Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King
A curious, fascinating document. It is almost as much about fandom and the roots of terror as it is about King’s work. Using a winningly self-deprecating tone, Bicks narrates her journey through these scrawled pages with wide-eyed wonder ... Somewhat less successful when Bicks’ sleuthing leads her to make inferences that may not be fully supported ... While Bicks is unable to come up with a unified theory of Stephen King’s works, this is probably for the best ... Part of the joy of Monsters in the Archives is that Caroline Bicks appreciates when to stop and let the work be the work.
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Even if you have a hard time getting through Mr. King’s tombstone-thick books, you might come away with admiration for his work ethic ... From his earliest days Mr. King wrote—and rewrote—a great deal, and it seems few of his pages escaped Ms. Bicks’s perusal.
Bicks deftly interweaves textual analysis with more general biographical data, gleaned from her conversations with King, both in person and via email ... For those with the patience to follow Bicks’s more erudite detours into Stephen King’s monstrosity, there is much to relish in this highly original book.
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