Dan McNeil's Blog

Today, I was walking up to the supermarket and on the way I saw three women each handing out swords made from those twisty balloons you get a kids' parties.  There didn't seem to be an advertising or other promotion going on - they just seemed to be handing out the swords.   If we lived in the world of Doctor Who then there'd probably be some strange alien power within each of those which would only reveal itself slowly and when someone is looking the other way, or something. But it makes you wonder doesn't it? The other night I had a dream.  Nothing unusual in that.  It was a kind of dream I have from time to time - a dream with a narrative.  Usually the narrative doesn't make much sense but every now and again there will be dreams set the same location with a story running through it.  The locations are familiar within the context of the dream, but they're not real places I actually recognise from the real world.  They often recur, though.  ...

Earlier this year I wrote about how James Herbert's last book wasn't that great.  Well I'm afraid I have similar news about Stephen King. On a recent holiday I read The Shining. I'm sure I must've read it before, but honestly don't remember - so I thought I'd give it a read. I was in the airport in Sydney flying down to Melbourne and the choice in the bookshop in the domestic terminal at Sydney airport wasn't fantastic.  So I picked it up and started to read it.  I then landed in Melbourne and found myself staying in a large, old hotel with long corridors and a very empty look about it.  Spooky. Anyway, when it came out, I thought, "I'll pick up Doctor Sleep".  This book came out last month, and follows the story of Danny Torrance, the boy from The Shining, quite a few years later.  The premise isn't too bad - there's a group of people who travel around America in RVs living off the "steam" given off when a child with...