Customer Reviews

We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories

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Owen King the son of mega-selling phenomenon Stephen King shines with this collection. His first foray into the publishing world. The writing is like a refreshened Stephen King, like the second coming. At times macabre but mostly very poignant.

The novella, "We're All In This Together," is a mostly bittersweet story. There is comedy mixed in. Mr. King captures the climate of the nation at the time period it takes place. Everyone thinks they are right. But we're all in it together and we all deal with the same problems, young or old.

"Frozen Animals" is a short strange, narrative about a dentist. I believe the title implies the chracters in this story are animals. Read the story and I think you will believe the same.

"Wonders" is a snapshot, a picture post-card of an era long gone. The thoughts and views of the characters are where the nation was at that time. Baseball seems to be a running theme with both King writers. This story is a macabre and sad semi-love story.

"Snake," a story of a young man obsessed with crime novels is kind of strange. He comes from a broken home and believes his father lies about everything. It is poignant and sort of ends abruptly.

The final story "My Second Wife" is like a bad acid trip. Very weird story of a road trip to aquire a death row inmates car. Strange, strange, strange.

All and all each narrative is crafted with surgical precision. A worthy beginning to what I hope will be a thriving career.

Owen King is off and running with his new book, "We're All in This Together", a collection of stories nicely put together by the author. If this book is any indication, the author has a luster-filled career ahead of him.

Beginning with the "novella", after which King's book is named, he takes us through four more engrossing (and occasionally "grossing"!) short stories. His finest offering is the novella itself, where politics mix with paint balls and odd family connections. King is terrifically descriptive and his attention to detail is engaging. The state of Maine figures prominently throughout the book, as one would understand, given his own background. The stories which follow are mostly fine but sometimes a little uneven. "My Second Wife", which concludes the book, is the richest and the warmest. "Frozen Animals" and "Snake" are filled with humor. Only "Wonders" kept me from giving this book five stars.

Owen King has produced a book that leaves me wanting to read his next one. "We're All in This Together" is well worth the read for its scope, depth and pace. I highly recommend it.

Owen King's debut collection, We're All in This Together, reveals an expert craftsman at work, a brilliant storyteller whose creations never strike a false note and never fail to surprise. The eponymous novella, set in the wake of the fateful 2000 presidential election, is told in the pitch-perfect voice of an adolescent coming uneasily of age in Maine. Carefully balancing pathos and humor, King tells of the dissolution and attempted restoration of the young narrator's family on the one hand and the attenuated but ultimately salvageable ideals of the community and its most high-minded exponents on the other. In the four short stories that follow, which take in everything from a baseball team representing Coney Island in fullest, oddest flower to an itinerant dentist whose snowbound trek to treat a patient requires as much mettle as the ghastly extraction he must perform, King's creative vision and his perfect empathy for the characters whose fallibilities and grace render their stories worth the telling are on full display. We're All in This Together is a remarkable collection which rewards with every turn of the page and resounds with an emotional authenticity able to make the most callous heart or the most deadened tooth ache.

Owen King's first book arrives just in time, a welcome corrective to all that needs improvement in contemporary fiction: it is heartfelt, genuine, and very, very funny. Gone are the tricky postmodern devices of the McSweeney's set, the pseudo-intellectuals riding up escalators to buy shoelaces. What we get, instead, are nineteenth-century animal trappers, pot-smoking retirees, paintball fighting, and a riot of Coney Island circus performers - all rendered with a combination of generous imagination and firm prose that made me think of Richard Russo, Dickens, or the early John Irving.

The title novella is a sympathetic commentary on the perils of dogmatism. It sketches a world in which neither of the ideological poles its plot so carefully sets up -- the liberal-activist grandfather or the hapless, republican "Dr. Vic"-- can be either fully supported or completely criticized. The child at the center of this tug-of-war is the story's emotional grounding: he learns, at the same pace readers do, to extend his sympathies, to look further than his assumptions -- and to recognize that we ourselves are often the ones most in need of, well, re-centering.

Despite their laugh-out-loud jokes and uniquely outsized plotting, it's possible, too, to identify thematic links among King's stories. In their ways, all of these stories demonstrate the untidiness of lived experience, charting how physical bodies, irrational emotions, and the world itself infringe on the desire for pure truths, for certainty. As is evident in "We're All In This Together" and "Wonders" especially, the solid assurance that an election or a baseball swing might offer is something that's never granted these characters.

And as "My Second Wife" shows maybe most of all, King's entertaining, endlessly promising first book gives evidence of a sensibility --the characters', the author's, or both-- that can't help but create stories as a way of coping with the world's hard contradictions. The storytellers King sketches here use humor and imagination as their preferred devices of survival: fiction itself brings coherence to lives that are unchangeably, even admirably messy.

This is an entertaining and affecting collection by a new writer with a gift for telling tales.

"We're All in This Together", the novella turned out to be surprisingly thought-provoking. I read it as a story, but then found myself thinking about who the "we" is. It is a worthy read, just as a story; the author is also talented in the use of words.

But, what impressed me most about the novella is that it is making me think about who the "we" is in "we". (That sentence will make sense after you have read it).

Are we a union, a family, friends, neighbors, a family faction, or, extrapolating, a nation, a planet? Who makes up the "we" and where does our responsibility lie. Things are happening all over the world, where do we fit in, and what is our responsibility, if any, to someone else. As I said, this book made me think.

About the short stories, while I read and enjoyed them, they did not make an impression on me, short stories are not my favorite genre.

But the novella, I plan to read it again in a few months. Something that makes me think is worth reading again.

p.s. Other things make me think, I don't want you to think that I will not think until I read this again... ;)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Owen King is definitely NOT resting on his father's laurels. The title story is complex, thought-provoking and humorous. The others are wonderful are well, very eclectic style. Written much more in the style of John Irving than Owen's father, Stephen King. Owen's future looks very bright indeed. Bravo!

The overarching theme of "We're All In This Together," the main novella in Owen King's debut collection, is that people are insane. Left, right, conservative, liberal - they're all nuts. They also all (well, almost all) believe that they're doing the right thing, but as King so astutely points out, well-intentioned crazy is still crazy. The novella is not just a gripping, touching and hilarious story; it's an important one, particularly in today's perspective-free political climate.

This book also takes a vast view of literary possibility. Every story is different, but King always demonstrates a keen eye for details both absurd and heart-rending while never managing to lose sight of his stories' vital emotional core. Even "My Second Wife" - a bit of sublime absurdity that starts with a parade and ends with an anorexic emu - touches on a serious place, a place full of love and loss and the power of human connection. These stories (like "Wonders," a Tim Powers-esque freakshow with a horribly beautiful edge, and "Frozen Animals," which seems to have been written in Jack London's darkest place) are full of sharp, tight images and observations that stay with you long after the covers are closed. Owen King is that rarest of all writers: a gifted storyteller with a true insight into human nature.

Very good novella to start the book, but the following short stories were less interesting. Owen provides excellent narration and character development but maybe lacks the great story ideas that his brother and father come up with. Owen appears to be more mainstream. I loved the title story. It had endearing characters and great twists at the end that I did not see coming. I hated for it to end, but not a whole lot happened. There were a bunch of great lines and insights into his main character, but some things came off as phony Hollywood. Owen is clearly another real talent in the family.

The novella is a compelling family story of a modern American teenager sandwiched between his aging, nostalgiac, Al Gore loving grandfather and his young, activist single mother. The novella left me sad at its conclusion only because it had ended. Satisfying ending? It depends upon the reader. Mr. King has a gift for sense of place. His prose is incredibly readable and very often witty, particularly the unique way he has the mother and son communicate with each other. (You have to find that out yourself.) I sometimes wanted to argue with the characters, who all possessed a bit of the curmudgeon - even the fifteen year-old central character George. I could see the novella as a film in the vein of Simon Burch.

Take a chance on We're All In This Together, $23.95 US, -- penned by the amiable Owen King -- and you'll be surprised. Owen, hereafter referred to as O, is the youngest son of novelists Stephen and Tabitha King, and interestingly enough, he's decided to try his hand at writing. After obtaining degrees from Vassar and Columbia University, he's apparently off to an auspicious start. This career decision must've required a gut check on his part, considering that dear old dad is the world's #1 bestselling author. That being said, O's work is savvy and stands on its own merit.

O's first book is comprised of one novella, and four short stories. The lead-off hitter "We're All In This Together" is his best effort. It revolves around George (age 15), his bereaved pot-smoking grandfather Henry, odious would-be stepfather Dr. Vic, and a lively fracas over a roadside billboard proclaiming Al Gore the "real" President of the United States. This 135-page novella -- a tale of family and political division -- is cleverly imagined, touching and downright funny in places, ("...down in D.C. we've got Ashcroft probably planning to compile a database of everyone who's ever had fun before" says one character) chiefly because O delights in smacking the six-year-old hornets nest known as the Contested Presidential Election of 2000. For those that courageously side with King, I suggest sending this book as a Valentine to your nearest (most vocal) Wingnut. Pluck their names from Editorials, and their addresses from ZabaSearch.com. ;)

Going the gruesome route in "Frozen Animals," we meet Pinet, an alcoholic dentist whose profession finds him lured (by two burly trappers) to a remote encampment during a raging blizzard. We follow the trio through the woods of Maine on a dark winter night, seeing as these two fellows have latched onto him in town. After an arduous climb, the dentist renders services on a trapper's wife in a squalid cabin, then the 20 page story ends abruptly. I observe this just in passing, but the title and certain passages here are eerily reminiscent of Kelly Link's story "Stone Animals" from Magic for Beginners. I wonder if O has read her stories, because I detect some sort of subconscious leakage or transference. Perhaps the two should collaborate on a story?

Even though "Wonders" was technically proficient, it slammed shut with a savage twist after 22 pages. Ostensibly a honeyed vignette about baseball on Coney Island, it wanders into oddball territory as one of the baseball players takes his girlfriend to a circus freak for an abortion. Woodpecker Burnham was a great character though!

The story "Wonders" sprouted from a thinly disguised event involving Boston Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice. A pop fly carried Rice to the edge of the stands and a fan stole the cap off Rice's head and quickly absconded. The entire team barreled into the Fenway stands to retrieve it.

How about "Snake?" It features another disaffected youth, but this time he's called Frank (age 16). Ken Ackerley drops son Frank off at the Jetport Mall during a weekend visit, because he has something else to do. Save for a kiosk huckster selling photos with his pet boa constrictor, the mall is generally empty. Fed up with Dad, Frank navigates a lengthy conversation with the charismatic photographer about the boa.

Each time I thought him daft, O somehow surprised me. "My Second Wife," a tale about a road trip to Starke, Florida (to acquire a death row inmate's mint condition black Jaguar) was strongly resonant upon re-reading. For some reason, this deeply masculine story reminded me of Scott Wolven's writing.

Readers looking for traces of horror in these stories will be let down because O veers away sharply from the kind of schlock (aliens, demonic cars, killer plagues, rabid dogs, serial killers, vampires) that his father has thrived upon for so long. Albeit fantastic schlock! Owen King has crashed the literary scene quite nicely here, and We're All In This Together is a robustly venomous debut.