"All that you love will be carried away"

When I first saw the above as a title to a story in Stephen King's Short story book called "Everything's Eventual." I didn't read it... not until last night and I've had the book for a few years.

I figured it was about love gone bad and didn't really want to read it, because I had a thirst for blood and read some of the other obvious bloody stories.

But last night, I flipped through the book and it landed on the story... page 69!

And I was surprised by it..the title is actually a piece of graffiti that the salesman in the story, Alfie Zimmerman has been collecting from reststops and rest rooms across the US for 7 years. And as the story unfolds, we find that he's got cancer and is going to kill himself. But the notebook of graffiti keeps distracting him...

I won't say anymore but it's a great story...one of his low-key ones that are often overlooked, like the novel "The Girl who loved Tom Gordon."

But there's some great graffiti in the book. Like:

"My mother made me a whore."

And written underneath is in a different penmanship :

"If I supply the yard will she make me one too?"

Priceless!

In the short story, Alfie has been longing to put his collection in a book and wondered is people would buy it.


I would, Alfie. I would.

1408

I'm a big Stephen King fan..it's no secret. His novels are awesome (ok, most of them are...some of the ones after his auto accident sorta suck). But his short stories..they freaking rule! I own every short story collection King's had published.

One of my favorite stories is 1408. It's in his Everything's Eventual colletion. There are 14 dark tales. This one is about a room in a hotel that goes beyond hauntings. 1408 added together is 13. As we all know there are no 13 floors, although 14 is really the 13th. So in this case..the story is about room 13 on floor 13. A writer who likes to debaunch haunted places spends the night (sorta) in the room and all kinds of things happen to him. Here's a spoiler on the Wikipedia site.

About two years ago, I found one of Stephen King's audio CD's on sale.

Blood and Smoke Audio CD Three tales all tied to smoking and ...blood. 1408 is the second tale and the longest. Stephen reads all the stories. He does an ok job, but if you're used to performance artists or actors reading CD novels, you probably won't like Stephens rendition. The first time I listed to 1408, I wasn't really frightened. I was in bed with the lights out. My headphones securely in my ear. And on the last few sentences of the story, a sax starts squealing and I swear it scared me so badly that I jumped ten feet off the bed and hit my head on the ceiling.

I recently found out that there is a movie that will be released this summer. John Cusack is playing the writer. Samuel L. Jackson is playing the Hotel Manager who tries to talk in out of staying in the room.

1408 movie

I will probably wait until it comes out on DVD to view it. I really hope they don't add to much junk to make the short story tale into a movie version length. If they do...may the thing in the wall find them.