This is going to look kind of weird on the page, but having done the usually done thing by starting this book review with a high-res copy of the book cover, let me now pivot and … embed a YouTube video:

The episode that clip is from aired in April of 2000. According to Wikipedia, Stephen King has written thirty fucking books since then, and I own nearly all of them. But King is 76, and it is really starting to feel like publishing is jockeying for who gets to step into his shoes when he passes. We all know the dude’s never going to retire; he’ll die at his keyboard and there are probably two decades of unpublished manuscripts out there. I’ll be dead before the last “undiscovered Stephen King manuscript” gets published, probably after being finished by Brandon Sanderson. And thirty books ago, King was already being lampooned (I’m not sorry, shut up) for being a guy who just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks.

A few years ago, Chuck Wendig wrote Wanderers, a book I liked a whole lot. The elevator pitch on that book was “What if Chuck Wendig wrote THE STAND,” and the book and the publicity all leaned into that comparison really hard. Since then he’s written three books: The Book of Accidents, which I wasn’t terribly fond of but not in a way that I blame the book for, and a sequel to Wanderers that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of right now. But the King comparisons haven’t stopped, and the massive change to his writing style to something more comfortably commercial that he debuted with Wanderers hasn’t changed, and anyway all of this is a long introduction so that I can write this sentence:

Black River Orchard is about evil apples.

I would like to submit that evil apples are at least equally as ridiculous, if not more so, than a lamp monster. But if Stephen King wrote a book about a lamp monster, I’d probably read it, and Chuck Wendig’s book about evil apples is six hundred and seventeen pages long and I read the whole thing cover-to-cover in less than 48 hours. It has been a long time since I have started a book, read the first 100 pages in a gulp, and then resolved that I was going to be doing more or less nothing else until I finished the book. I went and voted today. That and read this book are all I’ve done.

It’s a book about evil apples and it’s real real real fucking good. If Wendig’s books lately have shared a common weakness it’s that I haven’t loved their endings; this book nails the dismount. Orchard does not end happily; every character who survives is broken and changed by the horror of the book’s events, but it ends correctly; there are a lot of ways this book could have gone and most of the rest of them would have been wrong.

(Was it a good choice to read this at the end of October, by the way? Yes. Yes it was.)

Anyway, point is this is a good book. It’s creepy as hell– one thing Wendig hasn’t changed about his writing style is his ability to write about completely fucked up shit in a tremendously effective way, and I had to put the book down for a few minutes last night after a particularly brutal scene– and it’s nicely unpredictable. It also manages to be about something ridiculous without ever making fun of its own premise; I told my wife at about the 1/4 mark that I wasn’t looking forward to what I thought of as the inevitable scene where one of our protagonists has to convince someone that The Apples Are Evil, because how the hell do you write that conversation without being completely ridiculous and inadvertently comic, and, well, Wendig does it by being a better and smarter writer than me and by setting his book up in a way that a number of non-apple-eaters are slowly drawn together over the course of the book and so they never really need to convince anyone of anything; everyone has experienced the Apple Evil in their own way and so talking anyone else into it isn’t really necessary. Putting in a conversation where the book was making fun of its own plot would have broken it; that never happens.

Five stars, seven thumbs up, one of my favorite reads of the year. You’ll hear about this one in December, I’m sure.