The success of Gone Girl lead to a series of imitators. Some of them are full blooded and can stand on their own, but a lot of them are pale. Gillian Flynn’s book was not thrown together, but was carefully constructed and plotted – and she and other authors alike are probably sick of the endless comparisons. When you have a book like Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favour, which is a blatant facsimile of Gone Girl with all the good parts taken out and a thousand idiotic kitchen sinks thrown in, you have to make the comparison. A Simple Favour literally could not exist without the intervention of Gillian Flynn, and humanity is collectively stupider for it.

Things We Didn’t See Coming is a trap. In at least one paperback form, it does not have a blurb, just pull quotes. It is not until you open it and get a few stories in that you realise that they are all connected – and only then, if you’re me, because three consecutive stories featured a character called Margo. One can’t be blamed for not coming to this realisation sooner: Things We Didn’t See Coming has the appearance of a collection of short stories, and the majority of them, while post-apocalyptic, appear to deal with apocalypses of different varieties and root causes. The narrator is never named. Each apocalypse is presented without much in the way of context, and it does not need it. But, if you really are allergic to short stories, you may feel free to treat Things We Didn’t See Coming as a novel with large time gaps between chapters.

The Old West holds an intoxicating allure to the modern mind. Between both versions of Westworld, Back to the Future Part III, City Slickers and The Legend of Curly’s Gold alike, as a society we can’t help going back there. Whiskey When We’re Dry, John Larison’s debut novel, is a return to a well that we can visit any number of times without ever exhausting the supply. The West was boundless in the imagination, and can fit many stories; Whiskey When We’re Dry is one of the more meditative examples.

It’s no secret that the world is in political turmoil, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, set in the seventies, feels as painfully relevant as it does. Much can, and has, been said about the movie’s propping up of the police force as an institution despite its systemic racism, but it is a powerful piece of cinema and well made indeed.

Read the full review on Trespass.

Sometimes the best thing about a movie is its title. The Spy Who Dumped Me is not that movie, being much funnier than the moth eaten gag that it boasts for a name. Kate McKinnon is consistently the strongest element of every film that she features in, but The Spy Who Dumped Me is one of the first to properly utilise her. This is one of those films that will get overlooked despite its good nature, its reinforcement of positive female dynamics, and its more-competent-than-it-needs-to-be action choreography. Spy comedies may no longer be all the rage, but The Spy Who Dumped Me is a better example of the genre than Cars 2.

Read the full review at Trespass.

Constant Reader Chronicle is a new feature that aims to cover a single Stephen King novel, in chronological order, each month. It will skip novels undertaken as part of the Dark Tower cycle and the Mr. Mercedes novels but will otherwise cover every major work that Stephen King and that pesky Richard Bachman has committed to the page. Given that Carrie is such an iconic place to begin a career, this entry will contain fairly comprehensive spoilers. The remaining entries will be spoiler rated on an individual basis.

Stephen King’s first published novel is the prototypical King. The seeds of so many future books are present here, often in the most embryonic form, and Carrie predicts a bright future for its author that came true in perhaps the most lucrative way imaginable. You have a girl with a Shine (although it is not, of course, called that yet), a small town filled with people both decent and awful, and a cavalcade of carnage concentrated in the climax. Though parts of Carrie flirt with a form that wouldn’t ultimately come to be associated with King, this is an exquisitely realised first release.

The President is Missing is a trap, a lie of a novel. It’s the best title for a political thriller ever, and it is squandered on a book where we know where the president is at all times. It seems like a no-brainer: Former President Bill Clinton and Former Author James Patterson team up to write a political thriller. It is a no-brainer, but the brains are lacking from the book itself, rather than the reader.