One cannot accuse Stephen King of getting sentimental in his old age, because he has always had a soft heart, and it’s not always very deeply buried beneath the evil clowns, cars, and hotels. Elevation, essentially a novella, takes ideas that King has tackled before — Thinner springs readily to mind — but twists them, and makes them optimistic. Elevation is a short work that eschews complex explanation of its contents in favour of a quick burst of emotion and a punch of an ending.

The Kremlin’s Candidate, the least sloggy entry in the Red Sparrow series, brings things to a head in a way that could either end the series or leave it open for more. It’s taken a lot of deaths, a lot of breasts, and a lot of recipes to get this far. It’s unlikely that you’re going to see this story in movie form anytime soon, so soak in The Kremlin’s Candidate in prose form if you want to find out how Jennifer Lawrence’s overtly sexy spy winds up.

If you sell enough books, or enough movie tickets, or designer scents, you get at least one free pass. With Nine Perfect Strangers, on the back of the dual number one New York Times bestsellers Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty and the HBO adaptation of the former, Liane Moriarty has published her free pass. Because really, what is Nine Perfect Strangers? You can read it from cover to cover without being entirely sure. There is something here, but it becomes buried under the extraneous compost that Moriarty tosses about with abandon.

More can be said about Richard Bachman than can be said about Rage, his secret and forbidden debut novel, pulled from the shelves during the early days of school shooting contagion. Written well before school shootings became so common that it is difficult to tell them apart, Rage is a Stephen King piece so early that he was in high school himself when he wrote it.

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym created by Stephen King for a variety of reasons depending on what King feels like telling the reader at the time: Bachman was a way for King to put out more books per year, separate from the King brand; he was a way to get rejected earlier works published after some retooling; he was a chance to see if, eventually, Bachman’s books were able to be read, sold, and appreciated separately to the King name; and, to quote 1996’s “The Importance of Being Bachman”, an imprint for books written “in a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair.” 

Rage is not a cry for help, but rather a bitter study of the powerlessness that teenagers can feel, and the most artificial power they can conjure to battle that: a warm gun.

Most of the time, a movie is not better than the book that inspired it. A Simple Favour is not that time. An impossibly stupid book has become a gleefully over the top two hander about two women who need each other, except they really don’t.

Read the full review of A Simple Favour at Trespass.

John Cho uses a computer that always has the camera turned on – basically the nightmare of anyone who uses the internet consistently. Searching is a movie defined by its limitations, but it doesn’t suffer too terribly from them. You just wouldn’t want to watch too many of these screen time movies.

Read the full review of Searching at Trespass.

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.