Don’t judge a book by it’s cover…the cover is nice, the book sucked.

 

I found The Colorado Kid in a .99 cent used book bin. I should have left it there. Instead, I brought it home and struggled through 37 torturous pages before I just said  “Fuck it” and moved on to the next book.  I should have remembered that for me Steven King does horror real nice but I’ve never enjoyed any of his works outside of the horror genre. When he came out with The Eyes of the Dragon I was in full Steven King fan mode, so I was extremely excited that he was doing what I thought would be a kickass fantasy/ horror story. It wasn't a total bust, but I remember being disappointed.

The Colorado Kid was just a complete waste of my time. funny thing is that King himself states in the afterword that readers will either love the story or hate it, with no middle ground. in my case he hit the nail on the head. The little that I read was about as exciting as peeling a potato. 

The Colorado Kid was released by a small crime novel publishing outfit called Hard Case Crime. As a small publisher I’m sure they shit their pants when they managed to sign Steven King on for a story. It probably didn’t matter too much to them what he wrote about, I mean hell it’s Steven fricken King!  Oh well…

But hey! Something good did come out of all of this. While working on this post I ran across The Tainted Archive Blog. On the blog is an interview with one of the publishers, from whom we get this little gem of a quote:

“Well, we are branching out into pulp adventure fiction next year: In May we'll publish HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY, the first in a series of novels about a two-fisted modern-day adventurer named Gabriel Hunt, and additional volumes will follow every few months after that. The books will be published under Gabriel Hunt's name, but will actually be written by some old Hard Case Crime hands (me, David J. Schow, Christa Faust) as well as some friends of the family (James Reasoner, Nick Kaufmann, Raymond Benson). The books are intended to harken back to the style of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sax Rohmer, or Doc Savage and The Avenger, or Indiana Jones. They're a ton of fun to write and edit, and again, it's a type of book you just don't see being published anymore -- inexplicably so, when you consider just how popular the genre is at the movies.”

So maybe there was a reason for the pulp gods to test me so. It was their little way of letting me know to be out on the look out for some new two fisted action- coming soon.