From little acorns...

Stephen King has been on my mind the last few weeks, with my re-reading of "Carrie" (read my review here) and my essay up at Matthew Craig's excellent #CarrieAt40 thread (which you can read here).  Following yesterday's blog post, I was having a little Facebook discussion with Ross Warren, Anthony Cowin, Andrew Murray and Alison Littlewood and we started talking about our personal top 10 favourite King books.  Then I posted this...

Here's an idea - Ross, Anthony, Andrew, Alison - how about next year, we declare it a Stephen King year. Twelve of us, we each pick one book and then blog a review/essay on it and link back to each others blog.  What do you think?

"More reviews?  Really?"

Well, they all thought it was a very good idea whilst I was wondering whether or not I could get twelve people interested enough in the project to take part.  Turns out, that wasn't something I should have worried about at all as within an hour, I'd filled all twelve spots with people who'd asked to be involved.

Ross made the suggestion of rather than hosting it on various sites, we have a dedicated blog for the reviews so I set one up and Willie Meikle gave it the perfect title "King For A Year".  I asked a few more people if they'd like to take part, yet more people came forward of their own volition and by the end of last night, I'd filled 24 spots.  As I write this now, we have 36 reviewers.

Alison later tweeted me "from little acorns..." and I'm really pleased that the idea of the blog has taken off so well.  The concept of it is very simple - you pick your favourite King book (novel, novella, whatever) and write a review of it and all of them will be posted throughout the year in 2015.

Some reviews you might agree with, some you probably won't but hopefully they'll lead the reader to some new titles they haven't tried before.

I hope you, dear blog reader, will dip in and out to see what people have to say about "the bloke who writes the scary stuff" and I hope it entertains you.  I'll remind you nearer the time when it's about to start but for the moment, the blog is up with a holding page here - http://kingreviews2015.blogspot.co.uk/

And just to whet your appetite further, here's the list of confirmed reviewers (so far):

Anthony Cowin, Stephen Bacon, Jenny Barber, Matthew Craig, Donna Bond, Mihai Adascalitei, Willie Meikle, Maura McHugh, Gary McMahon, Sarah Langan, James Everington, Selina Lock, Adele Wearing, John Llewellyn Probert, Lynda E. Rucker, Mark West, Kim Talbot Hoelzli, Jay Eales, Thana Niveau, Alison Littlewood, Phil Sloman, Steven Savile, Ray Cluley, Johnny Mains, Liz Barnsley, Jim Mcleod, James Bennett, Carole Johnstone, Andrew Murray, Cate Gardner, K. T. Davies, Ross Warren ,Sheri White, Colin F. Barnes, Simon Bestwick, Richard Chizmar

I'm looking forward to this...