Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook
1981 Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook read by G. Valmont Thomas
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It is funny the way things go just how much we change – or don’t – as we age. My 14-year-old self had a curious connection with the accumulated Bachman sound books. Do not like Rage, because I loathed the protagonist adored The Long Walk, because I could see myself, marching with them, because it talked to me hated Roadwork, because oh my God it was so dull was frustrated. Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook. That The Running Man was not more like the Arnie-driven movie but that’s a story for another day. Rereading The Long Walk and Rage left me feeling exactly like I did back in the afternoon revisiting them was, for better or worse, such as being eased into a memory: the stories and characters came straight back to me as I read, alongside the same emotional responses. Roadwork, however, provoked an entirely different response.
What I found boring – as in, bottom of this King heap, nearly – now makes me feel horribly sad, more than a bit angry (with it, not at it), and really very impressed. Stephen King – Roadwork Audio Book Free. We know that, and we understand that he’s somewhat unhinged – he has an internal duologue happening through the audio book, between personalities called George and Fred – and that he does not much like the programs for a freeway extension that are going to be actioned. The new street goes right through his house and his office equally, and he’s the man who needs to sort out the relocation.
An additional thing we know, pretty much from the start: he has no intention of doing said relocations. Dawes is a broken man, a tired and mad man, who hides everything out of people around him. There’s something simmering and most of us recognize that simmering emotions finally boil. He’s not a guy to envy. Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook Download. Rather, there is a quietness to him that is unsettling – apart from within his mind, where George and Fred go at it amazing guns, which is even worse. They talk of terrible things sometimes, and you know they’ll be his downfall. The shows over the duration of the narrative – that Barton and Mary had a son, Charlie, who died of an inoperable brain tumour that Fred had been Charlie’s middle name, and that this was a game he had with his dad, using their middle names as terms of endearment that everything Barton refuses to do to make his life simpler is because he is so entrenched in the memories of his own son and their past together – all provoke sympathy (how could they not).
It’s there on every page. He’s unhinged, and he’s in a really poor location. Roadwork Audiobook. By the end of this novel his wife has left him he’s done deals with the mob, and he has discounted building machinery with home-made Molotov cocktails. It is touching. He is hollow, and desperately wishes that he weren’t. In the end, the conversation in his head is between George and (currently) Freddy, his son begging his father to never kill any of their policemen, trying to make him stay a good man Barton projecting, attempting to save himself. As with all the other early Bachman music books, there is no supernatural menace, no possessions or ghosts. Instead there is something more concrete, yet no less horrifying: cancer. King watched his mother die from it just a year or so before he wrote Roadwork, along with his private pain is there on each page: at the reduction of Fred, the way that Barton can’t forget him, can’t proceed beyond the pain of watching him suffer before being stripped away. He says that the sound book is the worst of the Bachmans, simply because it is trying to get some answers to the conundrum of human pain.
To my mind, that does not make it a terrible audio book that makes it a sound book that tries for something aside from scares. Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook Stephen King. It is trying to fathom exactly what a person goes through how low they can go when confronted with direct loss, and how debilitating that reduction (and its repercussions) can be. Over time, however, something shifted: in a subsequent edition of the Bachman music novels, King wrote a new introduction. In it he states that Roadwork is (his) favourite of the early Bachman music books.
I really don’t understand what changed his mind, but maybe it was the peace afforded by time of being able to stand back and see what he (or, rather, Richard Bachman)’d done. From the publication, that is the issue: Barton can’t. He is always there, with the home and the laundry along with his wife, everything reminding him of how things were. I’m happy that King is at peace with Roadwork, since it sits comfortably alongside a number of his best non-genre novels: a narrative about an actual person that has been ruined by the true horrors of real life. Stephen King – Roadwork Audiobook.