Stephen King 2025 read-along discussion
October 2023 Discussions
>
The best month of the year! October pick!
date
newest »
newest »
I’ve read this one(all) .. I really liked it :) happy October u guys
Mod
I’m ready to start November ! I love the short story’s . I hope all is well
The "Button Box" series consists of Gwendy's Button Box (written by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar), Gwendy's Magic Feather (written by Richard Chizmar), and Gwendy's Final Task (written by Stephen King). The first two are novellas while the third is a full-sized novel. For this challenge you can read any and/or all of the books but for non-spoilery reasons in this post I'm going to focus on the first book.
Gwendy's Button Box was published in 2017 by Cemetery Dance publications and written by both Stephen King and Richard Chizmar with illustrations by Keith Minnion. It comes in at around 175 pages (depending on the edition) so it should be a fun snippet of King for the upcoming month so you can fit in as many spooky books as you'd like. There was also a special edition with new cover art included in the long since deceased Nocturnal Reader's Box but we won't talk about that company here (good riddance). In true King fashion it takes us back to Castle Rock, Maine in the summer of 1974. Twelve year old Gwendy Peterson encounters a stranger in dark clothes and a black hat at the top of the "suicide stairs" at Castle View who invites her to "palaver". With it being such a short book I didn't want to go any further with the synopsis but of course it being written by Stephen King is enough to intrigue me.
Little is known about the origins of the story apart from the fact that both King and Chizmar have made these statements: "I had a story I couldn't finish, and [Chizmar] showed me the way home with style and panache," King said in a statement. In describing the writing process, Richard Chizmar said, "Steve sent me the first chunk of a short story. I added quite a bit and sent it back to him. He did a pass, then bounced it back to me for another pass. Then, we did the same thing all over again – one more draft each. Next thing you know, we had a full-length novella on our hands. We took a free hand in rewriting each other and adding new ideas and characters. The whole process took about a month."
So far no adaptations have been said to be in production but with King books that's only a matter of time. I'm very interested to not only start this series but to also sample a little bit of Richard Chizmar's writing as I have another book by him on my shelves, Chasing the Boogeyman.
Who else is pumped to finally get to (or continue on) with this series? I feel like it's been sitting on my shelf for ages itching to be picked up. Let us know which book you'll be reading in the comments down below!