Originally Posted by
LockedBreech
Just read a relatively new (2021 release) Stephen King book, "Later", Over 2-3 days last week. Back between 2016-2019 or so I read everything King ever wrote on a lark. I have a few authors I've done that for, he was challenging because he's pretty prolific.
King books, whether scary or non-scary, fall into 2 camps: amazing or forgettable. In my experience there's not much nuance to it. His books either stay with you for life or were clearly written quickly to fund a vacation.
"Later" was a "written-to-fund-a-vacation" book. It was not aggressively bad, but spend your time elsewhere.
This is normally a thread I'd contribute to a lot, but between early 2020 to present, I (a huge nerd, if that is not evident from my post history) decided to tackle the Warhammer 40K "The Horus Heresy" series based on a random 40K novel which I quite enjoyed. The Horus Heresy is 54 full-length novels and 10 finale novels (9 released, 1 incoming). The last major challenge I did like that was when I was a teenager and tackled all of the 60+ Animorphs young adult novels. Not content with that, I also wanted context as "Horus Heresy" is sorta the core historical context of 40K, so I read all 10 of the Eisenhorn novels, all 12 of the Ciaphas Cain novels, all 16 of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels, and a handful of other standalone books.
I'm currently on Horus Heresy Book #43 - "Garro" and I am closing in on the finale. By my current count I've read about 77 books in this series averaging about 450 pages since March 2020.
My conclusion/recommendation: delightful if you like sci-fi, horror, steampunk, and a mash-up of those that constantly touches on classics, especially Dune. However, it's a titanic commitment and slogging through a few of the less-great novels has been a chore. If you want to explore the universe without such a huge commitment, I'd recommend anything by Dan Abnett. Honestly, I think most of PF would really enjoy his Gaunt's Ghosts series. It's basically a very dark Band of Brothers in space. He's one of the only authors I've ever read who writes soldiers somewhat believably. Honorable mention would be the Ciaphas Cain series by Sandy Mitchell, which is a lighter, more humor-focused series focusing on a heroic commissar who is secretly very afraid and gets lucky a lot. Very enjoyable popcorn reading.