Book review rec: Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks reviewed by Kathryn Hughes

[brightknightie]

I think that this short book review (and likely the whole book it describes) may appeal not only to devoted fans of Stephen King, and to literary nerds like me, but to all of us who like to think about how reading and writing work:

"Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks review – The writing secrets of Stephen King: A deep dive into the horror novelist’s archives reveals pedantry, penny-pinching, and a total redraft of Carrie"
by Kathryn Hughes; The Guardian (US); Mon 30 Mar 2026 02.00 EDT

Excerpt: "In the same manuscript, Bicks also finds the novelist resisting the copy editor’s attempts to replace the word “rattly,” which King has used to describe the labored breathing of the novel’s dying two-year-old protagonist, Gage Creed. The copy editor suggests “congested” would be better. But King knows that rattly contains within itself a whole ghastly set of subliminal associations including scavenging vermin and unquiet ghosts with their infernal chains. Congested is something a coroner would write."

(TIL that The Guardian (US) has a "book of the day" feature.)