I am quickly realizing that I need to pay more attention to my fellow bloggers out there. When Carl said this would be his favorite of the year, I screeched to a halt and thought, wha? A self-published tale? Really? Interest piqued and a tad bemused at the idea (please forgive my elitist tone) I downloaded Hugh Howey's Wool Omnibus and on a whim, opened it to read the first few chapters, fully expecting to not really get it. Instead, I was hooked. Instantly.

I haven't been this excited about a book in a long time. I haven't been this eager to read a book every chance I got in a long line at a checkout counter. I actually was excited when I knew I had to wait in the stores fighting holiday crowds. Or waiting in line to get coffee. Sitting at a bookstore and foregoing all the other books I was buying for family and instead whipping out my iPhone to read just a few more pages. When was the last time I did that? Honestly, I really can't remember.

Even though it's broken into five "short stories," I would rather describe it as five parts. Wool feels like one continuous tale about a society in the future forced to live in a silo buried underground because the air is so toxic that any who venture outside are poisoned, ultimately succumbing to their death. Living in a silo with over a hundred levels below ground consisting of all the necessary systems to function a society properly, people exist almost within a caste system with the "up-toppers" as the upper-class with a "view" of the outside and the down deep levels of the working class. Because no one can go outside for fear of death, only those who are found guilty of a crime of some sort are sent to "cleaning," which allows them to go outside with only one requirement: to clean the cameras and sensors which invariably get thick with grime and distort the feed of the images of the outside world back to the silo's residents. It is always a death sentence to be sent outside.

Wool 1 sets the stage of introducing the silo, its residents and overall systems, and Mayor Jahns, Sheriff Holston, Deputy Marnes, and the IT group led by Bernard. It's been three years since the Sheriff's wife was sent outside, and he's never come to terms with it. Because I don't want to give anything away, I'll just vaguely describe that the remaining sections of Wool Omnibus delve into more characters, events, and such breathtaking moments of complete suspense that the idea of leaving the book to do something else seems utterly unimaginable. Everything is so intensely real that quite frankly, it's set the standard on any books I pick up for a long while. I still can't get these characters out of my head and I want more. My understanding is that there are at least three more parts to this tale and I am eagerly awaiting their releases.

I couldn't believe how sucked in I was. Each character was so thoroughly developed and the action so intense that I happily read the entire book on my iPhone. That means about 1200+ pages (screens?) that I flew through, desperate to know what happened next. It is one of the BEST books I have ever read in my LIFETIME, and is my absolute favorite book of the year. This, when released in print next year by Simon and Schuster, will be picked up on the day of release and will rest nicely on my bookshelf next to Stephen King's The Stand, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, and other favorites that I always want to have at my fingertips. As many of you know, science fiction is not one I'm that used to, so I can easily assure you that if your reading preferences include political corruption, mystery, thrillers, suspense, love, and more, I highly recommend that you step outside of your boundaries and do a dual risk of reading a self-published tale and one that just happens to be labeled as science fiction. The bottom line? I LOVED THIS BOOK.

Upcoming events to put on your calendar

• Simon & Schuster to release a print version in March 2013 in the United States. (Or, just buy it now.)
• Ridley Scott has optioned it for a film.

Others said:
Stainless Steel Droppings

Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing
Release Date: 4/6/12
Pages (screens?) on my iPhone: 1200+

FTC Disclosure: I purchased and downloaded this story directly to my iPhone.

About the Author

Hugh Howey is the bestselling author of the self-published phenomenon that is the Wool series. He is also the author of the Molly Fyde series and a host of others that can be found by clicking here. He currently lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife, Amber, and his dog, Bella.

Visit the author:

• On his website
• On Facebook
• On Twitter

Laws, yes. I've finished Stephen King's The Stand, and M-O-O-N, that spells freakin' awesome.

So here it is. The last post for all our hard work reading with everyone for Trish's Standalong (thank you, Trish, for hosting!) through nine long weeks. All 1,100+ pages. And I believe it was definitely worth it. SPOILERS will be in this, so if you haven't read this book or watched the TV movie (which I did watch and my thoughts are at the end), I would suggest you skip this post.

• Favorite Characters: Hands down, Tom Cullen was my absolute favorite character. That and Big Steve. Er, I mean Kojak. Good dog! And I just wish Harold had come to his epiphany much sooner. That scene with him? After Nadine and the oil slick? Oh, my goodness. I felt so bad.
• Characters I Hated: Nadine Cross. Oh, little missy. I did not like you, you twisted woman. (But, didn't it seem a bit odd that she went through her own quest to be with Randall Flagg and then she gets there, is pregnant, and then very quickly launches herself right off the balcony?)
• Characters I Hated That I Know I Was Supposed to Love: Sorry, I still don't like Frannie. Man, she. drove. me. NUTS. First, she won't say a word about crazy Harold and then she decides it's a super idea as the only pregnant gal in the Free Zone to go breaking into crazy Harold's house with Larry and not tell Stu? Which brings me to Larry. I... I just didn't feel the love for him that I knew I was supposed to feel. I found that he definitely grew up a little more, but I just never connected with him, sadly.
• No Resolution on the Abagail/Abigail Typo Debate: For those who may not have noticed, Mother Abagail was spelled two ways throughout the version that I had (1,100+ page with illustrations) and I thought it was something significant, but it wasn't. It really was just a typo. But this is Stephen King! Is it really just a typo...?
• Overall Thoughts: I finished late Tuesday night, and shut the book, speechless. I loved this journey, the quest, the ultimate stand, and I was amazed at the depth to which Stephen King's imagination can go. These characters felt real and in the Free Zone, most of them were ones that I'd want to hang out with and survive with. This is a book that I will love forever and will put up there in my own personal top 5 of favorite Stephen King books. It will also be one that I will frequently re-read. In fact, when it ended, I went right back to the first page and read the first few chapters again, picking up things that seemed much more important now that I knew what ended up happening.
• Something that Surprised Me? I was surprised at how much positivity was placed towards religion and God. In a lot of King books, there is always a touch of the spiritual, because in order to have evil, you must have good, but I was surprised that it didn't rage on the religious fanaticism piece for the good guys in the Free Zone. I'm not a very religious person, but it always annoys me when authors jump on bandwagons and rip apart those who are religious and throw a blanket over it all and claim it's fanatical, so it was cool to see that King made it extremely positive.
• Do I have any Mixed Feelings? Nah. I loved the book overall. I guess the only thing I wanted was closure on just a few minor things at the end. I needed silly resolution with two of my favorite characters, Tom Cullen and Kojak. I mean, after everything Stu went through at the end with Tom Cullen and Kojak, why, oh why, couldn't there have been closure for those two when they returned back to Boulder? I assume Tom moved back into his house, of course, but what about Kojak? Did he live with Stu, did he live with Tom? Silly little details like that are something I need to feel closure about!

Yes. I watched the 1994 TV version in the evenings this week, finishing it up late last night. Here are a few thoughts:

• What's With the Cheese? I was in college in the early 1990s and I recall excellent movies back then, including TV movies. Why was The Stand sort of cheesily produced? I mean, don't get me wrong, it follows the book pretty closely, but the acting was mostly poor and melodramatic (sadly, I'm looking at you, Molly Ringwald and Corin Nemec), with the exception of a few fantastic actors who are just awesome anyway (Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail and Ray Walston as Glen Bateman), but overall, it was just...cheesy.

Corin Nemec as Harold Lauder

Stu and Frannie

• Music is Key, but... The theme music with the guitar was cool and it made this post-Captain Trips world feel very sparse and desolate, but the rest of it was just layered into the film unnecessarily.
• Anything Strikingly Different between the Book and Movie? Other than all the cheese and melodrama, what I loved about the book was that the people over in Randall Flagg's camp were people who were led astray. That means that a lot of them were seriously twisted people, but a lot of them were also extremely good people at their core but who were weak and the alternative of being with Flagg was much more appealing than being with Mother Abagail. The former police detective, who meets up with the four from the Free Zone, Dorgan, was a good guy who happened to have chosen poorly. I felt for him in the book, felt sad for his weaknesses, but in the TV movie, Dorgan and everyone in Flagg's group were just a bunch of wild things that lived off chaos and reminded me a lot of the characters from the movie Escape from New York. I half-expected someone to start clinking beer bottles together and repeating "Warriors...come out and plaaaaahaaaayyyyy..." I wish Stephen King, who wrote the screenplay, stuck with the elements in his book that made it so phenomenal.
• All in All? It certainly is a nice chapter in the overall King book-to-film adaptation legacy, but I still feel that it didn't capture it well. As with a lot of King books that are turned into films, there is a lot more ham acting and outdated camera angles (look, it may have been filmed almost twenty years ago, but movies back in the early 1990s were not all like this, for cryin' out loud).
• In the end, though, I'm looking at you, Mr. Affleck, to remake The Stand the way it should be. I am trusting you, good sir. Don't let us down!

Image Credit

EXTRA! BeyondHollywood.com has a great snapshot of insight from Stephen King about his thoughts on the TV movie and the upcoming remake. It's pretty funny.

Click here to read other Standalong participants' thoughts. I took part in this for my own project, The Stephen King Project, which I am hosting with Kathleen from Boarding In My Forties.