Running With Scissors and the Outsider in Reading Journal

It’s a double feature. Only mildly science fiction.

Running with Scissors is a biographical piece with a gay narrator whose mother dumps him at her psychiatrist’s and pursues her desires (to be a poet and to be a swingin’ seventies lesbian, mostly.) What follows is tragicomic: kids gone wild, mostly, and there’s a sexual predator in the midst and Valium flows like bubblegum. It makes me realize that even though I’m a shitty mother, I’m not a self-absorbed shitty mother - and as a possible future therapist/helper, I kind of see why boundaries are required. They’re fucking necessary.

At one point, Augusten’s mother claims she has been raped by her psycho psychiatrist, and no one believes her. It’s dark and frightening. Probably a must-read for people who want to take a helper job - although I want to be a vocational rehabilitation person, I will still need boundaries and I will still have to work with individuals who might not have ‘em where I want ‘em.

The Outsider, King’s latest, is another trip over to psychic police procedural land. With elements of the Dark Half (but these guys aren’t twins) and It (there’s shapeshifting and fear) and Holly Gibney (the autistic woman from Finders Keepers/End of Watch) it’s a mildly predictable beach read. It doesn’t scare me. The luchadoras are a funny twist.

I wish it had had less gunplay and more, I don’t know, the teamwork that vanquished It. But it feels rushed and throwaway, more of a nod to Agatha Christie than a horror novel.

Next bathroom read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (I like classics in the loo.)
Next bag read: The Fireman (I’m on a horror kick.)