I just finished reading "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" by Stephen King. I read it because I'm currently reading Duma Key and it's fluctuating between chore and pleasure like an old-fashioned dipping bird fluctuates between up and down. (I'll save the problems I'm having with DK for another post though.)
I'm really astonished at just how sophomoric this story reads! I'm here to tell you it sounds like something I might have written in freshman comp in 1987, if not high school. The whole fight sequence in the restaurant was not only ridiculous but outright implausible at times.
For instance, if people saw a guy with a knife attacking a person (or even a group of people) in a crowded restaurant, a short visit to almost any gore site on the web these days will reveal that while bystanders will likely back off at first and start capturing the event on their cell phones, many of them will actually rush the guy and get him onto the ground before he's able to do much damage.
A nutjob with a gun is another story, but a guy with a knife? In an NYC restaurant? Forget about it. The guy would be lucky to get out of the place alive.
Implausibilities abound. What about the waiter who -- after everyone's been screaming in the dining room and one guy's even been murdered -- is still on his way out from the kitchen with a tray of food!? What? Was that guy deaf or something?
The whole thing seemed like it was written by a teen-aged kid more than a master of horror.
Unless I'm missing something and the whole thing was an inside joke -- a tongue in cheek slip of the pen -- I have to say this is one of the worst ever things I've read by King.
(I read "1408" earlier today as well and while that story was better than this one by far, it had it's own silly aspects that I might blog about later in another entry.)
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