Authorized Novelizations Podcast

Before him at the top of the dune stood an apparition. It was a rectangular slab, a bright red dab on a colorless canvas, twice his height, the sun glinted on its edges. He did not hesitate to sidle up to it, a kind and expected friend, grinning with relief as he slipped a coin into the slot beneath the words "Drink Coca-Cola in bottles." He stood back, giving the mechanism space to fulfill its single task and deliver carbonated manna from heaven. The aluminum monolith produced a rusty grunt and nothing more. EMPTY Micky blinked, unbelieving, and gave the dispenser an encouraging slap on the side. It did not respond, only stood proudly on its perch beneath the circle sky. He opened his mouth to release an anguished howl, but in cruel mimicry of the machine nothing emerged. Micky lashed out, pummeling the flanks of the thing with sheer brutal force like Sonny Liston going at the exposed ribs of an opponent. But this wasn't soft flesh that his knuckles scraped against, rather unrelenting sharp-edged metal which mocked him with its unbudgeability. Still he lashed out, kicked and cried and climbed and pounded, unable to hold back his rage. Pitiful. Pathetic. Primal. The fury of a primate. This was a part of him that really existed.

This is possibly the most bland and unfunny piece of media I've ever experienced. Reading the terms of service for YouTube (which I just did) is more entertaining and engaging to me than listening to them try and fail to make a joke. Their ability to not comprehend or process the plot and characters in a book is shocking. The way they manage to "read" a book, think about the book, then all sit down and talk to each other about it, and STILL not manage to see the major aspects of a character’s story, growth, and motivation; or how they managed to get the message of said story so unbelievably wrong to the point where they think it's the exact opposite of what the message actually is. I genuinely believe that their ability to think critically and construct a mental image of a scene, and what's happening in it, is worse than a quadriplegic person is at rock climbing, especially when it's not being spoon-fed to them with every thought and emotion explicitly stated so that they can understand that someone is, in fact, sad when someone in their family dies.

David stopped to catch his breath. The heat was bad enough already, and now that the cocaine was kicking in he was starting to sweat through his shirt. He took off his jacket, it really didn't fit him anyway. When he had recovered from all that running around like a maniac, he took a minute to introduce everyone else. They were a big group so it took a while, but they all deserved as much credit as he did. Well, maybe not quite as much. When they met back in Rhode Island the project had been his idea. He wouldn't say it to Chris's face, but they all knew they were nothing without David. That all seemed like a long time ago though, and here they were, making it big together in Hollywood. What could go wrong?

I hung up the phone. I’d been living a kind of magic, an excitable blur of half-remembered heroics from a paperback potboiler. But reading is just reading. The guys in those books? Those guys have to live with their choices. Those guys get hurt. And I didn’t even know which guy I was anymore. I had killed a man. The magic was schoolboy bulls**t. I sagged toward the floor and started to cry. The dog took a step forward and licked the tears from my face. I hugged it, and held on like that dumb mutt would save me. My stump still ached, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever be whole again. But it was a comfort to feel some well-meaning warmth from another living creature—even if that creature was in the process of digesting my finger.