Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Music and Sound the Works of Stephen King.

Each week, I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And in this episode, I have the pleasure of reviewing Stephen King's 2020 collection of novellas, if it bleeds.

But before we begin, I just want to give a shout out to the creators of the musical introduction to this episode.

John and Al Kaplan, who created a series of hilarious and incredibly catchy Arnold Schwarzenegger-themed musicals based on the movies of his heyday, including Total Recall, Conan the Barbarian, Terminator 2, Commando, and the one that I just used for the purposes of this podcast, Predator, the Musical, which includes the refrain that has been stuck in my head since I first heard that King was releasing this particular collection of novellas. If It Bleeds, we can kill it.

So let's put if it bleeds into a little bit of context. Throughout the years, Stephen King obviously has blessed us with many, many novels,

many collections of short stories, but less so collections of novellas.

He first gave us different seasons and set a high water mark for what he can do with the

novella just think about the impact of different seasons and the collection and the stories

that are within that particular collection and how they have lived on past just being the

printed page they have gone on to become very well regarded and beloved cinematic

adaptations of varying degrees of course we have apt pupil which was adapted by

Brian Singer who at the time was coming

off the success of the usual suspects.

Brian Singer, most recently his career has gone down in flames due to a lot of inappropriate

conduct and allegations of sexual harassment and worse.

But, you know, once upon time, in the 90s, in the late 90s, he was an up-and-comer, you know,

coming off the heels of one of 90s most celebrated films with one of the greatest twist endings in all cinema history

and was also given the the reins to the X-Men franchise and got that up off the ground and

you know i don't believe that the first movie holds up very well um or even x2 um which is blasphemous to say.

But had it not been for those movies, we would not have gotten anything close to resembling Avengers Endgame.

And I led with Apt Pupil because I wanted to get Apt Pupil out of the way because different seasons isn't remembered for the adaptation of apt pupil.

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