Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot

Stephen King called this book "insanely readable," and that may have been the final selling point for me. But first, there was the plot: A novelist with two books under his belt but nothing new on the horizon uses someone else's story under extraordinary circumstances, with dire results. I love a good novel about writing, but a lot could have gone wrong here. There's a story within a story, and sometimes those transitions are just too jarring and don't work for me. That wasn't a problem here, though, perhaps because the story within a story was so important to the main plot. Also, there were a couple of leaps in time, when a few years pass between chapters. This may be just me, but I don't usually like leaps in time. They distance me from the characters and, frankly, depress me. But they weren't a problem for me here. I did have suspicions about the big twist pretty early on, and the final reveal was a bit of an information dump, a little too Hercule Poirot in the drawing room telling everybody what happened. Maybe I'd take off half a star for that. But apart from that, yeah, insanely readable! Now to see what other books Jean Hanff Korelitz has written.