One day out of the blue, a dome comes down, creating a perfect circle around your town. Where does it come from? No idea! Who put it there? Dunno! And why? Well wouldn’t you like to know?

The people of Chester’s Mill will have to learn to live with each other and the daunting thought that maybe the dome will never lift. As the townspeople spend more and more time together, secrets start to come out… and they are not all pretty, to say the least…

Mixing supernatural, mystery, science and behavioral psychology, Stephen King has done it again, creating another highly enjoyable novel with a tremendous ending. Careful though, this book is quite long!

In this episode we are talking both about the book and the new TV series.

Who has not wondered what happened to Danny, the cute little boy locked in a battle of wits with a haunted hotel in the middle of the winter? Who has not pondered whether the negative energy trapped in the Overlook was still present, despite the boiler’s explosion and the hotel being burned to the ground? Doctor Sleep revisits the character of Danny. Now grown, he is ready to help Abra, a little girl whose psychic powers have attracted a band of “steam vampires” who want nothing more than harvest and inhale her powers in order to survive.

In pure Stephen King fashion, the story creeps up to its final showdown when the three main factions, Dan, Abra and the True, will fight to the death. It’s suspenseful, creepy, funny at times and dark at others but all in all, you just can’t put it down.  What more can I say? The name Stephen King says it all!

What do we remember of Mata Hari?

A dancer? Yes. A spy? Yes, that too. But what else?

In this fast-pace biography, Pat Shipman provides a fascinating account of how Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, Dutch citizen, became Mata Hari, and how this led her to be executed at the end of World War One.

Was Mata Hari a likable character, a gorgeous woman victim of her circumstances? Or was she a vile manipulator, eager and able to use men to retrieve her only means of sustenance: money? Was she by far the most intelligent women of her time, or an mere opportunist?

For anyone who is not familiar with Mata Hari, this is a very good start and will give the reader a pretty good idea who she was, what she was all about, and why she is still remembered today, for better or for worse.