I read some novels because I want to be dragged down a gravel road behind runaway horses, dangled head first over a yawning precipice, have my heart torn from a gaping hole in my chest…you get the idea. I want to be fucked with.

I read other books because the act of reading them is like settling in under a wool comforter in front of a roaring fire while a storm rages just outside, lashing the windows. I think of those novels as comfort reads. Make no mistake, for me comfort reads don’t necessarily have to be quiet, contemplative books. Some really extreme horror stories function as comfort reads for me. It’s more a feeling, I guess, when stepping into the pages of the novel feels like going home, like you’re in safe, capable hands.

The first two books in the Gwendy trilogy, Gwendy’s Button Box (Stephen King and Richard Chizmar) and Gwendy’s Magic Feather (Richard Chizmar) were definitely comfort reads for me. It’s not that the books are all rainbows and unicorns, free from stress and tension. Far from it. Like I said, it’s a feeling.

Gwendy’s Final Task, like its predecessors, is a comfort read for me. Having said that, I found this one much more tense, the stakes much higher. That infernal button box is back, doing what it does, and this time Gwendy is truly feeling the horrifying effects of carrying the weight of the world on her now-middle aged shoulders. There’s trauma and heartbreak in the pages here.

I’m not going to tell you much more than that. Gwendy’s Final Task is set mostly aboard a spaceship, and it moves at a breathless pace. I found myself reading just as quickly, one-more-chaptering when I should have been sleeping. It’s an immensely satisfying tale, well told. King and Chizmar are, let’s face it, really good at this writing thing.

About the ending. It is, I suppose, the only way it could end. There’s an inevitability about it. But it is not, I repeat not, comforting at all.