 Hi guys, it's Julia, and welcome back to my channel, and for today's video I'm going to be doing a book review, and today I'm going to be reviewing If It Bleeds by Stephen King. I've been meaning to make a book review video and a Stephen King book review for a while, but finally, I buddy read this with a bunch of you guys on my Goodreads group, and I'm excited to talk to you guys about it today. I have a bunch of tabs, and I have some notes made, so I'm excited to kind of go through with you and let you know my thoughts. If It Bleeds is a collection of four short stories that all range in topics from technology to addiction and paranormal. There's so many kind of topics and just little things that these collections explore. Some of the stories talk about more paranormal, some talk about addiction, technology, and the list kind of goes on from there. I'm going to be going through the four stories and like which one was my favorite, my thoughts on them. So the first story in here is Mr. Harrigan's Phone. So this one is based heavily around technology and it's about this older man who moved to the countryside even though he's kind of like a millionaire, I guess. People are kind of wondering why he moved, why he's not living a more luxurious life while in reality he's kind of just more isolated and wants to live in a small town countryside kind of thing. In this story we follow Boyden Craig who kind of develops a bond, kind of a little relationship with Mr. Harrigan and it's kind of just about them and how he views him and all those kind of things. It does talk about bullying and grief along the way but it was a really interesting story. It's definitely not what I expected and not what I thought he would start his collection with but it was really interesting. I gave it a 3.75 out of 5 and there's also references to like the Shawshank Reduction in here and also Castle Rock was also mentioned in here which I thought was really cool. I love finding those little references to different King books. I really liked the country kind of setting, like I do live in the country so it was just really refreshing reading about that. We have The Life of Chuck so this is one that a lot of people seem to really really like which is it wasn't my favorite but I can see why people would like it. The Life of Chuck has an interesting perspective on death specifically and grief and it's a story that's told backwards which I did not realize till later but it is told the other way so it's flipped and that's just a really interesting way to tell a story and I was just, I can't believe I didn't notice or pick up on things a bit earlier but yeah the story's told backwards so it's very uniquely written. This one has themes of like technology, death, suicide and a bit of like supernatural in here too so that's The Life of Chuck. I gave it 3.5 out of 5 stories. The third short story is If It Blades which is what this is titled after as you can see. If It Blades there are spoilers in this story for the Bill Hodges trilogy so please keep that in mind if you don't want to be spoiled for that entire trilogy maybe don't read that short story yet. There's also spoilers for The Outsider which I have not read so I did see some spoilers in there during that story. It deals with more violence, paranormal death, there's like a nice crime element, a mystery component it's, I love this one. So in this one we follow some of the characters from the Bill Hodges trilogy which is one of my favorites so we follow Holly in this story and it's just my favorite story I love being back with the whole gang and the whole squad and just everybody was together and I made me really happy. I felt like it was just, it was a little snippet of some of the stuff in the Bill Hodges trilogy almost like it just was like a little add-on and we got to see more of like Holly in Jerome and like all those people and it was so fun, I had a great time reading this one. So it was amazing being back with the characters which is why I think the third short story of If It Blades was my favorite and when I was in the Goodreads group a lot of people also really enjoyed this one so that was really nice to see and people who have read the Bill Hodges trilogy seem to enjoy it a lot more. The last story in this collection is called Rat. So this one kind of gives me like misery vibes, I don't know if people like read with that or if that's like a common thing to think but whatever, kind of gave me some misery vibes. The main character in this one was a very, his name was Drew, very typical like SK character, just kind of grumpy, loves writing, he wanted to go to a cabin, stay away from his family so he could finish writing the book that he's been working on so he goes to stay at a cabin pretty far away and there's some bad weather involved too and he's not the nicest to his family at all but it gives me misery vibes because we get that insight to the main characters like writing and their writing process and we just get to hear more about that. My favorite thing though almost about this was like the eerie cabin vibe that this story had so that's why it kind of reminded me of misery in that sense and it was about writing and it was in a cab, it was just reminded me of misery but it was good, it wasn't my favorite, there was this paranormal, supernatural kind of component to it with a rat and yeah I know it could be symbolism for some different things but I just didn't really like the last story, it wasn't my favorite, it was my least favorite so I gave it three out of five stars. But yeah that is the collection, that is my thoughts on the four short stories. I ended up really liking it, I really liked reading it with you guys and thank you so much to the people who decided to read it with me and comment on our like discussion boards and stuff, it was so much fun and yeah I'm really excited to do another buddy read which right now we are reading The Outsider because it was spoiled in this one so I was like we're gonna read it this next because I've owned this one for a bit so we're reading The Outsider, our thing ends I think on the 20th of August but if you need more time go for it, take the time you need, all the discussion boards are up they're not locked, they don't get closed, the Goodreads group will be linked down below if you want to discuss this book. I separated the Goodreads discussions into the sections that this has in it so that you can kind of comment when you read a certain section or just read it all and give your final thoughts, I don't know, whatever you want to do but yeah we're reading this right now but yeah If It Bleeds was a good collection in my opinion, not my favorite king obviously but the third story made me so happy, so happy, I had a great reading experience but yeah the the tabs in this I think I did characters, references, themes, yellow was certain quotes, like I have quotes, themes, characters, plot, in the darker colored tabs were the little king references that I found throughout this collection which I love looking for those little goodies and Easter eggs and that kind of thing, it was really fun. I overall ended up giving this a four to five stars, let me know if you guys have read this and what you thought of it down below, all been doing well and staying safe and there's so much going on in the world right now so I hope you guys are all doing okay and hanging in there, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, like trans rights movements, and also the explosion that occurred in Lebanon. I'll link stuff related to that in the description box if you want to help out with any of that but even if it's not like a donation there's some other ways that you can help or even just posting things, getting the word out there about certain things that's always helpful. Thank you guys so so much for watching, if you want to see any more videos like this you can subscribe to me down below, I have a Stephen King playlist that I will link down below, if you guys want to check that out it's just all this King books that I reviewed or my collection or any of that kind of stuff. I'm also wearing a new shirt I got and it's it related so look how cool it is, I thought it was super cool and it has, it always comes back on the sleeve, nothing on this side, and it has the creepy panty eyes, I thought it was super cool. Anyways again thank you guys so so much for watching and I'll see you super soon, bye!