Rating: 
Summary: King is the pinnacle of audio book entertainment
Review: Please do not listen to the 1-3 star reviews below. Stephen King is the true pinnacle of the audio book, both as a writer and narrator. Like Faulkner is to the printed word. Like the Beatles or Beethoven are to music. Like Kubric is to the cinema. I do a lot of audio book listening as a part of my work and over the last few years and countless audio books, I have come to the opinion that Stephen King is made for audio books. The truth be told, I have a hard time reading his books (when I read, I like the experience to be a little more stimulating) - but listening to them, especially when he is the narrator, is a pure joy. He is the ultimate storyteller, both in substance and tone. Yes, his voice is slightly unusual, but to hear him read his own words is to know that nobody else can do it better. I will take his readings of Bag of Bones (all 20-30 hours of it) over Willem Defoe or William Hurt reading some of his Four Past Midnight stories any day. Blood and Smoke is no exception. Thank you Stephen! You have found your true media.
Rating: 
Summary: Great, frightening stories
Review: Stephen King delivers another success with BLOOD AND SMOKE. All three stories are worth listening to, especially "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe", which happened to be my personal favorite. However, Stephen King just isn't a reader, and he shouldn't have been the one to read this. His voice wasn't appropriate and it did decrease the enjoyment of the audiobook at moments. I think this would have been a perfect five if it were to have been released in written form. But, as most of King's other works achieve, BLOOD AND SMOKE will keep you up at nights :)
Rating:
Summary: Paranormal but humorous
Review: Stephen King has been experimenting some new forms of communication for a while, and his attempt at giving short stories on CDs is quite a promising success. First his voice is agreeable and hoarse enough to give density to stories that need heavily-packed language. We could regret that some voice effects are too bland, but that is a choice and it is acceptable if we consider the object of these recordings is to make people use their imagination and not only to manipulate their hearing to plunge them into a pre-constructed audio world. We have to represent the referential world of the stories in our mind’s eye. First , Lunch at the Gotham Café is a thriller and it is absolutely exciting. Every moment of it is more dramatic than the previous one, exploring the mind of a man suddenly turned crazy and murderous, and also exploring the mind of the main character, Steve, trying to cope with the craziness of the havoc the maître d’ is creating, as well as exploring the vicious mind of Steve’s wife, soon to be ex-wife, who is getting just as lunatic as the maître d’ and becoming unable to see that she was saved by Steve and even quite able to try to make him fail in his attempt, to get some vengeance of hers, not realizing that she would kill herself in the same move. Blood all right, but Stephen King shows that under any stress at all, the real reaction of a smoker is to quit and then his vision is demultiplied into a nightmare that can any time come true. And it sure does here. Second, 1408 is the only story of the set that contains an element of supernatural dimension : one room of one hotel in New York is inhabited by some unhuman being, or is it really a being of any kind ? Yet it is carnivorous and you can only escape it by killing yourself or using the only thing it is afraid of : fire. And there is the smoke of a book of matches used to light up, not a cigarette but a victim, so that the being lets the victim go because it does not like roasted meat. Yet He will not escape the trap really and he will go away with some unhealthy souvenirs who will eventually bring him down to an early death in suffering. But keep some matches at hand all the time. It is the safest way to escape one of those haunting « beings » that live in the walls of our urban buildings. Third, In the Deathroom is another thriller, a realistic story about some kind of anti-communist dictatorship in some kind of Central American big-brother-state. There, tobacco is the means to escape, the tool to fake your way out of the torture room, the death room, the death row of the Ministry of Information of that hellish paradise for Hitler’s babies and apprentices. The point is that tobacco will never become a new habit for such an escapee from Tortureland. It will become some pilgrimage of a vague one-minute instant on forty-third street, just to pay homage to the tool that triggered out the forage to freedom of our hero. A brilliant set, a set of stories gleaming with power, suspense, surprise, horror, and, above all, realism. Stephen King is not speaking of any out-of-the-world fantasy, but of our everyday life of divorce, lunacy, crime, nightmares, fears, torture and dictatorship. Please get down to it and jump into that phenomenal trip.
Rating:
Summary: Great reading and writing but with some technical problems.
Review: Stephen King is a brilliant writer and I love hearing him read his work aloud. These three stories once again prove his talent. The only problems I had with this set of tapes were technical. First, "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" has been previously published in an anthology of horror stories so it was nothing new (also the tape reads "Lunch IN at the Gotham Cafe"). The music which opens and closes "1408" was so overbearing that it was hard to concentrate on Mr. King's voice. These things are probably beyond his control and didn't do much to lessen my enjoyment of the tapes. I highly recommend "Blood and Smoke" to anyone who likes Mr. King's work.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of time, money, and attention.
Review: Stephen King is great. I even like his voice. But I have never felt more money-screwed than when I shelled out 20 bucks for this box of audio tripe. These three shorts have to be the absolute FLATTEST stories in his otherwise estimable body of work. Jeers, Mr. King! Kindly send me my money back. You can pick up your tapes next to the roadkill or the median or wherever the hell it is they landed when I chucked them out the car window going 75. Booo!
Rating: 
Summary: Reading and Writing
Review: Stephen King is undoubtedly one of the greatest popular writers of our time; but is he one of the greatest readers? This begs the question, does an okay reading of a great story make the story just okay? Or, does an amazing reading of a terrible story make the story amazing? It's hard to say. Regardless, the three audio only (except for Lunch at the Gotham Cafe if you can dig it up) stories that make up Blood and Smoke come across as just okay. Lunch at the Gotham Cafe has a dissolving marriage at its heart and seems to be the most serious of the three stories. It is vintage King in its treatment of all the injustices in the world. Maybe lawyers aren't so bad after all. And divorces are just par for the course. Or maybe they both lead to something more horrible than any of us can imagine. Room 1408 is the most entertaining of the three in that it is as classic a haunted house story as they get. King does a terrific job twisting the hotel room into something horrible without actually throwing in any monsters. This story is also the most easily adaptable to the audio form. The final story, In the Deathroom, was entertaining, but had a "so what" kind of feeling about it. A reporter is captured by Mexican bad guys and interrogated "in the deathroom". While I was engaged, I'm not sure why. Maybe reading the story would have made it more accessible. Ultimately, the gimmik of the cigarette theme and the audio only presentation don't do anything meritorious to the collection. Cigarettes play a significant role in the first story and make ironic guest appearances in the other two, but that's it. And while I commend King for continuing to push the envelope on the written word (or spoken), I think I would have enjoyed these stories more were I to have read them.
Rating:
Summary: Another clever release from the King!
Review: Stephen King scores again with this audio-only collection of three short stories. Cigarettes and the act of smoking are recurring themes in each story, and the tapes are packaged in a box that resembles a flip-top pack of Marlboros. In the first story, "Lunch At The Gotham Cafe", heavy smoker Steve Davis agrees to meet his wife and her lawyer for lunch at a trendy Manhattan restaurant to negotiate mutually acceptable terms of divorce. Of course, this is a Stephen King story, which means that the maitre d' is a homicidal maniac with an axe to grind and a knife to wield! Fans of The Shining will especially enjoy the second story, "1402", where a writer who specializes in Weekly World News-type nonfiction books on the paranormal comes to a famous hotel to investigate the claim that Room 1402 is possessed by an evil force. Finishing off the pack (no pun intended) is "In The Death Room", a non-supernatural horror tale about an American reporter trapped in an interrogation room in an unnamed Central American country. Our hero is suspected to have knowledge (which he does) of an upcoming Communist coup against the country's fascist dictatorship, and the authorities are ready and willing to use the most horrific methods of torture available to extract the information. Does he sell out, does he escape, or is he executed? You'll just have to listen! Hail to the King!
Rating: 
Summary: For the love of god Think TWICE BEFORE BUYING THIS!
Review: Summary: Horribly Nasal voice! No pauses or individual tracks (so if you take the CD out prepare to fast forward through 15-45 minutes of audio) Lackluster stories with an emphasis on smoking..
Rating:
Summary: good short stories, but that's all they are
Review: Summary:
"Lunch at the Gotham Café" - Steve Davis shows up for a lunch meeting with his ex-wife and her lawyer but ends up facing down a psycho maitre'd who goes berserk for no reason. "1408" - Mike Enslin, a best-selling author of a number of ghost story books (he is actually a ghost-story debunker) decides to spend the night in what is supposed to be a haunted hotel room in New York City. A skeptical introduction turns into a nightmare as Mike finds out that this one is the real deal. "In the Deathroom" - Fletcher, a U.S. citizen in Central America, is brought in by the police of the country because of his affiliation with some insurgents. He is introduced to a torture device, but pulls a quick one and gets away, then uses the device on his captors. My Comments:
These were pretty good stories. As is the case with most short stories, there isn't much depth to these stories, but they are pretty interesting nonetheless. I would definitely recommend them for anyone who likes Stephen King and is looking for some good short stories.
Rating:
Summary: good short stories, but that's all they are
Review: Summary:
"Lunch at the Gotham Café" - Steve Davis shows up for a lunch meeting with his ex-wife and her lawyer but ends up facing down a psycho maitre'd who goes berserk for no reason. "1408" - Mike Enslin, a best-selling author of a number of ghost story books (he is actually a ghost-story debunker) decides to spend the night in what is supposed to be a haunted hotel room in New York City. A skeptical introduction turns into a nightmare as Mike finds out that this one is the real deal. "In the Deathroom" - Fletcher, a U.S. citizen in Central America, is brought in by the police of the country because of his affiliation with some insurgents. He is introduced to a torture device, but pulls a quick one and gets away, then uses the device on his captors. My Comments:
These were pretty good stories. As is the case with most short stories, there isn't much depth to these stories, but they are pretty interesting nonetheless. I would definitely recommend them for anyone who likes Stephen King and is looking for some good short stories.
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