The Story Of Joe Riddle

    Its funny how things work out, and I'm about to tell you how. My name is Joe Riddle, the former president of the well-known mob-backed trucking company International Joint Forces of Truckers Union, who supposedly disappeared in July 1975 in Detroit. I was declared dead in the early '80's. Everyone's been out looking for me, detectives from Detroit, FBI, you name it. They aren't going to find me though. Mostly because they're looking in the wrong places and in the wrong ways.  I'll tell you something I haven't been able to tell anybody until now; I'm a vampire. Yeah, no shit.
     Oh, I'm still around in Detroit. Just not in a way that the normal eye can see. I've been keeping tabs on my business and family from a distance, making sure they're okay. Oh I've never approached 'em. But they turned out alright. My son runs the business now. But its my business I wanted to tell you about. Mostly how I got back at those guineas that tried to kill me. You see, I'm not Italian. I'm from a small town outside Gary, Indiana called Ainsworth. I grew up dirt poor and had to quit school at fourteen to work to keep food on the table. But lots of people did in those days. It was the Great Depression. And it hit my family hard. My dad was a coal miner that died of black lung. So I was the oldest boy in my family and I had to help out. I sold produce from local farmers out of the backs of their trucks in the summers and I worked as a farm hand, whatever I could find. 
     We came to Detroit in the summer of 1930. I met Joe Terrasina while I was working as a driver for Kreger's Grocery. He would come and talk with me during my breaks and in between drives. His dad was mob boss Tony Terrasina, though I didn't know that at first. We were just playing craps together most of the time to start out with.  

Carrie by Stephen King (1974) 
       This book was originally published in 1974 and has a story that, for me, never gets old, no matter how dated the material may seem. There is still tremendous relevance in this day and age, despite the fact that when Carrie first came out, I was 2 years old. I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Carrie hit the bestsellers list, Stephen King was a part- time gas station attendant, married with three small children, and living in a trailer in Maine without a phone at the time. Hollywood didn't waste any time considering the book for film. Mr. King sold the film rights to United Artists and received $2,600 for it. 
     This is the first book by Stephen King that my fourteen year old daughter has read and she loved it. We bought it at the same time as we bought the DVD of the 2013 remake of Carrie. She probably liked the movie a little more, but I made sure she read the book first. 
     

   My favorite parts continue to be the way Carrie White incites her revenge upon a society that constantly tried to ridicule and not include her in everyday life for a girl her age. I have Attention Deficit Disorder myself and my immediate family also have some form of it, and it makes us a little different from others in how we conduct ourselves in everyday life. If you think about it, there's probably something about yourself  that makes you  different too. Which is why its easy to understand where Carrie White is coming from.