Just Finished Reading Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

My reading of this 2017 collaboration between Stephen King and Richard Chizmar is the result of my local public library not automatically renewing the two books I had previously checked-out (and was too lazy to return) and instead presenting me via e-mail with a bill for them as lost books.  I presently hastened to my nearest library and showed them the books, and then everything was hunky-dory again.  So I ventured back among the shelves and came up with two more books, unwittingly one of them being the THIRD book in a King-Chizmar trilogy.  I'll get to that one eventually, but first I got onto my Libby app and checked out the audio version for the series' first volume, a very short novel titled Gwendy's Button Box. Gwendy is a girl transitioning from elementary to middle school in her home town of, naturally, Castle Rock, Maine.  She is overweight and doesn't want to continue being the target of cruel nicknames...and kids that age are typically cruel. So she practices running up the steps leading to a local monument.  One day she encounters an elderly man who presents her with a mysterious mahogany box, complete with an assortment of colored buttons, a slot and levers.  He explains for her what each colored button means, and that the black one is the end of everything...pretty ominous, right?  She reluctantly accepts it and comes to regret the box, although it strangely seems to have set her on an inexplicable path to social popularity and academic excellence.  But as I have noted, kids that age tend to be cruel and Gwendy has repeated run-ins with one of the cruelest, which ultimately leads to the story's climax.  I read it in three days, and found at the very end of the audiobook that a Stephen King short story titled The Music Room was attached at the very end.  As for Gwendy's Button Box, King had come up with the idea and most of the book, but didn't know how to end it...he consulted his friend and asked him to see if he couldn't manage the task...and so a collaboration was born.  There are two more volumes, Gwendy's Magic Feather...completely written by Richard Chizmar...and Gwendy's Final Task, a return to the collaboration and a full-length novel.  It should be interesting for me to compare Chizmar's writing style as I read Book #2...