BOOK REVIEW: Lisey's Story by Stephen
King (2006)
I didn't
expect to enjoy reading this.
I was a long-time fan of King from the first time I started reading his books beginning with It (1986) in fifth grade.
I remember being young to ask the librarian if I could borrow books from the adult shelves.
Up till then I had been restricted to browsing the "Children's" room and the proportionately smaller section designated for "Young Adults".
Spinning metal racks with one or two copies of Tolkien and dozens of his bastard children.
Piers Anthony, R. A. Salvatore, Philip Jose Farmer, and any number of Sword & Sorcery style fantasy novels with dragons on the cover.
I remember the librarian appraising me with her learned eye and saying, "Okay... but you can only get two. We'll try you out on two and see how you do with those. If you take care of them and bring them back when they're due, we'll think about letting you take some more out."
In my hometown library, kids weren't even really allowed into the adult section.
It wasn't fenced off, but the circulation desk was right in front of the entrance.
The Children's Room was to the left, Young Adult and Periodicals in the area in front of the Circulation Desk and the Adult shelves were to the right.
If you were a kid, you were directed to the Children's Room lest you annoy the adults.
Asking and being allowed to enter the Adult section was like opening the door to a whole new world.
I had read almost the entire Children's Room and in the Adult section were ten times as many books.
I remember going to the horror section because I had enjoyed what I had read by Edgar Allan Poe, which was about as hard horror was allowed to get those days in the Young Adult section.
You have to remember this was at least a decade before the Goosebumps series started showing up.
I remember thinking that if I could only get two books, I’d better make them last.
I picked a thick book about the Mary Celeste, and Stephen King’s It.
My uncle Jim was a fan of horror movies and would let me watch whatever I wanted from his VHS collection as long as I promised I could handle it.
Of course I always promised, and I was allowed to watch wildly age inappropriate movies for a ten year old.
The Friday the 13th series, The Nightmare On Elm Street, and several of the film adaptations of Stephen King books.
Which ones specifically I can’t remember, but I remember Christine and Carrie at least and WPIX out of New York would show Cat’s Eye on regular rotation.
The book about the Mary Celeste was non-fiction.
There’s not a lot of non-fiction in the Children’s section, mostly books about animals written like Dick & Jane books.
Not knowing what a non-fiction book was, I was waiting for the story to kick in, and when it didn’t kick in after about fifty pages, I gave up on it being interesting.
That wasn’t a problem with It.
The first twenty or so pages of It are practically perfect.
A lyrical, poetic, hypnotizing, blend of plain words and plain talk used to draw the reader deeper and deeper into the story until poor little Georgie Denbrough disappears down the storm drain forever and ever.
It’s not just because I was ten and reading my first adult book.
A few years back I stopped at a friend’s house and I was too tired to interact so I asked if I could take a nap on their floor.
Despite the fact that I was exhausted I couldn’t fall asleep. They had a bookshelf with a hardcover copy of It so I picked it up intending to read a couple pages until I got sleepy and I ended up reading all the way until Georgie disappears down into the sewers without realizing I had read twenty pages.
That’s the power that King has when he’s at the top of his game.
Books that feel like cinder blocks but read like falling in love.
I haven’t enjoyed everything I’ve read by Stephen King.
For a while, it was like finding a bottomless well of wonder.
Carrie, Cujo, Christine, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, The Stand and his short story collections.
When I was a teen, I found the relatively new The Gunslinger and wondered, “Man, what can’t this guy do?”
But eventually my reading lapped his writing and I ran out of books by King I hadn’t read and I found other authors to read.
Clive Barker first and foremost with a solid reference from the King himself.
Later on down the road, Dolores Claiborne through Dreamcatcher, the books just didn’t have the same magic for me.
I’m not saying that they’re not good books and well worth reading.
I’m just saying that they didn’t work for me.
I started Cell expecting to be disappointed, and was blown away by the first hundred or so pages, but he lost me with the whole talking zombies thing.
I didn’t like Doctor Sleep.
Thought it was an interesting idea that had been poorly executed.
Read Joyland last week and appreciated it for what I was, but if it hadn’t been Stephen King brand, Good Housekeeping approved, I wouldn’t have thought much of it.
And I can imagine King chuckling and saying, “Fuck you too, buddy!”
And he’d be right to say so.
It’s just my opinion and I can cram it back in my ass with all of my other unwanted opinions.
But I want a book that, to paraphrase King’s UK documentary on horror movies, “The kind of (book) that makes you forget to make dinner. So when your husband comes home, you have to say ‘Sorry, honey. We’re going to have to order take-out tonight because I got caught up in this book I was reading.’ ”
Having played with the words and wrestled with the muse a bit myself I’m not looking to just read another book.
I’m looking to read the best books.
Books that are so good that they inspire me to try to step up my own game.
Sure, you could go to the library and start at one end and read your way through to the other, but you’d have to be a book masochist to want to because you’re going to read a lot of bad books.
The best books are tough to find in these modern times of self-published free-for-all.
I agree that the power of production should be in the hands of the people, but without experienced editors functioning as aesthetic gate-keepers, everyone knows someone that wrote a book.
I’ve been published by a legacy publisher and published my own books.
I wasn’t unhappy with being represented by a publisher and when I had a good book that I couldn’t get any publisher to even look at, I published it myself and wasn’t disappointed with the bigger piece of the pie I kept for my work.
The reason I even mention that is because I’m imaginary friends with a lot of independent authors.
Every day I get a couple friend requests from people that have a decent amount of friends in common and if their profile picture or cover picture is the cover of their latest book I assume that they’re not really looking to make friends but to build their fanbase and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Since I review books, when they’re trying to promote their new book I tell them that if they send me a PDF to check out if I can think of anything nice to say I’ll do a review.
Usually I don’t end up doing a review.
I get maybe twenty, twenty-five pages in and I’m overwhelmed by stylistic flaws in plot, theme, or writing style that a judicious editor could have addressed if given a chance, and I have to give up before finishing the book becomes a grudge match.
It’s not that they’re bad people.
I mean, there’s a few raging assholes in the bunch, but pricks can write decent books sometimes.
Lovecraft and Bukowski weren’t exemplary human beings but I enjoy reading their work anyway.
It’s not that they’re bad people, but they’re nice people that accidentally wrote bad books and didn’t have anyone looking over their shoulder to say, “Do you really think third-person omniscient flashback is the right perspective from which to tell this story?”
For a while there, it seemed like the King brand was so strong that there wasn’t anyone that had the power to tell the emperor that he might have been a bit under-dressed.
I don’t think that an author owes his fans anything.
If you like a book, then bully for you.
King could walk away from his brand and write nothing but Danielle Steele fan fiction for the rest of his life and readers can read it or not.
But when an author establishes a style, it can be disorienting when the author experiments in a different style.
I started reading Lisey’s Story not knowing what kind of book it was going to be.
Was it going to be an earth-shaker like his early novels, or a self-indulgent oroboros, or a self-cannibalizing recycling of themes and characters from his earlier work?
The book starts off with the widow of a writer.
Long-time readers of King know that a book with the author as a central character, or in this case, the widow of the author, can go either way.
Lisey’s Story captures some of that magic that King’s earlier work had.
The long lyrical passages and strategic use of plain talk that defined the early work in his brand.
After about fifty pages, I started to get bored of Lisey and her sisters and their chicken-pecking-order squabbling, but each time I sighed I told myself, “Just a few more pages…” and even King’s more disappointing work has the quality that keeps you promising yourself “Just a few more pages…” until you find yourself at the end and wondering how you just read a thousand page book that you almost gave up on every fifty pages or so.
At least that’s what it was like reading 11/22/63.
I almost threw my hands up and gave up when I got to the “Let’s put on a show!” part that ended with a big musical number and an honest-to-God pie fight.
While I was reading Lisey’s Story I was reminded of when I took on the novels of D. H. Lawrence.
Not Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which, in addition to being his best known title is also a relatively brisk read, but his dense brick book trilogy Women In Love, Sons & Lovers, and The Rainbow.
I picked them up on the recommendation of Henry Miller and any number of other authors whose works I had enjoyed.
Reading D. H. Lawrence is an odd experience because there are eighty page blocks of boring procedural writing about the average everyday lives of coal-miners and housemaids and just when you think you’re going to fall asleep or give up on the book there’s a paragraph that blows the top off your head you have to read three times to make sure that you read what you read and that’s what keeps you going for the next long boring block of eighty pages about babies on the floor and fires in fireplaces until another magical paragraph that fucks you up.
I was thinking about this comparison when I got to Page 170 of the PDF of Lisey's Story I was reading and there it was:
I was a long-time fan of King from the first time I started reading his books beginning with It (1986) in fifth grade.
I remember being young to ask the librarian if I could borrow books from the adult shelves.
Up till then I had been restricted to browsing the "Children's" room and the proportionately smaller section designated for "Young Adults".
Spinning metal racks with one or two copies of Tolkien and dozens of his bastard children.
Piers Anthony, R. A. Salvatore, Philip Jose Farmer, and any number of Sword & Sorcery style fantasy novels with dragons on the cover.
I remember the librarian appraising me with her learned eye and saying, "Okay... but you can only get two. We'll try you out on two and see how you do with those. If you take care of them and bring them back when they're due, we'll think about letting you take some more out."
In my hometown library, kids weren't even really allowed into the adult section.
It wasn't fenced off, but the circulation desk was right in front of the entrance.
The Children's Room was to the left, Young Adult and Periodicals in the area in front of the Circulation Desk and the Adult shelves were to the right.
If you were a kid, you were directed to the Children's Room lest you annoy the adults.
Asking and being allowed to enter the Adult section was like opening the door to a whole new world.
I had read almost the entire Children's Room and in the Adult section were ten times as many books.
I remember going to the horror section because I had enjoyed what I had read by Edgar Allan Poe, which was about as hard horror was allowed to get those days in the Young Adult section.
You have to remember this was at least a decade before the Goosebumps series started showing up.
I remember thinking that if I could only get two books, I’d better make them last.
I picked a thick book about the Mary Celeste, and Stephen King’s It.
My uncle Jim was a fan of horror movies and would let me watch whatever I wanted from his VHS collection as long as I promised I could handle it.
Of course I always promised, and I was allowed to watch wildly age inappropriate movies for a ten year old.
The Friday the 13th series, The Nightmare On Elm Street, and several of the film adaptations of Stephen King books.
Which ones specifically I can’t remember, but I remember Christine and Carrie at least and WPIX out of New York would show Cat’s Eye on regular rotation.
The book about the Mary Celeste was non-fiction.
There’s not a lot of non-fiction in the Children’s section, mostly books about animals written like Dick & Jane books.
Not knowing what a non-fiction book was, I was waiting for the story to kick in, and when it didn’t kick in after about fifty pages, I gave up on it being interesting.
That wasn’t a problem with It.
The first twenty or so pages of It are practically perfect.
A lyrical, poetic, hypnotizing, blend of plain words and plain talk used to draw the reader deeper and deeper into the story until poor little Georgie Denbrough disappears down the storm drain forever and ever.
It’s not just because I was ten and reading my first adult book.
A few years back I stopped at a friend’s house and I was too tired to interact so I asked if I could take a nap on their floor.
Despite the fact that I was exhausted I couldn’t fall asleep. They had a bookshelf with a hardcover copy of It so I picked it up intending to read a couple pages until I got sleepy and I ended up reading all the way until Georgie disappears down into the sewers without realizing I had read twenty pages.
That’s the power that King has when he’s at the top of his game.
Books that feel like cinder blocks but read like falling in love.
I haven’t enjoyed everything I’ve read by Stephen King.
For a while, it was like finding a bottomless well of wonder.
Carrie, Cujo, Christine, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, The Stand and his short story collections.
When I was a teen, I found the relatively new The Gunslinger and wondered, “Man, what can’t this guy do?”
But eventually my reading lapped his writing and I ran out of books by King I hadn’t read and I found other authors to read.
Clive Barker first and foremost with a solid reference from the King himself.
Later on down the road, Dolores Claiborne through Dreamcatcher, the books just didn’t have the same magic for me.
I’m not saying that they’re not good books and well worth reading.
I’m just saying that they didn’t work for me.
I started Cell expecting to be disappointed, and was blown away by the first hundred or so pages, but he lost me with the whole talking zombies thing.
I didn’t like Doctor Sleep.
Thought it was an interesting idea that had been poorly executed.
Read Joyland last week and appreciated it for what I was, but if it hadn’t been Stephen King brand, Good Housekeeping approved, I wouldn’t have thought much of it.
And I can imagine King chuckling and saying, “Fuck you too, buddy!”
And he’d be right to say so.
It’s just my opinion and I can cram it back in my ass with all of my other unwanted opinions.
But I want a book that, to paraphrase King’s UK documentary on horror movies, “The kind of (book) that makes you forget to make dinner. So when your husband comes home, you have to say ‘Sorry, honey. We’re going to have to order take-out tonight because I got caught up in this book I was reading.’ ”
Having played with the words and wrestled with the muse a bit myself I’m not looking to just read another book.
I’m looking to read the best books.
Books that are so good that they inspire me to try to step up my own game.
Sure, you could go to the library and start at one end and read your way through to the other, but you’d have to be a book masochist to want to because you’re going to read a lot of bad books.
The best books are tough to find in these modern times of self-published free-for-all.
I agree that the power of production should be in the hands of the people, but without experienced editors functioning as aesthetic gate-keepers, everyone knows someone that wrote a book.
I’ve been published by a legacy publisher and published my own books.
I wasn’t unhappy with being represented by a publisher and when I had a good book that I couldn’t get any publisher to even look at, I published it myself and wasn’t disappointed with the bigger piece of the pie I kept for my work.
The reason I even mention that is because I’m imaginary friends with a lot of independent authors.
Every day I get a couple friend requests from people that have a decent amount of friends in common and if their profile picture or cover picture is the cover of their latest book I assume that they’re not really looking to make friends but to build their fanbase and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Since I review books, when they’re trying to promote their new book I tell them that if they send me a PDF to check out if I can think of anything nice to say I’ll do a review.
Usually I don’t end up doing a review.
I get maybe twenty, twenty-five pages in and I’m overwhelmed by stylistic flaws in plot, theme, or writing style that a judicious editor could have addressed if given a chance, and I have to give up before finishing the book becomes a grudge match.
It’s not that they’re bad people.
I mean, there’s a few raging assholes in the bunch, but pricks can write decent books sometimes.
Lovecraft and Bukowski weren’t exemplary human beings but I enjoy reading their work anyway.
It’s not that they’re bad people, but they’re nice people that accidentally wrote bad books and didn’t have anyone looking over their shoulder to say, “Do you really think third-person omniscient flashback is the right perspective from which to tell this story?”
For a while there, it seemed like the King brand was so strong that there wasn’t anyone that had the power to tell the emperor that he might have been a bit under-dressed.
I don’t think that an author owes his fans anything.
If you like a book, then bully for you.
King could walk away from his brand and write nothing but Danielle Steele fan fiction for the rest of his life and readers can read it or not.
But when an author establishes a style, it can be disorienting when the author experiments in a different style.
I started reading Lisey’s Story not knowing what kind of book it was going to be.
Was it going to be an earth-shaker like his early novels, or a self-indulgent oroboros, or a self-cannibalizing recycling of themes and characters from his earlier work?
The book starts off with the widow of a writer.
Long-time readers of King know that a book with the author as a central character, or in this case, the widow of the author, can go either way.
Lisey’s Story captures some of that magic that King’s earlier work had.
The long lyrical passages and strategic use of plain talk that defined the early work in his brand.
After about fifty pages, I started to get bored of Lisey and her sisters and their chicken-pecking-order squabbling, but each time I sighed I told myself, “Just a few more pages…” and even King’s more disappointing work has the quality that keeps you promising yourself “Just a few more pages…” until you find yourself at the end and wondering how you just read a thousand page book that you almost gave up on every fifty pages or so.
At least that’s what it was like reading 11/22/63.
I almost threw my hands up and gave up when I got to the “Let’s put on a show!” part that ended with a big musical number and an honest-to-God pie fight.
While I was reading Lisey’s Story I was reminded of when I took on the novels of D. H. Lawrence.
Not Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which, in addition to being his best known title is also a relatively brisk read, but his dense brick book trilogy Women In Love, Sons & Lovers, and The Rainbow.
I picked them up on the recommendation of Henry Miller and any number of other authors whose works I had enjoyed.
Reading D. H. Lawrence is an odd experience because there are eighty page blocks of boring procedural writing about the average everyday lives of coal-miners and housemaids and just when you think you’re going to fall asleep or give up on the book there’s a paragraph that blows the top off your head you have to read three times to make sure that you read what you read and that’s what keeps you going for the next long boring block of eighty pages about babies on the floor and fires in fireplaces until another magical paragraph that fucks you up.
I was thinking about this comparison when I got to Page 170 of the PDF of Lisey's Story I was reading and there it was:
Part 2: Sowisa
"She turned, and saw a great white
moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved
like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon,
offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened
wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the
moon."
—D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
—D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
There it was.
King, that wily trickster had decided to write a contemporary homage to D. H. Lawrence in his own style, setting the stage with his own tropes and northern Maine idiosyncrasies and he did it so well that, having read the work of D. H. Lawrence, I was subconsciously reminded of the work of D. H. Lawrence.
Not that I expect King to ever read this self-indulgent review, but allow me to say, “Bravo, you talented bastard. You tricked me, and I don’t trick easy.”
King, that wily trickster had decided to write a contemporary homage to D. H. Lawrence in his own style, setting the stage with his own tropes and northern Maine idiosyncrasies and he did it so well that, having read the work of D. H. Lawrence, I was subconsciously reminded of the work of D. H. Lawrence.
Not that I expect King to ever read this self-indulgent review, but allow me to say, “Bravo, you talented bastard. You tricked me, and I don’t trick easy.”
