The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

It's been a long time since I've read a Stephen King book, but when I was in middle and high school, you'd have been hard-pressed to find me reading anything else. He was the first writer that I was really just into. I know that I read some of the short stories in his 2002 collection Everything's Eventual, but I didn't read the whole thing. I suppose the last novel thing by King that I read in its entirety was the 1998 novel Bag of Bones, which I liked well-enough. I suppose that, as I grew into adulthood, I just kind of grew out of Stephen King the same way I grew out of Metallica. I still keep a soft spot in my heart for Stephen King, though, and it was nice to re-enter his universe with Lisey's Story.

As always, I hate writing a synopsis when you can so easily find one on the internet. I'll just get to what I liked and disliked.

There's a freshness to this novel--a springy determination--that I think has been absent in recent King books. Bag of Bones didn't have it, at least. King is going somewhere, he's taking the reader with him, and it's going to be fun. A great deal of this novel deals with the internal language that develops between  Lisey and her husband--deceased, but he appears in memories--Scott. I think this is a really good idea. Taking the time to build and develop unique husband/wife language really adds to the dialogue and the movement of the story. Also, King utilizes some really fresh similes, especially at the beginning of the book. I'd give some examples, but I failed to note their location and I don't much feel like searching for them at this point. Unfortunately, the last half of the novel seems to lose its freshness. New, original similes are replaced with cliches, and the story begins to really grind down and become uninteresting. But, this isn't simply because of the language. It's the story.

I think King is a good writer, but he's at is best--as ironic as this sounds--when he limits his interaction with the supernatural or avoids it all together. He just can't help himself, though. During the first half of the novel, we're teased with supernatural explanations for occurring phenomenon, but it never really manifests itself. In fact, I thought Lisey's Story would be a book in which all conflict was ultimately natural, occurring in the natural world, and with natural solutions. Though not his reputation, King has published a number of stories and novels with little or no use of the supernatural to move the plot forward: "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption", Dolores Claiborne, Cujo, "The Body." Even in his best works in which the supernatural is utilized, it is really a secondary aspect to the plot (and, ultimately, several good novels have ended poorly because of supernatural phenomenon, such as The Stand and Needful Things). I think King is really ambitious as a writer, so I'm reluctant to say that his use of the super natural in Lisey's Story is laziness, but I will say that I think he uses the supernatural as a crutch.

If you like Stephen King, you'll like Lisey's Story. Otherwise, I suspect this is not the book that will convert you to a King fan. The ending isn't bad, I was just expecting a resolution through different means.