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maccaj asked me what I thought of Lisey's Story, Stephen King's most recent novel. It is, in fact, his best novel since the clutch of word children that produced Bag of Bones, Dolores Claiborne, and Gerald's Game. It's leagues better than From a Buick 8 and Cell, two incomprehensible messes that said not very much over a great many pages. I'm inclined to forgive their incoherence, however, since they were written in the aftermath of his near-fatal hit-and-run, and pain and good drugs likely colluded to dull his usually keen sense of story and narrative rhythm.
Lisey's Story is a return to his fighting trim, a thoughtful, melancholy, bittersweet exploration of grief and the art of saying goodbye. It's also about family-the ones into which we're born and the ones we choose to make. It's about brothers and fathers and husbands and wives. In many ways, it's the female counterpart to the masculine portrait of grief in Bag of Bones. It's about those left behind and final acts of love by those who've left.
It's lyrical and beautiful and threaded with insights into the often overlooked brutality of love. At one point, the newly widowed Lisey muses that if people truly comprehended the risk and cost involved in love, they would never take that leap. The sentiment was much more beautifully expressed, of course, and if I can be arsed to pick up my copy of the book, I'll quote it in its entirety. The first time I read it, it struck me like a punch and knotted my throat.
King is a consummate wordsmith, and he crafts some doozies here. "Bool." "Blood-bool." "Bool-ya Moon." "Bad-gunky". And, of course, "Incunks."
What a delightfully evocative word that is. Incunks. Incunks. Incunks. It conjures images of tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, tight-assed intellectuals with patches on their elbows and squint lines in the corners of their eyes from countless squinty hours in library basements. I've decided that if I ever become a famous writer, the Incunks can kindly keep their dusty hands off my unpublished papers and out of their pants. Let them dribble their sticky pretension over someone else's lost words. I know what I meant to say and what I didn't, and eager, Johnny-come-lately interpreters with teakwood hard-ons and ivory heads need not apply. Fucking Incunks.
Bool.
The end.
maccaj asked me what I thought of Lisey's Story, Stephen King's most recent novel. It is, in fact, his best novel since the clutch of word children that produced Bag of Bones, Dolores Claiborne, and Gerald's Game. It's leagues better than From a Buick 8 and Cell, two incomprehensible messes that said not very much over a great many pages. I'm inclined to forgive their incoherence, however, since they were written in the aftermath of his near-fatal hit-and-run, and pain and good drugs likely colluded to dull his usually keen sense of story and narrative rhythm.Lisey's Story is a return to his fighting trim, a thoughtful, melancholy, bittersweet exploration of grief and the art of saying goodbye. It's also about family-the ones into which we're born and the ones we choose to make. It's about brothers and fathers and husbands and wives. In many ways, it's the female counterpart to the masculine portrait of grief in Bag of Bones. It's about those left behind and final acts of love by those who've left.
It's lyrical and beautiful and threaded with insights into the often overlooked brutality of love. At one point, the newly widowed Lisey muses that if people truly comprehended the risk and cost involved in love, they would never take that leap. The sentiment was much more beautifully expressed, of course, and if I can be arsed to pick up my copy of the book, I'll quote it in its entirety. The first time I read it, it struck me like a punch and knotted my throat.
King is a consummate wordsmith, and he crafts some doozies here. "Bool." "Blood-bool." "Bool-ya Moon." "Bad-gunky". And, of course, "Incunks."
What a delightfully evocative word that is. Incunks. Incunks. Incunks. It conjures images of tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, tight-assed intellectuals with patches on their elbows and squint lines in the corners of their eyes from countless squinty hours in library basements. I've decided that if I ever become a famous writer, the Incunks can kindly keep their dusty hands off my unpublished papers and out of their pants. Let them dribble their sticky pretension over someone else's lost words. I know what I meant to say and what I didn't, and eager, Johnny-come-lately interpreters with teakwood hard-ons and ivory heads need not apply. Fucking Incunks.
Bool.
The end.
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