Should I start this by saying that I love Stephen King? Because I do. He’s an old friend, going back to 1985 when my eighth grade teacher read us one of his short stories and I went and bought Night Shift (the one with the cover of the terrifying windup monkey with cymbals on it), and then I consumed King regularly. I read Pet Sematary and didn’t sleep for a week.
I stopped reading King somewhere in high school/college because I guess I was too grown up and cool. King was a popular writer, right? And so I drifted away. And then somehow I came back 20 years later. I forget why, exactly. In part I came to see the snobbishness of categories like “popular literature,” thanks to Terry Eagleton and C.S. Lewis (Lewis has some lingering snobbishness, but was a wide ranging reader and writer). I found out that many PhD students find inspiration in his nonfiction book On Writing, which is about the writing process. I read the The Green Mile and loved it even more than the movie (which is saying a lot, it’s a wonderful film), and then became enthralled with The Gunslinger series. King was a comfort for a GenX’er; he was someone I had grown up with, in a sense, and reading him always had a bit of nostalgia. During the nightmare of COVID I found myself drawn to horror stories and movies of all types. I guess compensating with deeper horrors is one way to deal with the drudgery of everyday fears like masks and correctly washing your hands.
King says that Lisey’s Story is his favorite of his own novels. Like many of King’s works, it is about writing itself – The Green Mile includes Edgecombe’s written account of his prior life as a guard on death row, The Gunslinger has many meta moments where King is the creator of that world who meets his own characters, “Rat” from If It Bleeds (one of my favorites of King’s works, it’s just excellent all around) is about a writer and a magic rat. It’s a story about mental illness, and damaged people, and mortality. There’s a bogeyman and a scavenger hunt to solve, and a fantasy reality. It’s also a love story.
I’m not a big fan of Lisey’s Story. Is it a story of empowerment, grief, childhood trauma, or the magic of writing? A book doesn’t need to have a single theme, but you do expect some sort of cohesion. Why does King connect imagination, escapism, writing, and cutting/self-harm? The book toys with the fantasy world being fictional, but then swerves into it clearly being real. The hellish childhood of Scott Landon is also real, even though you wonder if some of it is fictional since he is a writer. Scott is someone who took Flannery O’Connor’s idea – that anyone who survives childhood has something to write about – literally. The book has monsters, infection, sister-bonding, and a shovel. Scott can see the future somehow, and leaves Lisey a scavenger hunt to find after his death to help her. But why not just tell her? It doesn’t hang together in a satisfying way.
At times I anticipated something more interesting happening. I thought maybe Scott was Paul, or there was no Paul, or the fantasy world of Boo’ya Moon was not literally real. I thought maybe the father would explain more about the fantasy world, or would become the monster of Boo’ya Moon. Anticipation while reading is part of the fun. But not when the anticipation is better than the work itself.
Is it just me? Maybe. King likes it, as did the Bram Stoker Award and World Fantasy Award. HBO likes it. I did listen to the audiobook, which is always a different experience than words on a page. Different strokes for different folks, and all. The HBO series is an alternate version written by King with various changes he has made to the story. I like that King likes the story so much and wrote the teleplay. I like King. I just didn’t like this as much as I thought I would.