Book Review

Some people might find it surprising that Stephen King writes a lot about love. Many of his greatest stories are love stories at their center. It is love that helps to light the way out of the darkness and love lost that causes the most angst and pain. You can find it in most of his longer tales sometimes front and center jockeying for position amongst the monsters (both human and supernatural) and the nightmares. At other times it is more subtle, dancing like a mote of light in and out of the frame maybe just something caught in the corner of your eye.  But with the last two King books I have read, love has been the featured attraction, the main event as it were. 11/22/1963 was a full blown romance that just happened to have a supernatural element to it. The love between Jack and Sadie was as real and heartbreaking as any that happens when two people who want to be together, need each other, complete each other in some undefinable way are ripped apart and not allowed the happy ending we as the reader all yearn for. Lisey’s story fits in this category too.

I found this copy of Lisey’s Story at a thrift store I frequent for the bargain price of $2.99. Not bad for a hard back that looked like the spine hadn’t even been cracked. It was needed to help complete the Stephen King section of my book shelves and was bought for that purpose, finding it to be such an enjoyable read was an added bonus. It is a seemingly simple story about a widow who is trying to deal with the grief of losing her husband and if King had stopped there and just went with that I think he could have hit it out of the park. The story gets complicated when it turns out that he is a world renowned and successful author so she is not allowed to grieve on her own terms or in her own time but is constantly harassed by “scholars”(or as Lisey calls them, “Incunks”) who want his papers to further their own ends and crazy fans. This is one of King’s most personal novels as he says to us, his constant readers, the idea came to him about his own wife if he had been killed when that car hit him. This book is written by a man who loves his wife very much and tells me that if she loves him back the same way that they are a very lucky and very blessed pair indeed. Unlike Lisey whose beloved is gone, I hope Stephen and Tabitha have many more happy years left to them. This is not to say that Lisey is Tabitha or that Stephen is Scott but I‘m sure that both of them are woven through these characters.

Lisey starts her journey with us while cleaning out her husband’s office, where he would write and where it can seem the most vibrant part of him is still to some degree extant. It has been two years since famous novelist Scott Langdon died in a way that will not be specified until almost the end of the book. Her grief is poignant.

“Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.”

To lose a soul deep love is to go through life a shadow of yourself; it seems that happiness is only a myth told to children and that all you can hope for is that some days you will feel less sad then others. It also seems that time is not the healer everyone touts it to be.

“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”

“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in a while with the old watering-can and it’s so sad—”

But as is with those left behind, you have to go on and go on she does. She has to deal with a mentally ill sister who is a cutter and a crazed #1 fan that wants her husband’s papers and considers a little mutilation and rape of a widow he thinks of as a Yoko just fine if it gets him what he wants. Much of the book is told in flashback and in it we meet Scott, the very epitome of the tortured artist and his well of secrets. He can travel to another world; a world that speeds healing and is beautiful in daylight but deadly after dark. It has dangers in the form of never seen creatures called “laughers” and something called a “long boy” with a mind so alien it can drive you mad. If it looks at you it can follow you back and stalk you in reflections or possess you and turn you into nothing better than a rabid dog. The story of Scott and his family is one of the best and creepiest parts of the book.

For all that I enjoyed this book and felt that there was plenty of gold to be mined; it is not without its flaws. It seemed strange to me that she could experience so much with this man, be married for 25 years and still deliberately forget so much about him but the mind is a curious thing, especially if forgetting is for sanities sake. It is this remembering with Lisey that makes up the bulk of the story telling. We are invited into this marriage and this woman’s head as a member of the family, into the private things that make up the relationship on the most mundane levels. The most jarring thing about this and from what I have read of other reviews, the most annoying is the language of their marriage. To be honest, I felt this too. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the book I hated the word “smucking”, by the middle I never wanted to read it again and thus hear it in my head and by the end I trained my eye to skip over it. Lisey to me seemed like such a boring character with nothing of her own to offer the world (she is no Sadie that’s for sure), she gave it all to Scott and was happy to live in his shadow. I liked her but never fell in love with her and couldn’t really understand why Scott did either. Scott seemed more real and vibrant then she ever did and he spent the entire book dead. But she was a safe place for him with a heart filled with kindness and that was what really mattered, she could holler him home.

My recommendation is if you love King you will enjoy this; if you love love-stories there is a lot to see and feel here. Many times the way he writes about love brought tears to my eyes and that in itself is enough for me. It is not his best work but it is far from his worst and how can you really dislike anything so filled with love and those who are just waiting for their love to holler them home?