Tag Archives: Stephen King

The Shining by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
Dysfunctional family gets collective ass kicked by haunted hotel.

Review:
I think The Shining is probably my favorite Stephen King book–and that includes the Dark Tower books. And I’m always tickled at how different it is from the Kubrick movie–and how I can love them both as complete works without needed them to resemble one another. My husband decided he’d give King a try, having never read any of his books, and asked me which one. I didn’t hesitate before recommending this one to him, and he’s really been enjoying it. I’m torn on which one to suggest he read next–for selfish reasons I want to say Cujo, because I’m in the mood to reread it myself, but I think The Dead Zone is more up his alley.

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia book and The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman, Hans Åke Lilja, and Kevin Quigley, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne

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Synopsis:
A thoroughly research set of quiz books for the ultimate Stephen King aficionado!

Review:
Wow, these trivia books are crazy comprehensive! The Trivia Book covers the books, and the Movie Trivia Book focuses on the movies. As any fan knows, there can be pretty substantive differences between the movies and the books.

So if you know that Andy Dufresne’s final poster was different in the novella and the movie, and you can even guess who replaced Linda Rondstadt in the movie, then these books are for you!

Many thanks to Cemetery Dance for the review copies.

The Dark Half by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
A literary author kills his crime fiction scribe alter ego, only to have him come to life and menace his family.

Review:
The Dark Half is classic King and a book I’ve ready maybe 4 times now. It felt thin to me this time, probably because I am so familiar with the plot. I still love the way it talks about the process of writing–I don’t think anybody really does that better than King.

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (Dark Tower, Book 4.5)

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Synopsis:
On their way to Calla Bryn Sturgis, Roland and his ka-tet take shelter from a starkblast, and Roland tells the story of his first quest after killing his mother, and within it tells a fairy tale about a brave boy who tangles with a demonic trickster.

Review:
Oh, my, and it was good to hear Roland’s voice again, you say true and I say thankya. With the series complete, King didn’t need to add to his Dark Tower saga, but The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like it’s been there the whole time.

The framing story follows Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy the billy-bumbler as they leave the Emerald City and follow the Path of the Beam towards the Dark Tower. Caught in a sudden, immense freezing storm called a starkblast, the ka-tet finds shelter. To pass the time, Roland volunteers a story in which he tells a story about a fictional starkblast and a boy named Tim Stoutheart.

In Roland’s story, he goes back to the time just after he killed his mother, when is father sent him out to a remote mining town where a skin-man is performing brutal murders in the form of an animal. One survivor holds the key to trapping the vicious monster, but Roland is inexperienced and may not have what it takes to bring peace to the town.

To wait out a terrifying night with the witness, a terrified young boy, Roland tells him a story that his mother used to tell him. Tim Stoutheart loses his father and his mother remarries. Her new husband is a brute, and when the Covenant Man comes to town, he gives Tim a token that unlocks a devastating series of events for Tim and his family. Tim, just a boy, must gather all his courage to take a magical journey into a forest populated by dragons, bad fairies, venomous pythons, mud people, and a wizard out of mythology.

Much has been made of the changes that happen offscreen between Wizard and Glass and The Wolves of the Calla (my personal favorite). Eddie, Susannah, and Jake become true gunslingers and we don’t really see how it happens. This is King’s answer. Becoming a gunslinger, in the end, simply means choosing to be a gunslinger. That’s how Roland and Tim Stoutheart survive their tales. It’s like they put on an identity, and when they succeed, it’s like they’ve never not been gunslingers. And that’s what Jake, Susannah, and Eddie will have to do.

The three stories are deftly embedded and the whole thing moves and I just didn’t want it to end.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
A schoolteacher travels through a wormhole to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.

Review:
11/22/63 started out really strong. I loved the premise and knew that Stephen King would do a lot more than just tell the A-story of Jake Epping, time traveler and would-be history changer. The historical aspects were really well done, particularly through the life Jake builds in small town Jodie, Texas, and the love story is poignant.

However, I felt like the ending was a foregone conclusion, and I didn’t feel like King delivered on the promise he made by setting the opening horror sequence in Derry right at the same time as It. I was expecting a lot more than I got.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
4 new stories that probe what ordinary people might do when faced with evil.

Review:
There were times when I considered putting down Full Dark, No Stars because it went so deep into the blackness. I know that sounds odd, because of who the author is, but for some reason these stories felt compressed in an unpleasant way. When King takes more time to develop his stories and let them breathe, you get some relief from the evil. That’s not the case with these small stories. And because in each one the evil is so intimate, the stories are claustrophobic to the extreme. I much prefer the mode where the evil is externalized to a greater degree. To me, his gold standard for the short form is “The Langoliers,” where you have an outside menace that then causes a moral breakdown amongst a group for characters. Moving among points-of-view provides a bit of an escape and some characters are also freed to find their best selves. Here you do get some glimpses of courage and even heroism, but the overall mood is relentlessly cynical and bleak.

That said, these stories do have solid literary merit, in terms of concept and execution. I guess I just might have too much Christmas spirit to appreciate them now. I might have liked them better in March.

Lisey’s Story by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
Two years after the death of her famous writer husband, Lisey Landon must return to the other world where he both drew his inspiration and unearthed his demons in order to defeat a madman and put her husband’s legacy to rest for good.

Review:
I listened to the audiobook of Lisey’s Story, narrated by the incomparable Mare Winningham, and this was actually my second encounter with the book, which I have read once before. It’s one of King’s most ambitiously intimate stories, delving deep into what he calls the “dark heart of every marriage.”

As Lisey Landon travels back and forth to Scott’s alternate world, home to “the well where we all go down to drink,” she faces demons both internal and external, tangible and terrifyingly supernatural. In doing so, she probes every corner of her life with famous writer Scott Landon, to name the darkness that nearly consumed them both.

I liked Lisey tremendously, though I felt like the conclusion to the storyline involving her stalker ended on an odd note. She’s a wonderfully realized character, and a real woman. I’m not sure I’ll be reading this one again, though. I think I’d actually get bored on a third read, and I don’t want my memories of Lisey despoiled.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
A collection of short stories.

Review:
Just After Sunset offers a lackluster selection of short stories, hardly any of which really grabbed me by the collar. Many of them had a fancy twist ending that could be spotted a mile away (“The Mute”), while others were just deadly dull (“The Things They Left Behind”).

I did enjoy “N,” which evoked the same creepy unease that I so loved in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. However, once it reached the final section it had no more surprises for me. “The Stationary Bike” was hypnotic, particularly because I listened to it while driving a very long stretch of I87 from Albany back to New York City. However, it just didn’t blow me away. Finally, “A Very Tight Place,” which concerns a man trapped in a tipped-over, locked port-o-potty, managed to gross me out, keep me riveted, and surprise me with some nice character touches. I think it’s the best of a subpar bunch.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
An impenetrable dome smashes down over a small Maine town, completely isolating them from the world.

Review:
I devoured Under the Dome, thoroughly enjoying King’s blend of deft characterizations, manic plotting, and outrageously broad social satire. Imagine the world coming to an end–but only over a few square miles, while the rest of America watches helpless to intervene.

In true King fashion, he takes an external horror device and uses it to expose the evil within. I’d call him a Calvinist, except it seems that the only kind of Christian King approves of is the one who has decided God doesn’t exist. Here, we get Lester Coggins, a vaguely charismatic preacher prone to apocalypticism and hypocrisy–always going down on his knees even when negotiating his stake in a drug deal–contrasted with Piper Libby, a minister whose growing agnosticism serves to make her more heroic by the minute. He’s toned down his vitriol against “Christians” in his last few books, but methinks that’s only because his recent works have been relatively intimate affairs with few characters. In addition to Coggins, he gives us Big Jim Rennie, a larger-than-life villain in the form of an obese Selectmen, one of Coggins’s flock who uses some Christian vocabulary but otherwise bears no resemblance to an actual believer. I don’t even have a problem with nominal Christians being satirized, but it seems to me that King’s analysis is stuck in the Falwell 80s. The Cogginses of today are more likely to be preaching wealth and prosperity without ever mentioning Jesus at all. I wasn’t buying that Big Jim Rennie needed Jesus to achieve his political goals. King would have me believe that Rennie actually thought Jesus was on his side and I’m not buying that either. King didn’t make it work because he doesn’t believe that there could be real Christians in the first place.

My other critique of the novel comes in its lack of a compelling protagonist. Big Jim Rennie looms so large over the pages of the book, and his heroic counterpart, Dale Barbara, a retired military man now slinging hash at Sweetbriar Rose’s, doesn’t match him in intensity. The others on Barbie’s team all have their moments, but none pop the way that the baddies do. Big Jim’s goals are very clear; the rest have only survival on their mind, but because they can’t escape they’re all trapped in a reactionary mode. I didn’t really latch on to any of them emotionally, so I ended up that same reactionary place.

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

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Synopsis:
Roland the gunslinger reaches the Dark Tower he’s been pursing for a thousand years.

Review:
Obviously there’s a lot more to The Dark Tower, book 7 in Stephen King’s epic series of the same name, than my one sentence synopsis implies. But essentially, that’s it. And, honestly, was Roland’s not reaching the Tower ever an option for King? The suspense has never been “will he?” but “what will it be like?”

But before Roland can reach the tower, he and his ka-tet (a former junkie, a legless woman, a kid, and a talking dog) have to save the world. And to do so, they need to save Stephen King himself from the car accident that nearly took his life in 1999. If King dies, the Tower falls and all of the universe will wink out of existence forever.

In every other version of America that Roland and co. have visited, the existence of the Tower and Roland’s quest have been unknown. Here, Roland goes to a version of New York City where his own Tet Corporation is protecting the rose that called to him from the empty lot. It’s a bit disconcerting to hear regular people using Calla-lingo and referring to things like Gan and the Prim and the can toi. It’s almost like seeing the story in its underwear. For me, it takes me out of the world of the story in a way that not even King’s inclusion of himself did.

Roland also has to face down his nemeses, the Crimson King and his bastard son Mordred. A bit anticlimactic, almost rushed–but King more than redeems himself with the nightmarish Odd’s End sequence. And the poignancy of the shattering of the ka-tet has depth and resonance to spare. King executes all of the emotional elements beautifully.

So what does it all mean? Well, ka is a wheel, and time is a face on the water. But like Ray Bradbury knew, one tiny breath can topple an empire. Am I satisfied by the ending? That’s not really the point. Do I think it’s the right ending? Yes. I may not like it, but I don’t think King could’ve ended it any other way, not with the cosmology and theology operating in the series. I don’t at all agree with his conception of ka, the cruel bitch that makes suckers of us all. I would love to see Roland’s journey rewritten in a universe with a good and sovereign God rather than fickle ka. It’s an interesting thought exercise.

I’m now curious to reread some of his post-Tower works to see if King fully exorcised Roland’s ghost, or whether he’s still on the path of the Beam. I did borrow the first two comic book compendiums from my brother, but I’m not going to read them. I don’t like comic books or graphic novels, and I’m not interested in reading Roland’s story in chronological order.

I think that might be my last reread of the Dark Tower series. (I doubt that’s true, but I’m not keeping the books in my permanent library.) Ultimately, the darkness of the meaning of the series overshadows the myriad pleasures I take from the storytelling.