I am a Constant Reader. I have been since that fateful
day in fifth grade when I descended into the dark basement of the town library
where all the fiction was shelved and selected a hardback book from the dusty
shelves, the jacket of which with its bold letters and screaming, open-mouthed
skull simply looked to me like the greatest thing ever. The novel was
Christine, and that afternoon I took it home and read it in one sitting
(actually one lying down) on my grandparents couch. From that day onward Stephen
King was one of my favorite writers, and any other writers who hold that title
have been in my life a shorter period. From that first reading of Christine to
finishing a re-read of Everything’s Eventual last night, King has been a
constant (heh) presence in my literary life. I read every new book as it comes
out, re-read at least one novel a year, and re-read some of his short stories
several times a year. Yeah, I’m a Constant Reader.
For some completely random reason, while driving to work
this morning I started thinking about King’s latter-day output. If you like
King, your favorite works (most likely encountered in your youth) were probably
written in the 70s or 80s. Maybe you stopped following him in the 90s (I
honestly did for a while, though I continued to re-read the older works.) Maybe
you came back to him in the 00s, or maybe you didn’t. His books are still
everywhere, but certainly not as ubiquitous as they were in the 80s. While the
last ten years have seen King acknowledged as one of the greats (regardless of
genre) and his books quite often get favorable reviews now, I have a feeling
that, in some ways, the actual works are flying a bit under the radar. Or put
another way: what is a King book in 2016? A tale well told, certainly, but do
you compare everything with the towering achievements earlier in his career? Do
you come to it as comfort food, so familiar with his tics that you don’t even
notice if he experiments, pushes himself as a writer? Is he too prolific?
I’m not going to pretend to answer these questions, most
of which are subjective and don’t have a real answer anyway. What I want to do
is look at the last 11 years of his work and shoot the shit about it. See, you
can do all kind of rigorous academic analysis on King if you want but that just
seems so at odds with what his work is and what it represents to me as a
reader. Fortunately, I’m incapable of that kind of writing. (This will become
obvious.) This post is just going to be me rambling on about the works covering
2005-2015. I’d guess I’d have a lot to say about some of ‘em and not a lot
about others. I chose 11 years as a cutoff because The Dark Tower series
“ended” (The Wind through the Keyhole aside) in 2004 with the publication of
the seventh book and it seemed to me that, with that millstone finally off from
around his neck, King felt free to once again just write whatever he wanted.
Also, I didn’t want to have to discuss The Dark Tower series. As a Constant
Reader, I certainly have opinions, but any discussion of said monolith would be
as long as the series itself and not as fun. This is supposed to be fun—we are
just having a couple of beers, there’s some background noise in the bar, and
neither the fate of the world nor our academic careers hang in balance. Anyway,
here we go.
The Colorado
Kid (2005)
What an odd title to start with! This book is a slight
(184 pages) crime novel published exclusively in paperback by Hard Case Crime,
a great little publisher that specializes in hardboiled noir crime fiction by
overlooked/forgotten pulp writers as well as a smattering of newer authors. It
probably reads less like King than almost any other novel of his I’ve read. This
must be one of the great things about being successful on the level he is: you
can do a project like this without worrying about any repercussions, financial
or critical. And you can use your name to bring attention to a worthy, less
mainstream publisher.
But does the book work? Slight is the word I keep coming back to. King is generally incapable of poor characterization and that is what carries the book. The plot is thin and secondary. I can’t say that the pace is brisk despite the novel’s brevity. I think it is really for hardcore Constant Readers only, or for those curious to see King write in a different genre. It is the polar opposite of The Dark Tower and if anything proves that King is capable of going outside the box and leveraging new tools.
Cell (2006)
Ah, Cell. Cell, Cell, Cell. I like to call this the
“Luddite novel” as it works in the classic sci-fi tradition of “technology is
gonna destroy us all!” Which, truthfully, I believe on some days. And not on
others. In Cell it appears that a signal has turned most cell phone users into
zombies. Yeah, it hurts to type that. In classic Stand tradition, some folks
wander through a post-apocalypse America and a good vs. evil battle ensues,
with many of the good ‘uns fleeing to Canada at the end because that’s what all
smart Americans always end up doing. Main hero Clay (a graphic artist instead
of a writer, gee there’s a novel twist) tries to find if his son was turned
into a zombie, and this tension—a parent terrified of what might have happened
to their child but unable to find out—is the most effective thing in the book
and, combined with King’s deft characterization, raises the story above its
silly plot.
Then we have the end of the book, which I won’t spoil for
anyone who hasn’t read it, but I can say that it caused a fair stir at the time
because it didn’t tie everything up in a neat bow. There are definitely those
who found this approach lazy, and I can see where they are coming from, but I
appreciated it and thought it ended the novel on a moment of suspense that
allowed the book to linger in the mind, which I don’t think it really would
have otherwise.
I don’t really have a problem with the ludicrous plot;
it’s part of the fun. The book knows it’s painting with broad strokes, and in
horror that can be quite effective. I think the biggest problem is that at
times Cell reads more like a movie script than a novel. The pacing is good,
though, and at 350 pages it’s relatively trim for a King book. It’s King
writing Get Offa My Lawn pulp, and it’s enjoyable like a conversation with a
cantankerous coot after three whiskeys (but before that crucial fourth when
they become obnoxious.)
Lisey’s Story
(2006)
This is my favorite latter-day King book. I will be the
first to admit that there is a major, non-book contributing factor for this:
the only time I’ve seen King in person was at a reading for this novel. That
day was very special for me, one of the only times in my life I’ve done
something entirely for myself. I took the day off from work and started writing
my second (and to date last) novel. I clocked in 10,000 words which is still a
record for me and everything seemed possible. Then I went downtown alone at a
time in my life where I rarely got time to myself and listened to King read
excerpts from Lisey’s Story and talk in general for two hours (among other
things, I remember him offering sympathy for us long-suffering Mariners fans.)
I cannot tell you how happy this evening made me; if I could relive this day
over and over again I would. The darkness that so often pulls at me was, for
one day, completely gone and replaced by joy.
Yeah, ok, but how about the book? There were a number of
articles published when Lisey’s Story came out about how King worked with an
editor of romance novels and that this was, in some sense, his romance novel.
It’s not, but it does explore the interiors of marriage in a way that is far
more affective and, well, real than most portraits of the married life found in
books of any genre. This is King writing in a deeply personal voice and it
feels like this book mattered to him—that he really wanted to get across the
mysteries and beauty of marriage, the interior worlds that marriage creates
that can only be visited by those two people. Lisey’s characterization is one
of the greatest in his pantheon. Deeply moving and beautiful, this is a book
that only someone who has been married a long time could have written.
Look, it’s not perfect—no book is. Yet another major
character is a novelist (I am so, so tired of this, regardless of author.) The
stalker subplot, while necessary to move the book along, cheapens the book a
little and I wish he could have found another way to bring in the outside
drama/tension. But these and other minor annoyances don’t take away from the
beauty of the writing, some of the finest of his career. If there are people
who actually still think King is nothing more than a hack writer, well, those
people are stupid. And they should read Lisey’s Story. But they probably
wouldn’t get it. Their loss.
Blaze (2007)
First, I really don’t know why King occasionally
publishes as Richard Bachman when everyone knows that Bachman is him. But
whatever, Blaze is a novel that was initially written at the start of his
career—before Carrie, in fact. For
whatever reason, he pulled it out, rewrote it and published it.
It’s not a bad book; I actually think this would have
been a better choice for Hard Case Crime than The Colorado Kid (which sure
sounds like a western by its title, huh?) King may have rewritten it, but this
book still feels of the late sixties/early seventies. Actually, I can see the
Bachman connection—it shares the vibe of Roadwork in some weird way, though
Roadwork is one of the least of all King novels. Blaze is more of a true pulp
novel and the characterization of mentally handicapped Blaze is well-drawn.
I guess the issue for me is that it’s an utterly forgettable
novel. There is nothing wrong with it, and if you need a beach read you can
blaze through (heh) in a couple of hours, you could do much worse. King is
always readable, after all. I almost completely forgot about this book the
moment I was done reading it, and in fact just had to go to Wikipedia to
remember what the plot was. That does not happen to me with King novels very
often. If you are looking for evidence to support the argument that King
publishes too much and can get anything published just because he is Stephen King, this one probably works.
But even though it seems like I just trashed it, I didn’t dislike it…there are
just a lot of other books you should read first.
Duma Key (2008)
Oh man, Duma Key. Let me put it right out there: the
first half of this large (611 pages) novel find King writing as strong as at
any point in his career, and in a brand new voice. It’s still King, but it’s
King dropping all his tropes and writing a new kind of novel for him, one that
builds on the strengths of Lisey’s Story but takes the emotional impact in a
completely different way. At times I forgot I was reading a King novel—and I loved that.
The second half of this novel descends into cliché and
the ending is the worst ending of any King novel. It’s horseshit.
Seriously, it’s inexplicable. Allow me to armchair
theorize (because we’re just having beers, remember, none of this really
matters.) King started writing this book and a whole new voice came out. He was
excited by this because the voice was working.
After all the years and gazillion books sold, here was proof that he wasn’t
done as an author, that he wasn’t reliving past glories. Each day he wrote he
became excited by the strength of this voice and the possibilities it
presented. And then…he simply got stuck. It happens to all writers, great and
poor. He simply didn’t know where to go next and the muse wasn’t helping. So he
does what all writers do: they fall back on what they know. Hey, King thinks,
I’m a horror writer, and ghost are always useful, and I’ll just throw these
ghosts in here and then I’ll completely change the character’s motivation and
personality and because I’m King it doesn’t matter if it works or not, or if it
robs the story of its integrity. It’ll still sell. Hell, does anyone really
want to hear me write in a new voice anyway? They’ll just accuse me of losing
my folksy charm and getting all pretentious.
Ok, that was a cynical paragraph and in case it’s not
obvious from this long love letter of a post, I think King is truly a great
writer and has handled his career with amazing dignity and integrity given his
massive success. So I don’t believe, perhaps, the intent of the paragraph
above, but I do think something happened in the writing of this book and for
whatever reason he couldn’t get around it. Better, I think, had the book been
abandoned. It’s such a crushing disappointment.
And that’s why I can’t recommend this book to any King
fan…except if, and this is a big exception, you want to read a different King
voice and dream of what might have been. Because as of today, he’s never
returned to anything resembling the voice in the first half of Duma Key. Which
makes me sad and disappointed. Perhaps it is important that our favorite
artists disappoint us on occasion: it holds a mirror up to our own role in the
dance and the expectations we bring to the table. On a technical and even a
readability level, King has written worse books. He’s just never written one
that disappointed me like Duma Key did.
Just After
Sunset (2008)
The thing that strikes me about latter-day Stephen King
short story collections—say, from Everything’s Eventual on—is that they lack
that one gut-punch, mind-blowing great
story. There is no Children of the Corn, Mist or Dolan’s Cadillac in any of
these collections. And that is fine. Because I would argue that SK short
stories of this vintage are more intimate. They feel more like a cabinet of curiosity
discovery. Just After Sunset is a solid collection, a trunkful of interesting curiosities
worth spending an afternoon poking around in. Not every story works, but most
of them do.
I think any discussion of this book has to start with N., the most explicitly Lovecraftian
story King has ever written. (For the record, King claims its main influence
was not Lovecraft but Machen.) It’s a great story that successfully evokes the
cosmic awe and terror of Lovecraft at his best. This isn’t territory King
generally plays in, and it’s fun to see him riff on it. It’s also a reminder
that King’s unmistakable style is actually more varied than usually assumed. N. still reads like a King story, not a
pastiche. This story comes the closest to the peaks of earlier short work.
Other highlights: Willa
is an enjoyable if minor ghost story. Graduation
Day is so cliché that it somehow transcends its limitations to be awesome
(I can’t explain this, it’s just true. How does he do this?) Stationary Bike is an odd tale that will
have you thinking twice about exercise bikes. And my second-favorite story in
the collection, The Gingerbread Girl,
is a tight tale of suspense that reads as the spiritual predecessor of Big Driver, one of my favorite late King
tales which we’ll get to when we talk about Full Dark, No Stars. Most of the
other stories are fine, only The Cat from
Hell is a failure—it is an early story, clearly not of a piece with the
others in this book, and offers an alternate universe where Night Shift was a
terrible book instead of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, short story collections of all time. That’s not a
world I want to live in.
King has admitted that it is harder to write short
stories than it used to be for him, but I’m glad he makes the effort. Too often
when we think of King we think of bloat, all of those 600-1200 page monsters.
His short fiction is a reminder that he can rein that in and work successfully
in the short fiction field.
Under the Dome
(2009)
I don’t know why, but I get the sense this book isn’t
highly thought of by a lot of King fans. I can understand that as it does have
a few problems: an absurd idea that is arguably too thin to carry a book this
size and an ending that probably infuriated a lot of folks. Let me put it right
out there: if you need everything explained in the end, this book isn’t for
you. There is an argument to be had as to whether the ending is a failed
attempt at ambiguity or just laziness. But I don’t want to hash that out here.
The reason I don’t is because I think the
characterization in this book is so skillfully done that it far outweighs any
of the issues above. King’s greatest gift as a writer is his ability to create
characters that are fully fleshed-out, recognizably human, and with backstories
that draw you in. At his best, no one writes better characters than King, and I
think Under the Dome has some of his finest. It’s not a book you read for plot.
You read it because you want to spend time with these folks, the good ones and
the bad ones. In that sense it reminds me of The Stand (though The Stand was
far better on the plot front, of course.)
Look, he’s not breaking new ground here: this is King in
his safety zone, occasionally recycling themes he’s more successfully explored
elsewhere. But as a Constant Reader there’s a certain comfort and joy in that
and reading Under the Dome was like hanging out with a friend that you really
wish you saw more of. It’s not a perfect book but it’s extremely enjoyable if
you are willing to meet it on its own terms.
Full Dark, No
Stars (2010)
I often find King’s novella collections to contain some
of his most interesting work. Different Seasons is a classic, and Four Past
Midnight is, for various personal reasons, one of my favorite King collections.
Full Dark, No Stars fits into this pattern, reminding me a lot of Different
Seasons in feel. Three of the four stories succeed for me, and the one that
doesn’t is still a breezy enough read.
1922 opens the
collection and is the longest story. A lengthy chunk of the story takes place
in 1922, and King’s ability to evoke the feel of people scraping out a living
on the edge is at its strongest here, which was honestly the first thing I
noticed. This factor is one of the key reasons his early work resonated with so
many and it has often been lacking in his post-80s work. Usually I’m not a big
fan of King’s work when it is set in any other era other than the 1950s or
present day (for reasons more due to my personal taste than his ability to
evoke these eras), but 1922 is an effecting yarn that dispenses with the good
vs. evil setup and explores the complexity of the decisions we make and whether
the past comes back to haunt us. Classic stuff, but it’s there if you want it,
not forced on you—you can also just read it as a great campfire tale.
Big Driver, as
mentioned above, is one of my favorite latter-day King tales, even though the
protagonist is once again a writer (seriously King, stop it. It’s the one note
that is really off in this tale—you settled for a double instead of a home
run.) Big Driver is a
non-supernatural thriller that treads on what I believe to be very uncomfortable
ground for King involving kidnapping, rape and revenge and lacks the comfort so
much of his writing provides. Like many, I’ve enjoyed King’s musings on horror
over the years, but one of the points he and I differ on is the value of
exploitation and slasher movies, particularly those of the rape/revenge variety
(he dismisses them as exploitative garbage, I find value in many of them and
think they are extremely important. It’s a topic too big to dive into here.)
And that’s why I was so surprised at this story, because it reads like one of
those seventies grindhouse movies, there’s even a quick reference to the movie Last House on the Left (though it’s not
made clear whether it’s the original, which King hated, or the remake, which he
liked.) Big Driver is ultimately a
tale of female empowerment, but I can see where it may not be interpreted that
way and it’s always dangerous for a male to write this type of story. Beyond
the fact that it’s a tale well told, I’m impressed that King would push himself
into such uncomfortable waters at this stage of his career and life. Big Driver deserves more discussion than
this longish paragraph—it’s impossible to adequately convey my thoughts about
this story in a short forum. I’ll leave it with this: Big Driver has stuck in my mind more than any other book/story
discussed in this post.
Fair Extension
is a slight tale that reads well enough but didn’t do much for me. A Good Marriage works largely due to the
characterization, that ol’ King standby. I find it to be an echo of the earlier
King tale Strawberry Spring, while
also briefly exploring the dark corners of long-time married life (material
explored much more in-depth and with a surer touch in Lisey’s Story.) Overall,
Full Dark, No Stars is solid King offering notable for its ability to surprise.
It also feels darker than a lot of his recent work.
11/22/63 (2011)
I rolled my eyes when I first read of this book’s plot.
Gee, another boomer artist exploring the JFK assassination (conspiracy, if
that’s your thing.) I mean, really, the world most emphatically does not
need another goddamn book/movie/whatever about this topic. Add to this that the
one time King explored the 1960s in any significant degree with Hearts in
Atlantis he ended up with one his slightest tales, a book that was actually
boring. I’m pretty much never bored reading King, but Hearts in Atlantis was an
exception. So, yeah, not good. Funny thing, though: this book is absolutely
excellent.
While the JFK conspiracy is a major plot element, the
book is driven by its (surprise!) excellent characterization, stunning period
detail and pacing that had me flying through this book despite its 849 page
length. It never felt long, it never dragged, and I was completely enthralled.
This is what it feels like to be in the hands of a master storyteller, and I
absolutely love it when I’m proven wrong. I remember saying before this book
came out that this could be the book where King finally jumped the shark. I was
worried that at the end I would be thinking maybe it was time for him to
retire. Instead I was rewarded with a book that I simply did not want to put
down.
Oh, you can find quibbles if you want to: like most major
King books, there are points in the narrative where credibility (in terms of
coincidence within the story) are stretched and the overall ending is odd and
might not work for some readers (I’m sensing a theme here in writing this
post--King struggles with endings more than I realized.) But honestly, even
these quibbles are charming somehow in a book that absolutely should not work
and instead succeeds brilliantly. I read a lot in any given year, but it’s not
often I read a book with a smile on my face all the way through, so happy in
the world it creates I don’t want to go back to the “real” world. Honestly, 11/22/63
is my third-favorite novel discussed in this post and absolutely holds up next
to his earlier work. Just writing this makes me want to go read it again.
The Dark Tower:
The Wind through the Keyhole (2012)
This is the only book in this era I have not yet read, so
I’ve got no thoughts on it. It’s pretty low on my King to-read list, if only
because I’ve never been as enamored of The Dark Tower saga as most of the other
Constant Readers I know are. It was fine enough for what it was, but I don’t
have a burning need to return there. I’ll get to it one of these days.
Probably.
Joyland (2013)
And here is my second-favorite novel of this era, behind
Lisey’s Story and ahead of 11/22/63. This is one of the great hidden gems of
King’s bibliography.
Do you like books that make you tear up? Because I
absolutely teared up at points reading Joyland. There is a deeply human warmth
to this story, and here again King’s characterization shines. Characters who should
be cloyingly sentimental clichés instead feel like real people, and the book
has a few things to say about youth, loss of innocence, and regret that play to
King’s strengths as a storyteller.
The book itself, like The Colorado Kid, was published by
Hard Case Crime but couldn’t be more different than that novel. Whereas The
Colorado Kid is slight, Joyland is a full story. It’s nominally a crime story
and even more nominally a ghost story, but neither of these aspects are all
that important to the story. Joyland is complex in the psychological portrayal
of its characters, and as such you really live with these people and find that
they linger in the memory once the tale is complete.
So yeah, it takes a lot for me to care enough about the
characters to tear up and off the top of my head I can only think of a handful
of novels that have done so. Sophie’s Choice and the climax of The Amber
Spyglass leap to mind and while I wouldn’t put Joyland on their level of
artistic achievement, the melancholy of the book stays with you long after
you’ve finished the last page. Why is King such a beloved writer? Because of
books like this. He cares, and you care.
Doctor Sleep
(2013)
Accompanied by greater publicity than any King project of
recent vintage, Doctor Sleep is ostensibly a sequel to The Shining. Talk about
treading dangerous waters! The Shining is one of the most loved and respected
of King’s novels, the favorite of many (myself, it’s a toss-up between The
Shining and ‘Salem’s Lot depending on my mood any given day, and if we count
novellas, The Long Walk. I’ve read all three somewhere between 20-40 times and
they are still magical each time.) I think it is safe to say that the view of
sequels divides pretty cleanly between those who love them and those who don’t.
If you are indifferent, you likely didn’t care about the original story in the
first place. By and large, I fall into the latter camp.
Here’s the thing: Doctor Sleep is not really a sequel. In
fact, I think The Shining connection is both thin and a hindrance. It has
little to do with the story, and even though one of the major characters is
Danny Torrance, he bears little resemblance to the character in The Shining
(which makes sense; he’s an adult now.) The only times I ever thought of The
Shining while reading is when the book shoved it down my throat, which is
mostly in the opening pages. How many people did this book bring around because
of this connection who maybe hadn’t read King in years, and what kind of book
did they get?
I think they got a largely successful one, albeit with a
few standard King flaws (a bit of bloat, an anti-climactic ending, and more
unusually for King, some questionable character motivations.) I found the story
engrossing, most of the characterization well-drawn, and I rather liked the
concept of The True Knot. Psychic vampires offer far more interesting
possibilities than your old-fashioned bloodsucker, and while I wish the book
would have perhaps done more with this concept, I think it worked. I mean, RV
people are pretty strange, it’s not that much of a leap! RVs are creepier than
the woods at night.
Doctor Sleep wouldn’t be my first choice for former
readers who’ve fallen away, but hopefully it piqued their interest enough to
check some of the other books in this post out. And I hope they enjoyed the
book; I did. I’m less likely to go back to it than, say, 11/22/63, but that
doesn’t take away from the pleasure I had reading it. I found that once I was
past the opening pages I was able to forget it was supposed to be connected to
The Shining and just enjoy Doctor Sleep for what it was. I do think that if you
don’t or aren’t able to enact that disconnect, it’s probably a disappointing
novel. Now Mr. King: please don’t ever write a sequel to ‘Salem’s Lot (I still
haven’t forgiven you for writing Father Callahan into The Dark Tower series.
Ugh.)
Mr. Mercedes
(2014)
King clearly enjoys the crime/mystery genre and Mr.
Mercedes is his attempt at not only a full-on, non-supernatural crime novel,
but at creating a set of reoccurring characters for future novels (unless you
count The Dark Tower, I suppose.) Mr. Mercedes is the first of three books with
this set of characters. And it leads to what I think is one of the great
unanswerable questions when considering late-period King: why on earth these
three characters?
There’s nothing wrong with them, mind you, except
that…they aren’t really that interesting. King claims to deeply love them,
proof that beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder (wait, isn’t that
the name of the Metallica song playing at the moment? Why, so it is…) I found
them to be considerably less engaging than his characters normally are, and as
a result Mr. Mercedes ranks pretty low on my list of King’s books. It’s an easy
enough read, and I don’t hate it, but perhaps it would be better if I did.
Indifference is the worst reaction to any work of art, I think.
That said, there is one deeply powerful scene that is
worth reading. Fortunately, it’s the opening 12 pages of the book. This scene,
in which a car plows through a group of jobless people standing in line for a
jobs fair and kills eight of them and severely wounds many others, is a
masterful demonstration of tension and heartbreak. In these 12 pages, we’ve
gotten to know the desperation and pain of these folks well and King writes
with a deeply empathetic feel for their struggles and crushed dreams. Which
makes that Mercedes tearing into the crowd truly devastating. I was angry and
heartbroken at the end of the scene. It says more in its 12 pages about the
state of the American dream today than all the bloviating essays and speeches
we are endlessly subjected to by our sham media and soulless “leaders.”
My recommendation? Read those first 12 pages and then
write your own story. I think King really struggles at times with the mechanics
of a crime story, and that comes across in the writing here. There are moments
of suspense, and the book is not terrible, but if you aren’t a hardcore
Constant Reader, you are probably safe skipping it. Or maybe you’ll find Hodges
and his pals far more interesting than I did.
Revival (2014)
You want a good, solid King novel? Revival’s your boy.
There might be nothing new under the sun, but Revival is full of the things
that make King novels so pleasurable: strong characterization, readability,
vague metaphysical ideas that are never really explained. That last may sound
like a criticism, but it’s not. I think when the metaphysical intrudes on our
lives it is vague, strange and something we of course don’t understand. That’s
what makes King’s best stories so believable—you identify with the characters
and their reactions/questions. Life doesn’t wrap its stories up in a neat bow,
and I don’t need my novels to either.
Organized religion has floated through a good share of
King novels, and his portrayals of it reflect an ambiguity that allows for a
multi-level exploration of the subject. There are plenty of bad preachers,
sure, but there are a lot of good (if occasionally misguided) folks in the
congregation. It’s a nuanced portrayal that creates the backdrop for Revival.
The novel is not about religion per se, but it does raise some questions that it
doesn’t pretend to answer. I grew up in a deeply religious household and
primarily identify as an atheist these days, but I appreciate writers who don’t
take a hard line on one side or the other.
Revival is a riff on the Frankenstein story to a large degree
(and according to King, also Machen’s The Great God Pan—man, he does love that
story. Understandably—it’s a brilliant story—I just find it funny how often he
mentions it as being connected to his work, because I rarely see the
parallels.) We also get King again flirting with cosmic horror, and I enjoy his
using this as a coloring agent rather than the focus of the story. Really, only
Ligotti can get away with story after story about cosmic dread, and Ligotti
can’t write an actual character to save his life (which is fine, it’s not
necessary for his work which I believe to be some of the most brilliant the
genre has ever produced.) If anything, it demonstrates how flexible the horror
genre really is. Revival is not a horrific novel, not at all, but it sits more
comfortably in the genre than many of his recent works. And the
characterization is great. I know, I say that about seemingly every one of his
stories, but dammit, it is true! More than anything, it’s what makes him such a
memorable writer. Tightly wound and featuring almost restrained prose, I liked
Revival a great deal.
Finders Keepers
(2015)
Book number two of the “Hodges trilogy” (following Mr.
Mercedes) is marginally better than Mr. Mercedes because the Hodges and his
pals are far more in the background. It lacks a scene with anywhere near the
power of the opening pages of Mr. Mercedes, and—for god’s sake, the plot! It is
completely loony!
We get a loser criminal who was so upset with how his
favorite writer ended a book series—and we are explicitly told these ain’t pulp
novels, mind you, this is some Updike-type shit—that he decides to kill the
writer and steal his notebooks that he is sure must have a much better novel in
them that shows the series did not sell out. Oooookay. And so he accomplishes
this but hides the trunk with the notebooks (and a bunch of cash) before
reading them and then ends up arrested for a different crime. Ooooookay. And
somehow years later a kid accidentally discovers the trunk and becomes obsessed
with the notebooks as well as using the cash secretly to help his struggling
family. Ooooookay. And then Mr. Criminal, now all old and shit, gets paroled
and the threads begin to intertwine…
Christ, I can’t do this with a straight face. I mean, I
laughed all the way through this book and I don’t think I was supposed to. Wily
ol’ King, he still made it somehow readable but if you can suspend your
disbelief you are made of stronger stuff than I. Lord. It was fun enough, if
maybe not in the way intended, but I suspect if there is a poor reader out
there for whom this was their first King novel, they will never read another.
Seriously, I know King really wants us to believe an unpublished novel of a
largely forgotten writer to somehow be a treasure people would obsessively fight
and kill for, but…no. The saving grace, as such, is the fairly well-drawn boy
who discovers the trunk, Peter, and your empathy for his desire to help his
family. I found the criminal, Morris, both pathetic and hilarious. I *think* I
was supposed to be frightened of him, but I’m more scared of a limp noodle. I
honestly don’t know if King was making a huge joke that only he got or if this
was just a misfire.
One more Hodges novel to go, out in June of this year.
And then hopefully these poor sods are put out to pasture.
The Bazaar of
Bad Dreams (2015)
And we come to his most recent published book, some 6300
words later. I’m a little tired—I didn’t realize what this would turn into!—so
I’m going to cheat and steal from my own 2015
books read post where I talked a bit about this collection:
I am as thrilled as
any Stephen King devotee can be that he still cranks out several books a year.
This year wasn’t one of his better ones, though. Finders Keepers features some
of the same characters as Mr. Mercedes (itself no great shakes) and the most
absurd plot I’ve read for some time. King’s readability makes it a breezy
enough read but there’s nothing special here (and I’m not the only fan who is
mystified as to why King enjoys these characters enough to give them more than
one book; they are, frankly, pretty dull.) The Bazaar of Bad Dreams was a
difficult read for me: 1)The best story by far, “Morality,” was previously
published in Blockade Billy, which was also included in this collection and
seems like a ploy to pad out the book; 2)Stephen King read a bunch of Raymond
Carver and then wrote a story like Raymond Carver, and despite the fact these
are 2 of my 3 favorite authors of all time, it didn’t work; 3)the stories more
often than not felt…incomplete, somehow. Like they were closer to sketches than
complete works. That said, there was one element to this collection I found
fascinating and compelling: King was upfront about wrestling with his own
mortality. Honestly, his intros were often better than the stories themselves.
Look, I realize it sounds like I just trashed this book, but if you are a fan,
you should read it. King’s worst is still better than most writer’s best, and
the comforting familiarity of his voice can’t be denied. I am proud to be a
Constant Reader…
I think the key there is that most of these stories
really do feel incomplete. They needed more time to germinate, perhaps, or they
were simply too thin on inspiration. Sometimes King’s magic touch is absent:
plot incongruities, for example, often annoy instead of not affecting the tale
as in past works. It could be because there are very few well-drawn characters
in this book. Yet I really did find his intros to the stories absorbing and
fascinating, as they really drove home a point:
We are not that far away from living in a world without
Stephen King.
He is very aware of his own mortality (I’m sure getting
hit with a van does that to a person) but there’s something about Bazaar where
it seems like he is really, truly thinking about the end of his life. And it’s
in that same folksy, non-hysterical and non-pretentious voice that has always
informed his writing. It cast a strange hue over this book that made it seem something
more than simply a collection of tales. I don’t think I’ve unlocked exactly
what that is, but it’s the reason that I will be going back soon and re-reading
this book.
I find it near impossible to picture a world without
King, as inevitable as it is. He’s been in my life since that fateful day I
picked up Christine, and when the day comes where there will be no new tales,
my heart will break. Artists are mortal like the rest of us, even if their work
is not. We are so, so lucky to have King. His inescapable presence makes it far
too easy to take that for granted. My friends, be you Constant Readers or
casual readers, take a moment and be thankful for all the tales he’s spun for
us and hopefully has yet to spin for us. Then pick up one of his books, those
books that make life just a bit more bearable, and enjoy. Thank you for
reading.
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