Stephen King has said several times that "Lisey's Story" is the novel he is proudest of. It is dedicated to his wife Tabatha and contains various echoes of his real life. For example it is set in Maine. The married couple at its centre are a very successful novelist and his wife - Scott and Lisa (Lisey) Langdon. And like King himself, Scott grew up in difficult circumstances with one sibling - an older brother.
But what did I think of this book?
My reaction is mixed. There were some gripping well-told episodes and the construction of the narrative was masterful but there were aspects of the book that left me squirming - including the invention of new words such as "smucking" to replace the casual swear word it rhymes with. Why?
Around half way through the novel, readers are introduced to a strange nether world known as "Boo'ya Moon" where strange beings exist in the night forest. But in the daytime, it is a land of sweet floral aromas where the dead and the living sit quietly by a lake. There the moon is always full. It is possible to cross between the real world and Boo'ya Moon as Lisey does a few times.
Instinctively, I find it very difficult to get along with or accept this kind of fantasising. Maybe it is a weakness in me but I am a big fan of realism and credibility and cannot get off on such flights of fancy. It's probably the reason why I was bored with "Lord of the Rings" and as for "Harry Potter" - totally yawn-worthy in my opinion. I can't see what all the fuss was about.
I am glad I read "Lisey's Story". It is only the second Stephen King novel I have ever read - the other was "Misery". I can't see me reading any more of his novels. After all there are so many great books out there in the world, shouting, "Read me!" and I am already in possession of several promising (and shorter!) books that still remain to be consumed.
Here's a small taste of "Lisey's Story". Through it, you can easily deduce what happened to Scott Landon a third of the way through the novel. But was he really gone?....
“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 old-timers 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.”
⦿
And here are three more holiday pictures taken by my lovely daughter, Frances with the aid of her smartphone. It appears that those damnable devices are useful for some things...
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/EZtaCYx
