I just finished reading Lisey's Story by Stephen King. This is just another example of a book that should never have been published, and never would have been published, except for the fact that it's written by a famous author.
Lisey's Story is an interminably dull story about a tormented horror writer's wife who has been left behind to pick up the pieces after his death. Because she takes too long to sort through the papers he's left (and potentially unpublished manuscripts), a crazed fan decides to stalk her and kill her. Throughout the plot, she reminisces about her husband, who was apparently a very brutalized child who grew up into a disturbed (but relatively harmless) individual. Sound familiar?
If this is Stephen King's cry for help, it's pretty obvious. However, he takes 653 dull pages to do it in. It would have been sheer kindness to spare the reader such puerile and uninteresting (and at times downright disgusting) reading. In King's defense, this is the way most of his novels are written, and yet people still buy them.
However, I find this truly enheartening. If people will buy this crap, it's time for me to whip out a similar novel. I am currently mulling this over.
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8 comments:
Having read some of your work (I think), it doesn't surprise me that you wouldn't like Stephen King mostly because you two write totally different genres. I think there are many books that he has written that are brilliantly done, Shawshank Redemption for example. However, there are some that aren't and I'm guessing this one isn't. The reason I think that is because I just found my copy of this book two days ago wedged behind the couch. I had started it back when it was published but found it dull and had forgotten about it probably because of a toddler who finds great joy in hiding my reading material. When I refound it a couple days ago, I put it back into my to-be-read pile but haven't been looking forward to re-reading the first 100 pages that I got through the first go around that were so dull.
I have found King's books to be predictable and very "formulated". The last one I read was Pet Cemetery and I was in 9th grade. The movie sucked.
Same thing with Dean Koontz. ZZZzzzZZZzzZZZZzzz.
People will read anything with "Dean Koontz" or "Stephen King" written on the cover. If you want to write a bad novel and make it a best seller, use one of those two names and pay off the real person.
I've never been able to get into Steven King's work, though I did sit next to him at a Red Sox game in 1992. Not that it matters...
News flash: Stephen King is a shitty writer. He was awesome when I was 14, though, Sauer.
and I think all of the horror writers out there can really identify w/ this one. I mean, the hundreds of thousands of American horror writers.
--Matt of Animal Mind
I think Stephen King's books are scary. It is scary so many people read them! What is up with that?
You are 100% correct....this book is crap and not worth buying. Dull, dul, dull.
In my reading experience, stephen king at his best, is like a faulty orgasm. He builds the plot up, only to let you down. The best of his I've read entails a series of short stories; it's called "everything's eventual." What eventually happens, is you have a series of bad experiences in what should have been the greatest night of your life.
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