Soooo I am at QFC a week back and see they have TEH NEW STEPHEN KING BOOK -- titled "Lisey's Story" -- on the shelf for a discount price of $11.99. WTF, I say. Now, I have not enjoyed any Stephen King books since The Shining, although the Dark Tower fans say that series gets better as it progresses, but I read the jacket and the plot's about a writer and it seems metaphorical and I think "awwwww, he's actually TRYING to write all smarty man for a change I gotta see this."
And I buy the book, and read it in between games of AoE3 or those brief moments when my daughter isn't trying to violate the cat with a plastic orca.
It SUCKS. S U C K S. The plot is about this writer's wife (yes, another fuckin' King book about being a magical writer -- oh the HUBRIS) whose husband has died and while she sifts through his belongings she realizes that all of his creativity (and every other writers') came from a secret and magical land. She also learns that he had an amazingly fucked up childhood, and that some monster from the magical writer jungle land wanted to eat his ass for reasons unknown. If King had been a GOOD writer, the magical land woulda stayed in metaphor and not become a distinguished mentally-challenged version of Weaveworld.
But King is NOT a good writer and thus we are treated to another failed attempt by King to out-Straub Peter Straub and out-Mathieson Richard Mathieson. As usual, it ends in almost comical disaster. The only scary bits come from a crazed fan (oh the HUBRIS again) who takes a can opener to Lisey's tata and uh well that's it, actually. The scary monster is a giant worm from Dune -- only in a JUNGLE, gettit -- and the discerning horror reader is left unimpressed. There's a subplot with a crazy sister that gets dovetailed in at the end, and that was alright, I guess.
Fuck, I wasn't even reading this as horror, anyhow. I don't need every King book to be about evil dead shit, and in fact I was hoping from the jacket that the stupid magical monster kingdom would remain a sustained and unrealized metaphor for the writer's fucked up childhood. Even worse, the whole book is drenched in this treacly "secret language of marriage" that King cakes every paragraph in, like a bad take on James Joyce by way of Virginia Woolf minus any literary merit. Lisey is always yammering about "strapping it on" (which was her and her husband's way of "getting hardcore" as opposed to the more obvious -- and interesting --interpretation) or substituting "smucking" for "fucking" because tee hee WTF. Look, I've been married nine fucking years, and I don't have a "secret language" with my wife that doesn't involve her cussing like a sailor at me when I play AoE3 instead of taking the trash out. This is AGAIN the typical unpleasant hubris of King -- a gooey translation of the life he shares with Tabby King into unpleasantly pompous prose. Quit fuckin' sneaking this sappy shit in, and DOUBLY quit writing entire books based on it. Read your fucking book on writing again, you google-eyed hack.
The book is a giant salespitch for the magical specialness of being a fiction writer. Fuck that. I'm a writer, and I don't have a magical land that isn't filled with porno and booze and videogames, and I'm sure as fuck not SPECIAL; at least not in the positive, self-aggrandizing way.
I give this book an EGM-styled 4/10. It' fuckin sucks. I want my 8 or so hours back.
