Lisey's Story Review

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Lisey's Story ReviewI'm a big King fan, and -- unless I'm dead broke or just plain dead -- will always read his new novels as soon as they come out, but all in all, I'd have to say "Lisey's Story" is not one of my favorites. It's not bad, exactly; there are way too many beautifully written passages to even consider calling the book bad.
However, I think that the book was badly in need of some editorial intervention at some point. I'm not referring to the book's length (though it IS too long, probably by about 300 pages), but rather to (1) an incredibly excessive use of silly language and (2) too many different threads of plot that don't manage to fully connect.
In terms of the silly language . . . well, "silly" is patently the wrong word for me to use. Here's the deal. The two main characters, one of whom exists only in recollection by the other, are a (formerly) married couple who have a sort of private language consisting of certain phrases ("Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate," for example) and words (replacing "afghan," meaning the sawhl. with "african," and so on). This is nothing revolutionary; it's the same thing as an inside joke, and everyone I know, in each significant relationship, has a few of tthose that get tossed around until they do in fact become a sort of private language. But here's the problem with that in a novel: it kept me at a distance the entire time. I think it was designed to bring me into the interior lives of these two people, but it had the exact opposite effect on me, and at a certain point in time I began to get actively annoyed every time this sort of thing appeared. And it's used A LOT. Less so toward the end of the novel, but it's incessant in the first 200 pages.
My second major problem is that there's just too much going on, and some of it I can't quite manage to care about.
One plot is about Lisey taking care of her mentally ill sister Amanda, and this storyline, while well told, just doesn't come together. Amanda's story has no resolution; she's only there so that she can back Lisey up in another element of the story, which she fails to do with any weight -- so, in a sense, she's a pointless character.
Another plot deals with Lisey's attempts to clean out her husband's many papers, which leads to an increasingly dangerous series of encounters with a stalker who could have walked straight out of King's "Secret Window, Secret Garden" (King even acknowledges this, in a way I'm sure will be lost on all but the most ardent King fans). This part of the plot allows Lisey to be an active character (in other words, it serves to actually give her something to do), but I don't buy it for a second. It seems incredibly forced, and not at all relevant.
The third major plot element involves Lisey remembering -- through clues Scott left her before his death -- certain things about her husband's life (and their life together) that she has sort of been repressing. This element of the novel works almost entirely, and if the rest had been jettisoned, it would rank as one of King's finest achievements. This part of the story is a beautifully told love story with additional touches of divine fantasy and brutal horror, and it's pretty much sublime. The problem is, it's told haltingly, with many interruptions from the other parts of the plot. It's a shame, because the svelte form of a classic dark fantasy have been rendered into corpulence by material that ought to have been exluded.
Ultimately, it's a novel that's well worth reading (it's about one-third brilliant), but I personally can only classify it as a big-time missed opportunity. Still, mediocre King is better than most writers when they're on top of their game.Lisey's Story Overview

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