{"id":55,"date":"2007-06-01T09:42:10","date_gmt":"2007-06-01T09:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/booklit.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/01\/stephen-king-liseys-story\/"},"modified":"2020-12-11T18:03:23","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T18:03:23","slug":"stephen-king-liseys-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/01\/stephen-king-liseys-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen King: Lisey’s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n Lisey’s Story<\/em> King continues with one of his favourite subjects: writers. In a departure from previous novels like Misery<\/em>, The Dark Half<\/em>, and Bag Of Bones<\/em>, the author is dead two years prior to the novel opening. Scott Landon, survived by his wife Lisey, won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award during his short life. It’s no mean feat for an author of horror novels. (Wake up, Stevie, you’re dreaming!) Now, as the story begins, Lisey is preparing to pack up Scott\u2019s scribblings and move on with her life. But, as she enters his study she is taken on trips down memory lane by the objects therein to such events as the couple\u2019s first date and an assassination attempt, John Lennon style, on Scott. The novel, however, isn\u2019t just a nostalgic journey; Lisey’s Story<\/em> is, at its core, about madness, and there\u2019s a fair peppering of characters a slate short of a roof: Scott\u2019s father, Lisey\u2019s sister, and a loony fanboy who just happens to be in the area. Nice. And it\u2019s this lunatic, threatening Lisey to offer Scott\u2019s papers to the local university, that forms much of the drama within the novel\u2019s here and now.<\/p>\n

As a read, the first 150 pages were a disorganised mess. It is apparent that King has attempted something different to his usual work, grappled with stylistic decisions, and not managed to pull it off. What we have here is a collection of memories, one after the other, that serve to portray Scott Landon as the man Lisey loved. They are lifeless recollections, told in the present tense for immediacy, but they fail to connect with any empathy the reader may have for their predicament. And so it continues, stories told without lustre, which is disappointing given that, while told in the third person, the scenes often delve into Lisey\u2019s mind. Aren\u2019t her memories exciting? The reason, to take the assassination attempt as an example, is that King is trying to cram every detail into the scene (and one which happens all too fast) rather than giving only the pertinent details.<\/p>\n

It picks up, however, with the introduction of the aforementioned fanboy as the drama begins to mount in the present, bringing Lisey out of her dull reveries. And, just as soon as the book becomes interesting, it commits literary seppuku and delves back into the past. The more we learn of Scott, the more Lisey remembers of him. So it comes to pass that, like King himself, Scott had a personal demon in the booze. Scott, also, to give the book a supernatural twist, has a place called Boo\u2019Ya Moon in which he retreats. It\u2019s a place that he finds both a relief and terrifying in equal measure.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with Lisey’s Story<\/em> is that it is wordy. Not just verbose to the point where an editor\u2019s red pen may have saved it, but wordy in the sense that it\u2019s full of meaningless words. In an attempt to catalogue the interior language of the Landons\u2019 marriage, King puts some of the stupidest twee phrases ever put in print into the mouths of his own characters. Thus Lisey, around fifty years old, goes around calling her elder sister \u2018Big Sissa Manda Bunny\u2019 and excessively using the word \u2018smucking\u2019. Scott, in the past, talks of nonsense such as bools, which seem to be some confused mess of clues and\/or gifts. Attempts to explain it fall by the wayside and this reader was left just as confused as Lisey first was when Scott came up to her, his wrists bleeding on their first date<\/em> and offered her his blood-bool. The biggest problem with this twee verbage isn\u2019t that it\u2019s utter nonsense, it\u2019s that King actually declares it as \u2018the interior language of their marriage.\u2019 I guess he\u2019s never read the show don\u2019t tell part of his own On Writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I honestly think that the biggest problem that I had with Lisey’s Story<\/em> is that King\u2019s prose is just one big ramblesnooze. That, and the fact that it\u2019s full of annoying phrases. Not signature phrases attributed to characters, as there\u2019s nothing wrong with that, but the continual poor attempt at introducing them: \u2018like so-and-so used to say\u2019, \u2018as they say\u2019, \u2018so-and-so used to call them\u2019 \u2018what so-and-so referred to as\u2019, and so on ad infinitum<\/em>. The other annoying aspect to the prose was the way that, rather than just tell the reader what the character was thinking, he would interrupt a paragraph with a bracketed sentence before continuing the narrative.<\/p>\n

As for the characters, they just lacked spirit. Lisey, despite being the eponymous title of the novel, doesn\u2019t have much of a story to tell. She wanders about, remembers a few things, and not much else until the denouement. Scott, as a character, came across much better but that\u2019s because he had a more interesting past, a broken home, the death of an older sibling, and a father certifiably mad. The other major player, the lunatic, works, although his appearances are few, his spectre still lingers throughout. Lesser used characters come and go, some more believable than others, but King really needed everyone to be plausible for his work to be more credible.<\/p>\n

While I didn\u2019t like Lisey’s Story<\/em>, I can find no fault with the idea, the notion of a spouse cleaning up the unfinished works of an author while grubby hands wait to get their eyes on them. And to catalogue a love that endures, even after death. It\u2019s just a pity that King thought of it. But I think that the novel would have been much better if King could tighten his prose, ditch silly get-out devices like Boo-Ya Moon, cut the glut of phrases and just write, and finish the story when it has met its natural conclusion rather than just saunter about for sixty pages cleaning up the loose ends. Next time Lisey has a story to tell, I won\u2019t be listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Lisey’s Story King continues with one of his favourite subjects: writers. In a departure from previous novels like Misery, The Dark Half, and Bag Of Bones, the author is dead two years prior to the novel opening. Scott Landon, survived by his wife Lisey, won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award during his Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-king-stephen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/King-Stephen-Liseys-Story.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pon-T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3696,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/3696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}