Lisey's Story

I finally finished Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King. So I’m going to attempt to give you a review without spilling too many beans.

My reading of Stephen King novels goes all the way back to high school. Of course at that time it was more for the gore factor than anything else; and his books seemed to keep me captivated more than others. It wasn’t until I started reading others, like Dean Koontz, that I realized ‘hey now there’s some story telling’.

While I’ve read my share of good books by Stephen King (think of The Shining, The Stand, It), I’ve also forced myself through some clunkers (Tommyknockers was terrible, Insomnia took me forever to finish).

Lisey’s Story fits somewhere in between; at times it feels like his best work (Lisey thinking back to when she realizes that her husband is ‘different’). There’s a lot of history to this husband and the coping mechanisms he has ‘created’ to deal with an abusive father. King does a great job of weaving this story throughout time and conveying the love between the deceased husband and his grieving wife. However some things were just so hard to overcome; for example the words that Lisey and her husband use are just plain ridiculous. If this is the way they talked they would be hard pressed to find any friends (and maybe that’s Kings point? These two had no one but themselves); ‘smucking’ is used liberally as their substitute for the ever present ‘F’ bomb. But why use that as a replacement when ‘f’ is used in the same sentence by the same character? And ‘Boo Ya Moon’? Nice. Now I feel like I’m stuck in a WWF title match, “Can you smell what the Rock is cooking? BOO YA MOON!”

Some of his books reach there climax a little too early and leave you left to wander through the last few chapters but Lisey’s Story does a good job of keeping you engaged until the very end.

I’d give it a 2.5 out of 5.

The Road

Having enjoyed the movie No Country For Old Men as much as I did, I decided to check out Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

It's the story of a father and son walking through a postapocalyptic America. It is quite a moving book. As the description on the back states this is "an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of". What would you do in a lawless society? Would you turn into a savage? Stick to a moral compass? Hopefully we will never had to make those types of decisions.

With few flashbacks to the pre apocalyptic world, the story concentrates on the moment by moment journey of the father and his young son as they work their way to the coast unaware of what will be there. McCarthy paints a dreary landscape with swirling and ever-present ash. The lack of sustenance coupled with human savagery, at times, is almost unbearable.

You follow along not knowing what the coast has in store for these two characters. What you're left with an example of love that has no bounds.