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.