This may be Lisey's story, but it is Scott Landon's world, and Scott Landon's world is part belles-lettres, part phantasmagoria, with its goners and gomers; its bad gunky, Boo'ya Moon, and booksnake; its SOWISA; its booms, bools, bool hunts, and blood bools; with its long boy, "the thing with the endless piebald side." Scott Landon's world, and in his world, "darkness love him." Flashbacks of their marriage dominate whole sections without the slightest hint of authorial labor; and, oddly, these flashbacks are the novel's core. Scott and Lisey in their swell courting days, Scott and Lisey unhappy in Germany, Scott stalked and nearly assassinated, Scott drinking, Scott not writing, Scott watching The Last Picture Show over and over and over again, Scott's mad secret where the hidden scars of his childhood finally come to bear (an amazing sustained piece of writing, that childhood sequence). Perhaps what makes these flashbacks so lucid are Lisey's own reactions as they relate to her present worries.
And then that tricky second-half. For all the die-hards, there is gore (at least the goriest thing I've ever read outside of Kafka's "The Penal Colony"), there are the dark rooms and the rumors of foreign sounds, footfalls on carpets, telephone lines going dead, the archetypal baddie called Zack McCool. For all that King establishes in the first two-hundred and fifty pages, the last half comes off as the letdown of an author writing what he can write big-willy slick. King's introduction to gore is subtle, using familiar household items to knock our socks into the laundry hamper (where, by the way, our murderer hides), but it just seems too pat. Can you imagine Emma Bovary loading a gun and sticking it in the rear underwire of her pantaloon?
Then again, a rather cool passage from Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot guides this stubborn (and ultimately ambivalent) reader: "Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't." And Lisey's Story, though fantastic, and by the third act outrageously wild, reads much like life itself - not clever, not justified, not symmetric, just how things turn out. Killers, footfalls, dead phone lines, blood on the floor, blood on skin; yet King depicts Lisey's reaction as human, caresses her as he writes her horrors: "There were a lot of things they didn't tell you about death…and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart."
In W.H. Auden's "The Guilty Vicarage," an expensive essay on the dime-store paperback, Auden defines literature and non-literature thusly: "The identification of fantasy (or non-literature) is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering; the identification of art is a sharing in the suffering of another." King has created the hybrid of this caveat, and lets his readers know it early in the novel, in naturalistic, caustic prose:
"By then she's lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that it is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day."
"By then she's lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that it is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day."
