Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey had to learn from him about books and blood and bools. Later, she understood that there was a place Scott went -- a place that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, Lisey's turn to go to Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King's most personal and powerful novel, Lisey's Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love.
Even by Stephen King standards,
Lisey's Story is haunting. Yet though it contains some supernatural elements, it is really a love story that speaks to passion, the intimacy of marriage, the craft of writing—and true madness. In Scott's escapist world and its relation to Lisey, the horrific elements come into play, but most critics agreed that despite the emotional punch of the story, it is not King's best. A convoluted stream-of-consciousness style, flashbacks within flashbacks, too much baby talk, and the novel's sheer length put off some reviewers, while others questioned whether what makes King's novels sell—their haunting, horrific gore—successfully works here. Still, it's classic Stephen King: you should know by now whether that's to your taste.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Starred Review. Following King's triumphant return to the world of gory horror in
Cell, the bestselling author proves he's still the master of supernatural suspense in this minimally bloody but disturbing and sorrowful love story set in rural Maine. Lisey's husband, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Scott Landon, has been dead for two years at the book's start, but his presence is felt on every page. Lisey hears him so often in her head that when her catatonic sister, Amanda, begins speaking to her with Scott's voice, she finds it not so much unbelievable as inevitable. Soon she's following a trail of clues that lead her to Scott's horrifying childhood and the eerie world called Boo'ya Moon, all while trying to help Amanda and avoid a murderous stalker. Both a metaphor for coming to terms with grief and a self-referencing parable of the writer's craft, this novel answers the question King posed 25 years ago in his tale "The Reach": yes, the dead do love.
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In the two years since her husband Scott's sudden death, professors and collectors mad to lay their hands on his unpublished manuscripts and letters, those of one of the most successful and lauded writers of his generation, have besieged Lisey (rhymes with CeeCee) Landon. The last of them, initially ingratiating, wound up threatening her. That decided her to prepare Scott's papers for donation to an appropriate archive. In the midst of doing that, she gets an answering machine message, then a telephone call and a written note, as well as a dead cat in the mailbox, from a grammatically challenged man who says he'll "hurt [her] places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances." Fortunately, she's been hearing Scott's voice lately, more than in recollection, and it leads her back to a place, another dimension, that he'd told her about but that she'd forgotten. The boy Scott and his long-dead brother went there to escape their sometimes psychopathic father; the grown-up Scott, to heal from many wounds, including those from a shooting that would have been fatal if Lisey hadn't intervened. It is paradisiacally beautiful but dangerous at night, when weird, savage creatures hunt in it. In this long, often long-feeling, utterly Stephen Kingish novel, Scott's strange and eventful past is thoroughly recovered, and Lisey's strength is revealed and confirmed, though not before the maniac does indeed hurt her. The book is also, perhaps, a parable about love and imagination that affirms love as the more salvific of the two.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reservedAdmit it: You've been a horrible snob about Stephen King. You've rolled your eyes at passengers on the Metro reading "Pet Sematary." You've told your son to put down "Salem's Lot" and get a real book. When King won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation, you gleefully quoted Harold Bloom's crack about this new "low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life."
Well, suck it up. Even that faint praise about how you can appreciate him for being good at "what he does" isn't going to cut it anymore. With Lisey's Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he'll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories and the psychological terror of his novels. (And yes, a few hairy monsters.) They're all evoked here in this moving story about the widow of a famous writer trying to lay her grief to rest.
King claims in an afterword that this character -- Lisey -- is not based on his wife, but there's no denying who the famous writer is, and King fanatics will pounce on these personal details like Cujo on a bucket of chicken wings. The story opens two years after the death of Scott Landon, a prolific horror writer almost as popular as King but more critically acclaimed. For months, Lisey has been hounded for access to Scott's papers by "the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end." (Take that, Dr. Bloom!)
Though entering Scott's office is like scratching the scab of her mourning, once Lisey finally starts sorting, boxing and labeling his effects, the work inspires waves of nostalgia. She's drawn back into memories of her 25-year marriage with a brilliant, loving man who was haunted by childhood trauma. But two alarming events disrupt her reverie: First, her sister Amanda suffers a violent relapse in her battle against depression. Then, in the middle of that crisis, an anonymous caller threatens to kill Lisey if she doesn't immediately donate her husband's papers to the University of Pittsburgh. The caller sounds like a kook, but his threat forces her to recall an earlier insane fan who tried to assassinate Scott during a lecture tour.
Of course, this is not the first time King has written about the misery of ardent fans. We all have reason to fear zombies and demonic Plymouths, but the world's most popular living writer is especially terrified about the adulation that his gory tales inspire. The word "fan," after all, is just one padded cell away from "fanatic." King delivers a number of self-deprecating cracks here about the benefits of fame and wealth, but when it comes to the dangers of entertaining millions with fantasies of mayhem, he's dead serious.
Lisey's Story moves in several different directions at once, but everything that happens seems part of a complicated plan arranged in advance by Scott Landon to show his wife how much he loved her. Lisey finds among his papers a kind of scavenger hunt -- a "bool," he calls it -- that leads her through the major events of their long marriage, "to allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once." In fact, one of the great charms of this novel is King's attention to the private language of affection: the silly phrases, lyrics, puns and pet names that Lisey cherishes as signs of their intimacy.
Her battle against Scott's mad scholar-fan lurches erratically from grisly to goofy, but fortunately much of the novel takes place in Lisey's memories as she recalls Scott's desperate courtship and his struggle to explain his father to her. He was a reclusive manic-depressive who loved his sons even as he savaged them. During the most horrific of these tales, when describing his father overcome with "endless swirling bad-gunky," Scott used to revert to his childhood voice. Read this on a bright afternoon: It's emotionally draining, and blood-draining, too -- King at his most psychologically acute, as sympathetic as he is terrifying, wielding a startling blend of affection, pathos and horror.
But there's something else lurking in this novel, something very strange, even for Stephen King. At its center, Lisey's Story contains a huge, ungainly metaphor for the source of creative inspiration. It's an otherworldly place that Scott called Boo'ya Moon, a lush garden of delights and dangers, blooming lupines and dark trees, just on the other side of our dimension. (Under its blood-red dust jacket, the book's cover sports a psychedelic painting of Boo'ya Moon.) By concentrating hard, Scott could slip over to this alternate reality to escape his father, recover from his wounds and find fresh ideas. It contains a "pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination."
King works this hallucinatory vision hard throughout the novel, but it seems like a metaphor that never met a meaning it didn't like: It's an oasis of healing, but also a place of grave danger; a retreat for receiving insight, but also an island of Lotus Eaters; a sanctuary from harm, but also the realm of a piebald fiend called "the long boy," which is sometimes an embodiment of Scott's depression but other times just a scary monster that eats people.
This amorphous metaphor feels like something King has rolled around in his mind for a long time, and his willingness to lay out such an intimate vision is endearing even if it's not entirely coherent. But what works beautifully throughout Lisey's Story is the rich portrait of a marriage and the complicated affection that outlives death. Who would have thought that a man who's spent the last 30 years scaring the hell out of us would produce a novel about the kind of love that carries us through grief?
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
In his intricate new novel, King explores two hidden worlds - the private life of a recently deceased best-selling writer, as seen from the perspective of his widow, and the imaginative landscape that formed the foundation of his work. As the novel opens, Lisey, Scott Landon's widow, is a sardonic observer of toadying academics, dangerously obsessive fans, and fame-struck bystanders. As she sorts through papers that Landon has left behind, she also becomes a traveller in a fantastical parallel world called Boo'ya Moon, to which he retreated during a horrific childhood and on which he drew throughout his creative life. It takes some time for these narrative strands to converge, but when they do Lisey moves between worlds at an exhilarating pace. Along the way, King also reveals, with subtle precision, the profound strangeness of widowhood, when someone who was present for so much of a shared life is gone.
Copyright © 2006
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