First Lines of Stephen King's "Holly"

 "It's an old city, and no longer in very good shape, nor is the lake beside which it has been built, but there are parts of it that are still pretty nice. Longtime residents would probably agree that the nicest section is Sugar Heights, and the nicest street running though it is Ridge Road, which makes a gentle downhill curve from Bell College of Arts and Sciences to Deerfield Park, two miles below. On its way, Ridge Road passes many find houses, some of which belong to college faculty and some to the city's more successful businesspeople--doctors, lawyers, bankers, and top-of-the-pyramid business executives. Most of these homes are Victorians, with impeccable paintjobs, bow windows, and lots of gingerbread trim."

- Stephen King, Holly

Another speedy read by the prolific King. This one contains some nasty scenes, but also has a lot of that folksy King observational prose which can be so addicting. Not the best of his novels I've ever read - I found the choice to reveal the who behind the whodunit to take the edge off of the suspense - but still a fun read to start off the new year.

Also: was surprised to wake up in the middle of the night to find that the writing and windows on the cover are glow-in-the-dark! Surprisingly creepy.

First Lines of Stephen King's "Billy Summers"

"Billy Summers waits in the hotel lobby, waiting for his ride. It's Friday noon. Although he's reading a digest-sized comic book called Archie's Pals 'n' Gals, he's thinking about Emile Zola, and Zola's third novel, his breakthrough, Therese Raquin."

- Stephen King, Billy Summers

Recently, I contracted a nasty case of swimmers ear, and luckily I had Stephen King's latest novel on hand to entertain me. Finding it hard to do anything else, I consumed the whole book in six days: a testament to both the propulsiveness of King's prose (even after all of these years!) but also the compelling story he's written. Many people make this claim, but in his recent novels I've found that his climaxes tend to border on the absurd: Take the final confrontation in Mr. Mercedes, the "supernatural showdown in Doctor Sleep, or even The Outsider's siege: they can feel by-the-numbers and sometimes even - as hard as it is to admit - boring.

This was not the case here. I was quickly sucked into Billy Summers. King's really does have a masterful eye for detail and an ability to create compelling characters. The plot of the first half of the book is a standard crime novel, and the second half builds on a "hit gone wrong" and moves to a darker place that explores the evil inside us all. Interestingly enough, the narrative is interspersed with an excellent "coming of age" story and war narrative, written by Billy himself, that provides insight into his character but also is a great book in it's own right. It avoided any supernatural elements and kept me reading and engaged to the very last page.

But there's one caveat that I have to mention. King has never shied away from gruesome details either physically or psychologically, but as I get older, i'm bothered by the extremely graphic details about sexual trauma. I'm not sure that level of detail is necessary for the story and, combined with (spoiler alert!) Alice's almost immediate recovery from a terrible sexual assault to become Billy's assistant, it rang false and perhaps somewhat titillating. Honestly, I couldn't avoid thinking this aspect was the male gaze at work, and pondered how the same story would have played out if written by a woman. It was a disturbing blemish on an otherwise excellent novel.

First Line of Stephen King's "11/22/63"

"I have never been what you'd call a crying man."

- Stephen King, the first lines of 11/22/63.

I'm back at the SK well again, and 300 pages into this 880 page behemoth there's no signs of the exhaustion that beset Doctor Sleep after an excellent start. It's very entertaining so far, and has already unexpectedly crossed paths with the history of one of his earlier - and best - books. More as I get farther along but 11/22/63 is an excellent read so far.

First Lines of Stephen King's "Doctor Sleep"

"On the second day of December in a year when a Georgia peanut farmer was doing business in the White House, one of Colorado's great resort hotels burned to the ground. The Overlook was declared a total loss."

- Stephen King, from Doctor Sleep.

I didn't want to be reading another SK book, but I flipped through the first few pages of this sequel to The Shining, depicting Danny as a middle-aged alcoholic whose shining has come back with a vengeance, and was (of course) hooked. Damn him. More when I come up for air - most likely after a sleepless night spent plowing through the last 150 pages.

The Most Popular Books in America, Reviewed

Matt Kahn is undertaking to read and review every book on the Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list from 1913 onwards. You can see his progress and the list of books on his blog.

I took a quick look through the list and i'm struck by how many books and authors I've never heard of - like The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, which topped the charts in 1931-32 and also won the Pulitzer. I'm also surprised about some of these results. I mean, Johnathan Livingston Seagull was the best selling book in America for two years straight? The Tommyknockers - most definitively NOT Stephen King's best book - was the most popular book in 1987? And it's disheartening to remember just how many people read the taught plots and lazy prose of John Grisham and Dan Brown. I was also surprised to see some film books - what seem to be adaptations of  E.T. and The Return of the Jedi - on the list, but read Kahn's note that Harry Potter books are not included in the PW bestsellers for some reason. (For the record, the Harry Potter books make for excellent reading.)

An interesting project!

Book Review: "The Stand" by Stephen King

Many Stephen King fans regard The Stand as his greatest novel. After finally completed the 1153 pages (of the Expanded Edition), I can see why they think so, even if I don’t agree with them. Certainly everything that makes Stephen King such a powerful and interesting writer is in place here—the propulsive narrative that drives you to keep turning the pages, the compelling character relationships, the chilling elements of the supernatural and horror – but, to me, the book is just a hot mess. A fascinating mess, but a mess nonetheless.

King kicks it off by tracking a plague—dubbed Captain Trips—as it narrowly escapes from a Top Secret military facility to infect the rest of the world. The way that King coldly details the spread of the disease, the effect it has on people, and the devastation that results is chillingly powerful. This is the spookiest part of the book – as when Stu, trapped in a CDC containment center, wanders through halls of dead and dying victims while searching for the exit.

After people have (mostly) stopped dying and the .04% of humanity that are immune to the plague take stock of what’s happened, they all start dreaming one of two dreams: of Randall Flagg, a “dark man” setting up camp in Las Vegas, or of Mother Abigail, a Christ-like 104 year old woman. Survivors are drawn towards one side or another depending on their nature, with King setting up a confrontation between them. He obviously wants to explore religious ideas, and what he calls “rising above adversity through faith” so, to this end, and despite his well-deserved reputation for wallowing in the darkness, King spends a long time with the “good” folks who congregate in Boulder, CO to re-establish society. This attempted rebirth of America is interesting, and SK is typically at his best when describing the interconnections between people in close knit environments, but the book’s pace falters as King includes too much sociology and politics while neglects Flagg’s group. The rest of the novel repeats this pattern: lots of interesting stretches that ultimately don’t really serve an important point in the big good vs. evil showdown – the Stand – that concludes the book.

In short, I liked The Stand, but I feel that King could have cut out a lot of material and ended up with a taught thriller in line with the gripping first third of the book. Many, many people have fallen in love with The Stand, but although I liked it, call me a simple acquaintance.

Related Posts:
Book Review: "The Wind through the Keyhole"

The New Language of the Cinema

David Mitchell's reaction to having Cloud Atlas adapted into film:

"None of the major changes the film made to my novel “threw me off” in the sense of sticking in my craw. I think that the changes are licensed by the spirit of the novel, and avoid traffic congestion in the film’s flow. Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. In the German edition of my last novel, my translator Volker Oldenburg rendered a rhyming panoramic tableau by rescripting the items in order to make it rhyme in German too. He judged that rhythm mattered more than the exact items in the tableau, and it was the right call. Similarly, when the Wachowskis and Tykwer judged that in a translation (into film) of “Cloud Atlas” Zachry’s and Meronym’s future needs more certitude, then I trusted them to make the right call. They want to avoid melodrama and pap and cliché as much as I do, but a film’s payoff works differently to a novel’s payoff, and the unwritten contract between author and reader differs somewhat to the unwritten contract between filmmaker and viewer. Adaptations gloss over these differences at their peril."

It's interesting that, in general, authors appear to give movie directors benevolent license to do whatever they have to do in order to make it work the big screen. Only occasionally do you hear of big disagreements like Stephen King's dislike of Kubrick's version of The Shining. It's very different than the typical reaction of the reader, who often intensely dislike having the pictures in their mind overwhelmed by the overpowering images of a movie.

Originally posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

First Lines of "The Stand"

"Sally."
A mutter.
"Wake up now, Sally."
A louder mutter: leeme lone.
He shook her harder.
"Wake up. You got to wake up!"
Charlie.
Charlie's voice. Calling her. For how long?
Sally swum up out of sleep.
...
"Sally, honey, don't ask questions. We have to get away. Far away. You just go get Baby LaVon and get her dressed."

-Stephen King, The Stand.

I'm hoping to burn out my current Stephen King obsession by finally tackling the last major novel of his I haven't read: his famous  plague novel from 1978 (although i'm reading the Complete and Uncut version published in 1990 since that's the copy my wife has). I'm about 416 pages in and so far it's really, really good, if a bit too long winded at times. The guy really knows how to get your blood moving!

Book Review: "The Wind Through the Keyhole"

Stephen King, never one to let a good story lie, returns to the world of the Dark Tower with his latest book, The Wind Through The Keyhole. The novel is really three short stories, each embedded within each other. We start off watching Roland the gunslinger and his ka-tet seeking shelter from a powerful storm called a starkblat, and, while the storm rages, he tells a story about a (disgusting) encounter he had with a shape shifting animal when he was a boy. During that encounter, young Roland tells the "The Wind Through the Keyhole" story, and this engaging fantasy takes up the majority of the book, a sprawling combination of quest, revenge myth, and make-a-deal-with-the-devil story. The book hits all of Stephen King's strengths and weaknesses - it's propulsively entertaining, imaginative, and yet sentimental and somewhat predicable.

For those of us that have read all seven of the original Dark Tower novels, jumping back into Mid-World feels like coming home and slipping on an old comfortable flannel shirt. SK has created a special world here, a slippery mixture of fantasy, horror, scifi, and meta-fiction. Having said that, I'd be lying if I didn't think that the framing added anything to the story. Other than placing the story in the Dark Tower universe, the old Roland story didn't do anything to me - it didn't tell me anything new about the characters or shed any light upon the stories that followed--it merely felt like a repeat of the second half of Wizard and Glass. The other two stories can stand-alone by themselves, although readers not familiar with SK's world may find themselves somewhat confused by the way the characters speak as well as the particulars of the "fallen world" of the Dark Tower. Regardless, those who sit back and let a master storyteller drive for a while won't be disappointed.

I enjoyed this book immensely, ripping though it all 307 pages in five days. I've greatly enjoyed his "mature" writing style ever since Bag of Bones (the bloated Under the Dome aside), and this book's no exception. Check out this writing:

"At some point he slipped down their covering enough to see a trillion stars sprawled across the dome of the sky, more than he had ever seen in his life. It was as if the storm had blown tiny holes in the world above the world, and turned it into a sieve. ... He felt awe as he looked up at those stars, but also a deep and abiding commitment, such as he had felt as a child, awakening in the night, safe and warm beneath his quilt, drowsing half in and half out of sleep, listening to the wind sing its lonely song of other places and other lives."

First Lines of "Wizard and Glass"

"The town of Candleton was a poisoned and irradiated ruin, but not dead; after all of the centuries, it still twitched with tenebrous life--trundling beetles the size of turtles, birds that looked like small, misshapen dragonlets, a few stumbling robots that passed in and out of the rotten buildings like stainless steel zombies, their joints squalling, their nuclear eyes flickering. "

- Stephen King, from Wizard and Glass

SK ends The Wastelands with a cliffhanger, with our heros about to confront Blane the Mono, and so of course you have to read what'll happen, even if - like me - you're reading it for the second time. That's what SK does to you. He makes you read past your bedtime, caught up in the world he creates, desperate to find out what happens. I'm not sure I'll read the flashback portion of Wizard and Glass - a huge percentage of the book is a retelling of Roland's first adventure - but I'll read about Blane and the last formative story of the ka-tet, the last step of the first part of the Dark Tower series. After this book, the last three books conclude the saga in a feverish rush (if you can describe over 1500 pages of text in that way). Damned good stuff - had forgotten how fun it was!

One of Those Divine Fools

"At this point, Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travelers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales--one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drips of dew."

- Stephen King, The Wastelands, page 242

First Lines of "The Wastelands"

"It was her third time with live ammunition, and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her."
- Stephen King, The Wastelands

Reading The Wind Through the Keyhole showed me how much I had forgotten about the Dark Tower universe in the 10-something years since I read the original seven novels. I remember the first one pretty well and remember not liking The Drawing of the Three very much (I wasn't much of a fan of his work in the 10-year period of time between the incredible It to Bag of Bones), so I'm rereading the third volume. Mixed bag so far, but the ideas in the overall series are a lot of fun to fall back into.

When the Machines Fail

"When the machines fail . . . when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching into the night can seem pretty cheerful compares to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant."

- Stephen King, "The Mist" from 1985's Skeleton Crew

First Lines of "The Wind Through the Keyhole"

"During the days after they left the Green Palace that wasn't Oz after all--but which was now the tomb of the unpleasant fellow Roland's ka-tet had known as the Tock-Tock Man--the boy Jake began to range farther and farther ahead of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah."

- Stephen King, from The Wind Through the Keyhole, in his return to the world of the Dark Tower. Reading the book is, so far, like crawling back into your own bed after a long vacation.

Stephen King Speaks

Two interesting Stephen King articles for you. One: an amusingly angry rant called "Tax Me for F@%&’s Sake!", and two: a Neil Gaiman profile that includes this great story:

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That’s what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say “You're this”, as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time that anything like what you’re talking about happened, I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this there was prison story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and one based on my childhood called “The Body,” and there is a story of this kid who finds a Nazi, “Apt Pupil”. I sent them to Viking, who was my published my editor was John Williams – dead many long years - terrific editor – he always took the work dead level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons ... And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn’t really a horror thing.
I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.'
“And I said, 'I wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn’t'. And she walked off and went on her way."

Perrotta Novels

I've had mixed experiences with the novels of Tom Perrotta. I absolutely loved Little Children (you can find my review here), but The Wishbones, not so much - I found it to be too glib and with too many coincidences.

His new novel The Leftovers has a fascinating premise: "a rapturelike event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth." What makes this conceit really interesting is that the people that were taken away have nothing in common. As Stephen King puts it in his great NYTimes review, "Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd alcoholic… [and] the rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people plumb over the edge."

I heard Perrotta talking about the novel on NPR the other day and was intrigued by his thinking about the premise. He was thoughtful and respectful about the implications of the rapture but didn't seem too serious. I enjoy the idea of taking a seemingly absurd idea and making it come true but with a twist. Plus, if the book is anything like Little Children, it will be written well in what SK describes as "beautifully modulated narration... His lines have a calm and unshowy clarity."

(As an aside, I hesitated to link to that review of Little Children, because it's a good example of my writing when I don't take the time to edit myself - it's unclear, stream of consciousness writing that's more thinking out loud than thoughtful conclusions. Still, it is what it is, but take it with a grain of salt.)

Cross posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

The Top SciFi and Fantasy Novels?

So NPR recently polled its readers for the 100 best scifi/fantasy novels, and published the results here. These types of exercises are pretty meaningless in that they are highly dependant on the people that respond (have internet access at home, have time to kill, are fans of the genre and poll host, etc.) but I’ll bite and offer some reactions:

- There’s no way that you should combine SciFi and Fantasy together. While there are sometimes some blury lines between the two, most often books fall hard to one side or another of this line. The survey would have been MUCH more relevant if the had been sepearated – even if to the top 50 in both.

- Nice to see that enough other people like Neil Stephenson that four of his books made the cut. Having said that, as pure SciFi, The Diamond Age (#75) is 1000% better than Snow Crash (#26). The Diamond Age is a trip because it combines stunning ideas, excellent writing, and believeable words together while continually pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that the world at the end of the novel is completely transformed from the world at the beginning. It's a hell of a lot of fun! Snow Crash feels like Neuromancer-lite and is probably is more popular because it’s less complex and was his first book that propelled Stephenson into the mainstream. Cryptonomicon(#53) is an excellent, amazing read (have to read it again sometime) but it’s not strictly scifi (in this case, the book is lumped in with the genre because of his past work). Anathem (#86) was unreadably dense.

- Only one PKD (at #21)? Really? The problem here is that some of his best writing and ideas are in short stories, and he doesn’t have any truly excellent collections like Ray Bradbury (both The Martian Chronicles at #27 and The Illustrated Man at #91 helped flesh out my dreams). I would have voted for UBIK, one of the best mind-fucks of a book i've ever encountered.

- Again, suffering for being a novella rather than a novel, but Arthur C. Clarke’s
"A Meeting with Medusa" is one of the best SciFi writings I’ve come across.

- To have left Solaris off this list completely is an inexcusable oversight. To be recognized as being even remotely credible, this book really has to be in the top 20.

- Have Canticle for Libowitz (#35); haven’t read it yet. Should move it to my bedside table.

- The first Dune (#4) really is an excellent novel. It sticks with you. Haven’t read any of the sequels though.

- China Miéville should really be higher than #98.

- As much as I like William Gibson, they did him right by only including Neuromancer (#14), although I can’t imagine anyone would quibble with the Burning Chrome collection.

- A bit surprised that Stephen King’s It didn’t make the cut - I still think it's the best thing he's ever done. Can’t speak to The Stand (#25), as it’s the only major Stephen King novel I haven’t yet read. Enjoyed the Dark Tower series (#23) but it didn't blow me away.

- I’m not much of a fantasy reader, but I do enjoy some of the classics like Lord of the Rings (#1) and LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea. If you want a good fantasy read, pick up the old Years Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling) at your local used book stores; they were gold mines of good stories, and I still pick them up to this day to read a story or two.

Cross-posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessarily. (Of course, I've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Reading, Running & Red Sox)

First Line of Under the Dome

"From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester's Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down."
- Stephen King
I'm not sure what i'm doing reading another 1000 page novel, but here I am. Under the Dome is an old school SK novel. It doesn't have the more mature themes of his more recent writings, but also doesn't have the life or death energy and urgency of his earlier work. Perhaps it's that i'm older than I was when I read It - to me, his best novel - but UtD feels a bit rote. Entertaining as hell, but it feels bloated.

The Praise is Always Tempered

Terrence Rafferty, in a generally positive review of SK's Full Night, No Stars, tempers his praise for the book by writing things like:

He’s essentially the same grab-you-by-the-lapels literary showman he was in the pulpy, punchy horror stories he used to peddle to men’s magazines... Unlike most writers, he seems never to have become bored with his own peculiar gifts — to have tired of the wonderful toys left under the tree for him when he was a kid.
...
This naked pleasure is King’s secret ingredient: it makes his work — good or bad — weirdly irresistible, even addictive. And it disarms criticism, as boyish enthusiasm often does. You might feel, as I do, that “Fair Extension,” the deal-with-the-Devil story in Full Dark, No Stars, is too glib and casual to bear the moral weight it aspires to, but it seems almost rude to say so. You might also think (as I do) that the long suspense story “Big Driver,” about a woman who suffers and then violently avenges a roadside rape, is a bit too easy for King... You could think that. But you wouldn’t really feel good about it.

I still don't understand why people begrudge SK's ability to just tell a damned good story. Is his prose great? No. Do his quirks - use of italics to indicate interior monologues or mental interruptions, the integrating blue-collar bonding that two characters inevitably share - grate after a while? Of course. But his stories are almost always entertaining, and usually scary as hell too. I don't have any problems with that. In fact, if you turned SK into a better prose writer - if he lost what Rafferty calls his "pulpy" writing - you'd probably lose the qualities that make him so entertaining, and I wouldn't want that at all. Three cheers for lowbrow literature!