Honestly, who among us hasn’t gotten frustrated with their favorite writer and felt like holding them prisoner while forcing them to write the exact bHonestly, who among us hasn’t gotten frustrated with their favorite writer and felt like holding them prisoner while forcing them to write the exact book that we want?
Well, don’t do that because it would be wrong! What kind of twisted freaks are you people?!?
Paul Sheldon is a best selling author who just ended his popular series of romance/adventure novels by killing off the lead character, Misery Chastain. After finishing a new novel at a Colorado resort Paul has a car accident and awakes to find that his legs have been shattered, but that he’s been saved by his self-proclaimed number one fan, Annie Wilkes.
Unfortunately, Annie turns out to be more than just a little crazy, and when she learns that Paul killed Misery in the latest book she demands that he write a new one that brings back her favorite character. Held captive by a madwoman, Paul is almost helpless to resist the physical and psychological tortures she uses to get her way while insisting that it’s really for his own good.
This book seems eerily prophetic of King’s career in some ways. Uncle Stevie hadn’t yet frustrated readers of his Dark Tower series with long delays between books, and yet he absolutely nailed the self-righteous fury of a fan who feels somehow cheated out of what they deserve. You gotta think that later on King worried that he had some version of Annie out there just waiting to chain him to typewriter to finish DT. He was also years away from suffering his own enormous physical trauma after being hit by a car, but he still makes you feel every agonizing moment that Paul suffers from his accident and at Annie’s hands. Like Paul, King would also have the experience of returning to writing being a matter of overcoming physical pain but also finding it to be a way to escape it.
One of King’s biggest strengths is that he knows the power of a good story, and this plot serves him well by really letting him dig into that. Annie’s obsession with Misery is something that probably almost every reader can relate to, but what’s really interesting is how Paul’s need to tell the story becomes just as compelling as Annie’s threats. The set-up lets Uncle Stevie explore the whole notion of just why we gotta know what happens next as well as the rules that make it a satisfying resolution or a cheat.
I could make a pretty solid argument that this is King’s best book. He was very much at the peak of his powers here, and either the simple two person structure of the story or good editing kept this at a normal novel length. That’d become a rarity in his bloated books after this, and it does feel like King at his most disciplined. In Annie Wilkes he crafted a character worthy of being included in a Villain’s Hall of Fame, and he makes good use of her as a figure who can be terrifying, sometimes tragic, and weirdly humorous at times.
However, I’m not saying it’s my favorite King book. (Probably The Stand or the last Dark Tower hold that honor.) Why wouldn’t his best book be the one I enjoy most? Because he did just too good of job on making us feel Paul’s pain. Sure, this is a book about a man who suffered a terrible accident and then found himself brutalized at the hands of a psychopath so it makes perfect sense that Uncle Stevie would want us to ache along with Paul. Yet, it’s very hard to spend an entire book with a main character who is almost always at some level of agony without feeling worn down by it. It’s necessary for the plot, but it also makes it a slog at times.
So it's definitely among King’s best, but it's also one I haven’t read it nearly as many times as some of his others because it’s simply too damn tough to get through at times. Still it’s a 5 star ride if you grit your teeth and keep reading as Paul keeps on writing....more
Only Stephen King could write an eleven hundred page book about the innocence and wonder of childhood, and then kick it off with a six-year-old boy geOnly Stephen King could write an eleven hundred page book about the innocence and wonder of childhood, and then kick it off with a six-year-old boy getting his arm ripped off by a clown.
Derry, Maine, in 1958 is a bad place to be if you’re a kid. Child disappearances and murders are occurring with astonishing regularity, and while the adults set curfews and hunt for maniacs a group of eleven-year-old outcasts know the truth - a supernatural entity has been terrorizing and killing the children of Derry. These seven kids eventually band together into a self-proclaimed Loser’s Club dedicated to destroy the evil they call It.
In 1985 the members of the Losers are called together again in order to fulfill a childhood promise to return to Derry if It ever returned. However, now they’re adults who have only foggy memories of exactly what they did to stop It the first time.
With this one King threw a kitchen sink full of monsters into this with the villain able to take the form of whatever will scare its latest victim the most. So the kids alternately face everything from werewolves, mummies, lepers, crawling eyes, giant birds and Frankenstein’s monster with It using the form of a demonic clown called Pennywise as the baseline. The concept that it’s the belief system of the kids that they use as their main weapon against It was a clever idea. So if it’s a werewolf and the kids believe it’s a werewolf then they also believe that silver can be used against the creature, and It has to abide by those rules.
Another of the more successful aspects of this book is how King creates seven likeable kid characters and then writes them as adults so that they really seem like the same people. Another part of this that is particularly sharp is just how well he portrays the sheer terror that each character seems to feel at one time or another. While he presents all as being brave and stepping up when it’s Big-Damn-Hero time they all also have moments where they’re pushed almost to their limits or beyond.
However, I’ve never been as high on this one as a lot of King fans are. I originally read it when I was five years older than the age of the Losers in their 1958 story so I had just left the age of childhood fantasy behind and wasn’t particularly enthralled with revisiting the concept. On the flip side of that, this was adult King engaging in a bit of nostalgia porn, and I was far too young to understand the fleeting nature of youth. Now I’m five years older than the Loser’s were in the 1985 portion of the story so it’s like I’m traveling back to the time I should be nostalgic about to listen to an older person’s nostalgia of yet an earlier time. Even though I've reread it several times over the years I've never been in sync with King’s rhythm when it comes to this one.
It’s some of King’s best work at tapping into the minds of kids as well as the bittersweet nature of looking back at that time as an adult, but it’s also one where he gave in to his worst impulses in letting the book bloat far beyond what was needed to tell the story
There’s a couple of other factors that keep this from being top shelf King for me, but they are filled with spoilers so don’t read any further if you don’t want to know.
(view spoiler)[ * I hated this the first time I read It, and my opinion has never improved. The idea that there’s an underage gang bang on poor Bev to reestablish the connection between the Losers when they’re lost in the sewers after facing It the first time is completely unnecessary and puts a layer of 'Ewww!' all over the childhood relationships.
* Poor Bev really gets the worst of it in a lot of ways in this book. Not only does she have sex with six guys to save them all, she’s the only one of the Losers to have an absolutely terrible life with her abusive husband as an adult. Granted, Eddie has a miserable marriage and Mike got stuck in Derry, but she’s the only one who gets used as a punching bag which seems odd considering that King indicates that they’re all under the spell/protection of the Turtle or whatever force of good made most of them rich but childless. ( Yeah, I know it relates back to her father, but it still seems grossly unfair.)
* By the end two of the Losers are dead, and the survivors won’t even get to remember each other or what they did. (I always wondered how Ben and Bev going off together as a couple at the end would work. Did they forget each other if one of them went to the store or something?) But they managed to kill It once and for all, right? That’s what we spent all that effort to find out, isn’t it? That the Losers suffered and don’t even get to celebrate their victory for long, but at least It is dead so the whole thing had to be worth it. Unless…….
You read Dreamcatcher which features a brief scene where a character goes to Derry and sees a memorial placed there by the Loser’s Club for all the kids who died, but which has the ominous graffiti message of ‘Pennywise Lives!’ on it.
First off, if the Losers can’t remember what happened or even each other, how did they put up a memorial? Secondly, the idea that I read this mammoth story only to have King retroactively throw a shadow over the ending by putting a line into another book severely pisses me off. After the unambiguous statement that It was dead at the end, an author shouldn’t play it cute and toss a line off for cheap thrills in something else that undermines the entire book. That is complete and utter bullshit of the highest order. (hide spoiler)]...more
Even though the film version of this one from Stanley Kubrick is generally considered a horror classic, Stephen King has never been shy about making hEven though the film version of this one from Stanley Kubrick is generally considered a horror classic, Stephen King has never been shy about making his dislike of it known. He hates it so much that he was heavily involved in making a more faithful adaptation of it as TV mini-series in 1997. (This inferior version invited comparisons of Stephen Weber from Wings to one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic performances. So that worked well….)
Considering Uncle Stevie’s longstanding grudge about it, I was more than a little shocked when he recently made a of Under the Dome to accept the changes that the new TV show was making. I can’t quite wrap my head around why a genius director creating something new and brilliant based on his story is bad, but anything that a fairly shitty TV show does with the source material is A-OK with King?
Whatever….
On to the book. As most everyone knows, this is about a family spending the winter in a haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains called the Overlook. Jack Torrance was a teacher and promising writer, but his alcoholism and short temper wrecked his career and very nearly ended his marriage. Jack has been sober over a year, and he and Wendy have started down the path of reconciliation. However, she can never entirely forgive him for breaking the arm of their son Danny in an incident that was equal parts rage and accident. Five year old Danny has psychic mojo that includes reading thoughts and precognition courtesy of visions shown to him by his imaginary friend, Tony.
Nearly broke, Jack takes on the job of being the winter caretaker for the Overlook. This means that the family will spend months alone in the hotel once the snow flies, and the last caretaker went axe-happy and killed his family. Unfortunately, the Overlook is like an emotional sponge that has soaked in every ugly act that ever took place within its rooms, and the presence of a high-powered psychic like Danny kicks the place into overdrive. As Jack is being driven into madness, Wendy and Danny become increasingly terrified of what he might do.
I once read something in which King talked about denial of his own substance abuse problems in which he noted that he somehow wrote The Shining without ever once realizing he was describing his own alcoholism. That element of the Jack Torrence character is what makes this one of his better books. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with a bunch of ghosts is scary in a horror story kind of way. The idea of being trapped in a hotel with an ill-tempered drunk with a history of violence as he is cracking up is downright terrifying.
Adding even more weight to that idea is that Jack Torrance isn’t a monster. He’s a troubled man who does love his wife and son, and he’s self-aware enough to realize that he’s on the brink. He’ll either turn his life around and earn his wife’s trust back, or he’ll give in to his own worst impulses. This would be hard enough under any circumstances, but under the influence of the evil spirits of the Overlook, Jack becomes a tragedy.
Another element jumped out at me while re-reading this time. King talked in his non-fiction Danse Macabre (Which I remember as being entertaining, but probably very dated by now. I would be very interested if Uncle Stevie wanted to take another look at what’s become of the horror genre since he wrote that one.) about the economic factor of The Amityville Horror and how a part of why the movie worked was that the family was essentially trapped by their finances.
He uses that idea to good effect here. Most people would run screaming from the Overloook in less than a week, but we’re frequently reminded that the Torrance family was swirling the drain financially. If the perception is that Jack botched this job, his last chance to get back to a more stable lifestyle is probably shot and that goes a long way towards allowing him to convince himself and Wendy that they’re overreacting to the weird occurrences during the early stages, and by the time they’ve become snowed in, the Overlook has its hooks deep into Jack.
It’s those more mundane things like a family struggling with money and that an evil entity turns one of them against the others by playing on his inherent weaknesses that make this one of my favorite King novels. ...more
You know what’s really scary? Getting sick while you’re reading the first part of The Stand. Just try running a fever, going through a box of tissues You know what’s really scary? Getting sick while you’re reading the first part of The Stand. Just try running a fever, going through a box of tissues and guzzling the better part of a bottle of NyQuil while Stephen King describes the grisly deaths of almost every one on Earth from a superflu. On top of feeling like crap, you'll be terrified. Bonus!
After a bio-engineered virus that acts like a revved up cold escapes from a U.S. government lab, it takes only weeks for almost all of humanity to succumb to the disease. A handful of survivors are mysteriously immune and begin having strange dreams, some of which are about a very old woman called Mother Abigail asking them to come see her. More disturbing are nightmares about a mysterious figure named Randall Flagg also known as the Dark Man or the Walkin’ Dude.
As they make their way through an America almost entirely devoid of people, the survivors begin to unite and realize that the flu was just the beginning of their problems. While some are drawn to the saintly Mother Abigail in Boulder Colorado who tells them that they have been chosen by God, others have flocked to Flagg in Las Vegas who is determined to annihilate all those who refuse to pledge their allegiance to him.
If King would have just written a book about a world destroyed by plague and a small number of people struggling in the aftermath, it probably would have been a compelling story. What sets this one apart is the supernatural element. Flagg is the embodiment of evil and chaos. He's a mysterious figure who has been giving the wrong people the push needed for them to make things worse for everyone, and he sees the plague as his chance to fulfill his own destiny as a wrecker of humanity.
And on the other side, we have God. Yep, that God. The Big Cheese himself. But this isn’t some kindly figure in a white robe with a white beard or George Burns or Morgan Freeman. This is the Old Testament God who demands obedience and worship while usually rewarding his most faithful servants with gruesome deaths.
King calls this a tale of dark Christianity in his forward, and one of the things I love about this book is that it does feel like a Biblical story, complete with contradictions and a moves-in-mysterious-ways factor. Stories don’t get much more epic than this, and King does a great job of depicting the meltdown of the world through the stories of a variety of relateable characters. (Larry Underwood remains among my favorite King creations.)
One of my few complaints is that this features a lot of King’s anti-technology themes that he’d use in several books like Cell or The Dark Tower series. We’re told repeatedly that the ‘old ways’ like trying to get the power back on in Boulder are a ‘death trip’. The good guys gather in the Rocky Mountains, but if they try to get the juice going so they won’t freeze to death in the winter, they’re somehow acting in defiance of God’s will and returning to the bad habits? Not all tech is bad tech, Mr. King. Nature is a bitch and will kill your ass quicker than the superflu.
Here’s another thing I’m not wild about. When this was published in the late ‘70s, the bean counters at King’s publishers had decided that the book as written would be too pricey in hardback and no one would pay a whopping $13 for a Stephen King hardback. So King cut about three hundred pages.
Around 1990 after it had become apparent that King could publish his shopping list as a best seller, he put those pages back in and released the uncut version. Which I’m fine with. The original stuff was cut for a financial reason, not an editorial one, and there’s some very nice bits of story added in. If King would have stopped there, we would have had a great definitive final version as originally created by the author.
Unfortunately, he seemed to catch a case of Lucasitis and decided to update the story a bit and change its original time frame from 1980 to 1990. I’m not sure why that seemed necessary to him. Yes, the book was a bit dated by then, but it was of its time. He didn’t rewrite the text (Which I’m grateful for.), but just stuck in some references to Madonna and Ronald Reagan and Spuds McKenzie.
This led to a whole bunch of anachronisms. Would students in 1990 call soldiers ’war pigs’? Someone in New York picks up a phone book to look up the number to call an ambulance instead of dialing 911? A song called Baby, Can You Dig Your Man is a huge hit? None of it quite fits together. There's also a layer of male chauvinism and lack of diversity that you can overlook in a book written in the late '70s, but seems out of place for a book set and updated for 1990.
The things that irritate me are still far outweighed by one of my favorite stories of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
I’m also glad to get a long overdue audio edition of this book. Great narration and 40+ hours of end of the world horror make for a damn fine listening experience....more
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