‘Lisey’s Story’ one of Stephen King’s finest
“Lisey’s Story”
by Stephen King (Scribner, 513 pages, $28)
Ever since “Different Seasons” – his remarkable 1982 anthology that produced “Stand by Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption” – Stephen King, chronicler of our darkest corners, has seemed to wrestle with what he wants to be.
Will he continue to reign as the master of modern terror who gave the world “Salem’s Lot,” “Cujo” and “Pet Sematary”? Or will he morph into something more subtle, a writer able to harness American angst and turn it into actual literature (and, not incidentally, cash)?
The 1998 accident that almost killed King muddied the waters even further. His works after that horrific experience – everything from the short-lived TV series “Kingdom Hospital” to his most recent novel, the problematic and uneven “Cell” – pointed toward an admirable reach that exceeded his already formidable grasp.
“Lisey’s Story,” the latest tale to emerge from the hardworking King word processor, is a culmination of this reaching. This time around, King has grasped onto something larger, something genuinely haunting and occasionally scary that is, nonetheless, most definitely not a horror novel.
It manages to unite two of the favorite places that King likes his characters to explore: the geography of an unfamiliar world and the equally daunting topography of one’s own thoughts.
Our tour guide this time is a middle-aged woman named Lisey DeBusher Landon, widow of the celebrated author Scott Landon. Lisey is living in their farmhouse in Maine, trying to heal and move on after her husband’s death two years before.
Trouble is, Scott keeps talking to her – not in the ghostly way, but through papers and messages and hidden nuggets he’s left behind.
Thoughts keep dragging Lisey from the here and now: thoughts of Scott getting shot and nearly killed by a Mark David Chapman-like assassin 18 years ago; Scott telling her of his unimaginably abusive childhood at the hands of a father he loved; Scott saying goodbye on his deathbed in 2004 after a weird infection killed him in less than a day.
Add to all that a very real-world threat: an insane person who has threatened to disfigure Lisey if she doesn’t turn her husband’s papers and unpublished works over to a greedy university professor.
What follows is a journey into the … well, the word is hard to pin down. The fantastic? The beyond? An alternate universe?
It is a twilight world called Boo’ya Moon – so named by Scott – and it is a land where lost people go. The comatose are there, as are the abused, the misplaced, perhaps even the dead. Scott found it when he was a kid; at times of trouble, he simply thought himself there.
It is in Boo’ya Moon that Lisey finds the strength to cope with her real-world life. And it is there, too, where she finds the answers to the lovely mystery that was, and perhaps still is, her haunted, talented husband.
“Lisey’s Story” is a sad, occasionally supernatural chronicle of a hardy union, full of pain and delight that outlasts the world in which it was born. It is passionate without being maudlin, intense without being overwrought, unsettling and surprising without being unduly gory.
It is Stephen King at his best, using the tricks in his weird toolbox, to make us see ourselves in ways that daily life rarely allows us to consider.