King of my world

At job interviews, one of the questions they invariably ask aspiring writers is, "Who are you favorite authors?"

It’s easy to rattle off the usual, universally admired suspects like J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, or (insert your own acclaimed writer here).

But what about your real favorites – the books you furtively slide off the shelf at airports, authored by names that regularly appear on best-seller lists, whose plots may not be driven by sterling literary prose, but whose gifts for storytelling keep you turning pages far into the night?

For the longest time, my foremost shame author was Stephen King, but now I can finally come out of the closet. Stephen King is my guilty pleasure. I have read practically every word Mr. King has written (with the exception of the Dark Tower series – sorry, Steve). Stephen King is the man, one of the many writers who inspired me to become a writer myself.

I’ve been a fan of horror ever since I started reading novels in earnest at 12. A preteen had to have edgier alternatives to Sidney Sheldon, and my shelves groaned with the supernatural and the macabre. King titles like Carrie, Night Shift and Salem’s Lot dominated, littered with other authors I’d discovered through King like Ray Bradbury, William Peter Blatty, Harlan Ellison and H. P. Lovecraft. It got to a point that my baby sister, who I shared the room with, couldn’t sleep if the door to my book closet was open, even a crack. The cover of Night Shift, from which alien eyes peered through a hand like a Man Ray nightmare, just freaked her out too much. One of us had to get up and shut that closet door before sleep could even be attempted.

Why are some of us drawn to horror, as I was with my cheap paperbacks and my husband, Scott, was with his Hammer and monster movies? He says it’s a way to explore our fears, our dark sides. Like Frankenstein, Dracula and other classic monsters of the genre, writers are inherently outsiders. Fiction writers, especially, tend to be observers of life more than participants, living mostly in their heads.

My first King book was Night Shift, a short-story collection that not only scared the Jordaches off me but also earned King a fan for life. His words had a white-knuckle, grab-you-by-the-balls urgency. His many pop-culture references captured the American zeitgeist. He had his own style, already seen in his first novel, Carrie, of rendering his characters’ thoughts parenthetically (later, the parenthetical interjections would also be italicized for further emphasis). He had a loony sense of black humor that was funny because it was true. He turned his home state of Maine, with mythical towns like Castle Rock and Derry, into a far more menacing world than Lovecraft’s New England. And boy, could he tell a story.

King has been my companion in sickness and in health, at times causing the former (his alien-sci-fi tale The Tommyknockers was so scary I literally got sick with fear one summer vacation). My favorites among his 40-odd books are Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Different Seasons, The Tommyknockers, Gerald’s Game, Misery, and On Writing, King’s memoir, style manual and update of that old college warhorse, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.

Shortly after On Writing came out, in which he documented being run over and nearly killed by "a character right out of one of my own novels," King announced that he was retiring. That’s right, nothing more would issue from the Maine mansion, no new title every six months to carry me through the year. The ironic thing was, having grown up with King, his "retirement" was about as believable as that haunted car, Christine. Maybe a recluse like J. D. Salinger could keep squirreling away new manuscripts in a safe, away from the hot little hands of all the phonies in publishing; but how could someone who churned out and released 1,000-page doorstops like Bag of Bones every four months stop writing; how could he possibly stanch the flow?

Sure enough, the output slowed to a trickle, but never came to a complete stop. Before I could even start properly missing him, there he was again on the shelf, with one thin novel a year, like From a Buick 8 and the more recent Cell.

The latest addition to the King catalog is Lisey’s Story, which is notable for not focusing primarily on horror, though there are a number of horrific things in it. I say "notable" but not "anomalous," because this is not the first time King has turned his pen away from the gruesome and written about matters, well… just plain human. Many of his best works, in fact, don’t have fangs or gouts of blood in them. His short story "The Last Rung on the Ladder" (from Night Shift), about a boy who saves his little sister from death by a fall, haunted me long after I read it. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body (two novellas from Different Seasons), both the basis for hit movies The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, remain superior to their movie adaptations. The list goes on, with novellas like "The Long Walk" (written as Richard Bachman), and "Apt Pupil."

Lisey’s Story is about a wife coping with the recent death of her husband, Scott Landon, a best-selling writer who sounds eerily close to Stephen King. In his study, Scott/Steve cranks up rock music to deafening levels as he writes to shut out the outside world. A former alcoholic who could fill whole garbage bags with liquor empties (and pill bottles, and cough syrup bottles), Scott/Steve has an almost saintly older brother, a wife with many quirky sisters, and is involved in a near-fatal, life-changing incident.

Unlike Scott Landon, though, who has been deified by the academe and won a Pulitzer for his fiction, King himself has struggled for over 30 years to be recognized as more than a popular hack. In 2003, he received the National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is kind of like Alfred Hitchcock receiving an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement instead of winning for Best Director. Still, it was literary knighthood, of sorts.

Lisey’s Story is King’s latest bid for literary greatness. Whether he succeeds or not is ultimately up to his Constant Readers. I must admit that the first 200 pages had me scratching my head. King seems to be channeling Anne Tyler as he introduces Lisey’s self-consciously eccentric family. Meeting the suicidal eldest sister, the feuding siblings and the Good Ma full of countrified chestnuts is like being initiated into a profane version of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

But just when I’m about ready to give up… he pulls me back in. Because at heart, Lisey’s Story is the story of a marriage – the kind of marriage we love hearing about but rarely see – a long-term affair that has survived sickness and health, good times and bad:

How many years does it take, she’ll wonder… lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?

Lisey and Scott are extremely lucky in that respect. Even if, during Scott’s celebrated life, Lisey is reduced to the background status of "gal pal," it is she who can let badly dysfunctional Scott shine and be his brilliant self; it is she who saves him, over and over again, even after death does them part:

For over two years now the old song seemed to be true: I get along without you very well. Then she had begun the work of cleaning out his study, and that had awakened his ghost, not in some ethery out-there-spirit-world, but in her.

King has created memorable female characters before, most notably in Gerald’s Game, Misery, Rose Madder, and Dolores Claiborne, where the protagonists were every bit as strong, complex and fascinating as a Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote heroine. Stalked by one of Scott’s deranged fans, Lisey, modeled in part after King’s wife Tabitha, is not Lara Croft, guns-blazing strong. As the nurturer of the family, she is extraordinary in her ordinariness, in her willingness to draw strength from the man she loves, in her subsuming of identity to a relationship that is not just the sum of Scott and Lisey but a living entity in itself, with its own history and secret language:

For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage’s interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA (strap it on whenever it seems appropriate) and smuck for f**k. Then it had fallen out of favor somewhere along the way, and she hadn’t thought of it for years: wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don’t give up yet.

While the Landon language may seem sillier than most, especially when taken out of context – Boo’ya Moon is the world Scott escapes to when he’s writing; bad gunky is the special brand of madness that runs through Scott’s family – the reader eventually finds out the reasons for King’s at-times-cloying self-indulgence.

There’s a brief section in the middle of Lisey’s Story that descends into full-blown horror, and, I hate to admit it, but it’s the best, most gripping part of the book. Perhaps King should finally resign himself to the fact that horror is what he’s always done best, embrace his malign gift wholeheartedly, and let Anne Tyler be Anne Tyler.

Unlike Capote, who described writing as "flagellating yourself with a whip," King is one of those blessed writers through whom the work flows. An effortless shifter into worlds like that occupied by Scott Landon, he’s always seemed to have unlimited access to that healing pool he writes about in Lisey’s Story, that wellspring of creativity we all dip into, except King doesn’t just take the occasional dip but dives headfirst. While the rest of us swim in the shallows, he’s navigating uncharted, subterranean depths.

…He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes – if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered – it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.

Though it takes a certain amount of patience and digging to unearth the treasure within Lisey’s Story, there is a reward to be found, and, as in King’s best works, it is ultimately affecting and haunting. This is King pushing his limits, rebelling against the confines of his genre, and writing about what matters to him most – a marriage so strong and true that it’s stranger – and more wonderful – than fiction.

* * *

"Lisey’s Story" and all of Stephen King’s earlier books are available at National Book Store.