A Novel Critique

I came into Lisey’s Story expecting something quiet. I’m not really sure why; after the publication of the gory, horror-packed novel Cell earlier this year, I assumed King would balance it off with something in the realm of reality, at least to a degree. All I knew about the book as I entered it was that it was the tale of Lisey Landon, whose novelist husband Scott had died two years prior, and she was still trying to put the pieces together. As the book opens, we find Lisey and her sister Amanda going through Scott’s old papers, trying in vain to put them in order so that those who would be interested in them – Lisey thinks of them as the Incunks – can have access. (“Incunk” is the first of many, many funny words we encounter in Lisey’s Story,” and its meaning is best left to King to describe.) I’m not sure what I thought then: maybe this was going to be a mystery about finding one of Scott’s missing books, or something similar.

As it turned out, I was right and wrong: right because, indeed, there is a missing book and Lisey is charged with finding it. Wrong because that’s not really the point of Lisey’s Story at all, and while it is a subdued book, it’s miles from quiet. I’m so glad I was wrong.

A goodly portion of the book concerns a man, a mentally unstable Incunk who first introduces himself as Zack McCool. Zack arrives courtesy of the Annie Wilkes Express, desperate to read Scott Landon’s unpublished work, and willing to do whatever it takes to get to it. “Whatever it takes” turns out to be pretty gruesome indeed; it’s interesting that King chose not to focus on one particularly bloody encounter head-on. It’s not that the novel shies away from the grue – far from it, in fact – but I’m impressed with both King’s restraint and his trust in his audience to make what isn’t shown all that much more horrifying.

But the most interesting thing about Lisey’s Story is that it’s not about Zack McCool at all, not really. He’s the external here, the pivot-point the cogs of this novel turn upon … but Lisey’s Story is far more concerned with the internal, with the curious and fascinating language that exists between two people in love with one another for a very long time. Zack McCool might be the catalyst, but the real fire here is in the secret world Lisey and Scott share. A secret world I assumed at first would be entirely metaphoric.

Lisey’s Story is a story about real people leading real lives, but as we march darkly into the center of Lisey and Scott’s marriage, we find that the basis of that reality is not entirely … well, natural. Deep at the center of their marriage – and, perhaps, Scott’s death – lies a secret so great that even Lisey won’t bring herself to face it. By the time “Zack McCool” comes onto the scene, she must force herself, one last time, to face both Scott’s demons and her own. In Stephen King novels, even unchecked grief is a source of terror.

It would be perhaps easy to categorize Lisey’s Story as another experiment in magic realism, a genre King has dabbled in before, most notably with Rose Madder. But the truth of the matter is that Lisey’s Story is virtually unclassifiable. The abrupt introduction of the supernatural (as well as the somewhat piecemeal nature) of Rose Madder is absent here; Lisey’s Story allows the otherworldly to creep in slowly, as Lisey remembers more and more about the parts of her marriage she’d wanted to keep hidden. And don’t go thinking that this is a rehash of Bag of Bones either; though both novels deal with love and the past’s dark persistence of will on the present, Lisey’s Story is far darker, with a more overt supernatural threat. (Long-time readers might also detect a certain similarity to the spooky Wendigo scenes in Pet Sematary, and it’s a welcome comparison.) There are also elements of Misery and The Dark Half present (the nature of creativity is very much a theme here, nearly as prevalent as the nature of love), but none of these elements from previous novels take away from the insistent immediacy of Lisey’s Story. It is its own book, and a very good one.

King has often been asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” In Lisey’s Story, he attempts to answer that question, as well as the deeper, more subtle questions about why people love each other, and at what cost.