Lisey's Story

“...the yellow thread of memory...”: very sharp foreshadowing

Note for myself: “Sh-Boom” was written and recorded by The Chords; the white versions that did well were the covers by The Billy Williams Quartet and The Crew-Cuts

The reason it took me so long to finish this book, after a couple of starts and much time, was my misreading of Lisey. The beginning of the novel reads, to me, like a famous widow's bragging to self-soothe through grief: that's right, he was my man, the world was jealous. But it's a false facade if you hang on...and if you pay attention to details, such as how very difficult Scott actually was as a spouse...and the much more subtle fact that Scott and Lisey appear to have no friends outside of each other...
Then it becomes another, richer novel entirely.

Yikes. I had a hard time getting thru this book. And, honestly, if it hadn???t been a King book, I would have given up. I found it tedious and boring, which is a shame because I usually love Stephen King???s writing. My mind wandered often and because of that, I often found myself confused. Perhaps I will give this book another chance in the future (a lot of folks on here seem to love it), but I think it???ll be a long, long time before I do.

Whew .. OK! I meant to read this one a long time ago but when it comes to Stephen King I HAVE to really want to read him. If you love this author .. you KNOW. It did take me a few to get into this one. I had to stop and start a few times, because I needed to reboot my mindset when cracking this one open.

While this wasn't a favorite of his for me, I still loved it. This man's writing is just so good and (for me at least) always offers much more than the supernatural, mysterious or horror. The fragility of our minds and the perceptions of what we make of our surroundings is on a whole other level when reading King.

I'm glad I finally yanked this off my shelf, no subtlety there

This long, fat book had me stymied for the maybe two-thirds of the book, but I hung in there and the payoff was well worth it. I only give it four stars because I know it was a struggle to get to the payoff. At first, I accused King's editor of doing him an injustice, but the end of the book clarifies that in his acknowledgements. It says:

“Quite often reviewers of novels–especially novels by people who sell great numbers of books–will say, ‘So-and-so would have benefitted from actual editing.' To those tempted to say it about LISEY'S STORY, I would be happy to submit sample pages from my first-draft manuscript, complete with [his editor's] notes. I had first-year French essays that came back cleaner.”

So, the mystery was intentional. I'm not sure if the narrator was supposed to be unreliable, but that's how it felt to me.