by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I read an interview somewhere in which Stephen King had said Lisey’s Story was his best novel in his opinion. I’m not sure how close that was to the release of the book, so who knows how much of that might have been leaning into the promotion, but still, that intrigues me. I think it may have been the same interview where he said he thought Tommyknockers might have been his worst. I liked Tommyknockers. King and I may have different tastes when it comes to his novels.
I enjoyed the novel Bag of Bones and although I have not yet read Lisey’s Story as of the time I’m first drafting this post, I get the sense that both stories are dealing with a similar grappling with loss. I’m not sure what the other parallels might be. I think the men in both novels might be authors. I think in this one the wife survives the author instead of the other way around in Bag of Bones.
I know this was written after King was struck by a van and went through that difficult recovery. This work is some ten or so novels and a few years down the road, but I don’t think that incident ever really left him. I’m not sure that the pain he experienced around that trauma is filed away and archived in the same mental, emotional, or spiritual drawers as his struggle with addiction is or other traumas of various shapes and sizes that preceded that accident. I have the impression that it changed him in ways other major experiences in his life did not, but everything we go through changes us in various ways, so I’m surely not saying anything terribly profound or insightful.
All that to say, I believe Lisey’s Story may have some depth and insights to it that could distinguish it from early explorations of loss penned by King. When Stephen King claims, at one point in his life anyway, that this might be his best novel, there may be a substantive reason why that is the case in how this connects to his own emotional experiences and in coping with his own suffering.
Because of what I believe I remember reading about his opinion of this novel, I’ve been looking forward to getting to this one for a while and I’m hoping it lives up to the status it has held in my mind.
My next post in this series will be After Lisey’s Story which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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