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Books

King's 'Story' worth telling

The horror novelist plays it largely straight in a finely wrought tale of grief and redemption.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published October 29, 2006

A lot of Stephen King's fans will spend a lot of time trying to pry autobiography out of Lisey's Story. And that's too bad.

Not that this novel doesn't bear some striking resemblances to the writer's life story. Its main character, Lisey Landon, is the widow of a hugely popular novelist, a tall, lanky Maine native who loves rock 'n' roll and says of himself, "I am crazy. I have delusions and visions. I write them down and people pay me to read them."

Like Lisey and Scott Landon, King and his wife, Tabitha, have been married for decades, since long before King's great success. Scott Landon even recovers from a near-fatal injury, in his case being shot by a deranged fan rather than being struck by a van, as King was in 1999. And the book is dedicated "To Tabby."

But all that is beside the point. If King ever decides to write an autobiography, he'll write one. In Lisey's Story he has written a very fine novel about the depths of grief, the redemption of love and the power of imagination.

It would be a shame to miss it because you were trying to parse how much of Scott's story is Stephen's. As the title says, this book is Lisey's.

When the novel opens, Scott has been dead for two years. Years after the shooting when Lisey saved his life, he succumbs to a sudden, devastating illness that doctors cannot identify, leaving Lisey with $20-million.

Their marriage has been passionate, intense, a little insular. And something more. From the earliest days of their courtship, Lisey has known that talented, charismatic Scott has enough dark secrets to fill, well, a Stephen King novel. His childhood was a morass of abuse and madness, softened only by a beloved older brother - and by a place he calls Boo'ya Moon.

It's a place of overwhelming beauty and healing waters, and of unseen creatures that laugh nastily in the woods and fruit that turns poisonous after sundown. It might seem a little like a dream, a little like a nightmare, except that sometimes Lisey wakes deep in the night and finds that Scott has vanished.

Boo'ya Moon, it turns out, is real enough for him to take her there. But he doesn't just need Boo'ya Moon to cope with his past and function in the present. He needs Lisey.

For a couple of decades, she devotes herself to him. No career, no kids, just Scott, who can be a witty, generous delight or a near-catatonic wreck. No matter what, she is there.

So it seems a little unlikely that she would recover easily from his stunning death. But as the story begins, she thinks she has. His sprawling office, filled with letters, books and perhaps unpublished manuscripts, lies untouched; Lisey believes that's just because she hasn't gotten around to cleaning it out.

Irritated by a university professor who is nagging her to donate Scott's papers (Lisey's Story is not kind to academics), she plunges into the task. She discovers her own denied grief and sets in motion a series of events - the mental breakdown of one of her sisters and a contact from a sinister man who calls himself Zack McCool and says he only wants her to donate Scott's papers - that will put her life on the line.

Lisey's Story has plenty of the patented King chills and thrills, and in Lisey it has a refreshing protagonist: a middle-aged woman who kicks butt and takes names.

Despite its supernatural elements, this is perhaps the closest thing to a straight literary novel King has written. The real conflict is not so much between Lisey and the sadistic McCool, or Lisey and the indescribable, fatal "long boy" of Boo'ya Moon that terrifies Scott, but between Lisey and her loss.

Lisey's Story paints a vivid, tender portrait of a marriage, complete with its private language and interior myths, its joys and desperations. King masterfully layers the present and a multitude of pasts to take us along on Lisey's journey into her own memory and heart: "There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart."

It's a painful trip, where the line between grief and madness grows faint. But in Boo'ya Moon, King creates not just a convincing fantasy world but a rich metaphor for the imagination: a world that can do us terrible harm or heal our broken hearts. Lisey's Story is, after all, not a story about its author but about the power of story itself.

Lisey's Story

By Stephen King

Scribner, 513 pages, $28

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 28, 2006, 12:01:19]