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Lisey's Story Hardcover – October 24, 2006
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateOctober 24, 2006
- Dimensions6.75 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100743289412
- ISBN-13978-0743289412
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What's it about?
A widow sorts through her celebrated husband's papers and discovers a terrifying and healing place he visited.Popular highlight
Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.201 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.187 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Guest Reviewer: Nora Roberts
Nora Roberts, who also writes under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, is the author of way too many bestselling books to name here (over 150!), but some of our favorites include: Angels Fall, Born in Death, Blue Smoke, and The Reef.
Stephen King hooked me about three decades ago with that sharply faceted, blood-stained jewel, The Shining. Through the years he's bumped my gooses with kiddie vampires, tingled my spine with beloved pets gone rabid, justified my personal fear of clowns and made me think twice about my cell phone. I've always considered The Stand--a long-time favorite--a towering tour de force, and have owed its author a debt as this was the first novel I could convince my older son to read from cover to cover.
But with Lisey's Story, King has accomplished one more feat. He broke my heart.
Lisey's Story is, at its core, a love story--heart-wrenching, passionate, terrifying and tender. It is the multi-layered and expertly crafted tale of a twenty-five year marriage, and a widow's journey through grief, through discovery and--this is King, after all--through a nightmare scape of the ordinary and extraordinary. Through Lisey's mind and heart, the reader is pulled into the intimacies of her marriage to bestselling novelist Scott Landon, and through her we come to know this complicated, troubled and heroic man.
Two years after his death, Lisey sorts through her husband's papers and her own shrouded memories. Following the clues Scott left her and her own instincts, she embarks on a journey that risks both her life and her sanity. She will face Scott's demons as well as her own, traveling into the past and into Boo'ya Moon, the seductive and terrifying world he'd shown her. There lives the power to heal, and the power to destroy.
Lisey Landon is a richly wrought character of charm and complexity, of realized inner strength and redoubtable humor. As the central figure she drives the story, and the story is so vividly textured, the reader will draw in the perfumed air of Boo'ya Moon, will see the sunlight flood through the windows of the Scott's studio--or the night press against them. Her voice will be clear in your ear as you experience the fear and the wonder. If your heart doesn't hitch at the demons she faces in this world and the other, if it doesn't thrill at her courage and endurance, you're going to need to check with a cardiologist, first chance.
Lisey's Story is bright and brilliant. It's dark and desperate. While I'll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King's wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems.
A few of them have sharp, hungry teeth. --Nora Roberts
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From The Washington Post
Well, suck it up. Even that faint praise about how you can appreciate him for being good at "what he does" isn't going to cut it anymore. With Lisey's Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he'll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories and the psychological terror of his novels. (And yes, a few hairy monsters.) They're all evoked here in this moving story about the widow of a famous writer trying to lay her grief to rest.
King claims in an afterword that this character -- Lisey -- is not based on his wife, but there's no denying who the famous writer is, and King fanatics will pounce on these personal details like Cujo on a bucket of chicken wings. The story opens two years after the death of Scott Landon, a prolific horror writer almost as popular as King but more critically acclaimed. For months, Lisey has been hounded for access to Scott's papers by "the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end." (Take that, Dr. Bloom!)
Though entering Scott's office is like scratching the scab of her mourning, once Lisey finally starts sorting, boxing and labeling his effects, the work inspires waves of nostalgia. She's drawn back into memories of her 25-year marriage with a brilliant, loving man who was haunted by childhood trauma. But two alarming events disrupt her reverie: First, her sister Amanda suffers a violent relapse in her battle against depression. Then, in the middle of that crisis, an anonymous caller threatens to kill Lisey if she doesn't immediately donate her husband's papers to the University of Pittsburgh. The caller sounds like a kook, but his threat forces her to recall an earlier insane fan who tried to assassinate Scott during a lecture tour.
Of course, this is not the first time King has written about the misery of ardent fans. We all have reason to fear zombies and demonic Plymouths, but the world's most popular living writer is especially terrified about the adulation that his gory tales inspire. The word "fan," after all, is just one padded cell away from "fanatic." King delivers a number of self-deprecating cracks here about the benefits of fame and wealth, but when it comes to the dangers of entertaining millions with fantasies of mayhem, he's dead serious.
Lisey's Story moves in several different directions at once, but everything that happens seems part of a complicated plan arranged in advance by Scott Landon to show his wife how much he loved her. Lisey finds among his papers a kind of scavenger hunt -- a "bool," he calls it -- that leads her through the major events of their long marriage, "to allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once." In fact, one of the great charms of this novel is King's attention to the private language of affection: the silly phrases, lyrics, puns and pet names that Lisey cherishes as signs of their intimacy.
Her battle against Scott's mad scholar-fan lurches erratically from grisly to goofy, but fortunately much of the novel takes place in Lisey's memories as she recalls Scott's desperate courtship and his struggle to explain his father to her. He was a reclusive manic-depressive who loved his sons even as he savaged them. During the most horrific of these tales, when describing his father overcome with "endless swirling bad-gunky," Scott used to revert to his childhood voice. Read this on a bright afternoon: It's emotionally draining, and blood-draining, too -- King at his most psychologically acute, as sympathetic as he is terrifying, wielding a startling blend of affection, pathos and horror.
But there's something else lurking in this novel, something very strange, even for Stephen King. At its center, Lisey's Story contains a huge, ungainly metaphor for the source of creative inspiration. It's an otherworldly place that Scott called Boo'ya Moon, a lush garden of delights and dangers, blooming lupines and dark trees, just on the other side of our dimension. (Under its blood-red dust jacket, the book's cover sports a psychedelic painting of Boo'ya Moon.) By concentrating hard, Scott could slip over to this alternate reality to escape his father, recover from his wounds and find fresh ideas. It contains a "pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination."
King works this hallucinatory vision hard throughout the novel, but it seems like a metaphor that never met a meaning it didn't like: It's an oasis of healing, but also a place of grave danger; a retreat for receiving insight, but also an island of Lotus Eaters; a sanctuary from harm, but also the realm of a piebald fiend called "the long boy," which is sometimes an embodiment of Scott's depression but other times just a scary monster that eats people.
This amorphous metaphor feels like something King has rolled around in his mind for a long time, and his willingness to lay out such an intimate vision is endearing even if it's not entirely coherent. But what works beautifully throughout Lisey's Story is the rich portrait of a marriage and the complicated affection that outlives death. Who would have thought that a man who's spent the last 30 years scaring the hell out of us would produce a novel about the kind of love that carries us through grief?
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner; First Edition (October 24, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0743289412
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743289412
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #150,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #505 in Ghost Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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Lisey's Story: A Novel
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About the author
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.
King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
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But it is much more than a retread. While I don't agree with King that it's the best novel he's ever written, it is quite compelling.
"Lisey's Story" is another King tale about marriage, loss and grief. And though some of it certainly gets lugubrious -- King always had a sentimental streak to go along with the gore -- it is never less than heartfelt. With all of its ghosts and stalkers and violence and strange exotic worlds and manifestations of death itself, "Lisey's Story" is really about picking yourself up after someone you love dies and moving on with your life.
King's story is about a woman who loses her beloved husband, and the book absolutely aches at its core.
The book has a tried-and-true plot structure -- a treasure-hunt (sorry, bool-hunt) of clues left behind that slowly reveals to Lisey (and us) what in the world is going on. King very effectively teases us and paws at us as he gradually lets us in on the truth. I found the plotting in "Lisey's Story" -- which asks you to pay attention -- to be some of the best in a King book in quite a while.
Of course, the book isn't only about love and heartbreak; it also provides some frights. King's description of the longboy, and a close encounter someone has with it, was completely horrifying in a weirdly real way. It is an image I can't imagine I will ever forget.
Ironically, King said he wrote this book while suffering from pneumonia and running to the bathroom to vomit. Despite this, he really loved the book and, like I mentioned already, considers it the best thing he's ever written.
"Lisey's Story" is just the type of skewed, twisted love story you'd expect King to create -- haunting, a little maudlin, frightening, and ultimately grounding all the crazy disparate elements in a relationship that feels utterly believable.
I read a "professional" review of Lisey's Story and the reviewer skewered Mr. King for Lisey's language idiosyncrasies and the local vernacular. I honestly feel the reviewer missed the point. I loved "hearing" the Mainer accent and the idioms that Lisey used. Also, I think some of the language shared between Lisey and Scott show not only the comfort level they have with each other but also a precious intimacy that comes with time and closeness. I think one of Stephen King's strengths is his ability to connect his characters with their location and community. I love how he hears language and makes it a part of the story. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Stephen King doesn't get the credit he deserves. He's unilaterally dismissed when he is not only one of the best story tellers we have, he's an artist with language.
It's also a story about survival and resilience. It's a story about how books, imagination and language can be a life preserver.
In the end it's a story about love and how familial bonds give us strength and purpose and support. Lisey had her sisters and her eccentric family and their homespun culture. Scott had Lisey. Mr. King illustrated how the little things, gifts, homemade or simplistic hold a powerful magic to "anchor" us to home.
This is a story of love, of what happens after you've lost that most important person in your life and they don't lay down quietly, but must have their say. Reminding you in stark detail all that you tried to sweep under the rug and ignore, but with the ultimate goal of getting Lisey to get on with her life. I see myself in Lisey, just like I have seen myself as many of the women that SK has written about, Rose Madder, Susannah Dean and Susan Delgado.
How SK reaches in and finds out our secrets and brings them to light just amazes me every time. I don't want to give away any spoilers, because when I read a review, I want to know if something is worth my time, or not. Believe me, this audio book is time well spent. Now a word about Mare Willingham's reading.
Fabulous!!!! I have listened to many books Mare has read over the years and this one is my favorite. She had tears running down my face more than once because her expression of the tale was so poignant. It was almost like Mare was telling the story of her own life and had all the richness and emotion of things remembered to go along with it.
To sum up, this novel is just a delight and full of all things you expect from SK and more. Try it you'll really like it!
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Reviewed in Mexico on August 23, 2022