Lisey's Story

By Stephen King

Let me start off by saying I am not a big fan of Stephen King. I have read quite a few of his novels: The Shining, Cujo, The Green Mile, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Desperation, The Dead Zone, It, Dolores Claiborne, Needful Things. I was hoping that this book would be more in the vein of Dolores Claiborne than in that of Desperation. This is because I am not a fan of horror or suspense stories. Well, Lisey's Story combines both, being an insightful look at strong woman, like Dolores Claiborne, but with horror elements too.
Lisey is a woman in her fifties whose successful novelist husband, Scott, died a couple years before. She thinks she is coping with Scott's death OK, but when she finally begins to clean out Scott's office, she has to face her memories of their life together; mainly she has to deal with the craziness that Scott brought with him into their marriage. Craziness runs in both their families, but it runs so strong in Scott's that he refused to ever have children, not wanting to pass on the "bad-gunkies," as he called it. As Lisey is trying to cope with remembering Scott's bad-gunkies, she also has to deal with a catatonic sister and some weirdo who wants to slice and dice her out of pure mean craziness.
The story starts off slow. I didn't really start to get into it until the part where Lisey is attacked by the weirdo. The pace of the story picked up pretty well then. Some of the language was hard to handle, lots of peculiar terms are used like bool, and smucking and SOWISA and puffickly huh-yooge (it took me a while to figure that one out) and they get in the way of the story somewhat, although I think King uses these words because they are so much a part of Lisey's internal dialogue and are part of the language of Lisey's marriage with Scott. Though the novel starts out kind of slow and kind of confusing (I had a hard time remembering what SOWISA was supposed to mean), King is a good story teller and his characters are interesting, charming and worth reading about.

Review from The Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/oct/28/stephenking.sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.