Everyone does it. Perhaps only in the darkest recesses of thought, we all fantasize about our own death, the aftermath and impact of it. To brush near death, to feel its cold breath on the back of the neck, forces the mind closer and closer to its reality; forces one to truly consider its implications, both practical and emotional. To look back is also to evaluate the worth of the life and of a life’s work. Lisey’s Story could be Stephen King’s fictional therapy, dealing with the death that reached out and scratched him and to what he may have left behind. The haunter is the haunted.

Two years after her husband’s death, Lisey Landon has not moved on; she’s haunted by her dead husband; the memories they made together, the horror of his past and the literary vultures who wish to pick at the carcass of his left-behind work. Lisey finally begins sifting through the inundating mass that forms the remnants of her husband's work, the minutia of over twenty years, the bits of stories, the correspondence, articles and clippings. The emersion into his words and pictures brings her, as she knew it would, back to the pain of his loss.

“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”

Compelled by the threats and violent torture of a madman, the clues left by her husband and the degeneration of one sister’s sanity, Lisey is forced to delve deeper and deeper into the memories and implications until she can free herself from them all. The hunt takes her to the jaws of a monster and into the fantastical world of Boo’ya Moon, a place of beauty and beasts, both magnificent and horrifying with the descriptions and imagery so finely wrought.

Boo’ya Moon is the realm of Scott’s salvation, where he retreated to survive the horrors of his childhood. It is a metaphor for the protective fragment in any human’s mind that allows them to withdraw from the dreadfulness of reality. Boo’ya Moon holds not only the best of Scott but also the worst. Lisey must conquer it all and like many widows, she learns just what she’s capable of and how to face the rest of her life without her husband.

Lisey’s Story is not precisely a love story, as its publicity contends, but the story of love and its power; a story laying bare the strange forces that ignite in the fecund setting of a marriage. It’s a story of all kinds of familial love, good parents, bad parents and siblings of all kinds, one that shows how love and dependency are interchangeable. King takes the opportunity to doff his hat, through Lisey’s tribulations, to what all the years of being Mrs. Stephen King must be like for his wife, the forgotten, ghost-like anonymity of it, while professing his complete and utter reliance upon her.

As he has done in many previous works (for instance The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half and Bag of Bones), King utilizes the writer as his vehicle. This time using him to offer more reflections on writing and language, contending with exquisite aptness, that the words and stories we all use and enjoy come from a ‘pool’, a place that is, as any writer knows, not always easy to find.

‘“I’ve told you about the pool, right?”

“Yes, Scott. Where we all go down to drink.”

“Yep. And cast our nets. Sometimes the really brave fisherfolk—the Austens, the Dostoevskys, the Faulkners—even launch boats and go out to where the big ones swim, but that pool is tricky. It’s bigger than it looks, it’s deeper than any man can tell, and it changes its aspect, especially after dark.”’

Looking at the body of King’s work, it is irrefutable that he swims in the deep end of the pool. Many of the scenes in Lisey’s Story are flashbacks, some are even flashbacks within flashbacks, layer upon layer of character depth and plot line. No one but Stephen King could get away with it (Jealous? Damn straight!).

Lisey’s Story is replete with that distinctive King flavor, that of a keen intelligent mind and its musings. However, it is the teasing foreshadowing, doled out crumb-by-crumb, of the bizarre to come that forces the reading on and on, faster and faster.

Reviewed by Donna Russo Morin
© November 2006