Stephen King - Lisey’s Story
Truth is often stranger than fiction. Unless that fiction was written by Stephen King, and then, somehow, somewhere, the truth might be wrapped up within it. Lisey’s Story is his new book and after writing the scary thrillers that have spawned more than 50 films, maybe the truth is catching up with him.
Here’s some truth. In 1999, Stephen King was hit and almost killed by a man named Bryan Smith as he was walking along a road near his home. This occurred a few months after he had finished most of the writing on a book entitled From a Buick 8, a story where one of the characters is killed in a car accident. A little over a year later, Smith died in his sleep at age 43 from an accidental overdose. He died on September 21st … Stephen King’s birthday. King has written many things to make you shiver in the dark, and after 30 years of writing, there are bound to be a few coincidences between his life and his art.
Lisey’s Story is a romance and a supernatural thriller, much like King’s relationship with writing has been. In the book, Lisey Landon, widow of the best selling and deceased novelist Scott Landon, finds herself exploring the strange world that both tortured and gave life to her late husband. You have to wonder what the parallels between Stephen King and his character Scott Landon are. His success has shown the life that writing has given him - but what torture might it have offered as well?
The book has recieved a fair amount of criticism for it’s liberal use of nonsensical language with terms like bool, Boo’ya Moon, and smucking. To give an imaginary world its own language takes skill and shows a kind of obsessive attention to detail that only goes into a story that the writer has the greatest of passions to tell.
What is Stephen King telling us with Lisey’s Story? Where is the line between truth and fiction?
