I find it hard to write about a Stephen King novel. While you are reading one, you are completely immersed, deeply involved in the world he has created. His loving attention to every detail of the world and the people in it makes you forget that this story could never really happen.
Or so you hope.
You finish the book and put it aside with a deep sigh of contentment and satisfaction. That lasts until you try to figure out how to explain what he has just done.
I mean, think about it:
After a mysterious virus wipes out 99% of human life, those few who remain alive engage in an epic battle between good and evil as they meet in a cornfield in Nebraska or travel to Colorado or to a casino in the Las Vegas desert. When you try to analyze it, it all just seems to crumble and blow away. Like a nightmare that dissipates when you turn on the light.
There is nothing inherently frightening about a cornfield in Nebraska. And yet, it haunted my dreams the first time I read
The Stand in 1980. I put down King's book because I was too frightened to continue. That had never happened before, and has never happened since. But there was something about the world that King had created that actually caused a fear to leap up from the pages into my head.
And that was the day I decided that Stephen King was simply the best at what he does. He uses the everyday, the mundane events of a normal life to build the bridge we walk across into the strange, very strange, worlds of his imagination.
First published in 1978, and set in 1980, The Stand follows the journeys of the survivors of the deadly plague, known as Captain Tripps, as they make their way, in ones and twos and then in small groups who pick up others, to the west, seeking the One who had called to them. His publishers insisted that King cut 400 pages from his manuscript because they just could not afford to publish the whole thing for the then current retail price of $12.95. That was the 800+ page version I read in 1980 when it came out in paperback.
This year I read the new (1990) version of the Stand with many of the pages returned to the novel. It was a revelation. The suspense was not as great, whether that was because I vaguely remember the ending or because the revision read slower, I don't know, but the stories and the characters went deeper. Things that puzzled me in my first reading became clearer in this one. I enjoyed it immensely.
Which is very strange, because I am the one at the amusement park who refuses to ride the scary roller coasters. And that is not a function of my age, because even as a child I disliked them and never could figure out why I should part with my hard-earned allowance to become badly frightened. Didn't life do enough of that already?
I continued to read most of what King wrote, save the Dark Tower series, until the mid 90s. And then I drifted away.
I returned in 2009, when Under the Dome was published.
Under the Dome is as much a condemnation of the Bush/Cheney era as it is a dark warning of the environmental damage that we have done to our planet which also happens to be protected/isolated by the dome of its own atmosphere.
From a New York Times Sunday Book Review article:
King’s new novel, “Under the Dome,” owes something to recent politics. “I enjoyed taking the Bush-Cheney dynamic and shrinking it to the small-town level,” he said. “The last administration interested me because of the aura of fundamentalist religion that surrounded it and the rather amazing incompetency of those top two guys. I thought there was something blackly humorous in it. So in a sense, ‘Under the Dome’ is an apocalyptic version of ‘The Peter Principle.’ ”
UpFront: Stephen King, 11/20/09
One October morning the small town of Chester's Mill, in Maine (where else?), is covered by a dome of unknown origin and composition. The dome cuts off and isolates the people of the town from the rest of the nation as efforts are undertaken on both sides of the dome to remove it and allow access.
For over a thousand pages we are treated to multiple characters with individual stories that all come together for the final battle between the good guys and the rest of the universe.
When I read this book, the healthcare debate was ongoing, with pushing, shoving and screaming by members of the corporate campaign better known as the Tea Party. King's timing was perfect on this one, as was his description of the logical conclusion to the policies Bush/Cheney espoused.
AND, CBS will be running a summer mini-series based on this book. Under the Dome will premiere on June 24 at 10:00pm eastern. Here is the trailer, and should you not care to plow through 1000 pages of Steven King flashing his progressive credentials, you can always settle for the TV machine.
How can a progressive liberal not want to buy a book from a man who writes:
Tax me for F@%&'s Sake?
In an April 30, 2012 article for The Daily Beast, he takes to task the right wing who say, like Chris Christie did about Warren Buffet's suggestion that he wasn't taxed enough,
Cut a check and shut up, they said.
If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.
Tired of hearing about it, they said.
Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it.
-Stephen King
And boy does he talk about it. In terms guaranteed to warm the soul of any Democrat who loves to hear truth spoken to power.
He acknowledges that the very rich, including himself, make large charitable donations. (And he doesn't even suggest that they may be motivated, in part, by tax benefits.)
Then he makes one of the most important points in our political debate that seems to have gotten lost somewhere. Why should we be dependent upon charity? Isn't that why we have a government?
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.
It is hard for me to not want to support the works of a man who gives the rights to some of his short stories to any student filmmaker for $1 and a copy of the completed film. Dollar Babies
Or for a man who is willing to try something new. Well, it's old, actually. Stephen King's newest novel will be released tomorrow. But only in paperback. (And audiobook) In an homage to the paperback pulp fiction of his youth, King's new work is a murder mystery novel set in an amusement park in 1973.
He has chosen Hard Case Crime, a small independent publisher to bring out this book. Its founder and editor, Charles Ardai, wrote about why for BoingBoing.net:
For me, at least, the other reason is that some stories just beg to be experienced in a certain way, and Joyland is one such. Joyland is framed as the reminiscence of a 61-year-old man about events he experienced four decades earlier, in the summer before his senior year of college. It’s about memory; it’s about the passage of time and its impact; it’s about ways of life that existed once and are gone now, ones that deserve not to be forgotten. It’s about all the things that led us to create Hard Case Crime in the first place.
There’s a reason that Michel Hazanavicius filmed The Artist, his Academy Award-winning Best Picture about the early days of Hollywood, in black-and-white and (largely) silent, and it’s not because he thought all movies should be filmed that way. That, too, was a story about a moment in the past, and it benefitted from making the audience experience the story the way audiences would have back in the silent-picture days. Hard Case Crime books are many things, and to the extent that you’re just looking for a good read, they can certainly be enjoyed on Kindles and Nooks. But one thing our books are is a shrine to a particular way of consuming stories and the particular object that for decades delivered that experience to millions of people. An object that has dimensions and heft and feels a certain way when you handle it, that looks a certain way when you thumb its pages back, creases a certain way when you jam it in a jacket pocket or a lunch bucket. Shape and form and texture matter. The past matters. Preserving things we love matters. And insofar as we want people to remember something we love, putting an example of it in their hands is a powerful way to do so.
I added the bold emphasis above. Because Stephen King never just writes a mystery or a thriller. He always writes about the underlying spirit of a man. About memory. About integrity, good and evil. About the essential truths that all good writers tackle. He just dresses them up in such truly enjoyable pulp fiction.
Much as I would love to write about Joyland, my copy won't get here until it is physically hefted onto my physical doorstep tomorrow morning. But I would guess that if you live near enough to a local bookseller, it might be a good day for a walk to buy a book. And while you are there, browse a little. Go ahead, look at the other authors whose last name starts with a K. You never know what you might find.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule