There was a time when Stephen King was my idol. I bought his books, listened to the audio tape adaptations, and was eventually inspired to become a creative writer one day. Now that I’m older (and more cynical and bitter), I’m starting to see bigger and bigger flaws, especially in his most recent work. I was willing to forgive this, at least until I read the utterly bullshit conclusion to The Dark Tower (that’s for another time), and I reached a breaking point with Lisey’s Story.

Lisey (pronounced “lee-see”) Landon is the widow of famed writer Scott Landon – I don’t think there’s been another author that’s written so much about writers as King – who passed away due to pneumonia. Lisey finds herself cleaning up Scott’s study and reminiscing on the many strange occurrences that filled Scott’s life. Meanwhile, she must also contend with a crazy, obsessed fan named Jim Dooley and her mentally unstable sister, Amanda.

600 pages. 600 pages of turgid prose and annoying characters. 600 pages of digression, flashbacks and unnecessary details. This is one of the most poorly-written novels I’ve ever read, and considering the dreck I’ve forced myself to peruse, that’s saying a lot.

The first problem lies in the writing itself – King’s writing has always been touch-and-go: some of it is quite good, at other times it’s awful. I don’t mean awful in an “I don’t understand what’s being said” kind of way, but in the “how can a human being put this shit on paper” way. Here’s an exact quote from the book, describing how Amanda had cut her hands while Lisey’s other sister, Darla, was distracted: “All while Darla had been on the toilet, doing no more than whizzing a little lemonade and blotting the old bush…”

I dare you to read that sentence aloud without cracking a smile or wincing in disgust.

Then there’s the terrifying threat Dooley utters when intimidating Lisey to turn over her husband’s unfinished work: “[I]f it dutn’t happen in a certain run of time, I’m going to come to where you are and I’m going to hurt you. I am going to hurt you places you didn’t let the boys to touch at the junior high dances.”

Then there’s the sickening vocabulary Scott and Lisey use, substituting “african” for “afghan” and “smucking” for “fucking”, or using the phrase “strap it on” when getting serious (which makes me think of a strap-on dildo, but that’s how my diseased mind works), or using the expression, “Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the carpenter”. I have a question: who the fuck talks like this? I’m sure there are married couples that develop a private language, but not to this extent. Scott even calls the bathroom “El Poopatorium”. Jesus!

The second problem is one that King always struggled with: overwriting. Everything in this book is examined in excruciating detail, down to what’s written on the blade of a silver shovel, or where Scott bought his desk, what the weather was like when he bought it, the personality of the man he bought it from, the size of the desk, and so on. While these things do have some importance later, you’d think King was describing the launch codes to a goddamn ICBM.

Next are the endless flashbacks. I can safely say that three-quarters of this book consists of flashbacks, and half of them aren’t even Lisey’s! Usually Lisey flashes back to a conversation with Scott, and he flashes back to his childhood – which means we have a flashback within a flashback. It’s like a fever dream, only not as entertaining. There’s a point where Lisey lies on the floor, bleeding and in pain after being tortured by Dooley, pondering the situation she’s in, and then goes on to have a sixty-page flashback.

There’s an annoying tendency for the characters to interject their thoughts into the narrative with a non sequitur. Like this:

“As Velma strolled through the garden, her eye fell on the luscious strawberry bush strawberry shortcake that blossomed over to her left. She made a mental note to pick a few later, before moving forward again. Just ahead was the old wooden shed (take ‘em behind the shed and shoot ‘em) where she kept her tools.”

It’s not so much “stream of consciousness” as it is “stream of schizophrenia”. It’s annoying and it’s jarring.

But the biggest problem with the novel is that, despite the title, this is not Lisey’s story. No, it’s Scott’s. Everything Lisey does is related to her husband, even in a tangential way, from confronting Dooley, to cleaning out his study, to breaking her sister out of catatonia, Scott is there every step of the way. It all has something to do with how Scott and his family have a psychic bond with an alternate reality called Boo’ya Moon (ugh), and, as a result, are filled with “bad-gunky” (ugh!) that slowly transforms them into insane, half-demon monstrosities. It’s even more incomprehensible than it sounds. In an attempt to prevent this, Scott’s father would frequently have his sons partake in “blood bools” (don’t ask) that involved bleeding out the bad-gunky, kind of like what a medieval barber would do to someone with imbalanced humors. Incidentally, if my spouse ran out and sliced up their hands because I yelled at them for being late (like Scott), I’d phone an asylum; Lisey takes it all in stride.

That’s another aspect that always pissed me off about King’s writing: many of his characters (mostly female ones) are either victims of child molestation or parental/domestic abuse. It stands to reason that these are the kind of issues you’d explore in a drama or horror story, but King’s used it so many times that it’s become a cliché, not to mention rather creepy.

After Lisey takes care of Dooley, she discovers Scott left her a package with a message titled “Lisey’s Story”, which is a bit of a misnomer, considering it’s all about Scott and how he buried a pickaxe in his father’s head. Seriously, how big do your balls have to be to name a 600 page novel Lisey’s Story and make it almost entirely about her famous dead husband? This is supposed to be about Lisey, Stephen, not Scott. Even after the main plot wraps up, we still have to read about Lisey reminiscing about Scott, because it’s always about him, always about this whiny, self-centered douche bag and his fucking boring problems, stop writing about him, stop writing so goddamn much in general SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

A better name for this book would be Stephen’s Bullshit, since that’s exactly what it is. I don’t know what happened to Stephen King – maybe the fame and money went to his head, maybe he’s run out of stories to tell, or maybe he’s gotten lazy. Whatever the reason, it’s a grueling task to read, a borefest from beginning to end. Even after years of exposing myself to the worst the Internet has to offer, I’m still staggered.