Customer Reviews

The Prison House

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I absolutely loved King's "football trilogy" (The Football Factory, Headhunters, England Away), and thought "Human Punk" was an excellent change of direction. However, his last book, "White Trash", was an utter disaster, and it was with some trepidation that I picked this one up. Regrettably, after slogging through 1/3 of the book I just couldn't be bothered to continue and have set it aside for the foreseeable future. The problem isn't the subject matter (a young British man imprisoned, apparently under dubious circumstances in an unspecified Mediterranean country, perhaps Greece), but the execution. The prison novel/film is a well-established genre, and in the first third of the book, King brings nothing new to it. There's the grim living conditions, the threat of violence, the kooky fellow prisoners, nasty warders, and balancing act between boredom and fear. In short, all the usual trappings of a prison story. Interwoven with the description of daily life are the prisoner's rambling memories of his childhood and various global travels. These extended stream of consciousness monologues may well appeal to fans of Burroughs, Bukowski, et al, but as I'm not particularly a fan of that style, they didn't work for me. In any event, the first 1/3 of the book dragged so badly that it'll be a long time before I return to it.