Lisey's Story: A Novel (Paperback)

by Stephen King (Author)
Key Phrases: fairy forest, bool hunt, soft shirring sound, Boo'ya Moon, Jim Dooley, Scott Landon (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Since his first novel was published in 1974, Stephen King has stretched the boundaries of the written word, not only bringing horror to new heights, but trying his hand at nearly every possible genre, including children's books, graphic novels, serial novels, literary fiction, nonfiction, westerns, fantasy, and even e-books (remember The Plant?). With Lisey's Story, once again King is trying something different. Lisey's Story is as much a romance as it is a supernatural thriller--but don't let us convince you. Who better to tell readers if King has written a romantic thriller than Nora Roberts? We asked Nora to read Lisey's Story and give us her take. Check out her review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts, who also writes under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, is the author of way too many bestselling books to name here (over 150!), but some of our favorites include: Angels Fall, Born in Death, Blue Smoke, and The Reef.

Stephen King hooked me about three decades ago with that sharply faceted, blood-stained jewel, The Shining. Through the years he's bumped my gooses with kiddie vampires, tingled my spine with beloved pets gone rabid, justified my personal fear of clowns and made me think twice about my cell phone. I've always considered The Stand--a long-time favorite--a towering tour de force, and have owed its author a debt as this was the first novel I could convince my older son to read from cover to cover.

But with Lisey's Story, King has accomplished one more feat. He broke my heart.

Lisey's Story is, at its core, a love story--heart-wrenching, passionate, terrifying and tender. It is the multi-layered and expertly crafted tale of a twenty-five year marriage, and a widow's journey through grief, through discovery and--this is King, after all--through a nightmare scape of the ordinary and extraordinary. Through Lisey's mind and heart, the reader is pulled into the intimacies of her marriage to bestselling novelist Scott Landon, and through her we come to know this complicated, troubled and heroic man.

Two years after his death, Lisey sorts through her husband's papers and her own shrouded memories. Following the clues Scott left her and her own instincts, she embarks on a journey that risks both her life and her sanity. She will face Scott's demons as well as her own, traveling into the past and into Boo'ya Moon, the seductive and terrifying world he'd shown her. There lives the power to heal, and the power to destroy.

Lisey Landon is a richly wrought character of charm and complexity, of realized inner strength and redoubtable humor. As the central figure she drives the story, and the story is so vividly textured, the reader will draw in the perfumed air of Boo'ya Moon, will see the sunlight flood through the windows of the Scott's studio--or the night press against them. Her voice will be clear in your ear as you experience the fear and the wonder. If your heart doesn't hitch at the demons she faces in this world and the other, if it doesn't thrill at her courage and endurance, you're going to need to check with a cardiologist, first chance.

Lisey's Story is bright and brilliant. It's dark and desperate. While I'll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King's wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems.

A few of them have sharp, hungry teeth. --Nora Roberts

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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Following King's triumphant return to the world of gory horror in Cell, the bestselling author proves he's still the master of supernatural suspense in this minimally bloody but disturbing and sorrowful love story set in rural Maine. Lisey's husband, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Scott Landon, has been dead for two years at the book's start, but his presence is felt on every page. Lisey hears him so often in her head that when her catatonic sister, Amanda, begins speaking to her with Scott's voice, she finds it not so much unbelievable as inevitable. Soon she's following a trail of clues that lead her to Scott's horrifying childhood and the eerie world called Boo'ya Moon, all while trying to help Amanda and avoid a murderous stalker. Both a metaphor for coming to terms with grief and a self-referencing parable of the writer's craft, this novel answers the question King posed 25 years ago in his tale "The Reach": yes, the dead do love. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Pocket (June 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416523359
• ISBN-13: 978-1416523352
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (465 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #239,325 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not one of my faves by King, November 3, 2006

By	Bryant Burnette "Bryant Burnette" (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lisey's Story (Hardcover)

I'm a big King fan, and -- unless I'm dead broke or just plain dead -- will always read his new novels as soon as they come out, but all in all, I'd have to say "Lisey's Story" is not one of my favorites. It's not bad, exactly; there are way too many beautifully written passages to even consider calling the book bad.

However, I think that the book was badly in need of some editorial intervention at some point. I'm not referring to the book's length (though it IS too long, probably by about 300 pages), but rather to (1) an incredibly excessive use of silly language and (2) too many different threads of plot that don't manage to fully connect.

In terms of the silly language . . . well, "silly" is patently the wrong word for me to use. Here's the deal. The two main characters, one of whom exists only in recollection by the other, are a (formerly) married couple who have a sort of private language consisting of certain phrases ("Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate," for example) and words (replacing "afghan," meaning the sawhl. with "african," and so on). This is nothing revolutionary; it's the same thing as an inside joke, and everyone I know, in each significant relationship, has a few of tthose that get tossed around until they do in fact become a sort of private language. But here's the problem with that in a novel: it kept me at a distance the entire time. I think it was designed to bring me into the interior lives of these two people, but it had the exact opposite effect on me, and at a certain point in time I began to get actively annoyed every time this sort of thing appeared. And it's used A LOT. Less so toward the end of the novel, but it's incessant in the first 200 pages.

My second major problem is that there's just too much going on, and some of it I can't quite manage to care about.

One plot is about Lisey taking care of her mentally ill sister Amanda, and this storyline, while well told, just doesn't come together. Amanda's story has no resolution; she's only there so that she can back Lisey up in another element of the story, which she fails to do with any weight -- so, in a sense, she's a pointless character.

Another plot deals with Lisey's attempts to clean out her husband's many papers, which leads to an increasingly dangerous series of encounters with a stalker who could have walked straight out of King's "Secret Window, Secret Garden" (King even acknowledges this, in a way I'm sure will be lost on all but the most ardent King fans). This part of the plot allows Lisey to be an active character (in other words, it serves to actually give her something to do), but I don't buy it for a second. It seems incredibly forced, and not at all relevant.

The third major plot element involves Lisey remembering -- through clues Scott left her before his death -- certain things about her husband's life (and their life together) that she has sort of been repressing. This element of the novel works almost entirely, and if the rest had been jettisoned, it would rank as one of King's finest achievements. This part of the story is a beautifully told love story with additional touches of divine fantasy and brutal horror, and it's pretty much sublime. The problem is, it's told haltingly, with many interruptions from the other parts of the plot. It's a shame, because the svelte form of a classic dark fantasy have been rendered into corpulence by material that ought to have been exluded.

Ultimately, it's a novel that's well worth reading (it's about one-third brilliant), but I personally can only classify it as a big-time missed opportunity. Still, mediocre King is better than most writers when they're on top of their game.

165 of 193 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blend of horror and love, October 24, 2006

By	Eileen Rieback (Coral Springs, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lisey's Story (Hardcover)

Lisey Landon, widow of best-selling horror author Scott Landon, is finally getting around to cleaning out her late husband's possessions. While going through his writings and memorabilia, she is assailed with a flood of memories of her love for, and life with, her tortured genius husband. At the same time, Lisey's sister has a mental breakdown and a crazed madman threatens Lisey's life if she doesn't turn all of Scott's memorabilia over to him.

King is back in top form as a horror writer. This story is about as horrific, creepy, and gruesome as they come. Scott had a nasty childhood and a special power he called upon when things got tough. However, mixed in with the horror is a reflection on the wellspring of creation that a writer draws upon and a story of a strong love that outlasts even death. The title notwithstanding, this is really Scott's story rather than Lisey's. It reminded me a bit of the book "Rebecca," because it's Scott's strong presence that prevails throughout the book rather than Lisey's, and it's often Scott's words that issue from Lisey's lips.

Although King has deftly woven together a story that balances both horror and love and includes some heart-pounding scenes, I had to knock a star off the rating because of King's continual use of invented words and pretentious phrases that were part of the Landon family language. For the first quarter of the book, I found the constant presence of such coined words as "blood-bool," SOWISA," "Boo'ya Moon," and "long boy" so confusing that I wished I had a secret decoder ring to turn them into more intelligible phrases. And Lisey's constant quoting of family phrases such as "puffickly huh-yooge" and "keep your string a-drawing" became irritating after a while. In spite of this flaw, "Lisey's Story" is a riveting book that the author has obviously poured his heart and soul into. Stephen King fans won't want to miss this journey into the darkness and back!

Eileen Rieback

38 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It's difficult to admit...but this book just isn't interesting., February 8, 2007

By	T.B.L. IV (Louisiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lisey's Story (Hardcover)

Please bear with me for one moment: From age 13 to 35, I have read Stephen King's work with a mixture of admiration and frustration. Everyone who reads King has a few favorites and a few "not-as-goods," but his books usually give some measure of satisfaction or entertainment. The frustration, for me, kicked in sometime around "Desperation", or maybe "Insomnia", when his books stopped being SCARY or COOL or UNIQUE and they just vaulted into WEIRD and KIND OF DUMB. As I read through "Everything's Eventual" and the tail end of the Dark Tower series, I thought that King was off his game but was still bringing something to the table every now and then...at least, something that made buying his books worth my time. I thought this book would be interesting. It sounds like a romance, or maybe a glimpse of a love letter to King's wife, Tabitha, in which we see a different side of him and how he views mortality. When I read the book jacket I felt even more strongly that the book would explore King's notion of love. After starting "Lisey's Story", however, I can say that this is the first Stephen King book (and I have read everything he has ever written)that I put in my car, forgot I owned it, and neglected to finish. The story features a woman named Lisey whose husband Scott, a writer, has passed away. She is dealing with the stress of his death as well as the fragile mental state of her sister, a person who cuts herself and lapses into strange mental states periodically. The book also features sections that depict a meditative dream state in which Lisey lucidly remembers traumatic events from her marriage in which Scott got hurt or harmed himself. These events are marked by odd events in which Scott heals unnaturally quickly, or says secret words that no one understands. At this point I must stop, because I quit reading. However, Lisey is boring, boring, boring. her inner voice is boring. She repeats family phrases to herself and says the work "smucking" (instead of a popular epithet) too often. She did not strike me as a mourning wife but rather a shallow character, even sort of plain and slow-witted. Her husband Scott is also boring. He is not interestingly weird, he's just weird. The made up language they use, which King invented, is juvenile and maddening to read. After reading "bool" and "blood-bool" five thousand times, I laughed at how banal and boring...and just how odd the story was. I was trying to like it, really trying. But, I wasn't engaged in the story, I didn't care about the people, I didn't like Scott, I didn't like Lisey, I didn't care about her welfare. I hated the language they spoke and I hated the plot. And finally, I just decided to quit. For as long as he is alive, I will buy this man's books and I'm cool with that. But this book sucked. Avoid.