So That's How You Read A Stephen King Book!

image credit: albanykid.com
It’s not the same year as the one in “From a Buick 8″, but pretty close.
 All I could think of when I saw it was “Low men in yellow coats”
 driving big shiny cars.

I'm waiting for Revival.  It's like watching the clock with an hour left the day before school lets out for summer.  Time is moving ever slower.  Ticktock.

In the meantime, I've started my way back through books I never finished the first time.  Wizard and Glass and today the novel From A Buick 8.  I tried From A Buick 8 at least 3 times before -- and no magic.  Sorry.  Is something wrong with me?  What gives? I snapped it up on my way out the door because -- well, it was there on the shelf.  It's hard not  to pick The Stand up again.

As I drove, I listened to From A Buick 8.  I expected nothing; honestly, I've listened to this first CD already.  But as I listened, I forgot about the "plot" and got involved with the characters.  Especially a kid named Ned.  As I got more interested in the book, I realized what my problem has been with this particular novel.  I know there is something up with a  Buick; it's an alien car or something.  And I'm so excited, I think the story is about the Buick.  After all, Ned isn't in the title;  the Buick is!  But the novel isn't really as much about the Buick as it is the human characters.  

When I read From A Buick 8, I want King to tell me early on what's up with that car.  GET TO THE CAR!  But he takes his time with a lot of police jargon and character background.  Impatience has been my downfall.  But as I listened this time, King's magic worked and the characters and plot found a rhythm that worked for me.  I started falling in love with this little book.

So, not to self and the rest of you stuck on a King book -- stop worrying about plot and spaceships and settle into the characters.  As King talks about people, he will start to unravel a pretty awesome plot.

The book is also distracting because it's told from multiple points of view.  And, to make matters worse, it starts with a lady named "Sandy."  Only, Sandy is a guy.  But the opening line just says, "Sandy."  Only when I LISTENED  to the novel did it dawn on me, "OH!  Sandy is a dude!"  How long before I was supposed to pick up on that in print?

There are actually quite a few Stephen King books I never finished.  Do I feel bad about that?  No.  It just means I got impatient with the story telling and lost interest; but I'll be back.  But I do notice that many of the books I find most frustrating come from an era stretching from the mid 90's to early 2000's.  Books like Rose Madder, From A Buick 8, Gerald's Game and Cell.  (I did finish some of these books, they just didn't sweep me away.)  

The most recent story King has written that I failed to complete was Lisey's Story.  Yes, I get impatient with it.  There's a lot of build  up, and I can't figure out what this book is about!  I prefer the likes of 11.22.63 -- which runs hard  on plot early on and then settles into character development mid novel.  But King doesn't always play that game.

Finally, The Talisman is a novel I find difficult to engage with.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe things feel a little forced to me; Jack Sawyer = Tom Sawyer and I roll my eyes.  The Talisman has one other  thing working against it, and I'll admit right now it's a stupid reason to complain.  I don't like the cover.  It doesn't say to me, "come read me."  It says to me, "If we print King's name big enough, you'll buy the book." 

Smythe Returns To The Forgotten Wolrd Of The Talisman

Photograph: www.peterstraub.net

I was excited to see a review of The Talisman appear as part of James Smythe's "Rereading Stephen King" series at The Guardian.  This is because I've never read The Talisman.  I promised a friend a while back  I'd get right to it, as he really encouraged me, saying it was quite good.  However, I can't seem to get very far into it!

Smythe says that this is a novel that completely "slipped" through his memory!  He couldn't remember a word of it.  Still, Smythe  comes away with a fresh love for the book, declaring, "The themes are strong; the world is strong; the characters are strong. It's well written. It's long, and maybe a little over-egged in places – some of the novel's mid-section sags – but the things that they were paying tribute to come through, and the story is a good one."

Smythe offers the best summery of the boo that I've read -- and I've read several.  Smythe notes the influence of Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz and Huck Finn streaming throughout the novel.

As always, Smythe does a nice job spotting the connections to King's other works.

The full article is at www.guardian.co.uk

On a final note -- I offer this strange comment: I think one reason I have been  unable to read The Talisman has to do with bad book cover.  Don't throw stones!  Seriously.  And, the original paperback  I tried to read was strangely bound.  The type face was unusual.  Everything about the edition I first tried to read seemed unusual and uber-boring!

Twilight Zone Magazine February 1985

I like to time travel. Maybe it's just time surfing. Captain Kirk is able to time travel by sling shotting his space ship around the sun. I do not have a space ship. Of course, Marty McFly had a car that could leap through time. Geez that movie was fun! Stephen King's next novel is about time travel, but I'm not real clear yet on the means by which movement through time is actually accomplished.

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Anyway, my means of time travel is old books and magazines. Actually, magazines are the best! A book stays focused on its subject, but a magazine gives you a full flavor of the time.

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So, via my Stephen King / Peter Straub edition of the Twilight Zone Magazine, I'm headed back to 1985. Come on, this is fun. Besides, I know half of you are at work right now anyway, and this has got to be a better trip than what your boss thinks you're doing.

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Advertizing Defines The Times

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Ads really define the times. No one in 1985 was begging you to visit their website, but there are a lot of book clubs to join.

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There is an ad for L. Ron Hubbard's new book, Battlefield Earth.

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Also there is an ad for Robert McCammon's Usher's Passing. Headline, "King, Straub, and now Robert McCammon." The text reads, "Wildly enthusiastic reviews greeted Robert R. McCammon's recent bestseller, Mystery walk. Now, in this new novel, Usher's Passing, McCammon's dazzling imagination tracest he descendants of the infamous family of Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher.". . . it sold hardcover for 14:95

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The back cover sports a full page, color ad for John Carpenters STARMAN. "In 1977 voyager II was launched into space, inviting all life forms int he universe to visit our planet. Get ready. Company's coming." Opens December 14 at a theater near you.

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By the way, there is a lot of hype in this magazine for the movie 2010. Even a full color article.

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Stories include:

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Nostalgia: "OLD DARK HOUSE FOR REND" by Ron Goulart. Did you see the movie of this? Old Dark House is a classic from 1932, directed by none other than James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein.

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"Changing Of The Guard" by Anne Serling, adapted from the teleplay by Rod Serling. I saw this episode! Oh yeah. . . I've seen them all.
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"The Time Wife" by Thomas Tolnay. "She looked exactly as his wife had looked twenty years ago. How could any man resist?" Here's a good line from the story, "I couldn't possibly tell my wife that there were two of her in the world." ha! that would be a problem.

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"Twisted Shadow" by Robert F. Funkley. "The garden was a cozy English world of serenity and peace -- all except a certain shadow that pointed the wrong way." This line here is pretty good: "She is being buried -- heaven protect her! Alive!"

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"Laughs! Thrills! Romance!!" by Ron Wolfe. "he had missed his chance for all of them -- and now it was too late."

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"Legacy" by Leigh Essex. "A daughter inherits many things from her mother. . . and love may be the least of them."

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The Quest For The Talisman

The cover article, "Stephen King, Peter Straub & the Quest for The Talisman" was written by Douglas E. Winter. It closely mirrors his chapter in The Art Of Darkness.

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Winter is excited that the work was exchanged "electronically" by "telephone modem communication between their respective word processors." Today, we would go. . . "yah!" But I guess passing information electronically was high tech stuff in 1985. But actually, this information was being sent back and forth in 1982!

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On Thanksgiving of 1982 Kign and Straub met in Boston. Late that night they undertook the "great Thanksgiving putsch" and gave the book its finished structure.

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King notes that he read everything Mark Twain wrote. Everything! Of course, King says that a lot of what he wrote he did to pay for his house, so it wasn't all good. There are a lot of references to "Reagan's America" and the nuclear threat. It was seen, at the time, as a dark period.

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Winters explains that the book has some pretty raw sex in it because the authors wanted to be sure they did not write a juvenile, Walt Disney book.

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SELECTED QUOTES:

Here are some quotes from King and Straub. Quotes make up the meat of the article, which were probably the notes Winter built his chapter from.

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STRAUB: "It was totally at random. When one of us took it, usually he went on until he reached a point at which he was comfortable dropping it. So we pretty much ignored our assignments and went on until a natural break. By and large, we started off writing it rigidly, and ended up doing it instinctively, which was by far the better of the two ways."

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KING: "It was a little bit like playing tennis. He would send what he had done and then I would work for three or four weeks and send the stuff back to him. And I really enjoyed the process -- partly because writers are so lazy. It was wonderful; the book would grow without me doing anything. But it was also a little bit like the old days, when I got the Saturday Evening Post with its serial stories. When Peter said he was going to send me something, and I would get excited because I was going to get to read some more of the story."

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STRAUB: [about editing each others work] "I think we both must have been a little touchy about that. Anyway, we accepted whatever the other guy did until the book was done. Then, in the final editing, we each took a free hand with the other's stuff. and there were times when I wished we could have done the whole book like that, becasue it was a wonderful and profound experience, and something very few writers ever get the chance to have. It's like having an X ray of someones mind when you review his material that way."

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KING: "The problems with The Talisman were always problems of length. The book had been conceived as a 'get it and bring it back' story, as opposed to The Lord of the Rings, which is a 'take it and get rid of it' story. But we began to realize that we had only mapped out half of the book -- that is to say, we had mapped about to the point where Jack gets it, and we had left bringing it back to another planning session. Except that by November of 1982, we already had something like six hundred pages of copy. So, we're sitting and looking at each other saying, 'We've got to do something.' We kicked around a lot of ideas, because there were lots of incidents we had planned for the way out that we hadn't got to yet, and we started realizing that this was going to be long."

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STRAUB: "It would have been a four-thousand page novel, and Steve and I would both be dead, if we were still trying to write that thing."

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KING: "It's a very mythic book. to me, the most wonderful thing about it is how eighteenth and nineteenth century the book is in terms of storytelling, and also in terms of the effort to create large archetypes.

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We were interested in the concept of the hero in literature. we talked about the hero in terms of the quest, the mythicization of the hero, and the return of the hero to a lesser being when the quest is completed. Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel that doesn't have a specific object for its quest, so we focused instead on things like the story of Jesus, the story of King Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We talked about those things, and when we wrote the book, it filtered down like sediment."

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STRAUB: "Twain was on our minds at the start, but the finished book suggests that our efforts were more conscious than they really were. I do know that we had Tom Sawyer in mind when we named Jack; but we really didn't have Twain on our minds during the whole term of the book."

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KING: "It's about children who have power."

Just couldn't make it!

Okay, here is a quick list of King books I started, but just couldn't make it through! This list says nothing about King's writing, only my perseverance in reading.

Lisey's Story. Seriously, was I supposed to keep up with all the flashbacks? My wife was listening to the book with me as we drove and we agreed that we couldn't even keep up with what era the scene was in. "No, this is past..." "oh yeah, you're right."

The Talisman. Sorry, I can't get past the first few pages of this. I keep reading about Jack Sawyer at the a cheap motel and looking at the sea, and it just doesn't grab me.

Christine. First person, third person, first person. . . huh?! I liked the movie.

The Tommyknockers. Okay, I liked the miniseries, so I keep coming back to this book. But it is frustratingly overwritten. I wish, seriously, that King would bless us with a better editied edition. If he could give us a new cut of the stand, why not a new cut of this? I think the idea of publishing Carrie and Tommyknockers together is funny. "Hey, we can't get anyone to read Tommyknockers. Maybe it they get hooked on Carrie, they will just keep reading. . ." Goodluck on that one.