Monday, May 03, 2010
The Return of the King
I've long had a strange aversion to Stephen King. I think some of it stems from the fact that, as a child, I was traumatized by his "READ" poster at the local library, which featured what was, by '80s five-year-old standards, a very realistic skeleton. Some of it can also probably be attributed to the fact that most of my friends were reading him when I was transitioning from Ramona Quimby to Virginia Woolf (less of a transition than one might think), which made me feel somewhat left out, since I knew I could never be caught with one of his books in my household. Most of it is probably due to his column in Entertainment Weekly, though. If I wanted an old person to hector me about what music I should be listening to, I would just go visit my grandmother.
But anyway, I decided to actually read a Stephen King novel, to either put those negative feelings to rest or prove to myself that they were justified all along. Unfortunately, the result ended up being somewhere in between. I read Bag Of Bones, and found it to actually be rather decently written, if not exactly the page turner I had expected. There certainly wasn't the volume of laughably clunky sentences one gets with a Dan Brown or a John Grisham, but there were also long passages just sort of describing life in small town Maine. I had thought it might read like a Twilight novel for grown ups, but it was actually rather thoughtful and complex. At the same time, I had expected that I wouldn't be able to put it down, but I ended up putting it down many, many times. Stephen King, you are a mystery.
The real pisser in all of this is that I think I'm going to have to read another one. Is there one that Oprah endorsed? That would seem all but certain to end badly.
I've long had a strange aversion to Stephen King. I think some of it stems from the fact that, as a child, I was traumatized by his "READ" poster at the local library, which featured what was, by '80s five-year-old standards, a very realistic skeleton. Some of it can also probably be attributed to the fact that most of my friends were reading him when I was transitioning from Ramona Quimby to Virginia Woolf (less of a transition than one might think), which made me feel somewhat left out, since I knew I could never be caught with one of his books in my household. Most of it is probably due to his column in Entertainment Weekly, though. If I wanted an old person to hector me about what music I should be listening to, I would just go visit my grandmother.
But anyway, I decided to actually read a Stephen King novel, to either put those negative feelings to rest or prove to myself that they were justified all along. Unfortunately, the result ended up being somewhere in between. I read Bag Of Bones, and found it to actually be rather decently written, if not exactly the page turner I had expected. There certainly wasn't the volume of laughably clunky sentences one gets with a Dan Brown or a John Grisham, but there were also long passages just sort of describing life in small town Maine. I had thought it might read like a Twilight novel for grown ups, but it was actually rather thoughtful and complex. At the same time, I had expected that I wouldn't be able to put it down, but I ended up putting it down many, many times. Stephen King, you are a mystery.
The real pisser in all of this is that I think I'm going to have to read another one. Is there one that Oprah endorsed? That would seem all but certain to end badly.
