Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (MOBI)

Description

Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey had to learn from him about books and blood and bools. Later, she understood that there was a place Scott went — a place that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it’s Lisey’s turn to face Scott’s demons, Lisey’s turn to go to Boo’ya Moon. What begins as a widow’s effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King’s most personal and powerful novel, Lisey’s Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love.

User’s Reviews

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 DurhamGuest Reviewer: Nora RobertsNora 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 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. From The New Yorker In his intricate new novel, King explores two hidden worlds – the private life of a recently deceased best-selling writer, as seen from the perspective of his widow, and the imaginative landscape that formed the foundation of his work. As the novel opens, Lisey, Scott Landon’s widow, is a sardonic observer of toadying academics, dangerously obsessive fans, and fame-struck bystanders. As she sorts through papers that Landon has left behind, she also becomes a traveller in a fantastical parallel world called Boo’ya Moon, to which he retreated during a horrific childhood and on which he drew throughout his creative life. It takes some time for these narrative strands to converge, but when they do Lisey moves between worlds at an exhilarating pace. Along the way, King also reveals, with subtle precision, the profound strangeness of widowhood, when someone who was present for so much of a shared life is gone. Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker From Bookmarks Magazine Even by Stephen King standards, Lisey’s Story is haunting. Yet though it contains some supernatural elements, it is really a love story that speaks to passion, the intimacy of marriage, the craft of writing—and true madness. In Scott’s escapist world and its relation to Lisey, the horrific elements come into play, but most critics agreed that despite the emotional punch of the story, it is not King’s best. A convoluted stream-of-consciousness style, flashbacks within flashbacks, too much baby talk, and the novel’s sheer length put off some reviewers, while others questioned whether what makes King’s novels sell—their haunting, horrific gore—successfully works here. Still, it’s classic Stephen King: you should know by now whether that’s to your taste. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist In the two years since her husband Scott’s sudden death, professors and collectors mad to lay their hands on his unpublished manuscripts and letters, those of one of the most successful and lauded writers of his generation, have besieged Lisey (rhymes with CeeCee) Landon. The last of them, initially ingratiating, wound up threatening her. That decided her to prepare Scott’s papers for donation to an appropriate archive. In the midst of doing that, she gets an answering machine message, then a telephone call and a written note, as well as a dead cat in the mailbox, from a grammatically challenged man who says he’ll “hurt [her] places you didn’t let the boys to touch at the junior high dances.” Fortunately, she’s been hearing Scott’s voice lately, more than in recollection, and it leads her back to a place, another dimension, that he’d told her about but that she’d forgotten. The boy Scott and his long-dead brother went there to escape their sometimes psychopathic father; the grown-up Scott, to heal from many wounds, including those from a shooting that would have been fatal if Lisey hadn’t intervened. It is paradisiacally beautiful but dangerous at night, when weird, savage creatures hunt in it. In this long, often long-feeling, utterly Stephen Kingish novel, Scott’s strange and eventful past is thoroughly recovered, and Lisey’s strength is revealed and confirmed, though not before the maniac does indeed hurt her. The book is also, perhaps, a parable about love and imagination that affirms love as the more salvific of the two. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved From The Washington Post Admit it: You’ve been a horrible snob about Stephen King. You’ve rolled your eyes at passengers on the Metro reading “Pet Sematary.” You’ve told your son to put down “Salem’s Lot” and get a real book. When King won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation, you gleefully quoted Harold Bloom’s crack about this new “low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.”Well, suck it up. Even that faint praise about how you can appreciate him for being good at “what he does” isn’t going to cut it anymore. With Lisey’s Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he’ll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories and the psychological terror of his novels. (And yes, a few hairy monsters.) They’re all evoked here in this moving story about the widow of a famous writer trying to lay her grief to rest.King claims in an afterword that this character — Lisey — is not based on his wife, but there’s no denying who the famous writer is, and King fanatics will pounce on these personal details like Cujo on a bucket of chicken wings. The story opens two years after the death of Scott Landon, a prolific horror writer almost as popular as King but more critically acclaimed. For months, Lisey has been hounded for access to Scott’s papers by “the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other’s abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool’s gold for decades on end.” (Take that, Dr. Bloom!) Though entering Scott’s office is like scratching the scab of her mourning, once Lisey finally starts sorting, boxing and labeling his effects, the work inspires waves of nostalgia. She’s drawn back into memories of her 25-year marriage with a brilliant, loving man who was haunted by childhood trauma. But two alarming events disrupt her reverie: First, her sister Amanda suffers a violent relapse in her battle against depression. Then, in the middle of that crisis, an anonymous caller threatens to kill Lisey if she doesn’t immediately donate her husband’s papers to the University of Pittsburgh. The caller sounds like a kook, but his threat forces her to recall an earlier insane fan who tried to assassinate Scott during a lecture tour.Of course, this is not the first time King has written about the misery of ardent fans. We all have reason to fear zombies and demonic Plymouths, but the world’s most popular living writer is especially terrified about the adulation that his gory tales inspire. The word “fan,” after all, is just one padded cell away from “fanatic.” King delivers a number of self-deprecating cracks here about the benefits of fame and wealth, but when it comes to the dangers of entertaining millions with fantasies of mayhem, he’s dead serious.Lisey’s Story moves in several different directions at once, but everything that happens seems part of a complicated plan arranged in advance by Scott Landon to show his wife how much he loved her. Lisey finds among his papers a kind of scavenger hunt — a “bool,” he calls it — that leads her through the major events of their long marriage, “to allow her to face in stages something she couldn’t face all at once.” In fact, one of the great charms of this novel is King’s attention to the private language of affection: the silly phrases, lyrics, puns and pet names that Lisey cherishes as signs of their intimacy.Her battle against Scott’s mad scholar-fan lurches erratically from grisly to goofy, but fortunately much of the novel takes place in Lisey’s memories as she recalls Scott’s desperate courtship and his struggle to explain his father to her. He was a reclusive manic-depressive who loved his sons even as he savaged them. During the most horrific of these tales, when describing his father overcome with “endless swirling bad-gunky,” Scott used to revert to his childhood voice. Read this on a bright afternoon: It’s emotionally draining, and blood-draining, too — King at his most psychologically acute, as sympathetic as he is terrifying, wielding a startling blend of affection, pathos and horror.But there’s something else lurking in this novel, something very strange, even for Stephen King. At its center, Lisey’s Story contains a huge, ungainly metaphor for the source of creative inspiration. It’s an otherworldly place that Scott called Boo’ya Moon, a lush garden of delights and dangers, blooming lupines and dark trees, just on the other side of our dimension. (Under its blood-red dust jacket, the book’s cover sports a psychedelic painting of Boo’ya Moon.) By concentrating hard, Scott could slip over to this alternate reality to escape his father, recover from his wounds and find fresh ideas. It contains a “pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it’s also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination.” King works this hallucinatory vision hard throughout the novel, but it seems like a metaphor that never met a meaning it didn’t like: It’s an oasis of healing, but also a place of grave danger; a retreat for receiving insight, but also an island of Lotus Eaters; a sanctuary from harm, but also the realm of a piebald fiend called “the long boy,” which is sometimes an embodiment of Scott’s depression but other times just a scary monster that eats people.This amorphous metaphor feels like something King has rolled around in his mind for a long time, and his willingness to lay out such an intimate vision is endearing even if it’s not entirely coherent. But what works beautifully throughout Lisey’s Story is the rich portrait of a marriage and the complicated affection that outlives death. Who would have thought that a man who’s spent the last 30 years scaring the hell out of us would produce a novel about the kind of love that carries us through grief? Reviewed by Ron Charles Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I’ve been progressively more disappointed with King’s offerings since Dreamcatcher and officially retired my Constant Reader title after The Outsider. I guess a misguided sense of loyalty and a huge number of rave reviews led me to take one more chance. Hard to believe that Mr. King wrote this awkward, poorly paced, and just plain bad novel! His characters have always been charismatic and complete; the reader’s entire experience hinges on feeling some interest in and attachment to, those characters. Lisey and her supporting cast evoked only boredom and annoyance. Nine chapters into the book, and we’re STILL hearing Widow Lisey’s internal musings over and over and over again. Now there are some teaser words in italics interjected to make sure you know that there’s more to the story than what you’re getting so far, but it’s crudely done and hard to care about. The cutsie nonsense words and insider jokes/phrases is likewise excessive. When you are 30% of the way into a book and you are STILL waiting for some kind of story to start, there’s a problem. All I can say is that IF SK REALLY wrote this book, I’m embarrassed for him.

⭐This is the 34th book of SK I’ve read (since 2017) so I want to put this review into that perspective. Every book of King’s I’ve read has been ‘good’ but some far better than others. To be expected with such a body of work.This book was at the near bottom of my list because it was simply TOO long. Not necessarily in page count; “The Stand”, the entire Dark Tower series, “It”, to name a few of my favorites were far longer in page count. This book is just too long, in need of editing. As others have written, and I agree, the first 150-170 pages just seem to go on and on and on. Yes, the characters, like all of King’s works are interesting; to a point. Once the book gets going, it stalls along the way too. I found this book, much like “Bag of Bones” and “Duma Key” are simply too long for what the reader gets. Yes, there are moving and interesting parts of this book and the others mentioned, but they are outnumbered by narrative that just needs a lot of trimming. I actually found Scott’s story far more interesting than Lisey’s or her too many sisters. And the ‘protagonist’ is isn’t all that fleshed out or interesting. Compared to say Rose the Hat in “Dr. Sleep”; this guy is a bore.I did finish the book; no way I’d not do so as a dedicated constant reader. And there are some good bits among a lot of narrative that’s not at all engaging.If you’re new to King, or if you’ve read a lot of his work and are looking for something new, I’d put those three books towards the bottom of the option list. Of course, if you’ve read all of Kings works and this is all you have left, read them. Nothing he writes deserves less than three stars based on the 34 books I’ve read so far.

⭐This book started off a little slow for me. I also wondered about the style and what King was up to with this novel, for somehow, it didn’t seem like his writing. Then the storyline picked up’ and I mean really picked up. How does one access an alternate reality? How does one travel to the world right next door that is gorgeous and so dangerous as the sun starts to go down. It’s a world full of laughing horrors and an unthinkable long beast, but a world Lisey travel to in order to save herself from the real monsters who live in our world.This book has stayed with me long after I have finished it. There is so much to think about, and one of the things I think about is love and the lengths some would go for it. I have heard that this is King’s favourite novel. I think it is my favourite, too, and that is saying a lot from a long time King fan who started reading his work in the late seventies. I highly recommend this book!

⭐Stephen King is America’s favorite novelist; rightly so! In Lisey’s Story he tells a poignant about a young widow who laments the death of her famous husband Scott Landon. He is a famous popular author and he leaves Lisey with twenty million dollars. She has big problems:a Evil men are seeking to obtain her late husband’s manuscripts and unpublished works,. Her life is threatened. One day she finds a dead cat in her mailbox and she is beaten up and cut by l Dooley her insane tormenter.b. Lisey’s sister Amanda is dealing with serious mental issues and has an affinity for cutting herself.c. Lisey wants to visit the magical pool where literary inspiration and her late husband’s spirit can be found,. He was once the target of an assassination attempt and died in Bowling Green Kentucky when he collapsed. The family history of the late Scott is scary. His father was a monster who tortured Scott and his brother. The scenes with the father are frightening and horrific. The book switches from one time to another with rapidity and keeps you alert when you read the text. The book draws you in with its story of love, loss and grief. Lisey is a good woman and King does well in his depiction of the workings of the female mind. This is an impressive book well worth your time and money.

⭐Having been a fan of Stephen King since the beginning, I am blown away by the fact that he never disappoints. Have there been books that were greater than others? Sure. But I was never enthralled by one of Kings’s books the way I was by The Stand…until Lisey’s Story.Although he claims in the afterward that “my wife is not Lisey Landon,” I found myself making comparisons and wondering, just wondering, how much of his perspective on a woman’s thoughts, feelings and experiences came from his lifelong marriage to his wife Tabitha. I’ll never know, of course. And while the aspects of the supernatural and the horrific are still here, there is a tenderness, a deep, sweet love that is the heart of this book. I wept at the end. So as not to “spoil” I’ll say no more. For I have wept at the conclusion of other Stephen King books. But this one is straight from the heart. You’ll be doing yourself a favor to read this book. Oh yea, I LOVED IT!

⭐It wasn’t until I listened to the first few chapters that I realised I had attempted to read this several years ago and given up so just wasted several of my hard-earned pounds. Again!Stephen king is a very talented writer and I’m a big fan of many of his excellent novels and short stories but to be honest this does not reflect well on him it is just so mind numbingly self indulgent, tedious boring and utterly pedestrian. Never ending rambling on. Page after page after page of padding. I was not in the slightest interested in the protagonist or her dead husband Scott. What were you thinking Mr. King?

⭐Amazing reality meets netherworld type fantasy, true classic Steven King delivery, with real sense of feeling, awareness of the female psyche, at times I wondered how a man could be so perceptive of a grieving widow’s mind set, guessing he must have consulted with a few or some professionals. A page turning, exciting, unnerving story, about marital bonds and sisterly love, about the darkness within some souls, and how we deal with it, about a strange, limbic parallel world, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could each visit when we needed to seek the souls of loved ones, even so, an almost meditative state, except for that question.. where did /how did he dissappear? I keep remembering Lissey’s husband’s mantra. “STRAP IT ON BABY..” this novel lingers in your thoughts long after the final word is read.

⭐I had read that this is King’s favourite of his work and I can see why. It is obviously a love letter to his wife. When I first started reading this; the first third our so, I was thinking it may have been great to write But I wasn’t convinced it made for a great read, in particular it didn’t have a great cast of characters or sense of place that King’s greatest novels have. Then, maybe a third of half way through this really started to come together and that start, really became the glue that made the second more exciting half bond together into a really good read.

⭐Am very disappointed. Only read just over the 10% it was so long winded and boring. Couldn’t take any more! Most unlike a Stephen King novel

⭐I love Stephen King and have bought and enjoyed all his books but this one less so because I found the language a bit difficult to get used to and I got lost in the story occasionally. I might read it again in a few months as I think some of the more tender nuances might have been missed during my struggle to understand what was going on.

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