Not a Bad Bool, just...

It’s not particularly new anymore, but it was when I started it. I’ve finally made it through Lisey’s Story, the Stephen King offering that Nora Roberts has called a haunting romance. She says she loved it.

I believe it might have been a better book if she had written it.

Without question, King has earned the right to pen novels however he likes, and some of his quirks are assumedly stylistic traits. Readers have varying tastes as well, accommodating terse writers like Lee Child, whose action story might begin:

There were three men. One was a killer. The two with guns would be victims in a matter of minutes.

If that first sentence alone had been included in Lisey’s Story it would have sounded more like:

There might have been a question as to exactly how many men (if they were men at all, but you can be assured – yes, you can! – that they were indeed men) were at the point at which they intended to be. At least, they were pretty sure they were there. Truth be told (if you can handle the truth…) it was a trio, that is to say, there were three of them.

You get the idea.

Lee Child’s description of the book might read: A writer’s widow faces trouble. Buys a gun. Travels to a secret world to get power. Boom. No more trouble.

Obviously, there is more to it than that, but if King’s invented words and parenthetical insights were eliminated, Lisey’s Story might be closer to “Lisey’s Short Story.” It isn’t a bad bool (I mean book, “bool” is one of King’s invented terms…), it’s simply one in need of a reader who enjoys the constant forays into the thinking processes of the characters, a reader with patience.

Or a good skimmer.