1992: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.

The Book:

1st Edition Cover

Length: 372 pages
Subject/Genre: Personal revenge/Gothic suspense

Dolores Claiborne is about the eponymous woman, an sixty-five year old maid on Little Tall Island, a small, working class area of the coast of Maine.  The novel begins with her turning herself in to the local sheriff, denying responsibility for the recent death of her long-time employer, Vera Donovan, but finally admitting to murdering her own husband decades prior.  Thus Dolores begins to tell her story, a story of abuse, helplessness, and retaliation, starting in the middle and slowly circling in toward the deaths.

Dolores Claiborne is very unusual for a King novel.  The most immediate difference to his usual style is the narration:  The entire book is one monological confession (in dialect) with a small epilogue tacked on.  Further, there is almost no supernatural element to the story.  The only supernatural element, brief glimpses of a little girl in a far away town, are completely irrelevant to the novel, both in terms of plot and symbolism.  As explained in the brief preface, this little girl is Jessie Burlingame, the main character of Gerald's Game, released the same year as Dolores Claiborne.  Basically, these scenes are saying "If you want to find out what the deal was with this girl, buy Gerald's Game, now available wherever books are sold!"  

That said, Dolores Claiborne is a very strong novel.  It's less horror than it is gothic, in the sense that Flannery O'Connor or Shirely Jackson's works are gothic.  It does have a number of King tropes, the small town Maine setting, the attempt to make everyday objects terrifying, but it doesn't suffer from them as much as some of his other works.  The novel paints a vivid picture of a desperate woman, and sucks you into life on that that small island in Maine.

Dolores Claiborne is possibly the least well-known of the King novels on the list. This despite the fact that it had a film adaptation in 1995 starring Kathy Bates as Dolores, Jennifer Jason Leigh as her daughter Selena, and smaller parts played by John C. Reilly, Christopher Plummer, and playwright Eric Bogosian.

Strangely enough, Dolores Claiborne was adapted into an opera and premiered in San Francisco last year.  It looks kind of bizarre:

The trailer for the movie on the other hand, looks pretty fantastic.   

If you're not a fan of King, looking to get into his work, or if you enjoy the gothic or suspenseful, I'd really recommend Dolores Claiborne.  Most of the negative reviews I've seen have boiled down to not liking the monologue structure or finding it not exciting enough (though, as a suspense novel, tension is everything).  It's definitely worth checking out.

Bestsellers of 1992:

1. Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

2. The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

3. Gerald's Game by Stephen King

4. Mixed Blessings by Danielle Steel

5. Jewels by Danielle Steel

6. The Stars Shine Down by Sidney Sheldon

7. The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice

8. Mexico by James Michener

9. Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

10. All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1992:

Children of Men by P. D. James

Jazz by Toni Morrison

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Sources:

"Dolores Claiborne." IMDB. Amazon

King, Stephen. Dolores Claiborne. 1992. New York: Signet, 1993. Print.

1987: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.

The Book:

Length: 747 pages
Subject/Genre:  Alien invasion/sci-fi-horror

The Tommyknockers is one of the few books on the list that I'd already read.  Widely regarded as one of King's worst, The Tommykockers takes place in Haven, Maine, where Western novelist Bobbi Anderson discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the woods.  As she begins to excavate the wreck, the people in the town start changing, becoming more and more like the alien species that visited long ago.  They develop an amazing technical ingenuity, but don't necessarily understand the concepts behind their inventions.  As Bobbi says "As I say, we've never been very good understanders. We're not a race of super-Einsteins.  Thomas Edison in space would be closer, I think."  However, the townspeople become increasingly psychotic and dangerous.  Bobbi's friend, poet James Gardener (Gard), is immune to the the effects of the change because of a metal plate in his head, and it's up to him to stop the people of Haven, and the alien technology, from wreaking havoc on the Earth.

While complaining about a Stephen King book being long is like complaining about it being set in Maine, The Tommyknockers has the major problem of spending hundreds of pages shifting around minor characters, which gets very repetitive, very fast.  King's tendency to take common-place items and recontextualize them as terrifying consistently fails here.  For example:

"The Coke machine banked back.  It hung in the air for a moment, its front turning back and forth in small arcs that reminded Leandro of the sweeps of a radar dish.  The sun flashed off its glass door.  Leandro could see bottles of Coke and Fanta inside.

Suddenly it pointed at him -- and accelerated toward him.

Found me, Christ---

He got up and tried to hop to the car on his left foot.  The soda machine bore down on him, coin return hooting dismally."  

'coin return hooting dismally' is probably the least scary description I've ever read in a horror novel. The success of The Tommyknockers is a bit surprising considering it competed against two other King books, including Misery.

King's cocaine addiction and alcoholism throughout the 1980s is frequently brought up in discussions of The Tommyknockers.  King himself admits to barely remembering having written Cujo.  There is much to be said for The Tommyknockers as an allegory for King's addiction (this article from The Guardian is worth a look), but that doesn't make up for the overall shortcomings of the novel.   Nevertheless, The Tommyknockers was adapted into a truly awful two part miniseries starring Jimmy Smits (The West Wing, NYPD Blue) and Marg Helgenberger (CSI):

It's pretty much just three hours of all the worst aspects of a made-for-tv sci-fi B-movie.   

I can't really recommend this book for anybody.  If you're a Stephen King fan or looking to get into his books, this is not a good choice.  It's one of his longest and worst books.  

Bestsellers of 1987:

1. The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

2. Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

3. Kaleidoscope by Danielle Steel

4. Misery by Stephen King

5. Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor

6. Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon

7. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

8. Fine Things by Danielle Steel

9. Heaven and Hell by John Jakes

10. The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

Also Published in 1987:

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Sources:

King, Stephen. The Tommyknockers. 1987. New York: Signet, 1988. Print.

1986: It by Stephen King

The Author:

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines. 

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list. He has since written multiple non-fiction works, as well as serving as a columnist for entertainment weekly.  At current count, King has published twelve short story collections, two comic series, six books of non-fiction, fifty-six novels, seven novellas, ten screenplays, and a musical libretto.  But you might know him better for his bit part as 'hoagie man' in George Romero's motocross/sword-fighting classic, Knightriders.

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 1090 pages
Subject/Genre: Supernatural horror/Horror

It is easily one of King's most famous novels (along with others like The Shining, The Green Mile, The Stand, Misery, The Dead Zone, and Carrie).  It's probably the only one of the King novels I'm reviewing that an audience who had never read a King novel would know the plot of offhand.  But I'll summarize anyway.

The story takes place in the town of Derry, Maine, switching back and forth between 1958 and 1985.  Seven preteen misfits of the underdog-sports-movie variety, become friends.  Bill has a stutter, Ben is a fat nerd, Richie is a smart-ass with glasses, Eddie is a coddled hypochondriac, Beverly is a girl from the poor side of town, Mike is black, and Stan is Jewish, and they all live in a particularly violent town.   The novel starts when "Stuttering" Bill Denbrough's little brother is murdered, the first in a long chain of child murders/disappearances.  The 1958 discovery of the true nature of It, is split up with long sections from the friends in 1985.  They had made a pact that, should It, ever return, so would they, to kill It once and for all.  

While It takes many shapes, the one it most frequently assumes is that of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.  As Beverly notes near the end of the novel: "[A] small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power." (ellipses part of the original quotation)  Like the clown, many of the forms It are either bizarre or come from the roster of classic horror movie monsters (e.g. werewolf, mummy, and at one point, Frankenstein's monster itself).  The effectiveness of this is largely dependent on your absorption in the novel.  If you're reading it as a horror novel, with the intent of enjoying the scares and identifying with the characters, it's effective.  If you're taking a step back, and analyzing everything, it's less so.    

But for all of It's horrors, a lot of the story is not about It so much as it is about these characters coming-of-age in the 1958 frame, and coming to terms with traumatic pasts in the 1985 frame.  It is one of King's strongest novels, and the characters' growth is one of, if not the, largest factors in this.  After all, King did write The Body, which is better known for its film adaptation, Stand By Me. Which leads to its own issues.  Too often the childhood segments get drowned in sentimentality, and take on the feel of a heart-warming period piece.  Not that this is inherently bad, it just doesn't really work in the context of the rest of the book.  Likewise, with certain plot aspects (e.g. the value of belief as a weapon against It or the introduction of the turtle) that, although logically consistent with the story, sometimes come across as too goofy or bizarre in a silly way. But then, in a book as long as It, something like that's bound to happen occasionally.

One reason It is the best-known of the King books I'm reviewing is it's popular film adaptation.  The 1990 two-part made-for-tv movie with Tim Curry as Pennywise has remained popular (or at least has maintained a cult following) since its release.

In a lot of ways, the book is darker than the film.   A lot of things that the film necessarily leaves off-screen (e.g. abuse, sex, etc) are explicit in the novel.  It's a solid horror novel.  It's also a good place to start for those looking to get into King's work, because it contains a number of tropes that appear often across his body of work (e.g., set in a mid-size town to mid-size city in Maine; child protagonists; a transcendent reality; a fascination with 1950's and earlier horror and sci-fi, etc).  That said, if you don't like horror novels, you won't like It.

Bestsellers of 1986:

1. It by Stephen King

2. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

3. Whirlwind by James Clavell

4. The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum

5. Hollywood Husbands by Jackie Collins

6. Wanderlust by Danielle Steel

7. I'll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz

8. The Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour

9. The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

10. A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Also Published in 1986:

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Sources:

King, Stephen. It. 1986. New York: Signet, 1987. Print.

1984: The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King

The Authors:

Peter Straub (1943-     ) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He attended the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he received a B.A., in 1965, then Columbia University where he received an M.A.  In 1966, Straub married Susan Bitker, with whom he now has two children.  After a short period teaching High School English in Wisconsin, Straub moved to Ireland, planning to get his doctorate from University College, Dublin.  He dropped the doctorate path to focus on writing.  

His first novel, Marriages, a mainstream story about an American businessman in Europe, was published in 1973.  Unable to find a publisher for a second mainstream novel, Straub began to write horror at the suggestion of his agent.  His first horror novel, Julia, was published in 1975.  His first major success came with the publication of Ghost Story (1979), and was followed by other well-received horror novels, winning multiple World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards.    

After the publication of Ghost Story, Straub moved back to the United States.  He had been friends with Stephen King, and the two of them decided to collaborate on a novel, The Talisman.  Since 1984, Straub has published eleven novels and four short story collections, as well as editorial work on the Library of America's Lovecraft anthology.  

Stephen King (1947-    ) was born in Portland, Maine.   His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother to raise King and his older brother.  King attended the University of Maine, earning a B.A. in English in 1970.  King and Tabitha Spruce had their first child in 1970, and married in 1971.  Their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born in 1972.  (He, like his mother and father, is a writer.  He writes under the name Joe Hill.)  King taught high school and supplemented his wages by selling short stories to magazines.

In 1973, he published his first novel, Carrie.  The first of his novels to make the annual top ten bestsellers list was The Dead Zone (1979).  Between 1980 and 2012, King appeared on the annual top ten list 34 times, in one case having three books on the same year's list.


The Book:   

Subject/Genre: Heroic Journey/Dark Fantasy


The Talisman begins with twelve year old Jack Sawyer and his mother, a retired B-movie actress, heading to a New Hampshire sea-side tourist town off-season.  Sawyer's father has been dead some years, and his business partner, Morgan Sloat, is trying to get control of Jack's father's share of the company (cliche 1: Evil businessman).  Jack suspects his mother is sick and has come to this town to die.  Here, he meets Speedy Parker, an wise old black man (cliche 2).  Parker gives Jack some information, that he (Parker), Jack's father, Sloat, and nameless others, can traverse between worlds: ours and a fantasy realm known only as "The Territories."  Not only that, but many people have 'Twinners', versions of themselves that exist in the other world.  There's no twinner of Jack, but his mother's twinner is the queen.  Jack must retrieve a special object known only as the talisman and save his mother and the queen (cliche 3).  He'll need to travel across the U.S. and The Territories, from New Hampshire to California, flipping back and forth to avoid danger.  Jack, Parker tells us, is special and has a great destiny (cliche 4).  Why?  Well, we'll find out in the last 100 pages.  

Despite it's reliance on standard fantasy plot devices, The Talisman is a fun read.  It tends to jump around a lot in terms of tone, going from almost cutesy to grotesque to heart-warming with little warning.  One of my big problems is with a couple aspects that are common in fantasy novels but are so over-used and, in some ways, just bad writing.  One is the 'mysterious artifact.'  Parker (and other characters) give Jack seemingly benign or mysterious objects.  They won't tell him what they're for, only that he'll know it when he sees it.  The problem here is that it's more often than not a mixture of Chekhov's gun and deus ex machina.  All seems lost, but this innocuous item that has been sitting in Jack's backpack for a few hundred pages is suddenly able to fix everything.  The other trope is needlessly withheld information.  This is particularly bad in The Talisman, because people who are on Jack's side refuse to tell him information that would help him.  In some cases, characters even make it clear that they can't say more, but why they can't is never explained or even hinted at.  Too much of the story relies on revelations that were inexplicably withheld from our hero.  

That said, there are parts of the journey that, on their own, buoy up the work (The Sunlight Home is a pretty strong piece of horror writing in and of itself).  Jack is a reasonably complex character who the reader can really get behind.  His sidekicks get a bit infuriating before eventually developing beyond a couple grating character traits.  


The Talisman has a sequel, 2001's Black House, co-written by Straub and King.  The two have said that they are interested in writing a third, but nothing has been officially determined.  

If you're a fan of dark fantasy, The Talisman is a good choice.  I read a lot of Stephen King books in high school, and if I were to rank The Talisman on a scale of 10 (10 being The Stand or Dark Tower I-IV, and 1 being The Regulators or Dark Tower VI) I'd give it a strong 6.


Bestsellers of 1984:

1. The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King
2. The Aquataine Progression by Robert Ludlum
3. The Sicilian by Mario Puzo
4. Love and War by John Jakes
5. The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss
6.  ...And the Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer
7. The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth
8. Full Circle by Danielle Steel
9. The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz by Joan Rivers
10. Lincoln by Gore Vidal

Also Published in 1984:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

Sources:

King, Stephen and Straub, Peter. The Talisman. 1984. New York: Berkley, 1985. Print.

"Peter Straub." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

ERB: Stephen King vs. Edgar Allan Poe

Last April, I posted Epic Rap Battles of History's Dr. Seuss vs. William Shakespeare.  Well, Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd have done it again, this time pitting Edgar Allan Poe against Stephen King: