Lisey's Story

Two years after the death of Scott Landon, celebrated novelist, his widow Lisey finally starts clearing his study, an act every widow in King's Maine knows is the dangerous one: the dead keep their secrets in their workrooms. What surfaces first is ordinary, manuscripts, memorabilia hunters, an academic pest demanding the papers. Then comes Zack McCool, a violent obsessive hired to frighten her into surrendering the archive, whose escalation from phone calls to mutilation gives the book its earthly menace.

The unearthly one is the marriage itself. In flashback, doled out as Lisey lets herself remember, King builds the private country of the Landons: the childhood of abuse and inherited madness Scott survived by escaping, bodily, to Boo'ya Moon, an other world of sweet smelling twilight, healing pools and a thing, long and patient and piebald, that waits at the edges. The dead of the Landon family went there; some of them came back. Lisey has been there too, once, and has spent the marriage carefully not knowing it, and her rescue of herself from McCool runs through the same door, following the trail of clues, a bool hunt, that Scott left her in advance, knowing what his death would send her way.

The book's real subject is the language of a long marriage, the private words, babyluv, smucking, the strap, that carry everything the couple never said aloud.

Around five hundred and thirty pages.

Best for readers who want King writing about love more than fear, the horror folded inside a portrait of marriage he has called his own favorite.