Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

Photo: from its Goodreads page

More a morality tale / fairy tale than novel (or novella), and a lot more Chizmar than King, but still an okay read that goes by fast. Since it's more of a fairy story, the characterizations are purposely light, the action is more to learn from than to entertain, and it's all supposed to be a slight breeze. To expect more is to be disappointed.

The ending didn't work for me, as it's more explanation than resolution. Richard Farris (AKA, Randall Flagg) will disappoint, as he seems like someone kinder than we know him to be. Here, he's more like the old man from Hearts in Atlantis than the badass from The Stand and The Dark Tower. He should've been called someone else here, with different initials. He's really a different character. In this way, he's more of a disappointment than is the talky, explanatory ending itself, but the book is so slight that you really won't mind. Like all morality tales, the ending is explained too much and is too completely wrapped up. I would've rather had something extra left over to think about, but that won't happen here. Is it more Gwendy, the box, or just life itself? You'll be told, which is a bummer. Should've been left more open-ended.

And, lastly, you won't see anything Dark Tower-ish here. Mr. R.F. and the box are just extras stepping out. You won't be able to place them within the Dark Tower's milieu, so don't try. There's no leftover strand, or beam, and those worlds don't influence this one in this book. If you want a standalone book that has tendrils and whispers of The Dark Tower, check out King's The Wind Through the Keyhole, which was quite a bit better, and released to very little fanfare. That one is a Dark Tower rejected section or chapter if I've ever seen one.

So you'll have to take this book on its own purposely slight merits, and judge them by those. I think it's pretty clear to see where King starts off and Chizmar takes over. This would've been darker, more ponderous and a lot less slight if King had written a bigger chunk of it. My guess is that King started it, maybe the first two or three chapters, and included the kite scene and maybe a hat scene or two, but let Chizmar take it. My guess is he figured The Wind Through the Keyhole was one Dark Tower standalone enough, and he didn't need another one. I'm guessing Chizmar stayed as far away from The Tower as he could. Perhaps he was asked to.

This one was more of a curiousity for me. I don't consider it part of the King canon and I won't be buying one for my entire First Edition Stephen King book collection. My copy was from the library, where it will return tomorrow. So if you want a quick little book / morality tale that's maybe 20% King, max, give this one a shot. It's not bad, but it's not King. If you have other King books that you need to get to, you're probably better off doing that.

End of Watch -- by Stephen King

Photo: First Edition book cover, from the book's Wikipedia page

Another compulsively readable story from King, who again shows here that he's more of a natural storyteller than a writer, which adds to the feeling of compulsive reading, rather than detracts. My guess is that if he were to worry more about fantastic writing, and less about fantastically-compulsive storytelling, his books would sell a lot less than they do. At this stage of his career, that's not likely to happen.

You don't have to read the first or second in the trilogy to read and get through this one, and I'm not quite sure how I take that. Good for sales, I think, but this does detract from the journey you're supposed to feel you've been on with these people over the last three books. I didn't feel like I'd been on the road with these guys, and when it all ends, it's in a this happens, then this happens, then this happens--and then these things stop happening kind of way. The storytelling just stops, but there's no...verisimilitude. There's no feeling of loss, exactly, or of the curtain closing. It just ends. That's it.

The way it's written adds to this lack of feeling. I'm rarely a fan of third-person omniscient present-tense, and I wasn't thrilled with it here. This is best when the writer needs a gritty, you are there kind of feel. That isn't needed here, which is a good thing, because it doesn't happen. The after-effect of this, though, is that it distances the narrator from the story and reader. You get a sense of detachment--not good, if you want that present-tense to pack a punch. Probably it was a decision for pure storytelling sake; again, this happens, then this happens, then this...but there's a lack of resonance with this choice. It's hard to feel anything for anyone with this kind of distance.

The story itself probably isn't anything you haven't seen before, even in a bad movie. Essentially this is Chucky, who moved from doll to person to doll to person, and so on. Brady's the doll here, and a crappy, vintage game is the method (rather than a chant or spell), but really it's all the same. There's a bit of psychobabble about herd mentality here, as well. I'm not sure it's wrong, exactly--at my job, I see herd mentality all the time--but I'm not so sure it's as pat and automatic as it's presented here. You'll have to decide that for yourself. But it's an interesting, anti-puppet message.

That's minor, though. The story here is, well, the real story, and you're either going to go with it or you're not. It's not even a matter of liking it or disliking it, really. It's a pleasant enough ride while you're on it. When the ride ended, I wasn't regretting the ride, but nor was I hoping it would continue forever. The ride is the ride, and it's not really about liking it or not, or even judging it. The ending for such a long book may be a downer. As usual, there's an ending after an ending here (I've written about this in King's books before), and if you're a Constant Reader as I am, you'll see it coming. King pulls no punches; he lets the cat out of the bag rather early here. (And, well, see the title?) In the 1st end, there wasn't much more than an old body with Chucky in him, after all, and an old human body is still just an old human body. That's pretty much the message for the second ending as well, but in a different way.

This one is probably the best of the three. The second was the worst for me, and parts of the first were grating. Nothing grating here, but it's not The Stand or The Shining, either. I do feel his overall mojo is gone. I wrote somewhere recently that I thought there had been too much of the Tower in his writings before, sort of a forced Purpose. But now I miss that, because in his most recent stuff, there doesn't seem to be purpose enough. Reading his work now passes the time, but it's possible you may ask yourself why you're doing it, rather than that other important thing you should be doing. But perhaps that's what reading is, anyway: escape from what you should be doing.

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that Revival (especially the ending) is the best of King's work lately, with Joyland being a pleasant distraction, but without the scares you'd expect to be there. Looking back at all his books now, I'm seeing that the last work of his to really wow me was Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower--and that was 19 books ago. (11/22/63 was overall very good, but there were some blocks that dragged a bit.) Anyway, an old body is an old body, and it is what it is.

Super 8

Photo: Movie poster, from its Wikipedia site

See this movie on cable for the story, the emotion, the great framed shots, the special effects, and the film nostalgia. It pays homage, in ways small and large, to the following films:

--E.T.

--Close Encounters

--The Thing (the original, according to Roger Ebert's 3 1/2 star review; I only saw Carpenter's 1982 film version)

--The Goonies

--The Blob (bad 80s version)

--Aliens

--Every teenage schmaltzy 80s movie with a girl with a bad father.  Say Anything comes to mind here.  So does Forrest Gump (I know that's a 90s film), but in a much different way.

--Every schmaltzy 50s movie with a town taken over by an alien, and the army takes over, and there's a professor (called "perfessor") somewhere, acting goofy.

--The Abyss

--The Stand (Okay, that's a miniseries, but still very much there)

--Every so-bad-it's-good zombie movie, including Night of the Living Dead

--Independence Day

This movie, essentially, is a combination, mostly, of The Goonies, E.T. and Close Encounters, with an alien that's a little Aliens, a little Independence Day, and a little Close Encounters (with the boy at the end) and a little Starman, too, I suppose.  And, of course, all he wants to do is get back home, like E.T.  But he strings up townspeople for food, a la Aliens, and kills quite a few of them, and the Air Force guys (usually in movies like this, they're Army guys), a la Aliens, and The Thing, but without the paranoia and Cold War social discourse.

I could re-write this blog entry and come up with a completely different homage-summary, and still be correct with that, too.  In fact, I have to throw in a tiny bit of Jaws, for the community-meeting thing run by the sheriff, and, now that I think about it, a tiny bit of Red Dawn and The Thing, because a woman stands up at this meeting and insists that the recent power outages and power-source thefts were due to "the Soviets."

I wonder if teens today would enjoy this as much as folks my age, and older.  I think they might--but not as much.  Too bad for them.  For God's sake, finally something good comes with getting older.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Photo: 11/22/63 book cover from its Wikipedia page

Inner ear infection the last three days, so one of the only things I could do laying in bed is read, and that only barely.  So I read this much-anticipated book.  I have mixed emotions and thoughts about it, so...let's break 'em down.

The Good:

Well, it's gotta be a good sign that I read 849 pages in essentially two days, and about 750 of those today (Wednesday) alone.  King's detractors will say that this is bad, that nothing serious enough to be written by one of the best-selling authors of the 20th Century should be that quick and easy to read.  While this smacks of elitism to me, I smell a tiny scent of truth, but then again, King never said he was Nabakov or Shakespeare, and while it's true that this novel, like most of his, doesn't have depth, per se, it does have resonance.  (Much like the harmonies he writes about, one supposes.)  Besides that, it's a good read, for a few reasons:

1.  It was nice to see Bevvie Marsh again, and Richie Tozier, too, I suppose.
2.  Astute fans will say hello to Christine (there's a '58 Plymouth Fury in a few places here, and it ain't nice), Cujo (by reference to nice but rabid dogs) and to the gateway keepers in Hearts in Atlantis and in Insomnia, as well as the town of Derry itself, which was never right in its head.  There are shimmers of The Dark Tower series (especially the most recent) and God knows what else, too.  There's a tiny nod to Back to the Future, too.
3.  King mixes and mashes Derry, Maine and Dallas, Texas in artistic ways similar to Desperation and The Regulators, as well as the mirrored characters in both.
4.  The book is ultimately about love won and lost, and a lovely scene of (odd, but it works) love at the end that is very similar to the ending of Edward Scissorhands--and not about time warps, or paradoxes, or any of those things.  Frankly, he doesn't handle those topics in any way that we haven't seen already.

Which leads me to

The Bad:

Mostly, what I just said: There isn't much in here about time travel, paradoxes, messing with time, harmonies or shimmers or whatever that we haven't already seen before.  And, maybe, better, elsewhere.  In fact, if the reader doesn't fall in love with Sadie (which this reader did), then the book falls apart at the seams.  But, to King's credit, you will love Sadie; I think the logical planner in King realizes that she is watermark here, and that he loses us if he loses her.  So, of course, he doesn't.  Like Juliet, Sadie seems to deserve better than the guy she falls for.

There's also no question at all about what will ultimately happen to her, or to Jake/George, which is both bad, and good, considering that you are compelled to read on despite this.  There's also no question about what'll happen when Jake/George goes back to the future (there's the nod), which King also correctly realizes and spends no more than a few pages on--and his character spends just an hour in the future close to the end.  But, again, despite all this, you read on, which is the ultimate good for writers and readers alike.

The only question is: What will he do, if anything, to set things right again?  I guessed it right, mostly because, as a writer myself, I couldn't imagine the character doing the whole thing all over again (there's another nod to the last Dark Tower), but you want to resolve the George/Sadie thing, too, which he does.  Or, at least, according to the Afterword, his son, Joe Hill, does, and King just writes it.  But, whatever.  It's satisfying and it works, despite borrowing heavily, I suspect, from Scissorhands--and it was Joe Hill's idea, to boot.

And so you get the idea.  It isn't The Stand, or It, and we'll have to agree that such high points may not be reached again.  (King himself thinks that The Stand, The Shining and Salem's Lot, out of all of them, will stand the test of time.  I mostly agree, except not for the Lot, which will be eclipsed by the Dark Tower series, by It, and by Different Seasons.)  But 11/22/63 is also not The Cell, Rose Madder or Under the Dome, either, so that's all good.  (Under the Dome is severely overrated.)  It's not existential fodder, either, as there is no grey area with its depiction of a future with a JFK who's lived--or of its depiction of 60s Dallas, either, for that matter.  It's a s--thole, clearly, and it better be undone.  Fast.  Luckily, every re-appearance is a quick reset.

Ultimately I gave it five stars because I read its 849 pages in about 48 hours, which has to be testament to the book's quality, or to my reading stamina, or both.  I'm a writer myself, and if someone told me he read my 849-page book in 48 hours, happily engrossed in its story as he recovered from an inner-ear infection, that would make me perfectly proud.  To relate: A friend of mine, who can be a very good, if not occasionally harshly helpful, reader and critic, read my 11-page zombie story recently--very, very quickly and, as it turned out, appreciably.  Never in a million years would I think that this fine poet would devour and appreciate my 11-page zombie story, but he did.  And I can't think of a better compliment to a writer than that.

And so there it is.  I'll leave you with one more thought, just realized: Sooner or later, King will have to be appreciated for his whimsical portrayal of 3-dimensional female characters who are all too easily appreciated or fallen in love with by his male readers--from Sadie, here, to an adult Bev Marsh in IT, to a feisty Wendy in The Shining (who was NOT a sniveling Shelley Duvall) to Carrie White, in a way, to Charlie McGee in another odd way, and even to Annie Wilkes, in a VERY odd way, as well as a few others in between.  Don't get me wrong, there were some real clunkers in there, too, but overall he is very good, if not entirely realistically good, at this, and I haven't heard anyone say so before.  Woody Allen (rightfully) gets tons of kudos for his developed female characters, and while they are in a different stratosphere than King's, there is still a consistent solidity to them after all these books and years.  And The Woodman's women aren't exactly completely realistic, either, right?

Four More Straub

Ghost Story

My favorite Straub.  Rivals anything King has done, including The Shining, The Stand, It, etc.  One of the few books, like The Shining, to actually and literally give me the chills.  Great read as a mystery, as horror, as literature, as, well, as anything!  A must-read for any fan of any genre.  And brilliantly constructed, from the very first sentence.

Houses Without Doors

Good compilation of stuff, uneven when combined, well-written individually.  Contains stories of men who go crazy, partly because they read too much.  Uh-oh...

In the Night Room

Solid, creepy, and well-stylized.  Straub's just a good writer, no matter what the genre.  He could've written in any genre.

The Throat

So well-written that I read all 600 pages or so in about three days.  Straub is simply a good writer.  Good story; characterization; mood; setting.  All coalesce to an effective creepiness.