Finders Keepers by Stephen King

Photo: from the book's Goodreads page.  (Yes, I review there as well.  Feel free them up.)

After finishing this book, which was essentially a good book and an okay way to pass the reading time of three days (in my case, anyway), I am nonetheless compelled to write the following:

Things That Have Annoyed Me in Stephen King's Latest Novels:

--His tendency to focus almost exclusively, at least for the first half, on the character normally considered to be the antagonist.  In this case, Morris Bellamy, who kills John Rothstein (a thinly-disguised combination of J.D. Salinger and John Updike) and steals his money and notebooks.  This is not ruining anything, by the way, because the inside flap tells you this faster than I just did.

Anyway, there are problems with doing this.  As I've mentioned in other recent reviews of King's work, the tendency to do this insinuates to the reader (again, at least this one) that King finds his antagonists more interesting than his protagonists.  (Or, at least, that he feels his readers will.)  This reminds me of actors who say they prefer playing the bad guy because he's usually more interesting than the bland good guy.  If this is the case, the answer here is to simply make the protagonist more convincing, or less bland, or whatever.  Often, an interesting protagonist will come to mirror the antagonist, thereby creating some depth.  (Hopefully this is what happens in my with-beta-readers-WIP).  King has done this focus-on-the-character-who's-normally-the-antagonist thing so frequently lately that it has to be by design.

The other problem with this is that it creates a cartoonish novel.  This novel will be compulsively-readable--which this one certainly is, as I finished it in a few days--but that doesn't mean it's satisfying.  I mentioned in a recent King review that his books have satisfied me less and less even though I'm reading them as quickly--if not more quickly--than ever.  I don't mean this as a snotty criticism, but I do mean it with seriousness.  By starting off with the antagonist, and by staying with him for so long, it creates the mirage (or, not, if you're strict about this sort of semantic thing) that the antagonist is actually the protagonist, and the protagonist, who's out to stop the bad-guy protagonist from doing bad things, is actually the antagonist, by definition.  This is how the old Tom & Jerry cartoons worked.

And it sucks, because it feels fake.  Because, really, it's backstory made into story, and you compulsively read it because it's there and that's all there is, but...it's not satisfying.  There's something wrong.  I'm not critical because it's not literature (somebody hit me upside the head if I ever get that snotty); I'm critical because it's not story.  Though story is what happens, and maybe why it happens, there's something more that story's supposed to be.  Something more real.  More weighty, perhaps, but that's entering Elitist Land, maybe.  But really it's just like watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon, which I tired of in my teens.  And I've tired of it here.

I'm sure King has done this purposely lately because it also falsely creates momentary cliffhangers at the end of every section.  And that's not done with realness, either.  It works like this: Protagonist, who's doing bad things that you want to read because we all want to see the dead body under the sheet at the car accident (King's frequently-used comparison, not mine), does bad things but comes upon some roadblock that stops him and allows the writer to introduce the protagonist--who's actually the antagonist here, by definition, because he's trying to stop the main character.  (Morris Bellamy, book advertising aside, is the main character here.  The cop from Mr. Mercedes, who's advertised as the main character and the star of this trilogy, does not appear in this one until literally half-way through.  And he's got remarkably little to do.  He really could be any retired cop from anywhere, from any novel from any writer.)  In this case, that roadblock is jail time.  Bellamy gets out and the game's afoot.  He does something.  Bill Hodges, the retired cop, does something, and catches up a little with the program.  In the meantime, other characters become more important and do more important things than Hodges does, and do so right until the end.  In this case, Pete Saubers is the other main character here.  Hodges is maybe third or fourth in line.  Anyway, the sections get shorter (yet another fake way to create tension: James Patterson-like short chapters or sections--and lots of them) and the back-and-forth gets more frequent and creates tension even when the story itself doesn't.

Fakery, I tell you.

If you've read King's books before, especially the recent ones, there's never any doubt about what's going to happen.  If you've read Misery, there's never any doubt about how it's going to happen.  And the little ironic twist in the last 5% of the book, that part about where the notebooks were after all--well, it made me roll my eyes.  Let me know if it did the same for you.

Bleh.  Compulsively readable bleh, but bleh nonetheless.

You expect something more.  And maybe that's part of the problem.  Maybe we shouldn't be expecting more from him anymore.  Can I say that out loud?

The other thing that needs to be said out loud: His stuff isn't scary anymore.  It's not even chilly.  (The ending of Revival is a blessed exception here.)  The only part of the novel that does that is the very, very end--an ending with a character that was in this book for .01% of it--and never in a relevant to this story kind of way.  That part--smack!--is the only even closely resembling creepy part of this whole thing.

That's what we want from King, right?  If I'm not going to get the real-life creeps and genius of "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," "The Body" or even Misery, than I want the creepiness of The Shining and IT.  The stuff he's giving us lately is nothing more than bad Dean Koontz.  This was especially true of Mr. Sleep, which was so bad I literally got angry.  (And was reminded of Dorothy Parker's quip, about another bad book, that it wasn't something to be put aside--but should instead be thrown with great force.)  But I don't want the back-and-forth of guns and robbers and that stuff.  I want little boys crawling underneath the snow, being chased by an unseen something that sticks its hand out of the snow, very suddenly.  I want he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.  This is TV show crap we're getting now, since Under the Dome did so well (in the ratings, during the summer, anyway), and I don't want it.  (Under the Dome is a classic example of King focusing almost-exclusively on the character who normally would be the antagonist, but isn't because of King's POV focus on him.  And the "protagonist" of Under the Dome was surely a bore--Steven Seagall in Under Seige.  A special-op hiding out, in retirement or not, as a cook.)

Anyway, this wasn't scary.  It wasn't intense.  It wasn't creepy.  It wasn't memorable.  It was compulsively readable--but I could say the same about my journal entries and even my shopping list.

And I'm still optimistic enough to want more out of Stephen King than this.  But maybe I shouldn't be.

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

Photo: The book's cover, from its Wikipedia page

This is probably the last of my unread Stephen King books for awhile, in case you were getting tired of my many Stephen King reviews lately.  At 625 pages, this one took half a week to read, and much of it was pretty intense.  This intensity waned a bit the more it went on; an editor working with two lesser-known names would've done much good here.  The second half, and definitely the last third, are very fat.  Much could have, and should have, been trimmed there.

But it is still a good ride, especially the first third.  It's told in a very third-person omniscient style, and in the present tense, no less.  Lots of the word "we," as in "And now we see Jack Sawyer--."  That takes a little getting used to, but it's not that bad.  It fits, though I can't see why such a different storytelling tactic was necessary.  The last third is so fatuous that even this third-person omniscient, present tense POV does not give the narrative a you-are-there feel.  It's so in need of editing, that such word-bloat takes away from the intensity the reader is supposed to feel by this narrative POV.  You don't get that "Once upon a time..." lean story-telling voice that the authors are clearly going for.  (The book even ends with exactly that phrase.)

Having said that, it's worth reading, especially if you're a fan of the The Talisman and/or The Dark Tower books.  Black House is situated firmly in the Dark Tower universe, much more so than The Talisman, though by the end of it, you get the feel that it's a story from a minor planet of that universe, so to speak.  It is not a major entry in that series; the Dark Tower saga, as it's now complete, can and does exist without this.  It's a side-room behind one of the many doors in the Dark Tower's house.  It's interesting to open that door and peer in, and see what's there, maybe admire the old furniture and to appreciate the character of the room, but when you shut the door, you can move on to the staircase and to the more important rooms.

Black House can't decide which character it wants to follow.  It follows Jack Sawyer more than anyone else, but not like The Talisman did, and when the focused POV of the second half follows a gross old man, a pawn of the Crimson King, it starts getting fat and unfocused.  With that character's demise, it then focuses again as it should, upon Jack Sawyer, and then goes a place or two that the reader wouldn't expect--but shouldn't be completely surprised about, either.  Stephen King has followed the antagonist before--lately in Under the Dome--and you have to wonder about his main character, his protagonist, if even he decides that his antagonist is much more interesting.  The reader had better agree--and this one didn't, in this case.  (I did agree with that tactic for Under the Dome.)

But it doesn't work here because the gross old man is still nothing more than a gross (and murderous) old man.  The power he has is given to him by the Crimson King and his minions, and so he's nothing more than that.  More or less, then, this novel is an examination of the root of evil, of where it comes from.  Where does an evil, murdering, pedophile cannibal like Albert Fish (Mentioned very frequently here, and worth a Wikipedia visit--if you can stomach it.  No sin if you can't.  It's extremely gut-wrenching stuff.) and Charles Burnside (this book's Albert Fish) come from?  Well, apparently from another universe, and its evil incarnate, which uses the (less?) evil and the weak here for its own nefarious purposes.  All well and good, I suppose, except that this book doesn't present a convincing case for that.

Ultimately, the first third of the book is extremely good.  The first half is very good.  By three-quarters it starts to wane, and by the end you're ready for the end to end.  But it still ends well, and so it is still worth reading--if you can tolerate the fat.  I was able to cut it away and dine on the rest.  If you can do that, this book is worth the read.

(The parts written by Straub, in my opinion, stand out from those written by King here.  My guess is that Straub wrote most of the first half, King most of the second.  There are some Straub writing patterns and signatures I recognized, and some from King as well.  For example, Straub does not tend to choose his antagonist as a POV focus as King does, and so I feel much of that is King's.  Since most of the Charles Burnside focus happens in the second half, I feel that's where King's fingerprints are.  The first half, especially, resonates, as all good writing should.  The first half sank into my consciousness enough so that I was compelled to write a previous blog entry, two entries ago.  Ironic, since most of what I wrote about were Stephen King thematic constructs, though it was Straub's treatment of them in the beginning of this book that compelled me to write about them.  But that's art for you.)