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Stephen King

Lisey's StoryKindle

Name: Lisey's Story
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Rating: 4.3 (7393 reviews)
Author: Stephen King
ISBN: 9781501138256

Stephen King

(Author)

4.3

7,393 ratings

Now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen

The “haunting…tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey” (The New York Times), Lisey’s Story is a literary masterpiece—an extraordinarily moving and haunting portrait of a marriage and its aftermath.

Lisey lost her husband Scott two years ago, after a twenty-five year marriage of profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey knew there was a place Scott went—a place that both terrified and healed him, could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it’s Lisey’s turn to face Scott’s demons, to go to that terrifying place known as Boo’ya Moon. What begins as a widow’s effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited.

“Intricate...exhilarating” (The New Yorker), perhaps Stephen King’s most personal and powerful novel ever, Lisey’s Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love. It is a beautiful, “rich portrait of a marriage, and the complicated affection that outlives death” (The Washington Post).

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ISBN-10

1501138251

ISBN-13

978-1501138256

Print length

544 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Scribner

Publication date

June 27, 2016

Dimensions

5.5 x 1.4 x 8.38 inches

Item weight

1.04 pounds

Popular Highlights in this book

Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.
Highlighted by 204 Kindle readers
Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.
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B000MGATTE

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.com Review

Since his first novel was published in 1974, Stephen King has stretched the boundaries of the written word, not only bringing horror to new heights, but trying his hand at nearly every possible genre, including children's books, graphic novels, serial novels, literary fiction, nonfiction, westerns, fantasy, and even e-books (remember The Plant?). With Lisey's Story, once again King is trying something different. Lisey's Story is as much a romance as it is a supernatural thriller--but don't let us convince you. Who better to tell readers if King has written a romantic thriller than Nora Roberts? We asked Nora to read Lisey's Story and give us her take. Check out her review below. --Daphne Durham Guest Reviewer: Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts, who also writes under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, is the author of way too many bestselling books to name here (over 150!), but some of our favorites include: Angels Fall, Born in Death, Blue Smoke, and The Reef.

Stephen King hooked me about three decades ago with that sharply faceted, blood-stained jewel, The Shining. Through the years he's bumped my gooses with kiddie vampires, tingled my spine with beloved pets gone rabid, justified my personal fear of clowns and made me think twice about my cell phone. I've always considered The Stand--a long-time favorite--a towering tour de force, and have owed its author a debt as this was the first novel I could convince my older son to read from cover to cover.

But with Lisey's Story, King has accomplished one more feat. He broke my heart.

Lisey's Story is, at its core, a love story--heart-wrenching, passionate, terrifying and tender. It is the multi-layered and expertly crafted tale of a twenty-five year marriage, and a widow's journey through grief, through discovery and--this is King, after all--through a nightmare scape of the ordinary and extraordinary. Through Lisey's mind and heart, the reader is pulled into the intimacies of her marriage to bestselling novelist Scott Landon, and through her we come to know this complicated, troubled and heroic man.

Two years after his death, Lisey sorts through her husband's papers and her own shrouded memories. Following the clues Scott left her and her own instincts, she embarks on a journey that risks both her life and her sanity. She will face Scott's demons as well as her own, traveling into the past and into Boo'ya Moon, the seductive and terrifying world he'd shown her. There lives the power to heal, and the power to destroy.

Lisey Landon is a richly wrought character of charm and complexity, of realized inner strength and redoubtable humor. As the central figure she drives the story, and the story is so vividly textured, the reader will draw in the perfumed air of Boo'ya Moon, will see the sunlight flood through the windows of the Scott's studio--or the night press against them. Her voice will be clear in your ear as you experience the fear and the wonder. If your heart doesn't hitch at the demons she faces in this world and the other, if it doesn't thrill at her courage and endurance, you're going to need to check with a cardiologist, first chance.

Lisey's Story is bright and brilliant. It's dark and desperate. While I'll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King's wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems.

A few of them have sharp, hungry teeth. --Nora Roberts

From Publishers Weekly

King's latest bid for literary respectability is read by acclaimed actress Winningham, best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Georgia. Winningham glazes King's novel in multiple coats of Southern honey, her voice shimmering with an old-fashioned glow for the tale of Lisey Landon, wife of acclaimed novelist Scott Landon, and her effort to discover the source of her husband's inspiration after his death. Winningham is a good fit for King in a less terror-filled mood, capturing the book's blend of the sentimental and the comic. The narrative is ushered in and out by the strains of Ryan Adams's "When the Stars Go Blue," and King reads his own afterword, where he details the sources of his own inspiration, carefully distancing himself and his loved ones from the characters in his book while making it clear that, like Scott Landon, he must dive deep into his subconscious and into the pool of literary history, to find inspiration.

From The New Yorker

In his intricate new novel, King explores two hidden worlds - the private life of a recently deceased best-selling writer, as seen from the perspective of his widow, and the imaginative landscape that formed the foundation of his work. As the novel opens, Lisey, Scott Landon's widow, is a sardonic observer of toadying academics, dangerously obsessive fans, and fame-struck bystanders. As she sorts through papers that Landon has left behind, she also becomes a traveller in a fantastical parallel world called Boo'ya Moon, to which he retreated during a horrific childhood and on which he drew throughout his creative life. It takes some time for these narrative strands to converge, but when they do Lisey moves between worlds at an exhilarating pace. Along the way, King also reveals, with subtle precision, the profound strangeness of widowhood, when someone who was present for so much of a shared life is gone.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Even by Stephen King standards, Lisey's Story is haunting. Yet though it contains some supernatural elements, it is really a love story that speaks to passion, the intimacy of marriage, the craft of writingand true madness. In Scott's escapist world and its relation to Lisey, the horrific elements come into play, but most critics agreed that despite the emotional punch of the story, it is not King's best. A convoluted stream-of-consciousness style, flashbacks within flashbacks, too much baby talk, and the novel's sheer length put off some reviewers, while others questioned whether what makes King's novels selltheir haunting, horrific goresuccessfully works here. Still, it's classic Stephen King: you should know by now whether that's to your taste.

From Booklist

In the two years since her husband Scott's sudden death, professors and collectors mad to lay their hands on his unpublished manuscripts and letters, those of one of the most successful and lauded writers of his generation, have besieged Lisey (rhymes with CeeCee) Landon. The last of them, initially ingratiating, wound up threatening her. That decided her to prepare Scott's papers for donation to an appropriate archive. In the midst of doing that, she gets an answering machine message, then a telephone call and a written note, as well as a dead cat in the mailbox, from a grammatically challenged man who says he'll "hurt [her] places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances." Fortunately, she's been hearing Scott's voice lately, more than in recollection, and it leads her back to a place, another dimension, that he'd told her about but that she'd forgotten. The boy Scott and his long-dead brother went there to escape their sometimes psychopathic father; the grown-up Scott, to heal from many wounds, including those from a shooting that would have been fatal if Lisey hadn't intervened. It is paradisiacally beautiful but dangerous at night, when weird, savage creatures hunt in it. In this long, often long-feeling, utterly Stephen Kingish novel, Scott's strange and eventful past is thoroughly recovered, and Lisey's strength is revealed and confirmed, though not before the maniac does indeed hurt her. The book is also, perhaps, a parable about love and imagination that affirms love as the more salvific of the two. Ray Olson

Review

"DAZZLING. . . . Stephen King at his finest and most generous." -- Nicholas Sparks, author of At First Sight and The Notebook

"MOVING. . . . A rich portrait of a marriage and the complicated affection that outlives death." -- The Washington Post

"HAUNTING. . . . A tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey." -- The New York Times

"With Lisey's Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he'll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom."" —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Haunting… A tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey." —The New York Times

"[An] intricate... novel, King explores two hidden worlds... [and] reveals, with subtle precision, the profound strangeness of widowhood, when someone who was present for so much of a shared life is gone." —The New Yorker

"Lisey's Story is a wondrous novel of marriage, a love story steeped in strength and tenderness, and cast with the most vivid, touching, and believable characters in recent literature. I came to adore Lisey Landon and her sisters, I ached for Scott and all he'd been through, and when I finally reached the bittersweet and heartfelt conclusion, my first thought was that I wanted to start over again from the beginning, for it felt as if I were saying good-bye to old friends. This is Stephen King at his finest and most generous, a dazzling novel that you'll thank yourself for reading long after the final page is turned." —Nicholas Sparks, author of At First Sight and The Notebook

"In Lisey's Story, Stephen King makes bold, brilliant use of his satanic storytelling gift, his angelic ear for language, and, above all, his incomparable ability to find the epic in the ordinary, to present us with the bloody and fabulous tale of an ordinary marriage. In his hands, the long, passionate union of Scott and Lisey Landon -- of any long-lived marriage, by implication -- becomes a fantastic kingdom, with its own geography and language, its dark and stirring chronicle of heroes and monsters, its tragedies, griefs, and glories. King has been getting me to look at the world with terror and wonder since I was fifteen years old, and I have never been more persuaded than by this book of his greatness." —Michael Chabon, author of The Final Solution: A Story of Detection and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Review

"In Lisey's Story, Stephen King makes bold, brilliant use of his satanic storytelling gift, his angelic ear for language, and, above all, his incomparable ability to find the epic in the ordinary, to present us with the bloody and fabulous tale of an ordinary marriage. In his hands, the long, passionate union of Scott and Lisey Landon -- of any long-lived marriage, by implication -- becomes a fantastic kingdom, with its own geography and language, its dark and stirring chronicle of heroes and monsters, its tragedies, griefs, and glories. King has been getting me to look at the world with terror and wonder since I was fifteen years old, and I have never been more persuaded than by this book of his greatness."-- Michael Chabon, author of The Final Solution: A Story of Detection and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Lisey's Story is a wondrous novel of marriage, a love story steeped in strength and tenderness, and cast with the most vivid, touching, and believable characters in recent literature. I came to adore Lisey Landon and her sisters, I ached for Scott and all he'd been through, and when I finally reached the bittersweet and heartfelt conclusion, my first thought was that I wanted to start over again from the beginning, for it felt as if I were saying good-bye to old friends. This is Stephen King at his finest and most generous, a dazzling novel that you'll thank yourself for reading long after the final page is turned."-- Nicholas Sparks, author of At First Sight and The Notebook

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Sample

I. Lisey and Amanda

(Everything the Same)

To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon. Her husband had won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, but Lisey had given only one interview in her life. This was for the well-known women's magazine that publishes the column "Yes, I'm Married to Him!" She spent roughly half of its five-hundred-word length explaining that her nickname rhymed with "CeeCee." Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Lisey's sister Amanda said that the picture accompanying the interview made Lisey look fat.

None of Lisey's sisters was immune to the pleasures of setting the cat among the pigeons ("stirring up a stink" had been their father's phrase for it), or having a good natter about someone else's dirty laundry, but the only one Lisey had a hard time liking was this same Amanda. Eldest (and oddest) of the onetime Debusher girls of Lisbon Falls, Amanda currently lived alone, in a house which Lisey had provided, a small, weather-tight place not too far from Castle View where Lisey, Darla, and Cantata could keep an eye on her. Lisey had bought it for her seven years ago, five before Scott died. Died Young. Died Before His Time, as the saying was. Lisey still had trouble believing he'd been gone for two years. It seemed both longer and the blink of an eye.

When Lisey finally got around to making a start at cleaning out his office suite, a long and beautifully lit series of rooms that had once been no more than the loft above a country barn, Amanda had shown up on the third day, after Lisey had finished her inventory of all the foreign editions (there were hundreds) but before she could do more than start listing the furniture, with little stars next to the pieces she thought she ought to keep. She waited for Amanda to ask her why she wasn't moving faster, for heaven's sake, but Amanda asked no questions. While Lisey moved from the furniture question to a listless (and day-long) consideration of the cardboard boxes of correspondence stacked in the main closet, Amanda's focus seemed to remain on the impressive stacks and piles of memorabilia which ran the length of the study's south wall. She worked her way back and forth along this snakelike accretion, saying little or nothing but jotting frequently in a little notebook she kept near to hand.

What Lisey didn't say was What are you looking for? Or What are you writing down? As Scott had pointed out on more than one occasion, Lisey had what was surely among the rarest of human talents: she was a business-minder who did not mind too much if you didn't mind yours. As long as you weren't making explosives to throw at someone, that was, and in Amanda's case, explosives were always a possibility. She was the sort of woman who couldn't help prying, the sort of woman who would open her mouth sooner or later.

Her husband had headed south from Rumford, where they had been living ("like a couple of wolverines caught in a drainpipe," Scott said after an afternoon visit he vowed never to repeat) in 1985. Her one child, named Intermezzo and called Metzie for short, had gone north to Canada (with a long-haul trucker for a beau) in 1989. "One flew north, one flew south, one couldn't shut her everlasting mouth." That had been their father's rhyme when they were kids, and the one of Dandy Dave Debusher's girls who could never shut her everlasting mouth was surely Manda, dumped first by her husband and then by her own daughter.

Hard to like as Amanda sometimes was, Lisey hadn't wanted her down there in Rumford on her own; didn't trust her on her own, if it came to that, and although they'd never said so aloud, Lisey was sure Darla and Cantata felt the same. So she'd had a talk with Scott, and found the little Cape Cod, which could be had for ninety-seven thousand dollars, cash on the nail. Amanda had moved up within easy checking range soon after.

Now Scott was dead and Lisey had finally gotten around to the business of cleaning out his writing quarters. Halfway through the fourth day, the foreign editions were boxed up, the correspondence was marked and in some sort of order, and she had a good idea of what furniture was going and what was staying. So why did it feel that she had done so

little? She'd known from the outset that this was a job which couldn't be hurried. Never mind all the importuning letters and phone calls she'd gotten since Scott's death (and more than a few visits, too). She supposed that in the end, the people who were interested in Scott's unpublished writing would get what they wanted, but not until she was ready to give it to them. They hadn't been clear on that at first; they weren't down with it, as the saying was. Now she thought most of them were.

There were lots of words for the stuff Scott had left behind. The only one she completely understood was memorabilia, but there was another one, a funny one, that sounded like incuncabilla. That was what the impatient people wanted, the wheedlers, and the angry ones -- Scott's incuncabilla. Lisey began to think of them as Incunks.

What she felt most of all, especially after Amanda showed up, was discouraged, as if she'd either underestimated the task itself or overestimated (wildly) her ability to see it through to its inevitable conclusion -- the saved furniture stored in the barn below, the rugs rolled up and taped shut, the yellow Ryder van in the driveway, throwing its shadow on the board fence between her yard and the Galloways' next door.

Oh, and don't forget the sad heart of this place, the three desktop computers (there had been four, but the one in the memory nook was now gone, thanks to Lisey herself). Each was newer and lighter than the last, but even the newest was a big desktop model and all of them still worked. They were password-protected, too, and she didn't know what the passwords were. She'd never asked, and had no idea what kind of electro-litter might be sleeping on the computers' hard drives. Grocery lists? Poems? Erotica? She was sure he'd been connected to the internet, but had no idea where he visited when he was there. Amazon? Drudge? Hank Williams Lives? Madam Cruella's Golden Showers & Tower of Power? She tended to think not anything like that last, to think she would have seen the bills (or at least divots in the monthly house-money account), except of course that was really bullshit. If Scott had wanted to hide a thousand a month from her, he could have done so. And the passwords? The joke was, he might have told her. She forgot stuff like that, that was all. She reminded herself to try her own name. Maybe after Amanda had taken herself home for the day. Which didn't look like happening anytime soon.

Lisey sat back and blew hair off her forehead. I won't get to the manuscripts until July, at this rate, she thought. The Incunks would go nuts if they saw the way I'm crawling along. Especially that last one.

The last one -- five months ago, this had been -- had managed not to blow up, had managed to keep a very civil tongue about him until she'd begun to think he might be different. Lisey told him that Scott's writing suite had been sitting empty for almost a year and a half at that time, but she'd almost mustered the energy and resolve to go up there and start the work of cleaning the rooms and setting the place to rights.

Her visitor's name had been Professor Joseph Woodbody, of the University of Pittsburgh English Department. Pitt was Scott's alma mater, and Woodbody's Scott Landon and the American Myth lecture class was extremely popular and extremely large. He also had four graduate students doing Scott Landon theses this year, and so it was probably inevitable that the Incunk warrior should come to the fore when Lisey spoke in such vague terms as sooner rather than later and almost certainly sometime this summer. But it wasn't until she assured him that she would give him a call "when the dust settles" that Woodbody really began to give way.

He said the fact that she had shared a great American writer's bed did not qualify her to serve as his literary executor. That, he said, was a job for an expert, and he understood that Mrs. Landon had no college degree at all. He reminded her of the time already gone since Scott Landon's death, and of the rumors that continued to grow. Supposedly there were piles of unpublished Landon fiction -- short stories, even novels. Could she not let him into the study for even a little while? Let him prospect a bit in the file cabinets and desk drawers, if only to set the most outrageous rumors to rest? She could stay with him the whole time, of course -- that went without saying.

"No," she'd said, showing Professor Woodbody to the door. "I'm not ready just yet." Overlooking the man's lower blows -- trying to, at least -- because he was obviously as crazy as the rest of them. He'd just hidden it better, and for a little longer. "And when I am, I'll want to look at everything, not just the manuscripts."

"But -- "

She had nodded seriously to him. "Everything the same."

"I don't understand what you mean by that."

Of course he didn't. It had been a part of her marriage's inner language. How many times had Scott come breezing in, calling "Hey, Lisey, I'm home -- everything the same?" Meaning is everything all right, is everything cool. But like most phrases of power (Scott had explained this once to her, but Lisey had already known it), it had an inside meaning. A man like Woodbody could never grasp the inside meaning of everything the same. Lisey could explain it all day and he still wouldn't get it. Why? Because he was an Incunk, and when it came to Scott Landon only one thing interested the Incunks.

"It doesn't matter," was what she'd said to Professor Woodbody on that day five months ago. "Scott would have understood."

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

Reviews

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

7,393 global ratings

taryn

Riveting story with great characters and a perfect ending!

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2016

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I have loved Stephen King's stories for years (decades?) This book has become one of my favorites! I'm not sure if I should describe the pace as steady or fast; I guess I'd say it is steadily at the perfect pace. The story goes back and forth between the present, various times in Lisey and her late-husband's past, and his descriptions of his childhood. Occasionally, I backed up a little to make sure I knew where I was, but that was more likely due to my eagerness to see what was next, than a reflection of the writing. I was quickly drawn in and almost resented it when I had to stop reading. (Is sleep absolutely necessary?) It's the quintessential story that you're dying to know what happened but can't stand the thought of finishing it!

I loved the characters! They were interesting, complex and relatable. Lisey was not a "poor me, my husband died" kind of character but my heart ached for her. Her relationship with her sisters was realistic. Her husband's childhood was horrifying but, other than the supernatural aspects, was also realistic. (I worked at a psychiatric hospital for children and sadly, it is all too realistic.)

Stephen King tells stories in a way that is completely immersive and I have sometimes felt that the stories are so phenomenal that it's impossible to end them in a way that does the rest of the story justice or is ultimately satisfying. (This is not intended as an insult in any way! He really is my favorite author and how do you put an end to such excellence?) This is not one of those stories. The ending was perfect!

6 people found this helpful

Rita Arens

The scariest part already happened, but she doesn't realize it yet.

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2014

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Though some of the other reviewers here took issue with made-up words, it's skill with dialect and dialogue and the way we use words to generate intimacy and reflect our personas that are at the core of my respect for Stephen King, novelist. It's very difficult to write any form of dialogue containing slang or dialect without losing people, and though King clearly lost some readers with his african afghan, I loved it all. We think everything is funny when we're young, we laugh to connect with others we've just met, and we form new languages to establish trust and intimacy before they are really there. We laugh with high school friends about stuff that wasn't funny, but it was funny back then because we wanted to laugh together and feel accepted by each other when we were fragile in our egos, before we grew up and knew who we were. That Lisey and Scott still use the language of young people even after being married for twenty-five years spoke of the depth of their relationship.

I've seldom read a book in which I so quickly became convinced of the love shared by Lisey and Scott. This was particularly impressive because Scott's dead. He is dead the whole book long. And Lisey is not nearly as interesting as Scott, but she manages to carry us beside her through the entire novel because we need to know what Scott saw in HER. We do find out in the end. Even though I didn't like bits and pieces of this novel, I am giving it five stars because I am still thinking about Lisey and Scott's relationship months after reading this book. AND THEY DON'T EXIST. -- Rita Arens, author of contemporary young adult novel THE OBVIOUS GAME (InkSpell Publishing, 2013)

17 people found this helpful

Texas

SK tells another woman's story eloquently

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2012

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Let me just say that for a dude, SK really knows how to write women. I know his wife Tabby probably helps immensely with his research, so my thanks go out to her, too.

This is a story of love, of what happens after you've lost that most important person in your life and they don't lay down quietly, but must have their say. Reminding you in stark detail all that you tried to sweep under the rug and ignore, but with the ultimate goal of getting Lisey to get on with her life. I see myself in Lisey, just like I have seen myself as many of the women that SK has written about, Rose Madder, Susannah Dean and Susan Delgado.

How SK reaches in and finds out our secrets and brings them to light just amazes me every time. I don't want to give away any spoilers, because when I read a review, I want to know if something is worth my time, or not. Believe me, this audio book is time well spent. Now a word about Mare Willingham's reading.

Fabulous!!!! I have listened to many books Mare has read over the years and this one is my favorite. She had tears running down my face more than once because her expression of the tale was so poignant. It was almost like Mare was telling the story of her own life and had all the richness and emotion of things remembered to go along with it.

To sum up, this novel is just a delight and full of all things you expect from SK and more. Try it you'll really like it!

6 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

There is so much love in this novel!

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2023

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Since 1979, I’ve read Stephen King’s books. Some delighted me, some made me sad, some helped me understand myself and know I wasn’t alone. While many people think of his genre as horror, I feel that he couldn’t write as he does without having had and feared losing love. I’m so very grateful that he is on the same planet at the same time as I am! This novel shows why.

6 people found this helpful

Jose Jones

Sentimental journey

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2007

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"Lisey's Story" is like "Bag of Bones" in reverse, with a little "Secret Window, Secret Garden" thrown in (as well as a pinch of Richard Matheson's "What Dreams May Come" and King's "Rose Madder").

But it is much more than a retread. While I don't agree with King that it's the best novel he's ever written, it is quite compelling.

"Lisey's Story" is another King tale about marriage, loss and grief. And though some of it certainly gets lugubrious -- King always had a sentimental streak to go along with the gore -- it is never less than heartfelt. With all of its ghosts and stalkers and violence and strange exotic worlds and manifestations of death itself, "Lisey's Story" is really about picking yourself up after someone you love dies and moving on with your life.

King's story is about a woman who loses her beloved husband, and the book absolutely aches at its core.

The book has a tried-and-true plot structure -- a treasure-hunt (sorry, bool-hunt) of clues left behind that slowly reveals to Lisey (and us) what in the world is going on. King very effectively teases us and paws at us as he gradually lets us in on the truth. I found the plotting in "Lisey's Story" -- which asks you to pay attention -- to be some of the best in a King book in quite a while.

Of course, the book isn't only about love and heartbreak; it also provides some frights. King's description of the longboy, and a close encounter someone has with it, was completely horrifying in a weirdly real way. It is an image I can't imagine I will ever forget.

Ironically, King said he wrote this book while suffering from pneumonia and running to the bathroom to vomit. Despite this, he really loved the book and, like I mentioned already, considers it the best thing he's ever written.

"Lisey's Story" is just the type of skewed, twisted love story you'd expect King to create -- haunting, a little maudlin, frightening, and ultimately grounding all the crazy disparate elements in a relationship that feels utterly believable.

5 people found this helpful

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