Elevation

Haven't completed a King book in awhile, not for the lack of trying. I'm currently in the middle of 10 of his works and they are all read around the 200+ mark. Some are re-reads and some for the first time. Big books have been the bane of my existence of late. I can't seem to care after a certain page count, doesn't matter how great the book is. So to pick up a short book by King was a beautiful change. Elevation a whopping 146 pages was a great read. 5 stars!

King is your favorite author you say? 5 stars is biased you say? Okay, sure I'll take the bait. Most books I've read by King get the stamp of approval from me. Not all get 5's, but a lot do. This one is getting a 5 because it's complete and I felt fulfilled at the end. This novella begins in the fictional town of Castle Rock. The one thing I absolutely love that King did was create a world for his characters to really live and breathe in. A place that we as readers can continue to come back to. We know what Castle Rock looks like and we know it's inhabitants. We also know that the supernatural flock to Castle Rock like blowflies to a corpse.

Scott Carey is our main character. He is a large man not just heavy, but tall. Over a period of time, Carey is privy to two things: one, his bathroom scale is broken, or two, he is. You see, Carey can't remember when he felt the urge to step on the scale and check out the hateful numbers. When he finally does, he is confused about what he sees. Weeks go by and it continues. The mirror shows the same man Carey has always been, large and in charge. The scale however, shows a man who is doing something that, millions of people can't...LOSE WEIGHT!

While reading this tale, it reminded me of Thinner by Richard Bachman...aka Stephen King. In Thinner, our male protagonist has a curse put on him by a roving gypsy family. A curse of revenge for the wronged death of the matriarchy. It doesn't matter how much our sad character eats he continues to whittle away. Knowing that one day he will just blink out of existence.

Elevation is a quieter tale. Our male protagonist is in awe of the situation. He goes to an old doctor friend to discuss probable reasons for the strange numbers on the scale. Instead of cursing God or people, Carey takes this weight loss as almost a spiritual journey. He is more at peace with the inevitable. We all die. There is no denying that fact. Carey is almost okay with it because the number is tangible in a way. He can count down to an approximate time. With this knowledge Carey does some pretty rewarding things with the time he has left. He makes friends, runs in a marathon, saves a business and looks at the stars. Sharing love and laughter. Wonderful meals with the people he cares about. These are things that Carey does not regret.

I liked that Carey stood up for the bigotry in his hometown. His new neighbors, a lesbian couple from the city, hoping to open up a Latin-Fusion flavor restaurant under the umbrella of "fine dining". Most of the town are against the couple, simply because they are gay. When a few gruffer men at the diner Carey is indulging in, start the hen-fest of gossip about the women, Carey speaks up. He almost gets into fisty-cuffs right there between the booths and the counter. He continues with other townfolk throughout the week when they start discriminating against the newcomers. However the louder of the two women Deirdre, takes offense. She doesn't need Carey to fight for her. No one asked him to stand up for the women. They don't need a man. They don't need him.

I also liked the fact that the characters grew. Not everyone had character development, but enough did to satisfy. All of this happened in 146 pages.

My name is Missy and I'm a Constant Reader.

This story is set in the author’s default location Castle Rock, Maine, the real place Stephen King and his imagination roams, walks and dreams, among other nefarious and sometimes macabre or horrific events. It has more of a ‘what if’ framework of a Twilight Zone episode and has only some mild horror elements.

The main characters include Scott Carey, who suffers from a mysterious illness that is causing rapid weight loss yet leaving his appearance healthy looking on the exterior. Also featured are a married lesbian couple who have opened a Mexican themed vegetarian restaurant and are facing various forms of intolerance from neighbors and random people in the community. Scott knows that eventually his weight will eventually become zero. He knows that in one way, or another, his time is limited since his physical weight eventually is headed toward a zero on the scale.

This is a novella 144 pages in length but is marketed as a novel by Scribner. I realize that the term novella is an approximation. At point of purchase at Amazon it is listed as 161 pages including additional pages which feature dedication, an ‘about the author’ section, copyright, and end pages. The term novella is generally defined by word count between roughly 17,000 words and up to 40,000 words in length. (The length of 144 pages is safely in Novella land).

I liked this story. I think it could fit inside a short fiction collection along with several other novellas and short stories. Yet Stephen already has If It Bleeds out. Ahem. Maybe Scribner just wanted to make some of the old green folding stuff, you know, the cheese, the cash, the mazuma, the bacon, the bank, the bucks, the readies, the wad, the gelt, the Jack -- the MOOLA! Nothing wrong with that, but if you pay for a double cheeseburger and get a hamburger – you just got ‘Hamburgled’! I think everyone who bought “Elevation” in Kindle should get a coupon for a few dollars off any other Stephen King book in his catalog or a pre-order.

I really love the shout out to Richard Matheson in the dedication.

The context of the story is contemporary. I am directly implying this feeling of doom and gloom gripping the world since 9/11 and 2015. Hopeless exhaustion in the face of brutal stupidity, overly PC, judgmental and perverse levels of racial, religious, ideologue-driven attacks and intolerance, gun violence and including homophobia -- not seen in the USA for 70 years. Even truth, itself, and our Constitution and voting rights are under attack. It’s wearing everyone down.

Some people ARE a challenge to be a good neighbor, a good friend. Even to simply meet someone and talk nowadays is challenging. What topics are safe and will not activate the PC police or the language police, or left-wing or right-wing ire? I mean a simple, “Looks like rain, doesn’t it?” could turn into a screaming match about if global warming is real – or, not? Likewise, you, yourself, might knowingly or unknowingly seem that way to strangers.

It does matter what we say, and it does matter what we do, and we all have a limited amount of time on this world. The concepts of this story are rooted in the real world until something fantastical occurs.

There is a smattering of Richard Matheson here and Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, and the aforementioned Rod Serling. The tone and style are adult in nature. What is cool about this story is that I think anyone pre-teens and older could enjoy this book.

Stephen King rarely disappoints. In fact, some of his books that I avoided when they were issued, later on I thoroughly enjoyed. He wrote several stinkers (I won’t friggin’ list them) this is not one of them. And the list is brief. Would it piss you off if I listed them? hahaha

About once a decade, Stephen King breaks from his usual mix of novels and short story collections to release a quartet of novellas, and the results are often some of his most interesting work. There's the break from horror that was Different Seasons, the brutal darkness of Full Dark, No Stars, the Vietnam trauma of Hearts in Atlantis - all of these collections give us a glimpse of King doing something different from his usual fare, and the results are often fascinating. (There's also Four Past Midnight, but that's one of King's less interesting collections by a long shot.)

I say all of this because you can't help but wonder if Elevation, the new novella from King, would work better as part of an anthology than it does on its own. Elevation is, as you'd expect from King, engaging, well-told, richly characterized, and compulsively readable. But it's also incredibly slight, and feels like a missed opportunity that might have been saved by setting up in conjunction with other pieces or shortening it down to the short story length the concept seems able to sustain.

I say all of this with the caveat that I still generally enjoyed Elevation; it's all but impossible for King to write something uninteresting, and Elevation has a great setup, as Castle Rock resident Scott Carey goes to see a doctor friend with a most unusual complaint. See, Scott is losing weight...sort of. Oh, he undeniably weighs less - that's not in question - but what is odd is that Scott's clothes don't affect his weight. Nor do the handbells he shoves in his pockets. Or the actual weight of his body. No, Scott's weight is going down steadily, no matter what the actual mass of that body might be. And at the rate it's going, Scott might not have more than a few months left before that weight hits zero - and whatever happens then can't be good, right?

All of this leads to Scott taking stock of his life and realizing that he may not have made much of a difference on this planet in his short time here, and coming to understand that maybe it's time to do something. So Scott starts trying to make peace with his neighbors, a relatively newly arrived (by small-town Maine standards, that is) lesbian couple with whom he's had some disagreements. But as Scott reaches out, he starts to see how the couple's been treated by the town around them, and how prejudice is still so much a factor in a town he thought was better than that. 

In lesser hands, Elevation could turn into either an after-school special about the importance of tolerance or a sappy story of acceptance. But King avoids that by letting all of his characters come to life, not as easy archetypes or symbols of their orientation, but as human beings who become friends. Yes, the plotting feels a little slight - more on that later - but as ever, King makes it work by turning this into a story about these people, not a story about all people.

The problem is, though, that that's about all there really is to Elevation. At King's best, he mixes those themes with the supernatural elements, letting them play off of each other in interesting ways. Here, Scott's "ailment" feels almost arbitrary, an element that wouldn't be much different than giving Scott any terminal disease and a short time left. (There's a single plot element, involving a race, that wouldn't work without it, but it's something that the story could easily move around.) And while King's intentions are good ones here, giving us a reminder of the importance of human connections and making the world a better place than we found it, King's done this message in other books, and done it better, and with more impact. Elevation feels slight because there's just not that much to it; it's a story that King would have used as part of a character's development in the background of something stronger, but he's released it on its own and expects it to satisfy. Is it a bad read? Not in the least, but like Scott Carey, it's even lighter than it looks, and that page count looks pretty light to begin with.

Lately, it seems, Amazon Customer Reviews have been experiencing a spike in reviews that are not, in the traditional sense, reviews at all. Some are Stephen King haters complaining about the price being charged for King, and other writers. Other false reviews are posted to register their umbrage at King due to his left-leaning political views.

Further, many reviewers who take pride in posting serious reviews get slammed for daring to be fans of his horror stories. Be that as it may, I will post my thoughts on his latest work, a short story that feels less new than some of his other more recent books.

At 160 pages, we get exposed to a character who's story feels just like any other main character in a SK Horror. His 'problem' is one that people of my weight think would be a blessing instead of an adversity. What is different in this story is that it becomes very un-King in the path it takes, but to say more might be seen as a spoiler, so I shall stop here.

BLUSH FACTOR: In case you're wondering, the writing does include some eff-words, so you probably won't want to read it to your children or prayer group, unless you are skilled at skipping over the moderate number of profanities.

THE WRITING & EDITING: Professional quality in terms of mechanics. Insofar as the story, though, this is quite tame, especially for King. The feel of this story reminds me of the stories King wrote for the iPad and for the Kindle, except that this one is oriented more towards the dissension prevailing across the American political spectrum.

BOTTOM LINE

Despite my favorable disposition towards the author, and his political ideology, which I share, the lack of originality in the tale has me less impressed than I expected. I still love his writing and will continue to fork over my money eagerly.

Three stars out of five.

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