Helpful Score: 2
Love's Company, January 24, 2006
Reviewer: sandalista
I divorced Mr. King in 1990 or 1991. About 100 pages into his doorstop du jour, The Dark Half, I concluded that his critics are right: life's too short and many King novels ('salami,' he called them) are much too long. Breaking up was hard to do because his short & almost flawless novel Misery had seduced me.
Misery is Scheherazade with an eponymous hog and a butane torch. Misery is a number-one fan club and the Annie Wilkes Travelers' Aide Society. Misery, above all, is Annie Wilkes with the butane torch and an axe.
It was said, before Misery, that the most horrifying element of King's horror novels was the portrait of Stephen King on the dust jackets of the novels. Annie Wilkes changed that. Neither a killer Plymouth nor a Tommyknocking telekinetic prom queen, Nurse Wilkes is ultimate horror: she's someone like someone we might know. Although she wears a vampire cross in the ridiculous Kathy Bates movie, King's Annie Wilkes is human and utterly helpful, joined in mysterious union with someone like someone we might become, someone almost utterly helpless. Helplessness, not vampires or Micmac monsters or killer cars, is our deepest secret fear. Although he doesn't understand Colorado winters, Stephen King understands the horror of helplessness, a heart of darkness darker than death.
Our divorce is final, but I still go back sometimes to the creative destruction of Mr. King's Blowtorch Annie or to the Apt Pupil, just to remember what might have been, two decades ago, before Salami was King.
Reviewer: sandalista
I divorced Mr. King in 1990 or 1991. About 100 pages into his doorstop du jour, The Dark Half, I concluded that his critics are right: life's too short and many King novels ('salami,' he called them) are much too long. Breaking up was hard to do because his short & almost flawless novel Misery had seduced me.
Misery is Scheherazade with an eponymous hog and a butane torch. Misery is a number-one fan club and the Annie Wilkes Travelers' Aide Society. Misery, above all, is Annie Wilkes with the butane torch and an axe.
It was said, before Misery, that the most horrifying element of King's horror novels was the portrait of Stephen King on the dust jackets of the novels. Annie Wilkes changed that. Neither a killer Plymouth nor a Tommyknocking telekinetic prom queen, Nurse Wilkes is ultimate horror: she's someone like someone we might know. Although she wears a vampire cross in the ridiculous Kathy Bates movie, King's Annie Wilkes is human and utterly helpful, joined in mysterious union with someone like someone we might become, someone almost utterly helpless. Helplessness, not vampires or Micmac monsters or killer cars, is our deepest secret fear. Although he doesn't understand Colorado winters, Stephen King understands the horror of helplessness, a heart of darkness darker than death.
Our divorce is final, but I still go back sometimes to the creative destruction of Mr. King's Blowtorch Annie or to the Apt Pupil, just to remember what might have been, two decades ago, before Salami was King.
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