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rynlingThe new Stephen King novel is good. It is so good. What right does it have to be so good.
The premise is that there is a boy who can see ghosts. Ghosts linger near their site of death for a day or two. They’re super chill, and they always tell the truth. This is interesting, but it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that the boy lives in New York City with his literary agent mom, who is having serious financial trouble due to the 2008 market crash and her brother’s medical bills. She’s also developing a problem with alcohol, which is enabled by her girlfriend, who is a cop. All the ghost stuff is incidental to what the reader actually cares about, which is whether this three-person family is going to be okay.
Every sentence is perfect, and there is not a word out of place. The chapters are short and neatly structured. The writing invites you in, and the next thing you know you’re a third of the way through the book. It’s like a one-to-one psychic transmission of story. Goddamn.
At a certain point I realized that, as a writer, I am never going to be Margaret Atwood, mainly because I have zero sense of duty to literary fiction as a genre or to society in general. But maybe, if I put in the work, I can try to aspire to the level of Stephen King.
The premise is that there is a boy who can see ghosts. Ghosts linger near their site of death for a day or two. They’re super chill, and they always tell the truth. This is interesting, but it doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that the boy lives in New York City with his literary agent mom, who is having serious financial trouble due to the 2008 market crash and her brother’s medical bills. She’s also developing a problem with alcohol, which is enabled by her girlfriend, who is a cop. All the ghost stuff is incidental to what the reader actually cares about, which is whether this three-person family is going to be okay.
Every sentence is perfect, and there is not a word out of place. The chapters are short and neatly structured. The writing invites you in, and the next thing you know you’re a third of the way through the book. It’s like a one-to-one psychic transmission of story. Goddamn.
At a certain point I realized that, as a writer, I am never going to be Margaret Atwood, mainly because I have zero sense of duty to literary fiction as a genre or to society in general. But maybe, if I put in the work, I can try to aspire to the level of Stephen King.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-03 02:15 pm (UTC)One of my professors once commented he would never deign to read a Stephen King book, not even if King wrote appropriately "literary" fiction, and went on a tangent about how embarrassing it would be to have a King book on his shelf and he would have to surreptitiously read it in the parking garage in his car, and it was an amusing bit as told and I liked this professor a lot but that was when I started to realize English literature academics were full of horseshit, and while my fellows were sipping the koolaid I ended up pouring mine into a plant and my decision not to get an MFA can probably be traced to that lecture, so thanks Dr. S---- you saved me a lot of time and money and trouble, and in gratitude I made solemn oath that when I get some pulp published I'm going to mail it to him with a note that says if he doesn't read it and respond favorably I will send a Stephen King book to his office every month until he retires, and thankfully he isn't retired or dead yet but the lord works in mysterious ways and that's an amazing threat to hold onto all these years so I REALLY need to start moving this along.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-11 02:52 pm (UTC)The mental image of your old professor hiding out in his car to read Stephen King novels is golden, by the way. I've been thinking about which of King's books you would send him first should you need to invoke your curse, and I'm leaning toward The Tommyknockers. Not only is the vintage hardcover dirt cheap, but it's something a masterpiece in its own horrible and shitty way. Never has there been such a true account of the experience of writing under the influence of cocaine without the word "cocaine" being used even once. Classic.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-14 12:29 pm (UTC)- With lots of hard work you can write and sell tons of stories without outlines
- Most of the books will have structural issues
- But it ends up not mattering too much as long as you stay away from drugs
- Stay away from drugs
no subject
Date: 2021-03-17 06:18 pm (UTC)