Stephen King

Firstly - I'm not done with my great repost, I'm just trying to get straight in my head what I want to say about after. There's a lot to say, and hopefully Lizzy will stop laughing at me for talking to myself at work quite so much when she reads it.

But I want to get on to the subject at hand, so to speak. I thought, if I didn't blog, a few entries ago that I'd already noticed I've mainly talked about female writers. I guess as a female I'm going to naturally gravitate to books written by other women, as I'll have a better understanding of their experiences etc.

But I read a Stephen King pretty young. Not one of his famous pieces, like The Shining. I can't even remember the name of it. It was an adult book I got out the library on my young adult account (I think they'd seen me in the library enough to know I'd probably exhausted all the other remotely interesting books), 22 short stories about love. God, I didn't know what I was taking out, and nor did the library (ahem, I was 14 at the time. One certain story got passed around my high school the two weeks I had that book, and everyone thought I was a pervert for it. I only showed them because someone had torn out a page and I was outraged. Never mind that it was a story about this woman who recieved this cursed locket and started having erotic dreams. She'd had a really pervy, descriptive one about her psychologist on the page next to the one torn out, hence why they made a big deal. I wanted to know the secret of the locket, but no, some other pervert wanted to keep it for themselves. I said in my last entry I read stuff way too mature for me ...) Anyway, the first story was a Stephen King.

It was weird. It was about this woman who was meeting her husband in a restaurant to announce she wanted a divorce, and it turned out she was having an affair with the head chef of this restaurant. When he saw the husband, he chased after him with a butchers knife. They fought, and the chef's intestines end up hanging out of his stomach yet he's still running after the husband like he's an olympic athelete. I read it in a state of disbelief.

A couple of years ago, I went through a phase of buying Stephen King, thinking I'd read them all and could face adult horror books the way I had Goosebumps and Point Horror as a kid. The book I got was called The Game, I believe. This couple go away to a lake for a romantic weekend, and he's into bondage so locks her to the bed with his handcuffs he bought off the police, and she decides suddenly she doesn't want to sleep with him so kicks him, winds him, and he falls into something behind him and dies.

It was another state-of-disbelief book. She's been locked up an hour or so, but is dying of dehydration? And a mongrel somehow enters the house, and finds the husband rotting and decaying and eats him in front of the wife. Which would be gross and set my teeth on edge and make my skin crawl but as I'm reading (and this is halfway through the book because King loves his detail) I'm thinking 'she's not been in this position a night. Rigamortis hasn't even set in, how the hell's he rotting? So how the hell would the dog smell him and think he was food?' I never finished that book. I couldn't, whatever happened I'd be criticising too.

I can see how King did that though, I mean, it takes a good few months to write a book, for me anyway. Your time scale isn't always the same as your characters. I find writing disjointedly actually helps my time flow. But surely he checked, and his editor read through and suggested maybe adding in a passing of some days to make her thirst and his state of death a little more realistic?

I'm going to be an editor's nightmare myself, aren't I? I just ... I don't get the glamour of Stephen King. I loved The Shining as the film, though I've not read the book ... but Stephen King to Horror is what Stephenie Meyer is to Vampires, in my opinion. He's got all the hype for it, but personally, I can pick too many holes.

Anyway ... so after I finished Shopaholic Ties The Knot (yeah, I started reading that one too) I'm going to crack on with the rest of On The Road. It's about time.