Re: Books by Stephen King
Lack of sleep means I've just read two more stories, so before answering Jayde and Guitarman's comments, I'll go through my thoughts on those.
Also, bare in mind these stories were read at about two AM, which is in fairness likely the right time to read stephen King, though also bare in mind they were read whilst doing a lot of washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen and other such domestic tasks which tend to get done at this point in time when I can't sleep, which is definitely not! the right thing to do whilst reading Stephen King, though given how much some things I've read whilst doing housework have creeped me out previously, I do submit my ability to multitask is pretty good .
Harvey's dream: Okay this one suffered a little from king trying too hard to make the story scary before we got to the actually scary bit, then not have the scary bit really continue to become scary enough. All of the talk of Janet's marriage and things going wrong which then get steam rolered by her husbands possibly prophetic dream didn't really build a scary atmosphere, especially with the implication that she had developed a little contempt for her husbantd. Then again, this is something King seems to have a problem with which comes up in a lot of his stories, very few of his characters can actually be nice, or even love each other successfully.
Of course, the concept of one or other daughter possibly being killed in a drunk car crash is a nasty enough one, but the shock never really registered to me as well as it should've done, indeed I thought sorry right number was a much better executed example of this type of premise, even if it was written as a screen play.
Rest stop: Okay I'll admit my thoughts on this one changed rather drastically as I was reading it.
My first thought, when king was talking of the author who wrote gritty suspense novels about a hired killer during the summer was that we were in for a retread of the dark half. My second thought, when we over hear the scuzbag beating his wife was that King was overdoing a little, especially with the author's less than nice feelings about domestic abuse (his joke about spousal abuse occuring because "they just don't listen" was just plane tasteless).
then however something happened, i remembered an incident in 2016 when we were still living in our small flat.
My downstairs neighbour was a lady in her fifties who'd had previously had a long relationship with a seemingly decent guy, which I gathered between the lines ended badly.
then however we saw several other guys over a short space of time. This culminated in an incident when my lady and I were woken at 5 AM by shouting and massive amounts of banging from below.
We at first assumed it was a party (my downstairs neighbor had many rather loud parties with her friends), however this was different.
There were sounds of breaking glass and smashing wood and definitely sounds of someone getting hit. My downstairs neighbor was sobbing and screaming for the guy to "just go." we couldn't exactly hear his half of the conversation but "no," and "fuck" came into it a lot.
So what do we do? Were I able to see I might have gone down there to sort things out, but I knew physical intervention would likely be a bad idea. In the end we settled on hammering on the floor, shouting "what's going on down there" and then calling 999.
Scummy guy left shortly after, before the police arrived, however when the police turned up, I went downstairs with my lady, my downstairs neighbor hugged me, then told the police she was alright, whereupon the wonderfully straight forward Jordy copper said:
"well if your alright, why is there blood on your face?"
In the end we never saw scummy guy again, indeed it wouldn't have surprised me if my neighbor got a restraining order, though I wasn't asked to witness or anything.
Later said neighbor also wrote complaining letters to the council about my guide dog's dog hair (yeah gratittude), but hay.
the point of all this, is that suddenly, this story of what sounded like a rather overthetop and stylised version of domestic abuse, down to the woman being pregnant and the man's rather typical "you looked as if you were attracted to some other guy" spiel, took on a new meaning, especially with the writer trying to decide what exactly to do about it.
does this mean the situation wasn't a bit cliche? I'm not sure, maybe it was a realistic response to a cliche situation (tasteless jokes aside), either way it did strike a cord with me.
So, the ending and seeing the bullying get his comeuppance at the hands of the writer's nastier alter ego was satisfying, though I do wish the writer had been less of an arse hole to the woman, or at least hadn't continued to be contemptuous towards her, his "move your dumb arse" comment and then observing that she "obeyed because she understood" didn't exactly make him pleasant, though not that his original persona had exactly been a nice guy to begin with.
So, not a bad story, one with disturbing realism, but a character who was a bit of a douche.
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