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Time for King to abdicate

Stephen King's Lisey's Story gives Adam Mars-Jones the creeps but for all the wrong reasons

Lisey's Story

by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton £17.99, pp563

I find Stephen King's writing profoundly creepy. It makes my skin crawl. Not the stories - the writing. He may have written 40-odd books by now, but Lisey's Story gives the impression of a reverse masterclass. There is nothing in this yarn about a writer traumatised in childhood, compensated with access to an ambiguous parallel world, with half the power to appal as the zombie prose in which it is cast.

The central character is Lisey (rhymes with 'fleecy'), widow of novelist Scott Landon. She's not literary - she doesn't know the difference between 'epigram' and 'epigraph', she calls acronyms 'agronims'. When scholars pester her about her late husband's literary remains, they ask about something she hears as 'incuncabilla'. Presumably they say 'incunabula', though academics wouldn't use that word to mean either juvenilia or unfinished work. Still, the contrived malapropism gives her a nickname for their tribe - the Incunks.

If you are allergic to the folksy, the cutesy and the downright crass, stop reading now. The pages become clogged with capitalised formulas and colourless family phrases. Lisey's sister Amanda (also known as 'big sissa Manda-Bunny') indexes Scott's archives in what is immediately called Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions. The heroine has only to give a thin smile for it to become Lisey's Tornado Look. The tiniest incident seems to trigger an avalanche of commonplaces. The whole tribe is addicted to regressive slang.

You might think that Scott, as a literary man who featured on the cover of Newsweek in 1992 ('Magical Realism and the Cult of Landon'), would shy away from childishness, but not at all. It's just what he likes. He calls his writing desk 'Dumbo's Big Jumbo'. He has 'been wont' to call the master bathroom 'Il Grande Poopatorium'. He may have taught Lisey the elegant expletive 'smuck', but he himself learned to say 'shite' rather than 'shit' from Lisey's family, the Debushers. 'Well, turnabout was fair play, so Good Ma had liked to claim, though shite had been their Dad's word, as it had been Dandy Dave Debusher who would sometimes tell folks a thing was no good, so I slang it forth.' How Scott had loved that ...

The Landons' marriage was a tissue of codes and endearments. In Misery, toxic babytalk was a marker of demented repression. Here, it's just a marker of Stephen King. In an 'Author's Statement' at the end of the book, King stresses the mighty contribution made by his editor, Nan Graham. He thanks her for 'sending him out in public with my shirt tucked in and my hair combed'. Next time, she might do something about the egg on his tie. She should certainly have insisted on removing the section epigraphs from DH Lawrence. He makes his hero a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but then has him write a bestselling horror novel. This fluent crossover seems more like self-delusion than fiction. It obviously rankled with Stephen King that Kubrick's film of The Shiningwas treated with more respect than the source novel. Why doesn't he get critical respect? For much the same reason McDonald's doesn't win cordon bleu awards.

Lisey's Story is short on tension and poorly paced. There's a lot of preparation to be got through before the supernatural element arrives and by then the time-scheme has become very awkward. After a brief scene of action, the heroine has a nested set of flashbacks lasting 60 pages. It turns out she's been repressing the memory of Boo'ya Moon, as Scott called it, an alternate reality which he showed her, a sort of Gothic Disneyland resort which is home to healing waters and also ultimate terror.

It's another mistake to refer to MR James, whose effects require far more control - and concision - than Stephen King can muster. He's much more a disciple of HP Lovecraft. Readers of Lisey's Story have plenty of time to ponder the ludicrousness of Boo'ya Moon, whose healing pool also represents the unconscious creativity of all mankind. That's how Scott was able to speak so deeply to his readers - 'people stuck on airplanes between LA and Sydney ... people taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sun-porch'. That's what Pulitzers and National Book Awards are given for these days, to writers with the rare gift of offering people an alternative to jigsaw puzzles.

Scott tells Lisey about the pool. 'Sometimes the really brave fisherfolk - the Austens, the Dostoevskys, the Faulkners - even launch boats go out to where the big ones swim, but the pool is tricky.' There it is at last, what the book has so sorely lacked, an unforgettable image. Jane Austen in her best gingham sou'wester hauling in a halibut with the face of Mr Darcy.