One New York Life

Every single night
The same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight

Still I always feel
This strange estrangement
Nothing here is real
Nothing here is right

[...]

Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavor?

I don’t want to be
Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see if this is really me
And I just want to be alive

—-

Joss Whedon… expressing it better than me.. Stupid work.

Big congratulations to Vote For the Worst for having a huge week as one of the front-runners were knocked off Idol this week while a girl who forgot the words and forced the band to start over didn’t even make it into the bottom 3.

In case you missed it, Dave was cool enough to comment on my somewhat critical post and gets it… which is great. It appears I fell for the character (something which you’d think I’d be able to see through by now). It was amusing to listen to Randy complain that the show “turned into something of a popularity contest this week”. As if it’s ever actually been anything but. The Girl and I have this argument constantly. She insists it’s a singing competition. I insist (correctly) that (conservatively) 95% of the people watching the show wouldn’t know an out of tune note if it bashed them in the face. Most of them are voting on who’s cute or who they like the best. The show’s continuous insistence that they’re a singing competition while opening up the voting to a viewership made up of people who don’t know an A from a C is stupid.

Anyway, check it out… it’s like Christmas over there.

I am a an admitted Stephen King fan-boy going back to high school. I read IT back in seventh grade and, in retrospect, I’m kinda shocked my high school library had it. Not that I’m real up to what goes on in high school these days but it seems that a book with some of the coarsest language I’ve read in any King book along with the fact that the last few chapters contain a somewhat graphic description of a 12-year-old girl getting gangbanged by six 11- to 13-year-old guys does not seem like something good Godfearin’ folks would want in their middle or high school library.

Regardless, I read it and it remains one of my top 3 books of all time… so much so that I re-undertake the 1,100 pages every three or four years or so. When I saw a few years back that King was semi-unretiring after his self-imposed, post-Dark Tower retirement, I was excited. After reading Cell (which got an unfair rep for having a shitty ending… get an imagination people), I was more excited. It seemed like he was ready to ride in to the twilight writing the type of books that got him there in the first place.

Of course, the Lisey’s Story came out… which was a totally different direction than Cell. And now Duma Key kind of continues Lisey’s Story’s direction.

The Good

• Getting a story completely out of New England was a nice change of pace. The New England stories are getting almost TOO self-referential. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t the rest of the world kinda notice all the f*cked up, supernatural stuff going on in that part of the country? There are entire shows dedicated to finding out if supernatural stuff exists. Someone’s eventually going to notice the occassional armageddon that happens in Maine, right?
• This seems to be one of the occassional personal books that King writes. I’m not sure if I can explain it to someone who’s not a King reader, but every few years he puts out a book where the central character is very obviously an exaggeration of himself. Bag of Bones was one of these… I think IT was, too in some ways. This is one of these. I always like these books a little more than the random cast-off horror stories.
• Strangely, I didn’t hate this book by any means but I’m having a terrible time coming up with bullets for this section.

The Bad

• Since Cell, this is the 2nd book in King’s post-accident/Dark Tower career. It is now the second in a row where his themes have become very depressing. Maybe it’s just a natural progression for a guy who’s crested into the 2nd half of his life and who probably has death on his mind more often; but death has become a very prevalent theme in his books… People used to die in his books, but the death usually served a purpose of some sort – and very rarely were the deaths as depressing as they were now. Lisey’s Story is an entire book written about a widowed wife left behind by a husband who died too soon. This book has characters die with the main character having left issues with them unresolved. I know that’s how real death works sometimes, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing to read about.
• As King gets richer and richer and becomes farther removed from being an everyday dude, his characters become harder and harder to relate to. The main character in this book is a multi-millionaire who built a successful company and just has enough money such that he never has anything left to worry about and can just cruise down to Florida and rent a house on the Gulf for a year. He also has started to drop his political beliefs into his books more and more often. Yes, I get it. You went from young, idealistic liberal, skipped the step where you had to struggle and work for a soulless company and pay taxes to people who are too lazy to work, went right to uber-rich and now you think we should all pay as much in tax as you and everyone who thinks otherwise is a soulless ass. You hate Bush. We get it. (Aside: Can we stop with the Bush thing? It’s been almost eight years now. There’s nothing left to say that hasn’t already been said by everyone a billion times. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have both made careers on it. Enough already). Much like in music, I respect the guy’s opinion but I really don’t need it in my horror fiction, thanks. Reading and sports are distinctly my escape from the politics nonsense.
• I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad… but I went with bad. This might be the first book I’ve ever read where I found myself completely indifferent to the main character in every possible way. The book was written from the first person with his time on Duma Key being four years removed from when he was writing the memoir. I just found Edgar Freemantle completely uninteresting in any way. I felt bad for him as a guy whose life fell apart because he was unfortunate enough to be the victim of a horrible accident… but it also makes me wonder about his decisions in the first place. I mean, he married a woman who leaves him when he’s recovering from this horrible accident that scrambles his brain for a year. Almost every instance where this woman appears defines her as a complete shrew who was obviously cheating on him while he was laid up in the accident. In the divorce, he just gives her 60% of the contracting company that he built from scratch. I understand the desire to just put stuff behind you, but he just seems like a pushover to the point he’s almost pathetic.

The Rest

King’s books are taking on a consistent feel since his Post Dark Tower books. If I’m being honest, the theme probably started in the final three Dark Tower books. They are heavilly laden with death, sadness, loss, and how people deal with them with a bit of random sci-fi filtered in. While I’m sure critics love this, it leaves me feeling like I’m not reading a King book. I don’t know that I need to read 600 page epics to tell me that getting old sucks. I’m pretty sure I already knew that.

I would probably be looking forward to the Dark Tower comics if I actually read comics anymore. I can’t even get myself to go get the Season 8 Buffy comics.

Mild recommendation.