Be Afraid: Stephen King Is in Love

Receiving a love letter from Stephen King has to be among life's more terrifying experiences. And so, in reading Lisey's Story, King's new romantic horror novel, one can't help but feel for Tabitha, the author's wife in real life. Little girls don't typically dream about someday receiving proclamations of love from the King of Horror, and Lisey's Story is precisely that.

Of course, that comes with the assumption of autobiography in King's works, though Lisey's Story does nothing to contradict that idea. Following the perspective of Lisey (whose name is mercifully explained as rhyming with "CeeCee" within the first paragraph), the wife of renowned, Maine-based author Scott Landon, the novel opens two years after Scott's death and follows Lisey's struggle to accept-and understand-her famous husband's life and death.

By eliminating Scott as the protagonist, King has removed his closest natural ally-he limits and challenges himself to find a new voice separate from his usual reliance on the White Male Author lead character. He captures Lisey adoringly, if not a bit gratuitously at times, and it's a very sweet, endearing portrait. However, the novel still remains true to King's past works, and a bitter, disturbing taste is revealed behind the sugar.

Parts of the book are actually horrifying (Lisey spends the better half of the novel mutilated-the actual event is passed over with chilling brevity, but the aftermath is well-documented) and nearly all of it is at least unsettling. Lisey battles wormlike monsters, painful memories of her husband and his childhood, and possibly scariest of all, a crazed Southern stalker who is also a fanatic admirer of Scott. This isn't the first time King has used this villain: the John Shooter character in Secret Window, Secret Garden had very similar motivations and cadence. But King's characters and locations do overlap from story to story, with Maine serving as his Yoknapatawpha County, which helps solidify Lisey's Story as a true part of his collection.

There's a sort of colloquial elegance to King's writing. He has a simple, common way of explanation that is matter-of-fact, yet also filled with incomprehensible idioms. It's like someone speaking English with a deep accent: the language is the same, but the little differences make it seem foreign.

The peculiar lexicon itself becomes a character, and a breathing, animated one at that. Instead of a mountain resort or a Plymouth Fury, here King has given life to language. Each relationship is characterized by its own particular, ever-evolving tongue. Lisey and her sisters speak with a strong influence from the superstitious farm lingo of their parents; Scott's family must create words to describe the strange world they inhabit; Scott and Lisey rely heavily on silly mispronunciations and inside jokes. Their "interior language," as Lisey calls it, is her last connection to her late husband, but then again, "what good is ... a special language if there's no one to talk to?"

Luckily for her, Scott isn't altogether missing. In fact, he's just about as prominent as Lisey, despite the significant handicap caused by his death. Scott pops into Lisey's mind fairly often, finishing her sentences and spitting retorts at her enemies when she cannot. His speech was so predictable to her and distinctive in life that she can now recreate it in his absence, even down to mid-sentence interruptions. The reader may begin to question her sanity, or just as easily attribute it to a part of her personal grieving process.

Lisey and Scott's secret language emphasizes their bond, and King seems to think that shared knowledge, and especially shared language, is the pinnacle of intimacy. Lisey's casual repetition of seemingly nonsensical phrases like "bool," "yum-yum tree," and "the thing with the endless piebald side" builds suspense while also excluding the reader. The couple lived-and continues to live, to a certain degree-an introverted, dependent lifestyle, and the reader is intruding on their private world.

Their marriage was defined by their interaction with language, which exemplified the power distribution in their relationship. While Scott was a personable, charming man, he was also obsessive and controlling, though in the nicest way possible. Lisey notes that nearly all of their interior language was supplied by him; her lone offering-"shite"-isn't even an original creation, but passed on from her father. It seems that language here is a genetic quality, or perhaps just a communicable disease. Either way, it's a central part of everyday life, and significantly more active in Lisey's.

Given King's frank, natural style, and his flair for the fantastic, it's a wonder he's never taken to writing romance novels before. Perhaps the paperbacks' faithful readers just aren't ready for anything like Lisey's Story-which is, to use the simplest and most appropriate definition, a love story that only Stephen King could write.