Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B
At this point in his career, Stephen King has nothing else to prove. As a "popular" author, King gets very little credit for just how versatile and innovative of a writer he is — though after his dozens and dozens of novels, he can be forgiven for sticking to "competent, consistent but unadventurous," which is how I would describe this new collection of four novellas. While King doesn't attempt to dazzle with creativity, his mastery of the short form is evident.
Did you like The Shawshank Redemption? How about Rob Reiner's classic coming-of-age tale, Stand By Me? Add in a slightly less well-known film, Apt Pupil, and you have the three movies based on three of the four novellas in Different Seasons, one of King's earlier novella collections. Not a bad track record. Though the nine-billion page The Stand is possibly King's single best work, he's at his most consistent with the medium-length style. King's major flaws are less grating in his shorter fiction, and he makes efforts to subdue them altogether in Full Dark, No Stars, mostly by toning down the ambition. It works, to some extent — the four stories here are all perfectly competent and enjoyable to read, despite their grim, off-putting subject matter. But the darkness running throughout these tales mostly just hides the fact that there's little drama or tension. The good guys (actually, good women, so far as it applies here) don't have too much trouble resolving their hideous problems, and the simplified conclusions are just a little too convenient. It's not a major blow, but the material in Full Dark is just not as memorable as anything in Different Seasons, making this a satisfying read, but far from essential.
The best tale here is the first one, "1922," and the closest the collection comes to classic horror. Each of these stories is about murder, to some extent, and "1922" deals with the subject most directly, by dropping us into a first-person account of a Kansas farmer who felt he had no choice but to kill his wife. King gets a lot of mileage out of the rustic countryside atmosphere, helping the surreal ending stick its landing, and the story takes a few interesting turns along the way. "Big Driver" — your basic "Hey lady, don't take that deserted country road shortcut home, you might blow a tire and run into some creepy yokel!" tale — is perhaps the darkest of these stories, but its bleak subject matter makes its convenient, all-too-easy ending feel mostly justified. "Fair Extension," a "make a deal with the devil to cure your cancer" story, is short, simple, and gleefully perverse — and makes its satirical simplicity work for it, by simply leaving off just when you think King would be forced to give the plot another twist. Much like "Big Driver," "A Good Marriage" ends a little too conveniently, but its simple intentions make for an interesting psychological experiment. It's an earnest examination of all the little things one knows about a person after years of intimacy, and the way larger, darker truths can still slip through the cracks.
Though everything works well enough, nothing works itself into your mind the way the best King stories do. Some of his more annoying writing habits pop up too often — King is excellent at writing about average people, and his characters are often more fully-fleshed than those of most literary darlings, but he still relies far too much on hokey inner-monologues and witticisms. King's characters all think in goofy puns and folky nonsense-phrases that they just love to repeat to themselves. But aside from that, King remains a fluid, clever writer, and unlike the majority of his peers, remains impressively self-aware of his strengths and limitations even after decades of dominating sales charts.
No comments:
Post a Comment