Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight
Stephen King
7/20/2008 - 7/22/2008
LT Review: 3.5 stars

LT Review:
This is a collection of four short novels (although they are short only by King standards, each runs around 200 pages). Overall, it's quite entertaining.

The first, The Langoliers is the best of the bunch. The story of a group of passengers on an LA to Boston fight that manages to travel through time, it's suspenseful, exciting, and driven (as many of King's tales are) by fear of both supernatural and more human evils. It's 250 pages that readers like me will plow through in a single sitting.

Secret Window, Secret Garden is the basis for the recent Johnny Depp movie "Secret Window." And tells the tale of a writer accused by a stranger of stealing a story that he knows he wrote himself. While I suspected the twist ending well before I got there, I expect that at the time this was published (well before a more recent and absurdly popular tale with a similar twist) the thought would have occurred to few readers, and maybe it won't occur to you. Overall, it's good but not great.

The Library Policeman is a gripping read, and enough to make someone currently pretty deep into library fines (like yours truly) more than a little bit nervous. The characters are what makes the story work here, and they are all elegantly flawed. I have trouble when King gets too into the descriptions of his monsters, but perhaps this is because I am not much of a visual reader, but overall, I enjoyed this one very much.

The Sun Dog, the last in the collection is by far the weakest. Centered around a paranormal camera, the events of the story seem a little too random and confusing. While some of the moments and secondary characters have a wonderful textured existence, the story fell flat for me overall, and I found myself not nearly as wrapped up in the action as I was with the other three.

Overall, it's a satisfying bunch of stories, although I see no real reason why it has to be read or considered as a collection at all. All of the novellas stand independent of the others, and there is no real theme particularly connecting them. (Aside from their tendency to keep you up past midnight, by which standard we could combine a large percentage of King's work into a single monstrous volume.)

Unless you are a die hard fan, you can skip The Sun Dog. I would recommend reading The Langoliers and The Library Policeman, and Secret Window, Secret Garden is certainly worth the 150 pages for quick readers, but if plowing through it is going to take you more than an evening, your time could probably be better spent somewhere else.

Maggie Specific thoughts: **Complete with a SPOILER ALERT**
I stole this book from the basement of my house, I have no idea how long ago, but I've been lugging it around unread for quite a while now. The thing that I have finally really admitted to myself is that I very very very much enjoy reading Stephen King. Perhaps the collected works of the master of horror is a strange new pastime to pick up shortly after moving into an apartment all by myself for the first time (sounds like something that might end up in one of his stories) but I'm having fun. Thinking about it, my affection for these stories specifically, and the others that I have read and am reading more generally, goes to the base of what I want as a reader. I like to be told a story. I am reading not as some grand academic exercise (that's what the lab is for) but to be entertained, and while I see value in the literary greats, I also have started to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving an author because he tells stories that I can't help but get wrapped up in. I guess, in the end, I don't want reading to be hard, I want it to be powerful, and moving, and entertaining, but this is not work for me, this is pleasure. That attitude is something that I am just coming to terms with (as a perfectionist, I feel sometimes like perhaps it is a waste of my time to have read the complete works of say Dennis Lehane but not War and Peace, because I want to be "good" at all the things that I do), but if I really think about it, that is the thread that joins all the books and writers that I love most... plan old good story telling.

King is unashamed to admit that storytelling is basically his goal, that he's not trying to work great constructs of language, but rather to tell good tales. He accomplishes that, and I find that I like and respect him more for doing what he does, doing it well, and not trying to be something he's not. Thinking about it I think is helping me to let myself be the kind of reader that I am at my core, and I am having a most wonderful time with it.

I should note here that John Irving, who I also really love (to the point where I get a little excited thinking about all the John Irving books that I haven't read yet, like presents waiting to be opened) says something similar about his own writing in an interview included in my copy of A Widow for One Year. Irving claims that he is trying to persuade the reader emotionally, not intellectually, and that he writes "plot-driven" novels. Both Irving and King seem to think about the story in their work, think of themselves as someone setting out, by writing words on a page, to get their readers emotionally involved in the tale they are weaving. And sure, A Prayer for Owen Meaney is something very different from The Langoliers, but what they have in common is that they are both great stories with wonderful characters. Both stories that, as I read them, involved me so totally that I was most annoyed when anyone wanted me to pay attention to anything else.

So I'm going to read a bunch of Stephen King now, and then maybe some more John Irving, and I am sure a bunch of other things, with some non-fiction thrown in. And if I never get to Finnegan's Wake... well, I'm just not going to feel bad about that anymore.

As an aside, the "more recent and absurdly popular tale" that I am referring to in the review of Secret Window, Secret Garden is, of course, Fight Club. And knowing that should tell you how the whole thing ends. Right.