★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This is my sixth Stephen King book I’ve finished over the past month.
Lisey’s Story started slowly and was confusing at times with so many flashbacks (including flashbacks within flashbacks, which can’t be easy to pull off as a writer). While there is a supernatural element, the book centers on rebounding from grief, in this case, the death of Lisey’s husband.
I caught myself wondering how King could write so poignantly about grief when he hasn’t lost his wife, but he’s obviously lost someone close to him to write about grief this way.
Highlights
Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.
And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.
She was frightened because she was realizing—too late, too late—that what’s done can’t be undone, and what’s remembered must somehow be lived with ever after.