Firestarter -- Stephen King
Holy fuck, did it really take me this long to read a Stephen King novel? I just managed to finish it a couple of days ago, and I picked it up--a long time ago. An embarrassingly long time ago. E's brother was reading it in the bathroom, I flipped through it and realized it had been a long time since I had read it, and I didn't remember it at all, and the language caught me the way it always does in Stephen King novels. It drives me a little nuts--there's something there. There's a talent, there.
The guy can write, fluidly, and he nails the regionalisms and he has good, big ideas--but there's also something missing, that I can't nail down, which gets worse with every book out. His early books, when he's not important enough yet to demand he not be edited, he comes close to that ephemeral something that almost makes him brilliant, though he never quite reaches it. A depth, a subtlety, something. I don't know. But Firestarter started out well, and kind of fell apart in the end without any of the characters achieving any kind of substance or nuance and the storyline never quite came together, and it made me sad, the way his books always do. Maybe that's why it took me so long to read this. That, and the internet is shiny.
The guy can write, fluidly, and he nails the regionalisms and he has good, big ideas--but there's also something missing, that I can't nail down, which gets worse with every book out. His early books, when he's not important enough yet to demand he not be edited, he comes close to that ephemeral something that almost makes him brilliant, though he never quite reaches it. A depth, a subtlety, something. I don't know. But Firestarter started out well, and kind of fell apart in the end without any of the characters achieving any kind of substance or nuance and the storyline never quite came together, and it made me sad, the way his books always do. Maybe that's why it took me so long to read this. That, and the internet is shiny.
