Lisey’s Story - who would have expected this tale to come from the word processor of Stephen King? King of the boogies and master of the bi-yearly fright fest? I recall him saying once in an interview that he was the ‘fast food of fiction’. He certainly has been that.

With Lisey’s Story however, we have a novel which hints at a section of King's mind that isn’t all gobbledy-gooks chasing kids, mad dogs and monstrous motorcars. This story seems to move away from those things. Almost.

Yes, there’s the weird words, the invented slang, things like bools and bad gunky, as well as the baby-talk terms that can get a bit tiresome in the beginning, but after a few hours they quickly become a part of your thought processes too. There’s the New England colloquial expressions of course; that has always been a part of the King novel du jour, but these are suited to our heroine now, since she resides in Castle County, Maine.

This time around, King has dared to drop his own preoccupation of past tales and set out on a literary composition of Lisey’s preoccupation of her own past. This is a multidimensional story of grief and love, of a woman surviving fame and dysfunctional families. As I read on, I felt I was peeling the layers away from a colorful onion and finding another story of a different color beneath the preceding ones, stories both mesmerizing and honest. Perhaps even King's most honest book to date.

Lisey’s Story is the story of Lisa Debusher Landon, 50-year-old widow of National Book award and Pulitzer prize-winning author Scott Landon, who, while clearing out her dead husband's writings from his work space two years after his death finds herself understanding for the very first time who he really was. He has left clues behind for her to discover. Clues about a ‘place’ called Boo’ya Moon, a lavender-scented parallel world of sorts. She learns this is the place Scott and his brother escaped to while growing up with their monstrous father in rural Pennsylvania. A place where Scott eventually takes his brother to - a brother driven to catatonia and worse.