This could have been a news report - "Man reads Steven King Novel and Survives." I did both just recently. Stephen King, the maker of malevolent cars and wicked school girls with powers, vehicles attacking man and iconographic symbolism may not be great literature but he succeeds in doing what he sets out to do most of the time – he entertains.
I have read King and other pop writers right there in River City on the Hudson and now south of the border. I not only read them but sometimes I liked them. I have even read Koontz and Clancy, mysteries and science-fiction galore. There is a place and time or is it a place in time when they are the choice to make, comfort food for the eyes, the mind can wait for Dostoevsky.
This particular 1999 King, a slim volume, appeared at a wonderful community book sale at the shopping center next door to my motel one morning in Miami. It was a dreary motel and rainy Sunday before boarding my ship on Monday. Then people exited a van with boxes of books to sell me after all those hours in fine bookstores weighted down by the mass of high prices.
The Stephen King I curled up on my couch with was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The story of a charming girl with a fistful of common sense as we find out. Her resourcefulness is perceived only after she has wandered from the path of the Appalachian Trail to find herself a little lost girl in the woods. There is a wolf, of sorts, a malevolent force that trails her and scents the innocence of small girls and is part of the dark forces of nature.
I am a firm believer in the study of first sentences of novels. They are, explained the writer, Robert Coover in a class back in college, the harbinger of the quality and direction of the work. “Call me Ismael,” wrote Melville, and swam into the collective mythology of fiction. Stephen King, for all my teasing, may create books by formula to please a mass audience but he does it with genius.
“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”
This is the first line Trisha speaks as narrator and character, little girl and protagonist, the little victim of neglect and American marital woes. Trisha is young and wastes no time finding her problem and sets the path of the book through the woods of words and the forests of The Appalachians. “All because I needed to pee...”
Article comments
1 - Ginger
Howard, I have not yet read the King book as, like yourself, I am not a fan, usually favoring Clive Barker when needing a shot of epinephrine. But you have grabbed me with your excellent writing and so I will check out The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
Stephen can thank you. Perhaps you can pass along your excellent writings skills to him when he does?