Non-endings (Stephen King)

I’VE really no right to criticise, since I for sure couldn’t do any better, but I see it a bit like the art of appreciating a good wine. I love wine and know enough to understand when I am drinking a good or even excellent example of its kind or when I’m making do with a drop that is simply mediocre or okay. My ability, though, to differentiate between a wine of quality and one that is less than perfect does not mean I am able to make wine. Nor would I ever pretend to possess anything like sufficient knowledge of how it’s done to think I would.

Similarly I am able to distinguish between good and bad writing, even though I know I cannot match it or outshine it. Over the last few months I have become familiar with the work of Stephen King. I have already talked about it at length and said how both the man and his style of writing intrigue me. The reasons for my fascination aren’t entirely clear to me since I am no friend of horror or science fiction writing, but King’s no nonsense, business like approach appeals to me. He gets the story told in a matter of fact way, without unnecessary frills or embellishments and yet he still manages to draw the reader into an unputdownable reading experience which rightly has made him his name.

A couple of days ago I finished reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I think I read the book once before, perhaps soon after it was published, but I wanted to refresh my memory of the story, since it falls more into the category of a thriller than a horror story.

The book is a great introduction to Stephen King. Nothing too horrific at all, just a gripping good yarn. It has only one main character, nine year old Tricia McFarland, who becomes lost in the woods between Maine and New Hampshire. With no other characters to divert, occupy the reader’s attention or add colour and depth, the tale should by rights feel a bit flat and disappointing. Miraculously and against the odds, however, it works brilliantly and the story is a real page turner - until the end, that is. To me it felt as though King’s attention had suddenly been diverted from his writing or he found he had some place else to be and needed to finish off in a hurry. There was no final twist in the tail which I would have expected from a writer of King’s calibre. Farmer finds child, saves her from brown bear about to attack her. Child wakes up in hospital surrounded by her family, relieved she is alive and safe following her ordeal of more than a week in the woods on her own.

Is that it, I wondered. Could King really be so predictable? It would seem so. I felt let down and overcome with a strange sense of emptiness when I closed the book. Perhaps he had become bored with his own story or maybe he was battling against the deadline his publisher set him. No doubt there is another story there entirely. Personally I love accounts of how books came to be written. Unfortunately, not many authors seem to choose to talk about the when and whys of their work.

I am about to start reading Nightshift, one of King’s collection of short stories. I am curious now to find out about how he deals with the endings in those.

At the moment I am trying to recall when there have been other occasions on which I have been disappointed by the way a book ended. I expect there will be a Part II to Non-endings at some point when I have had time to think about some of the books I’ve read over the last two decades or so.

22/08/06