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Two years after her famous husband’s death, Lisey Landon still hasn’t cleaned out the office where he wrote his best selling novels in the last years of their life together. Finally, she makes a start, but she’s plagued with the chilly notion that her dead husband wants her to find something, and she has to go back to Boo’ya Moon—that wonderfully scary place where we all go down to the pool and drink of life, but which we never visit at night, when the laughers come out, the long boy lurks in the Fairy Forest, and things turn to poison.
When Lisey’s life is threatened by the crazy goon of a man wanting Scott Landon’s inventory of books and unpublished manuscripts, she finds she has to return to Boo’ya Moon to bring back her sister, who has fallen into a catatonic state in this life but who sits and stares at the ship called Holley Hock in Boo’ya Moon, unable to tear herself away without help. Lisey needs her sister’s help to get rid of the psycho whom she knows will kill her before the police can save her.
Though Boo’ya Moon is mostly dangerous at night, it can still be dangerous during the day. Once you get to the pool, where it’s safe from the things in the forest, you might not want to leave. Slowly, Lisey is pulled into the madness of good bools (a good surprise), blood-bools (a bad surprise involving bloodshed), and bad-gunky that had made up her husband’s life. Scott has left her a good bool, but in order to get to it, she has a blood-bool coming and a lot of bad-gunky to go through.
It’s no doubt that Stephen King has a weird imagination—not to mention a knack for making up odd words and a strange fixation on other worlds. Though I didn’t find his characters in Lisey’s Story to be as memorable as they usual are, Boo’ya Moon sure won’t leave my mind anytime soon. It’s a place to escape to when life just doesn’t fit, but something’s not quite right about it. It’s not meant to be used as a permanent solution to a horrific life, no matter how tempting it might be. But, oh, it’s terribly fascinating!
Mr. King’s habit of stopping a scene mid-sentence and then sort of picking it back up in the next scene can get a little distracting and irritating, as can his tendency to sandwich a character’s thoughts between two sentence halves. But, other than that, Lisey’s Story is a darn good read. And King leaves us with an important message: that we all need the love and light of a good mate to help keep us healthy and whole and anchored in the world of the sane—whether self-help gurus would have us believe it or not.
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