Stephen King, "Gerald�s Game"
Funny how Stephen King novels keep making me think about my crazy ex-girlfriend. Not the one who gave me that last book on the Cold War � this is a different crazy ex-girlfriend. Hell, I could write volumes about all the crazy ex-girlfriends I�ve had. And in fact, I did.
Sure, I�ll admit it, I used to be a big Stephen King fan. Growing up at �The Apartment� as my friends all dubbed it once it gained its own sense of infamy, there was a library just across the street. Being young, poor and bored, I went there many times and read every single thing King had written. (This was when he was about at the 15 mark.) Then my friends and I started the punk band and reading kind of fell by the wayside.
Being a 15 year-old child, there were a lot of things I really liked by him: �The Dead Zone,� �The Shining,� �Pet Cemetery,� the short story collections � particularly �Different Seasons� and �The Mist� from �Skeleton Crew.� And I still think �The Stand� is a great piece of work. I won�t swear by the others.
Eventually I remembered how much I liked to read. Out of habit, I went to the same area of the library, and I picked up newer books by King. I found that I was getting a little sick of him. Worse, I was finally noticing that a lot of these books are essentially the same. I would throw his books across the room when I spotted the line he used in nearly every book: �And that was the last time (Blank) ever saw him/her alive.�
Then I read another collection of short stories, �Nightmares and Dreamscapes,� and after thinking it was 85 percent crap, I swore off of Stephen King, declaring him to be hopelessly lost in �hack� status.
Fast forward to last year. We had moved the horror section for the third time at the bookstore, and in a desperate attempt to make room, my boss tossed out several hardback copies of King books. I decided that while I didn�t want to pay any money for him, I wouldn�t mind reading some of his stuff again. This was back when I had maybe 20 books on my �To read� shelf.
Which brings me to my crazy ex-girlfriend. She had some issues, to say the least, but one of the major ones came over anything that had to do with rape or child molestation. I don�t think I really understood at first, until we watched some movie that had a rape scene in it. Her reaction was so violent, so terrified, that I now have a hard time seeing anything that has a rape scene in it. From then on, I was very careful about anything we watched to make sure she wouldn�t have to go through that again, and so I would never witness her reaction.
I would get information on books or films in advance, and I was getting disgusted with how many things, particularly movies, had gratuitous rape scene in them. More often than not it was unrelated to the story. They use rape or molestation as a tool to build dread.
And of course, this book has a child molestation scene in it. I would be able to deal with that, except for the fact that I found it completely unnecessary. He�s using it here to utilize shock, and I thought it was gratuitous. More infuriating, it seemed tacked on to jolt the audience, and it was fucking cheap. He already had a good story line with a significant amount of dread and revulsion in it, and this was just pandering.
It was also padding to thicken the book out. In fact there�s a lot of padding going on here, and I think he would have made a better book if he had whittled off nearly a hundred pages. And while it�s not total hack status, it does remind me why I gave him up so long ago.
