Wednesday reading.... Stephen King?!
Apr. 6th, 2022 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeFor once I can make a reading post on a Wednesday, remarkable.
My ESL tutee is a Stephen King fan, and to practice her English, she bought the most recent (or must at least be close to the most recent) Stephen King book, called Billy Summers. I've never read **any** Stephen King--not anything--but of course I know him from reputation and from books and stories of his that have turned into movies. Anyway, I bought the ebook of this so I could read along with her, ask reading comprehension questions, etc.
I was just idly following along until like the middle of ... the first chapter, at which point I desperately wanted to know more and began reading ahead, totally absorbed.
Observation no. 1: I don't think this is what you'd call a typical Stephen King? This is a thriller/suspense novel rather than a horror novel. It's "hitman with a heart of gold takes on One Last Job [he himself aware of how those go awry]" + "hitman discovers his inner novelist"
I'm into competent characters, and Billy Summers is very, very competent, so I liked that right away. A person discovering writing and thinking about what writing means and how to do it? Of course I'm going to like that too.
Observation no. 2: Stephen King has *super* control of voice. Billy Summers adopts a slightly slow persona when dealing with the people who hire him so that they'll underestimate him. So you have Billy being dull and Billy being sharp. Then you have the various voices he adopts in writing his memoir: himself as a child, then himself as an adult during the Iraq war--and at first he has to write these as if it's Dull Billy writing them, rather than Sharp Billy, because his work is being monitored. And Stephen King manages this masterfully--I was enjoying not only Billy's competence but Stephen King's.
I often observe writers slip up on voice. They're writing from the perspective of 19th century explorers, or children of mer-beings, or from the perspective of settlers on the space frontier, and suddenly some lingo from 21st-century writer discourse is there on the page--the writer's own thinking, not the characters'. Stephen King helps himself by writing in our present and by making his character a nascent writer, but he's not making slips like that.
Observation no. 3: It's interesting for me to watch Stephen King establishing moral credentials for his hitman protagonist, and I find myself musing on which moral positions are Billy's and which ones are, if not Stephen King's own, then anyway ones he thinks his reading audience will more or less agree with or at least tolerate. This feeds into thoughts I have about justice systems, how none of them are ever perfect and yet we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good (... but we can't let fatalism about the inability to achieve perfection mean we acquiesce to the dreadful, either).
Observation no. 4: The book is (so far; I'm about two-thirds through it) super well structured: one-third to establish Billy's competence; one-third to have him develop as a writer (which gives us his back story), and now the last third, where he'll either triumph over the antagonist ... or not! I don't know! I've never read a thriller/suspense novel either; I have no idea what the genre expectations are.
Observation no. 5: He must have written this before the pandemic, but then the pandemic happened, so periodically the narration says something along the lines of "Little did they realize that in six months everything would be locked down... little did they realize that six months later the cruise industry would come to a grinding halt." These read like the afterthoughts they are and are hilarious.
I guess I can see why Stephen King is a best-seller, is what I'm saying.
My ESL tutee is a Stephen King fan, and to practice her English, she bought the most recent (or must at least be close to the most recent) Stephen King book, called Billy Summers. I've never read **any** Stephen King--not anything--but of course I know him from reputation and from books and stories of his that have turned into movies. Anyway, I bought the ebook of this so I could read along with her, ask reading comprehension questions, etc.
I was just idly following along until like the middle of ... the first chapter, at which point I desperately wanted to know more and began reading ahead, totally absorbed.
Observation no. 1: I don't think this is what you'd call a typical Stephen King? This is a thriller/suspense novel rather than a horror novel. It's "hitman with a heart of gold takes on One Last Job [he himself aware of how those go awry]" + "hitman discovers his inner novelist"
I'm into competent characters, and Billy Summers is very, very competent, so I liked that right away. A person discovering writing and thinking about what writing means and how to do it? Of course I'm going to like that too.
Observation no. 2: Stephen King has *super* control of voice. Billy Summers adopts a slightly slow persona when dealing with the people who hire him so that they'll underestimate him. So you have Billy being dull and Billy being sharp. Then you have the various voices he adopts in writing his memoir: himself as a child, then himself as an adult during the Iraq war--and at first he has to write these as if it's Dull Billy writing them, rather than Sharp Billy, because his work is being monitored. And Stephen King manages this masterfully--I was enjoying not only Billy's competence but Stephen King's.
I often observe writers slip up on voice. They're writing from the perspective of 19th century explorers, or children of mer-beings, or from the perspective of settlers on the space frontier, and suddenly some lingo from 21st-century writer discourse is there on the page--the writer's own thinking, not the characters'. Stephen King helps himself by writing in our present and by making his character a nascent writer, but he's not making slips like that.
Observation no. 3: It's interesting for me to watch Stephen King establishing moral credentials for his hitman protagonist, and I find myself musing on which moral positions are Billy's and which ones are, if not Stephen King's own, then anyway ones he thinks his reading audience will more or less agree with or at least tolerate. This feeds into thoughts I have about justice systems, how none of them are ever perfect and yet we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good (... but we can't let fatalism about the inability to achieve perfection mean we acquiesce to the dreadful, either).
Observation no. 4: The book is (so far; I'm about two-thirds through it) super well structured: one-third to establish Billy's competence; one-third to have him develop as a writer (which gives us his back story), and now the last third, where he'll either triumph over the antagonist ... or not! I don't know! I've never read a thriller/suspense novel either; I have no idea what the genre expectations are.
Observation no. 5: He must have written this before the pandemic, but then the pandemic happened, so periodically the narration says something along the lines of "Little did they realize that in six months everything would be locked down... little did they realize that six months later the cruise industry would come to a grinding halt." These read like the afterthoughts they are and are hilarious.
I guess I can see why Stephen King is a best-seller, is what I'm saying.
