Lisey is the widow of a best-selling author Scott Landon, who still has an archive of his papers that various academics would like to get their hands on. One of her sisters has a nervous breakdown, which triggers memories for Lisey of some of the problems that her husband had. And then she starts getting phonecalls from some psycho who is on a mission to get hold of those papers.

It turns out Scott and his family has some kind of psychic power which let him visit a parallel world, and it was there that he got some of his inspiration for his books, but it was also there that various nasty monsters lurk. When the maniac comes for Lisey, she decides to make use of the technique Scott once taught her, in order to visit the special place and get help.

Another disappointing one. I didn't really get the structure of the book: to start with it jumped around in time quite a lot, giving flashbacks of the time Lisey and Scott were together, but this wasn't maintained throughout the whole book. It wasn't clear (to me) why Lisey chose the way she did to defend herself against the maniac: it would have been easier (and possible) to just get a gun and shoot him.

King often has characters remembering the sayings of various people they knew. But he went over the top in this one. I can't remember any off the top of my head now but it was full of stuff like "A cracked egg kills the frog, Grandmom used to say"

The book reminded me of "Rose Madder" - from what I remember, that one had a character who could cross over into an alternate world, in which both good and bad things might happen. I didn't like that book either.

Completed : 16-Sep-2007