Ax -wielding Annie Wilkes from "Misery"? Depressive Dolores Claiborne? Bloodthirsty prom queen Carrie White? Gunslinger Roland Deschain from the "Dark Tower" series? Or worse, Pennywise the Clown from "It"?
Nah. King is better off dining solo.
Until now. In his latest novel, "Lisey's Story," King has finally created an average, everyday character you wouldn't mind breaking bread with.
Lisey ("rhymes with CeeCee") Landon is the widow of famous writer Scott Landon, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner.
When the story begins, two years after her husband's death, Lisey is still reeling. She's trying to clean out Scott's study, cope with her grief, and fend off demands for his unpublished manuscripts from grabby archivists.
It's pretty banal stuff at first. But this is a King novel, and the story soon turns to the supernatural.
First, Lisey's catatonic sister, Amanda, starts speaking in Scott's voice. Then, a dangerous and mysterious stalker enters Lisey's world, and she travels to an alternate, ominous fantasy world called "Boo'ya Moon," a place where her husband fled to escape a violent childhood.
But the meat of the book is the love story between Lisey and Scott, and like any good marriage there isn't much room within its confines for anyone else.
Most of the time, we feel stuck as outside observers on King's long-winded flights of fancy. It's much like paging slowly through someone else's photo albums chronicling a full, but not always interesting, life.
Lisey and Scott share an intimate, secret language of sorts in their constant flashbacks -- a rich, rhythmic stew of running dialogue that comes across as part baby-talk, part song lyric. There is "bad-gunky," referring to inherited Landon insanity, and "babyluv," his pet name for her. It alternates between charming and tedious, wearing thin at the novel's end.
