by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I checked Dolores Claiborne out from the library during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I believe. I read it through in a couple days. I had finished Gerald’s Game maybe a year before. I knew this one was connected to that book. It was a gimmick Stephen King had put out there. He did the same thing with Desperation and The Regulators, too. As I recall, the female protagonists from Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne had visions of one another. That was it. I remember wondering why he’d bothered.
I recall going back and forth about my feelings on Dolores during the course of reading the book. Her struggles to manage her family as she went back and forth from the island reminded me of a character in the short story “Home Delivery” in Nightmares & Dreamscapes. I can’t remember which story I read first. I may have my timeline on when I read Dolores Claiborne wrong. Now that I think about it, I’m not positive she lived on an island off the coast of Maine.
The abuse scenes in this novel really bothered me when I read them. It could have been my own history of abuse I went through, but I think it was more than that. It was something more existential, I think, that I couldn’t articulate at the time I was reading it. Maybe I’ll get a better handle on what that was after a second reading.
I know that I wasn’t looking forward to rereading the novella “The Library Policeman” from Four Past Midnight because the abuse in that novella revealed nearer the end stuck so prominently in my mind. Revisited that story allowed me to experience the full scope of the tale and appreciate how much more there was to it. Maybe Dolores Claiborne could play out the same way.
It really is a shame we barely have enough time to read a story once and ultimately will not experience most of the stories that are available in the world in our lifetimes. We miss so much because of this insurmountable reality.
My next post in this series will be After Dolores Claiborne which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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