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.
A tale of two bitches because sometimes you have to be a high riding bitch just to survive. The relationship and interactions between these two women at all stages of their lives is the star of this novel. The scene that plays out during the eclipse is a powerful costar, of course.
This copy of Dolores Claiborne was a used bookstore buy during my efforts to get hold of all of King’s books for this blog series. While reading it, I had to be careful because both covers were trying to tear off at the same time. I have a bad habit of folding over a pocket paperback book as I read which doesn’t work as well with old books.
Some dude who used to own this copy used a “private library” seal with his name on it to imprint the first page and the back cover. Then, he decided to sell it. Or he died and other people sold it. Why bother imprinting your personal private library seal on an old paperback and one that’s not even a first printing.
A newspaper clipping was folded inside about a lawyer starting his own business. The name didn’t directly relate to the one on the private library seal. It was like someone was leaving me a bunch of clues to a mystery I had no desire to solve.
But back to the story …
This book was for Stephen King’s mother Ruth Phillip King.
We have the same 1963 eclipse map as in Gerald’s Game. King includes an introduction explaining the connection between the two books. This psychic connection doesn’t add all that much to the story really. He mentions the next visible eclipse in northern New England would be in the distant year of 2016.
We open on an interrogation with the accused talking to us and we only hear her side of the conversation. She’s accused of one crime, but is confessing to another.
“An island is a terrible place to try to kill someone.”
King talks about a character going from 130 to 190 pounds. Again, I’m not positive King has a good handle on what weight gain really looks like in reality. His descriptions of the morbidly fat are off by maybe a hundred pounds or more.
King uses the phrase “singing Ave Maria” for a description of pain in his last couple books.
A metaphor about welcome mats was really well played.
“Stupid reasons make stupid marriages”
The grocer called her Missus Claiborne back when she was still St. George. I wonder if that was a slip of the author or a slip in the memory of the woman telling her own story all these years later.
“The inside eye” is this dark concept that sees the “worst of it” and drives us to act. It plays against the dark eye of the eclipse and the dark eye of an open well.
The narrator references “the little town in the southern part of the state where they say no one lives” which is probably Jerusalem’s Lot from the novel Salem’s Lot and a couple subsequent short stories.
The coppery smell of the well water is referenced heavily in this novel as it was in Gerald’s Game.
Joe held on a lot longer than I remembered.
“God answered half my prayer that day and that’s how he answers most of them, I’ve noticed.”
News clippings from a scrapbook finish off the novel and resolves the lives of our surviving characters.
In the end, it’s the bitches of the world who abide.
My next post in this series will be Before Nightmares and Dreamscapes which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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