Lisey's
Story - Stephen King
Brand New: unabridged Still shrink wrapped 16 CD s
Perhaps Stephen King's most personal and powerful novel and audiobook to date, LISEY'S STORY is a beautifully textured suspense narrative about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness and the secret language of love.
Lisey Landon lost her husband Scott two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of profound, sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was a celebrated, award-winning, novelist. And a complex man. Lisey knew there was a dark place where her husband ventured to face his demons. Boo'ya Moon is what Scott called it; a realm that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed to write and live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face her husband's demons. And what begins as a widow's effort to sort through her husband's effects becomes a perilous journey into the heart of darkness.
About the Author Stephen King
(From Wikipedia) Stephen Edwin King (born September 21,
1947) is an American author best known for his highly
successful horror novels. A 2003 recipient of the Lifetime
Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, King's books
have been enormously successful, and are often featured on
bestseller lists.
King's stories frequently involve as an unremarkable
protagonist such as a middle-class family, a child, or many
times, a writer. The characters are involved in their
everyday lives, but the supernatural encounters and
extraordinary circumstances escalate over the course of the
story. King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror
genre, as shown in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, which
chronicles several decades of notable works in both
literature and cinema. He also writes stories outside the
horror genre, including the novellas The Body and Rita
Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (later adapted as the
movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption,
respectively), as well as The Green Mile and Hearts in
Atlantis.
Stephen King also wrote under the name of Richard Bachman.
Biographies
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine and is of
Scots-Irish ancestry. When King was two years old, his
father deserted his family. Ruth raised King and his adopted
older brother David by herself, sometimes under great
financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of
Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne,
Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut. King attended Durham
Elementary School and Lisbon High School. He grew to stand
6'4" tall.
King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he
wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently and sold
them to his friends. This was not popular among his
teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this
was discovered. The stories were copied using a mimeo
machine that his brother David used to copy a newspaper,
"Dave's Rag," which he self-published.
"Dave's Rag" was about local events, and King
would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King
discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's
house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately
hooked on these genres.
From 1966 to 1971, King studied English at the University of
Maine at Orono, Maine. At the university, he wrote a column
titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the university
magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in 1971.
King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one
at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write
the short story The Mangler. The campus period in his life
is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis.
After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of
Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high
school, King taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden,
Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a
trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in
men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the
introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold,
Tabitha would joke, "Come on Steve, think of a
monster". King also developed a drinking problem which
stayed with him for over a decade.
During this period, King began a number of novels. One of
his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers.
However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash.
Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it.
After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to
Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. Later, he
received an offer to buy it with a ,500 advance (not a
large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly
after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback
rights being sold for 0,000 (with 0,000 of it going to
the publisher). Shortly after its release, his mother died
of uterine cancer. She had the novel read to her before she
died.
In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was
consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well
over a decade. He even admits that he was drunk during his
mother's funeral while delivering the eulogy. He states
that he had based the alcoholic father in The Shining on
himself, though he did not admit it for several years.
Shortly after the publication of The Tommyknockers, King's
family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on
the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own
addictions: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine,
Xanax, Valium, NyQuil. He sought help, and quit all forms of
drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s.
King fans note that the relative wealth of King's characters
has risen through the decades, but not as precipitously as
King's wealth itself:
* His earliest works (Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, as
well as much of the work in Night Shift), deal with
working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck
in minimum-wage jobs.
* Late-1980s work involved middle-class people like teachers
and authors
* Late-1990s work sometimes dealt with airplane pilots,
writers and others who can frequently afford a second
homestead.
Stephen King's books have influenced many writers of our
time.
Car accident
In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of writing On
Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had finished
the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly
eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to
bother. King reports that it was the first book that he'd
abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had
just decided to continue the book. On June 17, he had
written up a list of questions that he was frequently asked
about writing, as well as some that he wished he would be
asked about it; on June 18, he had written four pages of the
section on writing.
On June 19, about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right
shoulder of Route 5 in North Lovell. Driver Bryan Smith,
distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler moving in the back
of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a
depression about 14 feet (4 meters) from the pavement of
Route 5.
Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that
witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless.[1]
Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's
official website, however, states that this was incorrect,
and that King was walking facing traffic.
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers
to contact his family, but in considerable pain. The author
was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital and
then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital. His
injuries - a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of
the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip - kept
him in Central Main Medical Center until July 9, almost
three weeks later.
Earlier that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8,
a novel where one of the characters dies in an automobile
accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries
"not to make too much of it." King's 1987 novel,
Misery, is also of a writer who experiences severe injuries
in an auto accident, but that novel focuses on the mental
ill-health of a devoted fan who nurses the writer.
After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King
resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still
shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes
before the pain became intolerable.
King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for
,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. Smith, a
disabled construction worker, died in his sleep in September
2000 at the age of 43.
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