*Gulp*
Carrie Done
'Salem's Lot Done
Rage Done
The Shining p. 88
48 Pages In 1 Day
Approximately 25,628 Pages And 104 Days To Go
I'll admit, not the most breathtaking (or reassuring) start.
I can't chalk it up to much besides a tendency to sleep instead of read on the morning commute. One could also point to the usual syndrome of the 100 or so pages of King's books being all set up, and difficult-to-wade-through set up at that.
I used to believe that wholeheartedly and it's sort of the main reason why I'm even doing something this ridiculous. See, back in Junior High, when I started reading Steve's stuff, I tended to mostly skim through the books. It's very easy to casually flip through pretty much any of his books and find the scary stuff. Type and its visual representation is a huge aspect of his style and so all you need to look for are lots of italics, capital letters and maybe a few
(stylistic tics)
stand alone fragments in parentheses.
Naturally, I would tend to miss anything character based and, as I sort of phased out his stuff during the aging process, I could sort of nod and agree when people dismissed his work. After all, to my knowledge, he hardly ever wrote anything about people, he just wrote grippingly scary scenes. That's all I ever read, see.
Prefatory Matters, the first Book of The Shining, is a perfect example of what I was missing out on. I'm actually more interested in reading these parts of the books than the effectively rendered scary stuff (although that ought to be neat). After all, that's what compells me throughout the DT books; the well drawn characters, the little things that stand out about them over the course of 6 (and soon to be 7) books. There's a wealth of this kind of detail in the first section of this book, almost enough to shovel the images of Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall out of my head and replace them with actually distinct characters of their own. (Jack Torrance is particularly difficult to visualize as Jack Nicholson in Jack Torrance's more maudlin and suicidal moments. He's rarely an Angry Drunk the way everyone remembers him in the film. Of course, he hasn't made it to the Overlook yet.)
Another thing that rings true in this book's opening sequences is King's handling of alcoholism and rearing a family among financial instability. We've all read the stories about King's early life and his life experience shows in this book much more than in Carrie or 'Salem's (even though the latter did have a writer in it, which brings our count to two so far, and Jack's certainly not the last).
Basically, I can see all this getting easier as I go along, since I've already started to appreciate his work more and not less (which was, of course, a possibility).
More reading to do.
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