There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Thin gimmicks, weighed down with King's weak characters and weaker prose (unlike his crisp short stories)-but the fans may come around yet again, despite the clear evidence that King needs the supernatural to distract from his awesome limitations as a mainstream storyteller.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

And 'The Breathing Method'-told, a la Peter Straub's Ghost Story, as a gentleman's club anecdote-is the most explicitly horrific: an unwed mother is decapitated on Christmas Eve but gives birth in falling sleet anyway. The third piece is the most conventional: 'The Body,' a familiar fall-from-innocence tale about four not-very-bright Maine lads (one of whom, the reminiscing narrator, will become a novelist) who go into the woods to locate the body of a boy thrown from a trestle by a train. Denker down the block is really an aged Nazi war criminal-so he extorts long confessions from the old man, relishing all the atrocity details, becoming totally corrupted by the Nazi mystique at last, however, the old Nazi (who gets his kicks by killing winos) takes revenge on the boy-and their evil symbiosis ends in a muddle of suicide, murder, and madness. 'Apt Pupil,' on the other hand, is crude and utterly unconvincing: Todd, an All-American California boy, discovers that Mr. The climax is feeble (especially after such a long build-up), the redemption theme is murky-but the close observation of prison life offers some engaging details. Best of the lot is Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption-in which banker Andy Dufresne, in a Maine prison for life for murdering his wife and her lover, plans his escape over a 20-year period, working his way through four feet of concrete to get to the sewer shaft beyond.

It will take all of King's monumental byline-insurance to drum up an audience for this bottom-of-the-trunk collection: four overpadded novellas, in non-horror genres-without the gripping situations needed to transcend King's notoriously clumsy writing.

Stephen king different seasons review