Gerald's Game & Others

It was a sad little branch library that I was working on saturday, with little prospect of customers and my co worker openly declared that we would be as well reading a book. As I didn't bring my own book I started reading 'Gerald's Game' by Stephen King simply because it was on shelves.

Written 19 (a magical number in King's canon of work) years ago the basic premise had never appealed to me: Gerald handcuffs his wife Jess to bed for sexual adventure and she accidentally kills him by kicking him and inducing a heart attack. She has to get out of this predicament and deal with flashbacks from her past (her incestuous father), a wild dog who enters the house and a monster(?) who visits in the night.

Despite my previous hesitancy, it turned out to be very compulsive reading and I duly finished the book three days later, reading half of it that very saturday. In fact must declare it to be one of King's best.

In the first instance, the bondage and notions of rape by her husband are quick in passing, leaving Jess to deal with getting out of the handcuffs. The relationship with her father is disturbing but fits in well with her present situation and a voice from her past helps to guide her through her escape attempts. I wasn't even sure if she would get out, half expecting some kind of deus ex machina, but thankfully this overused device wasn't reverted to. A monster also appears to visit her in the night but rather than be a cliched figment of her imagination (something King has used before in other books), the monster is cunningly unveiled at the end of the book.

So at the time of writing I have the following King books still to read: On Writing, Firestarter, Dreamcatcher, (1/2 of) The Talisman, and Lisey's Story. I am still waiting on my copy of his new book 'Full Dark No Stars' from the library but this book seemed short enough to fill the gap until I received the latest one by the King.

Prior to this I had just recently finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince as a build up to the new film and had started on one of the novels in the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy by James Ellroy, a coolection of three shorter novels.

Next up I am planning on reading something a bit more challenging, Steinbeck's Russian Journal, Roy Jenkin's biography of Churchill and Steve Jone's popular science book 'Coral'.