On reading

Yesterday, Denver’s mayor—Hizonner John Hickenlooper—announced this year’s “One Book, One Denver” edition: Nick Arvin’s ARTICLES OF WAR. It’s the first time in the program’s four years that a local writer’s work was chosen. Previously, Denver read Leif Enger’s “PEACE LIKE A RIVER,” Sandra Cisneros’s “CARAMELO,” and John Nichols’s “THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR.”

If you’re unfamiliar with “One Book, One Denver”—and I have to assume you are, considering the “national audience” for 52 Novels—it’s Mayor Hick’s brilliant effort to, first, get the entire community reading the same book, and then, second, get them talking about it, via events scheduled throughout the year.

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35 I remember all the hype for this book when it dropped in hardcover last year: if I remember correctly, most, if not all, of it was through the roof. King even got interviewed by The Paris Review… a sure sign this “once-favorite target of critics, has been embraced by at least some in the literary elite.”

Having just finished this book, I must say that it’s about time.

Sure, there’s signature King here in this book. He can’t get too far away from what butters his bread, namely a bizarre other-world where Lisey’s husband—bestselling novelist, Scott Landon—goes while in the dark realm of his mental illness. Scott’s able to take Lisey there and eventually teaches her how to get there on her own. It’s a skill that comes in handy after Scott’s death, as it helps save the lives of people who are close to her.

This other-world, that Scott uses as both an escape from the “bad-gunky” and as novel fodder, is rich with King-isms: scary monsters, wandering souls, and magical water.

Not exactly the stuff of typical literary fiction.

But what makes this book work so well is that it is, at it’s heart, a love story, chronicled between present day, and flashbacks to Lisey’s and Scott’s courtship and married life. There’s also the love story shared between Lisey and her older sisters, one of whom shares a troubling bond with Scott.

As King has said about this book, there are two hearts in a marriage, one light, one dark. What’s also revealed—so clearly in the “sister thing”—is that the light and dark hearts are a part of all close and important relationships.

If you can’t tell already, I loved this book.

34 Shhhhh. Be quiet.

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of my heart breaking.

I first caught wind of this book from Marcus Sakey over at the The Outfit. He had this to say about STONE CITY:

… the book is astonishingly good. Achingly good. Painfully, how-the-hell-does-he-do-that good.

I love Sakey’s debut novel… and his influences. So praise like this made me sit up and take notice.

He was right. STONE CITY is that good.

A college professor, Charlie Bauman, goes to prison after killing a teenage girl in a drunk driving accident. It’s a short hitch, but prison is prison. He manages to make an unassuming life for himself in the can by teaching inmates to read and write. With a year left on his sentence, things look pretty good for him.

That is, until two otherwise disconnected inmates are murdered in similar fashion.

It’s then that Bauman gets recruited separately by both sets of prison leadership—the State’s Attorney and Warden, and the heads of the convict factions—to find out who the killer is. The State thinks it’s an inmate. The inmates think it’s a hack. Either way, Bauman is in way over his head… but his investigation begins nonetheless.

With the help of a punk with ties to one of the recently offed inmates, Bauman navigates the, at times, extraordinarily complex political and social prison landscape to find the killer. At every turn, things are never what they seem and the threat of death is ever present.

Keep in mind, the story takes place entirely in prison, and Smith makes sure we see it all. This book was funny, and sad, and frightening. Most of all, it was surprisingly human.

I’m not kidding… it broke my heart.

P.S. If you want this book, you’ll have to find it at your local library or used bookshop. It’s currently out of print. If you can wait, Busted Flush Press is reissuing it sometime this year. Get it now at Amazon!

P.P.S. If you look at my Library entry for this book, it says it took me a month to read it. That’s not entirely true. While it did take me a while to finish—the first couple hundred pages were slow going for me—I actually set this book aside for a few weeks to read THE DARK RIVER, a Denver Public Library new release with a short due date. I didn’t want the fine for a late return.

33 I really loved THE TRAVELER. I thought it out-neuromanced NEUROMANCER.

And because of that, I was eager to read THE DARK RIVER. Couldn’t wait.

So, finally, I did read it.

I was disappointed. I just didn’t think the story was that good. Too much exposition sometimes (kinda like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace). The writing was often so wooden, I asked myself why I was continuing to read.

It’s because I’ll have to read the final book to know how it all ends. Skipping this one would have been worse than continuing it.

If you read THE TRAVELER and liked it, then read THE DARK RIVER because you have to.