By her own account she's an old Yankee bitch, Dolores Claiborne: foul temper, foul mouth, foul life. Folks on Little Tall Island have been waiting thirty years to find out just what happened on the eerie dark day her husband, Joe, died - the day of the total eclipse. The police want to know what happened yesterday, when rich, bedridden Vera Donovan, the island's grande dame sans merci and Dolores's longtime employer, died suddenly in her care. With no choice but to talk, Dolores Claiborne talks up a storm. "Everything I did, I did for love," she says, and this spellbinding novel is at once her confession and her defense. Given a voice as compelling as any in contemporary fiction, her story centers on a disintegrating marriage's molten core, where the mind's unblinking eye becomes huge with hate and a woman's heart turns murderous. It unfolds the strange intimacy between Dolores and Vera, and the link that binds them. It shows, finally, how fierce love can be, and how dreadful its consequences. And how the soul, harrowed by the hardest life, can achieve a kind of grace. |
Time
Powerful...Startlingly good.
San Francisco Chronicle
Among King's best...An unforgettable, unflinching glimpse into a mind driven to murder.
Publisher's Weekly
Described by the publisher as a companion piece to King's last book, Gerald's Game , this new novel surpasses it in every way, and shows that King, even without the trappings of horror and suspense, is a magnificent storyteller whose greatest strength has always been characterization. His sterling title character this time out is a Maine woman in her 60s who made a living as a housekeeper and now is under suspicion in the death of her senile employer, Vera Donovan, who fell down a flight of stairs. Did Dolores push her? Responding to the charges against her, Dolores recounts her life in a tightly woven narrative that is beguiling and touching at the appropriate moments. The friendship between these two lonely women ``livin' on a little chunk of rock off the Maine coast'' was the anchor of both their lives, and it soon becomes clear that Dolores didn't kill Vera. But she freely acknowledges--30 years after the fact--that she did kill her husband, Joe, during a solar eclipse on July 20, 1963, ``my day for seein' eyes everywhere.'' Presenting Dolores's story in her own remarkable colloquial voice, King brings readers face to face with a goodhearted, lovable woman whose honesty is ultimately unforgettable. 1.5 million first printing; BOMC main selection. (Dec.)
Library Journal
King again eschews supernatural horror, as he did recently in Gerald's Game , to study the equally monstrous things people can inflict on one another. The story, sparer than much of King's work, is a monolog by the title character, who is suspected of murdering her loutish, insensitive husband and the difficult, rich, and senile woman for whom she has kept house for many years. As Dolores tells her story to the local authorities, the details of a life of drudgery and marital unhappiness emerge, along with the ironic truth behind the deaths. In theme, style, and setting a companion piece to Gerald's Game , this new work is a quietly terrifying tale of desperation, abuse, and revenge that showcases King's talent as a powerful storyteller. Certain to be a best seller, it should appeal to a wide audience. For all popular fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/92.-- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.
BookList - Ray Olson
Like "Gerald's Game" , King's second novel this year is short by his standards, isn't concerned with supernatural horrors, and takes place mostly on one October day and, in flashback, on July 20, 1963, when a total eclipse of the sun laid a diagonal band of darkness across central Maine. A further resemblance is that it also features a female protagonist, but while King wrote "Gerald's Game" with third-person omniscience, he offers "Delores Claiborne" in that tough old Mainer's voice as she tells the sheriff of Little Tall Island about two deaths she's been involved with. One, just the other day, is that of her wealthy, invalided employer, Vera Donovan, whom it's suspected she fatally pushed downstairs. The other, which happened during that long-ago eclipse, is that of her drunken, good-for-nothing husband, Joe St. George. She didn't kill Vera, but she did kill Joe, and as she fills us in on the hows and whys of both deaths, King secures his place in the highest echelon of contemporary American novelists. For cantankerous, profane, scatological, and fiercely maternal Delores is as vital and vivid a character as any in American fiction. Moreover, the death of her husband is as virtuosic an essay in grand guignol as King has ever written. King is well out of the slump that so many of the contributors to the recent mid-career assessment, "Reign of Fear" , seemed to think he was in. In fact, he's never been better. |
