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The old horrormaster
in top form, this time with a demonic dealer
in magic and spells selling his wares to the
folks of Castle Rock, scene of several King
novels including The Dead Zone, Cujo -- and
how many others? King locates his hokey Our
Town in Maine, but as ever it's really
Consumerville, USA, with everyone's life
festooned with brand names. The cast is huge
and largely grotesque, since King--wearing a
tremendous cat's-smile--means to close the
book on Castle Rock and blow it off the map
in one of his best climaxes since Salem's
Lot. Editing here is supreme. King braids
perhaps a dozen storylines--with hardly a
drop of blood spilled for the first 250 or
so pages--into ever briefer takes that
climax in a hurtling, storm-ripped holocaust
whose symphonic energies fill the novel's
last third. Perhaps only five characters
stand out: Leland Gaunt, a gentlemanly
stranger who opens the Needful Things
curiosity shop; his first customer, Brian
Rusk, age eleven, who sells his soul for a
rare Sandy Koufax baseball card; practical
Polly Chalmers, who runs the You Sew `n' Sew
shop, welcomes Gaunt with a devil's-food
cake, and buys an amulet to relieve her
arthritis; her lover, Sheriff Alan Pangborn,
who buys nothing but is haunted by the
driving deaths of his wife and son; and Ace
Merrill, coke dealer in a bind, who becomes
Gaunt's handydevil and gets to drive Gaunt's
Tucker, a car that's faster than radar and
uses no gas. As he has for hundreds of
years, Gaunt sells citizens whatever pricks
and satisfies their inmost desires. But the
price dehumanizes them, and soon all the
townsfolk vent their barest aggressions on
each other with cleaver, knife, and gun:
Gaunt even opens a sideline of automatic
weapons. By novel's end, the whole town is
on a hysterical, psychotic mass rampage that
floods morgue and hospital with the delimbed
and obliterated. Then comes the big bang.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm! Leland King's glee, or Steven
Gaunt's, or rather--well, the author's--as
he rubs his palms over his
let's-blow-'em-away superclimax is
wonderfully catching.
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Publisher's Weekly
With the ``Last Castle Rock Story'' King bids a
magnificent farewell to the fictional Maine town where much
of his previous work has been set. Of grand proportion, the
novel ranks with King's best, in both plot and
characterization. A new store, Needful Things, opens in
town, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, offers seemingly
unbeatable (read: Faustian) bargains to Castle Rock's
troubled citizens. Among them are Polly Chalmers, lonely
seamstress whose arthritis is only one of the physical and
psychic pains she must bear; Brian Rusk, the 11-year-old boy
whose mother is not precisely attentive; and Alan Pangborn,
the new sheriff whose wife and son have recently died. These
are only three of the half-dozen or so brilliantly drawn
people met in the novel's one-month time span. As the dreams
of each strikingly memorable character, major and minor,
inexorably turn to nightmare, individuals and soon the
community are overwhelmed, while the precise nature of
Gaunt's evil thrillingly stays just out of focus. King, like
Leland Gaunt, knows just what his customers want.
The New York Times Book Review - Joe Queenan
Big, dumb, plodding and obvious, Mr. King's books are
the literary equivalent of heavy metal. The author peoples
his novels with ultralow rollers -- couch potatoes, barmy
widows, small-time hoods -- rarely producing a character
that an intelligent, normal reader could identify with, much
less like. . . . Plowing through [this] 690-page novel, in
which the only vaguely appealing characters are a hero who
happens to be a dummy and a heroine who is an absolute
pinhead, is like reading a very long book about English
royalty. The writing itself is no picnic: hundreds of pages
of rambling, turgid 'clots and clumps' churned out in Mr.
King's trademark dark-and-stormy-night style.
The Times Literary Supplement
[The book] is subtitled The last Castle Rock story. . .
. [It] is one of the more ingenious of King's visions of the
destruction of Maine small-town life. But like other of
King's novels in the genre, the plodding massiveness
eventually wearies. This is another 'two tons of crap in a
five-ton crate' (DonHerron's apt description of King's It,
BRD 1986). If it is the last novel of this kind that King
intends to write, literature will sustain no great loss. He
has shown in recent years that he can write subtler fiction
than NeedfulThings. The Dark Half {BRD 1991} (in which a
bestselling author is haunted by his murderous pseudonymous
self) and Misery {BRD 1988} (in which a bestselling author
is kept captive by his 'number one fan') can be read as
grimly ironic parables on King's own success. They suggest
that once he rids himself of old formulas -- however
remunerative -- he may yet write a book which will make his
enemies, the critics, think twice about him.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
King's best...fast-paced, well-constructed...cleverly
plotted.
Kirkus Reviews
The old horrormaster in top form, this time with a
demonic dealer in magic and spells selling his wares to the
folks of Castle Rock, scene of several King novels including
The Dead Zone, Cujo—and how many others? King locates his
hokey Our Town in Maine, but as ever it's really
Consumerville, USA, with everyone's life festooned with
brand names. The cast is huge and largely grotesque, since
King—wearing a tremendous cat's-smile—means to close the
book on Castle Rock and blow it off the map in one of his
best climaxes since Salem's Lot. Editing here is supreme.
King braids perhaps a dozen storylines—with hardly a drop of
blood spilled for the first 250 or so pages—into ever
briefer takes that climax in a hurtling, storm-ripped
holocaust whose symphonic energies fill the novel's last
third. Perhaps only five characters stand out: Leland Gaunt,
a gentlemanly stranger who opens the Needful Things
curiosity shop; his first customer, Brian Rusk, 11, who
sells his soul for a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card;
practical Polly Chalmers, who runs the You Sew `n' Sew shop,
welcomes Gaunt with a devil's-food cake, and buys an amulet
to relieve her arthritis; her lover, Sheriff Alan Pangborn,
who buys nothing but is haunted by the driving deaths of his
wife and son; and Ace Merrill, coke dealer in a bind, who
becomes Gaunt's handydevil and gets to drive Gaunt's Tucker,
a car that's faster than radar and uses no gas. As he has
for hundreds of years, Gaunt sells citizens whatever pricks
and satisfies their inmost desires. But the price
dehumanizes them, and soon all the townsfolk vent their
barest aggressions on each other with cleaver, knife,
andgun: Gaunt even opens a sideline of automatic weapons. By
novel's end, the whole town is on a hysterical, psychotic
mass rampage that floods morgue and hospital with the
delimbed and obliterated. Then comes the big bang.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm! Leland King's glee, or Steven Gaunt's, or
rather—well, the author's—as he rubs his palms over his
let's-blow-'em-away superclimax is wonderfully catching. |
