Bool! The End!

I finished reading Lisey's Story last night (I know, you'll all be so glad for a topic change). Excellent read. Mind you, there's a whole story that I haven't touched on in my ramblings here, and I'm not going to either, on the off chance that some of you might pick up the book and read it (do!). I do have a few more excerpts to share though, so sit back and enjoy the soak.

This is a bit wherein the character, Scott writes about his warped relationship with his father. Blew me away as I didn't quite expect to get struck from that fabulous li'l angle as juxtaposed against my own life... (leave it to King):
I tell him again: "I can't go.""Why not?"
But I can't explain. Some of it is having lived almost my whole life in that farmhouse with almost no one for company but Daddy and Paul... The thought of going out into that roaring strangeness alone scares the living Jesus out of me. And, more to the point, I love him. Not in the simple and uncomplicated... but yes, I love him. He has cut me and hit me and called me [names], he has terrorized many of my childhood days and sent me to bed on many nights feeling small and stupid and worthless, but those bad times have yielded their own perverse treasures; they have turned each kiss into gold, each of his compliments, even the most offhand, into things to be treasured. And even at ten--because I'm his son, his blood? maybe--I understand that his kisses and compliments are always sincere; they are always true things. He is a monster, but the monster is not incapable of love. That was the horror of my father...
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story
Ah... the rogue wave theory:
...and she was struck by the old sick of wanting him, that empty place that could now never be filled. That needing-place.
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story

I know this anger--we're very good friends--we send postcards to each other (as Mr. King might say). I was so glad/relieved/mollified to see someone else capture the feeling(s) in print:What comes over her--practical Lisey, Lisey who always stays cool... little Lisey who keeps her head when those all about her are losing theirs--what comes over her is a kind of seamless and bulging rage, a divine fury that seems to push her mind aside and take control of her body. Yet (she doesn't know if this is paradox or not) this fury also seems to clarify her thinking, must, because she finally understands. Two years is a long time, but the penny finally drops. She gets the picture. She sees the light.
He has kicked the bucket, as the saying is. (Do you like it?)
He has popped off. (Do you love it?)
He is eating a dirt sandwich. (It's a big one I caught in the pool where we all go down to drink and fish.)
And when you boil it down, what's left? Why, he has jilted her. Done a runner. Put an egg in his shoe and beat it, hit the road, Jack, took the Midnight Special out of town. He lit out for the Territories. He left the woman who loved him with every cell in her body and every brain in her not-so-smart head, and all she has is this shitty...smucking...shell.
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story

I absolutely love the powerfully real sense of the raw feeling of grieving over a lover (and coming back from such) that King conveys (so simply) in this paragraph:...Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind... but first she needed to finish grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time... Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, so ready to kick ass and take down names.
As the saying was.
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story

Finally...
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story