Dolores Claiborne

I am finally caught up on my review books and while I’m waiting for more to arrive, it gives me a chance to read some of the books I picked up at flea markets last year. Here is the first one.

Dolores Claiborne
© 1993 by Stephen King

ISBN: 0-671-84452-7
Publisher: Penguin Group
SRP: 23.50
305 pp.

About the book: “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 for 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 Donavan, 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.”

For me, this book didn’t fit the usual Stephen King mode. There was nothing supernatural or chilling about it, and no real plot surprises, but it did tell a good tale. It was also written in a different way with no chapters, just the entire book with Dolores at the police station telling what happened concerning the death of both her husband many years ago and her employer yesterday. Good story as expected of Stephen King.