Gwendy's Final Task

 

Gwendy’s Final Task – Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

Bad News, Good News, Bad News.  The Bad News is it is the consensus that even though Stephen King is considered one of the most popular authors during the last 50 years, he’s written some pretty awful books. The Good News is, for me at least, he’s had a pretty good streak going as of late, and I haven’t read anything too awful by him for quite some time. The Bad News is that this one, sadly, breaks the winning streak.  This offering was pretty bad on so many levels.

First, this is a sequel.  Actually I think it’s part 3 of a trilogy, yet part 2 was written by co-author Richard Chizmar as a solo effort, so I never made the effort to tackle that one.  Part 1 was actually a decent effort. It was somewhat brief, and could have easily been a novella instead of a standalone book that costs the reader $25 or $30.  That story was somewhat entertaining.  Part of the problem, for me anyway, is that I really didn’t remember much about the first book.  Something about a little girl who is given a “mysterious magical box” by a “mysterious stranger in a bowler hat”.  The magic box allows little Gwendy Peterson to do some pretty neat magical things, but with all good things, there are bad things attached. I think. I honestly don’t remember too many details, and I don’t really remember Stephen King doing a decent job in this novel reminding his readers of the exact reasoning behind the box and why Gwendy wanted to use it in the first place. Strike 1.

So fast forward several years.  I think we’re now in 2026. The book was written in 2022, so we’re in the “future” but if you pick this book up several years after it was written, you may not be aware of the fact that the story takes place in a hypothetical forthcoming time.  So some events we read about actually happened, such as the COVID pandemic.  Other events, like the Great Pyramids of Egypt exploding (or something) probably (let’s hope) won’t actually occur. So if one picks this book up in, say, 2028, they may be a tad confused by the “reality” that surrounds them in this book. Strike 2.

Gwendy is now a 64-year-old Senator.  Since our main character holds such a prestigious occupation in the world of American politics, this gives Stephen King his familiar, yet annoying, opportunity to espouse his annoying political opinions ad nauseum.  This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and it sadly won’t be the last.  Being political isn’t a bad thing in a book as long as you bottle the acid and tame the venom to a degree.  I recently read another fairly new King novel, “Billy Summers”, and in that book, King takes aim at Donald Trump about once every 75 pages or so.  In this book, however, King barfs up his opinions every other page it seems.  Like the author, I despise the 45^th President, yet such musings are not welcome when the man dictates his opinions in such a forced condescending way throughout the entire book.  If King ever truly wants to convert the ignorant Trump supporter, his methods in his writing simply won’t get the job done.

So when we read about Gwendy in her bid for the Senate against her Trump worshipping opponent, all of the annoying stereotypes bludgeon the reader over the head.  She campaigns with a mask.  Her opponent, of course, does not.  Of course it’s a conservative district, and of course Gwendy doesn’t have any chance of winning - especially when her opponent is a leader of his prestigious church (of course). Well, of course he has an affair with a young member of the congregation. Of course he then gets her pregnant. And of course he tries to secretly obtain an abortion. And of course he’s discovered, and of course it makes the national news. And of course this sinks his campaign allowing Gwendy to, of course, win the Senate seat.

Of course it does.

Strike 3.

Now, not to confuse you, but this little story takes place in the “past” during our story.  The “present” involves the well-known Senator Gwendy Peterson getting to go to Space with an astronaut crew.  Her main motive is to get rid of the magic box and the evil that it contains.  What better place to get rid of it than somewhere other than the planet Earth?  So our main story takes place on a space shuttle where Gwendy is surrounded by astronauts who all have specific duties, but, hey, it’s great publicity to allow an esteemed Senator to go along for the ride.  There’s another “non-astronaut” as well - some mega rich billionaire who is the epitome of a rich, white, Republican male.  So of course, Gwendy can’t stand the guy and every time we read a dialogue between these two characters, it’s quite painful since King goes out of his way to not allow a single, decent thing come out of such a monster’s mouth. So this unbelievable character serves no purpose other than to allow King to scratch his hateful itch towards such a stereotype.  Actually, the character DOES serve a purpose to the story, but the events that actually happen here are quite dumb.  Strike 4 (and Strike 5 as well).

If things in this hackneyed story don’t seem to get any worse, they sadly do. It seems as though Gwendy is in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, and she seems to be forgetting a lot of things. Whether or not this condition is due to the evil box, I’m not quite sure, but, oh boy, King never fails to remind us that Gwendy’s mind is deteriorating.  You want to metaphorically grab the author by the neck and scream “We get it! You don’t have to remind us every other friggin paragraph!”.    So we read something like “Gwendy reaches down to tie her shoes”.  But, then, Gwendy can’t remember how to tie her shoes. So King spends several paragraphs elaborating on this fact.  Oy.  Strike 6.

I should also point out that in addition to reading the other (two?) book(s) in the series, Stephen King also has a bad habit of including happenings from his other novels in his current story as well.  This might be kinda cool for someone who’s read every Stephen King book a multitude of times, but one wishes that the author be reminded that not everyone who picks up this book is familiar with the plots of novels such as “It” or any of the books in the Dark Tower series.  Strike 6. No wait….I mean Strike 7.

This book was a waste of time and a waste of money.  The first book in the series was good, but this one seems nothing other than trying to exploit that story and turn it into a worthless rant that we’ve all heard before.  It’s sad that the reader must endure this kind of tripe from King every few years are so. Especially when he’s capable of so much better.

Sparring Partners

 

Sparring Partners – by John Grisham

I made it a rule many years ago to never read the inner jacket of a new book – the part that gives the reader an overview of the story.  I found that in too many instances, too much of the plot was divulged in the paragraph or two on said jacket.   If John and Mary are a couple and Mary dies in a car accident in the story, I don’t want to read this tidbit on the jacket if Mary doesn’t die in the story until, say, page 200. I mention this because, in the case of this John Grisham offering, it probably would have helped me enjoy this book slightly better had I taken the time to read the overview of this one and know what to expect.

Here is where I’m going with this - this book isn’t a novel, it’s three novellas.  The jacket would have told me this, and it might have saved me some disappointment.  It’s not that I’m disappointed reading novellas instead of novels, it’s just that Grisham sort of failed in his goal here, and I may have been better prepared.  Two of these three stories end too abruptly and seem “unfinished”. He should have taken both of these stories for the full journey and given them each a total of 400 pages instead of 100.  This is a shame because these two stories are quite good.  Yet, for whatever reason, the stories just basically stop.  I really don’t know what happened here.  Was Grisham under contractual obligation to deliver such a book consisting of three novellas instead of a novel?  I might be able to understand if he messed up with one story, but two?

The one story here that does manage to be complete, is sadly the inferior of the three.  The middle story “Strawberry Moon” is another one of John Grisham’s “Woe is me.  The death penalty is so awful an unfair” story.  He’s written several of these. The idea is a good one, but we’ve simply read too much of them by Grisham since it’s one of his pet protests for such a story to be fresh.  So we read about a brutal murderer’s last couple of hours before he’s executed.  There are a few elements of the story that are a bit unique and refreshing, but for the most part, we suffer through the story along with the convict.

The other two stories, however, had enormous potential.  One story has our old friend Jake Brigance (from Grisham’s first novel “A Time To Kill”) dealing with a “missing attorney”, and the last story is a somewhat fresh legal tale about two spoiled rich brothers who hate each other but basically have to work at dad’s firm even though they’re in their 40s.  Dad, it seems, is in prison, but he’s powerful enough to pull the right strings and keep everyone in line behind him and do his bidding.  I couldn’t help but think of the HBO show “Succession”.  If you’re familiar with that show, think of a family as warped as that one.   You know it’s a warped family when everyone is happy to see the wife of the convict (and mother of the sparring partners) finally die. No love lost for this horrible woman. 

Again, this story had so much potential, yet when we get to the last ten pages of the story, we know we’re about to be disappointed (yet again) because there simply isn’t any way that the story can be wrapped up with only ten pages left.  Alas, we’re right.

As magnificent of a storyteller as John Grisham is, it seems like I tend to be more disappointed by his output as of late.  It’s quite frustrating since many of his books that don’t do it for me seem as though they could have easily been so much better with a tad more care.  This is the case here.  This one is definitely somewhat of a baffler. Let’s hope he does better next time.

 

How The Good Guys Finally Won

 

How The Good Guys Finally Won – by Jimmy Breslin

I must make a note of myself not to attempt to read “current event” books that are 50 years old.  This is a book that is loosely (very loosely) written about aspects of the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon back in 1974.  This book was written very shortly after the event, and history really hadn’t had time to digest the players, the motivations, and the events.  I’ve actually read a lot of HISTORY books about Watergate that were well done, but this really isn’t a history book since much of the history hadn’t actually happened yet.

This book really isn’t even much of a linear account.  My guess is that Jimmy Breslin, a political correspondent during the time, decided to record a lot of observations and goings on that was occurring during the 18 months or so prior to the Nixon resignation.  There are simply too many players here in the pages, too much jumping back and forth in time, and too much meticulous detail about inconsequential people and events that takes away from any sort of concise narrative.

The main player in this story is Massachusetts Democrat Tip O’Neil.  Now, you could argue that every member of congress that served in the early seventies has their own Watergate story, but O’Neill, to my knowledge, never really had a major part in the process. True, he was a major personality, and it is somewhat interesting to see him work the political strings behind the scenes, but this book never really seems to go anywhere, and we read much more about Tip than we do Richard Nixon.  There’s no real beginning, middle, nor end.  It simply feels as though we’re eavesdropping on a multitude of cocktail parties that took place in Washington D.C. with the major movers and shakers during the time of the Watergate scandal.  Now, Tip was a key player that started the whole “Impeach Nixon” movement started, but too much detail is spent on the particulars that most readers really don’t care to read.

Perhaps the intent of this book was to be more about “atmosphere” and less on “linear facts”, but if so, I guess I should take the blame for not being aware of exactly what the point of this book was.  I didn’t feel like there was any sort of consistent theme throughout this story.  The Watergate scandal has been documented ad nauseum, and there are even a few “conspiracy theory” stories out there (see the book “Silent Coup”), and I guess I was hoping for some sort of telling of the Watergate story through a different set of eyes.

I guess if I had been a political insider or junkie around 1976, a lot of the anecdotes and stories told here may have resonated with me, but I felt this thing was overall a boring account that never piqued my interest to want to know more about anyone featured in this book.  There are so many major players in the Watergate scandal, and I felt most of them were at least mentioned in this book, but there was no insight as to what made any of them tick nor what their motivation may have been.  Again, it seems as though the author assumes his reader already knows this, but the only people who would know such details are the political addicts of the 1970s.   If you don’t really know much about H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, and/or John Ehrlichman, well, you certainly won’t learn about any of them here.

I’ve only read one other book by this author, the telling of the brand-new New York Mets baseball franchise that was a trainwreck when first conceived.  Although that one was a “current” event book as well (The Mets became a team in 1962, the book was written in 1963), that one at least held my interest.   I would recommend a hard pass on this book, especially if your goal is to learn anything at all about Watergate.