Pages 3-5: Blissful Manipulation

 
Damn, but he's diving right in this time.

Let's be honest: there have been times when King has strolled into the story, particularly with some of his longer books.  The writing on the leisurely ones is just as compelling as ever, but one some of 'em -- I'm thinking Duma Key most recently -- you look up after Page 50 and realize that huh, not a hell of a lot has happened yet.

Not this time.  No sirree.  One mid-air plane crash and the severing of a friendly woodland creaure, all in the first two pages.  And then ...

"Their lives had another forty second to run."

This is why the people who hate Stephen King hate Stephen King.  This kind of pulpish, intrusive authorial device is something that writers are coached away from all the damn time.  And it's why King himself can't get no respect -- because the Big Time Critics who bestow that respect are subtle people, who like their stories whispered, who run from the campfire and don't like to be reminded that it's all blissful manipulation, that storytelling isn't all subtlety and ambiguity and the clever turn of phrase. Sometimes it is about The Golden Arm and the turn of the clock and BOO!

King makes hamhanded foreshadowing like this work -- partly because he creates a couple of characters that seem both real and care-worthy with just a few deft strokes, in half a dozen short paragraphs.  They don't seem like cannon fodder destined to die in the first scene ... even though that's exactly waht they are.  And it works because he zips past that selfsame manipulation fast, and pays off even faster.  The "forty seconds" is mentioned in the middle of the second page. The crash and severance happen in the next page and half, and then bam, we're out. Barely forty seconds has passed in realy time as well as book time, and now, suddenly, scarily, we're at the end of prologue, and it's already getting weird.

Stongest, strangest opening for an SK novel since I don't remember when.  And I couldn't be happier about it.

Here we goooo.....