Review: 'Elevation' by Stephen King (2018)

I’m not sure what the point of releasing ‘Elevation’ as a standalone work was, other than to bulk up King’s output schedule alongside May’s ‘The Outsider’.

Pretty sure any other author would be fine releasing one decent-sized book a year, and it’s not like ‘The Outsider’ was bad by any means.

Nevertheless, ‘Elevation’ is Stephen King’s second big release of 2018 and has too many irregularities to dismiss it as merely schedule filler.

Different retailers have billed ‘Elevation’ as a novella and novel and at under 150 pages I’d say it definitely classes as the former.

Furthermore, selling such a short book at £14.99 RRP is a kick in the teeth. 

For comparison, I bought Lionel Shriver’s ‘Property’ for the same price and that gave me two novellas and over a hundred pages of short stories.

Pricing aside, ‘Elevation’ marks yet another tale coming from Castle Rock. Even blowing the whole place up at the end of 1991’s ’Needful Things’ wasn’t enough to fell his favourite fictional locale.

In a time where where political discourse has wound it’s way into art in increasingly unsubtle ways, King deserves credit for showing some amount of restraint.

The tale is at its heart pretty straightforward. An overweight guy by the name of Scott Carey is mysteriously becoming lighter without his outward appearance changing at all. While battling against this mysterious affliction, Carey seeks to help his lesbian neighbour’s vegan restaurant pick up business before he floats off.

If any other author took that plot and those devices in this time, it would almost certainly be nowhere as dignified as the end result here. 

Stephen King stands as the author who can take any hokey story idea and make it into a credible piece, and he proves he’s still got that talent here.

I had no problems with the prose or characters, which all functioned fine for a novella and felt believable rather than too broad. The lack of an antagonist, which a lesser author might use as a straw man for the political bent, is a bold move and possibly proof of King’s wariness of the subject matter.

His general message of “we can still make an effort to get along in troubled times despite our differences” may be dismissed as twee by some but it remains an important one.

Most of my problems with ‘Elevation’ lie outside of the immediate text.

For one thing, despite the quality of the prose, you’ve seen ‘Elevation’ before.

Whether it’s the chapter that documents Scott’s marathon run (echoes of ‘The Long Walk’), or his fruitless attempts to reverse his weight-loss experience (perhaps an attempt to rewrite or perhaps reverse 1984’s grim but sloppy ‘Thinner’) to the use of Castle Rock as the backdrop for the tale, ‘Elevation’ reads like comfort food.

Stephen even brings back Mark Edward Geyer to supply illustrations, as he did to ‘Rose Madder’ and ‘The Green Mile’. 

Familiarity is nice, but isn’t a substitute for having teeth. 

‘The Green Mile’ was a poison apple of a book and ‘Rose Madder’ had opening so visceral the book never really recovered. 

There’s nothing to surprise you here.

The length is an issue for me as well. King has written far larger books with far less compelling narratives than this one. Although ‘Elevation’ never outstays its welcome, its status as a novella mean it also never really takes off. 

Looking back, between this and ‘The Outsider’s attempts to remake ‘The Dark Half’ as a ‘Mr. Mercedes’ instalment, I do wonder if Stephen King is going the way of David Bowie and attempting to reframe his own history. 

Like instead of rerecording and remixing tracks, he’s remixing ideas into what he thinks to be improved forms. (If so, I’d love to see him give ‘The Tommyknockers’ its due.)

Indeed, ‘Elevation’s frequent dips into nostalgia turn into the kind of book that, if it were a song, it’d be an inoffensive “new” tracked bunged onto the end of a best-of compilation after the band’s split up.

It’s kind of thing King can write in his sleep between bigger projects, although previous novellas usually came in collections for value (or in the case of ’The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’ could actually function as a modern YA introduction to King’s work).

Aside from the admirable if predictable political message, there’s no real reason for ‘Elevation’ to exist in this guise at all.

6/10

Review: Property (A Collection) by Lionel Shriver (2018)

I know this says more about me than the designer but when I saw the cover to Lionel Shriver’s debut short fiction all I saw was this:

I’m not even sorry.

Lionel Shriver has taken some flak in recent years for her stance that fiction should be written by anyone and about anyone regardless of either parties’ personal or cultural backgrounds. I mean, there’s a bit more nuance to it than that but I’m not going into that here. What I will say is while I do support an author’s decision to write about whoever they want, that doesn’t mean that I’ll enjoy the work regardless.

I’m also not sure if Lionel Shriver is aware that there is a difference between social commentary and “lol trigger the libtards”, and some of these stories do seem to serve little purpose than to exercise her right to write from the perspectives of other people, regardless of the quality of the result.

‘The Mandibles’ was one of the best dystopia novels I read this year, and it contained a shit-tonne of social commentary and motifs. Most of these were done pretty well and

I honestly wished it was longer so we could see the chaos continue to unfold.

Anyway, on to ‘Property’!

‘Property’ can’t seem to introduce one character without letting you know what their political stance is, or what newspaper they read in one UK-based story. Finger very much on the cultural pulse there.

‘Domestic Terrorism’ sticks out amongst the short stories for being a piece of social commentary that actually is given space to breathe and is interwoven into the narrative.

Family dynamics between parents and the nebulously-defined and much-maligned ‘millennial’ are bluntly presented alongside the instantaneous and reactionary powers of social media and politics in general over the last decade.

For almost every other offering here, it’s like Shriver was so anxious to fit the themes into so few pages that she did so regardless of how the stories would suffer. And some of them really do.

What I like about Shriver is her ability to write these abrasive characters who have their well-off delusions of sanctity smashed by the various blind cruelties of life.

The short story format doesn’t really allow her to pull these off as well as she does in her novels.

Conflict is largely limited to arguments between people that read like preludes to larger payoffs that never come.

The exceptions are the two novellas that bookend the collection.

‘The Standing Chandelier’ has room to breathe and show two not-lover protagonists letting their relationship atrophy, with the titular chandelier being a fantastically presented metaphor for a waste of time.

‘The Subletter’ uses the backdrop of 1990s Belfast to illuminate the turmoil between a live-in landlord and a tenant lacking in social graces to great effect.

If ‘Property’ was a collection of these sorts of novellas, it would be much improved. Shriver excels at cutting off her protagonists’ layers and letting the wounds scar over across many pages.

“The Self-Seeding Sycamore” is severely out of date, reading like a casserole of BBC America highlights. People judging one another over newspaper choices, arguments about shrubbery and regular viewings of Downton Abbey. The plot is the aching cliché of  two seemingly-incompatible neighbours striking up a relationship and discovering they’re not so different.

‘The Royal Male’ is about five pages long I suspect is a scene cut from a longer piece.

‘The Chapstick’ presents the immortal moral “don’t be a dick to airport security”.

‘Vermin’s an effective little piece that shows the deterioration of a property alongside a crumbling marriage.

‘Possession’ is a fun ghost story that runs with the idea of property becoming an extension of one’s personality and takes it to its logical conclusion. In this case, this is a haunted house.

When ‘Property’ works, it reads like it should, bite-sized Shriver. 

When it doesn’t, it reads like a thinly-reworked opinion column or a chunk of a larger aborted work.

Calling it a “Collection” is spot on. It's like an assortment of disparate items collected over a long period of time; the equivalent of emptying one’s kitchen junk drawer.

It’s packed with items that mean a lot to the right people, I’m sure. 

But not to me.

6/10