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
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