{"id":28944,"date":"2016-04-26T22:59:23","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28944"},"modified":"2016-04-26T22:59:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:59:45","slug":"the-pop-of-king-my-so-called-admirer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-my-so-called-admirer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: My So-Called Admirer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a>I was browsing the Borders in Boston one day in late August when a clerk cruised up and murmured, \u201cDude! Bret Easton Ellis is blaming his new book on you!\u201d
\nI thought he must have been joking\u2014city-glitterati Bret Easton Ellis doing Stephen King seemed about as likely as Stephen King doing Philip Roth\u2014but that night I put our names together on the com-puter, more or less on a whim, and was shocked when the Google search spat out something like 72,000 hits.
\nTurns out Bret Easton Ellis is calling Lunar Park a Stephen King homage, and claims to have read Salem\u2019s Lot at least a dozen times as a kid… or so says Elizabeth Hand in The Washington Post, but she also calls the demonic toy in Lunar Park a Yerby (it\u2019s actually a Terby, and yes, it matters). If Ellis really did read Salem\u2019s Lot a dozen times as a kid, the reasons for the past drug use he\u2019s spoken of become much clearer to me.
\nIn any case, of course I went back to the bookstore, bought Lunar Park, and read it. At one point the narrator asks, \u201cWho was going to buy the pitch I was making in order to save myself?\u201d Me, for one, and I get a 20 percent discount, too. I started looking for my own footprints, and ended up follow-ing Ellis\u2019. Not a wasted trip, either. Not at all.
\nI\u2019m not quite a Bret Easton Ellis virgin. I read American Psycho just to see what all the bellow-ing was about, and thought it was bad fiction by a good writer, the sort of hectoring narrative you can\u2019t wait to get away from at a party, delivered by a guy who\u2019s backed you into a corner and keeps telling repetitive anecdotes while his drink dribbles slowly onto your shirt.Lunar Park is nothing like that. I got no sense that Ellis has any real grounding in American hor-ror fiction (I\u2019m pretty sure he\u2019s read Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and, of course… me), but he\u2019s clearly seen enough movies to know what works and what to avoid. Surely it will be the only work of mainstream American fiction to be reviewed in Fangoria magazine this year. Think of it as… I don\u2019t
\nknow… John Cheever writes The Shining. If that turns your stomach, fine; many of the critics who\u2019ve reviewed Lunar Park have stuck it in the literary microwave and given it about four hours on high. If it sounds interesting, however, maybe you\u2019re with the group who finds the book a strange triumph.
\nCheck this out: A newly married writer with substance-abuse problems moves to the burbs with his very troubled family. (He\u2019s named Bret Easton Ellis, but never mind; that\u2019s your basic critic-kryptonite tossed out by a gun-shy novelist who\u2019s been shot in the ass too often by The New York Re-view of Books.) The house starts coming to life around him, reinventing itself as the one he lived in as a child. Neighborhood children begin to disappear. The ghost of his father appears. Worse, he starts getting blank e-mails from the bank where Dad\u2019s ashes are stored\u2014at two in the morning, the time of his father\u2019s death. The e-mails have a spooky Blair Witch Project-like home movie attached. His little girl\u2019s favorite toy (Terby the stuffed birdy) comes to life. And then, like George Stark in The Dark Half, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho turns up and begins to commit murders.
\nThere\u2019s some annoying hugger-mugger\u2014a phantom wind strong enough to knock over a vending machine that doesn\u2019t seem to bother Bret at all, for instance\u2014but there are also some dandy set pieces (as the Fangoria review, probably the best and certainly the most knowledgeable, points out). I kept expecting Ellis to cop out and retreat to the hackneyed haven of the \u201cserious novelist\u201d: Was it real or was it a dream? You must decide for yourself, dear reader. Nope; in the last couple of chapters, Lunar Park goes all out, balls to the wall. I respect that.<\/p>\n

And Lunar Park\u2019s denouement offers real and affecting insight into how fathers and sons can draw apart, and yet never stop yearning for some reconciliation. The creepiest insight the book has to offer\u2014and the most mature\u2014is that some such longings may even survive death.
\nWhether or not Bret Easton Ellis is \u201cdoing\u201d Stephen King at the beginning of Lunar Park (little parenthetical expressions and all) doesn\u2019t matter, because by the end, all the masks, imitations, and pharmacological shopping lists have been set aside. Even in American Psycho, that boringly bloodthirsty book, it was clear to me that Ellis was a fine storyteller. It\u2019s this facet of his writing that has most ap-pealed to readers and been most overlooked by critics. It seems at times to have appalled Ellis himself (one could almost believe it\u2019s the Terby hidden inside his laptop, flexing its claws). I got a clear sense of Lunar Park having started almost as a joke\u2014perhaps a rather desperate one, part apology for Ameri-can Psycho\u2014and having finished as what is close to a credo. That is the true magic of novels, which of-ten possess more strength (and reality) than their creators suppose: They see into our secret hearts.
\nSpeaking of hearts, readers of Lunar Park may be surprised to find that Bret Easton Ellis has a surprisingly large one. Here is a book that progresses from darkness and banality to light and epiphany with surprising strength and sureness.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was browsing the Borders in Boston one day in late August when a clerk cruised up and murmured, \u201cDude! Bret Easton Ellis is blaming his new book on you!\u201d I thought he must have been joking\u2014city-glitterati Bret Easton Ellis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28944","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28944"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28954,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28944\/revisions\/28954"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}