Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week, I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

This week, I look at the quasi-sequel to the previous year's publication Gerald's game

that serves as a spiritual companion, a literary sibling that similarly explores the horror of abuse through the perspective of a female protagonist,

one that is spotted in the form of ghostly visions from the pages of Gerald's game itself,

a novel in which King not only continues to challenge himself in character work, but also narrative structure.

From a pure writing standpoint, Dolores Claiborne is nothing

like anything he'd ever written before. Though the plot itself is very simple character examination

with a little bit of murder mystery, it's incredibly ambitious. First, it's not just a first-person

perspective. The focus is entirely on

Dolores Claiborne to the point where hers is the only voice or thought that we hear. This type of

technique can be incredibly challenging. Everything that King writes has to be done in such a way

where it appears to be a two-way conversation, even though it's really a one-way conversation, or at least a two-way conversation that only ever gives us one side, so everything he writes can never come at the expense of the audience who has to understand what's occurring from only one side. It's such a departure from the norm of his writing that some people have speculated that he didn't write it at all, and that Tabitha

had been the one to write it. Again, like I said in my Gerald's game review, I haven't read

anything by Tabitha, so I can't say for sure. I will say that there are certainly Stephen King's

galore in the novel, and to say that his wife wrote it is both insulting to his talent and

complimentary at the same time in the sense that it says that he captures the female perspective so well it couldn't have been written by a man.

Is that true? I don't know. All I know is that it's a deeply personal examination of a woman's life as a wife, mother, and employee.

Before I get any further, I'm going to read the

world's shortest Wikipedia entry, so I'll have a basis upon which I can build my analysis.

While being interrogated, Dolores Claiborne wants to make clear to the pleas that she did not

kill her wealthy, I'm sorry, her wealthy employer and elderly woman named Vera

...