Re: Books by Stephen King
I have a few issues with Gerald's Game, but most of what you disliked, Dark, I didn't mind.
For instance, I think it's too long and draggy in some places. It was a novella that King pumped up a little too much. This would do better if it was about 140 pages shorter. Lean, mean and scary as hell if done right and if the throttle is held down a little more, especially at the end. Like you, I think the post-escape part is really quite slow. Too slow, really.
But where I stop agreeing with you is in the targeting of men, and in the truth about Joubert.
So, men being awful and all that. Jessie dealt with arguably the single most important male figure in her life first molesting her, then emotionally blackmailing her into never, ever telling. We know the shit that caused her. So she ended up married to a man of considerable wealth, a lawyer who generally never grew up and was rather childish. This man then very nearly raped her before she fought back, kicked him in the gut, and inadvertently brought on the heart attack that bumped him off. Gerald did not deserve to die, but when you have someone in handcuffs and they tell you to let them go, you do it. You don't play games. You do it. This is why safe words exist for good reason, BTW. Anyway, I think you can understand how this worked out. The two most important men in Jessie's life have made her pretty understandably gun-shy. She doesn't actually believe every man out there is awful, not all the way down, but it's going to take her some time before she can get past what she's come through. To expect her to even hear the "not all men" rhetoric after her ordeal is just foolish, and to -use that rhetoric on her is borderline heartless. Because no, not all men are that way; in fact, most would be appalled by that level of behaviour. But the issue is that if that's your experience, ore most of it, then it's all you have, and you can't just be told that "well these other men will be different". I didn't see this as ham-fisted by King, I saw it as spot-on for survivors of male-perpetrated violence against women.
And now, Joubert. Okay, he went a -little bit far with this one. But the fact that there was a random necrophiliac who liked stealing bones and jewelry, I thought, was actually creepy as hell. King could've left it ambiguous, but I think the reason it was brought in at the end this way is because Jessie really needed to be able to put it to bed. Now she knows it was a man, not a figment of her imagination. A terribly disturbed, perhaps mentally unstable man. And hey, guess what? They're out there, folks. Women too. All genders, they're out there. So this was a little convenient, but not horribly outlandish. If it'd just been left as Jessie never knowing what she saw, it's arguably scarier but also far more bleak, as she'll never really get closure that way. I think King was, in his way, actually trying to bring the story to closure of a sort, the way Dolores got.
Speaking of, Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game were once halves of a bigger novel called In the Path of the Eclipse. You can see little pieces of them still tied to each other, but I think King got a bit spooked by what that would entail, and took them apart. Dolores worked very well, in my opinion; Gerald's Game was good, but not great, mostly owing to its wooliness and penchant for protracted rambling. Totally squicked out when I first read the escape though; I hope I'm never, ever called upon to do that to myself.
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