Stick the Landing

Or the rest doesn't matter

Earlier this week, I finished my audiobook and found myself at loose ends. I texted my mother, remembering that she was reading a book for Book Club that she was liking:

Me: Was there an audiobook that I was supposed to read next on your recommendation?

Mom: The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. I want to hear your thoughts on it.

Yesterday, I received this text:

Mom: How far are you in Sam Hell?

Me: Part 5, chapter 8.

Mom: Are you into it? Or meh?

Me: Totally into it.

Mom: Thank you.

Why “thank you?” Because she was off to book club and wanted to take my thoughts with her. Last night, I texted her one more time about the book:

Me: I have an hour left, and it has kind of fallen apart.

Mom: Yup. I recommended it to you before I reached the 75-80% mark.

It was bizarre, really. I was lying in bed, listening to the book and playing solitaire on my phone (my nighttime/alone time ritual) when the book… took a turn. At first I wondered if I had lost my mind. I was tired, it was late, maybe I was overthinking. But no, the writing had all of a sudden gone downhill. The themes in the book which, up until then, had been complex and fascinating, moved into the cliché. The characters became simple and a little offensive — I felt the author was judging them!

The last part of this novel ruined the rest of it for me, and I can’t in good conscience recommend it to friends. It felt like the author ran out of steam, and just wanted to wrap up the story in a way that would “make sense.”

The feeling with which I was left was not entirely unfamiliar. After all, I am a Game of Thrones fan. I say “am,” present tense, because although the ending of the television show broke me a little bit, I was able to give excuses for it. I read the books before I watched the show, and I knew that the showrunners were going to have to go rogue at some point when they ran out of source material.

The situation with GoT was not the same as other adaptations of beloved books — for the most part it didn’t have me yelling at the screen about how they were DOING IT WRONG (my poor mother put up with a lot of that during A Discovery of Witches). For the most part, I was tremendously pleased with how GoT wrangled the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series into episodic television. But the last season went off the rails, and the final two episodes were so painful that I will probably skip them when we eventually rewatch.

There are two miniseries that also managed to be absolutely incredible up until the dismount — coincidentally, they were both Stephen King properties. First was the miniseries for IT, from 1990. That book is loooong, as you may know, and the series was shown over two nights, with part one of the story playing on a Sunday night, and part two on the following Tuesday. The cast was stellar — both the child actors and their adult counterparts — and Tim Curry outdid himself as the stuff of nightmares, Pennywise the Clown. The movie had me in its grip all the way up until the last 10 minutes… when the fakest looking spider-monster you ever did see came out of the scary cave, and all of a sudden I was watching The Land of the Lost.

I was fated to be taken in again by a magical cast telling a captivating Stephen King story — this time by The Stand. Though it originally aired in 1994, I didn’t see it until at least a decade after that. Dan encouraged me to read the book, and it quickly became my favorite of King’s books. I was so excited to rent the miniseries (on VHS, naturally) and it didn’t disappoint. The casting was incredible once again, and the adapted screenplay was not lacking at all. I was totally enthralled right up until the final 10 minutes… when a cartoonish Hand (of God?) came down out of the sky and… well, unsuspended my disbelief.

I notice as I’m writing (complaining) that these last two examples were a failing of special effects, not of storytelling. I hope you, Dear Readers, have not had the storytelling rug pulled out from under you too many times in your lives.

But if you have? Please share. Help the community. HELP ME!

Thanks for reading.

Love, Susie