I am in the midst of a week of vacation time right now, and thought I'd work my way through a few bits of King-related ephemera in lieu of doing anything useful. In order to prove it, here come some random thoughts about it all, beginning with:
The last time I read a Tabitha King novel, it was
The Trap,
which I thought was pretty great. It was only the third of her novels I'd read, and next up in the queue is a book called
Pearl, with
One On One being the next after that. I'd been wanting to wait to listen to this audiobook until I had actually read the novel, because I generally find that I no longer respond very well to audiobooks as first "reads." This is especially true of abridged audiobooks, which are something I try to avoid whenever possible.
However, I'm also -- verrrrrrrrrrry slowly -- working on a series of posts about audiobook versions of King books, and the next title up in my explorations was his abridged reading of Tabitha's One On One. So I figured hey, the time has come; let's just dig into that, and think of it as a preview of the actual novel.
Which is exactly my response upon having finished it: I just got a preview of a novel. And I think it's a novel I'm going to like quite a lot; maybe more even than Tabitha King's
Caretakers,
which I flat-out loved.
Thing is, I can't make that call based on an abridged audiobook, even one narrated by Stephen King himself. Mr. King does a terrific job of reading Mrs. King's words; so much so that I immediately wished unabridged audiobooks existed of him reading all of her novels. Frankly, she deserves the attention, and that'd be one way to get a bit more of it.
The story (as you can read a bit for yourself from the back cover) is about the fraught relationship between two high-school basketball players. The Kings were, during the nineties, famous for their championing women's basketball at both the collegiate and high-school levels; Mr. King would work the sport into a short story ("Ur") in a roundabout way years later, but Mrs. King tackled the subject while they were in the thick of it. And, indeed, she wrote a regionally-published nonfiction book (Playing Like a Girl) about a high-school hoops team only a year after this.
As I have found to be the case previously, Mrs. King's gift is for writing characters. Deanie Gauthier is maybe the best I've read from her yet; I found her to be incredibly frustrating but also utterly irresistible, which meant that I was in complete sympathy with Sam, her male counterpart. This is a different-sides-of-the-tracks relationship, in some ways, but in a setting where more or less everyone is a born loser. Basketball arguably offers them both a way out of that world; but that world has its hooks in them deep, and does NOT want to let go. I got deeply invested in this relationship, and its ups and downs worked on me fully even though I was getting only what felt like a cursory summary of the novel's events.
That, of course, is the problem with abridged audiobooks. By definition, a lot of things have to get cut out; in a way, it's like hearing edited-down clips of songs and saying you've listened to a whole album. Nope, you sure haven't; and here, I really felt it. I was never sure when I bouncing from one scene to the next because it had been designed that way by Mrs. King, or because the rough blade of abridgement had sliced a scene to smithereens. It was mostly the latter, I feel sure.
Nevertheless, I found it to be enjoyable. The bottom line for me is that I love to hear Mr. King narrate a story; he's really, really good at it. He keeps the goofy character-voice tomfoolery to a minimum, and just goes at the material in straightforward fashion. I guess I'm glad he's spent much of his life writing books, as opposed to narrating them; but if somebody told me he'd spent secret hours recording dozens of audiobooks for other authors' works, I'd buy every single one of them when and if they got released. This is not merely because I'd feel obliged to for my collection, but also because I just like the way he reads.
