Publications: Reviews

ON WRITING by Stephen King (NEL 367pp £6.99) and DECIPHER by Stel Pavlou (Simon & Schuster 616pp £12.99)

Here are two completely different books, by very different writers. One is a piece of non-fiction by one of the best and best-selling writers in the horror field. The other is the first novel by a new writer. And there is a reason for covering these books in a joint review!

King’s On Writing is subtitled “A Memoir of the Craft” -- and Freemasonry it ain’t. On Writing consists of an extended autobiographical section, followed by his thoughts on the actual craft of writing. King shows how a writer’s life -- memories, incidents, relationships, upbringing, everything, can (and should) contribute to the writer’s work. The section “On Writing” is
King’s clear and simple set of guidelines for aspiring writers, liberally illustrated with examples from his own life and work.

Practical and straightforward in the way that King’s own work is practical and straightforward, the magic and mystique of the writer’s craft is explored without ever losing its essence, as it is never lost in the best of King’s prolific and high-quality output. (On Writing also contains
King’s response to his near-fatal accident in 1999.) This is a pro at work, and we get to have a look-in.

Stel Pavlou’s novel Decipher is one that contains many of the vices, as well as several of the virtues, that King describes. Decipher is a hugely entertaining and utterly preposterous piece of pulp fiction that reads something like the cross between “At the Mountains of Madness” with the Shaver Mystery and any number of stories by the likes of John Russell Fearn from those vivid pages of the Ziff-Davis Amazing Stories from the 1940’s.

What are the virtues of Decipher? Action and imagination, as Pavlou’s near-future story of discoveries under Antarctica, corporate greed and conspiracy, the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, the state of the Sun, carbon 60, ancient languages and myths, and the ultimate race against time tumbles through its over 600 pages. And the vices? Well -- too many infodumps, too many cliched ways of describing the characters, maybe simply too much happening, as if Pavlou wasn’t sure that he’d ever be able to write another novel. Pavlou commits the error of the young man from Japan. And including a four-page bibliography at the end crammed with scientific articles is a tad pretentious, even if there is a lot in the novel would be worth following up. Perhaps a web address would’ve done...

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard