A fantastic peek into a terrible situation. I was listening to the audiobook, so I didn't have any feeling for how much of the story was left.
I've been listening to a lot of audio books lately. My problem with the audio version of Full Dark, No Stars is the female narrator, Jessica Hecht. It didn't bother me too much during Big Driver, but it started driving me crazy throughout A Good Marriage. She tends to make every female voice sound air headed and weak. It's insane. I know Darcy, the main character, is a rational intelligent woman because of the way she puts the puzzle pieces together and because of the way she expresses herself internally. Then Hecht does Darcy's voice and it's super high pitched, slow, and over inflected. Then she started doing the same thing when reading Bob, just in a super low register. It's like as soon as the characters start talking they develop mental handicaps. I know that sounds awful, it's just what her reading of them sounds like. It got so I couldn't wait for the story to end. Not because of the story itself, but because of her unnatural delivery. Nobody sounds like that. So insincere.
There! I made it all the way through Full Dark. I was always a little wary of this collection because of it's promise of total darkness. But I enjoyed it a lot. Even though by the time I had made it to A Good Marriage, I had started having some pretty weird dreams. I totally blame the book. King has a way of getting under my skin and making me feel everything his characters are feeling. A very good collection of very bad situations.
I expected it to end after the conversation on the bed, with Darcy's trapped acceptance. That would have been a dark ending to the collection, hey? Then, I expected it to end at the funeral. I guess the ending with Ramsey serves to release Darcy from her remaining feelings of guilt and responsibility, but I'm not sure it was necessary. The most interesting part of it was actually learning the limitless depths of Bob's depravity in what he did to that little boy. And I thought he couldn't be more of a monster than he already was. I thought Darcy's decision to end Bob herself was an elegant solution to an incomprehensibly difficult situation. After all...an accident can be an unhappy woman's best friend.
I've been listening to a lot of audio books lately. My problem with the audio version of Full Dark, No Stars is the female narrator, Jessica Hecht. It didn't bother me too much during Big Driver, but it started driving me crazy throughout A Good Marriage. She tends to make every female voice sound air headed and weak. It's insane. I know Darcy, the main character, is a rational intelligent woman because of the way she puts the puzzle pieces together and because of the way she expresses herself internally. Then Hecht does Darcy's voice and it's super high pitched, slow, and over inflected. Then she started doing the same thing when reading Bob, just in a super low register. It's like as soon as the characters start talking they develop mental handicaps. I know that sounds awful, it's just what her reading of them sounds like. It got so I couldn't wait for the story to end. Not because of the story itself, but because of her unnatural delivery. Nobody sounds like that. So insincere.
There! I made it all the way through Full Dark. I was always a little wary of this collection because of it's promise of total darkness. But I enjoyed it a lot. Even though by the time I had made it to A Good Marriage, I had started having some pretty weird dreams. I totally blame the book. King has a way of getting under my skin and making me feel everything his characters are feeling. A very good collection of very bad situations.