Gwendy’s Button Box: (The Button Box Series) (Gwendy’s Button Box Trilogy)
£4.70
‘A resonant novella set in one of King’s signature locales: the small town of Castle Rock, Maine’ Washington Post
The small town of CASTLE ROCK, MAINE has witnessed some strange events and unusual visitors over the years, but there is one story that has never been told…until now.
There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974 twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zig-zag up the cliffside.
At the top of the stairs, Gwendy catches her breath and listens to the shouts of the kids on the playground. From a bit farther away comes the chink of an aluminum bat hitting a baseball as the Senior League kids practice for the Labor Day charity game.
One day, a stranger calls to Gwendy: ‘Hey, girl. Come on over here for a bit. We ought to palaver, you and me.’
On a bench in the shade sits a man in black jeans, a black suit coat, and a white shirt unbuttoned at the top. On his head is a small neat black hat. The time will come when Gwendy has nightmares about that hat…
Journey back to Castle Rock in this chilling new novella by Stephen King, bestselling author of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, and Richard Chizmar, award-winning author of A Long December.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton, 1st edition (2 Jun. 2017) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 2308 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 111 pages |
by Meesha
I have now read Gwendy’s Button Box twice, the previous time in 2017. I still enjoy it as much as I did on the first read, and it was a book that drew me in, and is something that I wished I’d read as a child.
It’s one of those books, perhaps one that you may not have read as a child, due to some adult themes (Frankie talking about Gwendy’s “sugar tits” and how tight her ass is, amongst other things, like death). But there are certain themes included in here, which would have sparked my imagination at a young age and perhaps been a better introduction to Stephen King than Carrie was.
For such a short book (it’s only 171 pages, with extremely short chapters), it will be a book that will leave you thinking afterwards. I wanted Gwendy to use the Button Box more, but it was nice to see her life improve little by little, even the bits that don’t necessarily feel like improvements. From the plump girl at the beginning in 1974, to the grown up teenager at the end, you are sucked into Gwendy’s journey from that little girl, through her first love, and everything that teenage-dom can throw at her.
Of course, it’s set in Maine, and more specifically Castle Rock. The “Suicide Stairs” make for an interesting beginning to the book, and the fascinating character of Richard Farris. I don’t know if anyone else made a connection between the man who killed himself on the stairs in the 1930s and Richard Farris – or maybe it was just something that King was hinting at or my brain thinking of connections which aren’t actually there.
This isn’t one of those James Patterson collaborations, where he’s slapped his name on the cover to give some unknown publicity. I haven’t heard of Richard Chizmar before this, and it’s very much a Stephen King novella, with the darkness and foreboding there. I don’t feel that the pace dragged at any points either but I do feel that some parts could have been fleshed out a bit more. Gwendy does go from 12 to 18 thereabouts pretty quickly and I wanted more from her, more about her life.
Interestingly, I loved this more than my Dad did, and he’s the big Stephen King fan. But I think Gwendy “spoke” to me, in a way that she probably didn’t speak to my dad. Perhaps there was a little part of me that identified with her.
You will read this in one sitting, and I’m re-reading this prior to reading the
sequel
. There was nothing here that led me to need a sequel and I was quite happy with the way the book ended – there was no cliffhanger ending, but obviously Richard had a bee in his bonnet or more ideas about what happened to Gwendy. It will be interesting to see how the sequel turns out, since it’s a considerably longer book. I would definitely recommend this, if you’re after a quick read and it might be something I will introduce my children to in the future.
by catherine
A short story stretched out by page formatting to make it appear as a novel. Definitely not worth the price.
by Kindle Customer
Enjoyed the story. Rather expensive books for such short stories though.
by Deiseach
When I saw that this was a collaboration between Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, I wasn’t at all sure what to think. Was this going to be like one of those dead horses publishing houses like to flog, where a deceased best-selling author continues to have their name slapped on the cover while a replacement dutifully makes a story out of the scraps of plot found while rummaging through the star’s notes? (Granted, King is not dead but the principle remains the same).
Well, it doesn’t seem to be that at all. I genuinely couldn’t tell by the prose style who was writing what, so congratulations to Mr Chizmar! This is a recognisable Stephen King story, not just because it is set in Castle Rock but because the characters and plot and themes are definitely those of Stephen King (by the bye, Stephen, whoever the big hulking lout who used to beat you up in high school was, we get it by now. You can stop writing that character in to everything, and making him smelly, with rotten teeth, ugly and stupid, a drop-out and juvenile delinquent who comes to a sticky end – honestly, we get it by now. It’s been years, let it *go*, man; write a different villain!)
Where I *did* notice a difference was in the shifts of tone – where you can see King gearing up for a good old massacre as in previous books and then Richard steps in and goes “No, Stephen, we’re not doing that in this book”.
So people (generally) survive, the ending is (more or less) happy, there are only a few deaths, and whatever huge apocalypse you might have been anticipating (because after all, this *is* a Stephen King book and at the very least half the town will fall into a suddenly gaping sinkhole, right?) never eventuates.
You can see the connections between other books, not alone in the Castle Rock continuity but the Gunslinger series. This leads to a certain tension between the plot of this particular book (which is much more optimistic than normal) and the expectations you have for a King novel (bad things will happen to good people, very bad things indeed). You get this when King is getting into his stride, dropping dark hints, setting a tone of brooding anticipation about the danger posed by the button box, and just when you expect something disastrous to happen – it’s then that Chizmar (I imagine) steps in and damps it all down.
There *is* a disaster (taken right from real life) and a very bad thing does happen to a good person, but in general life goes on remarkably well. You expect Gwendy, the heroine, to end up paying a dreadful price for the good things that happen to her as a result and looking at it one way, you could say she does (looking at it another, someone else pays that price for her) but the end seems to be genuinely good future for her, with no lingering “ah yes, but twenty years down the line, this bill will come due – with added interest” foreboding. The giver of the button box is also a surprisingly benign figure, given the intimations of darker purpose King attributes to him.
The main problem with that is that this is a novella – it should either have been a short story, where the compression would keep us going forward with the momentum of the tale and the untroubled future, and seeming lack of lasting effect on Gwendy, would not have been so noticeable, or expanded into a novel, where events over the five or so years of the story’s timespan could have been examined in more detail and the characterisation given more depth and the recovery of Gwendy from her trauma given space to breathe and happen.
But it’s a decent story all the same, and a real Stephen King story, and worth the time to read it.