Later (2021)

"Sometimes growing up means facing your demons."

Short and spoiler-free: Later has a great hook that engages you for most of its two-hundred-plus-pages. It unfortunately starts to wobble a bit in the last stretch and then the floor falls completely out in the last, baffling chapter. Mind your footing. 

Longer and spoiler-ier: 

Jamie Conklin lives with his mother. No father or siblings, just an uncle with Alzheimer's in a local home. His mom is a literary agent, and Jamie sees dead people. "It's not like the movie with Bruce Willis," he lets us know. He doesn't see every dead person, just some, and they always recognize him and wave or otherwise alert Jamie of their presence. The dead, always dressed in the clothes they died in (not counting things like ball-gags, which apparently do not translate to the great beyond) must answer truthfully any question put to them. It's unclear, really, how Jamie learns this - he seems to have an intuitive understanding of it at the novel's beginning; the novel is, by the by, told in first person flashback, so Jamie is looking back at his life from the vantage point of twenty two - or why this would be, but it's a cool enough little rule for the story to follow. 

Things get complicated (Uncle Harry's Alzheimers worsens, there's a not-Bernie-Madoff-hedge-fund story (why not just have it be Bernie Madoff?), Jamie's Mom Tia's star client dies) when Liz (Tia's cop girlfriend) asks Jamie to help in a case where a killer has died without revealing the details of his last plot. 

The dead killer does so - begrudgingly - but then he tells Jamie that Tia has cancer. Is this true? Jamie wonders if there's some asterisk to this particular spirit. Turns out there is; here's a dead guy who not only doesn't just tell the truth, he can stick around, out of spite for Jamie, some kind of outsider-spirit with anime beyond what Jamie's used to. Jamie can't turn to his mom or even Liz (with whom his mom has broken up over her crooked-cop drug-running and later drug-using ways) so he turns to his next-door neighbor, whose dead wife spoke to Jamie in the first chapter. The neighbor is one of those King characters that has spent a good deal of time in the occult section of the library (or the fiction-Author 'Ki - to Ko ' aisle) and knows certain things about how to get rid of troublesome spirits or vampires. He recommends the Ritual of Chüd, i.e. lock tongues with the enemy in astral battle and battle wits and wills.

Which he does and Jamie wins, rather easily, and commands that the spirit not only stop haunting him but come running whenever he beckons him. "Oh I'll whistle and you'll come to me, my lad." as a matter of fact. Which at least the author acknowledges is a completely bizarre thing for a young 21st century boy to say by attributing the wording to his professor friend. Even so, it's an awkward thing to read/ repeat a further dozen or two dozen times to come. 

After much agonizing over what might happen, Jamie finally does beckon the spirit at the end of the book to battle Liz - now in a destructive drug tailspin - kidnaps him and takes him to her distributor's house in the boonies. Hi-jinks ensue. Jamie wakes up with the cops and then in the next chapter, his uncle - the Alzheimer's patient - dies and his spirit tells him he's his father.

Needle scratch!

There follows a baffling few pages where Jamie first imagines how it could have gone and then says "no wait, that never happened." It's a confusing chapter on many levels, especially for that. Is King reversing himself? What? Here are paragraphs in question:

"Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars * on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars - I wouldn't have been more than four or five - Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. ' Easy-peasy.'"

* I'll break in to say this reveal happens on pg. 244. If you're a writer and leading up to a last chapter reveal about incest, maybe a hidden in plain sight mystery-scars-supporting-said-reveal might have been mentioned somewhere early on?

"And of course there's that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact * that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can't carry a tune in a tin pal can probably produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer, Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

Except hold it, wait one,

That whole story is fiction."

* I don't know who needs to hear this, but incestuous coupling does not actually produce supernatural offspring. Nor is it even reasonable to imagine hey, just a horny, grieving couple of siblings deciding - as adults - to bang, or for one of them to just up and rape the other, then carry on as business partners/ siblings/ caretakers. What in the goddamn world? 

Jamie goes on to say he is only speculating about all the above - or is he? - but the whole damn thing is confused, both the above and all after. (Also, Jamie seems to have forgot his catchphrase is "Check it out," not "hold it.") This last chapter is a succession of things that don't make sense on top of inconsistencies in the writing voice on top of failure to resolve the threads that are there. At least It, with its famous batshit gangbang in the sewers, did not end itself resolving an entirely different novel that no one had been reading up to that point.

(A comment over here cracked me up re: Later's parallels with It: "a weird-sex thing popping up (at the end of) an It spinoff is kind of appropriate." Can't argue with that.)

King always says his endings surprise him. (The pointed opposite of the book-a-year goldmine-author from the first part of the book, who has the ending in mind and works backward - more on him to come.) I don't think he's just being cute when he talks about his process; I think he literally does close his eyes and take dictation from his muse. Any writer has his or her process, and it's worked pretty well for King. The thing is, you're supposed to edit this, though. No one wants to read the unexpurgated narrative of anyone's muse, so when the day's communing with spirits ends with "Incest reveal, last chapter."  the writer needs to stop and say "Well, I'm sure this makes sense in the muse dimension, but have I been writing that book?" If the answer is no, then you go back and make sure that a re-read will reveal oh, how masterful, this was subtly hinted at and its dynamics emphasized to make sense as a reveal all throughout. 

It isn't, though, so it doesn't. It feels like the kind of twist you get at the end of 1408 or Identity or some other non-John-Cusack example. King sometimes does not resist (and sometimes flat-out insists upon) this kind of zigzag-and-crash-the-car strategy. ("Dedication" comes to mind.) 

Worse, the things he had been building are rendered nonsensical by the reveal. Here's one example - not the only one:

"All of this seemed normal to me. I don't think the world starts to come into focus until you're fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just kind of take what you've got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became a lot of mornings. I didn't even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz's snarly hair. My mother's hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly (...) I had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks - yes, I still see them - and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I'd pick the dead folks.

Any day of the fucking week."

Keep in mind Jamie is making that observation looking back on his life post incest reveal, even if the reader doesn't know it yet. Would that not be a sensible place to maybe hint to the reader that these things, while real and relatable, don't make sense in lieu of subsequent events and reveals? Sorry: when you're bound to a demon-outsider from beyond and then you find out your uncle is your father and your entire familial set-up is a poorly-constructed lie, you're not going to be sitting there reflecting on that and not bringing up any of the aforementioned. It would tie together. At the very least it's a missed opportunity; at worst it's intentionally misleading the reader. 

It's too damn bad, because this could so easily have been a great book. It's got a good hook - I see dead people; the dead people tell me truths, etc. - and a good complication - uh-oh, this one dead guy might be lying to me - and even if you commit to the incest reveal as the novel's raison d'etre, it's got a sensible enough theme - the dead tell uncomfortable secrets. But that only works if that reveal isn't just thrown into things in the last chapter. Like I said, you know from page one that Jamie is writing this with everything that happens in his rearview; it's purposefully constructed that way. But at no point does King avail himself of any opportunity to help his own reveal. This isn't just stylistic choice; it's an engineering issue. You can't just throw that on top of the story we were getting and expect it to hold such weight; it's like one of those commercials where you see how strong Saran wrap is compared to others and the watermelon goes crashing through the wrap and the narrator says "Be reasonable." 

I'm running a bit longer than intended so let's switch to bullet points and call it a day.

- There are conspicuous "editor" paragraphs strewn throughout that feel like notes from first readers transcribed into Jamie's voice. i.e. "Later I learned that..." or "Oh, and I erased Liz's messages" etc. Things that escaped the author on first pass that must be accounted for.  

- Speaking of those "later"s I will never understand leaving these sort of writer-clearing-his-throat/ running-tics used to just get him going. They extend to the repetitive phrases here and there ("champ" etc.) but FFS, get rid of these things when editing. The first paragraph of the book, for example, is like reading King clear his throat. None of this sort of thing is - as we see from subsequent events - true, or necessary. 

- Jamie in no way resembles a child of the twenty-first century, and his mother's job in no way resembles a literary agent's in New York City in the twenty-first century. This really took me out of the book in places. Had he set the book twenty years earlier, that'd have fixed it.

- I guess I haven't spent much time on the It connections. King fans are as used to kinda-sorta-related allusions as they are to bona-fide "this is directly from this other book" things. Both are wrapped up in all this stuff here. They're there but not there. Sort of like "Fair Extension." Or even the Turtle in It vs. the Turtle in the Dark Tower books proper. There's no real "answer" anywhere. I'm fine with the broad genre strokes of it all ("have a question about how to fight the demons and undead? Find the right library.") and have no real issue with the deadlights or Chud-ritual coming up. They certainly don't resolve or tie anything together and I don't think King is working off some kind of unified-multiversity playbook, he's just having fun. 

- Considerable time is spent developing what's-gonna-happen tension regarding whether or not to call back Thierrault. He even gets the proverbial warning from the dead (his friend the professor) about doing so and how it's a bad idea. Then it happens and it's not a big deal at all. "Go," says Jamie, and off he goes. A lot of air goes out of the balloon at this point. There was a better way to wrap this up; Liz's death and post-death scene, as well.

- Along the same lines, Chekov's gun, etc. should cancer be teased for Tia and then not return? Some good drama was made of this angle in The Outsider, could've worked here as well. 

- I haven't mentioned much about the fake-historical-fiction author and the Roanoke stuff, too. I wasn't too impressed with this, to be honest; none of it felt real to me. I liked the scene at the dead author's house and how it set the stage for the Liz/ Thierrault-terrorist scene to follow. But if there was some Misery-level novel-mirroring going on, it eluded me. Plus I just didn't buy this author as some huge multi-million-selling draw in the 21st century. Again, set the book in the recent past, and no problem. 

- Well FFS, the incest reveal again. That it happened in the first place, that we're to believe she just had the baby and built a business with Uncle Henry, that it's suggested without remarking on the True Detective hillbilly voodoo logic it represents that such a coupling produces magical offspring, all of it. It's possible questions were meant to linger to be explored in future volumes, but it hasn't been marketed as the first of an ongoing series, nor has anyone mentioned it post-release, that I've seen anyway. 

Either way, I don't have much interest in more. Whistle all you want, champ, my lad - I think I'll stay put. 

~

As mentioned last time, this will be the last post in the Hard Case Crime Chronicles series. Thanks for reading!