Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
It is surely fair to say that there will never be another writer like Stephen King, a master of his genre in such a way that rivals Dickens, Terry Pratchett, Agatha Christie or Jane Austen in their chosen avenues of exploring the desire and darkness within the human experience, a fair assumption that despite many suggesting he has lost his touch, or perhaps just simply been part of the everyday for far too long. It is more than likely that his performance as a writer, the stories crafted, still thrill millions around the world, the power of his imagination continues to hit heights that perhaps install just a twinge of envy in some, and downright rude resentment in others.
That is not to say that everything that Stephen King touches turns to some sort of alchemy driven literature inspired gold, that all he conducts is wrapped in silk-laden prose, dripping off the tongue like some narrative clothed honey onto the revellers of horror below, and yet when the words or the ideas catch fire in the reader’s mind, they stay there, boosted in appreciation, risen from the depths, gaining a readership heartened by his Elevation of the genre in which he aspired to and made his own.
Even if an idea is somehow almost replicated, one dare not ever suggest re-hashed when it comes to any type of art, stimulated by a previous work, it can still lead the reader down the path of belief, of thinking beyond the parameters of our own neat and tidy knowledge and familiarity.
Elevation perhaps owes much to another time of writing, the guise of Richard Bachman as he drew daggers as Mr. King’s erstwhile persona in several books and tales, notably in the case of 1984’s Thinner.
The initial idea of unexpected weight loss is there as a guide, it serves the purpose of the writer to revisit a place into which so many seek a kind of moral cleansing, a purification from the want and greed of our abundant times and the practise of feeling shame as half the world starves in perpetual hunger. It is in this short story, bordering upon the verges of the novella that once brought great acclaim to Stephen King, that sudden and dramatic weight loss should be added to the underlying fear in which we owe our existence; a state of mind that normally brings concern, that leads us down the dark road of suffering under certain ravaging diseases such as cancer and A.I.D.S..
The skill of Stephen King has always laid not just in the fear he hoists up like skeleton upon a surgeon’s wire but in the way he can make death so ordinary, even when he is placing the impossible or the seemingly fantastical before the reader; ordinary and yet macabre, chilling but welcome to the touch.
Elevation may be short on excessive narrative, it will never be considered epic, in the same dominion as It, The Stand, Under The Dome or Rose Madder but it does stick to the ribs, it causes the reader to understand there is more to this world than the black and white humdrum to which we are so enamoured with as we hurtle headlong through the 21st Century. A beautiful tale of acceptance, of knowing, of being raised to a different standard of description, Elevation leaves you feeling elated and wary of how ordinary death can be.
Ian D. Hall