Customer Reviews

Dolores Claiborne

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

To all naysayers that accuse Stephen King of being a commercial-blockbuster machine, this novel is another proof that this artist is instead a great writer. Written as a long monologue, Dolores Claiborne covers the testimony the titular character gives to Sherrif Andy Bissette of Little Tall Island. Over nine hours - if you listen to the audiobook version - she tries to prove her innocence in Vera's recent death, but admits to the 1963 murder of her late husband, Joe St-George, which the Little Tall Island community accused her for years, but never had the proofs to send her to jail. So to put claims to rest, she narrates her relation with Vera Donovan, her husband, her children and the events that brought the death of her husband and Vera.

Apart from a connection Dolores feels from a little girl involved in Gerald's Game, and a newsarticle mentioning the town Derry, involved in the novel IT, this book is not a paranormal story, but a realistic story of a woman fighting a dangerous patriarchal force living in her house.
And unlike conventional novels, this experimental story is in two chapters, the first one is Dolores' testimony, and the last one is the epilogue. So for those who read their books in several sessions, a bookmark is obligatory. As for the Kindle users, don't expect the book to be divided in different forms of chapters, so remember this if you buy an e-book copy of Dolores Claiborne. About the electronic version, I did found a few little typographical mistakes, but they were insignificant details that did not stop me from enjoying this novel, which I heard is going to be soon shown into an opera in 2013.

As such, Dolores Claiborne is an excellent Stephen King novel for its fans and an excellent entry to newcomers.

Dolores Claiborne is a housewife with problems. Stephen King gives us a window into her thoughts, feelings and desperation in her efforts to find a way through each new crisis. The activities and advice of her employer and friend add a startling new dimension to the plot as Dolores is led down the path of her life by events out of her control.

So brilliant is the writing, that the reader is at her side, feeling what she feels, as she finds the ultimate solution to her problems.

The characters are so real one feels that one knows them. It is a wonderful story that you shouldn't miss!

This is a great book, and the film is just as good, in a different way. This is one wife's struggle with domestic abuse at the hands of a drunken, insulting, violent husband. It leads to this desperate woman's disturbing scheme of retribution and murder. Powerfully chilling. In the book, Stephen King tells Delores' story from her own point-of-view, her own regional Maine dialect, her own voice. This gives the story an added realism that is most effective.

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

Dolores Claiborne(1993). Stephen King's 22nd Novel, Published Simultaneously With Gerald's Game.

Between the Late 80's and Early 90's, Stephen King was hard at work with the novels "Gerald's Game" and "Dolores Claiborne". He originally concieved them to be issued in a Two-Volume Set Entitled "In The Path Of The Eclipse" because of the similarities. Both main characters experience Total Solar Eclipses, and for one moment in both stories, are bonded. Both novels portray plotlines about Child Abuse, And Learning to live with the Horrors of your Past. Both Novels stand as some of Stephen King's most ambitious, but "Dolores Claiborne" is more so. A startling confession of the human mind, and the reasons that drive people to murder, present themselves in their full glory in "Dolores Claiborne"'s unending narrative(It has NO chapters or paragraphs), and it is a compelling read from start to finish. In Usual Fashion, "Gerald's Game" and "Dolores Claiborne" claimed the #1 Spot each, and both stand as some of Stephen King's deepest novels, dealing with the demons inside of us and from the past. "Dolores Claiborne" has been made into a successful and emotional movie, Starring Cathy Bates(Star of "Misery"). Read On To Find Out Why "Dolores Claiborne" stands as one of King's strongest novels.

Plot-

After the mysterious death of Vera Donavon, Longtime Housekeeper Dolores Claiborne is accused of pushing her down the stairs. As she goes in for a Police Interragation, Dolores decides to relate all of the misdeeds in her past. She tells the police that she never killed Vera Donavon, but she did murder her husband over 30 years ago. What follows is her compelling testimony of her troubled past, and what drove her to kill her husband, and most importantly, Why she did. We also learn of her deep friendship with Vera Donavan, and their troubled yet very loving relationship. Dolores relates everything about her past, and in her testimony, irrecovable sins are revealed, relationships are made and torn, and the horrors of the past are revealed in "Dolores Claiborne".

Writing-

Stephen King's writing in "Dolores Claiborne" is undoubtedly the most original I've ever read. Why, you ask? Mainly because the entire story is a narrative from a Police Interragation, and we read through the records taken at the interrogation. The reader learns everything of her past through Dolores Claiborne's "Yankee" drawl and slurred speech. While it takes a little while to get used to it, by the end of the novel, the unfinished words, the slurred words, and the made-up words seem completely natural, and the narrative flows quicker than most books I've read for THAT reason. Since there are NO chapters and NO Paragraph, the reader is almost FORCED to read "Dolores Claiborne" in one sitting, and I must say, that's not Hard At All! I found myself reading for about 4-5 hours straight just to finish "Dolores Claiborne", and you will undoubtedly do so to. In years to come, "Dolores Claiborne" will be recognized as one of King's best, as it doesn't focus on "outward" horror(Such as Evil Clowns, Possessed Dogs, or Evil Cars), but instead, focuses on the horror(or evil) inside of us all.

Overall, I found "Dolores Claiborne" to be an excellent triumph for Stephen King, as his unstopped and troublesome narrative is sure to influence other such books with it's magnificence. Although "Dolores Claiborne" isn't scary, it fully makes up for it with its Mystery, so any "Constant Reader" of Stephen King is sure not to be disappointed.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! FANS OF STEPHEN KING AND MYSTERIES WILL HIGHLY ENJOY "DOLORES CLAIBORNE". DRAMATIC AND UNFLINCHING, "DOLORES CLAIBORNE" WOULD MOST LIKELY BE ENJOYED BY MOST ANY READERS ALSO!

Also Recommended-

Gerald's Game-Stephen King
Phantoms-Dean Koontz
Mr.X-Peter Straub

Thanks For Reading!

What would you do if you were accused of a murder? What if you were accused of two murders?

In the book Dolores Claiborne you go through the whole thinking process of what would I do? Stephen King draws you in from the first page! The setting is on an island called Little Tall. It starts out when the main character Dolores Claiborne a house wife, mother, and cleaning lady, is accused of killing Mrs. Vera Donavan, her long time employer. This isn't the first time people have called her a killer. Her husband was found dead and the people of Little Tall thought she did away with him. They didn't blame her; he always got drunk and would beat her. King takes you through every thought Dolores has and you feel like you're a part of her. I really liked this book! It was different than any other book I've read. Maybe I liked it because it was about a single mother doing what she has to do to protect her kids. I think the character Dolores Claiborne was very brave- she didn't care what people thought just as long as everything was okay at home. She would fight back when her husband would beat her. She also went straight to the police after the death of Vera Donavan. I think in this book Stephen King was trying to shock his audience. He accomplished this. The way he chose to tell the story had you hooked through the whole book.

The conventional street wisdom is that the best movies adapted from Stephen King novels are the ones that do not mention they are adapted from Stephen King novels. Of course, if you look at the films "Stand By Me," "The Shawshank Redemption," and "Dolores Claiborne" as well as read the King stories they were based on, you would find that they are atypical works in that they do not have the supernatural elements we have expected from King ever since he published "Carrie." Consequently I am mulling over the idea that in some distant time there could be an emphasis on King's "non-horror" fiction that would study him as an example of a regional author and make an argument that even if he was the best selling author on the face of the planet at one time, that he was actually a decent written (i.e., the Charles Dickens of the 20th century).

"Dolores Claiborne" was written between October 1989-February 1992 (future generations of King scholars will have fun studying the overlap of his novels to create some tapestry of analytical insight) and the title character is a foul tempered, foul mouthed, old Yankee who has been living all her life on Little Tall Island off the coast of Maine. The novel is told in the first person by the 65-year-old Dolores, who has just been arrested for the murder of Vera Donovan, the even older richer lady who had been her longtime employer and who suddenly died in Dolores' care under extremely suspicious circumstances. In explaining what happened, Dolores not only tells her life story but also defends herself from the charge that she murdered Vera Donovan by explaining her involvement in the death of her husband Joe thirty years earlier on the day of the total eclipse.

It takes a while to get used to the way Dolores talks. Those who have seen Kathy Bates' captivating performance in the film are in no way prepared for how thick King lays on the accent and colloquialisms with Dolores as narrator. But after a while you get used to the missing letters or idiosyncratic spellings employed by Dolores and focus on the story. However, the murder mystery is just the hook for this novel, where the bigger mystery is the true nature of the relationship between Dolores and Vera. It was strange enough that Dolores came to work for Vera, but even stranger that she stayed for decades as the old lady began her descent into senility. Meanwhile, Dolores has been putting up with her drunken, abusive husband Joe. But while she puts up with anything Joe heaps upon her, she is more protective of their daughter Selena.

Ultimately, "Dolores Claiborne" is a character study and when the nature of the bond that was forged between Dolores and Vera is revealed, it is true to the characters and their situations. There is horror in this novel, but it comes from real human beings. This is not to suggest that King is making some sort of belated attempt to acknowledge real horror in the real world because those things have always been in his novels; they just get overshadowed by telekinetics, vampires, haunted hotels and the like. But this time there is nothing in the way and the bare boned approach serves both King and his characters well.

When I started reading this book, I was bracing myself for a bad experience--I'd just finished Heart of Darkness by Conrad, which is three big chapters and boring as all get out... And this book is one big chapter. I was also wondering what the "supernatural" plot of this book was--Most other Stephen King books I'd heard the basic gist before I'd begun reading, and this one offered me no clue.

I was pleasantly surprised to find, however, that this plot only had a hint of the supernatural, and that it was basically a picture a small-town poor woman grafted onto the character of a tiny Maine island. Normally "mundane" fiction bores me to tears, but this was one of the best books I've ever read. It had the superb characterization of any Stephen King novel--better, in fact, than most of the others--but without the bone-chilling plots that simultaneously sucked me in and repulsed me. I found myself reading the novel, thinking, "This sounds like Mom," and "This sounds like Grandma." I sincerely felt like I knew Dolores.

That isn't to say that it's without supernatural elements. The supernatural bears very little relevance at all, but it helps build the mood of the novel and the tension of the climax. Instead of the setting and the characters being centered around a supernatural plot and hook that relates (and indeed, is a metaphor for) some aspect of human nature, it's merely a portrait of a fictitious but nonetheless realistic person, with the supernatural and mundane plot elements centered around a lifelike character and setting.

One thing worth note, though, is that this is very light reading for a King novel--I finished less than twelve hours after I started. The brevity of it aside, this is a great book, and it really gives you a picture of what it's like in any small rural hamlet... with just a glimpse of something darker that will satiate any King fan's need to escape the mundane.

I thought this book was very good! It gets very intense in the middle of the book when Dolores decides she's gunna go through with her plan of killing her husband. I love Stephen King books. He's such an awesome author.
Mrs. Galloway- Mountain View High School, Boise, ID

Forget that Stephen King wrote this book, and leave your expectations at the door.

I was totally engrossed in the story of this poor, honest, hard-working woman and her husband and children. Also, the dynamics between her and her disabled woman boss. Dolores overcame many obstacles in her life, and there is not quite a happy ending.

Yes, the book is vaguely a murder mystery, but all the plot threads had me captivated from the beginning.

I take one star away from the book because it can get quite graphic about body functions -- after all she was a parent with nose-picking children and took care of a disabled woman with a bedpan. If you don't like that kind of realism, don't read this, but if you can stand the discussions, this is a great read. I was rooting for Dolores the whole way.

Stephen King may be famous for his horrific stories about demons and ghosts and other things that go bump in the night, but that's not always the case. In Delores Claiborne, the only thing that haunts the main character is her past.

The book is one giant narrative -- a story that Delores Claiborne tells in full detail as she's being questioned following the questionable death of her employer. She's decided, she tells the police officer in charge, that she's going to tell everything -- from start to finish. And that's what she does. She tells about her relationship with the crabby old rich woman who gave her a paycheck and plenty of hassles. She tells about her abusive husband. She tells about how she killed him -- and why she had to do it. Delores is a captivating woman -- one who comes to life throughout the pages of the book. You'll hear her voice as you read her story.

Delores Claiborne is an artistically-detailed sketch of a strong-willed woman who learns early in her life that she's got to look out for herself. It's an excellent book -- even for those who normally shy away from King's work.