I'm disappointed to admit, however, that when the book finally arrived it didn't grab me straight away. Two friends (both King readers) admitted that they'd put the book down before they'd completed the first hundred pages and another said you really had to persevere at it. I chose to read James Herbert's latest novel first and build myself steadily up to this new King tome. When the time came, however, I took a deep breath and plunged myself in to the world of Lisey Landon, her sisters, the ghost of her dead husband, a weird fantasy world she could jump to and a stalker intent on mutilating her private parts.

King's latest creation is Lisey Landon, the widow of a best-selling novelist and sister to three other women. Lisey is portrayed as an attractive fifty-something woman, wealthy but naïve as to the workings of the everyday world. Her husband - the wealthy, successful novelist Scott Landon - had seen to everything for her and, although he's been dead almost two years by the time this story is taken up, she's had to want for nothing except the time to grieve for her loss. Eventually, though, Lisey decides it's time to clean out her dead husband's study and, when she does, his ghost seems to come along for the ride. Built in to the story are Lisey's sisters and a plethora of what she calls Incunks - people who desperately want the prizes of unpublished work from her husband's computers and filing cabinets.

Along the way, the ghost of Scott Landon helps her out and, typically of a large Stephen King novel, a lot of back-story is written in to the book to help you build a better picture of the Landons and their life before his death. Throughout the novel you get glimpses of a horrendous childhood for the author and you're introduced to a secret world that apparently only he can get to in order to heal himself during moments of illness, injury and, apparently, insanity. But although he's dead and Lisey doesn't believe in ghosts, Scott has left her clues as to how she can help herself, almost as if he's foreseen the danger that she now faces, and the clues help her make the jump to Scott's secret world, 'Boo'ya Moon', which ostensibly exists in an alternate reality.

The other part of this book seems to be almost semi-autobiographical. "Write what you know about." That's the sage advice so often given to budding novelists, and King seems to have put that counsel to good use in this novel. In 1999 Stephen King was struck by a hit'n'run motorist and nearly didn't survive; since then, King has been promising to write the novel that occurred to him when that happened and I can't help but think that this might be that book.

Despite all this complexity and confusion, Lisey's Story is beautifully written with excellent prose and imagery, especially - and surprisingly - in the back story itself and also in the character's visits to another world, and the style is typically King - often imitated, rarely mastered, never equalled. The biggest disappointment to all of this beautiful imagery is the characters themselves, however. I'm sorry, Nicholas Sparks, but I didn't find the characters all that vivid or touchable. You're never quite able to develop an affinity with Scott Landon because he is always referred to in the back-story, plays a bit-part in the main story, his character's time-frame jumps around and, despite all of King's skill, it is still difficult to follow the character throughout the novel; Lisey's sisters aren't defined too well; her stalker is almost a back character there to add a little darkness to the novel; only Lisey Landon, herself, gets detail to her character and here, at least, is a character we can get our teeth in to.