Woof. Lisey’s Story, an Apple+ miniseries based off of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, was a chore for me to get through. It was only eight episodes, but it dragged on and I thought the story was a little stupid.
Truthfully, this might be the first thing I’ve watched based on Stephen King’s work because everything prior to this seemed to scary. I think the only reason I decided to give this thing a shot was because Dane DeHaan was in it. Now, I won’t let this poor experience be my last with any Stephen King adapted IP, but this was sure disappointing. The first episode definitely pulled me in, but then Lisey’s husband Scott shot water out of his mouth into her sister’s and I kind of knew then that it was all over for me. Yes, this was a thriller and a horror at times, but most of it was science fiction, and not in a good way.
Lisey has a late in life marriage to Scott, who at first seems pretty perfect, but then finds out he’s got some issues. As a boy, according to his father, his brother Paul had “the bad” and Scott had both “the bad” and “the gone.” Honestly, those two phrases confused the ever living hell out of me, and I still can’t say I know what it means. Either way, both brothers also had the ability to travel to some creepy world that housed both the living and the dead, so long as they had access to this place. There are healing waters there, as well as some giant monster made up of corpses that could eat you if you made too much noise.
In the present day, Scott has been dead a few years and her elder sister, Amanda, has had another mental break. Eventually, Lisey’s memories of this other world returns to her and she realizes that Amanda’s “double” is stuck there and rendering her other self incapacitated. Aside from trying to figure out how to get her sister back, she also has to fend off some wacko who’s convinced that Scott’s unpublished novels are the second coming or something. He’s unbelievably creepy and hella violent. What confused me the most about him was that he ended up getting his hands on Scott’s unpublished work but was still bothering Lisey after the fact.
Yeesh. Like I said, this thing was rough to get through. There were just a lot of referencing shots back to that secret world that didn’t move the story forward. There were also flashbacks within flashbacks…why? Overall, this was a very frustrating and boring series, and I can’t in good conscious recommend it to anyone.