Reviews

Blood and Smoke

Stephen King

Hodder and Stoughton Audio Books, £14.99, 3.5 hours

ISBN 1 840 32391 4

Rating:

B lood and Smoke is an audio book written and read engagingly by Stephen King. It comes in a flip-top box resembling a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. The "book" is actually a series of three short stories that take the listener "inside the world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction . . . the world of the smoker."

In Lunch at the Gotham Café Steve Davis is distraught after his wife leaves him. Two days later, he quits smoking. For the next two weeks he suffers intense withdrawal from nicotine and from his wife, until he meets her for lunch. After surviving an attack by a psychotic, knife wielding maître d', Davis buys a pack of Marlboros and lights one up. But then he tosses the cigarette away and stamps the pack with his foot. "I hadn't gone through this day," he explains, "just to start killing myself with tobacco again."

1408 is about Mike Enslin, a bestselling author of "true" ghost stories, who stays in New York city's most haunted hotel room. Enslin stopped smoking nine years ago, after his brother died of lung cancer. Ironically, Enslin saves himself from the horrors of room 1408 by igniting his shirt with a hotel matchbook. The room, perhaps because of its distaste for "cooked meat," "allows" Enslin to flee into the corridor, where another guest puts out his flames.

In the Deathroom features Mr Fletcher, a journalist being interrogated in a Central American stronghold. He launches his dramatic escape by thrusting his lit Marlboro cigarette into one of his captors' eyes. Back in New York city, Fletcher buys a pack of Marlboros, smokes a cigarette, but then discards the rest of the pack. Fletcher and the vendor agree that smoking is a "very bad habit" and that they are "lucky to be alive."

Why has King focused on the evils of tobacco? The most likely reason is the trauma he suffered when he was hit as a pedestrian by a van in June 1999. He was hospitalised for three weeks and underwent several operations to repair broken bones. He told the Bangor Daily News in August that he hadn't had a cigarette since the night before the crash. "I took the Dodge van cure," he quipped.

Two months later, King said that "to be able to walk and talk and occasionally crawl on my belly like a reptile has made me intensely grateful to be alive." No doubt he recognises that smoking is incompatible with the joy of being alive. Now, with his message about tobacco in Blood and Smoke, King aims to preach that gift of life to millions of others.

Ronald M Davis, North American editor. 

BMJ