Linda's Reviews > Elevation

Elevation......

Beyond the clouds, high octane, pie-in-the-sky, totally energized.

Stephen King has side-stepped his usual horror genre in Elevation. Instead, he has slipped in a short little novella that gives pause to the reader. King transports us, once again, to Castle Rock in Maine that seems to exist in a fog of the unexplainable. It's a favorite King setting in which he unrolls the carpet of Strange and we readers smile with anticipation.

We are introduced to Scott Carey, recently divorced and a website designer who works from home. Scott has an issue with his bathroom scale. (Oh, by the way, don't we all?) Every day he climbs aboard the weight soothsayer, Scott finds that he is loosing pounds without effort. (Ah, the humanity!) No matter if he is naked as a plucked chicken or dressed in a parka with pockets filled with heavy coins......he weighs less and less, but his body mass appears the same.

Frustrated, Scott raps on his neighbor's door. Retired Doctor Bob Ellis tries to coax Scott into checking himself into a hospital for tests. No go according to Scott. He's just started his new job and doesn't want to jeopardize it with health issues. And so begins our involvement, along with Scott and his neighbors, into a bizarre situation in which the numbers on that scale will lead to quite the countdown into what will be.

Elevation, ironically, may deflate those looking for the macabre-laced stories we've come to know from King. But take heart, Elevation is a gentle action/reaction adventure into the stubborn, pre-conceived, pass-down-the-line mindsets we find in today's world. Do we really "see" our neighbor full on or do we relegate them to dismissive blurs on the periphery of our own existence?

Mmmmm.....food for thought. See what you think.