To say that Lisey’s Story is one of Stephen King’s more complex, layered, and personal stories would be a bit of an understatement, as the author himself has expressed on multiple occasions that it’s one of his favorite novels that he’s written. Inspired by his own bouts with pneumonia and hospital stays, in which he returned home to see that his wife Tabitha had reorganized his office and inadvertently created the ominous feeling that he was witnessing how she would cope with his passing, King would go on to write his novel to work through not only those feelings of loss, but also the role his wife played in his own career. Regardless of what King went through as he wrote hundreds of stories over the decades, his wife Tabitha was with him at both the start and end of these journeys, with Lisey’s Story also tackling the differences in obligations to your romantic partner and to your fans, with some magical realism thrown in there for good measure. Apple TV+’s adaptation of the novel manages to hit the book’s major bullet points and does so with gorgeous cinematography, but King was so invested in the project, he wrote all eight episodes himself, resulting in an overlong experience that could have served itself better with a more expedited journey.
