Dolores Claiborne

All you want to know about Dolores Claiborne

This article is about the novel. For the film, see Dolores Claiborne (film).
Dolores Claiborne  

First edition cover
Author Stephen King
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Thriller, Crime
Publisher Viking
Publication date November 1992
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 305
ISBN ISBN 0670844527
Preceded by Gerald's Game
Followed by Insomnia

Dolores Claiborne is a 1992 thriller/crime novel by Stephen King. The novel is narrated by the title character. Atypically for a King novel, it has no chapters, double-spacing between paragraphs, or other section breaks; thus the text is a single continuous narrative which reads like a transcription of a spoken monologue. It was the best selling novel of 1992 in the United States.

Contents

Plot summary

As the story begins, Dolores Claiborne is in a police interrogation and wants to make clear to the police that she did not kill her wealthy employer, an elderly woman named Vera Donovan whom she has looked after for years. She does, however, confess to the indirect murder of her husband, Joe St. George, almost 30 years before. Her "confession" develops into the story of her life, her troubled marriage, and her relationship with her employer.

Unlike most other works by King, there is little focus on the supernatural; the only such event in the book is a psychic vision.

Connection to King's other works

This novel is most closely connected to Gerald's Game, in which it is revealed that main character Jessie Burlingame was sexually abused by her father during a solar eclipse. The same solar eclipse is detailed in Dolores Claiborne, and during the eclipse Dolores has a psychic vision where she sees Jessie being abused. Many years later, Dolores again imagines that Jessie is in danger; assumedly she is seeing the events detailed in Gerald's Game, with Jessie handcuffed to a bed. The two novels were initially conceived to be part of a single volume, titled In the Path of the Eclipse. Later editions of the novel have a foreword that explains the connection between the two.

The novel's fictional Little Tall Island is also the setting for King's screenplay Storm of the Century, which was filmed and broadcast in 1999.

There is also a reference to the town Jerusalem's Lot, as referred to in Salem's Lot and the short stories "Jerusalem's Lot" and "One for the Road", when Dolores mentions "that town upstate where they say no one lives".

Shawshank Prison (the setting for Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption) is also referred to several times in the novel.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Dolores Claiborne was adapted into a 1995 film starring Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and directed by Taylor Hackford.

According to King, a London group is currently working on an opera version of the novel.[1]

Editions

See also

References

  1. ^ King's afterward to The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Claiborne"

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