All That You Love Will Be Carried Away by Stephen King Smoothie Review
Since I’m reading a monster of a book, I created a way to balance my reading. (Basically because the thousand page book I”m reading right now is not all that exciting) By reading the novel Monday through Friday and short stories on the weekend I found a useful method. And the short story this time around is “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” by Stephen King
Given pretty and poetic nature of the title, one would thing it was a love story. But it’s not. What is it? Well to be perfectly honest, it is hard to explain, but I’ll try. A man named Aldire Zimmerman is sales man who checks into a motel in the middle of the snowstorm. Inside, he sits on the bed and pulls out a gun to kill himself, but stops to pull out his notebook to look over it one last time. The notebook is full of scribbled down puns, slings, and dirty messages that one would find written on bathroom walls. It is seven years worth of graffiti, that he is proud of and doesn’t want to let go of it, or let anyone find it after he died. So before he kills himself he goes down memory lane of all his favorite lines he wrote over the last seven years and manages to convince himself that it is a art and not insanity.
So the good? I can’t say much, other than that I kind of found it intriguing that the author was willing to share his theory on who is writing the stupid scribbles in public restrooms.
The bad? Well it basically boils down to this. It’s pointless. I’m playing the story over and over in my head, trying to find a deeper meaning and I just can’t. And the sad thing is, I think he was trying to say something deeper because the last line is just so strange. It asks us to say a prayer for all those with a life like Zimmerman. It was something that would have worked if there was something emotional in the story. But it wasn’t. The character is as shallow as possible. I wonder if Stephen King personally knew someone like this. I don’t’ know don’t know what his goal was here.
Overall, skip this. This is pointless. Unless you are someone who professionally writes profanity on bathroom walls for living, you can not relate to this character in the least. There is just nothing here.
½ smoothie out of four.
Overall: Stephen King’s Theory to Who Is writing dirty Messages In Public Restrooms.
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