Stephen King's The Body: Bookmarked Paperback – August 9, 2016 by Aaron Burch (Ig Publishing)

In Stephen King's The Body: Bookmarked Aaron Burch uses King's novella as a springboard into telling his own life and how the novella has influenced him.

Burch does exactly what the Bookmarked series asks its writers to do, basically write a personal reflection on an important work in that writer's life. The premise sounds wonderful to me and I hope to read others in this series but this particular volume did not particularly appeal to me. As unfair as it feels to form an opinion about a person from such a short and focused (in theory) work I just did not care for or about Burch. I was far from disliking him, nothing nearly so negative, I just didn't care. It came off to me as him mostly tooting his own horn about what he has done and does do. Oddly enough I can easily imagine liking him in real life but this particular introduction just left me disinterested. Maybe I was expecting something more along the lines of how the work taught him lessons and that was why it influenced him but what it looked like to me was that he simply related to the movie and has formed his professional life around coming-of-age narratives.

I want to emphasize that a work like this works very much on a level different from most other works. While memoir-like it is not a memoir, at least it isn't supposed to be. Yet it is very personal just the same. A reader's interest will likely ride as much on how they hear the writer's voice as on what the writer says. I found many of the ideas easy to relate to and thought back to my own youth. I just became tired of the writer's voice. This is perhaps an even more subjective and personal response as compared to one tempered by reading fiction or even a true memoir where one expects to read self-congratulatory comments and so are prepared.

I would still recommend this book simply because for every thing that annoyed me there will be people moved and interested. The book is not about King's novella, nor is it supposed to be. I was expecting something that would play back and forth between the novella and Burch rather than a book about Burch with periodic nods to the novella.