This review is a SPOILER, but it's impossible to talk about this book without revealing the plot. Besides, it's not WHAT the characters did, but HOW they did it that's much more important here. And I won't say a word about that.
What can you expect from Stephen King? Mysticism? Fantasy? Horror? As a rule, yes. They don't call him the King of Horrors for nothing. But Dolores Claiborne is completely out of that series. There's nothing supernatural here, except maybe the trash rabbits. And even those are just a figment of a sick imagination.
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
This novel is the confession of an ordinary American woman named Dolores Claiborne. She comes to the police station to testify about the death of her employer, Vera Kiss-Me-Ass Donovan. The testimony turns into an uninterrupted monologue that lasts an entire novel.
The elderly Vera Donnovan fell down the stairs, crashing to her death. And Dolores is suspected of her death. No, Dolores is innocent of the old woman's death, but she begins to confess to sins much older. Dolores is over 60 and has lived a difficult life, which she tells the police about.
In her confession Dolores unravels before the reader the canvas of her life: how at 18 she married a schoolmate she didn't really like, but already had a baby under her heart; how she bore her husband three children one after another; how she worked for the rich bitch Vera Donovan, working hard for 12 hours a day; how her husband constantly put her by the collar and whipped her.
Dolores tells the reader everything. How a hundred times she wanted to finish off Vera, because no one could bear her temper, but she did not. About how she took a shit after her when Vera could no longer stand up and was walking under herself. How she hugged her, stroking her head and comforting her when she saw trash rabbits everywhere. How she hated her, but loved her dearly.
Dolores will also tell about the death of her husband 30 years ago. Or rather, how she helped him go to the other world. A drunkard whose entire life consisted of drinking, picking his teeth, hating the world around him and getting under her own daughter's skirts. When Dolores notices the changes in her daughter and gets the awful truth out of her, she sees no other way out for herself. The only way to save her daughter from further abuse from her father (the worst has yet to happen), and also to break her sons out of the vicious circle of life saturated with hopelessness and constant pokes and even beatings from her father, so the only way to change her life and give her children a chance for a normal future is to kill. Dolores knows there's no other option for her. She could take the children and go far away, but the trouble is her husband took all the money from the children's bank accounts, leaving Dolores without a penny and the children without a chance for an education. After all, she had been saving for her children's college admission.
Dolores decides to kill, but is it that easy to kill a man? Although she is a simple uneducated woman, scrubbing the floors of Vera Donovan's rich house day and night, washing her sheets and cooking her meals, Dolores is far from simple. She thinks out her plan down to the last detail. And she carries it out so successfully that if she had not confessed to the crime she committed today, no one would have ever known the truth, despite the rumors that circulated.
It may not be difficult to plan a murder. But is it so easy to kill a man? Stephen King describes everything to the smallest detail. Every tiny detail. Every thought of Dolores. Every feeling, every fear. All her horror. Is it so easy to kill a man? A man you've lived with for 15 years? A man who is the father of your children? No, not easy at all. But Dolores Claiborne has nowhere else to turn.
After reading the book, the question arises: after the heroine confesses to the murder she committed, should she be punished? Or does murder for good deserve to be justified? Stephen King gives an unambiguous answer to this question. I, on the other hand, find it very difficult to answer. If a mother finds out that her scumbag husband is molesting her daughter, killing in the here and now is perfectly possible. But when you've been hatching a murder plan for months, thinking through every detail, the day and hour of the crime, it's too cruel, too cold-blooded.
Is Dolores Claiborne guilty, and does she deserve to be acquitted? The answer to that question remains open to me, so I will not dare to put a comma in the sentence "Execution cannot be pardoned.
King is, after all, a master of psychology. I can not imagine how he managed to get into the skin of the old woman Dolores and tell such a believable story about her whole life. Rare male writer can so finely feel the female nature, so completely understand the female train of thought, her actions, motivations, aspirations. Bravo!
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