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 murder of her husband, Joe St. George, almost 30 years before, after finding out that he sexually molested their fourteen year old daughter, Selena. Dolores's "confession" develops into the story of her life, her troubled marriage, and her relationship with her employer.
Unlike many other works by King, there is little focus on the supernatural; the only such event in the book are two telepathic visions, which form a link to King's novel Gerald's Game; although reviewer Sean Piccoli observed the novel otherwise contained "vintage bone-yard King: the tiny town, the secret lives. Murder and mayhem lurk reliably behind the tranquil veneer."
Read more about this topic: Dolores Claiborne
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)