Gwendy’s Button Box

Gwendy’s Button Box is a novel by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, whom I am not familiar with, but apparently he solely worked on the sequel, Gwendy’s Magic Feather, which will come out during the fall of 2019. Again I didn’t realize before reading it that it was going to be a series. I normally wait until a series is over before starting it because of what happened to King with The Dark Tower Series. Maybe I’m relaxing in my old age, but I was actually excited to learn that the story would continue. It probably helps that it will be out shortly so there (hopefully) won’t be enough time in between readings to forget details. Also because it is a fairly simple premise and story, it will be harder to forget.
Gwendy’s Button Box is an easy, absorbing and entertaining read. It took me three days to read it, but someone with a lot of uninterrupted free time could read it in one sitting. I would recommend it to King’s fans without reservations except for a trigger warning for sexual violence although no one is sexually violated, there is sexual assault. It is more like a fairy tale set in modern times in King’s favorite stomping grounds, Castle Rock, than a horror novel.
Gwendy’s Button Box starts with a mysterious stranger giving a box to a little girl to hold for safe keeping in exchange for some beneficial side effects. The story develops from how the little girl initially only thinks of the box’s benefits to how the box becomes a burden and a responsibility that weighs heavily on her in spite of its ameliorating effects. The momentum of the story is carried by the anticipation that the stranger will eventually return, but the tension lies in our uncertainty of the exact time of his return, and our eagerness to learn about what the box does and how Gwendy will act after each discovery.
Gwendy’s Button Box is not a horror story though there is a tension that steadily develops throughout the story and culminates during the denouement. The supernatural acts more as a metaphor for how anyone uses power, and how that power in the wrong hands could lead to disaster, but in the right hands, still is inherently dangerous and poses a risk of corruption. At first we are entranced and delighted by how it transforms her, but then concerned as it dominates her young life and the potential threat that it poses to others. There are really two villains in the story: the dark side of power and a person. I actually didn’t mind when the book explicitly screamed the message of the metaphor at the reader. Power is always a problem, not always a benefit though it can be.
Gwendy is a great protagonist because while she is likeable, she isn’t perfect, and even though two men are the authors, her thoughts sound like a little girl would think them. She is extremely relatable because of her problems when she is ordinary through the height of her powers. King has always been really uncannily good at teasing out the discomfort of relating to the world when you’re still a child but beginning to be seen as a sexual person by others or even when you’re an adult woman, but just living, not doing anything inherently sexual yet still being reduced to a sexual being.
I am intrigued by one aspect of Gwendy’s Button Box which subtlety mirrored the two sides of power for the hero and the human villain. There is a scene when the villain is briefly stopped from causing harm, but instead of learning that he should not behave badly because it puts him in danger, he learns that such a tool will enable him to have an advantage when he does behave badly. The yin and yang of power is represented by the tension between the protagonist and the antagonist, and the lessons that they take away from each event in his or her life. Even though the villain is two-dimensional, it was moments such as these that made it work and reflected how he descended (as opposed to evolved) as a character.
The collaboration between King and Chizmar was seamless and perfect. While Gwendy’s Button Box definitely still had the characteristic features of a King story, his folksy dialogue and usual excesses were restrained. Even though it was a short book, it didn’t feel abbreviated. I felt as if each snapshot of Gwendy’s life was expertly doled out to show the development from young girl to young woman. I enjoyed the fact that we would get glimpses of the broader effects of the box on others without losing focus on the main character and began to question whether or not the normal course of events was the box’s influence or not.
I also didn’t mind when Gwendy’s Button Box gets literal at the end and explains everything that precedes it mainly because I think that the book is trying to teach the reader a very valuable lesson that may need to be explicit to completely understand. Even people with immense power are not necessarily responsible for everything that happens. Our willingness to fall into self-condemnation and guilt or to credit or blame the supernatural for all of the world’s failings is a cop out. Sometimes bad things happen, and the cause has nothing to do with us or we’ll never know how much we contributed to that event. It is a real struggle that I wrestle with all day. There are even limits to the supernatural.
I highly recommend that you read Gwendy’s Button Box, but if you decided to wait until the next installment became available, I would understand. It is light enough to be enjoyable, but with enough depth to linger after you finish the book. Sometimes the best stories come in little packages.