King’s more familiar ideas also ground the series, the most notable being the unceasing tug-of-war between good and ill, the uneasy moral binaries through which souls flitter, and the distillation of pure evil in physical beings – here, the ‘long boy’, a monster who haunts the world of Boo’ya Moon. One of King’s major defects, however, is also arguably present: his clumsiness at depicting women. Lisey, a strong, multifaceted character, is substantially defined by her woebegone attachment to her dead husband – the more interesting, more disturbed, Maine-based, award-winning supernatural thriller writer Scott Landon (whose name might as well be Kephen Sting).

But King should be forgiven for this act of egoism, as unpalatable as it may seem on paper, for it is this bond between Lisey and Scott that forms the crux of the show. It’s the strength and solidarity of their lost marriage that haunts Lisey in the present day, where the show begins, two years after Scott’s death, as she roams around her empty home, holding the past around her like a shawl. She embarks on a bool hunt – ‘bool’ being one of the source novel’s clever neologisms, and the only one to really survive the retelling. It’s a volatile term, but in this context means a clue, a prize, a stage in a scavenger hunt. The bool hunt, set for her by her husband, begins with the shovel that she used to scar a crazed Landon fan years ago, and takes her down the paths that form her and Scott’s twined lanes of memory.

The force of remembrance – its claustrophobic, uncontainable power, as if emerging from a madeleine – forms the subject of the first half of the series, where Lisey spends much time in the past. Even in the first episode, unexplained flashes of memories interrupt the present-day storyline: a snow-swept tree, the tropical dimness of Boo’ya Moon, an empty hospital bed – jigsaw pieces that, throughout the series, revolve and click into place. Director Pablo Larraín (Naruda, Ema) calibrates the crackling tenor of Lisey’s neurosis: there’s a moment where she takes a breath alone in a ploughed field, and screams, writhing; another when she’s driving and bangs the side of her head against the car window, and then does it again, and again, and again, faster each time. Are these dreams, fantasies, memories? They all seem to form the same delicate fabric, too firmly entwined to parse apart.

Julianne Moore as Lisey and Clive Owens as Scott in Lisey’s Story (Apple TV+)

On the firmer ground of the show’s present-day narrative, trouble still lurks. Lisey’s older sister Amanda (Joan Allen) struggles with a severe mental illness. Suffering from bouts of self-harm and catatonia, Amanda drifts off into the world of Boo’ya Moon where she sits at the dark pool and gazes, beguiled, at a faraway memory, too captivated and lost to return to the living. Allen’s portrayal of Amanda is heartbreakingly eerie. Mind lost in another realm, her body in the real world stirs with small, underwater movements and occasions of child-like fear. Lisey and Amanda’s third sister Darla (Jennifer Jason Leigh) behaves with delightful incredulity as she responds to the show’s more surreal elements, and it’s Darla and Lisey’s tireless bickering that lends levity and authenticity to a story otherwise heavy with metaphor.

Darkness also comes in the form of a crazed Scott Landon super-fan, Jim Dooley (Dane DeHaan), who hounds present-day Lisey with a simmering lunacy. DeHaan is a show-stealer. Whether he is speaking to a quivering librarian, or to an embattled widow, his eyes don’t seem to blink, and the monotony of his voice summons to mind a fist ramming repeatedly against a skull, slamming and slamming into a hollow of dead air.

For those unacquainted with King’s novel, Lisey’s Story can feel lost in its own long-windedness, threading through detailed storylines un-unified in theme or continuity. Most disconnected are flashbacks of a distant past that Lisey plays no part in – where the separation from the central story feels too protracted to retain our interest. A plotline dedicated to Scott’s memories may work as a standalone show – particularly with the wan, puffy-cheeked young Scott (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) at its centre, but in Lisey’s Story, it just doesn’t seem to fit.

Nevertheless, as King said in his author’s statement at the end of the novel: ‘much here is heartfelt, very little is clever’. The show’s untidy strands of narrative and weighty symbolism scrape together to form something honest. Bools, ghosts, and dream-worlds all mark Lisey’s reality the same way as loss, memory, and madness. Steps towards closure and catharsis are as oblique and painful as a bool hunt, the memories of a lost marriage and past trauma as strong and sweeping as stepping into another world entirely. By virtue of Lisey Story’s retelling, this rich, unique tapestry of ideas is once again put out into the world, and what a beautiful thing that is.

Lisey’s Story is screening on Apple TV+ from 4 June 2021.