I am very proud to announce that I read IT. And survived. And can even take the dog out for a walk at night without fearing a horrible death by clown. This is some serious progress from the first time I read the book.
And in rereading the book, I understood in part why it scared me so much the first time--and possibly why it would scare anyone. When I was a kid, I used to volunteer at a historical museum and I often had to go into the creepy, dark basement by myself, where the modern plumbing and everything was (you went if you needed to get water, since we did not have a handy creek as they did back in the day). Having to go down in the dark by yourself reminded me of the opening of IT, particularly the cellar part. That really stuck with me. So did Stanley's death and the haunted house. And this is where SK gets you. He takes moderately creepy everyday situations and turns them into actual terror (remember that garbage disposal in Firestarter?). But I found it interesting how much did not stick with me, and I think that this book might have too much horror in it, in the sense that there are simply too many scenes to process and still be afraid. In fact, by the time we were back in 1985 and reminiscing in the Chinese restaurant, I was getting a bit done with horror scenes (oh no! The cookies have terrifying things instead of fortunes!). Then later, there was a scene with Audra at the hotel where the TV came on by itself and there were horrifying noises from the bathroom. This didn't scare me at all as a kid, which surprised me. My first instinct was that perhaps I simply had not stayed in too many hotels by that point in my life, which is probably true. But I think I may have read too much that was scary by that point and it started to blur together.
It's very clear that this book was a pivotal one for SK, because I think that it contained references to pretty much every single previous book that he wrote. Entire town destroyed? Carrie. Group bands together to fight evil bullies? 'The Body.' A werewolf? The Cycle of the Werewolf. Haunted house? The Talisman. Haunted town? 'Salem's Lot. Scary stuff in a bathroom? The Shining. I think you get the idea. Really, there was everything. Even stuff coming in the future. A reference to a bird from Africa? Misery (I can't tell you where that happened, it was very brief but stuck with me). A group banding together to fight evil for the Turtle? The Dark Tower. Small town goes gradually insane as though possessed by an evil force? Needful Things. Violence at a lumberjack camp? The Wind Through the Keyhole. Seriously, this one runs deep.
The book, at its core, is of course not about an evil killer sewer clown or even an evil female spider, but really about the boundary between childhood and adulthood, and how these collide. The idea that the characters had forgotten so much about their past didn't surprise me so much this time, as it did when I was a kid. Of course we forget many things as we age, we can't possibly remember it all. While the premise of IT was that the Losers forget because of the trauma that they experienced, it seems to me that perhaps it was the simple act of forgetting that we all encounter as we age.
I also was less disappointed by the ending than I was the first time. I felt like SK just ran out of ideas when I initially read the book, but now I am more convinced that he had a much bigger story in mind, but couldn't put it all in this one. I mean, it's not like he didn't try. The whole thing comes in at 1142 pages, after all. But this is the closest thing to the seven-volume Dark Tower that exists in his whole oeuvre, I think. And there is a bigger story, with the Turtle and larger forces and galactic battles--in other words, exactly The Dark Tower. But I think he hadn't quite formulated all of that yet. He would get back to it soon afterward, churning out 2 and 3 in the series within the next five years. And maybe this novel marks the bifurcation between the epic and the mundane in SK (not that they are ever fully bifurcated). Books set more in reality took one path, while books that thrived on fantasy took another. Considering that the next book is The Eyes of the Dragon, this idea of a split makes sense.
SK took four years to work on IT, which is virtually unheard of in his works. I hadn't realized this until completing it, but he also did not have any real novels that came out during this time. In fact, the previous novel was Pet Semetary, which means he went from a pretty dark place to an even more dark place (there was The Talisman, but that was co-written, and I am assuming that the Bachman books were earlier). So despite the fact that SK appeared to be very prolific, he was in fact honing this one novel for a long time. Certainly it shows in places. The beginning, with George's death, is incredibly captivating and well-written. The same can't be said throughout, which is not surprising to me since it is a very long novel. But what bugged me the most was that it was unclear why the Losers kept getting away, while others could not. With George, we see that he is tricked by IT because he doesn't know enough to be suspicious of a clown in the sewer (in fact, much of this reminded me of Erlkönig again, especially when IT tried to convince his victims that they were going to a more beautiful, fun world). But it's not clear in other places why the Losers could escape him, unless you buy the 'protected by the Turtle' argument.
Oh, and you don't really need the clown, of course. The situations in which the kids find themselves are all perilous and it seems pretty clear that they could have died regardless of what IT did. For instance, Ben tried to walk home by himself in the cold, even though the adults had haphazardly tried to stop him. Stanley should never have been in the Standpipe by himself, which was a known danger. Beverly's father is clearly close to insane and unquestionably abusive, whether he is possessed by IT or not. George never should have been playing in the storm water in the first place. I haven't even mentioned the bullies yet, who pose yet another hazard. In fact, the book serves as a reminder of just how perilous childhood can be, and how seemingly normal activities can, in fact, end tragically.
I was thinking that I would write multiple entries on the book and I may still have more to say later, but for now, I think that these are the most salient points from my rereading of IT. I am super glad that it wasn't nearly as scary as the first time around, although I am still not quite ready to tackle the mini-series. I did really enjoy this commentary on the book and recommend for more consideration of it: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/09/the-great-stephen-king-reread-it
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Friday, December 6, 2013
Skeleton Crew
Okay, I need to fess up about this book and the reason that it took me so long to read it. I ordered a copy from the library in August, then when it didn't turn up, did some quick investigating and learned that:
1) There was only one copy at the library;
2) It was reported missing.
So that put me behind by a few weeks.
Then I ordered a copy from Amazon and started reading. I had read this book before (summer of 1994, to be exact) and some stories I remembered well. For instance, the leading story, 'The Mist.' You can probably guess that it terrified me. Soon after reading it, I found myself walking around a strange city somewhat late at night and that terrified me even more, because what if a mist suddenly rolled in with the accompanying terrifying monsters? Naturally, that was not very likely, but you know how it is.
I also remembered a few more, like 'The Monkey,' particularly because I had the older copy of the book with the monkey toy on the cover:
I also remember 'The Monkey' being pretty predictable and not that great, which was true in this rereading as well. In fact, I did not remember all that many stories, and I have concluded that the reason for this is that several are not very good. Here is my assessment:
Very good stories: 'The Mist' (don't read if you live in a foggy area); 'Mrs. Todd's Shortcut' (I feel like this one really tends to stick with people, it is a fun story); 'Survivor Type' (sort of a proto-Misery, only ickier); 'Nona' (sort of predictable but still good); 'The Reach,' 'Word Processor of the Gods,' 'Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,' 'Gramma,' 'The Jaunt.'
Stories that made me want to put the book down and possibly never ever read it again and OH MY GOD HOW PAINFUL WAS THAT: 'The Wedding Gig' (WHY??????) and 'The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands.' Conclusion: I do not like stories that go to that gentleman's club in New York that is also featured in Different Seasons.
Stories that were meh: everything else in the book. 'The Raft' especially.
So that is my assessment: a mixed bag. The good stories really are very good and if you have never read 'The Mist,' you really should. Some fine stuff. But I officially give you permission to skip over ones that you find to be less than intriguing. They don't get any better.
Anyway, that is why it took me so long to get to this one, even though I had been trying to since August. I promise that this was not solely an attempt to procrastinate from the next book. Honest. Even though the next book is.......
1) There was only one copy at the library;
2) It was reported missing.
So that put me behind by a few weeks.
Then I ordered a copy from Amazon and started reading. I had read this book before (summer of 1994, to be exact) and some stories I remembered well. For instance, the leading story, 'The Mist.' You can probably guess that it terrified me. Soon after reading it, I found myself walking around a strange city somewhat late at night and that terrified me even more, because what if a mist suddenly rolled in with the accompanying terrifying monsters? Naturally, that was not very likely, but you know how it is.
I also remembered a few more, like 'The Monkey,' particularly because I had the older copy of the book with the monkey toy on the cover:
 |
| This one |
Very good stories: 'The Mist' (don't read if you live in a foggy area); 'Mrs. Todd's Shortcut' (I feel like this one really tends to stick with people, it is a fun story); 'Survivor Type' (sort of a proto-Misery, only ickier); 'Nona' (sort of predictable but still good); 'The Reach,' 'Word Processor of the Gods,' 'Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,' 'Gramma,' 'The Jaunt.'
Stories that made me want to put the book down and possibly never ever read it again and OH MY GOD HOW PAINFUL WAS THAT: 'The Wedding Gig' (WHY??????) and 'The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands.' Conclusion: I do not like stories that go to that gentleman's club in New York that is also featured in Different Seasons.
Stories that were meh: everything else in the book. 'The Raft' especially.
So that is my assessment: a mixed bag. The good stories really are very good and if you have never read 'The Mist,' you really should. Some fine stuff. But I officially give you permission to skip over ones that you find to be less than intriguing. They don't get any better.
Anyway, that is why it took me so long to get to this one, even though I had been trying to since August. I promise that this was not solely an attempt to procrastinate from the next book. Honest. Even though the next book is.......
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| What have I got myself into here??? |
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Thinner
The last of the Bachman books. I had an old copy. Here is how I can tell:
I thought that I had read Thinner when I was younger, then wasn't sure, then decided that probably I didn't since I didn't remember a thing about it. For some reason, I found the beginning to be a really slow read, but it went faster as I went along. I think that I would still argue without a doubt that this book would be better as a short story, although perhaps SK views a 300-page book as akin to a short story.
Anyway, the main idea of this book was that a lawyer, who had gotten away with manslaughter, was cursed by a gypsy and started losing massive weight. Obviously. This curse started when the gypsy touched him and said, 'Thinner' -- hence the title. Two other people were cursed in this book, one with scales and the other with a horrible skin condition. I am really curious to know how the gypsy summoned these two conditions ('Scales!').
We start in Connecticut, then guess where we go? No really. See if you can guess. Did you guess Maine? Because you are correct! We have already had a conversation about not setting pseudonym books in Maine, so I will just leave it at that.
There were some pretty gruesome moments in this book. Maybe not quite horror and I didn't find the premise of the thing very scary, but very gruesome. To exact his revenge, the main character, Billy, calls on a gangster friend to do the dirty work and he is about as brutal as you can get without actually killing anyone (part of the deal). Also, ball bearings did considerable damage in this book. Possibly more than they could do in real life using a slingshot.
Then everybody eats a slice of pie and dies. For real.
I am still not quite convinced on this book. It definitely was not my favorite, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be from the beginning. Probably skippable, if you are doing anything other than reading everything by SK in chronological order.
 |
| Maybe if you don't want people to think it's a pseudonym, add a bit more detail to the biography? |
I thought that I had read Thinner when I was younger, then wasn't sure, then decided that probably I didn't since I didn't remember a thing about it. For some reason, I found the beginning to be a really slow read, but it went faster as I went along. I think that I would still argue without a doubt that this book would be better as a short story, although perhaps SK views a 300-page book as akin to a short story.
Anyway, the main idea of this book was that a lawyer, who had gotten away with manslaughter, was cursed by a gypsy and started losing massive weight. Obviously. This curse started when the gypsy touched him and said, 'Thinner' -- hence the title. Two other people were cursed in this book, one with scales and the other with a horrible skin condition. I am really curious to know how the gypsy summoned these two conditions ('Scales!').
We start in Connecticut, then guess where we go? No really. See if you can guess. Did you guess Maine? Because you are correct! We have already had a conversation about not setting pseudonym books in Maine, so I will just leave it at that.
There were some pretty gruesome moments in this book. Maybe not quite horror and I didn't find the premise of the thing very scary, but very gruesome. To exact his revenge, the main character, Billy, calls on a gangster friend to do the dirty work and he is about as brutal as you can get without actually killing anyone (part of the deal). Also, ball bearings did considerable damage in this book. Possibly more than they could do in real life using a slingshot.
Then everybody eats a slice of pie and dies. For real.
I am still not quite convinced on this book. It definitely was not my favorite, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be from the beginning. Probably skippable, if you are doing anything other than reading everything by SK in chronological order.
The Talisman (OMG You Guys, This Book Is Really Good!!!!!)
When I started this project, I don't think that I was anticipating the discovery of any great SK books that I did not already know. I figured that I was vaguely aware of his oeuvre, enough so that I had read the ones that I liked and that the others would probably not be up my alley. Sure, there were some pleasant surprises (like The Dead Zone), but for the most part I was right. Books that I figured I would not really like that much, such as Christine and Firestarter, were not my favorites.
I also was less than enthused about reading The Talisman for two reasons. First, it was really long. Ugh. Second, there is a sticker on my library copy that states unequivocally that this book is science fiction. Ugh. Not that I don't like science fiction (I am writing this while watching an episode of original Star Trek), but from my previous encounter with SK's version of science fiction I was not impressed. By which I mean The Tommyknockers, which gets a full 5/5 in ughs from me. We will see how I think about it after a reread but from what I remember, it was a clunker.
However, as soon as I started The Talisman, I pretty freaking much loved it. It is like the Dark Tower in only one book (so the length is now okay with me). And it was in no way science fiction. The sticker totally lied. It was fantasy, and it blended together a large number of fantasy tales along with it, which was awesome. Also, it has all kinds of ties with his other work. Before, when people asked me which SK novel I would recommend for those new to his oeuvre, I would give this super long, drawn-out response. Now my answer is The Talisman.
So what is in here? Everything! Narnia, lots of Narnia (and it even references the Narnia references): sick mother (The Magician's Nephew) and closets to other worlds (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). Lord of the Rings, particularly when Jack almost can't give the talisman to anyone else (......precious........). Future King books (people are dim, like Flagg will be in The Eyes of the Dragon). Scary monsters in tunnels/sewers. A haunted hotel. A guy who is kind of like Tom from The Stand, only he is also a werewolf, so he is also kind of like a dog in human form (Wolf). Tom Sawyer. In other words, the same blend of features that make The Dark Tower work: eclectic combinations of references and influences. And you know what? It's fun too.
In fact, I think that in some ways it is even better than many other King novels because of its clarity. King wrote this in tandem with his friend Peter Straub and maybe Straub cleaned up some of his prose. The action sequences felt particularly clean and easy to follow. I don't always find that with King, and I have always assumed that this is because he was cranking through so many books that sometimes things got by that were obtuse. This time around though, it was really simply to follow what he was saying, particularly in the action scenes because they were so vivid. I still remember them now.
So, if you are looking for a fun Stephen King book that is kind of long but not obnoxiously so, then I highly recommend The Talisman. And I am already looking forward to reading it again someday.
(T-2 until IT)
I also was less than enthused about reading The Talisman for two reasons. First, it was really long. Ugh. Second, there is a sticker on my library copy that states unequivocally that this book is science fiction. Ugh. Not that I don't like science fiction (I am writing this while watching an episode of original Star Trek), but from my previous encounter with SK's version of science fiction I was not impressed. By which I mean The Tommyknockers, which gets a full 5/5 in ughs from me. We will see how I think about it after a reread but from what I remember, it was a clunker.
However, as soon as I started The Talisman, I pretty freaking much loved it. It is like the Dark Tower in only one book (so the length is now okay with me). And it was in no way science fiction. The sticker totally lied. It was fantasy, and it blended together a large number of fantasy tales along with it, which was awesome. Also, it has all kinds of ties with his other work. Before, when people asked me which SK novel I would recommend for those new to his oeuvre, I would give this super long, drawn-out response. Now my answer is The Talisman.
So what is in here? Everything! Narnia, lots of Narnia (and it even references the Narnia references): sick mother (The Magician's Nephew) and closets to other worlds (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). Lord of the Rings, particularly when Jack almost can't give the talisman to anyone else (......precious........). Future King books (people are dim, like Flagg will be in The Eyes of the Dragon). Scary monsters in tunnels/sewers. A haunted hotel. A guy who is kind of like Tom from The Stand, only he is also a werewolf, so he is also kind of like a dog in human form (Wolf). Tom Sawyer. In other words, the same blend of features that make The Dark Tower work: eclectic combinations of references and influences. And you know what? It's fun too.
In fact, I think that in some ways it is even better than many other King novels because of its clarity. King wrote this in tandem with his friend Peter Straub and maybe Straub cleaned up some of his prose. The action sequences felt particularly clean and easy to follow. I don't always find that with King, and I have always assumed that this is because he was cranking through so many books that sometimes things got by that were obtuse. This time around though, it was really simply to follow what he was saying, particularly in the action scenes because they were so vivid. I still remember them now.
So, if you are looking for a fun Stephen King book that is kind of long but not obnoxiously so, then I highly recommend The Talisman. And I am already looking forward to reading it again someday.
(T-2 until IT)
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Cycle of the Werewolf: This is IT
I have to say that I was not super excited to read The Cycle of the Werewolf. This book had many features that do not appeal to me. For instance, the plot felt very gimmacky: every month, during a full moon that has a great deal of artistic license regarding when it actually occurs, a werewolf attacks a person in a small Maine town. Meh. This project supposedly originated as a calendar, which was meant to have illustrations and a quick vignette from SK. This is one of the weirdest projects I have ever heard of. Who dreamed this up?
Another reason I was not excited about this: illustrated books. I am not huge on illustrated books. The whole graphic novel thing has passed me by. Maybe someday I will find out what makes these so popular, but right now they are not my thing. Yes, I am old.
(I want to point out that this is not the reason that I left Creepshow out of the blog. I left it out because I could not find a reasonably priced copy of it. If I ever do, then I will add it later. And yes, I will add it out of sequence and we will just all have to live with that).
A third reason I was not excited about this: werewolves. Meh. I guess I don't find werewolves that scary. Still better than haunted cars.
However, I liked it. I liked it more than I thought I would. Perhaps the fact that it was under 200 pages (with pictures!) helped. But I also liked that this was very clearly the precursor for It. There can't even be any debate on this point:
1) Small town terrorized by supernatural creature
2) Young boy places himself in danger and saves town
3) Young boy is somehow disabled--in this case, physically
That, in a nutshell, is the plot of It. Just add six more kids to #2 and you're good to go. And around 1000 more pages.
I also liked that SK came awfully close to admitting that his books would be much scarier without the supernatural element. When the constable is talking about the fact that this probably isn't a werewolf but some kind of psychopath, that seemed very close to an admission of the fact that what is really terrifying about these books is the events that take place and the fact that such horrific events can take place without the supernatural. In fact, the constable believes that Marty, the child who saves the town, interpreted his first encounter with the monster as a 'werewolf' to protect himself from the truth--that he saw a person from the town but was too traumatized to remember who it was. Nope. It was really a werewolf.
I will say that I did not like the name of our hero in this story: Marty Coslaw. I kept reading it as 'Marty Coleslaw.' And that sounded weird. Perhaps if you crank out as much prose as SK, sometimes your choice of names suffers as a result (TAD. That is all).
Another reason I was not excited about this: illustrated books. I am not huge on illustrated books. The whole graphic novel thing has passed me by. Maybe someday I will find out what makes these so popular, but right now they are not my thing. Yes, I am old.
(I want to point out that this is not the reason that I left Creepshow out of the blog. I left it out because I could not find a reasonably priced copy of it. If I ever do, then I will add it later. And yes, I will add it out of sequence and we will just all have to live with that).
A third reason I was not excited about this: werewolves. Meh. I guess I don't find werewolves that scary. Still better than haunted cars.
However, I liked it. I liked it more than I thought I would. Perhaps the fact that it was under 200 pages (with pictures!) helped. But I also liked that this was very clearly the precursor for It. There can't even be any debate on this point:
1) Small town terrorized by supernatural creature
2) Young boy places himself in danger and saves town
3) Young boy is somehow disabled--in this case, physically
That, in a nutshell, is the plot of It. Just add six more kids to #2 and you're good to go. And around 1000 more pages.
I also liked that SK came awfully close to admitting that his books would be much scarier without the supernatural element. When the constable is talking about the fact that this probably isn't a werewolf but some kind of psychopath, that seemed very close to an admission of the fact that what is really terrifying about these books is the events that take place and the fact that such horrific events can take place without the supernatural. In fact, the constable believes that Marty, the child who saves the town, interpreted his first encounter with the monster as a 'werewolf' to protect himself from the truth--that he saw a person from the town but was too traumatized to remember who it was. Nope. It was really a werewolf.
I will say that I did not like the name of our hero in this story: Marty Coslaw. I kept reading it as 'Marty Coleslaw.' And that sounded weird. Perhaps if you crank out as much prose as SK, sometimes your choice of names suffers as a result (TAD. That is all).
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Pet Sematary
If you have been following this blog at all, I probably do not even need to tell you that when I read this book as a teenager, it scared the living bejeezus out of me--if fact, you should just take for granted that the scary books scared me. This one had much to recommend it from a scary standpoint. There are ghosts, zombie cats, the dead resurrected, small children communicating with the dead from afar (King is big on this) and, of course, Sister Zelda. And Sister Zelda was not even a supernatural creature! Plus back then, it wasn't so easy to look up the symptoms of spinal meningitis through the power of the internet (in fact, it was impossible), so I actually thought that you mutated into a horrible monster with claw hands if you got meningitis.
Spoiler alert: you don't (thanks, internet!). I kept trying to figure out if maybe you did back in the 1960s or something, like when people used to have to live in iron lungs because they had polio and this is not a scenario that we are familiar with any more due to medical advances, but no, really. People do not mutate into monsters with claw hands from spinal meningitis. Here is what the Mayo Clinic has to say on the matter:
Now I realize that this version of events is totally from Rachel's point of view, so perhaps she just misunderstood things. But still. Something is off here. Or just factually incorrect, take your pick.
Anyway, back to Pet Sematary. As you may have guessed from my ability to treat Zelda's debilitating illness with a degree of levity, this time around the book didn't freak me out at all. And I even sat up very late at night reading it. I have no idea why. Maybe my fear of an SK book diminishes significantly for each re-read. But this may also be the book that I find easiest to understand within the framework of mythology. The story is basically the Orpheus myth retold, and I think that SK touches on exactly why Orpheus turns around before he reaches the surface.
As you may recall, the myth of Orpheus hinges on the idea that he has lost his beloved, so he retrieves her from the Underworld so that he can bring her back to life. There is only one stipulation, which is that he is not permitted to turn around until he reaches the surface. Naturally, like in any good horror story, Orpheus does not follow the rule and he loses Eurydice forever. Now, when most people encounter this myth they don't get it. Why would Orpheus turn around? SO DUMB. All he had to do was not turn around, and all would be well. Piece of cake.
Which is why a lot of retellings miss what I think is one of the key points in the original myth. He has no idea what is behind him since he has not seen Eurydice. He needs to take it on faith that she is there and that she will return as Eurydice, and not some terrifying Zelda monster, with the claw hands. You try walking through Hell without being able to turn around and make sure that your beloved is still your beloved! Less fun now, isn't it?
Pet Sematary plays on this myth because Louis keeps thinking that he can retrieve the dead, even though he should know after Gage that he really can't--heck, for that matter, he should know after the cat that he can't. The creatures that return from the Micmac burial site are the most horrific versions that could return. He should have turned around and left them behind forever. Orpheus turned out to be smarter than we thought!
Although not really, at least not the in version that has been preserved in Ovid's Metamorphoses. For Orpheus returns to the living, only to run around complaining about women and how it was all their faults that he could not bring back his beloved. He was so annoyed that he started dating men instead. A group of women--possibly the followers of Dionysus--took issue with this, ripping his body to shreds and leaving his head in a stream. I found a parallel with the succinct ending to Pet Sematary in that Rachel is the one to return. The final scene is, of course, ambiguous: we only know that she has returned from the grave and we suspect that she is now a corrupted, evil version of herself from the clues that SK provides. I like to imagine that she then rips his head off and tosses it in a stream to make the Orpheus theme complete.
This book returns to one of the major themes that is preoccupying King at this point in his career, which is the death of children, in particular little boys. A very similar thing happens, of course, in Cujo, and I have to say that I did not start on Pet Sematary for a while because I was concerned that it would be as grim as Cujo was. I found that overall it wasn't, which isn't to say that the part after Gage dies is anything less than very bleak. But I felt like Cujo was worse, particularly with the suffering that the kid had to endure. The line that stuck with me from that book was 'How long has Tad been dead?' Grim! I didn't find any single equivalent in Pet Sematary, it was more of an overall grimness that bedecked the Orpheus myth. In fact, the pacing was pretty interesting. The first part set up the situation very well and for once, we had almost all of our characters fully fleshed out. It was around 200 pages. The second part detailed all of the grimness that followed Gage's death and the ability (or lack thereof) to accept grief. That one was around 150 pages. The third part was really short, only about 30 pages, even with the epilogue. In fact, the most terrifying section, when Gage comes back to life, only needs a little bit of time to play out. The scenario has been totally set up already. What is key is the fact that then Louis/Orpheus takes the same journey again, only this time with his Eurydice.
(Am I losing my mind or do 'Louis' and 'Orpheus' kind of sound similar too? I may be reading too much into this).
There is one further quality that I find Louis and Orpheus share, which is that of hubris, to go all totally Greek on everything here--in some versions of the story, Orpheus is too confident and his attempt to rescue Eurydice is less about his love for her and more about his desire to prove that he can accomplish a feat that no other man has done in bringing back the dead. Louis is not a wholly flawed character; he is no Jack Torrence, where you are afraid for everyone in his presence, and he doesn't seem to be a bad father on the whole. In fact, he is mostly pretty normal. But there are some moments of hubris and these are what destroy him in the end. He views himself as detached from those around him because of his profession as a doctor; in the beginning of the story, in fact, he almost doesn't talk to his neighbor Jud because he fears that Jud will only want free medical advice. Okay, but that is viewing yourself through your professional accomplishments. At other points in the book he has similarly proud moments, such as when he is preparing to tear into a colleague through a professional critique in a journal. Of course, his greatest moment of pride is thinking that he can control Gage in case things do not go as planned. However, the antidote to his hubris is the fact that he is aging, a fact that is made abundantly clear throughout the novel. After his night of dragging Gage up to the burial site, he is in severe pain and exhausted. It is his exhaustion that allows Gage to get the scalpel and go on his rampage of terror. Had Louis been less sure of himself, probably he never would have even tried to rebury the body, of course. It is his confidence that as a doctor he will be able to assess the situation clinically (he even states so at one point) that is his downfall.
Death is a central theme in this book, but even in his understanding of it, Louis shows his pride. He explains to his wife that death is a natural thing; however, the majority of the deaths in Pet Sematary are not at all natural. I probably don't need to rehash Zelda's death by choking because she has turned into some kind of surreal demon as one example. Three accidents are caused by creatures getting hit by cars (I am counting the cat, Victor Pascow, and Gage). None of these creatures should be dead. They are all young, and Victor, as a jogger, was even trying to stay in shape and better his health. As we hear about the various physical ailments that Louis endures in the course of the novel--feeling tired after a walk in the woods, straining himself from carrying the cat--we start to realize that he is not in great shape. Could he be next? Is this really all his own fear of death manifesting itself? I think that probably yes. His hair going white at the end signals that he is now old too.
The return of the dead, in particular the dead soldier from World War 2, really reminded me of the evil reanimated corpse in The Gunslinger. In fact, this book had numerous parallels with other SK works, including a character revealing small-town secrets (this will come back in Needful Things), twins digesting each other in the womb (The Dark Half, although King brings this idea up a lot in his books) and some kind of ancient evil surrounding a small town in Maine (do I even need to say?).
I have one last thing to say about this book: if I had to give it a 'Fractured Fairytales' subtitle, it would be 'The Wendigo Ate My Baby.'
Spoiler alert: you don't (thanks, internet!). I kept trying to figure out if maybe you did back in the 1960s or something, like when people used to have to live in iron lungs because they had polio and this is not a scenario that we are familiar with any more due to medical advances, but no, really. People do not mutate into monsters with claw hands from spinal meningitis. Here is what the Mayo Clinic has to say on the matter:
The complications of meningitis can be severe. The longer you or your child has the disease without treatment, the greater the risk of seizures and permanent neurological damage, including:Don't get me wrong: these are bad things. But they are not the same as what is described with Zelda. Also, how long did this agony go on for in their house? The novel makes it seem like this disease lasted for years and years. Unlikely in the case of meningitis. I now have this giant conspiracy theory that actually Zelda had something else, only the family couldn't talk about what it really was, and maybe she just mutated into a horrible demon. Which would be kind of awesome. Someone get on this prequel.
- Hearing loss
- Memory difficulty
- Learning disabilities
- Brain damage
- Gait problems
- Seizures
- Kidney failure
- Shock
- Death
Now I realize that this version of events is totally from Rachel's point of view, so perhaps she just misunderstood things. But still. Something is off here. Or just factually incorrect, take your pick.
Anyway, back to Pet Sematary. As you may have guessed from my ability to treat Zelda's debilitating illness with a degree of levity, this time around the book didn't freak me out at all. And I even sat up very late at night reading it. I have no idea why. Maybe my fear of an SK book diminishes significantly for each re-read. But this may also be the book that I find easiest to understand within the framework of mythology. The story is basically the Orpheus myth retold, and I think that SK touches on exactly why Orpheus turns around before he reaches the surface.
As you may recall, the myth of Orpheus hinges on the idea that he has lost his beloved, so he retrieves her from the Underworld so that he can bring her back to life. There is only one stipulation, which is that he is not permitted to turn around until he reaches the surface. Naturally, like in any good horror story, Orpheus does not follow the rule and he loses Eurydice forever. Now, when most people encounter this myth they don't get it. Why would Orpheus turn around? SO DUMB. All he had to do was not turn around, and all would be well. Piece of cake.
Which is why a lot of retellings miss what I think is one of the key points in the original myth. He has no idea what is behind him since he has not seen Eurydice. He needs to take it on faith that she is there and that she will return as Eurydice, and not some terrifying Zelda monster, with the claw hands. You try walking through Hell without being able to turn around and make sure that your beloved is still your beloved! Less fun now, isn't it?
Pet Sematary plays on this myth because Louis keeps thinking that he can retrieve the dead, even though he should know after Gage that he really can't--heck, for that matter, he should know after the cat that he can't. The creatures that return from the Micmac burial site are the most horrific versions that could return. He should have turned around and left them behind forever. Orpheus turned out to be smarter than we thought!
Although not really, at least not the in version that has been preserved in Ovid's Metamorphoses. For Orpheus returns to the living, only to run around complaining about women and how it was all their faults that he could not bring back his beloved. He was so annoyed that he started dating men instead. A group of women--possibly the followers of Dionysus--took issue with this, ripping his body to shreds and leaving his head in a stream. I found a parallel with the succinct ending to Pet Sematary in that Rachel is the one to return. The final scene is, of course, ambiguous: we only know that she has returned from the grave and we suspect that she is now a corrupted, evil version of herself from the clues that SK provides. I like to imagine that she then rips his head off and tosses it in a stream to make the Orpheus theme complete.
This book returns to one of the major themes that is preoccupying King at this point in his career, which is the death of children, in particular little boys. A very similar thing happens, of course, in Cujo, and I have to say that I did not start on Pet Sematary for a while because I was concerned that it would be as grim as Cujo was. I found that overall it wasn't, which isn't to say that the part after Gage dies is anything less than very bleak. But I felt like Cujo was worse, particularly with the suffering that the kid had to endure. The line that stuck with me from that book was 'How long has Tad been dead?' Grim! I didn't find any single equivalent in Pet Sematary, it was more of an overall grimness that bedecked the Orpheus myth. In fact, the pacing was pretty interesting. The first part set up the situation very well and for once, we had almost all of our characters fully fleshed out. It was around 200 pages. The second part detailed all of the grimness that followed Gage's death and the ability (or lack thereof) to accept grief. That one was around 150 pages. The third part was really short, only about 30 pages, even with the epilogue. In fact, the most terrifying section, when Gage comes back to life, only needs a little bit of time to play out. The scenario has been totally set up already. What is key is the fact that then Louis/Orpheus takes the same journey again, only this time with his Eurydice.
(Am I losing my mind or do 'Louis' and 'Orpheus' kind of sound similar too? I may be reading too much into this).
There is one further quality that I find Louis and Orpheus share, which is that of hubris, to go all totally Greek on everything here--in some versions of the story, Orpheus is too confident and his attempt to rescue Eurydice is less about his love for her and more about his desire to prove that he can accomplish a feat that no other man has done in bringing back the dead. Louis is not a wholly flawed character; he is no Jack Torrence, where you are afraid for everyone in his presence, and he doesn't seem to be a bad father on the whole. In fact, he is mostly pretty normal. But there are some moments of hubris and these are what destroy him in the end. He views himself as detached from those around him because of his profession as a doctor; in the beginning of the story, in fact, he almost doesn't talk to his neighbor Jud because he fears that Jud will only want free medical advice. Okay, but that is viewing yourself through your professional accomplishments. At other points in the book he has similarly proud moments, such as when he is preparing to tear into a colleague through a professional critique in a journal. Of course, his greatest moment of pride is thinking that he can control Gage in case things do not go as planned. However, the antidote to his hubris is the fact that he is aging, a fact that is made abundantly clear throughout the novel. After his night of dragging Gage up to the burial site, he is in severe pain and exhausted. It is his exhaustion that allows Gage to get the scalpel and go on his rampage of terror. Had Louis been less sure of himself, probably he never would have even tried to rebury the body, of course. It is his confidence that as a doctor he will be able to assess the situation clinically (he even states so at one point) that is his downfall.
Death is a central theme in this book, but even in his understanding of it, Louis shows his pride. He explains to his wife that death is a natural thing; however, the majority of the deaths in Pet Sematary are not at all natural. I probably don't need to rehash Zelda's death by choking because she has turned into some kind of surreal demon as one example. Three accidents are caused by creatures getting hit by cars (I am counting the cat, Victor Pascow, and Gage). None of these creatures should be dead. They are all young, and Victor, as a jogger, was even trying to stay in shape and better his health. As we hear about the various physical ailments that Louis endures in the course of the novel--feeling tired after a walk in the woods, straining himself from carrying the cat--we start to realize that he is not in great shape. Could he be next? Is this really all his own fear of death manifesting itself? I think that probably yes. His hair going white at the end signals that he is now old too.
The return of the dead, in particular the dead soldier from World War 2, really reminded me of the evil reanimated corpse in The Gunslinger. In fact, this book had numerous parallels with other SK works, including a character revealing small-town secrets (this will come back in Needful Things), twins digesting each other in the womb (The Dark Half, although King brings this idea up a lot in his books) and some kind of ancient evil surrounding a small town in Maine (do I even need to say?).
I have one last thing to say about this book: if I had to give it a 'Fractured Fairytales' subtitle, it would be 'The Wendigo Ate My Baby.'
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Christine
Having completed Christine, I’m still not entirely sure
how I felt about it. Part of me feels
like this was a book that was directed at boys rather than girls, particularly
because it was centered on a car—but also because it considered where the lines
were drawn between being a boy and a man.
Another part of me like aspects of it, although I felt that it was
similar to several SK novels/short stories that I have already read. Some of it was pretty clunky, to be honest,
most specifically all of the references to disaster in the future. The best of these was a reference to the fact
that the narrator would not finish the football season, which sounded ominous,
but turned out to be because of an injury sustained on the field and not due to
a haunted car. This points to a larger
problem, which was the flawed narrative structure. In parts 1 and 3, Dennis—the friend of the
protagonist Arnie Cunningham—narrates the action. In part 2, Dennis is in the hospital, having
suffered from that fatalistic football injury, so there is instead an
omniscient narrator. Yet the story is
supposedly Dennis recounting his experience.
It doesn’t really make sense to have the part in the middle.
There’s another problem: the
haunted car. I just didn’t buy it. This strikes me as funny, because I could
‘buy’ vampires floating outside windows or clowns in sewers, but a car
possessed by a ghost seemed unrealistic to me.
As for previous influences, I
think that two of the stories from Different
Seasons were pretty clearly part of this novel. The complications of adolescent friendship
were similar to the themes from ‘The Body,’ while the increasing influence of
an evil, older figure from ‘Apt Pupil’ was a vital part of Christine. I also think that
SK was in an ‘everyday things that can kill you’ phase right around this
time. See, for instance, the dog in Cujo (which also had hints of continued
evil, even if that theme wasn’t developed fully).
One important thing that I
took from Christine was the origin of
the word ‘roont,’ which will be important in the fifth book of the Dark Tower. Turns out that ‘roont’ is simply the
Pittsburgh-area pronunciation of ‘ruined,’ meaning that the inhabitants of the
Calla were Yinzers. Mystery solved! There is one more clear connection to a future
novel that I found, which is the fact that LeBay committed arson when he was
younger that killed a family he did not like.
Annie Wilkes will do the same in Misery.
Christine,
along with The Shining, are the two
novels so far that most explicitly confronted the issue of addiction. In some ways, SK makes this clear as he even
refers to Arnie’s appearance as resembling that of a junkie near the end of the
book. But in other ways, the symptoms of
an addict are less clearly defined.
Arnie’s anger is similar to that felt by many addicts, as is his
alienation from friends and family members.
Although there is a ghost driving his car, Arnie’s lack of
responsibility and inability to remember ‘his’ actions are also similar to an
addict. Just as in The Shining, I think that this story would make even more sense
(and be even more tragic) with the supernatural element removed. Also, it would get rid of the ‘ghost in the
car’ device which I did not care for.
Different Seasons
This was my second time through Different Seasons, although I had a few vague recollections from my
prior reading of it. I remembered that I
liked ‘Shawshank,’ I disliked ‘Apt Pupil,’ and I thought ‘The Body’ was okay
(now the movie version, that was some good stuff. Wil Wheaton FTW). Also I remembered that I thought ‘The
Breathing Method’ was kind of over-extended and silly. And I will be damned if this doesn’t sum up
almost exactly how I felt when I reread the stories.
‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’
Let me start by saying that I think this story ranks in the
top 5 all time by King. Of
everything. It is fast, it has
character, it has a good twist, and it wraps up nicely. Now probably I have been biased because the
movie is also pretty good, but I recall from my first read through that I liked
this story as well. I want to quote
Roger Ebert in his review of the film: ‘The horror here is not of the
supernatural kind, but of the sort that flows from the realization than 10, 20,
30 years of a man's life have unreeled in the same unchanging daily prison
routine.’ Isn’t that great?
And it is an apt summary. There
is really no horror per se in this story, simply an intriguing tale of events
at a Maine prison. Plus I liked that SK
didn’t drop too many hints about the ending (I mean, you can piece it together
as you go, but it isn’t nearly as bad as some of his foreshadowing. See Christine).
What I didn’t know about these novellas is that they were
all written far earlier in King’s life. From
the afterword, he describes that he writes a major novel, then writes a novella
for the heck of it. That writing
compulsion is nutty. This novella was
written following The Dead Zone, which
makes all of the sense in the world to me.
The Dead Zone is also about
the passage of time and what happens in the interim. In that book, Johnny lost five years of his
life when he was in a coma, and SK did a great job of detailing how his life
changed irrevocably during this time. In
‘Shawshank,’ it is a much longer period of time, but Andy experiences a similar
loss of time while he is jailed. Really
great. The whole novella makes me happy.
‘Apt Pupil’
This one, I don’t like.
SK wrote it after The Shining,
which I imagine had to be a tough book for him, what with the drinking and the potentially
abusing your own son and how the book is about a writer and all. But I still don’t like this book. It is about a young psychopath (and yes, from
the very beginning he is identified as such, go read chapter 1 and notice his
lack of empathy and his need to put on the ‘right emotions’ for others) who
meets an old Nazi. Horrible events
ensue. I think that the only part I
liked in this one was the part when Dussander overdosed on Seconal, which
seemed like a really Valley of the Dolls
way of dying to me.
I don’t really get the point of this novel. It doesn’t offer enlightenment about the
condition of either of them. The murders
that take place are very graphic, perhaps unnecessarily so. I guess it could be understood as a character
sketch between two psychopaths, but I’m not sure that SK is really exploring
them. Certainly there are ties between
this and other novels, most notably Christine,
but I remain uneasy about this content—perhaps more uneasy than I have with any
of the books that I have read by him to date.
‘The Body’
As someone who has never been a 12-year old male, I think
that parts of this story will simply never make sense to me. It is a very boy-centric story. However, I liked it. I liked the storyteller angle and the coming
of age part. It’s hard not to read a lot
of King’s biography in this book, particularly since he purportedly saw one of
his friends get hit by a train when he was young (as recounted in Danse Macabre). The highly graphic description of the dead
boy seems to come from a very specific experience for SK—mind you, he is also a
good writer, so maybe this is just me projecting.
What I did not notice the last time I read this book is how
closely aspects of it resemble It (if
you’re curious, he wrote this one after ‘Salem’s
Lot). There is the gang of ‘losers,’
for instance. And there are mean boys
who want to beat them up. At one point,
SK mentions cannibals with their teeth sharpened, which conjured up It in my mind instantaneously, so I am
assuming that there are similarities between the two. But the most jarring moment was the following
near the end, when Chris and Gordie were talking about whether the others would
tell about their experience.
Gordie: They’re scared, Chris. Teddy especially, that they won’t take him in the Army. But Vern’s scared, too. They’ll lose some sleep over it, and there’s gonna be times this fall when it’s right on the tips of their tongues to tell somebody, but I don’t think they will. And then…you know what? It sounds fucking crazy but…I think they’ll almost forget it every happened. (424 in the 2004 Signet edition)
BOOM. That is totally
what happens in It. Between attacks, everyone gradually forgets
what happened, even the Losers, despite their intense experience the first time
around.
‘The Breathing Method’
Yeah, this one is kind of silly. SK weaves an elaborate tale of not-muchness around
a story of supernatural weirdness. This
one was after Firestarter, which also
felt kind of derivative. Would have
worked better as a short story, I feel.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
The Gunslinger (original)
I feel like reading this version of the book was a good call because I enjoyed it much more than the revised version. The revised version reminded me of the 'new' Star Wars, where you have scenes that aren't really necessary added in (like Han and Jabba...unnecessary). I was surprised to find that apart from the references to what happens later in the books, there were some other changes too. For instance, there is no 'threaded' meat as opposed to other meat; this little detail draws the reader's attention to the fact that there is something off with some of the available food products, which I think makes us assume that there has been some kind of nuclear (i.e., long-lasting) catastrophe.
There also wasn't so much about the number 19, which made more sense to me. This number comes back in the final books, but wasn't so prominent in the first books, so it felt weird for it to suddenly appear.
What I also found surprising is that Susan was mentioned, although mostly only in passing and not with the same detail as in the later book. I had one of the 1989 reprints, which ends with an afterword from SK. He said that he was looking forward to writing the next books, including the fact that he wanted to discover who this Susan was. Yay! This version of the book makes sense to me.
Certainly, the book in this format was less cohesive with the rest of the series, but I was okay with that. The revision felt too contrived, like SK was trying to tie everything together. That doesn't make sense to me, since the whole thing doesn't tie together and I don't think that it can. If you can get your hands on a copy of the early version, I would highly recommend it over the later one. That being said, it wasn't easy to find, so you may be stuck with the revision.
There also wasn't so much about the number 19, which made more sense to me. This number comes back in the final books, but wasn't so prominent in the first books, so it felt weird for it to suddenly appear.
What I also found surprising is that Susan was mentioned, although mostly only in passing and not with the same detail as in the later book. I had one of the 1989 reprints, which ends with an afterword from SK. He said that he was looking forward to writing the next books, including the fact that he wanted to discover who this Susan was. Yay! This version of the book makes sense to me.
Certainly, the book in this format was less cohesive with the rest of the series, but I was okay with that. The revision felt too contrived, like SK was trying to tie everything together. That doesn't make sense to me, since the whole thing doesn't tie together and I don't think that it can. If you can get your hands on a copy of the early version, I would highly recommend it over the later one. That being said, it wasn't easy to find, so you may be stuck with the revision.
Monday, February 25, 2013
The Writing of the Seven (The Gunslinger, revised)
Considering that I was excited to go back to the Dark Tower world and visit it again, it came as a surprise to me that I did not enjoy The Gunslinger as much as I thought I might. Sure, there were the same memorable scenes: crazy zombie guy reveals secret of death, gunslinger shoots up town, a raven named Zoltan. But I found myself distracted by the numerous mentions of events from previous novels, particularly Wizard and Glass, which is the fourth book in the series. To understand why, you have to put yourself in SK's shoes and think about the creation of the series as a whole. It also helped me, when I thought it through, to consider similar 7-book fantasy epics, because I think that I may have identified some kind of 'fourth-book crisis,' which is worth thinking about.
First, you need to know that Wizard and Glass may rank among one of SK's all-time best books. Not just in the Dark Tower series, although I would argue that it is the strongest of them. But in all of his books. It is set in a place called Mejis, which is a bit like California, and tells the story of Roland Deschain falling in love with a woman named Susan Delgado, then bad things happen. While the world depicted in Wizard and Glass is not quite modern, it is also a functioning society. By the time we get to The Gunslinger, this world seems to have completely disappeared. In other words, we enter the series in the middle.
As I mentioned before, there is plenty of time travel in the Dark Tower series as a whole, so maybe this shouldn't be surprising. But it leads to plenty of problems in terms of the information that you want to put in your early books because you are not really moving chronologically. In fact, even The Gunslinger doesn't move chronologically since we have flashbacks to Roland's early years and earning his guns. This problem of conflicting chronologies led SK to revise The Gunslinger and re-release it in 2003, ostensibly because he wanted to fix continuity problems and change the prose. This was around the same time that he finished the Dark Tower series after a 6-year hiatus.
Why did he suddenly finish? Because in the interim, he was involved in a serious car accident when he was hit by a minivan. This event gets written into the Dark Tower series and was obviously extremely traumatic for him. But that doesn't explain why there was an hiatus in the first place.
I think that there was this hiatus because Wizard and Glass was good. Really, really good. And I think that he wasn't quite sure what to do next. That whole novel is effectively a flashback, then the series moves forward with volume five (The Wolves of the Calla), although with a great deal of jumping through time and space--and a pretty big change in style. I think that SK's inertia while writing an epic is not unique, but I think that his chronology problems may be, particularly if you compare his seven-volume epic to others.
If you think about seven-volume epics, quite a few might leap to mind. There is the Narnia series, which was not written chronologically (it starts with book 2), but proceeds chronologically. C. S. Lewis did allow for some flexibility in terms of chronology because time spent in Narnia moves more slowly that time spent in our world. Thus Narnia ages considerably more quickly so that the whole duration of this world is the equivalent of one adult life here. However, the adventures themselves move in chronological order. You can't have Prince Caspian, for instance, before The Silver Chair, and while events from previous novels may be referenced, they are most frequently in a broad way that doesn't cause noticeable conflicts. Harry Potter is similar in that each year is clearly delineated in the series and everything moves forward, apart from a few necessary flashbacks.
However, the seven-book epic is not always so straight ahead. Take Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for instance. That is not technically a seven-book epic, but that is because Tolkien got stuck trying to fill in the past--in other words, he experienced a fourth-book crisis. There are books that give the history of this world, such as the Silmarillion and other writings, but Tolkien did not complete them. I think he ran into a similar issue to SK. If the world of the Hobbit has already been created, it can be difficult to go back and fill in the background while remaining consistent to the whole, short of making adaptations to the original (which is precisely what Peter Jackson in doing in his film adaptation, taking material from the Simarillion and other unfinished works).
SK came up with a different solution, which was to revise volume 1. And he did so in a way that it incorporated an awful lot of Wizard and Glass, I think because he was so enraptured in this world. So enraptured that he wasn't sure what to do next. So enraptured that the series stalled because there could not be a return to Mejis. But you could have Roland remember, and to do that you could have him thinking about his time there as he went on to the desert, Tull, and waste. There are a lot of references to Mejis, Susan, and a lost horn, all of which are clear references to later books in the series.
And this was exactly what I didn't like about it the third time around (so I didn't like it two out of three readings, weird). I did pick up on a few more details this time, like the mummified corpses in the former subway that disintegrated. But for the most part, I found myself wondering just how much SK revised this volume compared to the original, particularly because there was so much of Wizard and Glass at the periphery.
So I found a way to answer my own question: I got a copy of the original Gunslinger and shall read that next. I know, when I read The Stand I said something to the effect that I don't have time to check out old versus new versions. In the case of The Stand, I stick to my original argument. But this situation is different. I'm curious to know where The Gunslinger started and whether those hints were initially there. Fortunately, I was able to obtain a copy from an academic library--these are tricky to find now. Thus the official report on The Gunslinger will wait until I have read the original.
First, you need to know that Wizard and Glass may rank among one of SK's all-time best books. Not just in the Dark Tower series, although I would argue that it is the strongest of them. But in all of his books. It is set in a place called Mejis, which is a bit like California, and tells the story of Roland Deschain falling in love with a woman named Susan Delgado, then bad things happen. While the world depicted in Wizard and Glass is not quite modern, it is also a functioning society. By the time we get to The Gunslinger, this world seems to have completely disappeared. In other words, we enter the series in the middle.
As I mentioned before, there is plenty of time travel in the Dark Tower series as a whole, so maybe this shouldn't be surprising. But it leads to plenty of problems in terms of the information that you want to put in your early books because you are not really moving chronologically. In fact, even The Gunslinger doesn't move chronologically since we have flashbacks to Roland's early years and earning his guns. This problem of conflicting chronologies led SK to revise The Gunslinger and re-release it in 2003, ostensibly because he wanted to fix continuity problems and change the prose. This was around the same time that he finished the Dark Tower series after a 6-year hiatus.
Why did he suddenly finish? Because in the interim, he was involved in a serious car accident when he was hit by a minivan. This event gets written into the Dark Tower series and was obviously extremely traumatic for him. But that doesn't explain why there was an hiatus in the first place.
I think that there was this hiatus because Wizard and Glass was good. Really, really good. And I think that he wasn't quite sure what to do next. That whole novel is effectively a flashback, then the series moves forward with volume five (The Wolves of the Calla), although with a great deal of jumping through time and space--and a pretty big change in style. I think that SK's inertia while writing an epic is not unique, but I think that his chronology problems may be, particularly if you compare his seven-volume epic to others.
If you think about seven-volume epics, quite a few might leap to mind. There is the Narnia series, which was not written chronologically (it starts with book 2), but proceeds chronologically. C. S. Lewis did allow for some flexibility in terms of chronology because time spent in Narnia moves more slowly that time spent in our world. Thus Narnia ages considerably more quickly so that the whole duration of this world is the equivalent of one adult life here. However, the adventures themselves move in chronological order. You can't have Prince Caspian, for instance, before The Silver Chair, and while events from previous novels may be referenced, they are most frequently in a broad way that doesn't cause noticeable conflicts. Harry Potter is similar in that each year is clearly delineated in the series and everything moves forward, apart from a few necessary flashbacks.
However, the seven-book epic is not always so straight ahead. Take Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for instance. That is not technically a seven-book epic, but that is because Tolkien got stuck trying to fill in the past--in other words, he experienced a fourth-book crisis. There are books that give the history of this world, such as the Silmarillion and other writings, but Tolkien did not complete them. I think he ran into a similar issue to SK. If the world of the Hobbit has already been created, it can be difficult to go back and fill in the background while remaining consistent to the whole, short of making adaptations to the original (which is precisely what Peter Jackson in doing in his film adaptation, taking material from the Simarillion and other unfinished works).
SK came up with a different solution, which was to revise volume 1. And he did so in a way that it incorporated an awful lot of Wizard and Glass, I think because he was so enraptured in this world. So enraptured that he wasn't sure what to do next. So enraptured that the series stalled because there could not be a return to Mejis. But you could have Roland remember, and to do that you could have him thinking about his time there as he went on to the desert, Tull, and waste. There are a lot of references to Mejis, Susan, and a lost horn, all of which are clear references to later books in the series.
And this was exactly what I didn't like about it the third time around (so I didn't like it two out of three readings, weird). I did pick up on a few more details this time, like the mummified corpses in the former subway that disintegrated. But for the most part, I found myself wondering just how much SK revised this volume compared to the original, particularly because there was so much of Wizard and Glass at the periphery.
So I found a way to answer my own question: I got a copy of the original Gunslinger and shall read that next. I know, when I read The Stand I said something to the effect that I don't have time to check out old versus new versions. In the case of The Stand, I stick to my original argument. But this situation is different. I'm curious to know where The Gunslinger started and whether those hints were initially there. Fortunately, I was able to obtain a copy from an academic library--these are tricky to find now. Thus the official report on The Gunslinger will wait until I have read the original.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Before the Dark Tower
If I had to blame this crazy project of reading all SK works in chronological order on something (apart from the anthology of his first three novels that got it going), I think that I would choose to blame The Dark Tower. Probably I am not the first or only person to fall prey to this folly since so many of his works are mirrored in this series; there is a dangerous temptation to find everything that SK ever wrote somehow coming full circle in his magnum opus (which is so totally wrong, as I will explain). However, the journey that I took to get there is a bit unusual, so I wanted to share that before I start posting on these books. In fact, to best understand this journey, you need to know more about my relationship with SK over the years and how it has changed.
When I was a kid, some SK novels interested me and some didn't. I have no idea what the distinction was. So I can't tell you why I wanted to read Pet Semetary but had zero interest in Cujo. Undoubtedly, this was fueled in part by what was available at my local library (in the grown-ups section) and what was not. At the same time, I can explicitly remember being uninterested in some of them, such as Christine, which was available on the shelf but one that I never read. I can't remember the first novel that I ever read by him or what possessed to start reading these novels in the first place. Probably they seemed like Something Important that could be found also in movies and other cultural references, so I wanted to know what they were about.
If I had to guess, I would date my SK years from 1990-1995. The last 'new' book that I read by him was Needful Things (1991), which I owned in hard copy. I know that I read 'The Mist' in the summer of 1994--in fact, I can date a number of his books very precisely because I remember where and when I read them, or more exactly, where and when I became afraid from reading them. Perhaps it is for this reason that they stay more firmly fixed in my memory than most of the books that I have read in my life. I would say the same of John Bellairs, whose Gothic horror stories were like SK for kids, and whose novels also terrified me.
In other words, I was not an avid, constant reader (sorry SK), but one who disappeared for quite a while. I remember rediscovering some when I lived in Vienna (2003-2004) because the choice of English-language books was slim--that time, Pet Semetary didn't scare me as badly, and I realized that I just might be able to reread these stories that scared me so memorably when I was younger. Some I remembered fondly, like Misery (which I realized was actually about the writing process) and The Eyes of the Dragon (I ran out and bought a copy in the summer of 2005 just because I wanted to read it again). But these incidents were few and far between, and I can't say that I ever really planned to rekindle my relationship with SK.
You have to fast-forward to 2007 and a very long bus trip for my first encounter with The Dark Tower series. I was underemployed and looking for things to do, which may have been why I bought The Gunslinger to help pass the time for my travels. It would have been an ideal time to crank through seven books (after getting off the bus, of course, and back to my underemployed life at the end of the line). My reaction was that I did not care for it. Not at all. In fact, I found it boring and had absolutely no desire to continue reading the series. But I owned my personal copy of the book and did move it with me when I started my new job in the fall of 2007. It sat on the shelf, along with my copies of Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon as the only SK novels that I owned.
I'm not sure what possessed me to pick the book up again in the winter of 2011. I had just rearranged all of the books that I owned in preparation to put them in real bookshelves, so maybe it just caught my eye. But I decided to take it with me for some light reading while dog-sitting for friends. This time it did take, for some reason, although I couldn't say what changed from my first reading of it. I wanted to continue reading the series this time around and see what happened to Roland next.
The timing could not have been more ideal, because the next day I realized that I was coming down with the flu. As my final act before succumbing to illness, I rushed to my local library and picked up the next three books in The Dark Tower series. This was probably one of the best moves that I have ever made, literature-wise. The books helped get me through the illness without being too bored, while I had an ideal opportunity to read. And read I did. In fact, after finishing those four, I wanted to know how it ended (although I was recovered from flu). So that was my January 2010: reading all of The Dark Tower in the course of one month.
(You've probably realized that I read fast).
And then, I wanted to rediscover SK. Because I could hear echoes in The Dark Tower of his previous works, echoes that sometimes I barely remembered. But it was amazing to me how vivid those recollections could be. I remembered the prayer to the Turtle in IT. I was sure that the haunted house was a theme that had appeared in previous SK books. I wanted to find these common threads and tie them together...even though I rationally know that there is no such 'master-thread' in his works.
Part of what fascinated me about The Dark Tower was its unapologetic post-modernity. SK invents a world that seems to fit into conventional tropes; I think that we spend much of the first book thinking that we know what is happening ('It's a post-apocalyptic disaster zone! I'll bet nuclear weapons are to blame!'), and then things get weird. Very weird. Not explainable by conventional narratives weird. And I think that this post-modern approach to the epic is part of what makes these twists so fascinating. Characters walk through the worlds of other novels and meet their characters; time ceases to move in a linear fashion; and even death loses its permanence. This is the world that I wanted to explore more, and I think that there are hints of this post-modernity throughout King's oeuvre. Maybe not all the time. Maybe Cujo really was just a rabid dog. But his way of mitigating this post-modern universe by using a popular style (and writing an epic on the scale of C. S. Lewis or Tolkien) is a uniquely King creation. And this was what I found when I explored The Dark Tower again. It was fascinating and intoxicating, in a literary way, and perhaps that is why I felt I needed to complete the series in a month.
(That is kind of crazy when I think about it since I am no longer underemployed. It was almost 4000 pages. Yeesh.)
I think that The Dark Tower led to my reappraisal of King and wanting to reread his works. While I would still consider the anthology of his works sitting on a friend's shelf as the impetus, part of me is convinced that this is far more to do with finding fragmented shards of The Dark Tower in King's other works and trying to piece them together. Yet I know that this is impossible because you can't uncover a master narrative in a post-modern work, at least not in the conventional way. Maybe I am being a literary Roland here, seeking to fulfill my quest which is ultimately unfulfillable. At any rate, I am looking forward to revisiting the world of The Dark Tower to see if I can make any more sense of this complex, compelling universe.
When I was a kid, some SK novels interested me and some didn't. I have no idea what the distinction was. So I can't tell you why I wanted to read Pet Semetary but had zero interest in Cujo. Undoubtedly, this was fueled in part by what was available at my local library (in the grown-ups section) and what was not. At the same time, I can explicitly remember being uninterested in some of them, such as Christine, which was available on the shelf but one that I never read. I can't remember the first novel that I ever read by him or what possessed to start reading these novels in the first place. Probably they seemed like Something Important that could be found also in movies and other cultural references, so I wanted to know what they were about.
If I had to guess, I would date my SK years from 1990-1995. The last 'new' book that I read by him was Needful Things (1991), which I owned in hard copy. I know that I read 'The Mist' in the summer of 1994--in fact, I can date a number of his books very precisely because I remember where and when I read them, or more exactly, where and when I became afraid from reading them. Perhaps it is for this reason that they stay more firmly fixed in my memory than most of the books that I have read in my life. I would say the same of John Bellairs, whose Gothic horror stories were like SK for kids, and whose novels also terrified me.
In other words, I was not an avid, constant reader (sorry SK), but one who disappeared for quite a while. I remember rediscovering some when I lived in Vienna (2003-2004) because the choice of English-language books was slim--that time, Pet Semetary didn't scare me as badly, and I realized that I just might be able to reread these stories that scared me so memorably when I was younger. Some I remembered fondly, like Misery (which I realized was actually about the writing process) and The Eyes of the Dragon (I ran out and bought a copy in the summer of 2005 just because I wanted to read it again). But these incidents were few and far between, and I can't say that I ever really planned to rekindle my relationship with SK.
You have to fast-forward to 2007 and a very long bus trip for my first encounter with The Dark Tower series. I was underemployed and looking for things to do, which may have been why I bought The Gunslinger to help pass the time for my travels. It would have been an ideal time to crank through seven books (after getting off the bus, of course, and back to my underemployed life at the end of the line). My reaction was that I did not care for it. Not at all. In fact, I found it boring and had absolutely no desire to continue reading the series. But I owned my personal copy of the book and did move it with me when I started my new job in the fall of 2007. It sat on the shelf, along with my copies of Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon as the only SK novels that I owned.
I'm not sure what possessed me to pick the book up again in the winter of 2011. I had just rearranged all of the books that I owned in preparation to put them in real bookshelves, so maybe it just caught my eye. But I decided to take it with me for some light reading while dog-sitting for friends. This time it did take, for some reason, although I couldn't say what changed from my first reading of it. I wanted to continue reading the series this time around and see what happened to Roland next.
The timing could not have been more ideal, because the next day I realized that I was coming down with the flu. As my final act before succumbing to illness, I rushed to my local library and picked up the next three books in The Dark Tower series. This was probably one of the best moves that I have ever made, literature-wise. The books helped get me through the illness without being too bored, while I had an ideal opportunity to read. And read I did. In fact, after finishing those four, I wanted to know how it ended (although I was recovered from flu). So that was my January 2010: reading all of The Dark Tower in the course of one month.
(You've probably realized that I read fast).
And then, I wanted to rediscover SK. Because I could hear echoes in The Dark Tower of his previous works, echoes that sometimes I barely remembered. But it was amazing to me how vivid those recollections could be. I remembered the prayer to the Turtle in IT. I was sure that the haunted house was a theme that had appeared in previous SK books. I wanted to find these common threads and tie them together...even though I rationally know that there is no such 'master-thread' in his works.
Part of what fascinated me about The Dark Tower was its unapologetic post-modernity. SK invents a world that seems to fit into conventional tropes; I think that we spend much of the first book thinking that we know what is happening ('It's a post-apocalyptic disaster zone! I'll bet nuclear weapons are to blame!'), and then things get weird. Very weird. Not explainable by conventional narratives weird. And I think that this post-modern approach to the epic is part of what makes these twists so fascinating. Characters walk through the worlds of other novels and meet their characters; time ceases to move in a linear fashion; and even death loses its permanence. This is the world that I wanted to explore more, and I think that there are hints of this post-modernity throughout King's oeuvre. Maybe not all the time. Maybe Cujo really was just a rabid dog. But his way of mitigating this post-modern universe by using a popular style (and writing an epic on the scale of C. S. Lewis or Tolkien) is a uniquely King creation. And this was what I found when I explored The Dark Tower again. It was fascinating and intoxicating, in a literary way, and perhaps that is why I felt I needed to complete the series in a month.
(That is kind of crazy when I think about it since I am no longer underemployed. It was almost 4000 pages. Yeesh.)
I think that The Dark Tower led to my reappraisal of King and wanting to reread his works. While I would still consider the anthology of his works sitting on a friend's shelf as the impetus, part of me is convinced that this is far more to do with finding fragmented shards of The Dark Tower in King's other works and trying to piece them together. Yet I know that this is impossible because you can't uncover a master narrative in a post-modern work, at least not in the conventional way. Maybe I am being a literary Roland here, seeking to fulfill my quest which is ultimately unfulfillable. At any rate, I am looking forward to revisiting the world of The Dark Tower to see if I can make any more sense of this complex, compelling universe.
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