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.

Danse macabre

I think that Danse macabre is the longest time I have spent with a Stephen King novel in a very long time.  Not because it was long or that I had to slog through it.  I have just had a lot on my plate for the past little while.

I think that my favorite part was when SK talked about the movies that had genuinely frightened him and he mentioned The Blair Witch Project.  Now, I can write a lengthy list of movies that have terrified me in my day (I didn't even get through The Exorcist), not to mention that SK's novels terrified the crud out of my on a regular basis.  But I was not in any way frightened by The Blair Witch Project.  Not one bit.  Admittedly, I did not see it in theater because I was convinced that it would scare the pants off of me, but when I did finally see it on DVD, it did nothing.  So nyeah.

Other than that, I found SK's explanations of horror interesting.  He identifies three main archetypes: the Frankenstein (or 'The Thing Without A Name'), the werewolf, and the vampire.  For King, all modern horror descends from these archetypes.  A reasonable summary and he brings it all together in a compelling way.

I was particularly interested in his discussions of what makes people want to read (or write) horror.  For King, it is the knowledge that such terrifying creatures do not really exist--it is the mundane that provides solace in this situation.  I still think that part of what makes horror work is that even when terrible events happen, there is an explanation beyond the mundane experience.  True horror occurs when there can be no supernatural explanation and when the outcome is purely horrific.  Indeed, a number of King's books would be transformed from horror to tragedy if only the supernatural elements were removed.  Imagine The Shining where a man simply goes insane and tries to kill his family or It with a serial killer instead of a supernatural clown.  Of course, there are King novels without the supernatural (brain tumors or Misery).  But these are few and far between.

One section that interested me in particular was his summary of Dark Shadows, the single most ridiculous television show that ever aired.  I am a big fan.  You can't go wrong with a Gothic horror story set in soap-opera format combined with Technicolor costuming and make-up.  Certainly, many of the plot lines hinged around complete gibberish.  But there were the occasional moments of real horror that the show somehow managed to capture.  For instance, when Barnabas first appeared and kidnapped Maggie Evans, her walking around the house in a trance featured some very effective moments.  There was also the ghost of Barnabas' brother appearing as a speechless ghost, his face wrapped in bandages so that we saw none of his features.  But yes, most of it was pretty ridiculous.

'Salem's Lot

'Salem's Lot was the second-scariest Stephen King novel that I read when I was younger (It was the scariest, with the scariest short story award going to 'The Mist').  'Salem's Lot was also the only book that I can remember which made me put it down because I was so terrified by one of the scenes.  The scene in question is the one where Jimmy is impaled because he tried to walk down to the basement of the boarding house, only to find that the vampires removed the stairs and put knives at the bottom (they sneakily also made the light switch inoperable, so that Jimmy did not see this coming).  Gruesome.  I'm not sure why 'Salem's Lot affected me so much except that there are a number of very graphic and scary elements and I was pretty clearly an impressionable reader at that age.

Upon rereading it, though, I was less impressed--although I did find myself looking down into the basement of the house in which I was staying a few times, just to reassure myself that the stairs were still there.  Parts of it were written in a very clunky way, including a line that was essentially, 'She felt a drop of horror in her stomach, like a fetus of evil' (I'm paraphrasing because I don't have a copy of the book here.  Future quotes will be more accurate).  That's pretty awful. Mind you, Stephen King was writing at a fast clip, so I can see how you might come up with clunky similes or have repetitive sentence structure from time to time.

What I saw in 'Salem's Lot this time around was the roots for many of King's other novels (and the fact that these vampires can be easily warded off with a crucifix and by refusing them an invitation into the house, two facts that I evidently missed the first time around).  For instance, the group that is formed to combat the vampires reminded me of a ka-tet, which will be a feature of his later books, in particular the Dark Tower series.  A ka-tet is a group brought together because its members share a fate, and there are numerous mentions of the fact that one of the principal characters, Ben Mears, feels as though everything is coming together as if by fate--he is also a writer, which is an important trope in these early books.  Of course, there is also a group, which is a key feature of a ka-tet.  One of its members, Father Callahan, clearly stuck with King, since he will become part of the Dark Tower ka-tet at points--and we get the end of his story, which becomes more surreal and otherworldly after he leaves the Lot.

Other recurring themes in this one include the haunted house, which is a favorite King device.  Actually, in this case, the haunted house extends beyond its walls and envelops the town in its evil, a precursor to It--they also share the fact that children are the first victims.  There is a background provided for the Marsten House and why it became this nexus is provided, at least in part.  I'm quite certain that King has more background about this place and why Kurt Barlow chose it as his headquarters.  There will be numerous haunted houses to come (The Shining was next, after all) and while this one is very effective, I think that the most striking one that I have found in his works so far was in The Waste Lands, but I am getting ahead of myself here.  I do like that Marsten House looks over 'Salem's Lot (sort of like an Overlook...), which is the opposite of It, which finds its home under the town.  Neat reversal.

I found this vampire story somewhat amusing because I think that it is one of the more homoerotic that I have run across since so many of the vampires are men at first.  In a way, this feels like a reversal of Bram Stoker, where Dracula's Brides are gathered around like a harem. 

The plan is to read all of Stephen King's books, including the non-fiction, so I will read Danse Macabre, which is his reflection on the legacy of horror writing.  From what I understand, he talks about the cult TV show 'Dark Shadows' as unsuccessful, claiming that television is a bad medium for horror.  But it's hard for me to imagine that he wasn't in some way influenced by a show that features a dysfunctional family living in a house that features considerable paranormal activity, including a vampire.  And while the show as a whole may not have succeeded in terrifying its audience, I have found that some of its most effective moments occur during the early days of discovering that Barnabas is a vampire, such as when he has hypnotized Maggie (or whatever he did to her) and she is walking around, dressed in white as his lost love Josette, in a trace--these scenes were enhanced because they were shot in black and white, making them even creepier.  Not to mention that both are set in Maine.  Although 'Salem's Lot is a very different approach when compared to 'Dark Shadows', I can't help but think that there is a slight anxiety of influence.

Incidentally, I learned last night that all of the Barnabus and beyond 'Dark Shadows' is available for instant view on Netflix.  Enjoy!