Thinner

The last of the Bachman books.  I had an old copy.  Here is how I can tell:

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 Running Man

I am going to start right away by saying that I did not really like The Running Man that much.  However, I'm glad that I read it, because I think that you can see a number of different themes that SK was confronting around this time and some that would become important in his later works.

Things that I didn't like:

1) The countdown.  Especially because if you think about it, nothing actually counts down in this story, not even the explosion at the end. 

2) The protagonist.  Maybe this just felt hackneyed because I had just read Cujo, where the characters are fleshed out (okay, maybe too much so).  But this guy just seemed kind of like a jerk for no reason.  Now, I realize that he was living in a society that gave him reasons to be angry, but he seemed less angry at those causes and more just generally angry.  That didn't appeal to me.  There was something about the 'as a man, I need to go earn my family money' idea that was too simplistic for me.

3) The future.  I felt like the future in this story was somewhat vague and not all that sketched out.  Basically, everything, everywhere is a disaster, unless you are rich (which most people are not).  Everyone else is dying of awful diseases or appearing on fatal game shows.

Now, some people might say that SK was prescient in predicting the obsession that we have now with reality shows, and I will give you that.  But he already did that in The Long Walk (which is kind of like The Running Man with a slightly different cast and set of rules).  And he's often prescient, which is probably part of why he is considered to be a masterful writer and observer of society.  

Perhaps part of why this novel didn't work so well for me is that stories set in the near future rarely age well. The Running Man supposedly takes place in 2025, so not all that far away, but everything has turned into chaos.  We hear about this in little bits, like France is under martial law, but we don't know why.  Also, would it really be likely that everywhere would fall apart?  I don't know.  Most importantly, people are restricted in their use of information and access to it.  That part seemed kind of strange now, considering how much information is currently at our fingertips and how that has changed our society--I realize that this is an unfair way of evaluating a book, but I just couldn't get my head around the fact that there seemed to be very few technological developments (FreeVee was basically cable, but with only one channel and mandated in everyone's homes, and I think the cars could kind of float or something) but pretty much everything else was the same.  It didn't feel like a coherent world vision of the future, like you might find in Margaret Atwood, for instance.  The Long Walk was better in my view, perhaps because it didn't need to describe the whole society in detail, so it provided fewer chances for the reader to question the coherence of the future being presented.

Some things that will come back later:

1) Sewers are icky.  There is a scene where the protagonist escapes through the sewers and I was suddenly reminded of scenes from IT.

2) They've after you!  Of course, we have already seen this in Firestarter, among others, but what struck me about this iteration was the fact that the protagonist constantly thought that the Hunters were following him and needed to plan his mistake.  This reminded me very much of Father Callahan's experience as recounted in The Wolves of Calla, which is the fifth Dark Tower book, so we have a ways to go.  The way in which SK described the gradual realization that the people outside were not simply bystanders but actual threats is very similar to how Father Callahan figured out that the 'low men' were after him and went on the run.  There is a pretty big gap in terms of time for this idea and I wonder if it will appear in other books as well.  None leaps to mind in this case.

Speaking of chronology, there is also a question of which order SK was writing these things.  I don't know that it was in publication order; in fact, that seems unlikely.  There were some common themes between this one and Cujo, the most notable of which was the fact that the father was ultimately helpless to aid his child, despite his best intentions (and in this case, the mother of his child).  The reason that this seems particularly pertinent is that the next book is The Gunslinger, which was one that SK worked on for a very long time, dating back to 1970 in fact.  Yet it also has some common themes with this and other contemporaneous works (running, for instance).  Look for a new post soon, I suspect that The Gunslinger will go quickly.

Roadwork

Okay, I will admit it.  I needed a SK hiatus.  It just got to be too much with the '1970s America is really screwed up and what can be done' vibe.  And when I read the blurb for Roadwork, it seemed very much to be about how screwed up 1970s America was and how there was no rational response to what was happening.  I feel like if you are going to set a novel around Nixon/fuel crisis, that kind of response is somewhat inevitable.  When this is the umpteenth SK book in a row to confront these issues, sometimes you need a hiatus.

However, it turned out that I liked Roadwork more than I thought I would.  At its core was less the disintegration of American society and more the disintegration of a man whose life starting unraveling when his son died of a brain tumor.  You may be asking, 'What is the deal with all of these brain tumors?'  I was too.  I think in part they are terrifying because in SK's world, there is nothing that can be done about them.  In fact, this novel was particularly explicit in its description of the size of the tumor (a walnut) and how it was so deeply buried in the brain that nothing could be done.  So in part they are scary because they are 'inoperable' (a word that came up a lot in SK's description)--which is to say that we are hopeless in the face of such things.  But I think that the other scary part is the fact that they alter a person's behavior in ways that cannot be controlled.  Now that is a scary thought.  Forget vampires overriding your village or clowns in your sewer or pets coming back from the dead.  Losing control of your brain, and therefore your behavior, is a terrifying notion.

Of course, there are other recurring themes.  For instance, Vegas is evil (why all the Vegas hate, SK?).  The story is set in Maine...again, SK, if you don't want people to know that you are writing under an alias, set your story in New Jersey or something!*  One of the images that stuck with me the most was the constant dreams that the main character had about his son dying.  This reminded me very much of the Dark Tower series, where Roland keeps seeing Jake die and can't save him.  Perhaps this is where the idea initially came from.  In this case, it was made even more sad by the fact that Barton (main character) simply couldn't move on from this death.  He recognized that he should and even commended his wife--in a backhanded way--for managing to do this.  But he was unable to get anywhere.

I think that what most resonated with me from this novel was the idea that here was a grown-up acting in completely non-grown up ways.  Rather than confronting problems head-on, he came up with drastic responses or drastic non-responses.  For instance, he lost his job because of something that he needed to do and didn't.  He threw a hammer and broke his TV, even though he liked the TV and there was no rational reason for this response.  He wound up in a shoot-out/explosion with local authorities because he should have moved on with his life and didn't.  I'm pretty sure that virtually all of us has felt like this sometimes.  Probably we just did what we needed to do.  Maybe sometimes we let it slide and didn't do something that we should have done.  It probably didn't turn out as drastically as this scenario.  But I felt that Barton's motivations were surprisingly realistic and down-to-earth.  Sometimes we don't want to do things, but because we are grown-ups, we have to.

Perhaps most salient in this novel is the importance of Barton's identity, which he loses piece by piece.  He loses his job, which he has had for decades, in part because of a highway extension.  He is about to lose his home.  His inaction causes him to lose his wife.  Before all of this, he has lost his role as a father.  What is his identity by the end of this novel?  I don't think that even he knows and that is why he takes the extreme action that he did.  Throughout the book, we have narrations of the voices in his head, where he refers to himself by different names (it doesn't become clear until later that they are his middle name and the middle name of his son).  This composite personality arises because he no longer has a well-defined role to play.  In his final conversation with his wife, he feels that she is acting like a paperback novel: newly-divorced woman becoming independent by returning to school.  In other words, she has an identity for him, even if it is cliche.  But as the book continues, his identity is almost entirely lost.  Even when he seeks to make amends--becoming the benefactor of a charity, for instance--he is rebuffed.  I think that this is the reason that losing the house becomes such a catastrophic event for him: it is the only trace that he has of his former identities.

*Wikipedia says it is set in the Midwest.  Bollocks.  From the chapter set on December 31, 1973: 'He wondered what Olivia was doing now.  She hadn't tried to call back, although if she had he would probably have weakened and taken the call.  Maybe she had stayed in Vegas just long enough to get the money and had then caught a bus for...where?  Maine?  Did anyone leave Las Vegas for Maine in the middle of winter?  Surely not.'  (467 in The Bachman Books).  This doesn't definitively place the story in Maine, but after reading it, that was my assumption.

The Long Walk

After taking a post-Stand vacation, it was on to 'The Long Walk' this past weekend.  It's a quick read, although apparently it is 384 pages, according to Wikipedia.  Felt a lot faster.  Maybe everything feels faster after The Stand?

The basic premise behind 'The Long Walk' is that every year, one hundred teenaged boys start walking at the US/Canadian border in Maine and keep going until there is only one survivor.  If the participants drop under 4 miles an hour (which is a brisk pace), they are given a warning and after four, they are shot.  As I've mentioned before, if Stephen King wants to write novels that are not immediately associated with him, he might want to set them in places other than Maine (this one was also published as a Bachman book).  Alternatively, don't go in to extensive detail about Maine in the course of the novel.  Just a suggestion.

The story follows Garraty, one of the walkers and the guy who eventually wins the Long Walk (I would have given you a spoiler alert, but surely you already deduced this).  However, it is a bittersweet victory because he goes crazy or meets Death or something at the end.  Whatever it is, it is not good.  There is an earlier implication that winners of the Long Walk do not often survive for long after their victory and the same would seem to be true here.

This novel prefigures reality shows because it's clear that the Long Walk is watched by people throughout the United States.  There are some references to the fact that this version of America has a separate history and there are unusual details, such as numerous mentions of April 31.  I feel like if you are going to change a calendar, you should go whole hog like in the French Revolution and have months like Thermidor, but that is just me.  While some commentators on the internet seem to think that it is set in the future, I'm not sure about that.  It's not that far in the future, I don't think.  Most things seem quite normal, apart from the fact that there is a guy named the Major who runs things and entities called Squads that keep order (or something, their role is not clearly defined).  In fact, that's a potential flaw of this novel: it's not clear why these boys are walking or what purpose this serves.  More information about the society would make the story more compelling, at least in my opinion.

I think that the other element of the story that made it a bit repetitious to me was the limit of what you can say about people who are walking to death.  Sure, they suffer from pain, but to me these scenes began blending into each other because the characters were constantly suffering from pain.  At the same time, I wonder if this didn't provide a rough version of what King had to do in Misery, which was find different ways of explaining pain over time--or else there would not have been much of a story.  Describing a repetitive action is hard in prose, it would seem.

This novel struck me as similar to some of his contemporary writing, particularly with the focus on adolescents.  Others that are similar: Carrie, Rage, and the short story 'Sometimes They Come Back.'  You could put 'Children of the Corn' possibly in this category too.  What struck me was that the Long Walk was a representation of what should be the most vital force in society, adolescent males, and their ritualized loss of power on a national scale.  It's made clear that the Major runs the Long Walk and it seemed like a means by which he could show the weakness of being human: even these young, fit men could be gunned down and killed if he willed this to be.  There were very few dissidents shown who were opposed to the walk; instead, crowds watched and cheered on the participants.

I finished reading this book and writing this blog post while watching NFL football games and I was struck by at least one glaring similarity.  Recently, we have learned a lot about the danger of such contact sports, particularly concerning head injuries and the long-term damage that they can do.  Yet millions of people still tune in every week to watch men essentially maim themselves on national television.  It's no Long Walk and I don't want to imply that it goes that far, but I do find a parallel between the desire to watch and condone such violent acts.  Of course, football also displays athleticism and strategy, and the players are paid well for their efforts.  The Long Walk strikes me as more of a power-play by a shady, threatened dictator.

Rage

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses. 

Homer, Iliad, Book 1 (trans. Robert Fagles)

Whenever I would think of the title of this book, I automatically thought of the Iliad, which opens with the word, 'Rage' (wow, I did remember something from 'The Epic and Myth in Western Civilization,' a class I took my freshman year!).  Stephen King's Rage is somewhat different in tone, of course, but it ties back to this sentiment that has long been a vital part of Western literature.  In fact, he ties back to a lot of different books within this short novel.  I was actually surprised to find that there were such interesting elements to it--the last time I read Rage was probably at least fifteen years ago and I thought that it was a bit dry.  This time around, I discovered that it also confronts several themes that arose in his other contemporary novels.

Spoiler alert: no one walks around with a knife in his/her back.  That's one theme that is lacking.

If you're interested in reading this book, you may find it hard to get a copy.  Stephen King originally published it as Richard Bachman and I remember reading it in the anthology of his Bachman books when I was younger.  This collection is no longer readily in circulation.  Some school shooters have claimed that they found inspiration in this book and King decided to pull it.  My local library did not have a copy.  My local academic library, on the other hand, did.  So there are still versions of it out there, but it may be challenging to find.

The Bachman books differ from King's other novels because they are not as reliant on horror and the supernatural--although they do have science fiction and some of them are pretty horrific, just not in the 'vampires just took over your town' sense.  Rage, in fact, has zero horror, apart from the fact that a student takes a classroom hostage, although we learn quickly that he is not actually that scary in a sense.  Messed up, yes.  I felt that in a way, this story was akin to Carrie since it featured teens who felt ostracized, except that this time there was no telekinetic massacre.  Actually, while sharing aspects of their lives, it seems that the students learned that they had more in common than they thought.  Is it weird that this book reminded me of The Breakfast Club?

The main character, Charlie, is the narrator for this story, so we learn several of the reasons that he has such rage.  Most of it is directed at his father, whom he sees as a threat to his mother.  I need to retract what I said in my previous post: of the Stephen King novels I have read so far, this one is the most Oedipal.  This theme is in no way subtle.  But Charlie's father is a terror and abusive--one incident that takes place when Charlie is a child is not too far removed from Jack Torrence breaking his son's arm in The Shining.  But in this case, the father is not repentant and Charlie's rage continues to seethe.  I'm not sure if it was just the first-person narrator or the quirkiness of his expressions, but he reminded me of a slightly more psychotic Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, even borrowing some of the vocabulary when Charlie calls one of his classmates a phony.  Both Holden and Charlie are aware that they are not all right, even if they are unsure why that is.

At the periphery of Rage is a town that hides its secrets behind closed doors, much like in previous books as well.  This time, they come into the open from a variety of narrators since the classroom hostages are allowed to share their experiences.  This exchange helps to normalize them, demonstrating that they are not so far removed from each other (Breakfast Club, anyone?).  There is only one who does not: Ted Jones, who faces the rage from his classmates in the end and is the only student who is injured during the stand-off--Charlie does kill two teachers, though, which is why I believe King wanted the novel pulled.  In a way, this book sends a strangely positive message in that all of the teenagers are shown as experiencing rage, but in the end finding a way of confronting it.  I think that the subtext here is constructed by hearing about the lives of the adults that surround them: if they don't learn ways of finding happiness now, they could repeat the mistakes of their dysfunctional parents.

I think that the best part of Rage was the fact that it was only 131 pages in my edition.  I'll look back on this fondly when I get to The Stand (1152), which is not all that far off.

Also, I have a tip for Stephen King if he wants to write things under a pseudonym and not be found out: don't set your book in small-town Maine.