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 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)

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).

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:

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:

• Hearing loss
• Memory difficulty
• Learning disabilities
• Brain damage
• Gait problems
• Seizures
• Kidney failure
• Shock
• Death 

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.

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.'

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.

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.