The Dark Half: We Are Back Like George Stark Crawling Out Of A Grave

In case you were wondering what happened to this blog, no, Tommyknockers did not force me to abandon this project, although I would have been entirely justified if I had bailed after it. I am not writing a separate post on it, because I feel like the two mini-posts about its terribleness suffice. I do have a bit more to say about it, but then it shall transform into my short-hand for describing SK writing at his worst (or maybe 'killer Coke machines' will be the short-hand..it's already a post label for this blog).

When I first started this project, one of the stated rules about it was that I was not going to set a time frame to finish reading all of SK's novels in chronological order. I am sticking to that rule. So here we are, two and a half years later, and I'm picking it up again. In between, I have moved from Florida to Massachusetts to Maine! So it feels particularly salient to reread all of SK's books as a Maine resident. Don't worry, I live in Portland, which is not close enough to scope out his house on a regular basis or anything weird. But there still are some Maine SK perks, such as a 'Maine' collection at my local library which has a copy of every one of his books.

Anyway, next in the series is The Dark Half, SK's first book after sobering up and a highly (auto-)biographical take on that process. I had read this book as a kid, likely soon after it came out, and mostly what I remembered was that the author's ghost-vampire-zombie (?) twin comes after the author and his family. The author (Thad Beaumont) had recently buried his pseudonym (George Stark) and vowed not to write as him again, which causes the pseudonym to come to life as a terrifying character. This situation mimics one that SK experienced in real life when he was revealed to be Ricahrd Bachmann, although presumably the remainder of this novel is chiefly fiction.

But Stark's supernatural origins go back more deeply than Thad imagines. He did have an actual twin that he 'swallowed' in the womb, and doctors extract actual recognizable human body parts like an eye out of the author's brain when he is a child. These basic plot points are what I remembered from my initial reading. It wasn't a scary book for me, unlike the lasting scars of IT or 'Salem's Lot, and I remember reading it at camp, so it must have been doubly un-scary, what with all of those potentially terrifying woods and such around (why was I reading SK at camp? In hindsight, this seems like it was a very bad idea). But I didn't remember liking it or hating it, or much more about it, to be honest.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when I found that not only is this a good book, it's a very good book, and it definitely shows that Sober SK is vastly superior to Addict SK. One of the most striking aspects of The Dark Half is the fact that the prose is so clear and precise, unlike the flailing passages of Tommyknockers, but also a problem that plagued the vast majority of his novels from The Stand onward. No description feels 'fuzzy.' I will say that I still blame editors for that at least in part, but this novel is so much better in that regard.

Here is my last comment on Tommyknockers (for real this time): in essence, it is a rewriting of IT, although the more realistic version. In both, an alien species comes to Earth and takes over a town. In both, a force rises to fight against the alien's power. With IT, it is The Losers Club, a group of children then adults brought together because they are ostracized from their peers. In Tommyknockers, the job falls to Gard, who takes the alien ship on a suicide mission to stop its harmful influence from spreading any further. Gard is a broken man, an alcoholic whose behavior has cost him his career and strained relationships with those around him. In contrast, while The Losers suffered as children, their lives are seemingly blessed as adults and many of them have achieved great success (except for the Jewish Stan Uris, who committed suicide, and why did you have to go making the Jewish kid the neurotic one, SK? Why???). In fact, this has been one of the major criticisms of IT: that the characters do not speak like people, but like stereotypes; that Bill, the author at the center of The Losers Club, is a self-aggrandized version of a person; and that their fates do not fit their traumatic childhood. Tommyknockers reverses all of this. Instead of being strengthened and blessed by an encounter with aliens, Gard is weakened and killed. That seems more realistic to me, and I wonder if SK's addiction problems are manifesting themselves in this bleak outlook--Gard, of course, is also a writer, but one who has reached a state that renders him incapable of producing good work.

The Dark Half is also a rewriting of one of SK's earlier novels: Misery. In both, an author is held hostage by an outside force and must write a book. Both novels have novels-within-novels: Misery's Return and the latest Alexis Machine book in The Dark Half. However, there is a fundamental difference: in Misery, Annie is Paul Sheldon's muse, even though she is a very dangerous one. She has no qualms about feeding his addiction to pills, keeping him hostage, or even maiming him to ensure that he will finish the work. Misery becomes grim as Paul gets closer to finishing the novel, as it is clear that he is physically close to death too. Even in the epilogue, when he is back in New York and enjoying new-found success as a writer, it's clear that he is permanently damaged, both physically and mentally. There is a question about whether his survival was a triumph, or if he will be able to recover.

On the surface, The Dark Half shows its protagonist as the stronger force against his evil twin. George Stark is less of a muse and more of Mr. Hyde to Thad Beaumont's Dr. Jekyll. Stark's books were violent thrillers and brought some kind of change to Thad's personality when he was writing under this pseudonym, at least from the recollections of his wife. While there are references to earlier alcoholism and smoking (nothing more harmful than that, although one wonders), these are not directly correlated with the Stark novels; however, Stark's blatant disregard for human life and his propensity for smoking and drinking suggests that these behaviors were mirrored by Thad when he was writing these books. Thad is able to overcome his evil twin through a supernatural conceit, although we see that the two men are more alike than he wants to admit. Of course, this plot undoubtedly reflects the concerns that SK must have had at the time as he started his sober life. Not only was he likely worried about how his creative talent would manifest itself in the absence of drugs, this novel reveals how concerned he was about whether his family, specifically his wife, would be capable of forgiveness. There are many scenes in The Dark Half that celebrate the tranquility of the mundane, particularly involving Thad and Liz's twin infants.

There is another major difference between SK's two fictional accounts of writing: the fate of The Dark Half's fictional novel is the opposite of that in Misery. Thad destroys it when he sets fire to his summer house after vanquishing his evil twin. In fact, SK dwells on the destruction of the manuscript, noting that the hand-written pages float into the night sky, then burn up. With this, Stark is gone and Thad goes back to his wife and kids, virtually unscathed. He does not seem broken, he seems whole, and this wholesomeness has allowed him to win the day. It's not hard to see that this ending is partially wishful thinking for the newly-sober SK, who hoped that he would be able to conquer his demons and return to the comfort of domesticity.

[For those of you who are SK superfans and want me to get ahead of myself, I won't. We'll talk about Thad Beaumont's fate in later novels when we get to later novels.]

Horrible writing from 'The Tommyknockers,' Part 2

This book needs to be over.  It is SO BAD.  There are less than a hundred pages left and I keep trying to sit down and finish it, but then it gets too bad.  I don't want to give away just how bad, but I will let these two examples speak for themselves:

One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.  There was a thudding, crunching sound.  The front of Leandro's skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor.  A split second later his spine snapped.  For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a fast-moving car.  His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them.  The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules.  One fell off.

 If your question is, 'Did a character just get attacked by a giant, moving Coke machine?', then the answer is, 'Yes, this novel is, in fact, that bad.'  Also, the similes.  The terrible, terrible similes.  They fall like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor.

One more, which comes from a scene where Bobbi is describing the nature of the aliens who are possessing the town:

We're builders, not understanders.

If you're curious, SK uses the not-a-word 'understanders' more than once.  I mean, I am all for blaming his addled state for this catastrophe, but I also have to ask, where were his editors?

Horrible writing from 'Tommyknockers,' Part 1

I have a feeling this will be a multi-post topic.

I have started The Tommyknockers.  It is as bad as I remember.  Actually, I don't remember much about it, so it must be super bad.  And it is.  For instance, one of the characters is constantly referenced by her last name.  Think it over.  It's weird.  It feels wrong.  It feels lazy.  Ugh.

Anyway, I figured that at least if I can revel in the terrible writing, it might make it slightly more fun.  So here is the best passage I have found so far:

When he got drunk, his heart got hot.  The nukes.  The goddam nukes.  It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't really have to be Freud to figure out that what he was really protesting was the reactor in his own heart.  When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system.  There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired.  He sat and played with all the wrong switches.  That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.

I just........yeah.  Possibly the lengthiest and worst metaphor in SK's oeuvre, although I have a feeling that there are still more gems to come.

One more thing on Misery

What struck me on this reread as well is that Misery works in a similar way to The Eyes of the Dragon and 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.'  In all three, someone is imprisoned and needs to escape through an elaborate plot.  All three also rank among the stories that I feel are the best in SK's work.  Coincidence?

Misery (aka On Writing, Version 1.0)

[I told you that would be fast....here we are, just over 24 hours later, and Misery is done]

I know that I start to sound a bit like a broken record on this blog when I go on about how you don't actually need a terrifying alien clown or a bunch of vampires invading a town or a violent writer going crazy in a hotel or whatever in most of Stephen King's horror books to create the horror.  But bear with me a minute when I say that you don't actually need Annie Wilkes for Misery.  Because I know that this sounds absolutely absurd from one perspective (how else would you wind up with the basic scenario?), but from another perspective, it makes complete sense to me.  Sure, she is a psychopath with severe mental health issues and a penchant for the grotesque.  But she is also Paul's muse, albeit something of a practical version of one.  She is an editor and a facilitator for the creative process.  She offers advice that might seem to stem from her naivete.  However, as Paul starts to think over the advice that she has provided, he realizes that she is right: perhaps Fast Cars was not such a great project, perhaps his first draft of Misery's Return was not convincing, perhaps Annie (and therefore, perhaps readers in general) are not fooled by poor work.  The perverse situation in which Paul finds himself under her care creates the almost perfect scenario for him to write; at one point, he notes that before finding himself Annie's prisoner, he would avoid writing for the most mundane reasons, like having a headache, but while he is there, he maintains a steady schedule and is productive to an unprecedented degree.  He acknowledges that he plays Scherherazade both for her and for himself.  So muse, editor, facilitator, Shah...call it what you will, but Annie helps Paul reach his creative potential.  And when she has fulfilled this role, he kills her.  LITERALLY.

Mind you, in doing so, she reveals herself to be a complete headcase, and part of what makes this novel work, I think, is Paul's reaction as her antics get further and further out of control.  His near-panic when the troopers rescue him is grounded in hysteria, and rightly so.  The deterioration of his body is made very obvious when the troopers are looking him over in this scene, and the reader is reminded of how visceral the experience of writing this novel has been.  When the original state trooper comes out to investigate Annie's house, Paul is described as 'a man with blue eyes bulging from his white and whiskery old-man's face...staring at him from behind a window, moaning through closed lips, hands rattling uselessly on a board laid across the arms of a wheelchair' (p. 259).  This is in contrast with the Paul that we hear about from before the accident, a fun-loving, free-wheeling guy who even considers picking up the attractive bank attendant before continuing on his post-book journey.  Is part of this novel, then, about the fear of getting older too?  That he won't be able to finish his 'great novel' not only because of Annie, but because he simply won't finish it?  In the previous paragraph, before this description of Paul as old, is the following:

The truth of everything was so simple in its horridness; so dreadfully simple.  He was dying by inches, but dying that way wasn't as bad as he'd already feared.  But he was also fading, and that was an awful thing because it was moronic

This problem of fading, this could happen at any age, to anyone.  And it could suck away creative talent.  In fact, the Paul described in the very final section of the book has faded.  He can no longer write, he can no longer support himself (literally, in terms of mobility), he finds it hard to walk a mile, and he even cowers at his housekeeper and cat.  At the end, he finds a creative spark, but just enough to get started (and to stop him from drinking so that he doesn't lose his creativity).

I realize that I am getting a bit ahead of myself here: let's go back to the title of the book, and Paul's book Misery.  Misery is the main character in the novel, and perhaps it describes the entire process of writing the novel in the first place: it is misery.  Misery's Return, the name of Paul's next book in the series, seems almost like a joke when considered in this context.  However, with the misery, he also finds himself deeply invested in the process and the story, and ultimately he is fulfilled by the experience.  Perhaps that bird from Africa that he saw as a child was not so sad after all.

I found many parallels in this novel to other Stephen King works, some of which were very weird.  Like, who thought that the thumb pie from Thinner would return?  Or a killer lawnmower like in 'The Lawnmower Man'?  There were also a few hints of 'The Drawing of the Three,' but perhaps that is not surprising, considering how closely these two novels were written together (in fact, did you realize that King had four novels that were published in 1987 alone?  Four?  That is insane.  And this was the year after IT).  Keflex (penicillin) is featured in both novels, for instance, which is kind of weird.  What really resonated with me in both novels was the imagery of the ocean coming in and out: in 'The Drawing of the Three,' this is a literal ocean, since almost the whole novel takes place on the beach.  In Misery, the waves on a set of pilings was likened to the pain that Paul felt as he needed his Norvil, a pain that would then gradually abate, hiding the pilings again.  King has said that this book was very much about addiction, with Annie serving as a stand-in for his own problems at the time.  This time around, I actually found the addiction issue less salient; after all, Paul becomes addicted to his Norvil, but he also does need it to keep his pain at bay.  By contrast, Eddie Dean in 'The Drawing of the Three' was a real addict, a person who had to be ripped out of his own world to stop using heroin (and even then still tried to trick Roland to get back).  Misery, to me, felt much more like an expose on writing and how wracking the process can be--Annie Wilkes or no.

One last thought: is this the first book with no mention of the supernatural at all?  Cujo didn't need any supernatural plot driver, even though there were some references to a general evil descending on the town.  But that doesn't even happen in Misery: it is simply a person who is crazy.  Maybe this is the first novel where King is hinting that the supernatural in his other books is something of a cover that hides what is really terrifying: everyday people who don't act as they should.

'The Drawing of the Three'

So as you may recall, I was not such a fan of 'Gunslinger' when I reread it, and I was so disappointed that I sought out the old version of it (instead of the revised one) to see if I liked it better.  I was slightly trepidatious that I wouldn't enjoy this book either, even though I remembered it being pretty engaging the first time that I read the Dark Tower series--as you may recall, I was also down for the count with some kind of flu or something, so my judgment may have been skewed.  However, I still enjoyed it.  It was a very quick read, as I started it Friday night and by Sunday morning, I had it done, even though I lost an hour in there to Daylight Savings (during this same weekend, I helped in a rescue effort for two bunnies, attended a very long and not great baseball game, drove around numerous locales in the greater Fort Myers area, and listening to a chunk of Berg's Lulu.  As you do).

I was somewhat surprised as the proportions of this one, as I thought for some reason that Jake showed up again and kept wondering if SK was going to cover that in one paragraph or something.  My bad.  Not this book, the next book.  And while I did enjoy the section where Eddie Dean was brought into Roland's world (it's really great!), knowing the outcome of Odetta/Detta somehow made it slightly less compelling this time around.  That being said, I did enjoy the reread, and I think the book in general makes a lot of sense within SK's works of this time.

First, you have drug addiction, which will be a significant theme in the next two books: Misery and Tommyknockers.  Misery I know well and love; Tommyknockers I vaguely remember not enjoying whatsoever, but I think it's still about addiction from what I recall.  So I guess this is SK's druggie phase, which, if I had to put a limit on it, I would say started around Christine and ends around Tommyknockers.  This seems about right, as it appears that the King family intervention to get SK sober happened right after this novel.

Second, you have SK, known as the master of horror, etc....... branching out to something new with both Eyes of the Dragon and 'The Drawing of the Three.'  Let's bear in mind that 'The Gunslinger' was not a huge success when it was published, so he was leaving horror in pursuing this project.  And 'The Drawing of the Three' is a novel that crams in an awful lot of stuff.  It has fantasy, a mob scene, a heist movie, some kind of psychological thriller, family drama, and maybe even a little bit of horror in the lobstrosities.  I even saw some of Misery being paralleled here with the scenes when Roland is increasingly ill and on his own, having to cope.  But horror by no means drives this novel.

I don't want to give away too much here, since Misery is next on the list, but Misery is, among other things, also a book about writing--or perhaps more specifically, about how sometimes you would literally have to trap an author in a bed by maiming him, then forcing him to write, in order for him to finish a project.  It feels like that sometimes.  And I am wondering if part of this sentiment was brought up by these two books which move away from typical SK and instead feature more fantasy and adventure.  Maybe Misery serves as a transition back to what he was known for doing?  Still, he could have skipped Tommyknockers.  We all would have been okay.

I feel super confident that I will be done with Misery very soon and have a new post very soon.  One of my all-time SK favorites.

The Eyes of the Dragon

The Eyes of the Dragon was one of my favorite Stephen King books when I was younger.  It wasn't scary, it was relatively short, and it was a fun adventure story.  I reread it in 2005, just because I felt like it one day and ran out to buy a copy.  In the most recent rereading of it, I again enjoyed it, and I think that it makes a great 'short' novella after IT--remembering, of course, that SK's novellas in Different Seasons were written after completing his major books. 

This time around, I was very much reminded of 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' because I think that the two stories operate in very similar ways.  Both are, of course, about a man who is jailed because of a crime that he didn't commit.  But SK uses several of the same techniques too.  He gives clues about what will happen in advance, so if you are paying close attention you might put everything together.  Both men come up with elaborate plans (that rely on gifts) to make their escapes.  Eyes of the Dragon is intended for a younger audience--specifically King and Straub's kids--which I think changes the overall tone. There is also a dog as a major character in the form of Frisky, which is an idea that will stick around for SK too, particularly with the introduction of Oy in The Waste Lands.

Also worth noting, of course, is the return of Flagg, who hasn't been around for a while.  In fact, I think his last definitive appearance was in The Gunslinger (....or was it?  If you read the original, maybe not.  If you read the revised 2003 version, probably), and he was obliquely hinted at in 'Children of the Corn.'  Flagg will be back in a big way, of course, in the Dark Tower series.  In this novel, Flagg even has moments where he resembled It: he bares his teeth, he smells monstrous (according to Frisky), he poisons the sewers, and SK even refers to him as It at one point.  Not quite the same, but a terrifying monster nonetheless.

In sum, quick read, fun stuff, great adventure.  I still like this one a lot.  In fact, I am surprised that it has not been adapted, seems like it would be pretty easy to make it a compelling movie.

I did IT!

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

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:

This one

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.......

What have I got myself into here???

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.