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mae
05-24-2012, 12:45 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/24/rereading-stephen-king-carrie

Rereading Stephen King: week one – Carrie

James Smythe has read everything Stephen King has ever written – and now he's revisiting each novel in chronological order. First: a young girl with some dangerous powers

Carrie is Stephen King's first novel. A large part of its fame comes from the fact that it was actually the fourth novel he wrote and submitted to publishers – a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of big-name authors. "Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?" goes the common confidence-boosting phrase. And, nearly as famously, he actually threw his only draft of it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 70ish-strong publication history. (The first three books King wrote, incidentally, were Rage, The Long Walk and Blaze, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)

Carrie ended up being quite a zeitgeisty novel: published in the same rough timeframe as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, and when cinemas were showing Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man. The public were beginning to fall in love with the weirder, more human side of the paranormal – moving away from ghosts and hauntings, which used to preoccupy horror fiction.

The book itself is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent – and then, as the novel progresses, developing – telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more. By the end of the novel, there's a pretty impressive body count, and it's a body count you don't necessarily see coming given the general tone of the novel. Or, bluntly, given the character of Carrie herself.

Structurally it's a really weird one, with a standard Kingian third-person narrative voice interspersed with extracts from other media: newspaper reports, autobiographies of characters, transcripts of police interviews, that sort of thing. It's not a structure that entirely works, as the extracts are still slightly too close to King's standard narrative voice, and are often the worst (read: slowest) parts of the novel. While still reeling from the excitement of some of the third-person sections – particularly the classic prom scene – being dragged somewhere else entirely and presented with an often less-interesting viewpoint isn't always ideal. (In particular, there's a series of extracts from Susan Snell's fake biography; none are very interesting. Apart from anything else, they don't read like biography: they read like monologues.)

But, it's a really good story. Carrie herself is a fascinating character: an archetype (the damaged girl with powers beyond her sphere) to which King would return later in his career, and the book drags the reader along at a fair-old whack. King himself has described the novel as being "a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom". And that's a pretty fair assessment, I'd say. As a debut novel, it's a fairly good piece of juvenilia. As a statement of intent – that intent being to write stories that deal with the weird, twisted and human in equal measure – it's exceptional.

Kingisms

In every review, I'm going to look at the tropes and common stylistic touches that appear in King's novels. Carrie's obviously interesting as it was the first, and it throws up a few ideas he would repeat throughout his career. The big one in Carrie is the internal monologue. King has a habit

(habit? habits are formed, this is something innate)

of indenting brackets or dropping the italicised thoughts of his characters into his third-person narratives. (See what I did there?) It's an easy way to bypass "She thought", and actually pretty elegant. In Carrie, it's a stylistic device that's still new to him, and whereas he now uses it sparingly, here, it's everywhere. By the end of the novel, some pages are almost more internal monologue than not.

Carrie is also a relative tone-setter of a novel: the narrative is distinctly King's, covering themes he would revisit again, and to greater effect; and some of the dialogue – particularly in Carrie's conversations with her mother – is delivered in voices he would also return to in later novels (Misery, the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne).

Flagg-raising

One last thing. King has a character who has officially appeared in nine novels: Randall Flagg (aka Walter O'Dim, the Dark Man, the Man in Black, the Walkin' Dude). He's not a nice chap, and I'll take a much closer look at him in later novels – starting, if memory serves, with 1978's The Stand. But there are plenty of arguments to be made for his appearance in other King texts, and Carrie is no different.

Carrie's mother, in her religious fervour, frequently refers to – either directly, or through Carrie's prior indoctrination – "the black man … his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement". Now, while it's meant to be the devil in this instance – or, rather, a more direct suggestion of the devil than Randall Flagg's usual appearances – that particular being is never mentioned by name. And "the black man" is awfully close to the Man in Black and the Dark Man, I'd say …

Next up

1975's Salem's Lot, a story of vampires, small towns and another of King's common themes – writers.

Randall Flagg
05-24-2012, 12:52 PM
Outstanding. I love this idea, and I am enjoying the analysis.

Ben Mears
05-24-2012, 01:19 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/24/rereading-stephen-king-carrie

Rereading Stephen King: week one – Carrie

James Smythe has read everything Stephen King has ever written – and now he's revisiting each novel in chronological order. First: a young girl with some dangerous powers

Carrie is Stephen King's first novel. A large part of its fame comes from the fact that it was actually the fourth novel he wrote and submitted to publishers – a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of big-name authors. "Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?" goes the common confidence-boosting phrase. And, nearly as famously, he actually threw his only draft of it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 70ish-strong publication history. (The first three books King wrote, incidentally, were Rage, The Long Walk and Blaze, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)



Not to nitpick (but, of course I will) King's first three rejected novels (actually four) prior to Carrie were The Long Walk, Sword In The Darkness, Getting It On, and The Running Man. Blaze came after Carrie was submitted.

Shannon
05-24-2012, 02:00 PM
I like this idea also. How fast is he going to read each novel, does anyone know?

mae
05-24-2012, 02:57 PM
Well, this is entitled Week One, so I guess on a weekly basis.

herbertwest
05-25-2012, 03:40 AM
"James Smythe has read everything Stephen King has ever written"

No he didnt. Nobody did... but Stephen King himself. Even Tabitha didnt..

Brice
05-26-2012, 03:59 PM
I'm sure they mean everything he's published.

herbertwest
05-26-2012, 11:56 PM
Yes, but that's not what they written... and by everything he's published, i would guess that they mean all the NOVELS. Not short stories nor non fiction.

;-)

Brice
05-27-2012, 03:14 AM
Hey, maybe the guy's been stalking King since he was a kid literally reading everything.

mae
06-11-2012, 07:49 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/11/rereading-stephen-king-salems-lot

Rereading Stephen King: week two – Salem's Lot

Second novels are tough. The expectations of what you'll deliver – especially off a success – are phenomenal. Readers of the debut want to be satisfied by the follow-up; readers who heard about the first but didn't bite want to be wowed by the concept enough to pick it up; and those who hated the debut want you to fail. So, when Stephen King went from the quasi-plausible abuse-terror of Carrie to vampires, there must have been some worried readers (and, probably, publishers). Good job that Salem's Lot was – and still is – a hugely impressive novel, then.

The most impressive thing about the book is how long it takes for anything really to happen. After a short prologue, where it's established that a tall man and a young boy survive whatever it is we're about to read (and end up in the far sunnier climes of Mexico), we meet the town itself. Jerusalem's Lot is the main character here, a warm-up for what King would later do with his beloved fictional towns of Derry and Castle Rock. We're given a vivid description, details and foibles, before the town is populated with a cast of characters to rival any soap opera. All human life is here, as the saying goes: and they all want to know who the stranger is that's just moved to town.

He's Ben Mears, and he's a writer. He grew up in the titular town, and he has some bad memories of it. In particular, of the Marsten house, which seems to loom over everything, the perennial gothic house on the hill, where bad things happen and bad men have lived. Ben has written a few novels (with excellent fake-real names, like Air Dance), but they weren't exactly to small-town tastes: "Miss Coogan at the drugstore says that is pretty racy," Susan tells Ben early in the book; while another character remembers being perturbed when reading a homosexual rape scene in Conway's Daughter. Regardless, Ben has come to Salem's Lot to write his next book. We never learn exactly what it's about, despite numerous characters pestering him for information: but he does, at a later point in the novel, give away that it concerns "the recurrent power of evil", and the spooky events he once witnessed at the Marsten house.

So Ben does all the things you would do as a writer, stomping around your old turf and trying to put off the act of writing itself: he meets a girl who is in thrall of his talents, Susan; he visits a school, befriending a nice older teacher, Matt; he visits a doctor, Jimmy; he encounters a priest with a drinking problem, Father Callahan; he crosses paths with Mark Petrie, a kid with a penchant for classic Universal monster movies; and he remembers the time he went to the Marsten house when he himself was a child, and saw something inexplicable and pretty horrifying involving the ghost of the previous owner. King spends half the novel establishing the town, Ben, and his would-be gang of vampire hunters. The vampires themselves? For much of the first half, they're only hinted at.

The biggest hint comes in the form of a certain Mr Straker, along with his absentee business partner Mr Barlow. They decide to open an antique shop in a town that doesn't need one, and they buy the Marsten house to live in while they're there. Alarm bells ring all over, but nobody really cares because there are too many other things going on. Women nearly beat their babies to death because of the stress of motherhood; men drink too much and rape their wives; and gossip is everywhere, like rats behind the walls. Nobody stops to notice that, between Straker and Barlow, you've got – nearly, if you flip the W upside down – an anagram of Bram Stoker. When a young boy then dies in mysterious circumstances, the only person who really pays attention outside his family is the inept local lawman. As a reader, you want them all to care more than they do, because you can see what's coming: the inevitability of death.

It's almost exactly halfway through the novel that the blood hits the fan. More people die. Infant babies come back to life, and need to feed on more than milk. Being outside at night is no longer safe. After a deliberately hazy and meandering first half – one that lulls both reader and characters into a false sense of security – the second part of the novel barely breathes. It takes place over roughly two days and two nights, as Ben and his new friends – or what's left of them – try to end the rapidly spreading vampire menace and take Salem's Lot back.For better or worse, the book ends pretty much where it began: with the tall man and the boy in Mexico, trying to work out their next move.

When I was younger, it was this second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn't survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters. Where Carrie paints emotion in one very broad (red) stroke, there is far more subtlety here. Characters you don't like still engender pity. Back then it amazed me, once I got past the – as I erroneously thought – dragged-out beginning.

Now, it's the start that I love most. It's the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. "She dipped her head to suck at the straw," goess one passage, describing the drinking of a root beer. "Her neck was beautifully muscled." Another, during a kiss, reads: "She thought: he's tasting me." When the chaos finally unfolds, it's a real payoff. You care. I can't reasonably claim this is the greatest vampire novel ever written, but it certainly provides the most outright entertainment. It takes an archetype, puts it in a situation you wouldn't expect, and watches the damage unfurl.

Of course, the novel itself can be read as metaphor: the small-town American way of life, being bled dry by outside influences, left as a hollow shell of its former being. But I actually prefer to see it as what it is: a story about the evil that's always there, lurking in the darkness, waiting for a moment to return.

[B]Kingisms

It's easy to see all these early novels as dry runs for ideas King would later develop. Salem's Lot as proxy for EveryTown USA (twinned with Hidden Darkness); Mark as the overly bright kid we all wish we'd been at his age; and, biggest of all, Ben Mears as the hampered writer, ruined by life, trying to write but faced with a reality that's more dangerous than anything in his mind. We get descriptions of Mears's books; we see how the writing is jammed inside Mears, unable to come out; and we see more of an obsession with the bleeding between life and art that King would return to again and again.

King likes writing writers. It's easy to dismiss this as him writing what he knows, but I think it's something else. I think he knows that a writer – or, at least, his type of writer – can imagine the things King's small-town sheriffs and doctors can't (or won't). They can take leaps of logic, bounding alongside the narrative. They can be ciphers for King himself in the novel. They don't need to explain why they know something: they just know it. This was simply the first example of his life-long obsession with writers, why they write, and how the action of writing serves the story being told; an obsession that would, I think, culminate in the best book about writing ever written, On Writing.

Connections

There are connections between a lot of King's books, usually using the Dark Tower series as their central hub. While Salem's Lot is definitely its own novel, it wouldn't be the last time King would write about the tainted priest Father Callahan, or these particular vampires: they would both crop up in Wolves of the Calla. There, the vampire mythos would be expanded upon, with Barlow given an origin; and (the now) Pere Callahan would tag along with the main group of characters (known in the Dark Tower stories as the "Ka-Tet") on their journey to a very different New York than the one for which he leaves in Salem's Lot.

There also exist two short stories that directly tie into Salem's Lot: a prequel, Jerusalem's Lot (set in the town in 1850, heavily Lovecraftian in tone and subject matter); and a sequel, One for the Road (set a couple of years after the novel, and more a bookend than new story outright). Both can be found in the Night Shift collection, which we'll get to soon enough.

Next up

In a fortnight we're at the Overlook Hotel, confusing ourselves about what was King and what was Kubrick, for The Shining.

Shannon
06-11-2012, 03:39 PM
Yuck. I know I'll get blasted for this, but I loathed 'Salem's Lot. Boring boring boring. And as far as "most outright entertainment" in a vampire novel, obviously this guy hasn't read any of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle books. Those things are entertainment, as well as story, characters, and a mythology that would rival Lost. Just my 2.5 cents.

Brice
06-11-2012, 04:20 PM
Yuck. I know I'll get blasted for this, but I loathed 'Salem's Lot. Boring boring boring. And as far as "most outright entertainment" in a vampire novel, obviously this guy hasn't read any of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle books. Those things are entertainment, as well as story, characters, and a mythology that would rival Lost. Just my 2.5 cents.

The first 3 vampire books by Rice were fantastic. The rest of her writing career has been devoted to fucking it up.

Shannon
06-11-2012, 10:54 PM
No way. Memnoch The Devil and Blackwood Farm were both amazing additions to the story. Lestat meeting Jesus, come on! lol

Ben Mears
06-12-2012, 05:46 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/11/rereading-stephen-king-salems-lot

Rereading Stephen King: week two – Salem's Lot

Second novels are tough. The expectations of what you'll deliver – especially off a success – are phenomenal.

The reason SL is so good and why it succeeded as a second novel is partially due to the fact that is was actually SK's seventh novel (Getting It On, The Long Walk, Sword In The Darkness, The Running Man, Carrie, & Blaze) but only his second published novel.


Ben has come to Salem's Lot to write his next book. We never learn exactly what it's about, despite numerous characters pestering him for information: but he does, at a later point in the novel, give away that it concerns "the recurrent power of evil", and the spooky events he once witnessed at the Marsten house.

The book Ben was working on was called The Night Creature. "...about the town, " he said, and his eyes gleamed. "The town and the madness that spreads over it and poisons it. I'm writing about mindless evil-the worst kind of all, because there is no escape from it." Ben never completed the book; as a matter of fact he burned the manuscript before leaving the Lot. However, according to the original 'Salem's Lot manuscript, he did write a novel called The Hollow, about a small Maine town named Durham that told of a savage, mythic power struggle between a local lawyer and a mill owner/real estate agent. Evidently this novel won the National Book Award.



When I was younger, it was this second half that enraptured me: the rush of the hunt (on both sides); the thrill of not knowing who would and wouldn't survive; and the pain of how much this affected the characters. Where Carrie paints emotion in one very broad (red) stroke, there is far more subtlety here. Characters you don't like still engender pity. Back then it amazed me, once I got past the – as I erroneously thought – dragged-out beginning.

Now, it's the start that I love most. It's the slowest of slow burns, all hints and drip-feed. King infuses it with descriptions that start you thinking about vampires before they even factor in the novel. When the chaos finally unfolds, it's a real payoff. You care. It takes an archetype, puts it in a situation you wouldn't expect, and watches the damage unfurl.

My sentiments exactly. Upon my annual reading of 'Salem's Lot I languish over the first half of the book, just enjoying the ride before it, in the words of the author "...takes off like a big-ass bird into a world where all the rules have become moot and anything is possible"



I don't know how to break a quote apart so I just added my comments in bold above.

Brice
06-17-2012, 09:15 PM
No way. Memnoch The Devil and Blackwood Farm were both amazing additions to the story. Lestat meeting Jesus, come on! lol

I did enjoy Memnoch. Truthfully after that I just couldn't fucking care about the series much.

Shannon
06-17-2012, 10:35 PM
I just couldn't get into it when she mixed the vamps and witches. Pandora was ok because it was still vampire based. I tried reading the first witch book and it bored me to death. So yeah, in Blood Canticle (the last vamp book) when Lestat falls in love with the main witch character, I was like "come onnnnnn, you're Lestat!" lol

caroline938
06-17-2012, 11:12 PM
I'm finding your project to be an interesting one, and I'm looking forward to seeing the next installments. I, too, have read the entire canon many times. I'm new to the list, so please forgive me if this is an off the reservation remark.

Your first post made reference to identifying tropes and other stylistic devices and providing some literary analysis for each text. I think your plot summaries are clear, but I'm not yet willing to give you a pass on what you've said you'd deliver. Yes, King uses italics to show interior monologues, and that has become a stylistic trademark of his--one of many. I think it would be really interesting to discuss WHY he uses that trope the way he does, and I don't think it's just to save himself the trouble of typing 'He thought.' Also, I'm finding that though your effort is valiant, you have a tendency to rely on plot summary and what you liked and did not like, which is worlds away from thesis and analysis. You did say, at one point, that King's On Writing was the best book on writing you'd run across. I agree with you. I actually agree with almost everything you've written. I'm just pushing you a bit.

Cheers,

Caroline

Shannon
06-17-2012, 11:55 PM
Dear Caroline,

James Smyth isn't a member here. ... I think.

Hugs,
Shannon

Brice
06-18-2012, 04:45 AM
Yes, I believe she needs to go The Guardian there if she'd like to push him.

Randall Flagg
06-18-2012, 11:08 AM
Or get him to pop in here.
Brice, would you please take care of that?

caroline938
06-18-2012, 01:26 PM
My very first post to this forum, and it's to someone who's not even a MEMBER of this forum. I'd push if I could, but I'm not sure even someone with the touch can evoke good critical thinking skills. It's a pretty thought, though. Maybe I'll swing by the Guardian and see.

Caroline, not quite mortified enough to light out, but I do like knowing that I'm standing in the right where and when

Brice
06-18-2012, 02:35 PM
Or get him to pop in here.
Brice, would you please take care of that?

I'll let him know about us and invite him. :)


Caroline, stick around.

Jean
06-19-2012, 02:51 AM
My very first post to this forum, and it's to someone who's not even a MEMBER of this forum.
I don't think there's anything catastrophic about this. We can discuss his articles here just as well as where he posts them; the only thing is that here we can't expect a reply.

Personally, I am not very impressed with his analysis. It's like a columnist who ran out of ideas, and started describing his breakfast, day in, day out, under the guise of analyzing modern cuisine. I have seen a lot more intersting reviews in our site. It is very commendable, however, that he reads Sai King's works, and seems to like them.

caroline938
06-20-2012, 05:05 PM
No, I'm not either. In seven long years of teaching undergraduate English courses, I read thousands and thousands of pages of 'analysis' that had about the same depth and breadth. He promised critical analysis, and I haven't seen any yet. He promised to identify tropes and stylistic devices, and I'm still waiting for him to come back and tell us that a) he knows they're the same thing, and b) the list is longer than 'King uses parens and italics to call out internal monologues.' It's true: he does--and frequently with considerable imagination--but there is so much more that can be said about his style, both his prose and the arc of his narratives, that I feel compelled to complain that we've not yet gotten our money's worth. I concur that it's admirable that he's clearly read the works closely and just as clearly admires them, and his regard for On Writing has earned him enough of my respect to keep me reading.

But my undergrads had a tough time understanding the difference between plot description and plot analysis. Between 'what' and 'so what,' or 'who' and 'who cares.' Critical analysis happens when you tell me why something has significance, what it represents, what the author is trying to do, how is point relates to a larger point or SOMETHING. Amazing how many of them came from good suburban school districts and were still entirely unclear on all the above. Very dispiriting.

King is especially challenging in some ways, because he is first, foremost and finally, a storyteller. There's a great line, somewhere in Misery I think: "Writing fiction is like masturbation. They both require quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched." That might not be it exactly, but it's close. King is very clear that telling the story, finding out how it ends, is absolutely a matter of life and death. I'm pretty sure he's right. When people get their personal narratives, their stories screwed up, we call it insanity. Talk therapy is based on getting the story right. Freud's Beyond The Pleasure Principle says that narratives are always driving towards closure, and thus to the appropriate death. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And King takes potshots at academics in plenty of his Forwards, Afterwards, and so on. I've taught him nevertheless, and I've written about him nevertheless, and will no doubt do so again.

But to return to where this mail started (why use ten words when 100 will do? Say sorry), I would like to see him do some really solid critical thinking. Something we can sink our teethes into, so to speak. Not that I'm spoiling for a fight, but I'd like something more than plot summaries. I will say that he writes well, which is nice. Always nice not to proofread in your head when you're reading someone else. Cheers, all.

C

Randall Flagg
06-21-2012, 06:00 AM
Thanks.

caroline938
06-21-2012, 07:20 AM
"If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter book."
Mark Twain

mae
06-22-2012, 07:33 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/22/rereading-stephen-king-the-shining

Rereading Stephen King: week three – The Shining

The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance, who is employed as the caretaker of the gargantuan Overlook Hotel in Colorado one winter. Moving his wife, Wendy, and their son, Danny, into it for the season, he hopes to find peace: to finish his writing project, to escape his latent alcoholism, and to stich his fractured family unit together. But when they're alone, Jack appears to go insane, pushed into fantasy – or hallucination. Eventually, he attacks his family, attempting to kill them in a twisted mirroring of the awful events that, it transpires, occurred in the hotel's past. This is the story of both King's 1977 novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation three years later, but they're vastly distinctive beasts. For the King fan, however, it's hard to think of one without the other. The Shining is two stories, both the same, but somehow very different.

I first read the book when I was 13, and loved it. It wasn't scary per se; it was tense and atmospheric. Then I watched Kubrick's film (long before the rating on the box suggested that I should). It burned images into my mind: Danny's endless steadicam cycle down the hotel corridors, ending with the twins in the hallway; the woman in room 237; the creepy partygoers in animal masks; the horrifying reveal of the message "Redrum"; the wash of blood from the elevator; Jack Nicholson with the axe at the door calling "Here's Johnny!"; and the maze, with Jack's sloping walk as he pursues his wife and child. It destroyed me: it's the only film which, to this day, I have trouble watching alone. The original book is close enough to the movie in story that – when I began to reread it – I honestly couldn't remember what was from the source material and what wasn't. They were so entwined that I was unable to separate the atmosphere of one from the other, to not let book-Jack's motivations bleed into my watching the movie, to not let the horrifying twins appear as I read about the hotel corridors.

So, how much is actually different? The maze is an addition; a replacement for a topiary animal garden, which I'll come to later. The catchphrase (for that's what it has become) was movie only; room 237 is actually room 217; and the visual tricks Kubrick employed – the long tricycle-ride corridor shots, the use of colour as signifier, the doubling up of visual motifs – all came from the director's imagination. He chopped from and added to the novel as he saw fit. In the novel, the famous movie-poster axe isn't Jack's weapon of choice; instead, it's a roque mallet. But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.

In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) – so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice – hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back. And Danny …

Well, that brings us onto "the shining" itself. In both novel and movie, it's almost a footnote. Some people can "shine", which means they're psychic. Danny Torrance has the ability. He can see the darkness in the Overlook and tell us – in all our naivety – what it is we should be scared of. (It also gives him an invisible friend, Tony, who is little more than a scary indicator of when bad things are going to happen.) He's super-bright in the novel, well beyond his supposed five years, and he knows when things are wrong. He's our window into the horrors of the Overlook. In the film, he's a kid, scared and almost uselessly infantile. When we can see the horrors ourselves, we don't need a cipher.

The only other character in both versions who has "the shining" is Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook. In both, he comes back to try to save Wendy and Danny after Jack has gone crazy (and after Danny's used the shining as a long-distance loudspeaker). In the novel, he's deus ex machina; in the movie, he's fodder. This is a general attitude of the movie versus the novel: in the film, everything is designed to make Jack the monster he's destined to become. In the novel, it's all there to be rejected, if he's strong enough. The fact that he isn't – bar one final moment of control, when he tells Danny to run away from him, before he beats his own face to a pulp with his mallet – shows you how powerful the hotel's evil really is. It's stronger than the evil of man alone, certainly.

It's fairly common knowledge that King isn't a fan of the film adaptation. He has described it as "a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones", saying that, "a visceral sceptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel." In the novel, as in so many of King's early classics, location is all. The Overlook Hotel itself is alive; huge and vacant, with secrets hidden everywhere. Haunted bathrooms, the echoing memories of debauched parties, a topiary animal garden that seems to come to life, wasps' nests that feature a never-ending stream of hostile insects. The hotel wears its malevolence on its sleeve. It has a history of bringing power towards it, and of trying to grow by consuming that power. Jack hears the voice of the Overlook as the novel progresses – his own touch of the shining – and it gnaws at him, turning him away from his family. It wants Danny, because of his special ability and whether it gets him or not is down to Jack. As Wendy explains to her son, "It wasn't your daddy trying to hurt me … the Overlook has gotten into your daddy!" Jack's misdemeanours – his failings as a father and husband – aren't even his own. The primal thing that makes him who he is, which he's so desperate to supress, is what the hotel thrives on. In the movie, he's a monster. The hotel isn't alive: Jack might be possessed, he might not. Either way, he's a bad man. What happens would have happened anyway, even if they hadn't been able to see the hotel's ghosts; the memories of those it has left for dead.

But probably the most telling scene in both – a scene that really shows how they are different – is when Jack finds himself at the hotel bar in a vast empty ballroom, with no alcohol. And then, suddenly, there's a bartender, Lloyd, and shelves full of bottles. Lloyd serves Jack a drink and listens to his woes. There's Jack and the hotel and … something else there with him. In the book, we're told the drinks are "imaginary": the hotel is making Jack see what it wants him to see. Everything changes: the hotel becomes alive to Jack and him alone, and he is suddenly out of control. The bartender even gives him advice, telling Jack he needs to "correct" his family. In the movie, however, the bar is, for that moment, real: there's no attempt at an explanation. When Jack leaves, spiralling into insanity, we have to take the bar scene for what it is – a momentary blip.

The endings are equally different. The movie closes with Jack quietly dying in the snow, Wendy and Danny fleeing his frozen corpse; and a closing shot of a photograph taken years before, of a crowd of revellers at the Overlook. In the middle stands Jack, somehow a dead man who lived again, doomed to repeat his old mistakes. It's a mystery that isn't explained – and doesn't need to be. When the book ends, however, it's with an explosion, as Jack fails to stop the rising pressure of the hotel's overworked boiler (an ongoing metaphor for his own simmering insanity). After that, Wendy and Danny end up on a beach somewhere: as in Salem's Lot, after the darkness, the survivors seek heat and light to counteract all they've seen. They understand the hotel was evil: that it sought Danny, his power, and that it would do anything it could to get him. They live to fight another day.

I hold the movie and book in equal measure. I remember moments from both, where neither medium is more valid than the other. They're both stories about hidden evil emerging when the snow sets in; when a family is isolated and broken, and when a man with buried darkness finally collapses and becomes what he was always, inevitably, going to be. Neither is the correct version: one is the original, and one is a cover; a different take on the same powerful, terrifying material. Neither stands in the way of the other's brilliance: and, if allowed to, each can help the other to … well, shine.

Connections

"The shining" is a concept used again and again in King's work: not always called by that name, but always with similar traits. The strongest connections are with The Stand, where characters do indeed "shine"; and with It, where Overlook chef Dick Hallorann once saved a character's life in a nightclub brawl. There are also connections with the Dark Tower series: the Overlook's Red Eye Lounge, some thematic concepts regarding the use and gathering of psychics, the suggestion that Danny's imaginary friend could be one of the Dark Tower's Twinners. But the biggest connection by far is with the soon-to-be-released Doctor Sleep. A sequel of sorts, it's about a middle-aged Danny Torrance, now a doctor, struggling with his own alcoholism and a group of psychic vampires.

Next time

Next time, the pseudonymous Richard Bachman is the author, as we look at the high school massacre novel Rage – the only Stephen King novel no longer in print.

Shannon
06-22-2012, 08:36 AM
"The only other character in both versions who has "the shining" is ..."

Not gonna get into the INSANE debate about what the movie could or couldn't be, but in the film, I don't believe this is true at all.

stkmw02
06-22-2012, 08:39 AM
I always thought Jack had a little of the "shinnin'" too... was that just me?

mae
07-03-2012, 09:06 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/03/rereading-stephen-king-rage

Rereading Stephen King: week four – Rage

There's only one Stephen King novel you can't walk into your local bookshop and buy, and it's Rage. Charlie Decker, Rage's protagonist – well, and antagonist, really – goes into school one day, gets in trouble with the principal (for physically threatening a teacher), swears a lot, takes a gun from his locker, sets the locker on fire, and then goes into his algebra class. After killing two teachers he holds the rest of the class hostage, threatening their lives if they don't play along with his demands. Over the next four hours, Stockholm syndrome kicks in: the kids begin to identify with Decker, themselves nearly killing the lone student who holds out, and he releases them. He then attempts to get himself killed by the police chief who comes to arrest him. He fails.

On 1 December 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal – who would soon garner the alias The Prayer Slayer – walked into his school in West Paducah, Kentucky, with a shotgun, a rifle and a pistol. He shot eight rounds from the pistol at a prayer group. He killed three of them, wounded five, and then dropped the gun. The last thing he said before he surrendered to the school principal was: "Kill me, please. I can't believe I did that."

Of course, a motive was sought: even though Carneal was schizophrenic; even though he had been bullied, the butt of jokes and torment, and had threatened retaliation. A copy of Rage was found in his locker. And, to some commentators, the possibility of the book having had an influence on Carneal's actions was nearly as good as a motive. Carneal was psychologically unbalanced as it was; at the end of his tether because of the nastiness of his fellow schoolmates. But Rage was, apparently, a tipping point. It's been out of print ever since.

King himself asked for it to be removed. He didn't like the thought of anybody else coming across the book and finding motivation in it. Carneal wasn't the first: Jeffrey Lyne Cox held a class of students hostage at gunpoint in 1988, inspired by the novel; Dustin L Pierce did the same in 1989, down to the detail of imprisoning his algebra class; in 1996, Barry Loukaitis killed his algebra teacher and two others, before holding the rest of the class to ransom. At his trial, Loukaitis even said that he tried to model his life after Decker. All three had read the book, and they were young and impressionable. (Crucially, though less sensationally, they were also all bullied and tormented at school.)

I also was once a bullied, impressionable teenager. It was then that I first read Rage in my father's battered old copy of The Bachman Books, a compendium of the first four novels published under King's long-dead pseudonym, invented in order to allow him to publish more books faster. I didn't care that they weren't first published under his name; they were his writing. Before this collection I'd read Misery, It and The Dark Half, and I was drinking the Kool-Aid, totally willing to read anything that came from his pen. Rage, it transpired, was King's first novel – or, at least, the earliest he started writing, beginning it in high school in 1966 and finishing it four years later after rediscovering a draft in a box. I'd be willing to bet that he'd recently read both Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye: Rage is almost an update of those novels' primary motifs, presenting a boiling-pot of group-consciousness-driven homicide, teenage rebellion, psychological torment and angst-fuelled loneliness (heck, it even mentions Catcher's famed "phonies").

At the time I was confused. What I liked about King's books was that they all spoke of evil and the ways it could manifest. Rage just struck me as a story about an unstable arsehole who doesn't think or care about the result of his actions. I didn't see the evil. The other stories in the compendium – all of them essentially about humans' inhumanity to humans – were far more effective, because I could see where they were coming from. The protagonists had rage, or suffering, or were even maybe willing to kill, but it never felt so base as it did here. Decker was, as far as I was concerned, a straightforward villain. Even as he told his classmates his tale of woe – a substory of an abusive father, a figure presented as vile but who, crucially, hasn't killed two teachers and threatened the lives of many, many more – I couldn't muster sympathy. Come the end, I assumed I wasn't meant to.

Now, rereading it, I'm sure I wasn't. Now, I see the novel as a character piece about a hateful, nasty, broken little man. He's charismatic and persuasive, and he somehow hoodwinks a class just as impressionable as he. He finds out that they're all afraid of the same thing – of being alone, of thinking that others don't share the terror of life that they all feel – and he somehow makes them tell their secrets. The hostage scenario is turned into a self-help circle; the students side with Decker, and they turn everything around. But there's a fundamental lack of realism to the scenario. Sure, maybe we're all alone when we're that age, and maybe we're all feeling the same pain. But in real life, we're not going to sympathise with the killer. We're not going to abandon morality for the sake of siding with somebody who's got major Freudian/Oedipal issues with his father and a rifle in his hand. Where so many of King's early works focus on the true horror being humans themselves, they usually pick a figure to single out. Rage doesn't. Rage says we're all capable of falling; it just depends how far.

But, in real life, as the four boys who followed Rage to its extreme conclusion discovered, we don't side with the killers. We don't think that they're right all along. King said of Rage that it's "now out of print, and a good thing". I'm not sure I agree: it's a story; people will access it if they want to, and a novel isn't going to make – or stop – somebody unstable from committing an act of horrific violence. King has also said that his "college writing [Rage and a short story called Cain Rose Up] would have raised red flags … someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them." That's as may be: but he only thought these things up as fiction. He didn't do them. The doing is all.

In the best possible way, I hate Rage: I hate it because I hate Decker, and he is the book in its entirety. I don't really care how alone he is, how much he's suffered: he is, as King might say himself, just a sick-hearted sonofabitch. But reading it now, I really see that that's the point. It's not a great novel by any stretch, but if it sets out to show you how evil people can be – and how thin the line between internal and external manifestations of pain can be – Rage succeeds on pretty much all counts.

Connections

Rage's only real connection to King's texts is by virtue of it being a Bachman Book. It's tied to the others that King wrote under his pseudonym because of their history rather than content. Also, the aforementioned Cain Rose Up is clearly a precursor: a short story that King wrote in high school about an unhinged college-student sniper, which also features a character called Pig Pen (and can be found in King's Skeleton Crew collection).

Next time

King has written a frankly astonishing number of short stories. Next week I'll be looking at the first compendium: Night Shift.

Randall Flagg
07-03-2012, 11:56 AM
Decker didn't have a rifle, I believe he only had a handgun.

Merlin1958
07-03-2012, 12:10 PM
Yuck. I know I'll get blasted for this, but I loathed 'Salem's Lot. Boring boring boring. And as far as "most outright entertainment" in a vampire novel, obviously this guy hasn't read any of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicle books. Those things are entertainment, as well as story, characters, and a mythology that would rival Lost. Just my 2.5 cents.

I'd have to differ with you there, Shannon. I've read quite a bit of Rice' work and IMHO they are "Romance" novels with fangs. The "Mythology" I think you are referring too (and don't get me started on "Lost". What mythology? LOL) is predominantly from "Memnoch, The Devil" and that was nicked from "Paradise Lost" IMHO.

To be honest though I really enjoyed 'Salem's Lot", so that may skew my opinion about other "Vampire" books. Loved Stoker's "Dracula" as well. Now there's a Vampire novel!!!!

How was that Shannon? No "Octopuss"!! LOL

Merlin1958
07-03-2012, 12:11 PM
Decker didn't have a rifle, I believe he only had a handgun.

A Luger to be exact as I recall.

WeDealInLead
07-04-2012, 05:58 AM
Rage is a terrible book.

Jean
07-04-2012, 06:05 AM
Rage is a terrible book.
Very true.

mae
07-17-2012, 09:00 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/17/rereading-stephen-king-night-shift

Rereading Stephen King: week five – Night Shift

There exists a sloppy but perhaps not wholly unjust accusation that a lot of Stephen King's earliest work is based on a definite formula: take a thing that people are scared of and make it scarier. Vampires, clowns, dogs, aliens, spooky old hotels, the general concept of death … There's an argument to be made that his most successful novels (in terms of commercial awareness) adhere to this pattern; and to many casual readers, this is all King is capable of. True fans, however, know different. Night Shift is notable for being the first experience that the public had – not counting Rage, which they didn't know was by King – of just how astonishingly wide-reaching his imagination is. Night Shift features 20 stories written over more than a decade, some published as early as 1969 (when King was only 22). No fewer than six stories from the collection have been made into movies; one was the inspiration for King's most famous and lauded novel; and two provide brilliant bookends to probably his scariest book.

It begins and (nearly) ends with these bookends, both stories that add to the mythos established in Salem's Lot. Jerusalem's Lot is an epistolary prequel, taking place in 1850, and so imbued with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos that it might almost be set in Innsmouth. It tells the age-old story of an ancient evil found in a small abandoned town – but this time the evil comes in the form of a worm (along with a couple of vampires) that was drawn to the town in the late 18th century by a puritanical cult. The narrator and his servant discover the town and it secrets, and their story is told posthumously by the narrator's descendant – a descendant who, it transpires, is doomed to repeat his ancestor's mistakes, rats in the walls and all. One for the Road, on the other hand, is set after the events of Salem's Lot: a much more basic story of a family lost in the abandoned town during a snowstorm, it's an effective and neat ending to the more ambiguous conclusion of the original novel, offering hints as to whether Ben and Mark succeeded in their mission at the end of Salem's Lot. (Interestingly, King really wears his influence on his sleeve for these two stories: where the worm in the prequel tale is heavily indebted to Brian Lumley's Cthulhu classic The Burrowers Beneath, the second story's lost family are named the Lumleys. Nice little touch.)

In between these two are some stories that casual readers might assume are full novels. Children of the Corn, Sometimes They Come Back, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man were all made into varyingly successful films (with, in The Lawnmower Man's case, litigious levels of alteration to the original concept). Children of the Corn stands out as one of King's greatest scary shorts: ostensibly about the dangers of organised religion, it's packed with terrifying children, murderous monsters and a pretty vile use for corn husks. The collection also features King's first published foray into science fiction, and one of my first real exposures to the genre. I Am the Doorway is the story of an astronaut who is mutated in order to give an alien the ability to see through his body. Only, he's a bad cypher, and the images are distorted; the alien, presented with the horrors of Earth, takes over his body and forces him to murder on its behalf. It's almost pure Ray Bradbury in tone, but with a distinctly King-ian horror touch, and a real kicker at the close.

Then there's Night Surf, the story of a group of survivors capturing and burning a man as a sacrifice to prevent them from catching a disease called Captain Trips. Sound familiar? I read this collection before I read The Stand, and I distinctly remember thinking that Captain Trips was a strange name for a virus, and wondering where this little story – this strange thing that seemed aimlessly dark, like an idea looking for a plot – came from. Evidently, King did as well, because a few years after writing it he turned the nugget into 700 pages of apocalyptic epic journey narrative.

Before I read Night Shift, my 13-year-old self assumed, not unlike those readers who dismiss his stories as one-dimensional nasties, that King was relatively easily pigeonholed. He wrote horror, tales designed to scare, and they did their job. A couple of the tales in Night Shift confused me at first, therefore. Quitters, Inc and The Man Who Loved Flowers are both odd-but-great additions to King's storybook, the former a clever tale about a man who is desperate to quit smoking, the latter an insight into the cruel vacancy of a serial killer. The Ledge is a curious experiment in atmosphere, set on the ledge running around the outside of a building. Strawberry Spring a lovely unreliable narrative about a serial killer terrorising university students.

But then there are two stories in the collection that barely qualify as horror – at least, not in the sense that people usually talk about King's writing. It was a revelation, that this man who was so expert at finding what scared me was also able to write stories with nothing but an emotional core. The Last Rung on the Ladder deals with the suicide of a loved one, and it's affecting, but not nearly as much as the collection's final story, The Woman in the Room. I read Night Shift in the very early 90s: no internet, no way of reading about authorial motivation or whatever. All I knew was that there's this brutal, painful story about a man contemplating helping his terminally ill mother to end her pain. I was reading King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert novels, scaring myself and embracing these dark, horrifying grotesques; The Woman in the Room is the first story I remember reading that affected me in another way altogether. It was horror but of a totally different kind: a horror of realism, of emotional torment, of the mystery of illness, of real-world pain. I had been scared by him, and I knew his books were my favourite of the three writers who dragged me into adult reading, but I had no idea how good a writer he was until the end of Night Shift. Some of the rest of the collection threw me, because it felt silly. The Mangler, about a possessed laundry machine? Battleground, about possessed toy soldiers? Trucks, about possessed … trucks? They were silly. I enjoyed them, but they don't exactly challenge the reader's preconceptions of King's work. The Woman in the Room did, and it's beautiful. Now, because of the wonders of the modern age, I know that it's basically non-fiction. King called it "healing fiction", written to help him cope with his mother's death. That only serves to make it more affecting.

King says in Night Shift's introduction that a good horror story "holds the reader or listener spellbound for a little while, lost in a world that never was, never could be … the story holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft." Night Shift is full of good horror stories. But one – the one that feels real, that deals with cancer and pain and the frailty of life that we understand as little as we understand haunted houses and vampires – stands head and shoulders above the rest. This is something King would revisit in later short fictions, where he abandoned fantastical horror for cruel, bitter realities; but as a rare note here, it's exemplary.

Flagg-raising

It's been a few weeks since I've written about Randall Flagg, the big bad antagonist who appears throughout much of King's work. He makes his first real appearance in The Stand, and then explicitly in several of King's later books, but he has a number of smaller walk-ons throughout King's oeuvre, some obvious, some less so. In Children of the Corn we find one of the latter examples. The titular cult of children worships an old evil pagan version of Christianity's God, and they call this god He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Now – bear with me – Randall Flagg's most common pseudonym is Walter O'Dim; He Who Walks Behind the Rows is a name given by the children, a sobriquet that just happens to include all the letters of the name Walter, in order. And yes, maybe that's a stretch (although King's innate sense of world building means that very few stretches in his fiction are unplanned). And then, in The Stand, there's an abundance of corn, and something in there, watching …

Next time

We get to grips with Captain Trips – and Randall Flagg – in The Stand.

Randall Flagg
07-17-2012, 10:55 AM
Thanks Pablo, interesting read, but the Randall Flagg discussion really is a stretch.

Shannon
07-17-2012, 09:47 PM
I agree.

Last Rung On The Ladder FTW!

mae
08-03-2012, 07:43 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/03/rereading-stephen-king-the-stand

Rereading Stephen King: week six – The Stand

The Stand – the original version of it, something I'll talk about later – was published in 1978. I read it 16 years after that. I can remember the time and place: on holiday in Turkey with my family. I can remember that the copy I had was already falling apart, because it was enormous, and the binding wasn't made to be opened, I don't think. The glue melted as I read the thing; page by page, it fell apart. While I knew I loved King before that holiday, afterwards I'd have followed him to hell and back. It's because of The Stand that I've read all his work, and that I embarked on this series; it's because of The Stand that I'm a writer at all. And because of all this, I don't really know where to start writing about it.

Maybe with Captain Trips. Prior to 1978, King had published three novels under his name that focused on ordinary people ruined or damaged by extraordinary (and inexplicably paranormal) situations. The Stand looked at those ordinary people – the readers of his book – and said: let's damage you all. Rather than the threat being ghosts or vampires, it was a sickness, nicknamed, in the novel, Captain Trips. The sickness was a flu that killed 99.4% of the world's population, and it's terrifying, because we all get the flu. Even as you read the novel, you feel a chill coming over you. (Trust me: I reread this partly on my morning commute, sitting next to somebody with a cough that sounded like death. It's still scary.) Because it's plausible, it affects people in a lasting way. When swine flu broke out in 2009, I lost track of the number of tweets referring to it as Captain Trips. When we're scared we joke; and we joke because of the bubonic plague, because of Spanish flu, and because it feels so wholly reasonable to imagine a virus decimating the world. Worse still? Captain Trips was made in a lab, just like those biological weapons we're all slightly terrified of. The bad guy in The Stand was made by us, and it killed us. That's hubris for you.

I call it the bad guy, but Captain Trips isn't the bad guy. Not really. That honour falls to Randall Flagg. I've mentioned him before – in my Carrie and Night Shift rereads – but here's where he makes his grand entrance. He's a man of many names: The Walking Dude, The Ageless Stranger, He Who Walks Behind The Rows, The Man In Black, Walter O'Dim, The Dark Man. In The Stand, one character calls him The Antagonist, vague and present and inexplicable. He's bigger than the novel, than the world that's collapsed and torn itself apart; and he only appears when it's done, walking from nowhere, only hazily able to remember who he was before (but that he killed policemen, fought for the KKK, and helped to kidnap Patty Hearst).

Where King's previous antagonists were small fry (or protagonists flipped on their heads), Randall Flagg is never less than pure evil. He has a counterpart, as all evils should: Mother Abigail, 108 years old, who communes with God, and who is the frail good to Flagg's evil. Both have the ability to inspire those around them, but Flagg has an advantage: evil is inherently stronger. It's easier. He's able to gather an army from the weak-minded, the stragglers, finding the darkness that's in us all and using it. He brings out everything awful in those susceptible to him: in his lackey Lloyd, and Trashcan Man, and The Kid, and Harold.

Harold. Poor Harold Emery Lauder, the weakest of the weak. A boy only a couple of years older than I was when I read the book for the first time, and who – like me, as I was discovering – wanted nothing more than to be a writer. And he knew about the same things that I did: being in love with girls who didn't know he existed; wanting to be somebody that he was hopelessly ill-prepared to be; and (the bane of all teenagers) feeling singular, alone. Harold was the crux for me; he presented me with the question that makes the novel so powerful and affecting to so many people. What would I do? If I was suddenly completely alone, if I was given the ability to do anything I wanted with no consequences, would I retain my morality? Or would I, like Harold, naturally skew towards evil because of my baser – albeit human – desires? Do we all have that potential inside us?

As the novel progresses and the survivors of the flu are forced to pick sides – drawn through their dreams to the darkness or the light, to Randall Flagg or Mother Abigail – Harold shows his true colours. In the novel's early stages he is a confused, angry, horny teenager; through Flagg's influence, he loses himself. He becomes a killer, a cold-blooded mess of rage when Flagg persuades him (using sexy schoolteacher Nadine, and the promise of Harold finally getting laid) to detonate a bomb and kill his friends. After succeeding and running away, he ends his life alone, his own hands on the gun, the only time in the novel he's actually offered anything resembling control. I remember thinking how terribly sad this was, because when the book starts he's just a kid. That's easy to forget. Stu Redman feels sad for him as well, and if I most associated with Harold at times, Stu was who I wanted to become.

Why? He's noble. He's quiet and moral and even passionate, and he manages to help inspire the gang of good guys to carry on, despite Randall Flagg's dark temptations. He's the one whom Mother Abigail entrusts to go to Flagg and fight back. He's an authority figure, respected and clever, and he's willing to die for the good of the world and his friends. He doesn't: he breaks his leg, almost as if he's spared, and he watches Las Vegas explode at the novel's close; the threat eliminated, the world ready to rebuild itself. He is able to be the father to Frannie's child.

That's not an accident. Nothing in The Stand is an accident. As much as it's a novel about the battle between good and evil, it's also a novel about fate. These people – the American contingent of the 0.6% of the world's population who survived Captain Trips – manage to meet up in Las Vegas, called from all around by dreams. Did they choose to find each other, or was it chosen for them? Mother Abigail's dreams come courtesy of God; she is his prophet, and she assembles her own biblical-type followers. Pregnant Franny, whose child can assert the human race's survival; the forgiving and ailing Glen; deaf-mute Nick; mentally challenged Tom Cullen, who will save Stu Redman; Larry Underwood, who starts the novel dreaming of Flagg, and is filled with darkness, but somehow finds the light. All the cast are put upon and challenged.

I read once that The Stand was essentially the Book of Job, with the survivors in Job's place: tested by good and evil both; pushed and challenged to see how much they could endure, as if their suffering were a game. There's a little more epic fantasy here than in the Bible, maybe, and it ends not with a war, but with an accident; with the chaos of Trashcan Man finding a weapon, and with Flagg's showing off going to far. But I can still see it. Good wins by default, because evil cannot. Those were the rules in the Old Testament, and they're the rules now.

I've read this book five times in adulthood, by my reckoning, and more when I was a teenager. I know some people read books over and over, but I don't; I'm a once-round-then-shelve-it reader, unless a book really stands out to me. This is my most reread book. I can't think of one that has affected me so much. It scared me and excited me; but more than that, it was the first time I noticed the textures of a novel. The Stand is dense and rich. Every character is full and alive, and they're all in the book with a purpose. They cover every shade of human morality, and that astonished me: the deftness of King's writing in making no two feel alike, and making their deaths – because a lot of the cast die, heroes and villains both, something that almost feels inevitable from the outset – mean something. Everything in the book means something, and nothing is accidental. I can still read it and see the narrative threads, set up to be exploited, revealed or knocked down: and the hints in the subtle stylistic touches (Mother Abigail's side drawn into longer, more florid descriptions of their actions; Flagg's side blunter, more bullish, more exposed).

I don't think I can talk objectively, really.

The Stand is a masterpiece, and I don't use that word lightly. King says in the novel's introduction that he "wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting", and that's absolutely what he did. I didn't read Tolkien when I was a kid, I read this. These pieces are about me rereading King's work, and with The Stand, there were sections that felt almost as if I could recite them. It made me who I am, I think. It started me thinking that I really wanted to write a novel, not just play with stories. It made me want to practise and work at my writing, and then write drafts of books that wouldn't ever come to anything, and then, after years of turmoil, write a novel that finally got published, called The Testimony. And it wasn't until I was sitting in an editorial meeting about it, and somebody mentioned The Stand that it all fell into place. The Testimony is a novel where everybody in the world hears what might be the voice of God; and then people start falling ill, some awful flu-like symptom destroying them. Some, a small percentage, are immune to God's words, and – it seems – the illness. It's written from the viewpoints of many different characters, all of them showing different shades of humanity, of morality. Things go nuclear. It's nothing like The Stand, when you actually get down to it, but as I sat in that editorial meeting, and as I read The Stand again, I realised that I am wholly, totally indebted to King's book. I couldn't have written The Testimony without wanting to capture some of what The Stand did in me; and so I wouldn't be who I am without having read it, and having had it in my life. I don't think it's King's best novel – there are many more to come that could lay claim to that title – but, to me, it's easily his most important.

Connections

Well. Randall Flagg is King's most persistent antagonist, and the single biggest connection in King's books (bar, maybe, Maine). This is where Flagg really begins, and it's from here that he finds his way into more novels than you can shake a small black stone with a red flaw at. But he's not the only thing. In Wizard and Glass, the fourth book of the Dark Tower series, the main characters travel through an alternate reality version of Topeka post-Captain Trips, complete with graffiti of Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg…

Versions

Important to note, this: there are two versions of The Stand. One was published in 1978, and it's about 800 pages long, and it's set in the 1980s. Another was published in 1991, and it's about 1,200 pages long, and it's set in the 90s. The books are the same story, the same characters; content cut from the early version was put back and the book slightly remastered, as it were, for King's later, more-receptive-to-giant-novels audience. Whichever one you read it's the same book, but for the finality of a single scene at the end of the remaster: where Randall Flagg has survived the novel's endgame, reborn somewhere else entirely, new memories and a new identity, and with a new group of people to try and lead.

Next time

We go no slower than four miles an hour through an alternate-history United States in The Long Walk.

mae
08-06-2012, 07:55 AM
No one wants to comment on this one? I thought it was his best entry to date.

Randall Flagg
08-06-2012, 05:24 PM
No one wants to comment on this one? I thought it was his best entry to date.
I am chewing on it. Comment in a day or so.

Randall Flagg
08-24-2012, 05:25 AM
I enjoyed his thoughts on The Stand, and think it was one of his best analysis.

mae
08-30-2012, 06:31 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/30/rereading-stephen-king-the-long-walk

Rereading Stephen King: week seven – The Long Walk

The Long Walk is one of the famed "Bachman Books", novels that King wrote before he was published in his own name, and that were only published (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) in the wake of the success of Salem's Lot. In fact, The Long Walk is the earliest of all King's books, written when he was just 18. I've previously talked about Rage, his second published novel, and one that I think is pretty easy to see as juvenilia. That's not to say it's bad, per se: just that the ideas in it, the execution of it, aren't a patch on where King's skills would push him in later novels. You'd expect The Long Walk to fall foul of the same youthful errors, but, somehow, it transcends them. I count this book as among King's finest works: a horrifying piece of not-horror that's as powerful today as it was when it was released in 1979. There are traces of The Long Walk in a great number of contemporary young adult novels – its DNA is all over The Hunger Games, for example – but, unlike so many of the books it has influenced, The Long Walk is actually scary; threatening and unsettling. Given the allegorical nature of the novel's content, so it should be.

The premise: 100 teenage boys are picked from a televised draft lottery by a despotic alternate-history version of the US army, and told to walk until they stop. If they drop below four miles an hour they get a warning. Three warnings and they're shot dead. Of the 100 who start the walk, only one survives, and he is granted the ultimate prize: anything he wants for the rest of his life. And that's it. There's no big bad hiding in the shadows (unless you count the Major, a modern-day fascistic twist on an Uncle Sam figure who organises the event and rallies the boys to walk), no huge narrative twist, no deus ex machina. It's a book that starts with 100 characters who, slowly but surely, are whittled down to one. Sometimes it happens in bursts of vivid description, their infractions logged and detailed, the bullets ringing out from the pages; sometimes it happens via word of mouth, as the boys who are left alive gossip about their dwindling numbers. But you know that 99 of these boys are going to die, and then the book will end. There's no reason given for why the Walk happens, not really. It's referred to as "the national sport", and that's a large chunk of it: entertainment, watched by millions on television. But that's not all, and it's definitely not enough.

The boy we readers want to win is 16-year-old Ray Garraty. He's the main character, our eyes on the Walk. Garraty has a mother and a girlfriend (whom he daydreams of: virginal lusting for whatever she's got underneath her sweater), and he wants to survive. He doesn't know why he's doing the Walk really: only that, when his number was called and he was given the chance to back out, he didn't. Greed and the promise of glory took him that far, and they would be the things that would carry him to the end of the race: that's Garraty's logic. He meets the other boys for the first time as they wait on the start line, and we discover that they all have their motivations. For some, it's love: one boy, Scramm, is married with a baby on the way. For some, it's the prize itself; the pot of gold at the end. Some of the boys have hidden, darker reasons for doing the Walk. But they all drop, and they all die. And at the end, days of ceaseless walking later, feet hobbled and flayed and bloody, his friends shot dead before his very eyes, one of them survives. Although, as McVries, a boy whom Garraty befriends, is quick to point out, it's a raw form of survival: a survival in which the prize is to realise that nothing can make up for what you've seen and what you've done.

The Long Walk, it's plain to see, is a metaphor for war; specifically, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam which was taking place during the novel's gestation: the televised draft, the horror of seeing new friends die, the seeming lack of reason for it occurring in the first place. To all involved, it's endless; or, rather, there is only one end. And the winner – I won't spoil who it is here – is damaged beyond belief. King manages to encapsulate some of what it must be like to survive when all around you is blood and gunshots in the darkness and your friends falling to their deaths.

It's very tempting in these rereads for me to focus on who I was when I read the book for the first time, but sometimes needs must: as a teenage boy, I saw so much of myself in the protagonists of The Long Walk that it scared me to read it. With the first Iraq war feeling as if it was on the cusp of turning into something that could, in some crazy future, directly involve me, it was scarier still. The jingoistic nature of army recruitment, the screams of doing your duty and honouring your country, all of that, it's all in The Long Walk: in the pride that the Major inspires at the start and end, in the national anthems and parades and flags draped over jeeps; in the way that the Walkers, hating the Major as the Walk goes on, stop to applaud when he passes in some jarring show of respect; in the dead eyes and unfaltering bullets of the soldiers told to kill those Walkers who have done nothing wrong except stop walking; and in the Walkers themselves, who don't know why they signed up, and don't understand why they're doing this, but know that they cannot stop until they're told that it's over.

Next time

We're waking from a five-year coma with special powers as we step into The Dead Zone.

Randall Flagg
08-30-2012, 06:51 AM
Very good assessment of the book. One of King's best works IMO.

Shannon
09-03-2012, 02:53 AM
I loved The Long Walk. Such a simple idea, yet an amazing story.

mae
09-12-2012, 08:04 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/12/rereading-stephen-king-dead-zone

Rereading Stephen King: Week eight - The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone was the strangest experience of my rereading experiment thus far. It's the first book that is totally different to my memories of it; to the point where I even doubted that I had read it, and hadn't just watched the (admittedly excellent) David Cronenberg movie adaptation too much. I had read it, though – I still have the original copy to prove it – but it had slipped from my mind almost completely. (Into the dead zone?) Why? Maybe because, structurally, it's easily the strangest book King had, until this point, attempted to write; and maybe because, unlike other King (not Bachman) novels of the time, it doesn't really have a bad guy to focus on and drive the narrative. Not that it's any the worse for that, mind you …

So, the plot. Johnny Smith is a teacher, dating a fellow teacher called Sarah. They have a potential future together – it's tentative but brewing – until they go to a fair one day, and Johnny wins a lot of money playing Wheel of Fortune. Long story short, there's a car crash, and Johnny ends up in a coma for the next five years. When he wakes up, nothing is like it was: Sarah is married, his father has been praying he'd die, his mother has found a cult-like branch of Christianity to join, and the world has moved on. Oh, and Johnny has woken up with a new ability: he can touch people and read them, almost, telling them something about their future. It's flaky and unexplained, but that makes it better: you're never sure what he's going to tell people. Only, he doesn't have all the details. Some are unreachable from him, like memories that can't be recalled; he calls this blank space in his mind the Dead Zone. He has operations on his legs and arms and neck, where the muscles have atrophied. Some people find out about his power, but it's subtle and quiet. Testing it, almost.

This takes us up to the halfway mark of the novel. This is the biggest sign that something is up (in the best possible way) in King-land: we're allowed time to grow into knowing Johnny. He's possibly King's most likeable protagonist thus far, a really nice guy who tries and who wants others to be happy. He wants peace, and his life back, and we want to see him get those things. So, when he's asked by Sheriff Bannerman of Castle Rock to help with a murder – there's a raincoat-wearing serial killer on the loose, whose modus operandi is to murder one woman a year, terrifying a small town – we want him to succeed. And he does help: what seems like it will be the main thread of the novel – finally! an antagonist! – is solved quickly and efficiently. Johnny's powers help him solve a crime that has eluded the police for years, but he's not a hero: he's just a man who wants to do the right thing. And we, as readers, are left with a third of the book to go, and a question about exactly where it goes from here.

Well, it goes to Greg Stillson. We've seen him a few times through the novel, in vignettes where he has kicked a dog to death, terrorised an unruly teenager, blackmailed a senator, but they've been context-free. Now, in the novel's final stretch, we meet him, and Johnny Smith shakes his hand. Stillson is rallying for a seat in the House of Representatives, an independent candidate who relies on jingoism and hot dogs to win votes. Johnny Smith, though, sees the future: where Stillson becomes President one day, and leads the US into a war the like of which it's never seen. He's a Bad Man, in King's grand tradition, and he must, Johnny knows, be stopped.

A strange structure – almost four distinct parts that feed into each other – and one that absolutely works. When it ends, with a Carrie-style assemblage of external media (newspaper articles and police reports), it's almost a disappointment that the challenging pace of the rest of the book has been abandoned. And while the book deals with psychic powers, it does so in a very different way to, say, Carrie or Firestarter: these are quiet and unwanted, and they're accidental. They are, in their own way, almost believable.

And, somehow, The Dead Zone ends in a way that I would never have predicted when I began reading it: as one of my favourite King novels. Last week, in the comments, we discussed our Top 10 Kings, and I listed mine before I began this rereading project. That list has definitely changed now, not least so that I can put this book on there. It's amazing: it feels like King pushing himself, challenging himself to write something outside his usual patch, even as it appears to be entirely resting there. As with many of his best, it's not a horror, even: over its many sections it's a slow-burn psychological thriller; a crime novel; even (whisper it) a more literary novel about rehabilitation and loss. In many ways, in fact, The Dead Zone is a template for the recent glut of Scandinavian crime novels: a detective story with an unconventional detective, pursuing a case with elements of horror, but which delves deeper into the detective's psyche than most.

King-isms

So, there's a major thematic King-ism here, and one that he would return to with 2011's 11/22/63. When Johnny meets Stillson and shakes his hand, and sees what will happen to America – and the world – if Stillson is left unchecked, he wonders: "If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?" This is a question that King clearly wondered himself, this idea of going back to a root of something and fixing the issue before it has a chance to manifest.

Connections

While Salem's Lot is mentioned in The Dead Zone, this is actually the first Castle Rock novel. Castle Rock is a small town in Maine where a number of King's books are set, and it's here that Johnny is called to assist with the raincoat killer. Sheriff Bannerman, who calls for Johnny's help, reappears in Cujo and in Different Seasons' The Body.

But this book also has two more distinctly self-referential (and fourth-wall breaking) connections. At one point, Johnny is accused of burning down a building by having "set it on fire with his mind, like in that book Carrie"; and, in the Dark Tower VII, a robot butler called Nigel is reading The Dead Zone. He references Greg Stillson, and then offers his own – wholly impartial – review of the book: "Quite enjoyable," he says.

Randall Flagg
09-12-2012, 11:27 AM
I reread the book ~1 year ago and found it to be outstanding. The anguish Jonny felt over his lost "years/love" is tangible and almost tearful. Particularly the interesting way the loss was repaired by the couple. Just an incredibly well written book, that holds up decades later.
Certainly in my top 10 King novels-perhaps the top 5.

Jean
09-13-2012, 06:28 AM
hear, hear

Iwritecode
09-14-2012, 06:07 AM
I've read this story 2 or 3 times and still can't quite put my finger on why so many people like it. Or exactly why I don't.

mae
09-27-2012, 08:15 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/27/rereading-stephen-king-firestarter

Rereading Stephen King: week nine - Firestarter

This had to happen eventually. The problem with something as subjective as literature is that your average reader is, sooner or later, going to disagree with majority opinion; and I knew that when it happened during this reread, I would have to write about it honestly. A few weeks ago, in the thread for The Long Walk reread, commenters began listing their top 10 favourite King books. Many, many people included Firestarter. And why wouldn't they? It's early King, when (collective wisdom has it) he was still writing exciting, original novels, playing in the ballparks of horror-SF that his diehard early readers love. It's one of the books that stepped into public consciousness – it had a film made with Drew Barrymore in, for goodness' sake – and people rattle it off as a classic. I really liked it too. Or, at least, I did the first time that I read it.

Charlie McGee is a little girl in the grand, early-King tradition of "kids with special powers". Hers is pyrokinesis, and was triggered by some shady drug experiments committed on her parents by an even-more-shady governmental organisation known as The Shop. Oh, and also, because the plot needs it, her dad, Andy, is a bit psychic (another side-effect of the experiments). His power isn't firestarting but something called "The Push", which is a bit like Jedi mind-control only not quite as cool and effortless. They're on the run from The Shop, because The Shop wants them back. When The Shop tries to capture them, they kill Charlie's mother, and now Charlie and Andy run and run and run and run. Things happen: there's a hitman hired to pursue them (the amazingly named John Rainbird), Andy and Charlie are separated, Andy becomes addicted to drugs, and then they're captured by The Shop and then they are reunited and then they escape and then the ending happens, where people die and Rolling Stone magazine is, somehow, wound into the tale. It's a series of small events that have repercussions, but none actually really drives the narrative: they feel like bumps in the road instead.

For me, that's a problem. The book is ostensibly a road-trip narrative where we're following Andy and Charlie across America. But what I've told you in that paragraph above? It's the whole story. It's a very thin narrative, stretched over a pretty big book, and I'm not sure that one can sustain the other. Then there's the problem of thematic repetition. It's possible that this is an effect of the manner in which I'm reading these books: I'm aware that this isn't a normal way to consume (or re-consume) a body of work. But the issues with Firestarter – easily, in my opinion, the least effective of King's early works – come mainly from a terrific sense of my having seen this all before. Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone: they all feature characters with mental abilities not a million miles away from those in Firestarter (and we're not even at the Breakers yet). In these books, explanations of those abilities are generally vague, and that works to their benefit. Here, The Shop and their experiments are the lynchpin of the entire story: driving it forward, with The Shop as a pursuer that's never really effective or scary. For me, the explanation should have been strapped to the back of a more prominent narrative. Firestarter often feels like it's biding its time, waiting for something earth-shattering to happen.

It's not a bad book. I'm doing it a disservice, probably. It's well written, Charlie is exceedingly likable, The Shop has the potential to be a really fun concept ... But Firestarter mostly does nothing. In such a lengthy book, I really missed a three-act structure (or, rather, a more defined three -act structure, given how much of the back-story is told through flashback and reminiscence); I missed the ebb and flow of something more rigid to hold it together. The Dead Zone didn't have a conventional structure either, but where risks made that book sing, using them in an effective way, everything in Firestarter feels a little more like treading water. And the length also makes this feel like a bit of a slog. In his early years, King was, for the most part, very good at knowing what books needed to feel epic, and giving them an appropriate page-count. The smaller-in-scope books, he kept short: Rage, The Long Walk, Carrie. This is the first time in my reread I've found something amiss: a King novel that doesn't have the story to back itself up. Would it be better if it were half as long? I'd bet the farm on it.

And, yes: this is contentious. I've seen innumerable people on these here internets saying they love Firestarter, and I think that I did, once. It was never top tier for me, but I loved it. Maybe it's the density of how I'm reading these books that highlights the flaws; maybe it's just that there's been a lot of stuff like this in the world since it came out, much of it by King himself. But I also think it's quite a hollow book, something I suspect King himself knows. In the afterword to a recent Dark Tower comic, King stated that he felt Firestarter should "obviously" be turned into a comic. He's totally right: it could make an excellent comic mini-series. Cut into six issues, the peaks and troughs of the story would play better, with the smaller fragments of plot dedicated to an issue each. I'd really like that: the opportunity to read this book in a format that actually suits the narrative. Because, honestly? I'm not sure that the long-form novel is it.

Connections

The Shop pops up occasionally in other books, mentioned in The Stand, The Mist and The Tommyknockers, either as a cause of the mess or as the government department tasked to clean said mess up. Perhaps they were something that King once intended to make more of as part of his extended universe? Or, as @mattcraig posits, maybe they were just an easy way to use the CIA in a story without directly calling them that?

Next time

We're defending our land and throwing Molotov cocktails at bulldozers in the Bachman-attributed Roadwork.

divemaster
09-28-2012, 06:06 AM
Firestarter remains in my upper-tier King. It's a suspenseful, exciting read. Not as literary as some others, but so what? It entertains me.

I am curious as to what he will say about Roadwork, a story that hit me exactly right but that most people don't really get into.

Iwritecode
09-28-2012, 06:51 AM
Firestarter remains in my upper-tier King. It's a suspenseful, exciting read. Not as literary as some others, but so what? It entertains me.

I am curious as to what he will say about Roadwork, a story that hit me exactly right but that most people don't really get into.

Firestarter is middle of the road for me. Not great but not horrible either. I think it was the first SK book I ever read. Well, started reading. I didn't actually finish it until years later after I had read a few other SK books.

I never quite "got" Roadwork. I didn't understand the motivation for the main character and couldn't relate to him at all.

Jean
09-29-2012, 07:29 AM
Firestarter is middle of the road for me. Not great but not horrible either.
same here


I never quite "got" Roadwork. I didn't understand the motivation for the main character and couldn't relate to him at all.I did and I could. Which is rather disturbing, come to think of it.


<...> Roadwork, a story that hit me exactly right <...>http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearheart.gifhttp://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearheart.gifhttp://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k291/mishemplushem/Facilitation/bearheart.gif

mae
10-16-2012, 08:23 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/16/rereading-stephen-king-roadwork

Rereading Stephen King: week ten – Roadwork

It's funny the way things go; how much we change – or don't – as we get older. My 14-year-old self had a curious relationship with the collected Bachman Books. Didn't like Rage, because I hated the protagonist; loved The Long Walk, because I could see myself there, marching with them, because it spoke to me; hated Roadwork, because oh my God it was so boring; was disappointed (!) that The Running Man wasn't more like the Arnie-driven movie (but that's a story for another day).

Rereading The Long Walk and Rage left me feeling the same as I did back in the day; revisiting them was, for better or worse, like being eased into a memory: the stories and characters came back to me as I read, alongside the same emotional responses. Roadwork, however, provoked an entirely different reaction. What I once found boring – as in, bottom of the King pile, nearly – now makes me feel terribly sad, more than a little angry (with it, not at it), and really quite impressed.

Roadwork begins with Barton George Dawes buying guns. We know this, and we know that he's a bit unhinged – he has an internal duologue going on throughout the book, between characters called George and Fred – and that he doesn't much like the plans for a freeway extension that are about to be actioned. The new road will go right through his house and his workplace both, and he's the man who has to sort out the relocation. One more thing we know, pretty much from the beginning: he has no intention of performing said relocations. Dawes is a broken man, a tired and angry man, who hides everything from those around him. There's something simmering; and we all know that simmering emotions eventually boil over.

We see Dawes' life, then, as small as it is: his wife, Mary, and their otherwise all-too-empty house; his job running an industrial laundry; his terrifyingly empty relationships with others. He's not a man to envy. Rather, there's a quietness to him that's unsettling – apart from inside his head, where George and Fred go at it great guns, which is even worse. They talk of terrible things sometimes, and you know that they will be his downfall. The reveals over the course of the narrative – that Barton and Mary had a son, Charlie, who died of an inoperable brain tumour; that Fred was Charlie's middle name, and that this was a game he had with his dad, using their middle names as terms of endearment; that everything Barton refuses to do to make his life easier is because he is so entrenched in the memories of his son and their past together – all provoke empathy (how could they not).

But still, Barton George Dawes is disintegrating. It's there on every page. He's unhinged, and he's in a very bad place. By the close of the novel his wife has left him, he's done deals with the mob, and he's blown up construction machinery with home-made Molotov cocktails. He finishes in a stand-off with the police and the media both, steadfast in his refusal to give up his house, his life, his memories. It's touching. He's hollow, and desperately wishes that he weren't. At the end, the conversation in his head is between George and (now) "Freddy", his son begging his father to not kill any of the policemen, trying to make him stay a good man; Barton projecting, trying to save himself.

As with the other early Bachman books, there's no supernatural menace, no ghosts or possessions. Instead there is something more tangible, yet no less horrifying: cancer. King watched his mother die from it only a year or so before he wrote Roadwork, and his personal pain is there on every page: in the loss of Fred, the way that Barton can't forget him, can't move on past the pain of seeing him suffer before being stripped away. In the first collected editions of the books, King wrote an introduction in which he said that Roadwork was written when he was "grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it". He says the book is the worst of the Bachmans, simply because it's "trying to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain". To my mind, that doesn't make it a bad book; that makes it a book that strives for something other than scares. It's trying to fathom exactly what a person goes through; how low they can go when faced with direct loss, and how painful that loss (and its repercussions) can be.

Over time, though, something shifted: in a later edition of the Bachman Books, King wrote a new introduction. In it he says that Roadwork is "(his) favourite of the early Bachman books". I don't know what changed his mind, but perhaps it was the peace afforded by time; of being able to stand back and see what he (or, rather, Richard Bachman) had done. In the novel, that's the problem: Barton can't. He's always there, with the house and the laundry and his wife, everything reminding him of the way that things were. I'm pleased that King is at peace with Roadwork, because it sits comfortably alongside some of his best non-genre novels: a story about a real person who has been ruined by the true horrors of real life.

Connections

Weirdly, for a Bachman book, there's a connection to King's oeuvre in the narrative itself: the laundry that Barton runs, The Blue Ribbon Laundry, shares a name with the one that Carrie's mother works in. Also, it's the novel where The Mangler comes to life (from the story of the same name, published in Night Shift). They're not the same laundry (one would assume), but they all share one thing, aside from the name: bad stuff happens to those who associate with them.

Next time

A small town is terrorised by a big old crazy dog that the residents can't get rid of, just as the author is terrorised by his own unshakeable demons. It's Cujo.

divemaster
10-16-2012, 07:51 PM
The above article touches on why Roadwork is one of King's best stories. It's one thing to be able to tell the story of a man falling apart, but quite another to enable to reader to experience that disintegration. I love the way King described the "circuit breaker" Dawes had in his head. His way to compartmentalize his life--his outside actions with how he dealt with his wife and his boss and his responsibilities; all the while the other side of his brain driving him to unspeakable actions. He's not a bad man. Just a broken man who can't deal with the compounding losses of his life. It's the proverbial snowball headed for hell. First his son, and then the highway, and then his job and his wife...

Does Dawes think he can defeat the highway? Of course not. Does he think that his actions with regard to his job will magically set things right or teach somebody a lesson? Of course not. He's not delusional--he just trips the circuit breaker to buy a few more days of sanity.

Don't we all have a circuit breaker of some sort in our brains? One side of our mind tells us what we want to hear about ourselves while the other drives us to act as The Stranger (as Billy Joel sang about).

mae
11-02-2012, 04:42 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/02/rereading-stephen-king-cujo

Rereading Stephen King: week 11 – Cujo

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.
– Stephen King, On Writing

Stephen King knew he was an addict in 1975, when he was writing The Shining. It manifested in his writing, as part of what he was doing; hidden from everybody else, it was in him, and on the page. Back then, it was only alcohol. As he became more popular, wrote more, earned more, took more time away from his family to work, his addictions escalated. How could they not? He needed to hit deadlines, and he liked the taste of what he was addicted to. You can see it through his fiction: in Jack Torrance's alcoholic self-pity, desperately scared of becoming what he's destined to be, trying to hold his family together even as he shakes it apart; in Larry Underwood throwing his life (and money, and 15 minutes of fame) away on drink and drugs at the start of The Stand; in his short stories, tales of addiction and internal collapse and death. Then, in case all this passed you by, along comes Cujo: and in the giant, slobbering, seemingly unstoppable dog, we find the bluntest metaphor for addiction yet presented in King's oeuvre (a title it would hold until Misery and The Tommyknockers).

No ghosts, only the vaguest hint of any supernatural aspects (see the Connections section below), no secret government institutes: Cujo is simply a lovable St Bernard. Until he isn't. His owners, the Camber family, are distracted by the day-to-day hassles of their lives; and by Joe, the patriarch, being a bad father/husband (in the grand King tradition of those). Because of this, they don't get poor Cujo – a dog that Joe is disinterested in at the best of times – vaccinated against rabies. When the dog goes poking his nose into caves, he gets bitten by a bat – a nod to Salem's Lot there that can't be ignored – and becomes rabid. And so the book's bad guy is born: a beast whose actions are beyond his control, who kills those inhabitants of Castle Rock who cross his path, one by one. A lack of control leading to evil: another of King's dominant themes in these early novels.

In fact, though, Cujo spends most of the book involved with Donna and Tad Trenton. Recently moved to Castle Rock, the Trentons are nice, responsible people, the sort who definitely wouldn't have forgotten to get their dog inoculated. They're the sort of people who shouldn't be destroyed by forces beyond their control. But when their own family patriarch, Vic, is away, Donna and Tad are locked in the family car (and for a large portion of the book) while Cujo terrorises them. For them, characters who are conventionally set up to be the survivors, the book ends not with a bang but a whimper: Donna, having been bitten by Cujo, eventually drives a broken baseball bat through the dog's eye. Tad isn't so lucky: he dies in the car. Not because of Cujo, or not directly; but due to dehydration.

As I say, it's all one giant metaphor for King's addiction. Metaphor is there in all fiction if you look for it, of course, but this book aches with symbolism. On the outside, Cujo is cuddly, pleasant, likable. When he's bitten – and maybe that bite from a bat can be directly equated to King's Salem's Lot success – he changes. Filled with uncontrollable rage, foaming at the mouth, unable to be the good dog he was. As King writes: "He had always tried to be a good dog. He had been struck by something … free will was not a factor." He – Cujo, King – is trapped inside whatever's driving his body for him. He hurts those he loves. He is brutal and remorseless, because he is not himself. Those who would stop him are cut down or trapped. They can only look at him through windows and pray he leaves them alone, or that they get a chance to stop him. Even when the demon is dead, it still kills them. Well, no. Actually, what kills Tad is his desperate need for a drink.

Maybe that's too much. Maybe we have to come at this from a Barthesian position, standing back: this is a scary book about a rabid dog. But I simply don't believe we can. King cannot remember writing the book, but he did. Daily, he sat at his keyboard and drank himself into a stupor and beat the keys, and at the other end Cujo was sent to his editor. Somewhere inside, his subconscious was driving: something had to be.

Many of his books from this point on are less than subtle with their metaphor. That isn't a criticism: I think King does some of his best work when looking inward, consciously or not. It's not always pretty, but it's always interesting. It's not as if Cujo was the first of his novels to mine the alcoholism metaphor – The Shining told the story of an ex-English teacher with a drinking problem – but this is the point at which it became the book. Not a character, but the whole text.

Structurally, Cujo is fascinating. There are no chapters, no page breaks: it's a constant rush of words, darting between characters and with reminiscing periods of backstory, but always pushing forward. Like the plot and the dog – and, yes, King's addiction – it's unrelenting. The book stops when the dog does, or just after, as the families try to pick up the pieces of their lives in the wake of the chaos that has wrecked them. The surviving members of the Camber family, Cujo's owners, buy a new dog. This one is vaccinated, but here's the thing: it's still a dog. The potential for what it could do, how it could turn on you, is always inside it.

Reading interviews with King from the time when his addictions weren't public knowledge, he feigns normality, pretends he knew what he was doing when he wrote Cujo. Now, after he's admitted that he was then suffering his worst bout of alcoholic torpor, we know it was all a lie. Cujo is as much a surprise to him as it is to the reader: the brutality, the pace, the agony inside. It's a tremendous book – more tremendous, in my view, when you know how it was written, and how absent King really was. It's scary, it's tense, it's incredibly pacy. And it's another non-supernatural book. It's a shame King can't remember writing it, that he can't revel in his creation of something this good. But what's not a shame is that we have it: not only as readers of great fiction, but as admirers of a man who was suffering and couldn't face his demons in person, so put them directly on to the page.

Connections

Cujo – either the dog itself or the deaths it rendered – is invoked in several other Castle Rock novels: The Tommyknockers, The Dark Half, Needful Things (all books, incidentally, that deal with King's addictions in their own ways). There's a bigger connection, though: to The Dead Zone, in which Sheriff George Bannerman asks for John Smith's help to catch the Castle Rock Strangler, Frank Dodd. Bannerman reappears in Cujo and meets his end at the dog's teeth. But another character also makes the transition to this book: Dodd himself. It's weird, and vague, but we're told at the start of Cujo – on page one – about Dodd, and that "the monster never dies … It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980", when Cujo is set. It's suggested, briefly, that Dodd is somehow the darkness haunting Tad Trenton's closet; that he's a part of the darkness that fills Cujo and drives him to commit his horrible killings. This is another common theme of King's: the sense that evil is innate, and more powerful than the individual instance. It's never made totally explicit in Cujo, but it's definitely suggested: Cujo, Frank Dodd, the other darkness that will, in later books, invade Castle Rock – they're one and the same.

Next time

We're raining fire, flying planes and somehow being played by Arnie in the film of the same name: it's The Running Man.

mae
11-22-2012, 05:41 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/22/rereading-stephen-king-the-running-man

Rereading Stephen King: week 12 – The Running Man

The Running Man was, for me, one of those books you read after you've seen the movie. I knew that it was a Stephen King novel; it was the last of the compiled Bachman Books I owned (though not the last to be written by the Bachman persona; there were still three more to be published – four if you count Misery), the only one I hadn't read yet. I watched the movie, because the TV movie of It was (to my adolescent self) incredible, and I had seen The Shining and that was incredible, and this had Arnold Schwarzenegger in it and I loved Predator… It was a series of things that led to me watching the film first, and then reading the book. And that was a curious experience for me.

First published in 1982 under the Bachman pseudonym, The Running Man is a particularly SFish dystopian novel about a future where America is run by a totalitarian government, and television game shows are bloody and omnipresent. Essentially, it's The Hunger Games. King wrote it in a week (in fact, 72 hours, apparently) and it was pretty much published as a first draft. Nowadays, the film is far more famous than the book; an action classic, of sorts. It's full of fight scenes and statements about the nature of television; of sitting down and watching while atrocities occur; of a quasi-plausible future.

Fourteen-year-old me didn't really care about that. I cared, back then, that Arnie was the main character, and he kicked all sorts of ass. He quipped while killing the bad guys ("What a pain in the neck!" when beheading somebody; "He had to split!" when cutting somebody in half; "He was Subzero, now he's just plain zero!" when killing a man whose gimmick is ice-related)! He smoked an endless run of cigars! He fought for the rights of the common people! He won the love of a woman by being really, really masculine (in a way that, now, is actually a little bit creepy). He brought down the entire government/evil TV company that framed him for murder! The film was a masterpiece of 1980s idiocy, and I totally loved it.

The book, though … Where was the quipping? Where was the fun? The plot was completely different, too. For a start, Ben Richards (and, in hindsight, I should have seen what a terrible name for an Arnie character that is) has a dying child who needs medicine, and a wife who has had to take to prostitution in order to provide for the family. He's a weak man, physically and emotionally, and desperate. He's not framed for killing protesters because he's a soldier: he's a man who is willing to do anything for his family. Over the course of the novel, the game show aspect of the movie isn't the prominent thing, unlike the neon of the filmed counterpart: instead, there's a bleakness, a sadness at the state of the world. And the ending? Well, it's quite the kicker. (Spoiler follows!) After discovering that his wife and child have been killed by the television company, Ben hijacks a plane and crashes it into their skyscraper. Quite aside from the chilling visuals that provides us with nowadays, it's a horrifying end to the novel: there's no hope there, not really. It's not as if Ben saves the day and the world and frees the people from the tyranny of the awful television state they now live in; instead he's driven (as in most of these early Bachman Books) by personal rage, deep inner pain, "his black eyes burning like the eyes of a demon". Ben is a mouthpiece for King's own views about where society could be heading; he's got something to say, and it's said through his pain.

But when I was younger, of course, this wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want moaning and suffering and politics; I wanted the quips. The film set my expectations, and the novel failed to meet them. With The Shining, it was different: I read the book first, and saw the film as an adaptation. Same with It. But I came to this the other way, and to some extent treated the King original as a novelisation. That isn't a slur; I read a lot of novelisations when I was a kid, in lieu of seeing the films (with Alien, pretty much my favourite film of all time, I'd read the Alan Dean Foster novelisation and the Simonson/Goodwin comic before I ever saw the film) .

This time, I read the book and much preferred it. Maybe I'm more attuned to the sadness now; maybe I'm better with the weaker Ben Richards, the desperation that makes him enter the competition. It's decently written: not King's best, but not his worst. The structure is interesting too, echoing his other dystopian game show novel of the period, The Long Walk. Where that novel counted down the boys left alive as part of the text, here the short chapters are on constant countdown, starting at 101. You know when the book is going to end: the timer tells you. It's a pacey device, and one that serves the game-show content of the novel, and this is a good book; mid-tier King.

After I'd read it, I thought it only fair that I also revisit the film. I hadn't seen it since I first watched it: like so many films of the time, it was eminently disposable; fun, but the sort of film you rented rather than owned. Rewatching it was odd. Turns out it's awful. Totally dreadful: lumbering and badly made; full of terrible acting, terrible quips ("What a pain in the neck!" etc), terrible everything. There's very little to love; the best thing about it is the John 'St Elmo's Fire' Parr theme song. The things that it's shouting about – television, oppression – are little more than meaningless bellows. The book has action, but it also has a point; it has pathos, where the film is all comic-action bluster. And Arnie should never have been cast as Ben Richards. He was always meant to be weak, driven, desperate; and he was always meant to have something to say.

Next: We discover that there are other worlds than these: it's The Gunslinger, the first book in King's Dark Tower series.

Randall Flagg
11-25-2012, 05:29 AM
Interesting observations. Yes the movie was terrible. Richard Dawson was the only decent character in the film. I enjoyed the book. Yes it was bleak, and one could tell where it was headed, but it gave me a feeling for what King felt about society at the time he wrote the book.

Iwritecode
11-26-2012, 07:19 AM
I’ve always thought that The Running Man was the perfect example for the classic phrase: “The book was better”.

I always hated the movie. They made it too “Hollywood” with the big-name actors, lots of action and explosions, and the guy winning over the girl in the end.

I would love to see a re-make that follows closer to the storyline in the book. Not sure what they would do with the ending though.

mae
12-15-2012, 10:03 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/dec/13/stephen-king-the-gunslinger

Rereading Stephen King week 13: The Gunslinger

Hindsight is everything. I first picked up book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, when I was in the deepest throes of my teenage King addiction. I had read a lot of his books by this point (around 1995) and was ploughing through them. I came to The Eyes of the Dragon, a book that looked different from the others on the shelf, read it … and hated it. Hated it with every part of my horror-loving self. I knew what I wanted from Stephen King. I wanted the horror. I wanted the science fiction. I wanted the weird darkness in the hearts of normal people. The Gunslinger was, I knew, part of a longer-running story; it was also a fantasy novel, as The Eyes of the Dragon was. It was, I decided, after 20 pages of weird-speak and dusty places and a man called Roland, not for me. That's fine, I thought, not every book has to be for me. But I wasn't alone. It seemed they weren't King's most popular books. I moved on.

In 2003, I realised that I was an idiot. A friend, a huge King fan, noticed the gap in my collection. He told me I was insane. I hadn't read The Dark Tower? King's magnum opus? We were heading towards the end of the series, with Book V (Wolves of the Calla) about to be published, and I was behind. I was going on holiday for a week to sunnier climes, and decided to take the first four books with me.

Day one of the holiday, I put my back out. Seriously. I'm not an old man, just a criminally unfit one. I jumped into a freezing cold swimming pool and pulled a muscle – or rather, the muscle, the one that helps you, you know, move. I spent three days on a sofa, and began reading The Gunslinger on day one. I finished book four, Wizard and Glass, three days later. I was totally embroiled. It was like nothing I'd ever read. It was funny and dark and scary and nasty and really, really strange. Somewhere between high and (so-called) low art; literary metafiction meets SF/fantasy/western pulp. But most importantly, how had I lived without it? The first line – "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" – is so perfect. How had I not wanted to read the whole thing? What did the teenage me get so wrong?

Now I understand. The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I've ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there's a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning's poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He's cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black. This is Randall Flagg, whom you might remember from The Stand (though he is never called by that name here). He's a Very Bad Man. It transpires that he's been a part of Roland's life, in various guises, since the Gunslinger was a child, and that's he's responsible for some horrible things. Roland has to find him, catch him and kill him. That's what a Gunslinger does.

So far, so fetch quest. But The Gunslinger is curiously structured. There are five distinct parts, each with both a main story thread and some form of character-fleshing flashback into Roland's history. People are introduced who seem as if they'll stick around for the long run, only to be cut down or sacrificed to the story. The only constant throughout each part: Roland and his pursuit. And (Spoiler alert!) just as you think it's building towards Roland catching Flagg (or O'Dim or Marten, noms des plumes that he travels under in this book), the nemeses meet and … they have a campfire. They don't fight. There's no physical battle. Flagg uses magic to show Roland how insignificant he is, and then he makes him sleep for 10 years. That sounds tepid, like a let down – but it's not. It's so powerful to read it: to know it as the start of a journey that's going to take you to other worlds.

And it really does. It feels like a western, for the most part, but Roland's flashbacks, set in his homeland of Gilead, they're high fantasy. It's high-falutin' and fancy, and there are all sorts of traditional fantasy tropes. Oh, and then there are the Slow Mutants, whom Roland and his sort-of-ward Jake (a refugee from another world, where New York is a place and they have taxicabs and movie theatres) meet as they're travelling on the abandoned railroad. (In the earlier versions of the novel, the strangeness of the worlds was more explicit: there were references to England, Mars, Jesus, Easter – all manner of things that implied we, the readers, were not being told the whole truth. These were deleted in a 2003 re-edit of the novel, possibly because they gave too much of the whole Dark Tower game away too early.) While the metafiction present in the later Dark Tower novels isn't directly seen, the world in which it can take place is established.

The Gunslinger is a great novel. It's strange and obtuse, but absolutely succeeds in its primary intent: to establish Roland and his larger quest, to find the Dark Tower and the Crimson King. The books that followed it would take the story to different places still, and push it forward; but reading this, you understand why King's fans love it as they do. It's him, but more so. As the series goes on it becomes his whole canon, the glue that holds his universe together. It's not for everyone, but somehow it also is: as when looking at King's entire literary output, The Gunslinger is a hodge-podge of genres and styles, thrown together, that somehow works perfectly. People assume that they won't like it, but I'd really beg every King fan, however fairweather, to give it a try. That first line is near-perfect; and the rest of the book follows suit.

Connections

Without discussing the links between this and the other Dark Tower books (because that is absolutely everything), there are curiously few direct connections to other King texts. Randall Flagg is the major one (appearing in The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Talisman, and mentioned or alluded to in many other books). The conversation between Flagg and Roland is echoed much later in Insomnia, along with the presence of the Crimson King (whom we also see in Hearts in Atlantis, The Black House and maybe other works such as It, depending on interpretation). In Cell, one of the characters writes a comicbook featuring a thinly veiled Roland character. The connections would rocket up as the books went on, however, eventually weaving the Dark Tower into every other book that King has written.

Next up

When we make it to the other side of Christmas we'll be looking at Different Seasons (or, the book that spawned The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me).

mae
01-15-2013, 07:23 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jan/15/stephenking-fiction

Rereading Stephen King: Different Seasons

I once had an argument with somebody about The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't complicated: they didn't believe me that it was written by Stephen King. When I assured them that it was, and that it was published in the same novella compendium as the story that became the classic 80s movie Stand By Me, it was possible to see their belief system crumble. This film that they loved – like so many people, their favourite film (going by the fact that it's currently rated the best movie of all time over at IMDB – was based on a story by the man who wrote that book about the killer clown. That it says it at the very start of the movie, in the opening credits, is almost immaterial: to most people, it doesn't feel as they imagine a Stephen King story should. There's nothing weird, mystical. There's no horror, and he is, after all, a horror writer. (Of course, now I see that there is horror in the stories, just maybe not the horror that I was used to from him: instead, it's the horror of emotional lurches, of war crimes, of being an overly inquisitive kid, of telling stories designed to unsettle and shock: but it's a horror you have to want to see, I suspect.)

Way back when – and I actually can't remember the first time that I read this, only that I did; and possibly more than once, given the state of my collapsing copy – I didn't read this with any baggage. It's a King book, I thought. And the cover of my edition was about as "generic horror book" as it's possible to find. Based on that cover (bats, full moon, screaming woman, slash of blood), I expected Salems Lot 2: A Lot More. So, I read the stories, but found myself marginally disappointed. Different Seasons is a collection of four novellas, published together because they were, according to King, "mainstream (almost as depressing a word as genre)", and yet sold as any other of his novels was. So, my misunderstanding of what I was coming to read was understandable; my relative dislike my fault, however, not his.

I didn't necessarily want to read him writing about a prison escape or a Nazi war criminal, so I actually gave up on Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (to give it its full title), and on Apt Pupil, because I thought they were really quite boring. The first half of the book, culled. I did, however, love The Body, where four teenage friends, about my age, go off to find the body of another teenage boy, presumed dead. The narrator in it, Gordon, is now older, but he tells the story looking back at his teenage self: a boy who loved reading, who wanted to be a writer. (The narrative even features some short stories that Gordon supposedly wrote, although they are rather more fully-formed and complete than those a real 12-year-old would write, I suspect.) So there, I saw myself, or what I wanted to be.

Where I didn't see myself was in The Breathing Method, my favourite of the four. A story within a story (a structure that immediately appealed), it's about a woman desperate to give birth to her baby, even though she can't afford doctors. I couldn't tell you why I loved it, until I began rereading it: there's a sense of something curiously macabre from the start, which lends this – the least traditionally King story in the collection – an atmosphere that spoke to me.

So, in true obtuse style, the novella I perhaps liked least has become the most famous, through its film adaptation. I prefer the film of Shawshank to its written counterpart, no question. Even rereading it now, it was hard to shake the shadow of the film, which I feel is stronger, slightly, in pacing and storytelling. Don't get me wrong. It's good! Great, even, probably. But it works better as a movie. Some things just do. I could maybe be argued that The Body is the same – Stand By Me is a tremendously tense hug of a movie, tonally astonishing, nailing the hazy feeling of being a teenager in the most incredible way. The book does it as well, but – and the written-word heresy continues – I think I actually now prefer the film. I love it, because of how it makes me feel. It makes me remember being a kid rather than reading the story the first time around, and the two are very different things.

Apt Pupil has also been turned into a film, by Bryan Singer. It's a pretty good one, as well, and so I thought I knew what to expect. I did, apart from one major omission in the adaptation: that the novella is actually about serial killer. Reading it now, it's pretty nasty stuff: two characters, both killing the homeless in an attempt to either understand death, or to gear up towards killing each other. And there's some slightly uncomfortable content in there: one dream sequence, where the 16-year old main character, Todd, fantasises about the rape of a young Jewish girl, is a little clunkier than King-now would write; and some of the language, dealing with the notions of antisemitism, is similarly rather heavy-handed. Despite being maybe closer to King's usual oeuvre than the rest of the collection – serial killers! – it's actually my least favourite of the four. Another one where I prefer the film …

And so, to the last story in the collection: the one that I remember loving the most, but actually remembered the content of the least, simply because it hasn't been turned into a film. Truthfully, it couldn't be: it's a little slight, and there's not much plot. It's all atmosphere. I'm also pleased to report it's still my favourite: slightly odd, more than a little askew, it's got a fascinating narrative voice, questioning and curious. The story within a story holds up brilliantly well – there's a peculiar thing where one first-person narrator gives way to another with only a chapter break between them, and they have something of the same voice to them, a simplicity to their speech that makes you wonder if King isn't playing with that as a concept to unsettle you, to make you question the narrator – and the stories that both tell (one of hearing a story, another of a woman giving birth in the back of a crashed cab) quiet and strange enough that I can't help but love them. The final moments of both unsettle: fact blending into fiction, truths unspoken, neither narrator nor reader sure of what to believe.

I feel guilty, a little. Here are four novellas that are each at least pretty good in their own right – I might not like Apt Pupil, but there's nothing wrong with it on a fundamental level – but I prefer the film adaptations of them to the written versions; and the one I love most, there's not even a film of, and it's the smallest in the collection by some measure (and in every way that term can be applied). Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, though: they were shuffled out of the publishing house first time around, mis-sold, mis-represented. They're probably not anybody's favourite examples of King's writing, but maybe, in this case, the stories being well known regardless of the medium they're told in, maybe that's enough.

Connections

Connections a-plenty, here. The novellas reference each other in subtle ways throughout, but also reference a number of other early King works. In The Body, Cujo is mentioned, as is Jerusalem's Lot; and Chamberlain, the town where Carrie is set. Ace Merrill, one of the characters, pops up in Needful Things; and Evvie Chalmers is in both Cujo and The Dead Zone. Apt Pupil references Springheel Jack, a serial killer from the short story Strawberry Spring. And Rita Hayworth mentions Steve Dubay, later to turn up in It.

Next

A story about being young, dumb and owning your own (possessed, murderous) car: it's Christine.

divemaster
01-15-2013, 09:11 AM
An interesting perspective, though I disagree with most of it. Different Seasons is one of my favorite King works and it has been since the first time I read it.

While the movie versions of Shawshank and Stand By Me are indeed good, I prefer King's stories. It's a closer call with Shawshank b/c the performances are so great but overall I believe the story provides more depth. The Body certainly does. Part of it might be that I read the stories long before the movies came out, so the written version was my first introduction.

And the less said about Apt Pupil (the movie), the better. I was bored on travel one night and killed some time at the cinema. Could not come close to the psychological horror of the story (being seduced by evil), which I enjoyed very much.

I liked The Breathing Method, though it rates fourth of the four stories to me. I liked the strange men's club and the subtle mysteries surrounding it. If memory serves, this was the same setting as The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands, right? That's a pretty big connection--I'm surprised the author above missed it.

Bev Vincent
01-15-2013, 09:22 AM
And someone is working on making "The Breathing Method" into a film: Scott Teems is working on a script and Scott Derrickson (director of Sinister) will direct, assuming it gets financing.

mae
01-15-2013, 09:27 AM
Indeed. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the column, as the author overall seems to be a very knowledgeable King fan. This was probably the first column of his that I wholeheartedly disagreed with. The Shawshank film is a truly great film but the novella is so much better. Never was a huge fan of The Body's adaptation. Liked Apt Pupil's but again the novella is so much better. And of course the book itself is one of King's overall best.

mae
01-30-2013, 08:26 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jan/30/rereading-stephen-king-christine

Rereading Stephen King: week 15 – Christine

The easiest period of Stephen King's writing to talk about is his early years. Back then, he was carving his own niche. He wasn't universally loved, but he was universally sold, and that was probably enough for him. He had his vices at this point, of course. They were well-hidden – and I'll talk more about that come Tommyknockers time – but they were there. Still, the books came, mainly because he had them squirrelled away. Different Seasons was published between Cujo and Christine, but it was written much earlier, back when King was perhaps more in control of what he was actually doing. Christine was the truth poking out from the lie of Rita Hayworth and The Body.

Christine is the story of Arnold "Arnie" Cunningham (a name taken from two Happy Days characters), a shortsighted bookish type (a "loser") who has only one friend and not much of a life. He's an aching stereotype, but that's not always a bad thing – as King had shown before – particularly when the stereotype breaks their mould and becomes the hero. So, we accept that he is somewhat nerdy; we accept that his one friend, Dennis, is one of the most hollow characters King has ever written, seemingly existing only to tell Arnie to be careful (and given that he's the narrator of the book, that's some going); and we accept that Arnie would see a battered, ruined 1958 Plymouth Fury on his way home from school and just buy it. No ifs or buts: he's taken in, wanting to be cool, and he falls in love.

It's sold to Arnie by a crotchety back-brace-wearing old man called Roland LeBay, who loves that car, but it's time to sell it on. Dennis doesn't like LeBay. Dennis doesn't like the car. Dennis doesn't like the idea of just buying a car outright ("To my ever increasing horror, Arnie pulled his wallet out … "). Arnie buys the car anyway, takes it to a garage and learns how to turn it into the car of his dreams: fixing the engine, the paintwork. Arnie then begins a transformation: taking on some of LeBay's traits, his curmudgeonly ways, his gruff demeanour. He is suddenly (and inexplicably) attractive to a new girl in town, Leigh (another of King's early easy stereotypes: like Susan in Salem's Lot, she is a Very Nice Girl). Leigh and Arnold begin dating. Arnie is a moron, and becomes more and more like LeBay, even to the point where he starts wearing a back brace. Dennis develops a thing for Leigh – adding a smidgen of personality to the narrative – and then, over the next god-knows-how-many pages, things come to a head, and we discover, shock of shocks, that somehow the car is possessed by LeBay or something, and that maybe it's now trying to possess Arnie, and oh my god ARNOLD rearranged is ROLAND and on and on. The car drives itself into a trap set by Leigh and Dennis, and is crushed. Arnie dies in a (potentially) unrelated car crash. Dennis, the narrator with nothing to him, becomes one of King's stereotypes himself: the writer looking back on events, wondering what might have been.

For such a straightforward narrative, it's a bit of a structural mess. While most of the book is in first-person, with Dennis as our trusty reliable narrator, there's a section where he ends up in hospital after a football accident and the narrative switches, inexplicably, to third-person omniscient. It's jarring and clumsy – or it would be if it wasn't close enough to the tepid style of narrative presented in Dennis's voice the rest of the way through. (Incidentally, King has said that he "wrote [himself] into a box" when working on Christine, putting Dennis in hospital, and that the narrative shift was the only way out of that, which sounds suspicious to me: I can think of a number of ways to solve that particular narrative pickle.) When we get Dennis back, nothing much has changed. It doesn't even feel as if he hasn't been with us, not really. Come the end of the novel, it's still not clear who the third-person narrator is, or how Dennis knows what it reported. Both narrations are hollow, an accusation I'd level at much of the rest of the book. None of the characters feels like they're worth much, being either underwritten (in the case of Dennis and Leigh) or overwritten (in the way that Arnie – and, by default, LeBay – seems to just become more and more ridiculous as the novel goes on).

I've mentioned before the detractors who say King's oeuvre consists of a simple formula: x (where x = any seemingly innocuous thing: dog, hotel, clown etc), + y (where y = possession, demons, the undead) = novel. It's an accusation that only exists because some of King's more commercially famous novels play off these now-standard horror novel devices. For the most part, it's completely ridiculous, and more than a little unfair. Except for, I'd argue, here. Christine is a novel that, King once said, began life as a short story. It could have been, like The Mangler or Trucks, a nice little short that did this entire plot in 40 pages. But it's not. It was sold as a big deal, King's next big horror novel, and, I suspect, it was the first time that a lot of his fans felt cheated. I reckon King probably does too: it's nowhere near his best. Given the existence of another novel in King's catalogue that deals with a supernatural car, 2002's From a Buick 8, maybe King wanted to try this again, just to prove it could be done?

Connections

Christine – or, a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury, at least – turns up in a few other King novels. In It it's driven around by Henry Bowers' psychotic father, in 11.22.63 a car of the same description makes a number of appearances (including being driven by the psychotic Johnny Dunhill – see the theme?) and in The Stand, Stu Redman and Tom Cullen find said model of car abandoned, with a key bearing the initials AC inside.

Next

King writing the most pure horror novel he's ever written: it's Pet Sematary (sic).

Stebbins
01-30-2013, 08:54 AM
Glad I stumbled into this thread. I read the first two reviews and, like others have said, find this to be a noble effort. However, what is the purpose? As a couple other members have touched on, it's very heavy on plot-summary.

Through this thread I did discover the Ambannon Books website though. And now know Jerome enjoys IPAs; they've become my favorite type of beer over the past year :thumbsup:

divemaster
01-30-2013, 09:19 AM
Here I again disagree (strongly!) with the critic-reviewer. I loved Christine. I thought King nailed the high school setting and the types that populate it (jock, loner, etc.). It helped that King was a teacher (college, I think) and was probably very close to the subject of high school issues. Plus, he wasn't all that far removed from high school himself. I bet if he tried to write Christine now, it would be a much different story--less raw and more...nostalgic. And not for the better.

Also, I thought the narrative shift was handled very effectively. I remember reading it the first time and thinking "oh, neat; shift from First to Third, back to First." I did not find it contrived or signifying a lack of imagination or writing skill.

Perhaps I am just more forgiving of King than the above reviewer. We'll see when he gets to The Tommyknockers. I wonder what he thought of it--I pretty much hated it.

Bev Vincent
01-30-2013, 09:37 AM
I agree with him about the structural problems and, to an extent, the relative blandness of Dennis as a narrator. Good story, but flawed execution.

Stebbins
01-30-2013, 10:23 AM
Here I again disagree (strongly!) with the critic-reviewer. I loved Christine. I thought King nailed the high school setting and the types that populate it (jock, loner, etc.). It helped that King was a teacher (college, I think) and was probably very close to the subject of high school issues. Plus, he wasn't all that far removed from high school himself. I bet if he tried to write Christine now, it would be a much different story--less raw and more...nostalgic. And not for the better.

Also, I thought the narrative shift was handled very effectively. I remember reading it the first time and thinking "oh, neat; shift from First to Third, back to First." I did not find it contrived or signifying a lack of imagination or writing skill.

Perhaps I am just more forgiving of King than the above reviewer. We'll see when he gets to The Tommyknockers. I wonder what he thought of it--I pretty much hated it.

King was a high school teacher, just to clarify.

I have not read Christine so I cannot weigh in. I did, however, love The Tommyknockers :unsure: (I know I am a minority though. A site had it in his bottom 5 works, which infuriated me)

Bev Vincent
01-30-2013, 10:56 AM
I'd put The Tommyknockers in his bottom two. Along with Needful Things.

mae
01-30-2013, 11:49 AM
:cry: I love The Tommyknockers. And Christine.

Jean
01-30-2013, 12:17 PM
:cry: I love The Tommyknockers. And Christine.
So do bears.


<...> I did, however, love The Tommyknockers :unsure: (I know I am a minority though. <...>
Bears can hardly be a minority. We are legion.

Stebbins
01-30-2013, 01:37 PM
Insomnia and TGWLTG are my bottom two out of the twenty-eight I have read thus far.

Jean
01-30-2013, 01:52 PM
oh shit... bears love TGWLTG... anyway, there's a special thread for this. Back on topic: Christine is an amazing book, and if a critic seriously calls it a "structural mess" ------ but I think I've already said before what I think of his analyses.

Roland of Gilead 33
01-30-2013, 06:30 PM
tom gordon is for me one of his worst books he ever put out. granted i haven't read all his books yet but that one i dunno felt like it took me years to read instead of months. even though the book was short. that's how bad it was for me to read. i love 'the tommyknockers though. a favorite of mine.

the thing with that is that it starts out to damn slow. but i love the book and hell i even enjoy the movie that later was made of it. even though i' d love to see it done right for the screen tv mini-series or a big screen version i don't care which. Insommina and sorry about my spelling i also loved.

i've read that one 2 or 3 times since it first came out. the only downside i got from reading it when it 1st came out when i was in high school was the fact that it fucking reading of cigerettes. HEAVELY i mean it felt like someone had dropped the book into a garbage dumpster and nothing was in the dumpster but ciggerette butts and ash from all the smoking that's how strong this damn thing was.

and if you wonder why i didn't complain about the smell is cause i wasn't going to read that one at the time anytime soon. and plus the book was new and i got it from the libary and you know how short of a time you get it from there when books are new.

Jean
01-31-2013, 12:36 AM
Dear friends, for Gan's sake:

King's worst novel (http://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?915-King-s-worst-novel)
Your Ranking of King's Books (http://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?14982-Your-Ranking-of-King-s-Books)
Insomnia (http://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?3264-Insomnia-Let-s-Discuss!-*SPOILERS*)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (http://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?3603-The-Girl-Who-Loved-Tom-Gordon)

Stebbins
01-31-2013, 05:28 AM
Haha, sorry Jean [I did stop once you pointed it out though].

mae
01-31-2013, 06:54 AM
"King's worst novel" is a ludicrous thread title.

jhanic
01-31-2013, 09:51 AM
Somewhere, I don't remember where, I read that King felt he had to switch narrators in Christine because, with Dennis in the hospital, how else could he tell about the activities that then occurred?

John

Bev Vincent
01-31-2013, 10:02 AM
He talked about it in his interview with Mark Singer in the New Yorker, about how insecure he felt about the novel because of that but someone (his editor, I think) reassured him that it worked.

Randall Flagg
01-31-2013, 12:59 PM
He may have also mentioned it in an interview by Douglas Winter-or in an interview Winter referred to in "The Art of Darkness..."

mae
02-22-2013, 11:45 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/feb/21/rereading-stephen-king-pet-sematary

Rereading Stephen King: week 16 – Pet Sematary



King's introduction to this novel tells a cute story: about how he wrote it, then found himself horrified by it. It was so wrong, so dark, he put it into a drawer and thought he'd never publish it. It was, he claims, too horrifying to put out into the world. Then he reached the end of a contract, and he needed to publish a novel. There was only this one left, and his wife persuaded him to publish it, maybe against his better judgment. But he wondered if this was right; if it wasn't just too unpleasant.

It's a good story: the master of horror finding something too scary to exist. Doesn't matter if it's true or not; what matters is, it's part of the mythos. If you read that proviso before you read the book itself, you're in the state he wants you to be: ready, willing, but apprehensive, slightly on edge about what exactly this book contains – the perfect state to read some horror.

Horror has something of a bad reputation these days, surrounded by constant claims that, as a literary genre, it's on its last legs: there are, after all, only so many ways you can tell a ghost story. King has a curious relationship with horror himself. While his work moves between genres and styles, horror – in its truest sense – is what underpins much of these early texts. The Shining, Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine: they're all horror novels, in the most conventional sense of the word, the kind that is so unfairly maligned: haunted houses, vampires, possessed whatevers. But King knows that horror can be something else. It can, at its best, make us reflect on the darkness of the human soul. Sure, Pet Sematary is a story about evil from beyond the grave, reanimated animals, terrible physical injuries … But more than that, it's about what happens when we want something so much we don't care about the consequences.

I remember reading this book the first time around. I had only seen a few proper horror movies, because persuading my parents to rent them for me was easier said than done, but I already had a favourite: Poltergeist. I loved the idea that your house might have ghosts hanging around. It was so exotic, so unlike the Victorian house of nothing that I lived in. In Poltergeist, the house was built on top of a sacred American Indian burial ground, and the ghosts that ruined poor Carol Anne's life were affronted by the way the land had been dug, supplanted, ruined in a quest to build affordable modern housing. I loved that idea so much: revenge, hundreds of years later, and based on traditions and notions that we, so ignorant and modern, cannot understand. I found that burial ground again in the film of The Shining: an excuse for the actions of the Overlook Hotel, and of Jack Torrance himself. Terror, driven by these ancient spirits, desperate for revenge. So when I began reading Pet Sematary, and found a mention of the titular cemetery being built on Micmac Indian land … well, I was prepared. That way lies death; that way lies horror.

I was wrong, of course. Never let it be said that King gives the reader what they expect. In King's world, the Indian burial ground somehow means life. And those movies, and most of the horror I had read up to that point (King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert – even the gateway drug that was Christopher Pike), focused their ideas on central figures representative of evil: bad guys, if you will. So I expected this horror-proxy to make an appearance in Pet Sematary too. I read about Louis Creed and his family, moving to Maine so he can start a new job; and about Jud, their neighbour, a nice old man who knew something about the Pet Sematary up the hill; and about their cat, Church, being killed by one of the many speeding trucks on the road outside; and how Louis and Jud buried the cat in a secret, locals-only burial ground; and how the cat came back. There wasn't a hint of anything truly evil – just something wrong, and a feeling of inevitability. A darkness there, waiting: in Louis's two children; in the road; in the warning that you should never try to bring a human back, because that is a wrong-step too far. More than any King book – more than any supposed horror, full stop – I kept thinking about it, dwelling on it. It reverberated. Other books were scary; Pet Sematary was true horror.

Coming back to the book after nearly 20 years, I was faintly nervous. I remembered how the book made me feel, even if I didn't necessarily recall its content. It's curious: scares don't stay with me, not really; but horror (something that makes you question beliefs, emotional and moral responses, yourself even) hangs around. And reading it now, it was exactly how I wanted it to be. Still only the vaguest hints of something malevolent, still no terrifying bad guy. Yet still that terrible inevitability, even though I knew it was coming. The teasing of it. It's a hundred pages before the cemetery is even introduced; it's another hundred before the cat dies and then comes back. It's not until the novel's final hundred pages that Louis's youngest son, Gage, is hit by a truck and dragged down the road; and even longer, closer to the climax, before he stumbles back to the house, dead behind the eyes, grinning.

The book is built from the subtlety of behind-the-scenes malevolence, constructed slowly and forcefully, and so beautifully paced that you cannot help but be pulled in. King was facing his own demons at the time, but they don't present themselves here. Here, he shows how subtle his hand can be. Louis Creed is a weak man who thinks that he's strong; a man who finds excuses, blames his failings on things he doesn't understand. And they're not even failings that are specific to him: we all have them.

When the novel reaches its conclusion – one that terrified me then and still does now, frankly – and its heart is revealed to be the same as that of the classic WW Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", we're prepared for it. But not that prepared. Because there's a hope that Louis will make a different decision: that he'll be the conventional hero we expect in fiction. But Louis's desires are the same as ours: to keep those we love safe and close, and to ensure that they have the best life possible.

There's a lesson in the tale: sometimes it's better to let things go, no matter how much it hurts. As Jud says, earlier in the novel: "Sometimes dead is better." And while we know that, in Louis's position we might do exactly the same as him. That's the skill of true horror, I think: finding our weak spot and making us wonder.

Connections

There's a brief section in the later part of the book where Rachel Creed, Louis's wife, drives past Jerusalem's Lot as she races back to her husband; in Insomnia, there is a suggestion that Atropos (long story short: bad guy related to fate) killed Gage, as he has taken the little boy's trainer as a keepsake; and there's a nice moment early on in the novel where Louis says: "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy," which of course was a common phrase long before Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining, but took on a very different meaning afterwards.

COMING NEXT: Stock up on silver, it's Cycle Of The Werewolf

mae
03-07-2013, 07:28 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/07/stephen-king-cycle-of-the-werewolf

Rereading Stephen King: week 17 – Cycle of the Werewolf

There was a time when I was far more obsessed with material things than I am now. When I was a teenager – when every bit of my income (pocket money) was essentially expendable, and when I had the time to do nothing with my weekends and evenings other than indulge in the stuff I loved – I was able to read every book I wanted from the library, listen to every album that my friends copied for me, and rent those terrible films from the video shop that were, frankly, a waste of everybody's time. And a lot of the King novels that I took out of the library I then wanted to buy, because I thought I'd read them again and again, to soak them in.

I wanted to buy Cycle of the Werewolf, but it was just so expensive. So I saved. I bought it over Misery. That's not a choice I'm necessarily proud of, now. Now, I realise, it's almost the very definition of a book that would have been better off staying in the library. Not because it's bad or anything, but because it's just so slight. (In the comments of the last Rereading, somebody wished me luck writing about this for an article. I get their point: I'd forgotten what a slip of a book this actually was.)

So: 1983, King, wrote what really only amounts to a short story but was sold as a novella about a werewolf. It's structured really neatly, actually: there are 12 chapters, one for each month of a year, and each chapter features a single incident during the lunar cycle where the titular werewolf attacks somebody. So it's a countdown – and we know that King loves his countdowns – as we go from January to December. Each month brings with it a new victim, a new (very) short story about them, and so the body count and the threat of the werewolf rises. And it's also nearly a puzzle, as the characters that are killed interact with the werewolf. In some circumstances, characters see the werewolf change, and they know who it is before we do. When Alfie Knopfler, the owner of the local diner (The Chat'n'Chew) sees the werewolf first, his narrative refers to the character who changes as "the customer". So it's a puzzle, but irritatingly, not one that we can solve: the narrative just outs the werewolf as being Reverend Lester Lowe, the town's priest. From then on, it's a matter of following him towards his death at the hands of 10-year-old paraplegic Marty, the closest thing this story has to a protagonist.

It's a conventional, well-told tale that would have made a perfectly fine short story in one of the many collections King would ultimately put out. So why was it published by itself? Well, it's illustrated. There's are some pieces of art by Bernie Wrightson in the book, one for each month of the cycle, and they show key moments of action – almost all involving the werewolf about to dig into that month's victim, and all in a style that's part fine art, part comic book. But they're still essentially markers, and the bulk of the text – if that's the right word – is the story itself.

So, the content is fine, the package is nice, it was expensive for what it was: so why did I buy it? I think the answer lies in the question, why does this exist in the first place? King fans wanted more. We wanted everything. I was into comics, and it felt like King had somehow found a way to slip between the worlds of the things that I liked. And I was indicative of a larger audience that King had: those who wanted the traditional horror, who wanted to be scared or chilled. It made sense that this man who wrote Salem's Lot and Cujo would one day write a werewolf story. King, for his part, was in his furious writing phase – addictions and all – and churning the stories out. It makes sense he would want to get them onto shelves. He puts them out, we buy them. It's how publishing works.

What's most interesting to me is this, however: I didn't begrudge it. At the time, I didn't question the value of this. The art, the story – and I do really like it – they were a package I enjoyed. It's mid-tier King, clearly, and it's hard to find in a lot of bookshops, so maybe my initial reading experience was the right one: that this is something to take from a library to read in the 20 minutes it'll take you, to admire the art and how closely it mirrors the world King has created, and how evocative it can be when mixed with your own imagination. For Collectors Only sometimes gets used as a slur, but it shouldn't be. This is a book collectors and King superfans will love. Everybody else might just wonder what the fuss is about.

One last thing. I don't want to harp on about King's addictions, but it's hard not to, when you know they were there during the writing. This was mid-addiction, and there's something basic and obvious about it when you know that: a mild-mannered man, turned into a monster by forces out of his control. And what hits hardest is the Reverend Lowe's explanation of why this happens. It's not that he was bitten, he explains: he simply picked some flowers. He picked some flowers to put into a vase, and they died far too quickly – as soon as he had them in his hands. After that, he lost all control. Marty begins sending him notes that suggest he would be better off killing himself. "Why don't you end it all?" one note reads, because that way, he would be protecting others from himself. And he doesn't consider it, because he's selfish. He didn't ask for the problem: it just found him.

It's one of the frankest depictions of King's addictions you'll find in his books. It's blunt, painful, and quite devastatingly sad.

Next time: King writes a parallel world post-apocalypse with his horror novel chum Peter Straub: The Talisman.

Iwritecode
03-07-2013, 08:30 AM
The only form in which I own and have read Cycle of the Werewolf is in a Stephen King weekly calendar that I got for Christmas a few years back. It had little bits of trivia and stuff written at the bottom of the pages. The 12 parts of the story were at the first week of each month.

I remember seeing the actual book in the store, checking the price and then putting it back. I very rarely buy SK books new. Most of my collection comes from picking copies up at garage sales for a few bucks or they were gifts.

Bev Vincent
03-07-2013, 08:43 AM
There's a very affordable trade paperback edition that includes King's screenplay for the movie. It's sold as SILVER BULLET instead of CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF.

mae
03-07-2013, 10:16 AM
And the original Plume large-format softcover is also still in print, isn't it? I'd still like to get the original hardcover, the only first edition King I'm still missing, but they're so expensive. Would love it if they repubulished Silver Bullet in hardcover.

jhanic
03-07-2013, 01:27 PM
I find it interesting that the idea of how the whole thing started--that King was supposed to do a calendar--is not mentioned.

John

Bev Vincent
03-07-2013, 01:27 PM
Yeah -- I posted a brief comment to that effect.

Bev Vincent
03-26-2013, 11:57 AM
Week 18: The Talisman (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/26/stephen-king-rereading-the-talisman)

features this great photo of the authors (+1)

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/BOOKS/Pix/pictures/2013/3/26/1364321351889/Peter-Straub-and-Stephen--007.jpg

mae
03-26-2013, 06:52 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/26/stephen-king-rereading-the-talisman

Rereading Stephen King: week 18 – The Talisman

I couldn't remember a word of this. It was bound to happen sooner or later: a book I'd read which had slipped entirely through my memory. Sometimes I find a book is loose and hazy in my memory – I have a bad memory, and while overarching plots usually stick for everything I've read, details are often significantly more vague – but for The Talisman, I couldn't remember anything. I have the original copy; I know it had a sequel, in 2001's Black House; and I know that, since it was written, it's become more and more entwined within the Dark Tower mythos that runs through so many of King's novels. But everything else? Gone.

At the tail-end of the 1970s, Stephen King and Peter Straub – an American horror novelist, and friend of King's – decided to write a novel together. It took them four years to get started, and when they did, it was essentially writing in turns: doing the beginning and the end together, and then passing the narrative back and forth between themselves in a writing relay. The book's germ was an idea that King had had in college.It was, as @jsatellite told me, something of a game for the two writers, imitating each other's style to produce something which felt like a single author's work.

The book itself is the story of Jack Sawyer, a 12-year-old boy whose mother is dying from cancer. So he heads off on a "fetch quest", to find something that can save her. He meets a handyman named Lester "Speedy" Parker who teaches him all about the other world that we can't see: a parallel version of our own, known as the Territories. The physical rules in the Territories are curious: time and distance have different meanings (with the alternate world being more akin to a compressed version of the United States), and everybody from one world has "twinner" in the other: sharing some of each other's physical traits, life events and character. Everybody has one, apart from Jack: his twinner, Jason, died when it was a baby, nearly taking Jack with it. (And Jason's name lives on in the Territories, used as a blasphemy, their own proxy for Jesus.) And, surprise surprise, his dying mother has a twinner of her own: Queen Laura DeLoessian (who is loved and adored by everybody, and has fallen into a deep sleep she cannot be roused from). Speedy's twinner, a gunslinger named Parkus, tells Jack all about a Talisman that can heal his mother, and so begins a fantasy novel fetch quest.

And make no mistake: this is very definitely fantasy. The two horror novelists wrote something with very few moments of conventional horror. They included werewolves (sort of) but made them friendly. They have a big bad guy (or, guys: Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris) who isn't scary per se, bringing technology and violence to the Territories in order to let them destroy themselves. There's a moment in the novel where Jack goes to watch Lord of the Rings: not a coincidence.

And there's another major theme, which also sounds through much fantasy fiction: friendship. Here, though, the primary influence is Huckleberry Finn: that book's story of friendship is echoed strongly in Jack Sawyer's relationships with both Wolf and Richard Sloat. (As Straub has said, "Twain was on our minds at the start".)

The themes are strong; the world is strong; the characters are strong. It's well written. It's long, and maybe a little over-egged in places – some of the novel's mid-section sags – but the things that they were paying tribute to come through, and the story is a good one. So: why didn't I remember it? I don't know.

I've thought about it the past few days, as I've come across moments in the book I love, now – Wolf in our world; the Blasted Lands; the Black Hotel – and I just don't understand it. It's not quite top-tier, but it's a really enjoyable novel, worthy of both writers' bibliographies. And I must have enjoyed it, because I went away and read Straub's excellent, haunting Ghost Story when I was a teenager, and his equally excellent PTSD horror Koko, and I wouldn't have done that had I not. So now I'm tempted to blame it on my teenage distaste for fantasy. It's why I didn't read the Dark Tower books; it's why I disliked Eyes Of The Dragon (but more on that in a few weeks). But in many ways, I'm really pleased I didn't remember it. I got to read a King novel from the 1980s with fresh eyes, and experience an adventure that had, somehow, pretty much passed me by.

Connections

Oh ho, this is a curious one. So, when it was written, there were a few connections to other things in King's oeuvre (and, no doubt, Straub's, though I cannot help with those): there's a reference to Pet Sematary by way of The Wizard of Oz, with The Talisman echoing that book's reference to "Oz the gweat and tewwible"; there is a reference to Rainbird, from Firestarter; and the references to Gunslingers and the phrase "do ya ken" both come from the early parts of the Dark Tower series. However, at this point (popular myth has it), the book wasn't intended to be a part of that series. It was Straub who wrote in those connections, and King just neatened the corners as he wrote more novels. And, when they came to revisit this world and these characters in 2001's Black House, they would bind the two universes completely …

Up next: the final book written while Richard Bachman was still alive – Thinner.

Iwritecode
03-27-2013, 05:42 AM
I had a similar experience with this story. I read it once. Then years later I re-read it because I could barely remember any of the story. All I could really remember was Jack and the territories. I had totally forgotten about things like Wolf, Richard Sloat, Sunlight Garder and couldn't remember the ending at all.

thegunslinger41
03-27-2013, 05:54 AM
Was re-reading CUJO. Had a hard time getting through it this time. Both the mother and her son are so irritatingly fragile....and annoying as FUK! I kept wanting CUJO to just put them out of their misery. LOL.

:)

Jean
03-27-2013, 11:01 AM
I had a similar experience with this story. I read it once. Then years later I re-read it because I could barely remember any of the story. All I could really remember was Jack and the territories. I had totally forgotten about things like Wolf, Richard Sloat, Sunlight Garder and couldn't remember the ending at all.these were the only things I remembered after the first reading, and, I am afraid are the only things I remember now. As far as the ending is concerned, all I remember is that there was a lot of fuss.

mae
04-16-2013, 10:41 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/apr/16/rereading-stephen-king-thinner

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 19: Thinner

Richard Bachman could only have lived so long, I suppose. His voice – rich in language, nasty in tone – was never going to be a bestseller, really, but King's was. By 1984, everything that King wrote was selling by the truckload. He couldn't put a foot wrong: bestseller begat bestseller. But he was writing faster than publishers could cope with. We're on entry 19 now in this rereading experiment, and yet only 10 years into King's career. So, the pseudonym had been necessary to stop King looking suspiciously prolific. But all things have to come to an end, and soon after Thinner was released, that end arrived. But before it: a novel that summed up the rest of King's Bachman-attributed output, while adding in just enough evidence of its real author to raise suspicions.

Until this point, Bachman wrote human stories. The four Bachman books were about broken, trapped men, desperately clinging to humanity while the world they inhabited pushed them further away from it. Rage, Running Man, The Long Walk, Roadwork: while they might trip into SF territory, they all exist by focusing on the human side of their protagonists, backing them into corners and making them fight their way out . King's work at this point utilised more traditional horror tropes – the haunted or possessed whatevers that drove the stories along. That line dividing King from Bachman collapsed with Thinner, which throws its hat firmly into the supernatural ring almost from the first. This was the first Bachman book I read with King's name on the cover, not Bachman's; I didn't even know it was a Bachman until later on, and I didn't question the narrative voice for a second.

Billy Halleck is a complete asshole of a protagonist. He's a lawyer, morbidly obese, who runs over a gypsy when not watching the road because his wife is giving him a hand-job. When he gets the court case and charges dismissed, thanks to knowing the right people, the gypsy's father (whose predominant physical feature is his "rotting nose") seeks Halleck out outside the courthouse. He touches his face and says a single word: Thinner.

From that point onwards, Halleck finds that the weight he was previously carrying – he starts the novel at a pretty hefty 249lb – starts to drop off him. No matter what he does, off it comes. It's slow at first, but then speeds up, and after discovering that the people who have helped him evade justice are similarly tainted (with strange scaly skin and acne, no less), Halleck realises that this is a gypsy curse. However, because he's an asshole who sees no reason to accept blame for what happened he doesn'tworry about atoning. Instead, he decides to use his old ex-mafia friend Richie to help him track down and then pay back the gypsies, before…

Well, spoilers. So, the gypsy man bakes a pie (using some of Halleck's blood) which will pass on the curse to whoever eats it. Now, Halleck is – as already established – an asshole. He should, the gypsy suggests, eat the pie himself, and just accept his fate. That would be taking responsibility for his actions. The curse can't be lifted outright; and only a complete asshole would pass it. But, as we've established…

What maybe can't be seen coming is that Halleck thinks that his wife is to blame for his situation, because she was the onedistracting him from the road. He thinks about giving her the pie, knowing it will harm, hurt and kill her. But he doesn't. He sleeps on it. While he's asleep, his wife and young daughter eat the pie, damning them both. And then, in the novel's final moments, Halleck cuts himself a slice: a gesture that isn't as selfless as it maybe appears. It's a way of meaning that he doesn't have to deal with the guilt of his family dying. Penance through self-destruction.

Before this point, King had done a good job playing with notions of unlikeable protagonists (Carrie; Jack Torrance, certainly; I'd argue that Louis Creed's selfish actions put him on the wrong side of Nice Guy), but Halleck takes things a step further. I don't think there's anything redeemable about him, which actually makes reading the novel relatively tough. You want something to latch onto, and it's not there. When he's terrified, I didn't care. I wanted him to suffer, frankly. And he does, so it's satisfying from that point of view. But then that ending comes along…

I remember loving the ending when I was younger. It made the novel for me, frankly, because it was so dark and cold. Such a brutal way of ending a book: no hope, no going back. Even the innocent in the tale (his daughter) is punished because of his selfish actions. But maybe I'm going soft, because now I wonder whether there wasn't a way of redeeming him. Maybe he could have turned Halleck around. One thing's for sure: the ending being as bleak as it is makes the book feel more distinctly Bachman: the pseudonym's books have a way with endings that stare into the darkness.

So, it's a Bachman book: dark ending; man cut off and struggling to overcome something that is ruining his life; even structurally, the countdown motif that was used in The Long Walk and The Running Man is present here, as each chapter starts with Halleck's current (and constantly deteriorating) weight. But – and it's a big but – this novel is firmly supernatural. It's a supernatural horror story, the first that Bachman had apparently written, but a very familiar move for King. One reviewer at the time ironically remarked that it was "what Stephen King would write if Stephen King could write". In the text of the novel itself, Halleck refers to his experience as being like "something out of a Stephen King novel" – not just a moment of metafictional interjection, but a direct hint, if you're looking for it. So it's maybe not a surprise that King was found out. And while King was apparently disappointed that his secret was out, there's a case to be made for him maybe tripping up on purpose. How did he pick the Bachman books? What made a book Bachman rather than King? Was erring closer to King's usual output here some deep-level subconscious version of self-sabotage? Of wanting to be found out? Of wanting to be able to claim these books as his own again?

The next Bachman novel was meant to be Misery. It's a story for another day, of course; but that's a novel that ties in thematically with all of the previous Bachman books, while being probably the most perfect distillation of King's voice that he would write. It's a book that I think might be his finest, and there's a part of me that wonders if he didn't know that it would be as well. And who would want their finest work attributed to somebody else? Thinner might have just been a get-out clause: a fine horror novel that was never going to set the world alight if published under King's name outright, but that definitely worked to bridge the gap between King and his pseudonym.

Next time: King's second short story collection, Skeleton Crew.

Randall Flagg
04-16-2013, 11:23 AM
I loved the book. Yes Halleck was unlikable; that's what I liked about him. The predictable ending was exactly as it should have been.

divemaster
04-16-2013, 12:36 PM
I loved the book. Yes Halleck was unlikable; that's what I liked about him. The predictable ending was exactly as it should have been.

I agree. I liked everything about Thinner.

"You tell him I've got a curse. It's called the Curse of the White Man from Town. So call it off."

Good stuff.

Bev Vincent
05-08-2013, 06:08 AM
Skeleton Crew (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/may/08/rereading-stephen-king-skeleton-crew)

mae
05-08-2013, 07:15 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/may/08/rereading-stephen-king-skeleton-crew

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 20: Skeleton Crew

Revisiting any book that means something to you is hard, especially when you're a writer. Books feed into our own narrative voices, and the stories we want to tell. It's difficult to pin down the literary influences of many writers, but I think I wear my influences on my sleeve. Greatest among these are some of the stories featured in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. As I reread this collection, I could see how these stories did what they did to me, how they had managed to affect me for so long.

This week I'm going to do something different. I will focus on only three of Skeleton Crew's tales, talking about each in detail. In the comments thread, I urge you to post your own thoughts on your favourite stories from this book. Because The Monkey, Uncle Otto's Truck, Word Processor of the Gods, all the rest of them: they're great stories, and they should be spoken about. But I'm going to look at the three that led me towards writing one of my own novels, The Explorer. So, this is a personal reread – but then, aren't all the best readings personal?

I first read Skeleton Crew as part of my initial King binge, aged 13 and hugely impressionable. His shorts weren't what I wanted from him, so a tiny part of it felt like duty – getting through something that represented a huge amount of time and effort from somebody of whom I was in awe. But the quality of the tales (starting with The Mist, which would have been a novel for most other writers) was such that it soon became one of my favourite King books. Short stories have a way of seeping into the subconscious, I think, as the reader dwells on what was left out. Skeleton Crew is full of stories that linger – some, because they feel as though they're a part of the extended King universe, but some because they're just perfectly realised. And these three, I think, worked their way into me more than the others.

The Jaunt

A simple story: a family is going to travel to Mars; it's the future and water is the Earth's most precious commodity. They're getting there by "jaunting", a process by which you travel through time and space to arrive at your destination instantaneously. We meet the family as they relax in a departure lounge, waiting to be sedated for their trip. The father tells his kids about how the Jaunt was discovered – how a scientist who opened the portal killed mice and tested the technology on prisoners, and how one prisoner was awake during the jaunt. "It's eternity in there," the man said when he came out, his hair turned shock-white – a forerunner for a similar scene in King's later novel It.

The story is essentially exposition until the kicker, which is that the son stays awake during the jaunt, cheating the sedation so he can see what's inside. It's terrifying, because you don't see it coming. You expect mishap, sure, we've been set up for it – but that it involves a child?

King has always been excellent at fooling you into thinking things are heading one way, before veering in an even darker direction. And it was through this short story (and its notion of the jaunt) that I first heard of Alfred Bester's incredible SF novel The Stars My Destination, without which it's likely my own writing would be quite different. I also stole the notion of keeping your eyes open as you stare into a powerful light, one you shouldn't be looking into. (There's possibly an analogy for all of King's work in that concept.)

Beachworld

This one's underrated, I think; you rarely hear people talking about it. Three astronauts crash their craft on a planet that has no water, trees or people. Instead, there is only sand. The sand, it transpires, has something resembling sentience: it swarms and swallows the craft, and threatens to do the same to the astronauts. More than anything, this is a story about isolation, about being stranded, with nowhere to go. It's another concept I stole for my own work. The theme appears in other stories in Skeleton Crew, such as The Mist and The Raft, placing people in a terrifying situation that's out of their hands and picking them off one by one.

I loved this story when I was a kid, and I love it now. The central conceit is loopy – one of those distinctly King-ian turns that few authors are able to pull off. The horror is top-notch, especially in the creepy, disaffected way one of the astronauts sings the Beach Boys as he's swallowed by the sand. I always think of it when I'm brushing sand off my feet after I've been to the seaside. Most of all, there's something horrifying about the thought of being alone, of being left to rot or be consumed. I stole that, too.

Survivor Type

Speaking of being left to rot … in this story, a man is shipwrecked. Everybody else on the ship has died, and he's alone with only the boat's cargo to keep him company: a huge amount of heroin. He used to be a doctor, so he has skills – for instance, when he kills a bird and has to eat it raw; when he injures himself and has to amputate his foot (which, starving, he promptly eats); and then, later, when he has to amputate more and more of his body to ward off both infection and hunger. It's a terrifying story, with an isolated and potentially unreliable narrator (I stole that) who witnesses the degradation of his memories and sanity (stole that), and whose only recourse against loneliness is to reflect on what put him in that situation (stole that as well).

Again, King plays on common, conventional fears. Who hasn't wondered what might happen if they were shipwrecked? Who hasn't wondered how far they would go to survive? But the fact that King pushes the story as far as he does – no happy ending, no last-minute reprieve – dampens the horror. When somebody has pushed themselves this far – "Lady fingers, they taste just like lady fingers", he howls as he eats his own hand – there's no going back.

I'm aware that the things I've attributed to these stories happen in the work of other writers, in other books, but it was strange for me to read these tales now, in light of my own writing. And – spoiler alert for the next instalment – in rereading the novel It, the debt so many horror/thriller writers owe to King is more obvious than ever.

Should I feel guilty about being so influenced by another writer? I don't see it so much as theft as understanding where I learned what it was I wanted to write, and how I wanted to write it. This rereading experiment has shown me the extent of my debt to King's writing, and the impact of his stories on us as readers. The tremendous community generated by this series of articles is evidence of that. So, again, in the comments, tell us which of the Skeleton Crew stories you loved most, and why you loved them. I for one would like to know.

Next

They all float down here: it's time for one of Stephen King's most famous novels, It.

Bev Vincent
05-28-2013, 12:51 PM
Chapter 21: IT (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/may/28/rereading-stephen-king-it)

Iwritecode
05-29-2013, 06:24 AM
The Shining's Dick Halloran, saving Mike Hanlon in the Black Spot fire

I thought that was Mike's dad that got saved?

jhanic
05-29-2013, 07:56 AM
It was.

John

mae
05-29-2013, 08:34 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/may/28/rereading-stephen-king-it

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 21: It

It is one of King's most enduring novels; it's crossed over from just being read by his fans, and become a part of a wider cultural consciousness. There's something universal about it; something that feels like a summation of King's previous work in the horror genre. I've mentioned, in the past, the slur that King created his novels by simply taking things with the potential to be creepy – empty hotels, dogs, disease – and ramping up the horror. For his detractors, It is possibly the most obvious example. But his use of classic horror tropes here was wholly intentional; and, by using them, he created what is likely his scariest novel in the process.

It is intimidatingly huge. Fourteen hundred pages long in my printing (the only bigger novel I own is Infinite Jest), and famously weighing nigh-on four pounds, it's a challenge to hold, let alone read. I don't recall a huge amount about the physical experience of reading most novels. The book is all, for the most part. But I remember reading It in the summer. It is, as has been mentioned before on this very site, a summer novel. I spent a week of the school holidays in Derry, King's fictional Maine town, with my fictional friends in the novel's so-called Losers' Club, during the long summer of 1958. I knew them all: Bill, Bev, Richie, Ben, Mike, Stan and Eddie. We were all roughly the same age, we were all misfits, and all that any of us wanted was to stop being afraid. I had things going on in my own life that I couldn't deal with; their problems were bigger than mine, but I felt that they would have understood me regardless. They would have accepted me.

And then they grew up, and I got to see where they landed. The book is essentially two novels, featuring the same characters during different parts of their lives – teenagers in 1958, and adults in 1985 – as they attempt to deal with their hopes and fears; and with the titular menace. The monster presents itself as that which you are most afraid of; it finds your fears, and feasts on them. It's a creature beyond any that King had unleashed before that point, because it represented every evil: all childhood fears manifested.

Of course, the most famous and lasting of those manifestations is Pennywise, the clown that – thanks, in no small part, to Tim Curry's performance in the surprisingly enduring TV movie adaptation – has come to be a face of the novel itself. I'd never been scared of clowns, but something about Pennywise taught me how to be. As the novel goes on, we see it manifest as vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, a mummy, all classic horror icons; but Pennywise is the one that endures, the creation that is wholly King's. In Time magazine, around the book's release, King stated that his thought had been to "bring on all the monsters one last time … and call it It" . He wanted to sum up all of childhood in those fears, and then cast those fears off; to write a novel about the loss of childhood innocence. Pennywise – an image associated with laughter and innocent joy – was his trump card. Of course, Pennywise isn't the novel's biggest terror. The most prominent notions of fear in the novel come from the Losers' Club themselves: their home lives, the things that have made them pariahs.

I can't read It for pure pleasure now, not really. I'm a different reader, and there are things that I would critique, if I had to: common complaints, about how long the novel is; or about questionable scenes concerning childhood sexuality that shocked me when I was a kid. (One particular scene involving the young Losers' Club taking part in what amounts to an orgy shocks me to this day.)

Looking at it as a writer, it's incredible: a structural marvel, an author at the height of his powers, and he's showing off. Juggling dual narratives, historical interludes, an astonishing number of characters, King somehow makes it all seem effortless. It wasn't, of course – at the end of the novel we are told that it took him four years to write – but it seems to emerged from his imagination fully formed. It's perhaps the best example of King's astonishing skill with focalisation, as well, moving between different character viewpoints. Even after multiple reads over the course of my life – five? six? I can't say for sure – it still wows me.

Connections

This novel sits in the middle of much of King's work: in Derry, the fictional town thatis the setting for so many stories; in The Shining's Dick Halloran, saving Mike Hanlon in the Black Spot fire; in the links with the Dark Tower, especially Stuttering Bill and the Turtle (long story for another time); in Mike Hanlon, popping up in Insomnia; in the mentions of the towns from Children Of The Corn. And, most powerful of all, in 11/22/63: when the time-travelling main character visits Derry and meets Bev and Richie. I felt as he did; travelling back to somewhere that I knew, to meet people that I knew from another time.

There's something else that I think is interesting. King's eldest son, Joe Hill (one of the three kids that It was dedicated to) has recently published an excellent and hugely unsettling novel called NOS-4R2. Just as It was a culmination of King's work in the horror genre, Hill has described NOS-4R2 as his "senior PhD thesis on horror". There's a moment in the book where a map is shown of worlds that we cannot visit through normal means. One of them is Pennywise's Circus. Maybe everything is just on the path of a beam …

Next: King's foray into the traditional fantasy genre, The Eyes Of The Dragon.

harrison ryan
06-21-2013, 05:20 AM
The newest installment has been posted: The Eyes of the Dragon. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jun/20/rereading-stephen-king-eyes-of-the-dragon)

mae
06-21-2013, 06:07 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jun/20/rereading-stephen-king-eyes-of-the-dragon

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 22: The Eyes of the Dragon

There's a lot of debate in some circles about exactly what sort of author Stephen King is. Genres are either dismissive of him, or claim ownership: people who dislike horror claim that he's not a horror writer; people who dislike fantasy seem willing to pretend that The Dark Tower series just doesn't exist; and some seem to dislike the books he's written that take on a more literary bent, simply because they don't feature those things that go bump in the night.

I like to think that I've grown past that now, and that I can take King for who he is, and on a book-by-book basis. I like to think I can do that with anything I read now, frankly – genre be damned. When I was 13, however, that was impossible for me: he wrote horror novels. Anything else, I wasn't really interested.

I hated The Hobbit. I just couldn't imagine why anybody would want to read such a twee, simpering narrative, overwritten and unimaginative. I didn't like it one bit. I was told to try The Lord of the Rings, as something more grown-up, but that was, somehow, worse; just a mess of nonsense to me.

So, when I was going through King's work and came to the cover of this – which proudly declared, over a picture of a wizard and some fancy patterns, that this was "a classic fantasy from the master storyteller" – I just had no interest in it. I brought my own baggage to those 400 pages of dragons and wizards and traditional, fantasy-quest narrative, and I (perhaps inevitably) hated it. Maybe, of all the King novels I have to reread for this project, this was the one I was dreading most; and I'm not alone in that. Many King fans dislike it, simply because it strays into a genre they don't see as his.

What did I specifically hate? I hated the tone. I hated the narrator of this novel-told-as-story, an omniscient wizard (I assumed) with a personality. I even disliked the main characters, Peter and Thomas, for being whiny and having a curious lack of agency. And the ending, which just seemed to fade into nothingness after building up to what, in my mind, should have been a terrific climax, a battle to end all battles. Villains, I thought, should not escape. They should not go unpunished.

One of the issues was that, for some reason, I had read The Eyes of the Dragon before I read The Stand. Don't ask me why – it makes no sense to me either – and yet there it is. So, the fact that the bad guy in the novel is Randall Flagg, antagonist of The Stand and The Dark Tower series, was lost on me. I don't know what that would have changed back then. It would have blown my mind, likely. I don't remember making the connection when I read The Stand, because I think I was trying to forget the earlier fantasy novel I wanted to pretend my hero hadn't written. I shelved it and never looked back. I don't even own my first print copy of it any more.

Which brings us to the present, and to me coming back to this novel for the first time in 20 years. Now, I have read and enjoyed a lot of fantasy novels – even Lord of the Rings. Now – post-Stand, post-Dark Tower books, post-every other hint of Flagg or mid-world in King's other books – I was able to approach this novel in a completely different way.

It's dedicated to Ben (son of Peter) Straub and Naomi King, his then-13-year-old daughter. King wrote it for her, to give her something of his to read. He put her and Ben in the novel as minor characters (even marrying them off in the end), and he created a narrator that, when you pick apart the voice, isn't some wizard at all; it's King himself. It's a storyteller, trying to ease in ideas and concepts, and trying to parlay some of what makes him a storyteller on to the page itself. Compare the voice with the one he uses in his introductions – his "constant reader" invocations – it's the same.

The book is a fantasy novel that feels, for the most part, as if it's aimed at a young adult audience. I couldn't escape the thought in this reread, though I think it made me far prefer the novel this time around.

The narrative voice is what carries it, doing some wonderful things – particularly with regard to narrative point of view, allowing us inside Flagg's head in a way that we are not permitted in his other appearances, and we see him as nearly human, confused and flawed, with just the beginnings of his malignant evil – and come the novel's final chapter, it feels almost as if King is sitting next to you, shutting a book and telling you it's time for bed.

There are life lessons here ("Did they all live happily ever after? They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories might say."), and some rounding off of individual character narratives in way that feels almost CS Lewis-ish.

But then there's also, if you know how Flagg's story ends, a real darkness – and it probably wouldn't be a King novel without it. This is the first chronological appearance of Flagg in King's work, set before The Stand. So when Thomas and Dennis go off in search of Flagg and, as the book says, confront him, we are not told what happens. Instead, the story is left open and hanging, to be revisited; and we know, because we're his constant readers – because Flagg exists past this tale, and into so many other novels – that the story King would tell us simply cannot have a happy ending.

Now I know, of course, that King didn't only write horror novels. He writes a lot of them, sure, but there's so much of his output that is somewhat unclassifiable. The Eyes of the Dragon is not. It's a fantasy novel, through and through. But that doesn't mean it should be shunned. Every writer wants to stretch their wings, and we should let them: it's how great writers can grow.

Now, I can see this as the fun exercise in fantasy genre storytelling that it is. It doesn't need to be The Stand, or It. Not everything can be. Many King fans can't see that. The fact this book exists seems have made some fans (going by some of the more extreme Amazon and Goodreads reviews) not very happy at all; and some Kng fans write it off to this day without having read it, simply because of the shift to another genre.

But maybe their anger is a good thing. Without it, we might not have had Misery – a book about a novelist whose fans won't let him write anything other than what they know and love him for. As The Eyes of the Dragon says at its close, however: "That is another tale, for another day …"

Next: From one Randall Flagg book to another – it's The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three.

Bev Vincent
07-09-2013, 06:29 AM
chapter 23: The Drawing of the Three (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jul/09/rereading-stephen-king-drawing-of-the-tree)

mae
07-09-2013, 07:24 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jul/09/rereading-stephen-king-drawing-of-the-tree

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 23: The Drawing of the Three

In 1987, Stephen King was at the height of both his powers, and his popularity. In the 13 years and 23 books since Carrie was released, his name had become publishing gold. It, The Shining, The Stand, Salem's Lot: these were books that were going to go down in publishing history. And then, in 1987, King published four novels within a 10-month period, three of them standalone books with something to offer for nearly every potential reader. The Eyes of the Dragon was a young adult fantasy novel; Misery was a literary psychological thriller; The Tommyknockers was a science fiction horror epic. And then there was The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three..

The sequel to The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three seems to have been meant for what King referred to as the "Constant Reader" – those who follow his every published word. It wasn't as if The Gunslinger set the world on fire ( sales figures suggest that it was, on release, one of his lesser-selling books); there would likely have been more fervour for a sequel to something like Firestarter or Salem's Lot. But King didn't, at that point in his career, write sequels – it's taken 36 years for the first to be looming over the hill in the form of Doctor Sleep, the forthcoming follow-up to The Shining – so the Dark Tower series was an anomaly. Where every other novel had the lowest barrier for entry possible, the Dark Tower books relied on the reader having read the others.

The Drawing of the Three picks up the action where The Gunslinger left off – or as near as dammit, after a section ("Argument") that essentially takes the role of those Previously On... bits at the start of TV shows. Roland of Gilead had been chasing the Man In Black across the desert, then they had a little tarot-card reading, Roland fell asleep for 10 years and the Man In Black escaped. Book one was hugely tense and bizarrely structured, a three-act tribute to both Sergio Leone and Tolkien filled with tonal statements of intent: dead towns, displaced children (from "other worlds than these") and a truly evil villain. Book two begins with another such statement, when Roland is attacked by a giant lobster and loses two of the fingers on his right hand. He then wanders in a fever to a beach filled with doors, each of which leads to New York City at various points in its history.

The book, from that point, becomes a "putting together the band" style narrative, with Roland going to three different times in our world and meeting significant characters. The first, Eddie, is a drug smuggler and addict, whose life is saved by Roland; the second is Odetta Holmes, a disabled black civil rights protester with multiple personality disorder; and the third is a red herring, a bad guy rather than team-mate. This is Jack Mort, the man who not only gave Odetta her split personality, but was also the reason that she lost her legs. Jack Mort, it's clear, is another of King's Very Bad Men, one whose actions have wide and far-reaching effects for the Dark Tower series, even as his particular story is neatly dealt with over the course of this single novel.

But this is a book primarily about repercussions. My own relationship with the Dark Tower novels, as I've previously said, happened 30 years after The Gunslinger was first published, and after I'd read everything else King had written. I read the first four Dark Tower novels as if they were one utterly mammoth tome over a period of only a few days. They spilled into each other, so where the first was a strangely-structured wander through vague and hazily ambient storytelling, this is more direct, a very different sort of book. There's even a tonal shift, I feel now, that doesn't jar, but definitely seems to bridge the first to the later books in the series.

Some people will see that as damning. Bridge novels – a term used to describe those books in a series that simply bind the other books together without being readable on their own – are often chastised, but they have a place. And this is a bridge novel, in the truest sense of the word. If you don't know Roland, the loss of his fingers surely means nothing to you; if you don't read the later books, the effects that Mort has on the rest of the series will make him seem as if he's somewhat pointless; and if you don't know who Jake is, the mention of him will mean nothing to you. It picks up threads while setting up new ones, and is pretty impenetrable if you don't know what you're letting yourself in for.

That's the way with the Dark Tower books. They're not casual; they're for King's Constant Readers. They're all about the threads, and how they're tied up. Rereading them is fascinating, because they're so incredibly intricate. Lines and themes reappear, fading in and out; and taken on their own, maybe they don't mean much. As part of the whole, though, they're quite the thing. It's why the series has the following that it does; to read it makes you feel a part of something. That's how I felt when I first read it, because the books felt as if they had been written for me and me alone; and that's how I feel now, when I understand it within the context of the rest of King's oeuvre.

But, for heaven's sake, don't try reading it on its own.

Connections

Last time, for The Eyes of the Dragon, I mentioned that Dennis and Thomas's story, chasing after Randall Flagg, was left hanging open, to be revisited. In The Drawing of the Three, that revisiting occurs, as Roland tells a tale of witnessing said chase. Amazed at Flagg's power, he was shocked when he saw one of them being turned into a dog. Maybe that's not the end to the story that some readers wanted, but it's definitely a cap on Dennis, Thomas and The Eyes of the Dragon – and brings that book firmly into the Dark Tower mythology.

Of course, there are many more connections to the rest of the Dark Tower books in this, but that's pretty much a given.

Next time: Don't even attempt to run away from what might well be King's finest novel: it's MISERY.

Iwritecode
07-10-2013, 06:43 AM
But King didn't, at that point in his career, write sequels – it's taken 36 years for the first to be looming over the hill in the form of Doctor Sleep, the forthcoming follow-up to The Shining – so the Dark Tower series was an anomaly.

Doesn't Black House count as a sequel?


Last time, for The Eyes of the Dragon, I mentioned that Dennis and Thomas's story, chasing after Randall Flagg, was left hanging open, to be revisited. In The Drawing of the Three, that revisiting occurs, as Roland tells a tale of witnessing said chase. Amazed at Flagg's power, he was shocked when he saw one of them being turned into a dog.

Somebody was turned into a dog? Why don't I remember this at all?

ChristineB
07-10-2013, 06:49 AM
Yeh Black House is a sequel and I don't consider DotT to be a sequel at all more like a continuation, which is what I consider all the books in the series to be. JMO

Bev Vincent
07-10-2013, 06:53 AM
Somebody was turned into a dog? Why don't I remember this at all?

DoT3: These three had crossed only a tiny part of what had been a confused and confusing time in the gunslinger's life, but he would never forget seeing Flagg change a man who had irritated him into a howling dog. He remembered that well enough.

ChristineB
07-10-2013, 07:26 AM
So is that actually about the people from EotD or just something he saw Flagg do to an anonymous stranger?

Bev Vincent
07-10-2013, 07:44 AM
Roland met up with Dennis and Peter as they were on Flagg's trail. He saw Flagg at around the same time.

Randall Flagg
07-12-2013, 11:35 AM
I never considered DOTT as a bridge novel. It was engrossing, and impossible to put down. I think I read it without eating, drinking, and only coming up for air.
WOTC and especially SOS are bridge novels. DOTT was/is perfect.

jhanic
07-12-2013, 11:51 AM
I would also consider Wizard and Glass a bridge novel, in that the vast majority of the book does not advance the story. I agree that Drawing of the Three is definitely NOT a bridge novel.

John

Jean
07-14-2013, 04:02 AM
WOTC and especially SOS are bridge novels.
bears read both
without eating, drinking, and only coming up for air.

***
On the other hand, I don't see how these volumes can be considered separately. On yet another hand, if anything doesn't have a value of its own, it's The Gunslinger; not a bridge, but a front door (though not very inviting).

(partly agree with John above anyway)

Bev Vincent
07-30-2013, 06:52 AM
chapter 24: Misery (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/30/rereading-stephen-king-misery)

mae
07-31-2013, 08:41 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/30/rereading-stephen-king-misery

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 24: Misery

1987 was a big year for King. Four novels published in 10 months. That's ludicrous. Yes, he didn't write them all that quickly (although a quick glimpse at his release schedule for previous years suggests it's not as if he took any real holidays from the typewriter), but the act of editing them, prepping them for release, and promoting them: that would have been tiring.

And it was a strange year in terms of the books themselves, because only one of the titles – The Tommyknockers – resembles the sort of thing King's staunch fanbase already drooled over. (Even then, it's a piece of SF rather than straight-up horror.) Misery is the strangest of them all, however, because it barely relates to any of King's other books. Instead? It's one of the greatest thrillers ever written.

While I might have my hyperbole hat on, this book deserves it. It began life as what would have been the final Richard Bachman book before King killed him off. The books authored by that pseudonym, as I've harped on about before, were nastier in a way than King's traditional output; their bad guys were more human, and the books less supernatural. Misery has no supernatural elements, focusing instead on a story that is actually desperately sad, and, to my mind, hugely personal to King.

Paul Shelton is a much-loved author of a specific kind of genre fiction: the bodice-ripper. His main character, the wonderfully named Misery Chastain, is loved by his fans, but not so much by her author. So, he does what any sane writer who wants to write other stories would do: he kills her off, in a book that, at the novel's start, is still unpublished. And then he writes an utterly different novel, Fast Cars, packed full of violence, and swearing, and catharsis. Paul has a car crash – the irony – and is rescued from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, his "biggest fan". She lives in the middle of nowhere, and used to be a nurse, and she can, she tells him, nurse him back to health. Only, of course, she doesn't. As his biggest fan, she's driven almost entirely by a desire to see him write the books that she wants him to write. There's the hint that she might have set a trap to get him – it's a hell of a coincidence that he should end up crashing just where she could find him – but that's not the story. The majority of the book's plot is superbly simple: Paul is injured and trapped in Annie's house, and she is insane. He has to escape, and save his life, because there will come a point, it's clear, where she will push him too far.

It's unbelievably tense, and superbly written, probably – along with Bag of Bones, but we're not getting to that for a long time yet – King's finest prose. And this is a novel with no ghosts or psychics or aliens; it's a book about a woman who feels too passionately for a character that she has created in her head, a character who doesn't – and cannot – exist, and for the writer who created her. It's a book about being mentally ill, in many ways; and, true to this period of King's output, about dependency.

There's one overriding theme that runs through Misery and the two books that followed, The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half: all three deal, whether consciously or not, with King's addiction to drink and drugs at the height of its powers. They're about stages of addiction: The Tommyknockers is probably King's most drug-addled book, like seeing the world through a lens of cocaine and sleeplessness; Misery is about kicking addiction, being deprived of the thing you need the most; and The Dark Half is about burying the person that you were, that you hated, and trying to begin the next (clean) stage of your life. That these three books were published as King was cleaning himself up and kicking his addictions simply can't be a coincidence.

In Misery, themes of addiction and entrapment abound. Paul is trapped physically by Annie, kept on a bed and, in the novel's most horrifying moment, has his foot amputated to ensure that he cannot move. And he's trapped by the drugs that she gives him, the painkillers that she gets him addicted to during his initial healing process and which make him compliant. And he's trapped in his career, writing books for a fanbase he's sick of, people who want him to endlessly regurgitate the same thing again and again (and that's a whole other thematic crossover from the text to King's real-world life). The metaphors don't stop with Paul: Annie is trapped in the books and worlds that she loves; she is trapped by her past; she is trapped by mental problems. The old adage goes that writers should write what they know, and I think here King did: he wrote a novel with two characters who are at war over him. They're at war over freedom, and the chance to start again, free of the shackles that have been holding them back. When I read the book back it was all I could see: endless references to being trapped and addicted. At the novel's close, when Paul has escaped Annie's clutches, her impact remains. He hasn't kicked his sickness; he's just escaped it for a little while. It haunts him, and likely always will.

But then, through all that, the book is what matters. It's one of the best exercises in tension and restraint that I have ever encountered: as a template novel for the thriller, echoes of it can still be seen in today's huge publishing successes. It might just be King's finest novel: an example of the power that his words can have. Every character in the book feels it, and so do you as a reader. This is a book that every reader, King fan or not, should read.

Connections

Misery overtly references two of King's more conventional horror texts: Annie refers to The Shining's Overlook Hotel at one point (which also counts as a reference to King's forthcoming Doctor Sleep); and Paul Sheldon grew up near the Kaspbrak family, as featured in It. And it works the other way as well: in a few other King tales (Rose Madder, Desperation, The Library Policeman), characters talk of having read books in Sheldon's much-beloved Misery series…

Next: Late last night and the night before, it's The Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.

Bev Vincent
08-28-2013, 06:12 AM
Chapter 25: The Tommyknockers (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/28/the-tommyknockers-stephen-king-rereading)

mae
08-28-2013, 06:53 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/28/the-tommyknockers-stephen-king-rereading

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 25: The Tommyknockers

When I was a teenager, the concept of addiction – of something being a need, not a want – was foreign to me. I didn't understand the many ways that Paul Sheldon in Misery was reliant on Annie; I simply understood that the pills were keeping his pain away, but of course there's more to it than that. So when I first read The Tommyknockers, the same themes of addiction didn't sit with me as they should. Probably more than any other novel in this rereading project, The Tommyknockers is a different book to me now, because I can see it for what it is: a book about addiction, and probably the best example in the canon of King writing metaphorically.

Published at the tail end of 1987, the last of four books King released that year, it stands as one of King's longest novels. The paperback is a brick. The story is simple, and hugely in debt to Lovecraft, Quatermass and the Pit and Invasion of the Body Snatchers: a spacecraft is discovered buried in the woods, and when excavated releases a gas that makes the townsfolk turn into the alien race that once inhabited the craft. The plot is fairly slight; it's the characters that give the book its bulk.

I was used to King's flawed protagonists, so many of them fundamentally broken and trying to find a way out of their own personal holes. But the teenage me had never been so confused as when I met Gard. He's a writer and an addict (two King tropes that have come up again and again, and will continue to do so as we head deeper into this project), but there's an almost disarming honesty about him. King's addicts are often ruined, but they try. They want to be better people: either by kicking their addictions, or by making it clear that the addictions don't necessarily define who they are. Gard is different; he's broken, but for most of the novel it seems as if there's no way for him to fix himself. He's an alcoholic, and that alcoholism defines him absolutely. He has fugue states, periods of memory loss and violent temper, all of which he regrets but shows no real desire to stop. His friend Bobbi (another writer) is the one who discovers the spacecraft, and she's the one who drives Gard through the novel. He sees the changes in her, and he knows that something is wrong. But he's caught up in his own mess, in himself.

She becomes more lost because he's too distracted by his own issues to notice when she needs him. By the time that the alien presence has possessed most of the town – Gard is spared because of a metal plate in his head, though that can't save him from his personal demons – he is a wreck, yet somehow the only one who can save his community; and, indeed, the world.

I mentioned in my Misery reread that to me, Misery, The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half all represent different stages of addiction; and that The Tommyknockers is the darkness of addiction writ large. There's the possession of everybody in the town by this thing that forces them to change who they are; Gard's own addictions; Bobbi's possession, and forcing of painkillers on Gard to be able to read his thoughts; Gard's final decision, which reads like a cry for help, a suicidal howl that destroys the lives of everybody he's ever known. There's pain on the page, for better or worse.

Unfortunately – you knew this was coming, right? – it's painful to read in a few other ways as well. The Tommyknockers is a mess. That's hard for me to say, because I love King's writing, but out of the sixty-something books there were bound to be a few duds. It's both confused and confusing, and far too long. It was written when King was at the worst stage of his addictions by all accounts, and it reads like one long, cocaine-fuelled late-night paranoia fantasy, where everybody is part of some conspiracy that only the addict can truly see. If you consider the novel's two writers as proxies for King, it's almost glaringly apparent: one has been changed by the presence of the spaceship for what they perceive to be the better; the other changed irrevocably for the worse. It's obvious, when you lay it out, but also unsatisfying. Not only is the book no fun to read, it's harder still when you feel King's own pain lifting off the page.

I didn't like the book back when I first read it, but I couldn't express why. Now, I can see that it isn't a novel; it's a cry for help. And the best thing I can say about it is that, after he published it, King's wife, Tabitha, intervened. King didn't write for another two years, getting clean and suffering horrific writer's block as a result. When he came back, he'd written The Dark Half, a book I class among his greatest; and from there he entered a run of novels (Needful Things, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder) that challenged both King as a writer and all those readers who thought they knew what King was capable of. One of the most common themes with addicts is that you have to hit bottom before you can pick yourself up. I don't like The Tommyknockers, but I don't think it's meant to be liked; it's important that it exists, but for reasons beyond the page.

Connections

The Tommyknockers is jam-packed. Gard has a fugue-state conversation with Jack from The Talisman after a drinking session; there's a sighting of Pennywise in a storm drain; there's a reference to Johnny Smith's coma, from The Dead Zone; to a dog "acting like a regular Cujo!"; and then to the Shop, the government department which pops up in countless other King books (and which really needs its own book now, I think).

Next: The sparrows are flying again: it's The Dark Half.

Jean
08-28-2013, 07:12 AM
a fantastic reduction of what is a great novel to the small potato the critic want it to be

Bev Vincent
08-28-2013, 07:50 AM
I agree with almost all of what he has to say -- Tommyknockers is at the very bottom of my list of King books. I was intrigued, actually, by his insight into addiction and how it relates to the book. Food for thought.

Iwritecode
08-28-2013, 12:40 PM
it stands as one of King's longest novels.

I had never really thought of this as one of his longer novels but it comes in around #16 in page count out of his 40+ novels.

Bev Vincent
08-28-2013, 12:44 PM
It just SEEMS really, really long...

mae
10-21-2013, 04:13 PM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/21/rereading-stephen-king-the-dark-half

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 26: The Dark Half

King's addictions have been well documented in this series. The Tommyknockers, his previous novel, was written in a haze of cocaine and cough syrup, and reads like it; after its publication, King's wife, Tabitha, staged an intervention. He was to kick his habits, save his family, and then resume writing. When he came back, two years later, it was with The Dark Half, a novel that manages to encapsulate all King's demons – his addictions, his worries about his family life, the ups and downs of his own publishing career – while being unlike anything he'd written before.

The Dark Half is my favourite King novel. It may not be his best, but it's the one that I love most.

When King's angry, less-pleasant Richard Bachman pseudonym was discovered by the reading public, he decided to kill him off, and issued a press release about the fake writer's death. It was a nice touch. In The Dark Half, Thad Beaumont is a writer who has an angry, unpleasant pseudonym of his own: George Stark. The pseudonym is discovered, and Beaumont is forced to kill him off as well. A story runs in People magazine, along with a photograph of a mock burial, a headstone for a man who never existed. "George Stark," the headstone reads, "Not a very nice guy". With King's pseudonym, however, that was that (aside from his own journeys back into the Bachman voice in later novels). For Beaumont, burying this fake man somehow channels him into coming to life. The rest of the novel deals with what happens when Stark comes out of that grave (heralded by the message, "The sparrows are flying again") and enacts a terrible series of killings – killings that inevitably leave Beaumont as the prime suspect.

The plot is one of King's strongest – the idea of your demons becoming real, and hunting you out to enact some grotesque revenge, is a hugely appealing one – and yet what lingers after reading are the ways in which King's own life intrudes upon his fictional work. If Stark is seen as a projection of all of those traits that King saw and hated in himself (anger, pain, addiction, a potential for violence), the work takes on a whole new layer. At the end of the book, when Stark is vanquished, Beaumont's wife leaves him, unable to see the man she once loved past the hate and pain he has brought upon his family. It's possible to see this as a fear that King himself had; that Tabitha, his long-suffering wife, would find herself unable to see the man that she loved for all the mess in their lives.

What stuck with me was that it was about a writer actually writing. Though the writer with demons is an essential King trope, this book feels as though it's about an actual, working writer: somebody with a career. For better or worse, when I was a teenager I saw Thad Beaumont as an aspirational figure; a man who was doing what I wanted to do. I once rewrote The Dark Half – don't laugh – across 17 pages, abridging it into a short story in an attempt to understand how King did it. Even the excerpts of Stark's writing – about an even nastier man than the faux-author, called Alexis Machine – tied into the main story. Stark's writing was Beaumont's writing was King's writing. If Alexis Machine was Beaumont's darkest moment, so too was it King's.

In my first edition of the novel, the cover proclaims The Dark Half to be King's "masterpiece". It's not heralded as one of his great novels now, and I think that's hugely unfair. It's a deeply personal book, intimately bound up with the creative process, and yet also presents a gripping, and almost grotesquely dark story to rival any other that King has written.

Connections

The Dark Half introduces Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who will later reappear in Needful Things – another hugely underrated book – and Bag Of Bones. (And, thanks to Pangborn's reappearance, we discover the true ending of The Dark Half: that, when Beaumont's wife leaves him, he ends up killing himself.)

Next: Four Past Midnight

divemaster
10-22-2013, 05:23 AM
The Dark Half is one of the few King novels I've only read once. I recall thinking it had a great set-up but then about two-thirds of the way through it really lost momentum. Interestingly, I felt the same way about Needful Things, another novel I only read once. It's not a matter of not liking "the ending," as in one or two final scenes that didn't deliver. More of "Wow, what a great plot scenario for a novel! What interesting characters!" for more than half the book and then "huh, it got kindof lame."

But after 20 years both are due for a re-read. I may have a different impression next go 'round.

Bev Vincent
11-26-2013, 07:06 AM
Chapter 27: Four Past Midnight (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/nov/26/rereading-stephen-king-four-past-midnight)

mae
11-26-2013, 07:08 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/nov/26/rereading-stephen-king-four-past-midnight

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 27: Four Past Midnight

The Langoliers - that's why I remember Four Past Midnight. There are three other novellas in this collection, but The Langoliers is the one that stuck with me, some of the images burned into my mind as brightly as any of King's stories. It's not just me: lots of readers seem to single it out, not necessarily aware that it's part of a collection of novellas.

King has published a few of these collections. Different Seasons, Hearts In Atlantis, Full Dark No Stars, even the Bachman Books – each features pieces that, for many writers, would be published as individual books. Four Past Midnight is no exception: four stories that cover many different facets of King's writing, but all intrinsically tied to this stage of King's career.

Still, The Langoliers is the one. It's harrowing. The main characters are all asleep on American Pride Flight 29, a red-eye flight across America. When they wake up, they're alone. Everybody else on the flight has disappeared, leaving the plane without a crew. They land the plane – one of the surviving passengers is a pilot – and step out into the airport to discover that they're totally alone. There's nobody in the terminal, nobody else anywhere. There's something wrong with the air, and with all food and water: everything is stale and tasteless. The survivors hear static, in the distance; some crackling that they can't explain. Then, the Langoliers appear: terrifying creatures that eat lost time, swallow up the past. Somehow, the plane flew through a rift, and the characters who survived the flight are trapped in that fragment of the past, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

It's a great idea, with the execution both grounded and terrifying. Several of our natural fears are preyed upon – flying, being alone, creatures with scary teeth – but there's a great second level of terror being worked into the story: the fear of losing (or wasting) time. (The concepts of wasting time and losing control are almost the primary antagonists in this story.)

So, that was what I brought to this reread: I couldn't really remember the other stories in the book. What I took away, however, were the other three. Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Library Policeman are fine novellas, about a mentally unstable, possibly psychotic writer accused of plagiarism, and an evil being who hunts down those who have overdue library books; but it's The Sun Dog that I most loved. A Castle Rock-set prelude of sorts to the grotesquely underrated Needful Things (coming up in a few weeks' time,), it features a camera that, whenever it takes a photograph, shows an unsettling black dog (another of King's recurring themes, especially relevant in his post-addiction times) The dog comes closer and closer to the camera with each new picture, until it eventually breaks free of the camera itself. Again, it's material that King had played with before, and would do again – the possession (no pun intended) that gives the user more than they ever wanted, exposing them to a terror that they push themselves to explore through their own curiosity – but it's done succinctly here, and with real control. The inevitability is what pushes the story along – we want to see the dog escape, as horrifying as we know that will be.

It's a pretty strong collection, all told; while the middle two stories are perhaps slightly weaker (surprising, given that Secret Window was deemed strong enough to be turned into a Johnny Depp film a decade ago), the two tales that bookend the book are among King's best shorter pieces. The Langoliers won't ever not scare me, simply because it chimes with so many of my own fears – I've always had a thing about static – and The Sun Dog works beautifully as another addition to those metaphorical stories about King's own personal fears.

Next: Ka-tet assemble! For chapter 28, we will be back in the Dark Tower, for The Waste Lands.

Jean
11-26-2013, 08:02 AM
but it's The Sun Dog that I most lovedit's the first time that bears agree with him about anything

Iwritecode
11-26-2013, 09:39 AM
I suppose if I had to rank the stories in order it would go:

The Langoliers
The Sun Dog
The Library Policeman
Secret Window, Secret Garden

Although the first 2 could almost be 1 and 1a.

Jean
11-26-2013, 10:09 AM
I suppose if I had to rank the stories in order it would go:

The Langoliers
The Sun Dog
The Library Policeman
Secret Window, Secret Garden

Although the first 2 could almost be 1 and 1a.Same here, with 1a and 1 reversed

stroppygoblin
11-26-2013, 02:47 PM
All, please don't take this as in anyway reflecting of you or what you have written, but this is exactly why I hated English Literature classes <muffled> years ago... I like to read a story and enjoy being in the moment, I enjoy a connection with the characters and their dialog but mostly I enjoy the way it looks in MY head. For me picking the book apart analytically seems like the best way to ruin a good story.

Iwritecode
11-27-2013, 07:09 AM
I don't really mind when others do it. It's interesting to see what they think of the story or what it means to them. It doesn't add or subtract from my enjoyment of the story when I read it.

I just don't have the ability to do it myself. It's the reason I have trouble explaining exactly why I like or dislike something whether it's music, books, movies or whatever.

I almost envy the ones that can.

Randall Flagg
11-27-2013, 01:09 PM
I didn't enjoy The Langoliers.
The Sun Dog and Secret Window Secret Garden were the best in my opinion.

mae
02-25-2014, 06:23 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/feb/25/rereading-stephen-king-the-dark-tower-the-waste-lands

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 28: The Dark Tower III - The Waste Lands

The first two parts of the Dark Tower series are rather different. One is quiet, focused yet fractured; the other is more sprawling, introducing monsters and parallel worlds and multiple personalities. King realised that himself, later retconning some of the content to bring the first part – the amazing Gunslinger – into line with later books. The series was written over a 30-year period, and is still going, in dribs and drabs. I assume that when he started writing it, King wasn't entirely sure what form it was ultimately going to take. I suspect that The Waste Lands, book 3 in the series, was the point where the bigger picture started to reveal itself to King – because that's certainly where it all starts happening for his Constant Readers.

The Waste Lands takes its title from TS Eliot's poem of nearly the same name: a major work of modernism, disjointed in its voices, which looks at society through historical and mythical allusions. Referencing it so directly is perhaps the first indication readers were given of King's intentions in the creation of his fantastical world: while this is not our world, the connections and links to it are strong, albeit wholly fractured. This would be a theme that King would carry through the rest of the series, dipping in and out of our reality, of the myths and stories that we tell.

Another thing that's shared by both texts is the debt that they owe to their influences. Sources and references abound in both, with Eliot taking in Homer, Spenser, Chaucer, Conrad, Milton, Huxley: the sum of what made him a writer, spilling out through his own words. The same is true for King. Take Shardik, the cyborg bear that the ka-tet come across in the early part of the book. He's named for a fantasy novel by Richard Adams; and characters think of rabbits when they encounter him, bringing to mind Adams' most famous work, Watership Down. But the presence of the bear also owes a debt to Tolkien; and in his cyborg construction, there are nods to Caidin, to Dick, to Ellison. King takes anything he fancies for his new creations, allowing them to step beyond their origins.

That's demonstrated ably by Blaine the Mono. In The Waste Lands, Roland and the ka-tet travel to Lud, a city that was once beautiful and advanced, but has since been ruined by war. It's not hospitable, and after some shenanigans – involving Jake being kidnapped, and Roland having to rescue him – they find The Cradle of Lud, a monorail station that houses Blaine. Blaine is a highly intelligent AI-driven monorail whose intelligence has degraded over time, giving him a slightly split personality. Blaine forces the ka-tet to beat him in a riddle completion before he'll help them. You've read this before, in The Hobbit – we've already seen Beorn, and we've now met Gollum. Split personality, degraded from years of solitude; riddles; an offer of help; and, just like Gollum, Blaine simply is not trustworthy. (We know this because Blaine's appearance is foreshadowed by a book that Jake brings with him, the story of Charlie the Choo Choo, a train who had a smile that "couldn't be trusted". King loves his foreshadowing, and he's never more blunt with it than in this series.) But Blaine is not just a stand-in for Gollum: he's a reference point, an idea taken and pushed further, broken and bent to fit King's means.

That's how all of his allusions go in these books, even the ones to his own work: they're all part of the stew, and they all go towards making up the worlds that these novels take place in. Everything is fair game as a reference point. Here's where the main idea of the Dark Tower starts to form: all is story, and all is part of one whole. This idea is something that we – and King – will explore further as the series goes on.

There's a story in this novel – of course there is – but it is also the point at which the Dark Tower books stopped feeling like standalones. At the end of this volume, you're led straight into book four, which picks up the action exactly where this leaves off. But that's no bad thing. If you've made it this far into the Dark Tower series, you won't be stopping now. They're not for everybody – there's no neat bow to tie them up with, no monster in the cupboard to point to as the reason the books work – but they're supremely satisfying. For King's Constant Readers, though, it would be a long wait until the next Dark Tower book: Wizard and Glass wouldn't be published for another six years …

Next: You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need. It's Needful Things!

Iwritecode
02-25-2014, 07:37 AM
Take Shardik, the cyborg bear that the ka-tet come across in the early part of the book. He's named for a fantasy novel by Richard Adams; and characters think of rabbits when they encounter him, bringing to mind Adams' most famous work, Watership Down. But the presence of the bear also owes a debt to Tolkien; and in his cyborg construction, there are nods to Caidin, to Dick, to Ellison.


Blaine forces the ka-tet to beat him in a riddle completion before he'll help them. You've read this before, in The Hobbit – we've already seen Beorn, and we've now met Gollum. Split personality, degraded from years of solitude; riddles; an offer of help; and, just like Gollum, Blaine simply is not trustworthy.

References like this always go right over my head. I’ve read the hobbit and the LOTR trilogy but I’ve never made the connection between Blain and Gollum.


There's a story in this novel – of course there is – but it is also the point at which the Dark Tower books stopped feeling like standalones. At the end of this volume, you're led straight into book four, which picks up the action exactly where this leaves off.

Maybe it’s because I started reading the DT series just after W&G came out but I never thought that the first 2 books felt like standalones. The 2nd started right where the first left off.

Jean
02-26-2014, 01:02 AM
Maybe it’s because I started reading the DT series just after W&G came out but I never thought that the first 2 books felt like standalones. The 2nd started right where the first left off.Precisely.

mae
06-17-2014, 05:50 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/17/rereading-stephen-king-needful-things

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 29: Needful Things

If there's one thing that Stephen King understands above all others – above spider demons and psychic communication lines and psychopathic fans – it's addiction. He's shown that again and again, with characters demonstrating that what they need isn't always the same as what they want. In The Shining, Jack wants to write, to look after his family; he needs the drink that he's trying to escape from. In Misery, Annie's wants – her basic desires – turn nasty when they become needs (as, frankly, do Paul's). It's a recurring theme. So when King calls a novel Needful Things, you know he's not entering the territory of desire with anything resembling a soft touch.

In lovely, sunny, not-at-all terrifying Castle Rock, the titular shop is opened by Leland Gaunt. It's essentially a knick-knack shop that sells one-off items, and – for the customers of the shop – they just so happen to be the exact thing that they've always wanted to buy. The things are cheap, as well; well below their actual street value. The denizens of Castle Rock can't believe their luck; surely there must be a catch? This is Stephen King. Of course there is.

Leland Gaunt – being a Very Bad Man, in the King tradition of Very Bad Men – wants tricks to be played on other people who live there. That's the deal: you get what you've always wanted – or, as Gaunt would have it, needed – in exchange for some small physical act that will cause somebody else minor distress. On paper, it seems like a no-brainer. But these apparently mild jokes – smearing somebody's bed-linen with mud, for example – will have a domino effect, and the reactions to the these acts will be far more powerful than the initial action itself.

It's a neat idea, really, because everybody has something that they want to the point of needing it. The concept plays on the nature of dreaming: of there being something that's seemingly out of reach, until we're asked exactly how far we would go to achieve that thing. For most people, in reality, it's likely to be something less tangible than a baseball card or some magic sunglasses that make you think you're having sex with Elvis Presley. And that's where the heart of the story comes in: Polly Chalmers, in constant pain due to her crippling arthritis, wants relief for her pain. Simple as that. It's the tension between her and her boyfriend Alan Pangborn, the sheriff of Castle Rock, who thinks that there's something deeply fishy about Gaunt, that drives the novel along. Even as King shows us these domino effects again and again, as increasingly malicious tricks are played on townsfolk who take their reactions to terrifying, murderous extremes, there's a real heart here. Polly is in pain; Alan wants her to feel better, but he doesn't trust the source of her relief.

Against what's apparently the consensus, I really like this novel. I think it's fun and playful, and while we can bicker endlessly about whether King is actually a horror writer or not, it manages to be both horrifying and – somehow – darkly funny, all at the same time. King said it was a satire of 80s Reaganite greed, and that's obvious upon rereading. There's no limit to how far these people will go for what they need, even after they've seen the effect that Gaunt and his shop has on their friends and families. People are desperate for more and more, and they want it now, hang the consequences. (Were King writing this now, I suspect that Gaunt would be written as a stand-in for Jeff Bezos.) Yes, it's got its problems: the structure is a little repetitive, as though King was having so much fun with the chainof chaotic events which form the novel's spine that he included a few too many. Pangborn is a little weak, and perhaps Gaunt too ineffective as a traditional King baddie to really make you worry; there are a number of rather awkward stereotypes in the novel; and the end is pretty terrible, being a mish-mash of other Epic King Novel endings, seemingly because – I'm guessing – King couldn't find another way out.

Or, maybe, that's the ending he wanted. Maybe that's the crucial thing. He was past his addictions when he wrote this – it was the first book he wrote after kicking them – and maybe the sheer catharsis of it should be seen as enough. Blunt metaphor time, but prior to this King had wanted things to the point of needing them, and they were ruining everything, hurting those he loved. After he was clean? He could see that it was better to want than need, simply because the want can sit there, untouched. A need? That's when things turn – as King shows us again and again – really nasty.

Connections

Castle Rock appears in so many King books and stories it's hard to spot all the references. While this was billed as "the last Castle Rock book", it's anything but – the town crops up again and again, most recently in Under the Dome. But that's not all: Gaunt's cocaine-fuelled hired hand in this novel is Ace Merrill, last seen in The Body; Polly's aunt, Evie, was a character in Cujo; Alan Pangborn was a major player in The Dark Half; and at the end of the novel, Gaunt goes off to set up shop in Junction City, as seen in the short The Library Policeman.

Next time: We'll all be handcuffed to the bed and forced to read Gerald's Game …

Randall Flagg
06-17-2014, 10:45 AM
Informative review. It's been so long since I read the book, the review brings quite a bit back.
Thanks.

Bev Vincent
07-24-2014, 02:19 AM
Chapter 30: Gerald's Game (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jul/24/rereading-stephen-king-geralds-game)

mae
07-24-2014, 05:03 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jul/24/rereading-stephen-king-geralds-game

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 30: Gerald's Game

Picture the scene: I'm 13, and I'm tearing through King novels at a frankly terrifying rate. I'm reading them all, revelling in their strange worlds, their broken protagonists, their aliens and vampires and ghosts and madness. I know what sort of writer King is, and he's the writer for me. Everything I love, it's there in his stories. Then my father gets a new King novel when we go on holiday, and I read it. I'm puzzled.

The book is one of King's simpler plots: a husband and wife are having some BDSM-tinged sex when the husband – the titular Gerald – is killed, after Jessie (his wife) tells him that the game has gone too far, that she wants it ended, and he ignores her. She kicks him in the groin and he falls off the bed, splitting his head open, leaving Jessie handcuffed to the bed with no visible means of escape. Jessie then spends the rest of book in basically this one location, attempting to free herself by breaking the bed or moving it closer to the handcuff keys. (When she finally manages it, it's through a particularly grotesque method that has haunted me whenever I've seen anybody cut their hands since – something apparently known as degloving.) Much of the book takes place inside Jessie's head: both in terms of her internal monologue, and the voices that she hears talking to her. Trapped there, with time to ruminate, the voices reveal secrets to her that she's kept buried, changing her attitudes and feelings about both herself and her now-dead husband. (Oh, and Gerald? His body gets eaten by a starving stray dog that wanders into their house, because of course it does.)

It's a fascinating set-up, the sort of thing that you can conceivably see King setting himself as a challenge: the equivalent of all those bottle episodes of television shows, where characters are trapped in a room for the duration and forced to work out their issues. Of course, the teenage me thought it was stupid. I can't say that I entirely understood why she was handcuffed to the bed, or why that would be a thing she would agree to, so maybe the rest was a mystery to me. The only time I remember the book picking up was at the end, when a spectral serial killer known as The Space Cowboy arrives and has a little fight with Jessie. That's what I wanted from King! Ghostly manifestations of weird killers! And there it was! He didn't let me down.

Reading as an adult, Gerald's Game seems just as dark as it should be; the fact that Jessie tells him to stop and he doesn't now elicits a nasty churn in my gut. I'm pleased when he dies. I don't remember having that feeling back in the day: King was a master of the hatefully-likeable protagonist, and some of the attitudes of his characters in the early novels err on the side of uncomfortable. But Gerald is a bad man, and his death earned. Jessie's torment is painful to read, and her desperation – especially as she comes to terms with the abuse that she suffered as a child, buried for so long – is harrowing. The book is actually hugely affecting – until the final stretch.

Because what I loved as a kid is far less effective to my adult sense. The Space Cowboy – a mixture of Jessie's imagination and a real serial killer – is pretty much the strongest example of deus ex machina in his entire oeuvre. The character exists solely to give Jessie the impetus to free herself, and it pretty much ruins the ending. Now, reading it, I want King to see this through. Don't introduce the bullshit weirdness: stick with Jessie and what's truly affecting. Keep us with her. Have her escape, have her leave the cabin, and that's it. Cut to black. Don't tell us what happens afterwards, in the outside world, because this is a book about the internal one. It's a book about a scared woman coming to terms with who she is, what's been done to her, and finding the strength to overcome. The Space Cowboy threatens to undo that.

But then, different readers want different things. I can totally understand that King's audience at the time would want this weirdness, because I did! I was desperate for it. Maybe I didn't quite realise what a good writer he was back then, though; and how little he had to rely on the gimmickry. Maybe he didn't either – but he would exercise his subtlety muscles a lot over the subsequent decade.

Connections

There's a strong connection to Dolores Claiborne, with both main characters having a psychic connection that enables them to share visions on a couple of occasions. (Most interestingly, this is likely because they once began life as two halves of the same novel, a project that was to be titled In The Path of the Eclipse.)

Next time: We're seeing the other half of King's project: Dolores Claiborne.

Jon
07-25-2014, 07:05 AM
I don't really mind when others do it. It's interesting to see what they think of the story or what it means to them. It doesn't add or subtract from my enjoyment of the story when I read it.



I agree. This is why I am so excited to see a book become a movie. Usually I am forgiving and understanding that a movie cannot live up to a book. Every now and then, however, someone take a great book and trashes it with a crappy movie like Tommyknockers. Even with Traci Lords...they had the babe factor nailed down and they blew it!

mae
02-05-2015, 06:55 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/05/rereading-stephen-king-chapter-31-dolores-claiborne

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 31: Dolores Claiborne

Stephen King’s non-supernatural books are often dismissed as something he does in-between the real business of scaring people. But his bibliography shows he has written almost as many books that don’t overtly play with the horror genre as horror books themselves. Last time, with Gerald’s Game, we looked at a book that tinkered with the genre in themes, but not in execution. And with Dolores Claiborne – now almost forgotten by the more casual King fan, despite being bestselling US novel of 1992 – we visit that same idea again: a horror that is not scary, about personal rather than supernatural demons.

First, we have to get past the semi-phonetic nature of the text. Creative writing students are taught to avoid dialect as it’s hard to make it ring true, rather than sounding like a pastiche. It can look wrong on the page, as well as reading like a transcribed monologue (which in this case, as a transcription of a confession, it kind-of is). Even when dialect is done brilliantly well, grammatical tics and abbreviated words can make it tricky to parse. This book’s dialect speech is a barrier to its being taken seriously – a gate that has to be hurdled.

But get past the exclamations of “Gorry!” and constant dropped Gs from word endins, and you’ll find one of King’s most extraordinarily heartfelt books. I didn’t see this as a teenager. This is the nature of rereading: we change our interpretations of a text according to our own lives, our ages, knowledge and experience. Reading Gerald’s Game as a teenager, I wanted horror that wasn’t there, but the kinkiness and weirdness of the tale kept me reading. With Dolores Claiborne, I didn’t understand why I was reading this boring story about a woman who killed her husband. Now, though? God, what an idiot I was.

This book works. There’s no other way of putting it. The dialect somehow clicks, and after 10 or 15 pages it slips into the background. You’re picturing Dolores telling you her story. You’re with her in these impassioned flashbacks that take us away from the novel’s purported main hook – that Dolores might have killed her employer – to the truth: that she didn’t do that, but that she did kill her husband, Joe St George, an abusive and grotesque creation who resembles an extreme version of Gerald in King’s previous novel.

Sure, maybe Joe seems that way because he’s only seen through Dolores’ eyes – he’s an irredeemable grotesque – but the form of the novel allows that. Close first-person texts permit more personal interpretations, as the narrator doesn’t have to be balanced. We don’t have to see Joe as a well-rounded person, or decide whether Dolores was justified in killing him. What matters is that we’re seeing her first-person point of view exclusively.

That single point of view is a huge change for King. In all his previous books he shifts from character to character, giving you close insight into each of them, and never losing track of the story. That is his his most admirable technical skill: I’m not sure anybody has ever been better at doing it, Dickens included. But his method in this book is tighter, far more focused. After The Body, Dolores Claiborne is only King’s second first-person single-viewpoint narrative (and that’s after more than 30 books). And it’s a treat to read: King was letting himself off the leash, going wild with the possibilities of such a focused, intense voice. It lets him get away with a lot, and the voice – in terms of narrative and dialect delivery – is hugely playful.

But the content isn’t play. It’s deadly serious. The book opens with a dedication to his mother. King’s father abandoned his family when the writer was young, leaving his mother to bring the children up by herself. She was a caregiver, working herself hard to ensure her family were comfortable, and looking after her infirm parents. She never got to pay her husband back for his abandonment. And, as much as we can ever assume any text is authorial wish-fulfilment, maybe this one is. Perhaps Dolores, who is kind, good, and put-upon, even when she’s committing murder, is King’s mother’s proxy. Again and again he uses proxies, and it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that Dolores is no different. The descriptions of Dolores’ key emotional moments – her feelings about her husband; her friendship with Vera, the woman she cares for; her relationship with her daughter, particularly in the ending – are some of King’s finest. Technically and emotionally this book is a treat.

This reread has changed my opinion about yet another of King’s novels: a book I wasn’t keen on as a kid, that now I kind of love. As soon as I finished it, I picked up the phone and rang my mother. Just to say hi.

Connections

This is linked to Gerald’s Game through some lovely dreams of an eclipse, but otherwise it’s as close as King gets to a standalone.

Next time: It’s time to meet the Crimson King in Insomnia.

divemaster
02-05-2015, 09:22 AM
Coincidentally, I just re-read Dolores Claiborne last month. I noticed the movie (which I have never seen) coming up in my Netflix cue and wanted to re-read the novel first. I originally read it, oh, 15 years ago or so and I could remember the basic gist of the plot and that "I really liked it."

Upon a re-read, I have to change "really liked it" to "loved it." Anyone who questions whether King can actually write (as opposed to ""entertain" or "tell a good story") should read this book. The writing is masterful, no other way about it. Plus, the story is very compelling. Kept me glued.

Unlike the quoted critic, I didn't find the local dialect off-putting whatsoever. I've been put off just a wee bit in some of King's other works, but this one rang true and genuine from the get-go and didn't take any effort at all to get past the dialect.

Bev Vincent
02-05-2015, 09:27 AM
It's an under-appreciated film, too, in my opinion. It is a very clever adaptation in that it turns the source material inside out and upside down but captures the essence of the novel very well.

jhanic
02-05-2015, 11:03 AM
The audio version of the book, read by Frances Sternhagen, is one of the best. She IS Dolores! By the way, the audio version is slightly different than the published text.

John

Bev Vincent
04-27-2015, 08:11 AM
Chapter 32: Insomina (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/27/rereading-stephen-king-insomnia-it-the-dark-tower)

mae
04-27-2015, 09:58 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/27/rereading-stephen-king-insomnia-it-the-dark-tower

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 32: Insomnia

In the 1990s, 29 novels into his career, King could do whatever he wanted. His most famous books had been turned into films, he’d had more bestsellers than anybody could hope to dream of, and he’d taken a short hiatus in which he overcame his addictions. He could have followed the publishing dictum “write what sells”, churned out sequels or revisited themes and ideas. The world was hankering (then, as now) for more Pennywise. Instead? In The Dark Half we got a book that bordered on the metafictional, followed by two novels, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, that showcased King’s desire to represent female characters better.

Then, in 1994, he unleashed Insomnia on the world. I remember buying this one, as with so many King novels, at the airport right before a holiday. I cradled the thing for the whole journey: I didn’t have much choice, as it was so big it wouldn’t fit into my backpack. And I was excited! Even though Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne had left me a little cold, this – according to the blurb on the back of the book – was a return to King’s more conventional horror writing.

But Ralph Roberts, a septuagenarian widower and Insomnia’s main character, shocked me a little. I’m not sure I’d read many books with older main characters. Through King, I had been introduced to adult protagonists, but my concept of their lives extended only to a faintly rock’n’roll version of middle age. They longed for their youth, tried to recapture it: it’s a theme in so many of King’s novels. But not in Insomnia. In Insomnia, they’re older and getting the hell on with it.

This makes me sound like an idiot, I’m sure, but I was 14. I was an idiot. I wasn’t interested in senior citizens any more than (shame on me) I was interested in the more intricate feminist notes that King was hitting. At first I didn’t care about Ralph, or Lois, his romantic interest and co-lead; but then, suddenly, I did. A large chunk of the book reads like a standalone novel appealing to the new fans King had picked up with his previous couple of novels: people who wanted less in the way of schlock monsters, and more of his insights into humanity.

And then, for me, the book got suddenly interesting. Ralph suffers from the insomnia of the title, and thanks to his lack of sleep, one day he starts to see things. He glimpses strange auras around people that trail off into the sky like strings (or, as he comes to think of them, as lifelines); then he starts to see strange, shrunken men dressed like doctors, creeping around at night wielding huge pairs of scissors. The “little bald doctors” – who are linked to the ancient Greek conception of the Fates – are killing people; cutting their strings. For 14-year-old me, this was the moment when the book suddenly became a horror story, which is what I thought I wanted from King.

Only, wait! The strange bald doctors aren’t stock horror villains. They’re actually serving to bridge the divide between the concepts of “purpose” and “random” – two key notions in King’s Dark Tower series, and a less high-profile constant throughout much of his later work. The theme of free will versus some form of higher predestination runs through a huge amount of King’s fiction, coming to a head in the Dark Tower series. In Insomnia it was laid bare, and when I first read it, King sort of lost me. There’s a lengthy and important subplot concerning abortions and the pro-choice camp, and the book wanders into total ka-is-a-wheel, heavy-referencing-for-the-fanbase territory. This is also where King introduces the Crimson King, who would later drive much of the action in the final Dark Tower novels. That’s when the truth of this book is revealed. It’s not a standalone. It’s a Dark Tower novel, almost more so than even The Gunslinger.

If you remember my reread of The Gunslinger, I didn’t read the Dark Tower series until I was 23. So when I first read Insomnia, all its references to King’s other works meant nothing to me. Insomnia worked fine by itself – once I started to accept it for what it is, rather than what I wanted it to be – but it works so, so much better when considered as part of King’s wider oeuvre. It’s crucial, frankly, to an understanding of some of the deeper themes of the Dark Tower books; and vice versa.

Over the years since I first read it, I’ve returned to Insomnia almost more than any other King book. (The only one I can say for certain that I’ve read more times is The Dark Half.) Something about its ruminations on time, higher powers, memories and the inevitability of life affected me. It continues to. It is potentially his single most influential work, for me.

And that must have coloured my feelings towards the text, because now I think it’s a masterpiece: an amazing, powerful meditation on free will. By the end of Ralph’s journey – and make no mistake, it is a journey, even though he technically doesn’t go anywhere; even though he’s a character I (wrongly) assumed had no more journeys left in him to make – you’re completely embroiled, and desperately hoping that the inevitability which the novel has pretty much guaranteed the whole way through won’t come to pass.

But it does. Ralph gets the ending that King promised him, almost on the very first page: he finally gets cured of his sleeping sickness.

Connections

Insomnia is a Dark Tower book, more so than perhaps any other non-main series text. We’ve got the Crimson King (known here as the Kingfisher); Patrick Danville, who would be hugely important in the final Dark Tower books; and there are massive thematic connections, particularly regarding Purpose and Random, the “grammar” of the Dark Tower. Insomnia is also hugely indebted to It, being set in the same town only eight years later, and refers to the events of that novel. There is a good argument to be made for Insomnia being something of a spiritual sequel: both books feature the same themes, and there are loud echoes of the earlier book. At the start of this reread, I said that the world wanted more Pennywise; in the Kingfisher, we have a creature strongly connected to that original evil, in ways that suggest the two are more than just acquaintances.

Next time: We’re taking the bull by the horns and rereading Rose Madder.

mae
04-27-2015, 10:03 AM
Insomnia is definitely Top 5 King for me, and I also read it prior to reading any Dark Tower novels. It's perfectly fine on its own. A masterpiece, indeed.

Merlin1958
04-27-2015, 10:07 AM
Insomnia is definitely Top 5 King for me, and I also read it prior to reading any Dark Tower novels. It's perfectly fine on its own. A masterpiece, indeed.

You're absolutely right, but it also fits in nicely with the Dark Tower, publication wise. Especially since you don't have to wait for the next installment anymore. You can go straight from "Insomnia" to the next DT published installment.

mikeC
04-28-2015, 10:22 AM
I was thinking I was the same age as you Bev when I read this, then I realized I was 20, whoops. I definitely enjoyed this book later in life and after the DT series ended. It is a fantastic book. The audio narrator Eli Wallach is also excellent.
One of my favorite parts of Stu's SK tour was seeing the inspiration of the streets where Ralph lived. It was always hard for me to visualize that in my head.

mae
08-05-2015, 08:33 AM
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/rereading-stephen-king-rose-madder

Rereading Stephen King chapter 33: Rose Madder

When you look at a writer’s work from afar, it’s easy to see thematic arcs across bibliographies. You can see what fascinated them at the time of certain creative periods, and with King – with the masses of novels he’s got to his name – it’s easier to see than most. There’s the classic horror period (vampires, ancient burial grounds, psychic powers, apocalypses); there’s the quieter, worried parent period (rabid dogs, dead pets, children trapped in fantasy worlds); and then there’s a paranoiac addiction – and recovery – period (insane fans, alien invasions and crazy barely-real twins).

And now we come to Rose Madder, the end of King’s fourth major arc: one that focuses on gender and violence. Where other books fed into King’s interest in the perhaps more conventionally supernatural, his run from Needful Things to Rose Madder concerns itself with rather less obvious threats – both in the form of ourselves, and those we hold closest to us. With these arcs, you hope the writer will say more with each subsequent book on the theme; interrogate something they have thus far left untouched.

Unfortunately, with Rose Madder, that’s not quite the case.

The bulk of the book focuses on Rose Daniels and her awful husband, Norman. Rose is a nice, normal lady. Norman is entirely without redeeming features. Even by King’s standards, he’s pretty far down the rung: he’s sexually and emotionally abusive to his wife; he’s racist; he’s homophobic; he tortures people by squeezing their testicles until they burst. In the opening section of the book, he beats Rose so badly that she miscarries their child. Rose, terrified, stays with him – she’s alone, and worried about the repercussions if she left. She knows he would find her and punish her.

By the time she finally leaves him, it’s 9 years later. She flees to another city, and there she establishes a life. She enters into a relationship with a much nicer, far more timid man.

And then, when you’re wondering where the customary King touch is in this quite literary novel about domestic abuse, Rose buys a magic painting. It’s a portrait of a woman in a gown made from rose madder paint, and it changes a bit. The book is slightly vague as to how it changes, exactly. King doesn’t really describe it, but that’s probably OK, because it’s … magic? This section feels curiously lazy, given how strong a descriptive writer King is; but, then again, it’s impossible to evoke the power a piece of art can have on a person by simply describing it. Maybe vagueness is better.

Rose eventually discovers that she can go into the painting, and meets the woman depicted there, Dorcas. Rose calls Dorcas Rose Madder, like the paint, but also – pun alert! – because she’s like an insane and angry version of Rose.

And this is where the book collapses. There’s a minotaur in the painting as well, who is a proxy for Norman, until Norman chases Rose down – popping testicles and biting people to death as he goes – and then gets into the painting and turns into the minotaur himself. And then Dorcas kills him, by biting him to death.

If that sounds a bit stupid, the problem is that it kind of is. Unlike most weirdnesses that King delves into, this feels sloppy and ill-thought-out. Perhaps King should have focused on Rose and her new life, on a serious tale of domestic abuse. That’s where the book works, because it feels as though King actually has something to say.

Over this rereading, it’s become apparent in this thematic arc that women who are treated badly are given strength; they’re able to overcome whatever was pushing them down. Rose Madder feels as though King is saying that again, but with far less power. Rose’s strength comes from a magic painting that never seems to make any sense or work with the wider narrative, so it makes the whole piece fall flat.

But there is one positive outcome. With this book, another of King’s wider arcs comes into play: the notion of justice. And for the next few (standalone) novels, that’s something that would really inform the stories King was telling.

Connections

This is nearly a Dark Tower novel. The concept of Ka is mentioned, and Rose and Dorcas visit Lud (the post-apocalyptic city in The Wastelands).

Next time: As if it’s been raised from the dead by the hands of the blessed, it’s The Green Mile!

mae
08-05-2015, 08:38 AM
So do not agree. Rose Madder is one of my favorite King novels! Haters gonna hate...

jhanic
08-05-2015, 08:48 AM
I disagree somewhat. I wish King would have left out the supernatural portion of the story completely and stuck with a more mystery-type tale. I would have loved to see Norman put on trial (or killed by police).

John

biomieg
08-05-2015, 10:19 AM
Rose Madder is one of my favorites as well. A hugely underrated book.

zelig
08-05-2015, 06:02 PM
I disagree somewhat. I wish King would have left out the supernatural portion of the story completely and stuck with a more mystery-type tale. I would have loved to see Norman put on trial (or killed by police).

John

John, I agree with you on this. I enjoyed the book, but I feel the same way about the supernatural element.

Randall Flagg
08-06-2015, 01:08 PM
I disliked the book.
King was in an arc where he seemed almost apologetic for (blamed) men, and empowers women. Nothing wrong with that. "Dolores Claiborne" was near perfect. "Rose Madder" is a mess.

jhanic
08-06-2015, 04:16 PM
RF, I agree with you completely on Dolores Claibourne. It's one of King's best. I especially like Frances Sternhagen's recording. She WAS Dolores. Also, the recording had extra material that wasn't included in the book. I don''t know what she used, but I really enjoyed it. I have a Word file with the differences between the hardcover and the recording.

John

zelig
08-06-2015, 04:43 PM
RF, I agree with you completely on Dolores Claibourne. It's one of King's best. I especially like Frances Sternhagen's recording. She WAS Dolores. Also, the recording had extra material that wasn't included in the book. I don''t know what she used, but I really enjoyed it. I have a Word file with the differences between the hardcover and the recording.

John

I had heard about the differences between the audio and the book but never had an opportunity to see these differences. It would be nice to take a look at that Word doc. Dolores is also one of my favorite King books.

jhanic
08-07-2015, 03:30 AM
RF, I agree with you completely on Dolores Claibourne. It's one of King's best. I especially like Frances Sternhagen's recording. She WAS Dolores. Also, the recording had extra material that wasn't included in the book. I don''t know what she used, but I really enjoyed it. I have a Word file with the differences between the hardcover and the recording.

John

I had heard about the differences between the audio and the book but never had an opportunity to see these differences. It would be nice to take a look at that Word doc. Dolores is also one of my favorite King books.

Paul, just PM your email address and I'll send it to you.

John

herbertwest
08-23-2015, 08:43 AM
Does anyone knows when the audiobook version of DOLORES CLAIBORNE was first released?
Thanks !

Bev Vincent
08-24-2015, 03:34 AM
Does anyone knows when the audiobook version of DOLORES CLAIBORNE was first released?
Thanks !

3/1/1995, according to this link (http://www.paperbackswap.com/Dolores-Claiborne/book/0453009573/)