Stephen King Reviewed

Skeleton Crew (1985)

2009-08-28T18:49:00.000+01:00

King's second collection of short stories, Skeleton Crew, begins (much like Night Shift) with an introduction in which he describes some of the history and motivations behind the tales: it's not so much the money - although that was obviously important to him during the early years - as the compulsion to write, to turn an idea into something concrete, which drives him. As I mentioned in my review of Night Shift, there's something quite satisfying about King's forewords - you get the sense that he is sometimes puzzled by his imagination and his ability to translate it into a good piece of prose, but the overwhelming impression the reader is left with is that he simply loves writing. The collection ends with a 'Notes' section, in which King gives a little more detail on how some of these stories came into being - this includes an amusing aside about the retired doctor next door, who, when asked how long a man could survive if he was forced to eat his own body, "looked doubtful at first (the year before, in pursuit of another story, I had asked him if he thought it was possible for a man to swallow a cat)".

As King states in his introduction, these stories span seventeen years, running from the year before he went to college ('The Reaper's Image') to 1983 ('The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet'). While it would perhaps be trite to draw conclusions about King's development as a writer during those years, the material gathered here certainly shows that he is not the one-trick pony many have accused him of being. Stories range from short, sharp shockers to lengthy character-driven pieces, covering a range of topics and styles.

Skeleton Crew opens with 'The Mist', a novella which - by King's own admission - "got a little long". But don't let that put you off, because it's one of his most memorable yarns, a B-movie monsterfest set in a supermarket which matches gruesome shocks with the swift breakdown of societal norms under stress. 'The Mist' is textbook King: packed with detail about its characters, tightly paced and filled with strong set pieces. The microcosm of the supermarket is as well realised as any of his small-town settings, and allows King to crank up the tension as the trapped shoppers confront mysterious aberrations which might attack at any moment.

He follows 'The Mist' with a brief piece of wish fulfilment, 'Here There Be Tygers', in which a young boy and his teacher discover something nasty lurking the washroom. This story contrasts harshly with 'Cain Rose Up', in which a college student finishes his exams and starts shooting passersby from his dorm room window. The former is enjoyable fantasy, a 'what if my mean teacher got eaten by a tiger somehow' daydream become real, whereas the latter leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth. I would tentatively guess that King wrote 'Cain Rose Up' while at college himself, as it has a ring of youthful bitterness to it (but perhaps I'm projecting here).

Other stories fall into a variety of categories. Classic horror comes in the form of a demonic, doomladen toy ('The Monkey'), a Lovecraftian grandmother ('Gramma'), a deadly mirror ('The Reaper's Image') and a self-cannibalising castaway ('Survivor Type'). We venture back to the mysterious storytelling club of the author's earlier 'The Breathing Method' (see Different Seasons), where another nested tale-within-a-tale introduces us to 'The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands'. Unusually, Skeleton Crew contains a couple of poems, one dedicated to King's son, 'For Owen', while the other, 'Paranoid: A Chant' - filled with the dark imagery of conspiracy theorists and mental breakdown - seems to have something in common with 'The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet', a story about a writer on the verge of insanity and a publisher in the depths of alcoholism. King also ventures into eerie science fiction with 'Word Processor of the Gods', 'Beachworld' and 'The Jaunt', the latter a chiller that has been branded into my memory since I first read it in my teenage years.

Harder to classify are two companion pieces: 'Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)', in which a milkman - Spike Milligan by name - toys with the lives of a neighbourhood, leaving them bottles and cartons containing deadly creatures or substances; and 'Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2)', in which two drunks persuade an old acquaintance to inspect a car and then meet their ends. These related stories are funny and sinister by turns, but there's something weird about them - I'm not sure if it's just the tone or the unexplained 'bug' that various characters seem to see from time to time, but they seem off-kilter somehow. Far more normal is 'The Wedding Gig', which recounts a mismatched, mob-related wedding and its disastrous results - there is nothing supernatural about the story, and instead King paints a vivid picture of the 1920s jazz scene. Returning to the mysterious, however, we come to 'Uncle Otto's Truck' (in which an abandoned truck with no wheels gradually creeps up on its increasingly paranoid owner) and 'Mrs Todd's Shortcut', which is one of my favourite stories from the anthology, an engrossing and touching tale of shortcuts shorter than a straight line.

King weaves a motif - "Do you love?" - and its response - "Yes, and true love never dies" - through several of the stories in Skeleton Crew, with varying degrees of success. 'The Reach' is a sweet study of an old woman who has never left her island home, but who gradually realises that her departed friends and family are waiting for her out on the ice. In 'The Raft', a quartet of students take an ill-advised trip to a nearby lake at the end of summer, only to fall victim to a nameless, remorseless creature floating out on the water (this contains moments of truly grotesque gore, and is powerfully horrible). Finally, in 'Nona', a hitchhiker hooks up with a beautiful girl, and only learns too late that she is not what she seems, by which point he has been driven to murder and madness.

While a few of the stories in Skeleton Crew may not linger in the reader's mind much beyond the turning of the final page, others will (if my experience is anything to go by) be far more difficult to shake. This is another great collection, and one which I have forced on a number of people over the years. As with Night Shift, I still find myself revisiting these tales every few years, and it has been a genuine pleasure to do so once again.

Next: The Bachman Books.

Thinner (1984)

2009-07-29T01:12:00.001+01:00

(writing as Richard Bachman)

Over the years, Stephen King has written a number of novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and, technically, Thinner is the fifth of these. For the purposes of this project, however, his earlier books will be covered in my review of The Bachman Books (1985), which collects them in sequence. Also awaiting discussion in that review are King’s reasons for writing under an assumed name in the first place. But, for now, let’s get back to Thinner.

The plot sees obese lawyer Billy Halleck suffering the effects of a gypsy curse. Having accidentally run down an old gypsy woman while receiving a handjob from his wife in the car, Halleck escapes legal punishment thanks to his friendships with the town’s police chief and the judge handling the case. While leaving court, an ancient gypsy, Taduz Lemke – father to the murdered woman – strokes Halleck’s face, whispering one word: “Thinner”.

Spoilers ahead! We then follow Halleck as he begins to lose weight at a steady rate, journeying from 251 pounds to a skeletal 127 pounds. As he slims down, his wife, Heidi, and daughter, Linda, progress from delighted to troubled to terrified. Visits to the family doctor reveal no abnormalities, and Halleck gradually comes to understand that Lemke is inflicting his own form of justice upon him. And the thinner he becomes, the more Halleck blames Heidi for her part in his physical deterioration, his rage becoming increasingly uncontrollable.

Having finally put two and two together, Halleck approaches his erstwhile cronies, only to find that they are suffering their own punishments. Judge Cary Rossington is growing scales all over his body, and Duncan Hopley, the chief of police, is afflicted with a particularly gruesome form of full-body acne. These passages are vintage King, engrossing the reader in the stories of each character in a convincing manner. The gypsy’s lesson is horribly effective, as neither official is able to bear living with his affliction.

Increasingly desperate, Halleck enlists the help of a former client, Richie ‘The Hammer’ Ginelli. Stylistically, King gradually builds more and more pace into the novel to mirror time running out for his protagonist; the majority of the chapters are headed up with Halleck’s current weight, which helps to drive the novel along to its conclusion. Becoming weaker and weaker, and under threat of committal from his increasingly distant wife, Halleck tracks the Romany band up the eastern seaboard. Once he finds them, Ginelli begins to systematically terrorise the gypsies, hoping to scare them into lifting the curse. This mad-dog approach eventually pays off, although there is a catch: Lemke cannot lift the curse, but can only transfer it to someone else. He creates a pie filled with blood – whoever eats from the pie will suffer the fate meant for Halleck. This transferral of responsibility at the eleventh hour could potentially leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth, but King throws in a twisty ending which is ultimately fairly satisfying.

The curse seems to be a staple of human society, from the ancient world to the modern. Much like spiritualism and the mumbo-jumbo of the medium, it has captured the imagination of the credulous to such an extent that it has become one of the classic clichés of the horror genre, being co-opted into the mythology of werewolves, vampires and all manner of things that go bump in the night – from the Egyptian pharaohs to the deadly videotape of Ringu. The gypsy curse is not exempt from such cliché, and indeed has become a well-worn device to explain weird goings-on in popular mainstream entertainment (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons).

And this is my major issue with Thinner: cliché. The curses which Lemke dishes out are compelling for much of the novel, but I couldn’t help but notice a much more serious problem - the general air of cliché which also hangs over several of the main characters. Ginelli is a typical Italian-American mobster, the sort of man who calls you ‘paisan’ as he tucks in to a plate of his mother’s dingamagoo, while Gina Lemke (Taduz’s grand-daughter) conforms to the stereotype of the fiery gypsy female, beautiful but deadly. This is surprising, as King generally (although not always) manages to avoid such obvious caricatures in his work, and is especially jarring given that Halleck swiftly comes to recognise his small-town bigotry for the unfair stereotyping that it is.

The underlying themes of the novel – guilt, justice and the taking of responsibility for one’s actions – suffer as a result, which is a shame, because there is much to enjoy about the book (its pace and the grotesque nature of the various curses, among other things). What could have been a strong, moral tale ends up being slightly undermined, making Thinner feel a little silly when it could have been a humdinger.

Next: Skeleton Crew.

The Talisman (1984)

2009-07-28T23:40:00.005+01:00

(with Peter Straub)

The Talisman marks King’s first collaboration with fellow horror author Peter Straub. Those who have read King’s study of the genre, Danse Macabre, will remember that King cited Straub’s Ghost Story as one of his essential reads*, so it is satisfying that the two finally managed to find the time to put this epic novel together.

A classic fantasy quest, The Talisman follows its twelve-year-old hero, Jack Sawyer, from New Hampshire to California. The novel opens at the Alhambra Hotel in off-season Arcadia Beach, where Jack’s mother, Lily, a faded B-movie starlet, is slowly dying of cancer and hiding from her rapacious brother-in-law, Morgan Sloat. Jack is befriended by a mysterious handyman, Speedy Parker, who awakens in him memories of his childhood daydreams and the place which these allowed him to visit: the Territories.

Spoilers ahead! As Speedy proves to Jack, the Territories are real – a parallel world which reflects a twisted version of real life. Using a bottle of sickly, bitter wine, Jack is able to flip over into the Territories. We gradually come to understand that this feudal, agrarian land mirrors the US in terms of geography, although the Territories are compressed; a hundred feet travelled there equates to roughly half a mile here. Another important factor to note is that characters in the Territories have ‘twinners’ in this world – for example, Speedy Parker parallels Parkus, while Morgan Sloat parallels the monstrous Morgan of Orris. Twinners are able to flip between the two worlds, their consciousnesses rudely inserted into the parallel body. Jack is free from this limitation, his twinner having died in infancy (while he escaped a similar fate by moments). King and Straub feed us (and Jack) this information gradually through Speedy Parker, who promptly sends his young friend on a mission – to save his mother (and her twinner, Queen Laura DeLoessian), he must seek out a talisman in the far reaches of the land and return it to Arcadia Beach. A lot of the detail, however, is only filled in as Jack’s journey progresses.

During the course of Jack’s travels, King and Straub expertly contrast moments of wonder (Jack’s exploration of the Queen’s Pavillion with Captain Farren; winged men flying for the fun of it) with scenes of terror (the approach of Morgan of Orris’s gothic carriage; an encounter with his insane henchman, Osmond), all the while giving us little hints of the true nature of the Territories and Sloat’s plans for them. Jack comes to realise that his flipping between worlds can cause devastation to both worlds (in the form of earthquakes), and we later find that a civil war in the Territories resulted in the much larger scale First World War.

Jack is beset by evil forces in both worlds, although those in the US proper are more prosaically threatening. Jack applies for a job at the Oatley Tap, a seedy tavern in a nothing town, and is effectively enslaved by Smokey, the brutish owner. He is also warned off his quest by a demonic cowboy, Elroy, who represents everything that Sloat has corrupted.

However, Jack also finds companions along the way, most notably in the form of Wolf. The Wolfs (the Territories’ version of werewolves) are shepherds loyal to the Queen, although some of their number – including the previously mentioned Elroy – have become ravenous, evil killers. Jack’s Wolf is a simple, friendly soul, who almost loses his mind when Jack accidentally flips them both into the US. Although I can’t be sure, Wolf seems to me to be very much a King character – lovable and innocent, but with a dark edge (for example, in a terrific section in which he locks Jack in a shed until his monthly change is completed, “protecting the herd” with a barely suppressed sense of malevolent hunger). When the two companions are subsequent arrested for vagrancy by a corrupt police officer and sent to Sunlight Gardener’s correctional facility for wayward boys, Wolf’s fate is heartbreaking. This, again, is another strong section from the authors, building to a ferocious climax which is both tragic and satisfyingly violent.

From this point on, Jack’s fate becomes gradually intertwined with that of Richard Sloat, his oldest friend and Morgan’s son. Arriving at Thayer boarding school, Jack finds that his story is greeted with blank disbelief by Richard, whose desperate need to cling to reality is eventually explained: he once stumbled into the Territories as a child and met something… nasty. However, when rogue twinners lay siege to the school, Richard is propelled into flight with Jack across the Territories’ radioactive desert, the Blasted Lands (which corresponds to the nuclear test sites in Nevada). After a great deal of hardship, a ferocious battle and a bad case of radiation poisoning, the two boys arrive at the abandoned town of Point Venuti, California, and the Black Hotel, home to the talisman itself.

Major spoiler ahead! At its heart, The Talisman is a traditional tale of good versus evil, and some critics of the time dismissed the ending of the novel as being predictable. Personally, I think I would have felt a little cheated if the book had ended any other way – especially after how much investment King and Straub demand of the reader in Jack as a protagonist. And while it will surprise few people to learn how it all turns out in the end, the authors make a point of suddenly opening up a whole realm of possibilities when the talisman is finally located – it is a lynch pin at the centre of a multitude of parallel worlds, including (but by no means limited to) the Territories and the US. Indeed, by the end of his quest, Jack has come to think of the US as the 'American Territories', and reality itself has taken on a new and complex meaning for him. So I’m not sure I would agree that everything about the conclusion to The Talisman is predictable. But even if that were the case, this book is worth reading for the journey alone.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: King would later expand on the multiple world idea in his Dark Tower series, as well as completing (again with Straub) a sequel of sorts, Black House, which explicitly links the two sets of stories together.

* I would also highly recommend his increasingly meta ‘Blue Rose’ trilogy (Koko, Mystery and The Throat), which completely took over my life one summer.

Next: Thinner.

Cycle of the Werewolf (1983)

2009-07-24T10:46:00.001+01:00

The next book in this ongoing project is something of an oddity. King was approached to create some text for a werewolf-themed calendar, to be illustrated by comics artist Berni Wrightson. The story he came up with was deemed too long for the original format, and was published instead as an illustrated novella. The result, Cycle of the Werewolf, contains detailed and often beautiful artwork alongside King's plot.

Fairly minor spoilers ahead! The book is divided into calendar months, and each is given its own double page title illustration. King introduces us to the small town of Tarker's Mills in a series of vignettes, each of which take place in successive months - on the night of the full moon, of course. Due to the nature of the form, we know within pages that a werewolf is preying on the local population - starting with a railway worker and continuing, one a month, until the monster comes up against our hero, Marty Coslaw.

An eleven-year-old confined to a wheelchair, Marty first confronts the werewolf during an illicit late-night firework display (the Fourth of July celebrations having been cancelled due to a curfew established by concerned police). The boy manages to blind the creature in one eye, narrowly avoiding becoming the seventh victim. Over the following weeks, Marty works out the identity of the werewolf, plots to unmask him, and arranges a final showdown on New Year's Eve. The conciseness of this central story is filled out by King's ability to sketch in precise details of the secondary characters - even those who are destined to die within a few hundred words of their initial appearance are given just enough background to be distinct from one another. This is especially true of Marty's family - his bitchy sister, overly cheerful father, concerned mother, and understanding Uncle Al - which emerges as a fully realised, functioning unit in remarkably few pages.

Cycle of the Werewolf is written in the present tense, which lends the slim story a sense of urgency it might otherwise lack. In some places, this mirrors the tense, short paragraphs of the denouements of many of King's novels (for example, when the early victims are attacked by the beast); in others, it is simply the precision of the short story writer. The last two months of the year develop this tension: November sees the werewolf justifying his killing spree to himself, while December gives us Marty and Uncle Al preparing for the finale, their gun loaded with silver bullets.

Wrightson's artwork complements King's text perfectly, giving us snapshots of the attacks throughout in highly detailed style. Personally, I slightly take issue with the positioning of some of these full page images, which frequently show the fate of the character in question a page before the text reaches that point - but this is a minor quibble. The black and white "month" title pages manage to be both mournful and menacing in equal measure, despite showing mostly empty pastoral scenes. Cycle of the Werewolf is a slightly strange beast - with a little work, it could have been a strong novel (which I would love to have read), but the limits imposed by the creative processes involved meant that it was always going to be an unusual hybrid - but, on its own terms, the book is successful, and I've always had a soft spot for it.

Editorial note: I'm not sure whether NEL were prepared for the novelty of publishing an illustrated novella, but they certainly did a fairly poor job editorially. There is an inconsistency in the werewolf's eye colour after the first chapter (they change from yellow to green) - considered by some to be a rare King error, although you could also overlook this as an example of imaginative licence. Anyway, perhaps something an editor could have highlighted. Far more annoying in my opinion, however, are the quite obvious typos throughout. I would hope that these have been picked up in the years since my version was printed.

Next: The Talisman.

Pet Sematary (1983)

2009-07-23T18:01:00.001+01:00

After the slightly unsatisfying experience presented by my recent reading of Christine, we move on to an enduring favourite King novel of mine, Pet Sematary. An exploration of death and our attitudes towards this most certain of states, King's ninth novel burrowed into my mind during my teenage years and lodged there - enabling me to clearly recall, in the years between then and now, the chill which certain scenes provoked at the time of reading.

The plot opens on a family arriving at their new home on the outskirts of Ludlow, Maine. Dr Louis Creed, due to start work at the small university medical centre, is accompanied by his wife, Rachel, and their two young children, Ellie and Gage. They are welcomed by their elderly neighbour, Jud Crandall - one of a number of wise, lovable old men who populate King's works. Jud's warning about the busy country road which separates their properties is slipped into their initial conversation with little fanfare, although it is only the first of various portents of what is to follow.

One Saturday, Jud takes the family up the track which runs into the woods at the top of their property, and which leads to the Pet Sematary. This is a place sacred to Ludlow's children, where generations of kids have buried their animals. The Pet Sematary is comprised of concentric circles of grave markers, most faded with age, filling a natural clearing in the forest (for example, "IN MEMORY OF MARTA OUR PET RABIT DYED MARCH 1 1965")*. This backs onto a deadfall - a tumbled down stack of old branches and tree trunks - which marks its boundary; beyond lie deeper woods. During this afternoon ramble, King throws out little hints that things may not be quite what they seem: a turn of phrase from Jud, a distracted query in Louis's mind. But the trip to the Pet Sematary serves another purpose as well: to introduce the topic of death. Having been confronted with the evidence of the grave markers, five-year-old Ellie begins to contemplate the potential loss of the family cat, Church, and death in general. This leads to a furious row between Louis and Rachel, essentially highlighting their respective attitudes towards death: Louis rationally accepts that death is a part of life, but Rachel becomes hysterical whenever the subject is brought up (we later discover that this is the result of her childhood guilt over the agonised, protracted death of her sister Zelda from spinal meningitis).

However, Louis is swiftly forced to deal with a death of his own, when - on the first day of term - a student is hit by a car on campus. Victor Pascow's injuries are horrific (his head half crushed, a collarbone jutting from the flesh of his shoulder), but King also uses him to foreshadow what is to follow. The dying student addresses Louis by name, whispering cryptic statements about the Pet Sematary, which is sinister enough - but, that night, Pascow visits Louis in his dreams, leading him up the path into the woods and delivering a stern warning that the deadfall must not be crossed. Louis wakes up from this nightmare, only to find that his feet are covered in dirt and fir needles. It's a jolting moment, coming as it does during the first minutes of consciousness, but the implications are more disturbing still. Was he sleepwalking? Was he even asleep? King refuses to answer this directly, but one thing is clear: Pascow is a harbinger of doom.

Spoilers ahead! There follows a sequence of events which draw Louis and his family inexorably into danger. Louis takes Church to the vet to be neutered, thinking that he will be less likely to roam into the road. Jud's wife, Norma, suffers a minor heart attack, and Louis is on hand to provide an immediate response. Rachel takes the children away to her parents' house in Chicago for Thanksgiving, leaving Louis behind in Ludlow. King artfully brings these circumstances together when Church is killed on the road, and the scene is set for one of the key passages in the novel. Thinking to reward Louis for his earlier medical help, Jud takes him out to the ‘real’ cemetery, which lies in the deep woods beyond the deadfall: a shunned Indian burial ground. The journey is fraught with eerie mystery, and King creates a genuine sense of tension as they proceed past unseen entities in the fog and finally bury Church on the sinister Micmac plateau. Jud is evasive throughout this strange night, refusing to explain the purpose of their exhausting trek until later. By the time Church reappears miraculously resurrected the next morning, King has the reader in the palm of his hand. We are invested in his characters to such an extent that we simply accept the resurrection and its consequences: Church has come back wrong, stinking of soil and death and exhibiting signs of being a much more predatory creature than he was before.

Major spoilers ahead! There is something horribly inevitable about the death of Gage on the road several months later. The shock of the incident itself (he is run over by a truck) and the Creeds’ natural responses to it immediately suggest to the reader some of what will follow. Rachel’s stunned grief isolates Louis, pushing him to consider the unthinkable in an effort to save their combined sanity. King uses an awful funeral scene between Louis and his father-in-law to build the pressure on Louis’s fragile mental state. Jud’s warnings about the history of the Micmac burial ground fall on deaf ears, despite their hints of abomination, cannibalism and the supernatural evil of the wendigo spirit. From this point on, King repeatedly stresses that Louis feels himself to be on the edge of madness, but he is powerless to resist the dread temptation to bring his young son back to life.

While we are never completely sure about Jud’s motivations in exposing Louis to the burial ground in the first instance, it gradually becomes clear that the place exerts a tremendous force over them both (and indeed over numerous people in the past). Although Jud only ever wanted to help Louis, he comes to realise that he has been used to feed the demonic hunger of the place, and has allowed himself to be co-opted at least partly willingly. The compulsion of the burial ground plays on the natural instinct to deny death and the pain it brings.

And so we come to one of my favourite scenes in the book, as Louis sets out to retrieve his son’s body. In his examination of the genre, Danse Macabre, King discusses the archetype of the ghoul, and it is interesting to see how he deals with the subject in Pet Sematary. Grave-robbing is one of the most powerful taboos in human society – which, of course, has not prevented its occurrence throughout history – and this section is necessarily harrowing. King expertly draws it out to almost unbearable lengths as Louis breaks into the graveyard, digs up his son and attempts to get him back to his car, all the while threatened with discovery and exposure. That we are torn between hope on Louis’s behalf and horror at what he is doing is a testament to the breathless quality of the writing. His subsequent nightmarish trip up to the burial ground with Gage’s body develops this tension in the reader. After all, we know what the results of Louis’s actions will be – and yet he remains a heart-rending study in human fallibility. Gage’s return as a murderous revenant is tragic in its inevitability, and his actions fulfil our worst fears, leading to the deaths of both Jud and Rachel. And yet King refuses to let us off the hook even at this late stage, producing possibly the most terrible, sinister ending to any of his works.

Without wishing to labour the point, King’s focus on death differentiates this book from the majority of his novels. It is so steeped in the trappings of doom and despair with which we surround death that there seems to be no escape, no hope. And yet it is not depressing (as it could very easily have been), but invigorating. My rereading of the novel concluded at around 2am on a cold, windy night, and I experienced the same horrified (and yet delighted) shudder when I read its closing lines as I had when I was a teenager. On that basis, I think Pet Sematary is destined to remain one of my favourites for the foreseeable future.

Notes for the obssesive factfan: Jud refers to the events of Cujo, and Rachel drives past the turning to Jerusalem’s Lot shortly before she falls victim to Gage’s scalpel. Also, at the end of his awful first proper day at work, Louis receives the (infamous?) handjob in the bath which various people discussed in the comments to an earlier post. Just letting you know…

* The misspelling of 'cemetery' on the sign marking the entrance to this sacred ground is likewise the work of a child from times past.

Next: Cycle of the Werewolf.

Christine (1983)

2008-12-04T16:46:00.004Z

Arnie Cunningham is the quintessential nerd: bullied at school, struggling to live up to his parents' high expectations, weedy and riddled with acne. His oldest (and only) friend, Dennis Guilder, has none of these problems, and has always played the role of Arnie's protector. The friendship which exists between the two teenagers accounts for much of what occurs in Christine, King's eighth novel. But there is, of course, another major factor, Christine herself.

The book opens with a brief prologue introducing the two friends, which also serves to foreshadow the events in the novel proper; from the start, we know that something bad is going to happen - a common enough effect in King's writing, but I think this is most explicit instance of it in his work up to this point ("It was bad from the start. And it got worse in a hurry."). King cleverly introduces Christine here as well, discussing how Arnie falls in love with her at first sight in such a way that we think she is a girl. This notion is dispelled a page or so later, when we get our first glimpse of her: a delapidated 1958 Plymouth Fury rusting on a lawn with a 'For Sale' sign on the windscreen.

Arnie is instantly smitten and leaves a deposit with the current owner, a lecherous wretch named Roland D LeBay. LeBay is unpleasant from the outset, a misanthrope living in squalor, and he swiftly extorts as much money from Arnie as he is able, despite Dennis's best efforts. Christine immediately proves divisive, bringing out a stubborn streak in Arnie which sets him at odds with his parents, Michael and Regina. Instead of leaving the car outside their house, he rents a bay at the seedy local garage, Darnell's, where he begins restoring her to her former glory.

In the meantime, King builds in various other plotlines, only to leave them simmering off to one side: LeBay dies, and Dennis learns some disturbing facts about Christine from the old man's brother, George; a nasty confrontation at school results in the expulsion of Buddy Repperton, head of a gang of bullying delinquents; new girl Leigh Cabot transfers in from another school and takes a shine to Arnie; and Dennis is seriously injured in a triple takedown on the football field. And all the time, Arnie's work on Christine is nearing completion.

Spoilers ahead! King structures Christine in a fairly unusual way. The first section - covering everything above - is written in the first person from Dennis's point of view. With his accident, which leaves him hospitalised for several months (and therefore out of the loop), the narration moves to the third person. Arnie's love for Christine grows more and more obsessive, leading to an increasing estrangement from his parents. But we also get the first rumblings of evil from Christine, as Leigh - now dating Arnie - almost chokes to death on a hamburger inside the car. In this scene, King suggests a malevolent sentience within Christine, as the glowing dashboard instruments become eyes watching Leigh's struggle for air. However, while we might be willing to believe Leigh's terrified opinion, Arnie is not.

Christine has now been moved out to a parking lot out at the airport, at the insistence of Arnie's parents, and it isn't long before Buddy Repperton and his cronies discover her there. They wreak a vicious revenge on Arnie, utterly trashing his now-pristine car: ruining the gas tank with sugar, smashing all of the windows and panels, and leaving a shit on the dashboard for good measure. Arnie's immediate response - horror - says a lot about his relationship with Christine; this is the worst possible thing that could happen in his world. His next response - that "the shitters" who are responsible will get what's coming to them - confirms a nasty idea which King has been gradually building up: that Arnie is becoming (or is in some way possessed by) Roland LeBay - see, for example, his use of LeBay's term "shitters" to refer to those who cross him, or his developing back pain, which eventually requires him to wear a brace, just like LeBay did. And his handwriting, while signing Dennis's cast, is no longer his own.

Major spoilers ahead! It is at this point, some 280 pages into the novel, that King gears up, revs the engine and takes us for a spin.* We are treated to a series of murders around Libertyville, as Christine bumps off Buddy Repperton's gang in brutal fashion. Moochie Welch (what a great name) is ground into the pavement over and over again. Buddy and his other friends die in a spectacular crash in the depths of winter. These scenes are undeniably thrilling, especially given that the victims of these events actually see the driver before they die: the rotting corpse of Roland D LeBay. The passages where Christine is transformed from vaguely ominous vehicle to death car left me wanting more of the same, but King is angling for something a little more complex. The appearance of a police detective, Rudy Junkins, at Darnell's garage provides dramatic irony for the reader; it's a bit like Columbo - we know the solution to the crimes, but he has to work his way to the same conclusion bit by bit. That the conclusion in this case is supernatural obviously complicates matter for him. But his line of questioning is enough to persuade Will Darnell of the truth, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.

I don't really want to keep on endlessly explaining the various plot strands, so I'll try to wrap this up in short order. It turns out that LeBay's wife and daughter both died inside Christine - the daughter in a parallel "accident" to the one which almost kills Leigh. King suggests that LeBay has offered them up as a kind of sacrifice to allow him (and Christine) to return from the dead. The action switches back to the first person as Dennis is released from hospital and sets out with Leigh to finally destroy Christine. But even when this seems to have been achieved, King gives us an ominous coda to the story which suggests otherwise.

I've missed out a lot of the detail in this review, which is a reflection on the novel itself. Christine is almost 600 pages long, and the majority of its length is either background (ominous dreams, mysterious little events, and much of the plot given above) or conjecture from the characters (asking "Can this really be happening?" over and over again). King has an obvious fondness for the 1950s B-movie; there is some discussion of this in Danse Macabre. He also shows his appreciation of the music of that era in the lyrics which open every chapter - not to mention the fact that Christine's radio will only pick up '50s stations. However, there is too little action in the novel for it to work effectively. This is especially frustrating because, in the best scenes, the blank, relentless force of Christine's evil calls up Halloween's Michael Myers or, more appropriately, the looming truck of Steven Spielberg's Duel. There are numerous memorable moments, but they take a long time to arrive. The characters are well drawn, but we spend (I feel like a Philistine for writing this) too long waiting for something to happen. Many of King's books develop in a similar fashion, but here the pay-off feels a little too rushed, a little too weak. It's almost as if the B-movie trappings are getting in the way of the Grade A horror I have come to expect.

I remember really enjoying Christine as a teenager. This time around, however, I found myself struggling to get into it in the same way. Perhaps I was more able to identify with the characters in those days, or perhaps I was just more willing to believe in the idea of an evil car. Either way - despite King's usual strong characterisation and set pieces - I now find it a little disappointing.** Which isn't to say that I won't go back and read it again some day (or that you shouldn't read it yourself), because it is as technically well written as one might expect and there are passages, as I have said, which are definitely gripping. But there are others I would reread first.

* Apologies for that.

** And I should stress that I really did find it only a little disappointing. I think my main problem is that this is the first book so far which has been at all underwhelming. It's not a failure; it's just not as strong as the chillers which have preceded it.

Next: Pet Sematary.

Different Seasons (1982)

2008-11-10T22:08:00.003Z

As King points out in the afterword to Different Seasons, the novella is rather an awkward proposition for a publisher. Too short to be released individually, yet too long for most fiction magazines to consider, the novella falls somewhere in between and is therefore often likely to remain unread by anyone other than the author. Thankfully, the successes of his previous works gave King a considerable amount of clout with his publishers. The result is Different Seasons, a strong collection of four novellas which - at first glance - might seem to have little in common. However, while only one of them is an outright horror story, the others each contain various horrific elements, regardless of their central plot.

The first, 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption' (subtitled Hope Springs Eternal), will be familiar - in essence, at least - to most people, thanks to the success of the film adaptation. The plot, concerning convicted murderer Andy Dufresne, is narrated by Red, an Irish-American fixer at the notorious Shawshank penitentiary. Almost from the beginning, King establishes Red as a believable character in his own right; he is a likable and trustworthy narrator. Red's relationship with Andy develops from wary respect to true friendship in a measured, gradual way that never seems forced. King's style here is concise but detailed, creating a whole world within Shawshank's walls: wardens come and go, brutal guards and inmates are confronted or accommodated, and all the while Andy makes himself invaluable to those above him in the prison hierarchy.

Major spoiler ahead! But this is all a diversion from Andy's secret work: escape. Behind a series of posters (starting with one of Rita Hayworth), he gradually chips away at the wall above his bed. This escape route is the one thing which keep Andy going over the years, and he directs all of his energies to (a) creating it and (b) dissembling, with the result that his eventual escape is a surprise to everyone, even in the close world of the prison community. King reveals Andy's escape fairly early on, which allows him to expand on (some of) the details via Red's recollections and prison hearsay. As a paean to hope, perseverance and optimism in the face of cruelty and depression, 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption' is a complete success. Hardcore fans of the rather bloated film may be disappointed by this pared-down original, but I much prefer it.

The next story, 'Apt Pupil' (subtitled Summer of Corruption), is an entirely different animal. It opens with 13-year-old Todd Bowden - the apt pupil of the title, an all-American boy with top grades - knocking on the door of an old man in Santa Donato, California. Todd has worked out that the old man is Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi commandant (the "Blood Fiend of Patin") living under an assumed name, and proceeds to blackmail him. It's a simple enough set-up, but the story swiftly develops into a horrible power game, with control alternating between the two. Todd's initial reason for the blackmail is simple interest in the subject, but his curiosity about experimentation and genocide grows into an unhealthy and disturbing obsession. In the meantime, he is unaware that he has awakened the long-dormant monster in Dussander.

Spoilers ahead! Their mutual descent into evil covers some gruesome ground. Todd struggles for normalcy as his grades begin to fail, but it is his burgeoning sexual nature which provides some of the most sinister moments - in particular, his first wet dream, in which deviant experimentation and murder become inextricably linked with arousal. Another chilling scene involves Todd forcing his opponent to wear a costume-shop Nazi uniform and goose step around the house. King's perversion of Todd's innocence parallels his portrayal of Dussander's gradual loss of the self-imposed control which has preserved him this long, and both begin separate killing sprees among Santa Donato's homeless population. A particularly tense section in which Dussander has a heart attack allows King to exploit the paranoid relationship of dependency which exists between his characters to the fullest extent, and the consequences of this scene set up a truly bleak denouement. By far the darkest of the stories in this collection, 'Apt Pupil' makes for a harrowing and almost physically grimy read.

'The Body' (subtitled Fall from Innocence) will again be familiar to fans of the film version, Stand By Me, which is a remarkably faithful rendering of the source material. The plot takes us to Castle Rock, and follows four friends as they embark on a journey to find the body of a local child who has gone missing in the woods. Inadvertently tipped off to the location of the body, narrator Gordie Lachance and his friends - Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio - race to beat a group of older and meaner kids to get there first. Their adventure is a classic coming-of-age tale, as the four boys make the transition from the long, fun summer days of childhood to the more realistic and painful state of adulthood. King gives us a solid grounding in the geography and families of Castle Rock, and creates an air of poignancy around the boys' jaunt up the train tracks. On the first page of the novella, he writes:

"I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in 1960, a long time ago... although sometimes it doesn't seem that long to me. Especially on the nights I wake up from those dreams where the hail fell into his open eyes."

I love that last sentence; it tells you a great deal in very few words, and manages to be chilling and almost heartbreaking at the same time. King maintains this bittersweet tone - surely one of the hardest challenges of writing to pull off successfully without descending into mawkishness - throughout, and the novella feels like a very personal piece of writing.* Gordie is a natural storyteller, even at this young age, and we are treated to a couple of his early pieces, including the puketastic tale of a pie-eating contest and a moody fictional reflection on the death of his brother. Although these moments work to break up the (mostly comical) plot, we are always aware of the end goal, the body of the title. In their final confrontation with the older boys, our heroes realise that they will never look on life in the same way again. I think that however unhappy one's childhood might have been (and mine was generally happy, so this is an assumption on my part), there will always be a few moments that we treasure in later life. In this tale of lost innocence and the drifting nature of friendship, King has crafted a sweet and touching portrait of those times.

The final novella in the collection is 'The Breathing Method' (subtitled A Winter's Tale), a gothic horror story if ever there was one. Our narrator, Mr Adley, is invited to a mysterious gentlemen's club by his employer, where the informal membership play billiards, or sit by the fire with a good book. The Club is overseen by a manservant, Stevens - always ready with the appropriate drink at the perfect moment, but not especially welcoming of questions. Adley embraces the various oddities of the Club, taking the hint when Stevens rebuffs his genuine (and understandable) curiosity. For sometimes, eerie tales are told, which draw the listener into rapt attendance. One of these, a pre-Christmas horror story told by a member called McCarron, makes up the body of the novella. I won't go into detail about it here, but it is a deliciously macabre affair, revolving around McCarron (a doctor) and one of his pregnant patients. Although this story is the centrepiece of 'The Breathing Method' (and gives the novella its name), King is almost as interested in the Club itself. The enigmatic - and at times, deeply sinister - Stevens is a strong creation, as is the rather bumbling Adley, ever-so-slightly out of his depth in this enticing but unsettling brownstone.

The Club's motto is: "It is the tale, not he who tells it." King opens Different Seasons with the same line. Given that each of the novellas contained within the book revolve around stories, most told by well realised narrators, one more concerned with uncovering the evils of the past, this should not be surprising. I find it interesting that King's current reputation is for knocking out bloated novels one after another - as if he doesn't know when to stop writing - but these stories give the lie to that kind of thinking. In his shorter fiction, King displays a truly skilful economy with words, as is the case here. And while Different Seasons might not have been what his horror readership were expecting at the time of its publication, I would argue that the book contains some of his most effective stories to date.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: Andy Dufresne is mentioned in 'Apt Pupil', having given Dussander financial advice at some point before his incarceration. 'The Body' refers to Shawshank penitentiary, and also to the events of Cujo, introducing Constable (later to be Sheriff) Bannerman. Finally, King notes that each novella was written immediately after he had completed one of his earlier novels - I won't list them here, as this is possibly only of interest to me.

* Indeed, in Danse Macabre (if I'm not mistaken), King briefly mentions the earliest bad thing he can remember: stumbling home, confused and alone, the friend he was with having been struck by a train. The parallels with 'The Body' are striking.

Next: Christine.

Danse Macabre (1981)

2008-10-20T01:16:00.004+01:00

Danse Macabre is Stephen King's first non-fiction book, a survey of the horror genre which was written in part so that the author would not have to explain his attraction to the field any more. King adopts an informal, chatty style which will be familiar to those who have read the foreword to his short story collection Night Shift. Starting with the bones of a lecture series (Themes in Supernatural Literature, given at the University of Maine) and incorporating personal opinion and elements of autobiography, King reviews developments in the horror genre over the preceding thirty years.

To provide historical context for these developments, King first turns to the origins and archetypes of horror, citing the common myths and urban legends of childhood as our initial exposure to the genre - he gives as his main example the tale of the killer with a hook for a hand who preys on nubile teens out at the lovers' lane. But we can draw a line from these (often still current) stories back to the grotesqueries of the Brothers Grimm, and further back to Aesop's fables (which are themselves shared across many cultures in some form or other). I find the sociological implication of this argument interesting: given that this type of story occurs in most societies, we can posit that humans have developed a powerful need for cautionary tales, with two main purposes in mind: explaining the unknown and controlling the young.

King makes a point of emphasising the moralistic nature of most horror stories - they tend to be conservative, preserving the norm and punishing the transgressor. He gradually gives us the core elements on which horror is built: fear of death, the unknown and the dark, and the helplessness we experience in the face of losing our sense of control. It is no coincidence that these are states which many of us associate with childhood. King argues that the lack of sophistication in horror can allow us "to regain our childish perspective on death". This is amply illustrated by King's works, which tend to feature at least one child in peril; as an author, he is almost always successful in forcing the readers to put themselves into the shoes of a young character, with the result that we begin to get scared as if we were that age. On a personal note, I enjoyed matching King's basic tenets with examples of his application of said tenets. Although he provides some illustrations from his early work, there are numerous later novels which spring to mind throughout his discussion of the mechanics of what truly scares us.

The early chapters also allow King to attempt a definition of the degrees to which we experience this fearful response: terror, the 'purest' form, is rooted firmly in anticipation; horror is the moment when we finally see the creature responsible for our anticipation; and revulsion is the visceral 'gross-out' scene where the creature pulls someone's guts out. As King explains, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud." There is something satisfyingly honest about this.

Moving on from the theoretical side of fear, King introduces the novels which effectively created modern horror, and on which almost all modern horror depends. These are Stoker's Dracula, Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Shelley's Frankenstein. In these excellent works, King recognises three horror archetypes: the vampire, the werewolf and the thing. After reading his narrative of the development of each archetype, across all media, it is difficult not to agree - although I should probably point out that King is not saying that Dr Jekyll is literally a werewolf; he effectively uses the term to apply to any character who is transformed into a base monster at the expense of their humanity. Tied into this is another of King's central ideas, that of the battle between our Apollonian (intellectual, moral, noble) and Dionysian (base, pleasure-seeking, anarchic) characteristics. In this light, the vampire and the thing are generally purely Dionysian beings, while the werewolf is in transition from one side to the other. The concept is epically illustrated in The Stand, where the battlelines are drawn entirely according to this duality, but it is also represented in a more personal way in, for example, Jack Torrance in The Shining. Anyway, enough theory for now.

Having established his general principles, King moves on to look at horror as it is represented in the various media. Regarding television, he turns scathing, describing the medium as, among other things, "the bottomless pit of shit". Although he obviously has fond memories of both The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, King is more concerned with their shortcomings - and they are really the shortcomings of television as a whole: it's far more scary when you use your imagination. Simply showing some producer's version of events immediately quantifies the unknown. The same is true of cinema, of course, although the bigger the budget, the better (theoretically, if not always actually) the effect should be. However, both are prone to compromise and studio/network pressure, and the results are more often on display right there on the screen. King prefers radio to either of them; sound effects direct the listener's thoughts to the right area, but the detail is filled in by the imagination. Horror needs to be focused and put together skilfully; mediocrity = bad.

Despite these reservations, King devotes two chapters to horror in cinema, one covering the classics of the genre (up to 1981) and the other devoted to populist junk. He traces the history of horror on film, from German expressionism to exploitation via Hammer-era gimmicks. I like his enthusiasm for cheesy rubbish and his descriptions of ludicrous gross-out scenes he has seen. Aside from producing a list of great films to be watched at the earliest available opportunity, King also discusses the pitfalls of the industry. Sadly, his comments have been borne out by some pretty shoddy subsequent interpretations of his own material. Interestingly, though, he then moves on to briefly mention the "porno-violence" in some of the worst films of the day, a topic which recently reared its head with the whole "torture porn" media craze.

However, by far the longest section of the book is turned over to literature. Horror fiction is, of course, King's chosen genre and it's intriguing to see what he would recommend. He begins by introducing a fourth archetype: the ghost. The ghost is a link to the past, a reminder of forgotten crimes, of wronged souls. Starting with Peter Straub's Ghost Story, King explores the narcissism - and resulting introspection - of the New American Gothic. He brings in The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, source material for The Haunting, and The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddon. The haunted house, complete with malevolent intent and the distortion of perspective, perfectly represents the strength of will and self-obsession of the traditional (evil) ghost.

From here, King moves on to a pair of studies in paranoia. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin is a classic of urban paranoia. Rosemary's sinister situation results in a questioning of faith and a fear of any kind of change, no matter how seemingly benign. Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, meanwhile, is more concerned with small-town paranoia. In some ways, King argues, this novel set the mould for the modern horror novel: in warning about the annihilation of the free personality in society, Finny unwittingly found his novel co-opted during McCarthy-era paranoia about the reds under the beds. In correspondence with King, he spells out the point that he himself meant no deeper meaning to the story: it's about pod people replacing humans with perfect (but emotionless) replacements. I love it when writers say this kind of thing.

I won't go through all of the authors in detail here. Books of note, however, include Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson (both books I really like). And it was nice to see James Herbert (The Fog, The Rats and many others) being championed at one point. While placing him firmly in the pulp tradition of extreme gore and lurid subject matter, King praises how he "assaults the reader". The section is informative and entertaining, containing - as I mentioned above - correspondence and conversational anecdotes with many of the authors he profiles. It's clear that some of these writers were influential in King's formative years, while others are seem more like the colleagues they actually are. Either way, these revealing passages are something of a coup.

King goes on to talk about horror in general terms, as an artform and as simple entertainment. He highlights the link between horror and humour, pointing out that horror is essentially unbelievable and foolish if handled incorrectly: story is all important, and King is not afraid to show his contempt for authors he considers to be poor at delivering it. He is equally dismissive of literary critics, citing their "infuriating elitism and their total ignorance of what popular fiction does." King also briefly mentions the responsibilities of the author/filmmaker/TV writer - is there a morality behind the story? And who is to blame if a copycat decides to emulate something you wrote?

King finishes this engrossing book by stating that horror is not about death so much as magic, dreams and imagination. After all, it's only fantasy. But during the night, when you feel a chill run down your spine and your eyes stare unblinking at the words of a finely crafted story, horror acts as a reaffirmation of life. I quite like that.

Notes on things which didn't make the grade from my initial seven pages of notes: I especially liked King's comments on "people who turn to the end" and those who fold down the corners of books to mark their place (it's nice to know that I'm not alone). I also had quite a nice paragraph on the role of the horror writer as the watcher for the mutant among us, but I lost it when Firefox decided to shut down for some reason and it's getting late now. Lastly, King on the primary duty of literature: "...to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed." Good turn of phrase.

Next: Different Seasons.

Cujo (1981)

2008-10-05T23:22:00.001+01:00

Wow, you've got to love that cover.

Cujo marks a welcome return to King's fictional town of Castle Rock. The novel opens with a brief recap of the murders featured in The Dead Zone, and King suggests ominously that although the perpetrator of those crimes is dead, "the monster never dies". And, in Cujo himself, the monster has assumed an equally terrifying form.

King swiftly introduces his main characters, the Trentons: Vic, an advertising man, is facing the potential ruin of his company after a disastrous new product causes a national panic. His wife, Donna, is trapped in the ennui and loneliness of being a housewife and mother. Their four-year-old son, Tad, is convinced that there is a monster in his closet, a shadowy beast with demonic eyes which snarls and growls in the dead of night. On top of this, King takes the reader on a tour of the surrounding area, contrasting the Trentons' suburban lifestyle with the rougher, more ramshackle inhabitants out on Town Road No. 3. These include the Camber family, and their gentle giant of a dog, Cujo. In a fairly early scene, Cujo chases a rabbit into a bolthole and is bitten by a rabid bat. This unfortunate occurrence will have serious - and, in some cases, fatal - consequences in due course.

Major spoilers ahead! Donna, it transpires, has been having an affair with local handyman and poet Steve Kemp. Realising that she has made a terrible mistake, she eventually rebuffs his advances - in retaliation, Kemp sends an anonymous note to Vic, hoping to destroy the Trentons' relationship completely. In this section of the novel, King gives us an insight into Donna's reasons for cuckolding her husband: her day-to-day loneliness, her fear of Tad growing up, the loss of her youth. However, although we may understand why she has had the affair, we feel less than sympathetic towards her. The Trentons initially seem like a model family unit, and it comes as something of a shock when its existence teeters on the brink of destruction. The breakdown of their relationship is effectively described: Vic descends into confusion and despair, while Donna struggles with her feelings of guilt and terror of losing Tad. In the midst of this, Vic is called away to attempt to rescue his business with his partner, Roger Breakstone.

King intersperses the Trentons' woes with developments at the Camber homestead. Joe, a mechanic with something of a mean streak, spends much of his spare time edging towards alcoholism with his misanthropic neighbour, Gary Pervier (who is well on his way to that unfortunate state). Charity Camber timidly works to show their son, Brett, that a better life is possible and that his father is not the ideal role model he believes him to be. She jumps at the chance to take him on a trip to visit her well-to-do sister's family, leaving Joe and Gary to drink themselves stupid. But Cujo is now very sick indeed, and it's not long before he makes his first kill.

I can't remember how old I was when I first read Cujo (anywhere from 13 to 16, at a guess), but I can remember very clearly how I felt while reading it. Cujo taps into that most primal of fears, being attacked by a predator. Having grown up with a number of dogs in the house, I am naturally comfortable with them, but those few that have ever really troubled me have all been big dogs.* And Cujo is an enormous dog, a 200-pound St Bernard. There is very little that anyone would be able to do against a dog of that size if it decided to attack them. Put simply, people should not own dogs which are physically bigger or stronger than them. If, for whatever reason, you can't control your dog, what exactly are you supposed to do if it turns on someone? Or on you? My views on dog-handling aside, I think it's fairly obvious that the bigger and stronger the dog, the greater the potential for trouble if the dog goes rogue.

King's descriptions of Cujo's attacks still provoke the same response in me that they originally did: shuddering horror. Gary Pervier has his throat ripped out in the first attack, and when Joe drops in to see him, Cujo goes to work on his groin. Yikes. These scenes are split between the victims' points of view and Cujo's own, in pain and infuriated. As one might expect, King handles the attacks with panache - both men realise the threat they are facing just in time to be brutally killed, short paragraphs heightening the tension as they meet their ends.

With Vic away on business, Donna and Tad are left together, each dealing with their own demons. In order to combat the monster in the closet, Vic has left Tad with the "monster words", a simple incantation to drive away the things that scare him. It is tempting to interpret the closet monster as a metaphor for the marital difficulties of the parents, a mental representation of Tad's understanding that something is wrong between them. But King also suggests at various points - as he did at the very beginning of the novel - that the spectre is somehow an extension of Frank Dodd's evil. In appearance, it instantly calls up Cujo, of course, but there's more to it than that. Is there a link between Tad's nightmares and reality?

King finally ups the ante when Donna's car starts to give up the ghost. She takes it out to Camber's workshop, where it finally breaks down completely. The Cambers aren't there. But Cujo is. What follows is a gruelling three-day standoff during the hottest summer on record. Donna and Tad are trapped in the car, while Cujo makes regular assaults on the windows. These attacks are more psychologically affecting than the more gory ones which came earlier, playing on fears of starvation and dehydration as much as the idea of being savaged to death by a demented beast. Tad's monster words will have little effect here.

However, King infuriatingly (but skilfully) keeps various other plotlines bubbling away, leaving Donna and Tad trapped in the car. Vic, worried that he is unable to reach Donna by phone, contacts the police. Kemp returns to the Trenton house and systematically destroys room after room of possessions, becoming a perfect red herring for the police to waste time on and something of a mirror for Cujo himself.** These delays keep the reader in a state of ever-increasing tension until the climax.

Final, crucial spoiler: the ending. Sheriff Bannerman, also featured in The Dead Zone, finds Donna and her son - mostly by luck - but is killed before he can report their whereabouts. Donna finally beats Cujo to death with a baseball bat in a chilling scene of primal, instinctive violence, but not before she has been savaged herself. And, in the end, her efforts are in vain. Tad dies of dehydration. I have generally tried not to explicitly give away the endings to any of King's books in these reviews, but this one is so incredibly bleak and cruel that I feel it deserves some discussion. Tad is an innocent, instantly the most sympathetic character in the novel - he is a well-drawn and loveable little boy. King's decision to kill him off makes the denouement of the book that much more horrific. As such, Cujo is notable as the most realistic of King's novels so far. Apart from the hints of a connection between perpetrators of violence already mentioned, there is nothing supernatural about the plot. These events could actually happen. Through Tad's death, Vic and Donna's marital problems are put into perspective: King shows that there are far worse things to have to cope with. The death of a child is commonly regarded as one of the worst events imaginable in our society, and in Cujo this is made explicitly clear. It makes for a harrowing end to a gripping piece of work.

Next: Danse Macabre.

* For example, a huge and generally very friendly Great Dane once pulled me from a swing as a child by simply holding my foot in its mouth, flipping me onto my face. While I was shaken by this, there was no intent to harm; it wasn't a bite - the dog just wanted to play. However, the same dog came to a sad end some months later, when it savagely ripped the heads off an entire flock of geese and had to be put down. The point being that you can never really predict how an animal is going to behave at any given time.

** King has stated that he wrote Cujo while in the grip of an intense period of drink and drug abuse; he has very little memory of actually writing the book. In this light, I find it interesting that he chose to use his own Christian name (for the first time in his work, as far as I remember) for one of the most dislikable characters in the novel. I think this also helps to explain why it contains (a) a couple of alcoholics, who are horribly dispatched, and (b) a much bleaker view of humanity in general than is found elsewhere in his canon.

Firestarter (1980)

2008-09-01T13:18:00.001+01:00

I should probably start off with an apology for the length of time it's taken me to publish this review. I finished reading Firestarter several weeks ago, and found that I had a problem: I couldn't write a review that I was happy with. And while I struggled to get started (over and over again), various work commitments were slowly building in the background, culminating in a punishing couple of weeks of proofreading a wretched historical novel. But that's all behind me now, and I think I've probably said everything that I wanted to below. However, there's still something bothering me: I can't really categorise it. This is not to suggest that I necessarily need to categorise every book I read (but woe betide you if you put horror on my general fiction shelves*). But I finished it and realised that I didn't quite know what to make of it. The novel isn't outright horror, although there are certainly horrific things in it; it's not quite sci-fi, but the whole thing is built on a sci-fi concept. Firestarter is a hybrid of both, mixed in with a page-turning chase thriller. I think this slightly sidetracked my write-up for a while - but it made no difference to the speed with which I devoured the novel, or my enjoyment of it.

King's sixth novel develops some of the themes which the author first visited in Carrie. At the end of his debut, King hinted at a possible future scenario where psychic powers might be harnessed by the government - the point being that if the government doesn't have control of these things, someone else might. What if Carrie hadn't burned herself out, but had kept on destroying and burning and killing? Where would it all end? In Firestarter, King explores the idea of a government actively creating psychic abilities and then having to deal with the consequences. As you might guess, they do a pretty poor job of it.

The novel begins with Andy McGee and his young daughter Charlie on the run in New York. King swiftly fills in bits and pieces of their backstory, weaving explanations into their flight from the city. As a student, Andy signs up for a medical experiment being run on his college campus; he will receive $200 for taking a mild hallucinogen and being monitored for a day or so.** But what he and his fellow volunteers (including his future wife, Vicky) don't know is that the LSD they're being given - known as Lot Six - will bring them mild psychic abilities. Or madness. King handles the experiment with his usual confidence: Andy and Vicky bond instantly through a sudden telepathic connection, patients display signs of telekinesis and mind-reading, and a student in one bed claws his eyes out, shrieking. What they don't realise is that these tests are being run by a shadowy CIA/NSA-style outfit called The Shop, which has a long-term vested interest in the participants. Andy's hazy memories of the chilling eye-gouging episode lead him back to Room 70, where he discovers two things: the scientific team is long gone, and he has developed the ability to 'push' people with his mind - a kind of psychic hypnosis which leaves him with a thudding headache.

Spoilers ahead! In the following years, Andy and Vicky get married and have a daughter. The Shop has determined that the couple are dead-ends in terms of their new skills (Vicky has a very mild telekinetic ability), but their daughter holds great potential and bears close scrutiny. After a horrendous mix-up, The Shop's agents torture and kill Vicky and snatch Charlie. King gives these agents their comeuppance, however, in a brilliantly tense sequence in which we realise the full power of Andy's 'push': the first agent, told that he is blind, is left insane; the second, told to go to sleep, remains in a coma for months. King also shows us the flipside to this kind of power - after overusing his ability, Andy is left physically crippled by head pain.

This might seem like rather a lot of backstory to wade through (at least in my retelling, and I'm only mentioning key moments), but it serves several purposes. The scientific reasons for Charlie's pyrokinesis (of which more later) and Andy's 'push' are described in terms which are explicit enough to be believable and vague enough to leave many aspects of the experiment a blank. We don't necessarily need to understand exactly how these powers are created; more important is the suggestion, planted fairly early on, that Charlie is effectively unquantifiable - a genetic loose cannon which The Shop is determined to possess and control.

While our sympathies are obviously with the McGees in their desperate flight from shadowy authorities, King also allows us to follow The Shop's attempts to capture our heroes. The Shop's top man, Captain 'Cap' Hollister - nearing retirement and increasingly resolved to see this thing through to the bitter end - sends out a team to capture Andy and Charlie, who by this time are enjoying the hospitality of an elderly couple at a remote farm. As agents surround them, King hits us with the first of Charlie's set pieces. Seeing that her father has now become expendable, she unleashes fire in a panicked, uncontrolled burst. Faces melt off, cars explode and the whole Shop operation descends into chaos. Perhaps more chillingly, Charlie becomes a cold, emotionless killing machine - she enjoys using her power, and it gets away from her; she can't stop.*** The repercussions of this episode are serious for everyone involved, as will be seen.

Skipping forward past various near misses and the McGees' eventual capture, the second half of the book sees The Shop in control. Sequestered for testing, Andy becomes bloated and muddled, addicted to the pills used to repress his 'push'. Charlie, meanwhile, has vowed never to use her ability again. Her fear of her own enjoyment is credible and completely understandable. As Dr Wanless, the originator of the Lot Six tests, explains, the McGees taught their daughter to control and direct her power by instilling in her a mental complex, similar to the sort of training parents all over the world use every day with young children. The analogy King gives is toilet training - a societal conditioning so powerful that the majority of adults will do almost anything rather than soil themselves. The farm siege is the first time (beyond a few early accidents, as any child might experience) that this complex is actively challenged, and Charlie is truly disturbed by the results. Her refusal to co-operate presents a major problem for The Shop, and King uses this to establish the framework of the rest of the book.

Cap is compromised into allowing one of his assassins, a disfigured native American Vietnam veteran named John Rainbird - a psychopath with an obsession with death - to work on Charlie. He poses as a humble cleaner and gradually wins her trust. Rainbird is the true villain of Firestarter - while The Shop as an organisation is ultimately responsible, Rainbird is the architect of the final destructive climax. He wants to cajole and coerce Charlie into using her talents before snuffing her out for his own purposes. His manipulation of the young girl is slow, careful and awful - King gradually develops this insidious, false friendship in such a way that the reader is left in a contradictory position: we want Charlie to use her powers again, and we want The Shop to get its comeuppance, but we also want her to resist for as long as possible - to not be taken in by Rainbird's lies. King suggests at one point that Charlie may have nuclear potential post-puberty, and this tinges everything that follows with that potential: when she finally goes off, will anyone be left standing?

The last section of the book builds to an explosive climax, taking in several terrific set pieces along the way: Andy's rediscovery of his 'push' (and the hypnotic 'ricochet' that this sometimes sets up in the victim's mind) leads to an outrageously visceral end for the doctor he uses it on - there is something truly horrific about the idea of blankly feeding your whole arm into a kitchen waste disposal unit. The 'push' is self-destructive, though - in much the same way as Johnny Smith's gift/curse in The Dead Zone, Andy's power is causing neurological damage. And the finale, once Charlie's complex has been completely removed, is excellent; gripping and satisfying.

Throughout Firestarter, King keeps a firm grasp on the various characters and points of view, so that while the plot may jump back and forth between The Shop and the McGees - and the past and present - we are never overwhelmed or confused by the order of events. And, as I mentioned at the start of this review, I tore through the book and really enjoyed it. I think my initial hang-up about genre is actually irrelevant: it simply reflects the fact that Firestarter shows King stretching his wings, trying out a new direction in his already very successful style. The novel opens with a quote from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (which I cannot recommend highly enough): "It was a pleasure to burn." Regardless of my earlier struggle to actually complete this post, the book itself was a pleasure to read.

* I'm serious about this. Horror goes in a separate bookcase with sci-fi and comics, and Stephen King gets a triple-stacked shelf of his own.

** I had a friend at university who almost went in for something similar. Except he was going to have his little toes cut off and then reattached by a microsurgery student. In the end, he got a student loan instead. I was always a little bit disappointed.

*** Early on, Charlie's firestarting ability is referred to as 'the Bad Thing', a term used in The Shining for Jack's alcoholism. While a link between the two is never explicitly stated in Firestarter, I found it interesting that in both cases there are strong elements of attraction and compulsion associated with the term for the character who does 'the Bad Thing'. Looked at in this light (and assuming the reader's familiarity with The Shining), it nicely foreshadows Charlie's growing enjoyment of her abilities a long time before she actually uses them. Apologies for the continuing footnotes. I'll try to make this the last one.

Next: Cujo.

The Dead Zone (1979)

2008-08-05T01:06:00.001+01:00

The Dead Zone, King's follow-up to The Stand, is a sombre exploration of psychic abilities and their attendant responsibilities. Reading the two books one after the other, the contrasts are striking: where The Stand is epic and expansive, The Dead Zone is lean and almost muted in tone - it immediately seems like a much more personal story.

The prologue introduces us to the two central characters of the novel, the hero and villain respectively, many years before they will actually meet. The first is Johnny Smith, a young lad who has a nasty accident while ice skating. His head injury results in a soon-forgotten burst of prophecy and years of "hunches". Meanwhile, the villain of the piece - Greg Stillson - is a travelling Bible salesman who kicks a dog to death in his first scene. Despite his obvious anger management issues, Stillson believes himself to be destined for greatness. Whether he will attain that greatness, however, will depend on much which is to follow.

Skip ahead to October 1970. Johnny is now a teacher in the small town of Cleaves Mills, and is dating one of his colleagues, Sarah Bracknell. King establishes very quickly that Johnny is a really nice person with a good sense of humour - the reader soon finds him as endearing as Sarah does. We follow them as they head out on a fateful date at the county fair, where King pulls out the first of several strong setpieces: Johnny hits a winning streak on a Wheel of Fortune stall, eventually winning several hundred dollars from his initial bet, rubbing his forehead absently all the while. However, Johnny's luck runs out at the end of the night, when his taxi crashes into some drag-racing teens, killing the driver and leaving Johnny in a coma for the next five years.

Spoilers ahead! When he finally wakes up, his old life is gone - Sarah is married with a child, his parents have used up their savings keeping him in hospital, and his mother's religion has become a full-blown mania - and he has a long road of surgery and physiotherapy ahead of him. In addition, Johnny has developed a fully-fledged psychic power: he can see a person's past or future by touching either them or their possessions. His mother, Vera, swiftly seizes on this as evidence of God's "plan" for him, but Johnny is less sure.*

I found it interesting that at no point does Johnny consider his power to be a blessing. It is mysterious, it doesn't manifest itself in any predictable pattern and it is not controllable. It is useful at times (such as when Johnny "sees" someone's house burning down and is able to call the fire brigade in time to minimise the damage), but the visions gradually become more obviously linked to head pain - even on this basic level, there is a downside to his ability. There is also, equally importantly, the "dead zone" itself: an area of his brain which was damaged in the crash. This affects Johnny both in the real world (he struggles to remember street names, for example) and in his visions; there are often blind spots in his second sight, details which he cannot see. All of which is important to the plot, as we will see. And all of which is handled adroitly by King - where I have made it sound maddeningly vague and have rambled on for ages, he slowly builds up the picture we have of Johnny's condition, essentially keeping us at the same stage of understanding as the character for much of the book.

Major spoilers ahead! While all this is developing, we occasionally break away to chart Stillson's rise through the social ranks. He becomes a successful businessman, and later mayor of his town, through a combination of underhand moves and outright intimidation. We also witness growing desperation in a small Maine town called Castle Rock, where a killer known as the 'Castle Rock Strangler' is murdering and raping (in that order) females of all ages. King weaves these elements into the novel a little at a time, until eventually Johnny is sought out by Sheriff George Bannerman. He solves the case in a matter of pages. It all feels rather abrupt, to be honest. It's almost as if King wanted to introduce his fictional town, but didn't want to divert the reader from Johnny's main storyline for too long. It just seems a slight shame to leave so soon.

The "main" storyline mentioned above revolves - as you will already have surmised - around Stillson, by now a candidate for the House of Representatives. The political background of the mid-70s runs throughout the novel, but comes firmly into focus when (a) Johnny meets soon-to-be President Carter, shaking his hand and predicting electoral success, and (b) Johnny is gladhanded by Stillson at a rally and sees global nuclear war. In about twenty years' time, Stillson will somehow become President and trigger the end of the world. This raises the "if you could go back in time and kill Hitler in the early 1930s, would you do it?" dilemma; should Johnny assassinate Stillson to save the world? Making this decision more troubling still is the fact that there are blue filters covering key moments of the vision - the dead zone.

The construction of The Dead Zone is quite unusual. As I've already mentioned, there are several background plotlines which gradually come to bear on the episodic treatment of Johnny's tale, some of which are major and some of which are throwaway bits of detail that can only be fully understood in light of much later events (a salesman's visit to a bar, for example). The structure of the final part of the book is bold: King ends the story and then shows us why it ended the way it did in 'Notes from the Dead Zone', a coda which is satisfying and melancholy at the same time. The tragedy of Johnny Smith's post-coma life - the pain, the social isolation, the terrible burden of foreknowledge - makes him stand out among King's protagonists. Johnny is arguably his most sympathetic character so far, and he is dealt a harrowing hand by his creator. It makes The Dead Zone a compelling read.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: Johnny's psychic power is hysterically compared to being "just like in that book Carrie." And a signpost in the vicinity of Castle Rock points to Jerusalem's Lot, suggesting that it isn't all that far away.

* This makes for an interesting comparison with God's influence in The Stand. In that book, Mother Abigail repeatedly speaks of God's "plan" and "will", and (for the most part) the other characters follow this plan, regardless of their personal beliefs. In The Dead Zone, Vera's insistence on "doing God's work" is (a) rejected by her son and husband, and (b) presented as a symptom of her unhinged, obsessional mind. My theory is that King decided to balance his previous example of benign, barely questioned religious authority with this unhappy woman. In this book, God's "will" can be seen to work (if at all) through less direct methods.

Next: Firestarter.

The Stand (1978/1990)

2008-07-28T16:00:00.002+01:00

The Stand is often described - by critics and fans alike - as Stephen King's "best" novel. You will probably have noticed by now that I'm not grading or ranking these books as I go through them (and I don't intend to start now). This is for two main reasons: (a) I suspect that I would end up continually tinkering with my grades as I went on, and (b) I would prefer (where possible) to judge each book on its own merits, rather than in comparison with other work.* And so, on the one hand, I slightly object to this book's huge reputation on principle. However, balancing this out is the fact that I accidentally spent most of the last week reading The Stand rather than working or sleeping. It's a humdinger.

Before getting started, I should probably make clear for the record that my copy is the reissued "complete and uncut edition" from 1990, which means that all the dates have been changed to fit the revised timeframe of the story and a whole chunk of character background has been reinserted. This additional material accounts for around 400 manuscript pages, which were originally removed, as King writes in his preface, "at the behest of the accounting department" rather than for editorial reasons. The end result is a book of 1,423 pages - weighty even by King's standards.

Spoilers ahead! The novel begins with the accidental release of a plague - the superflu, aka Project Blue, aka Captain Trips, aka Tube Neck - from a secret military installation beneath the Mojave Desert. Charles Campion, a security guard, manages to escape before the bioweapons lab is fully sealed off, and flees across the US with his wife and child in a desperate attempt to outrun death. Instead, they take the plague with them, starting a chain reaction that leads to the end of the world as we know it.

King deftly combines sections following the spread of the plague with the personal stories of those who will become major players in what is to follow. We witness the links which allow the infection to spread and the military's attempts to quarantine and isolate those who are infected - both of which illustrate the repercussions of good and bad decisions under pressure, as well as the effects of chance interactions. One chapter relates the first (unrepressed) reports of the virus, as the media rebel against increasingly brutal cover-ups before being taken off the air with extreme prejudice. Within 200 pages, the reader is completely involved, and the novel is almost forcing you to read it. Widespread panic and grim glimpses into the lives of the infected and dying build up a bleak and shocking picture of a society in sudden collapse.

Against this chilling background, we gradually come to know the central characters, all of whom are (for reasons not fully understood by military science) immune to the superflu. King gives each of them personal tragedies to deal with, and we come to identify strongly with them as a result. Stuart Redman, the only survivor from his small Texas town, is isolated in the plague response centre at Stovington, sealed off while the rest of the world is dying; Larry Underwood, a musician visiting his mother in New York, is left to bleakly wander the streets of the big city, struggling with the responsibilities of being a survivor; pregnant Frannie Goldsmith buries her father in the garden as her Maine town dies around her; deaf-mute Nick Andros finds himself left in charge of dying prisoners in an Arkansas jail. King succesfully delineates his main characters, keeping them distinct from one another - which becomes more and more important as the cast gradually grows. There are some truly haunting moments on show here, Larry's flight out of New York through the corpse-filled Lincoln Tunnel being perhaps the best example.

We are also introduced to a number of other characters who are destined for darker things. Lloyd Henreid, effectively on death row for a tristate killing spree, is left to starve in his cell. A pyromaniac known as the Trashcan Man roams the deserted countryside, torching everything in his path. And Randall Flagg - the Walkin' Dude, the dark man - is making his way to Las Vegas.

Flagg is something of an enigma: is he the antichrist? He doesn't remember. He can send out his Eye (in one of several nods to The Lord of the Rings saga) to spy on others. He can control various "evil" animals - wolves, crows, etc. He can drive people mad with a look. And he can manipulate the weak into betrayal and murder. However, his past is something of a mystery - King hints that he has been involved in a number of well-known atrocities (the JFK assassination, the Manson murders), purely in positions of terrible influence. But the fact that Flagg is an unknown quantity even to himself makes his character that bit less predictable and more sinister. All of which means that King is able to build up the threat that Flagg represents to the survivors of the plague.

These fall into two categories: the good and the evil (although perhaps "the weak" would be more accurate). Both groups experience vivid dreams, some featuring an ancient, benevolent black woman (Mother Abigail) and others featuring Flagg. The survivors are drawn to one or the other, depending on their driving characteristics. The "good" survivors end up in Boulder, Colorado, trying to re-establish society; the "evil" survivors gather around Flagg in Las Vegas, and rapidly set to work on collecting weaponry for an assault on Boulder. And this is where the story begins to falter slightly.

In his depiction of the Boulder Free Zone, King relies on former sociology professor Glen Bateman to explain his concepts of basic societies. I began to feel that this character - while endearing in his own right - was being used a little too much to deliver weighty chunks of exposition and societal theory; much is made of the establishment of a committee to oversee the fledgling community, and this slows down the breakneck pace of the preceeding 800 pages. And society is always balanced against religion: Mother Abigail dismisses the committee as unimportant, her point being that whatever happens to them will be down to God and not their petty, earthly organisations. The battle lines between good and evil, right and wrong, God and the Devil - however you want to interpret it - are drawn, and not everyone is going to survive the final showdown (which involves a literal example of deus ex machina that is laughable on film but just about acceptable on the page, mostly because King handles it through allusion in a matter-of-fact way).

In a sense, the "stand" that is finally made is one of the intuitive against the rational. King illustrates, time and again, the stupidity of mankind - firstly in the release of and response to the superflu, and then in the way that the emergent societies develop. Flagg can be interpreted as a representation of the rational: he is the logic that results in mutually assured destruction, the belief in technology which ultimately blinds us to the effects of using said technology, the very mentality that allows for the existence of biological weapons. Mother Abigail, on the other hand, represents a more instinctive and compassionate way of life - whether you choose to take on board the religious message or not (and several of the main characters do not). However, it seems unfair to reduce this sprawling tome to a simple battle between opposing sides; there is much more to it than that implies. See, for example, the chapter in which King describes a second epidemic of "natural" deaths following the end of the plague - these are pointless, tragic, stupid and fitting by turn, taking in snake bite, drug overdose, falling down a well, getting locked in a freezer. They are the everyday accidents of life, to which we are prone now and would still be after a disaster of this magnitude. The randomness and coincidences of life prevail.

Right, time to wrap this up once and for all. Although I don't personally consider this to be Stephen King's "best" book, it is certainly an exciting and thrilling piece of writing. And while it could probably do with a little bit of pruning around the midsection, The Stand is a memorable, harrowing and compelling drama which effectively took over my life for a week (on the second reading) - you should take that as a recommendation.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: The Stand contains King's first reference to Castle Rock, a fictional town which features in many of his books to come. And, at one point, Mother Abigail refers to having "the shine".

* Prepare for me to ignore this lofty ideal completely in later posts, as and when I forget about trying to stick to it...

Next: The Dead Zone.

Night Shift (1978)

2008-07-21T14:42:00.002+01:00

Night Shift is the first of King's short story collections, and was an early favourite of mine. The foreword is the first instance of the author addressing himself to his readers, discussing - among other things - the nature of fear, the compulsion to write, and the audience's relationship with the horrific. King fans will recognise the warm, friendly tone instantly, as it has come to characterise his written interactions with the reader in numerous forewords and in his forays into non-fiction. King's self-deprecating comment here that "no-one reads a writer's preface" (apart from those with a vested interest) is starkly at odds with the following that these chatty epistles seem to have developed among fan groups. And - without wanting to sound too much like a creepy stalker - there is something almost comforting about them; it's a little like meeting an old friend after a few years of lost contact. I'm guessing this is the effect he was hoping for. Anyway, let's move on to the book proper. There may be a few (fairly minor) spoilers ahead.

The book is a mixture of outright horror tales, suspense stories and other, less easily defined pieces. In the first category, King includes two companion pieces to 'Salem's Lot, one a prequel of sorts ('Jerusalem's Lot') and the other ('One For The Road') a chilling coda to the novel. 'Night Surf' is a brief glimpse at the horrors of King's huge, apocalyptic plague novel, The Stand (which I am currently reading), offering a bleak picture of teenagers on a beach pondering their future (if any). Other terrors in this category include rats ('Graveyard Shift'), demonic machinery ('The Mangler', 'Trucks', 'The Lawnmower Man', 'Battleground'), voodoo ('I Know What You Need'), gruesome transmutation ('I Am The Doorway', 'Grey Matter') and overly religious children ('Children of the Corn'). There are also a couple of stories ('Sometimes They Come Back', 'The Boogeyman') in which adults are forced to deal - in very different ways - with the perils of childhood.

The suspense tales include two stories used in the anthology film Cat's Eye - 'The Ledge' and 'Quitters, Inc.' - both of which are very hard to read without putting oneself in the protagonists' place. These, together with 'Strawberry Spring' and 'The Man Who Loved Flowers' (the latter a wonderful piece of economical, twisty writing), nod towards the unsettling quality of The Twilight Zone or some of Ray Bradbury's short stories.

It's easy to see why so many of the stories mentioned so far have been filmed - the vivid descriptions paint chilling snapshots which remain in the mind long after the words themselves have faded. But this is the art of the short story: to create a fully realised world in a short amount of space to the fullest effect possible - and it is an art on which King has a firm grasp. Even remembering (most of) the endings from previous readings, I was still gripped by the majority of these tales. There are moments which have remained in my brain since I first read this collection, aged 13, and which still make me shudder if they happen to pop unexpectedly into my thoughts ('The Boogeyman' probably being the prime example).

But there are also a couple of stories I have not yet mentioned; these are unsettling in a different way, in that they are much more difficult to categorise. 'The Last Rung On The Ladder' is an affecting description of a childhood game played between the narrator and his sister - a game which is mirrored in their adult lives. It's a story suffused with regret, hearkening back to the innocence of youth. 'The Woman In The Room' describes the pain of losing a parent, and the moral dilemma between hoping for (and perhaps helping towards) a swift death and letting things run their own, hard course. I am surprised to find that, this time around, these stories are the ones that linger in my mind. Perhaps this is down to my age (31 rather than 13), or perhaps the other, more actively horrific, stories are now so ingrained in me that I don't need to think about them all that often. Either way, this is an excellent collection, and one to which I will no doubt return many more times.

Next: The Stand.

The Shining (1977)

2008-07-16T13:47:00.003+01:00

I think everyone is likely to be familiar with the plot of The Shining: a family spends the winter caretaking a hotel resort in the Colorado mountains, with disastrous consequences. My feelings about the novel of The Shining are slightly mixed. Kubrick's film version casts such a long shadow over any discussion of the story; it is almost impossible - unless you have never watched the film - not to think of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. And yet Stephen King was never happy with Kubrick's interpretation of his work, claiming that while it was a strong piece of film-making, it was not a good adaptation of the book.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this dislike (apart from the removal of much that is supernatural, such as the creeping topiary animals, in favour of the psychological) was that Nicholson's iconic performance is too roguishly likable, even when he's clearly lost his mind. In the novel, Jack Torrance is remarkably unlikable - a recovering alcoholic who has previously broken his son's arm and severely beaten a student under his care. While King develops him as a rounded character - and we can see that he truly does love his family - he is driven almost entirely by hatred and rage. His backstory (his own alcoholic father destroying the family) mirrors his own situation, but is very quickly twisted to become a justification for his monstrous behaviour. But that is King's intention: Torrance is a monster-in-waiting, and the malign spirit of the hotel recognises and exploits this to its own ends.

Jack's situation is also mirrored by the play he is attempting to write, and his attitude to his characters. There is a section where he contemplates his own unlikable protagonist; we understand that he tries to see the good and bad in each of them ("let the reader lay blame"), but is gradually losing the ability not to pick sides. I can't help but think that this reflects King's view of his creation as well. It is tempting to go further, and to draw parallels between Torrance and King - the author had a long struggle with addiction himself - but I will leave that to the biographers.

Just to quickly return to the Kubrick version, I should mention that it is my favourite filmed adaptation of King's work (and would probably be in my top ten films, if anyone were unkind enough to actually make me compile such a list). Despite cutting much of what makes the book so disturbing, Kubrick managed something which is very rarely achieved: capturing the essence of King's work. There are King films almost beyond counting which take his excellent ideas and then ruin them utterly by being too literal and by using substandard actors. The Shining takes the opposite approach - paring the plot down to basics, extracting career-defining performances from almost all of the key players, and constantly building dread in a way that I'm not sure has ever been repeated. Anyway, enough about the film.

The novel gives us the full, bloody history of the Overlook, as Jack becomes more and more obsessed with it. His descent into madness is heavily signposted but handled convincingly; not only do we know what he is thinking, we also see things from the points-of-view of his wife and son, Wendy and Danny. And Danny knows more than a five-year-old should about both his father and the hotel. The true horror of the situation is almost always experienced (by us) through Danny - a further development of King's ability to call up the things that scare children to make the reader feel those terrors firsthand. References to Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, and the adult debaucheries lying just beneath the surface of reality in the hotel, add a further disturbing element to Danny's situation; there are things that he is too young to understand, but he has to deal with them nonetheless.

Once Jack has finally slipped off the shackles of sanity, The Shining gears up for a gripping final act, building to a very different climax from that which Kubrick decided to show. And this is where the unlikability of Jack Torrance throughout the book pays off: in his last lines before the hotel completely takes possession of him, Jack redeems himself by trying to save his son. And then the Overlook fully reveals itself in a truly chilling scene, and the race to the finish is on. I won't go into it in any more detail here - read the book yourself.

Next: Night Shift.

'Salem's Lot (1975)

2008-07-14T10:17:00.002+01:00

'Salem's Lot is King's first 'long' novel, and is one which I came to early in my horror career. And, as you can tell from the cover above (from my edition), it's a vampire novel. In a way, it's a shame that this is telegraphed before you even pick up the book, because King effectively wrongfoots the reader for over a hundred pages: the Marsten house, looming over the town of Jerusalem's Lot, dominates the early action - this, together with references to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (source material for the eerie, black and white film, The Haunting, 1963), suggests that we are actually reading a haunted house novel.

The chapter structure introduces us to the major characters, and indeed the town itself, gradually. We get to know most of the inhabitants of the Lot - some in passing, some in more detail - as writer Ben Mears struggles to exorcise his childhood demons and comes to understand that something awful has arrived in town at roughly the same time as him. What exactly are Straker and Barlow, the new owners of the Marsten house, up to? At first, Ben is alone in his suspicions, but gradually he draws in others. His relationships with Susan (romantic interest) and Matt (the wise teacher) develop credibly and smoothly. Father Callahan, a Catholic priest, and Jimmy, a local doctor, are also pulled into the group. After around two hundred pages, the reader is fully caught up in the affairs of this small country town. And then King suddenly hits us with shocks and action, and keeps the pressure on for the rest of the book.

Spoilers ahead! The plotting and background work all pay off with some chilling moments: a little dead boy floats at a window, begging to be let in; Susan teams up with Mark, a child with a love of the old Universal-style monsters, for an ill-fated expedition into the Marsten house. Her subsequent transformation into a vampire leads to a turning point in the book, as our heroes are forced to destroy a friend and ally. This, as you might expect, means war. Other major characters are either sidetracked or killed off as the plot races ahead, gradually forcing Ben and Mark together to face the monstrous Barlow alone. And while King considerably raises the bar in terms of violence and gore as compared to that in Carrie, we are shown how physically and emotionally overwhelming these things can be for those who witness them (especially for children).

'Salem's Lot is King's first real page turner, blending thrills and horror into the initial, insidious machinations of evil. Much is made of the necessity for suspension of belief among the main characters (ie if you refuse to even entertain the possibility of vampires, you've already lost), and this lesson is not lost on the reader: we must accept that these things are real if we are to truly feel a chill down our spines when a branch scrapes the window in the dead of night. Fortunately, the lengthy build-up is entirely successful in its depiction of a small town being slowly but completely overrun by monsters, and 'Salem's Lot is just as enjoyable as I remembered it being.

Next: The Shining.

Carrie (1974)

2008-07-06T14:03:00.003+01:00

Over the years, I think I've probably read the majority of King's books at least a couple of times each. His debut (or at least first published) novel, Carrie, is one that I've somehow never revisited, despite its brevity - I think this is partly because I know Brian de Palma's film adaptation so well. The film (memorable for excellent performances from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, as well as the lurid shock moments and split screen effects) casts a long shadow, and it's often hard in this sort of instance to disassociate the characters in a book from the actors in a filmed version. Attempting to put aside this cultural baggage, I settled in one evening last week and started to read.

The story is told with support from newspaper articles, extracts from books, transcripts from official hearings and news wires - the majority of which discuss events in the town of Chamberlain (which we are yet to read of) with the benefit of hindsight. This kind of foreshadowing is woven into the plot a little at a time; the eventual tragedy is well signposted. On the first page, we learn that Carrie White has telekinetic powers, and it isn't long before we are told that a lot of people have died as a result of these powers.

Carrie herself is presented as a bullied, isolated girl suffering under the twin hardships of a home life dominated by a fanatically religious mother and a school life where she is the butt of every joke. The cruelty of her teenaged peers is highlighted early on, in a scene where Carrie gets her first (very late) period in the school showers and is mocked and humiliated by her classmates. This is a very strong scene, both as an immediate indication of her status at the bottom of the social ladder, and as the beginning of the blood theme which becomes so important later in the book. King has said in interviews that he threw away his first draft of the book in disgust after completing this early scene, and it is easy to see why: there is something raw and almost primal in the taunting Carrie receives, and this informs much of what is to follow.

The cruelty of children and small town life in general are themes that King has often returned to in his work (as we will see in later posts), and I found it interesting to return to where this all started. While I think that later books explore childhood in a more rounded, more satisfying way, there is no denying the power of Carrie's humiliating life. We empathise with her, but also understand that she will become a monster; King builds our sympathy for Carrie, and then - during the horrors of prom night, when her only experience of social acceptance is cruelly snatched away - turns the tables on the reader. We already know that she will kill hundreds of people, but by this point we are almost rooting for her to do so. King's ability to fully engage the reader with his central character means that (a) we feel for her almost from the beginning of the book, and (b) we end up feeling that her tormentors are getting their just desserts - particularly her demented mother, and Billy and Chris, the couple who kickstart the mayhem that occurs on prom night. And as she realises that she has become a monster, we realise that we have been silently encouraging her to do so.

Stylistically, Carrie introduces some of King's favourite devices, including the addition of thoughts in brackets breaking up paragraphs of action. What will later develop into a deft building of tension is here slightly more experimental: as the story moves to its climax, scenes begin to overlap, jumping back and forth as we switch from character to character and view incidents from a number of perspectives. While Carrie might not be the most polished of King's novels, its mixture of religious fervour and the awakening of latent potentialities - both pubertal and telekinetic - makes it a compelling read nonetheless.

Next: 'Salem's Lot.

Introduction

2008-07-04T15:49:00.009+01:00

Welcome to a project I have been planning for quite some time: reading all of Stephen King's novels and short stories in order. Perhaps I should explain...

I have been a huge fan of King's books since I first borrowed a copy of Misery from a friend at school. I was around eleven or twelve years old (1988-89), and was already a confirmed reader - often to the exclusion of sleep or outdoor pursuits. I took the book home, and read it in bed by torchlight until 2 a.m. My mother noticed it on my bedside table in the morning, opened the book at random, and immediately told me I couldn't read it and should take it back to my friend (I should probably point out that this was the only time I was ever prohibited from reading anything by my parents, and that I subsequently learned that there was a general prohibition on King's books at school, which she had picked up on. A few years later, I was well on my way to collecting as many of his works as I could find, and my parents never once objected). I finished it during lunchbreaks over the next week, and never looked back.

Over the years, I tended to avoid the Dark Tower series - assuming them to be fantasy rather than horror - until I realised one day that I had read everything else he had written (at least until his next book came out). I bought the first three books in the series, and soon found that I was hopelessly engrossed. The wait for the fourth part almost drove me mad. And then I started noticing similarities with other books on my shelf: a recurring character here, a memorable turn of phrase there. I decided to put off completing the series until I had revisited those previous worlds and characters, so that I wouldn't miss a thing.

I am still a devoted reader (and still a King fan), but work and the easy distractions of television, DVDs and the internet have encroached on my time more and more of late. But that is now going to change. After several years of promising myself that I would start my grand reading project, I have decided that now is the time. I hope you enjoy (or at least follow) the journey.

A few points to note:

I will be reading and reviewing all of King's books in (roughly) publication order, which can be found here. There are a few works on the list which are either out of print and/or were revised or collected elsewhere; hopefully, there will not be too many gaps. My personal collection is made up entirely of UK editions, for those who are interested.
I have decided to leave the Dark Tower series until the end of this endeavour, so as not to lose momentum once I get into it again.
Please feel free to leave comments and opinions. Nothing too abusive, though. Also, please leave a name (and URL if you have one) rather than posting anonymously.
Finally, these reviews are likely to contain spoilers - I'm not sure that I can write thoroughly about these books without giving away a few plot points here and there. However, as an avid reader generally and a King fan specifically, I will do my best not to actively ruin things for those who are yet to read them.

Thanks for reading.