The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)

Following It, arguably Stephen King's most satisfying piece of work to this point in his career, was always going to be a challenge - the novel was something of a high water mark, complex in structure and rich in prevalent King themes. And so it came to pass that readers were divided over his next release, The Eyes of the Dragon, a straightforward fantasy novel about feudal skullduggery. Reading the novels one after another, it's hard not to sympathise with those who bemoaned the dashing of their high expectations; after the dense plotting and split timelines of It, this book almost feels like a palate cleanser.

Major spoilers ahead! Here's the plot in a nutshell: in the kingdom of Delain, King Roland has two sons, Peter (strong-willed, intelligent, brave) and Thomas (weak, jealous, neglected). Sinister adviser Flagg poisons Roland, pins the murder on Peter and has him imprisoned for life at the top of a 300-foot tower, the Needle. Thomas, who secretly witnessed his father's death, is crowned in his older brother's place. Peter ingeniously engineers his eventual escape, some years later, with the help of his few remaining friends, a stack of napkins and a dollhouse. Flagg is wounded and flees the realm. Thomas and his butler head out on a quest to track him down. The end.

There's more to it, of course, but those are the bare bones. The Eyes of the Dragon started life as a book for King's daughter (who had read none of his previous novels due to their horror content, and who also appears as a minor character) and has some of the hallmarks of what would come to be known as 'young adult' fiction: among them, a relatively uncomplicated story, a few twists and turns, a sense of morality and life lessons aplenty. And as with much YA fare (and as we have come to expect from King), it's also very readable. The omniscient first person narrator delivers the tale as if this were a bedtime story, occasionally linking back to the real world, and the book's short chapters help to keep things moving along at a brisk pace. King also uses his narrator to slip in didactic tips on subjects including relationships, nicotine and guilt, which is less irksome than that probably sounds.

However, the fact that the novel is aimed at a younger audience has a downside - The Eyes of the Dragon lacks the emotional punch of King's best writing (or at least it provoked little feeling in me). Peter and Thomas are both essentially passive characters to whom bad things happen, which can make the time we spend with them drag. Thomas reads as a tiresome, unlikable puppet, despite the narrator's efforts to justify or explain his weakness, while even Peter's inherent goodness and ingenuity begin to grate after a while. This passivity extends to several of the secondary characters (among them Anders Peyna and Ben Staad), who spend much of the book with their hands tied, waiting for the right time to act. King's standard operating procedure here would be to milk the various delays and uncertainties for tension, but The Eyes of the Dragon more often feels flat instead.

The one exception to this, and I think the reason behind it, is the Flagg character. Regular readers will recognise the name from The Stand, in which Randall Flagg represented and controlled the worst aspects of humanity. He's an enigmatic but compelling force of evil and influence. The fantasy version on display in The Eyes of the Dragon is no less compelling - hundreds of years old, a scheming murderer and a demonic agent of anarchy, Flagg is by far the most interesting character in the novel, and the book only fully comes alive when he features. King clearly relishes writing his villain, as evidenced by the amount of detail we get about him near the beginning of the story. The sequence in which Flagg carefully measures out the virulent poison that brings such a wretched death to Roland is tense and thrilling, as is the death itself. His manipulation of Thomas as he feeds his insecurity and greed is cruel and horribly insidious. In a nod to his horror readership, King references Leng and Alhazred, placing Flagg firmly in the Lovecraftian realm of forbidden knowledge. But the strength of Flagg as a character is part of the novel's problem: when the villain owns and uses a copy of the Necronomicon bound in human skin, the teenage antagonists can't help but feel slightly insipid.

While dealing with the flaws in The Eyes of the Dragon, I should also briefly mention the book's sporadic illustrations (in my edition, those of David Palladini, although other editions have had different artists), which I must admit are not to my personal taste. While it's possible that the awkward compositions and odd perspectives are perhaps trying to evoke the flatness of medieval art, in my opinion these images rather detract from the story. Apart from the opening dragon illustration on the title page, I'm afraid they left me cold.

As I noted at the top of this post, readers were unsure about The Eyes of the Dragon when it was first published, many of them clamouring for a return to King's staple genre - a backlash that would subsequently be reflected in King's scathing treatment of the writer/fan relationship, Misery. As is probably clear by now, my own views on the novel are mixed; despite its general readability and some engaging sequences, it feels a little underwhelming. Certainly it's an unusual departure in terms of genre, plot and tone (in fact, it shares most in common with The Gunslinger in that respect) and taken on its own terms, as a tale for younger readers, the novel succeeds. But it's easy to see how a more mature (specifically horror) audience might consider the book disposable. And while the feudal version of Flagg gives insight into what will become an increasingly important figure in other books, that isn't enough to make it likely that I'll return to The Eyes of the Dragon any time soon.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: Naomi's dog Frisky thinks in the same format as Cujo (but without the rabid insanity), which is a nice touch. King's reference to sorcerers being used at sea for weather control calls to mind Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, whether deliberately or not. Finally, just as Flagg is an alternate version of Randall Flagg from The Stand, arguably so too is King Roland a weaker version of Roland from The Dark Tower series - but we'll revisit these connections in more detail at a later date.

Next: The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three.

It (1986)

An expansive and engrossing work, It tells the story of seven children battling an archetypal monster in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, and opens with a chapter that ranks (in my opinion) among the best that the author has ever written - a microcosm of the rest of the novel. King quickly introduces us to Bill Denbrough, one of his central characters, through the eyes of his younger brother, George. Bill, sick in bed in 1957, makes his brother a paper boat. George braves the imagined horrors of the basement to fetch paraffin to waterproof this creation, kisses Bill's cheek in farewell and then heads out into the rain. The boat is swept into a storm drain, and little George is startled when a clown offers him a balloon from down in the sewer. Reaching for it, he is savagely murdered, his arm torn clean off. With this one chapter, King touches on several of the book's key ideas - childhood, the end of innocence, the nature of community - while dragging the reader from the everyday to the uncanny and finally to the horrific.

The next chapter is a slightly different beast. Jumping to 1984, King details the circumstances surrounding the grisly death of Adrian Mellon. An effeminate and rather childish homosexual, Mellon has been targeted by some local assholes who take exception to his existence, beat him to a pulp and then throw him from a bridge into the canal. As the police try to get to the bottom of contradictory statements, a common factor emerges: witnesses on both sides of the conflict report seeing a clown beneath the bridge. And one of them sees it biting into the prone Mellon, tearing a large chunk out of his armpit. As the victim's boyfriend tearfully explains, he understands what the clown is - it's the dark underside of the town. As must surely be the intention, this sequence leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Spoilers ahead! The duality of these two chapters is reflected throughout the novel. Structurally, King splits the rest of the book between 1958 and 1985, childhood and adulthood, innocence and corruption - beginning with our introduction to the protagonists: Bill Denbrough, Ben Hanscom, Beverley Marsh, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Stan Uris and Mike Hanlon. Childhood friends bound together by the events of 1958, they have all moved away from Derry and mysteriously forgotten their shared past. All apart from Mike, now the town's librarian. As the other adults (now unusually successful in their chosen fields) each receive Mike's pivotal phone call reminding them of an old promise and summoning them home, King juxtaposes their current lives against their hazy recollections of youth. Only methodical, rational Stan remembers enough to break his word, and his calm, shocking suicide is a vivid and terrible window onto a nightmare that the others are yet to recall.

With his central characters established and on their way back to Derry, King gives us more and more detail into their backgrounds. As the mist that hangs over their memories begins to lift, each one remembers their early encounters with the titular monster and the circumstances that pushed them together into their Losers' Club (school bullies, parental neglect/abuse and physical difference emerging as core issues). These evocative scenes are important in several ways, as King deftly conjures Derry as a real place, makes the kids' friendships believable and sweet, and occasionally gives us lurching scares as It circles ever closer. Beset from the outside, the children turn to each other for support and a semblance of safety.

The nature of the monster that stalks the sewers and abandoned places in town gradually comes into focus as the Losers join together and share their experiences. As we learn more about the threat they (and the other children of Derry) faced in 1958, King gives us interludes in the form of Mike Hanlon's ongoing attempts in 1985 to compile a history of It and its relationship to the town. Having never left Derry, Mike's memories of their experiences never completely faded - and he has sacrificed the fame and wealth that the others stumbled into later in life. Bill, who has a personal stake in facing It, may be the de facto leader of the Losers, but Mike is our anchor in the narrative: an occasional narrator, trustworthy but scared, and the source of much backstory...

Major spoilers ahead! One of King's most vicious and unsettling antagonists, It violently feeds on children and their fear. Although often appearing as the jocular, nightmarish Pennywise the Clown, It is a shapeshifter able to take the form of its victim's deepest dread - including a mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a giant bird (a warped version of Godzilla's sometime ally Rodan), a leper, a teenage werewolf, the ghosts of dead children, a witch, Frankenstein's monster, a vampire, a living statue, the Crawling Eye... and on and on through the touchstones of horror lore pulled from prose and B-movies. Indeed, in many ways the novel reads as King's love letter to his own influences.

In general, only children see these glamours; adults tend to ignore them, either consciously or subconsciously, sometimes to a child's cost. It can influence troubled minds in its favour - human monsters like Henry Bowers, the Losers' unhinged bully (who is goaded into psychosis as the novel progresses), or Al Marsh, Bev's abusive father - but for the most part, adults are seemingly willing to look the other way. By setting things up in this way, King is able to explore the horror lurking beneath the veneer of small-town values, focusing in on how children process trauma and differ in their reactions to friendship and death. When children are forced to deal with the adult world on its own terms, it throws into stark relief how easily adults can use kids for their own ends - as emotional crutches or as punching bags, say. King has touched on themes of childhood before (see, for example, 'The Body' from Different Seasons), but It feels like the culmination of his ideas on the subject.

Mike's detective work uncovers a pattern behind It's killings dating back to the first settlers to arrive in what would become Derry. In roughly 27-year cycles, the town is prey to escalating levels of child murder, often culminating in larger disasters once the adult community gets involved (a catastrophic explosion at the ironworks; a racially charged fire at the Black Spot, a jazz club run by black soldiers; the killing of the Bradley Gang by the great and good of the town; an axe massacre in a loggers' pub - all vividly written sequences that raise the stakes for our heroes). Derry's collective tendency to forget these events over time is a broader version of what happened to the Losers who left town: It has glamoured their memories.

Ultimate spoilers ahead! But what exactly have they forgotten? While it is clear early on that the children confronted It but failed to destroy It once and for all, King holds back the details of what actually happened until the final section of the book. This allows him to firmly embed the reader with the Losers, building tension while making us care what happens. That the 1958 climax is still riveting despite our foreknowledge that it was ultimately futile shows the effectiveness of this approach. Tracking the monster to its lair, they enter into a ritual battle of wills in which their minds are flung into a metaphysical void (the "macroverse"), hurtling towards It's true essence, an insane Lovecraftian abstraction of light. By confronting their fear in this realm, they can stun It's physical form long enough to deliver the coup de grâce. But they're children, they're terrified and they blow their chance. While this feels like the confrontation we've been expecting, what happens next is a startlingly bold choice on King's part.

Lost in the dark sewers beneath the city, on the verge of mental collapse and with the self-belief that has carried them this far fading fast, the Losers cement their bond in the only way left to them - with their bodies. And so, one by one, the boys lose their virginity with Bev. An "essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity", their brief, immature sex is hugely symbolic, the ultimate affirmation of life. Taken out of context, it's easy to see how a pre-teen group sex scene might trouble readers (which it clearly has over the years, as a very carefully phrased web search will reveal), but King makes it seem like a natural and touching extension of their friendship. What could have been deeply problematic material somehow... isn't. It's a remarkable piece of writing, simultaneously shocking and well judged.

Indeed, It finds King at the top of his technical game throughout. The split timeline allows him to contrast or repeat events as characters return to their childhood haunts, a doubling of past and present that highlights how much or little they have changed in the interim. The cycles of It's killings are reinforced by smaller cycles of behaviour from the protagonists (Bev's abusive father being replaced by a violent, misogynist husband; Eddie stumbling from dependent, smothering mother to dependent, smothering wife). Detailed character development is balanced with tense set pieces (the attacks at 29 Neibolt Street; the rock fight with bullies that finally cements the Losers' friendship; and many others), while occasional vignettes (such as the potted life and death of Patrick Hockstetter, a disturbed teen serial killer in the making) take us out of and then suddenly back into the action.

Transitions between characters, shifting the emphasis from one to another, help to build foreboding as we circle around a running throughline of events, and King gradually builds in shorter and shorter sections, further ramping up the tension. This is especially true during the twin climax of the book, as he interweaves the confrontations with It in 1958 and 1985, throwing in cliffhanger moments that span time and character. As the novel approaches it end, core themes of friendship and memory are overlaid with sacrifice, belief and responsibility.

It is King's longest book since The Stand, but benefits from its focus on Derry and the evil that unpins the history of the town - while The Stand is a continent-spanning epic, It feels like a more personal work by far. The book, like its titular character, plays on our childhood fears; if you can remember being scared as a child, there will be something that unsettles you here. As a result, it's one of King's most chilling, satisfying pieces of work to date. And, as is probably clear from the length of this post, it's one of my favourites.

Notes for the obsessive factfan: It contains numerous links to other King novels. Along with a brief reference to the Castle Rock killings of The Dead Zone and an early appearance by Rebecca Paulson from The Tommyknockers, we also learn early on that the adult Ben Hanscom lives in Hemingford Home (home of Mother Abigail in The Stand), where a "lively" virus is currently doing the rounds. Shortly before Henry Bowers' demise, It provides him with much-needed transport - a red and white Plymouth Fury (Christine!) driven by his dead friend Belch - while a young Dick Halloran (The Shining) plays a key role during the Black Spot tragedy, using his gift to direct his friends to safety during that deadly fire. It also marks the first example (I think) of a protagonist in King's writing who is himself a successful writer; this character type will recur regularly as we progress through his books.

Next: The Eyes of the Dragon.

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982)

The Dark Tower series is unarguably Stephen King's magnum opus, spanning eight volumes and thousands of pages. Each book opens with the same introduction, 'On Being Nineteen (And A Few Other Things)', which gives the reader some insight into how the series came into being and discusses the motivations involved in continuing (and eventually completing) the series. Charmed by Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings - obviously the touchstone for a great many writers - the 19-year-old King understood enough to wait a while before he started work on his own epic, and here he makes much of the ambition and self-belief of youth, and the importance of writers allowing themselves the time to mature - essentially to let a story develop. It was only when he caught a screening of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly aged 22 that lightning struck: "I realised that what I wanted to write was a novel that contained Tolkein's sense of quest and magic but set against Leone's almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop." Later the same year (1970), King started work on The Gunslinger; it would be more than a decade before it was published in book form. Subsequent volumes appeared at irregular intervals, and the series slowly took shape.

Of course, the trouble with writing a complicated, expansive story over many years is (as George R. R. Martin has also discovered) audience investment - people need to you finish; you have a responsibility to do so. King was finally prompted to complete the Dark Tower series after being struck and almost killed by a van in 1999 (as detailed in On Writing); his brush with death persuaded him to push aside all other projects in favour of delivering the final books to a desperate fanbase. At the same time, King began revising the first volume. As he explains in a foreword specific to the revised 2003 edition of The Gunslinger, he considers the series to be one long novel - and after multiple volumes and 33 years, "the beginning was out of sync with the ending". Thus, various false starts and continuity errors have now been removed from this "young man's book", a few new scenes have been inserted for clarification, and the authorial voice has been tightened up to match that of the later work. So, bearing all this in mind, how does the novel measure up?

The Gunslinger opens with two cryptic subtitles, one reading '19' and the other 'Resumption'. We'll return to those later. For the time being, it's probably better to focus on the first line of the book proper - "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed" - which effectively sums up the deceptively simple plot. King quickly highlights the scope of the landscape, a hard-baked alkali wasteland that prompts dizziness and a sense of dislocation in the titular gunslinger, Roland of Gilead. He's been tracking the man in black (hereafter MiB) for (as far as we know) years. Three weeks out of the last town, Tull, the gunslinger has been reduced by the harshness of his surroundings to his basic essence: his impassive nature and his guns, each carefully weighted to his hands. The only thing driving him on is the prospect of running the MiB to ground. But why? Who is this mystery man? And what could possibly be important enough to merit Roland's determined vendetta? Well, that's really the point of the book, so what answers there are will have to wait a little.

As discussed above, The Gunslinger is a kind of western-fantasy hybrid, and King does some intriguing world-building here. This is, we soon gather, either a parallel or future version of our world, in which animals can sometimes talk, demons are real and mutation is rife. So far, so fantasy. But King muddies our preconceptions by throwing in incongruous overlaps from our world here and there (see, for example, the fact that 'Hey Jude' is an old ballad here or the long-dead overhead "sparklights" which run along the roads). Roland's world appears to be slowly decaying - it "has moved on", fallen from its peak. His homeland is gone, as are the other gunslingers. He's the last of his kind, a deadly killer hundreds of years old, clothed in some kind of nobility. He has nothing left but his ongoing quest.

Spoilers ahead! The structure of the book sees King alternating between the gunslinger's progress and flashbacks which fill in details about various key moments from his youth and his journey so far. The first of these comes as Roland happens upon a shack deep in the desert. He shares information with the farmer who scratches a living there, telling him about what happened back in Tull - a dilapidated, dying town in which he found clues, brief solace and finally danger and death. As becomes clear, the MiB has moved various players into fatal alignment in Tull, making the whole town into a trap to ensnare Roland. After the rather bare early desert scenes, this flashback - introducing an array of characters - sees King sketching in the township, establishing that something is wrong, and ramping up to Roland's blazing destruction of the raddled population in short order. Tull is also where the '19' subtitle comes into play. After displaying an uncanny knack for necromancy, the MiB has left a terrible note for one of the characters, giving her the trigger word "nineteen" and pointing her towards the baffled town junkie that he's resurrected; if she says the word, Nort will tell her what lies beyond death. The note promises that such knowledge will drive her insane, but that she will not be able to stop herself from speaking "nineteen" aloud. It's a sinister little sidebar, and one which appears to exist solely to give us some insight into the MiB - King makes clear that he's a trickster, openly derisive of the people he's toying with, full of mirth at the trouble that Roland is stoically walking into.

Indeed, the MiB's traps come to play a central role in The Gunslinger. Sixteen days further into the desert, going glareblind and on the verge of physical collapse, Roland meets the next one - Jake Chambers, a confused 10-year-old who appears to come from New York. Or at least that's where the MiB shoved him in front of a bus to die, before he woke up in this world. The companionship and responsibility that he represents awaken something in the gunslinger. As they travel into the mountains together, Roland comes to identify with this lost lad, sharing tales (of his childhood apprenticeship under the brutal Cort, of the machinations of sly advisor Marten against Roland's father) and, almost against his will, coming to love the boy.

Major spoilers ahead! It is this love that is the MiB's (and King's) most painful ploy. After various travails, Roland is faced with a pivotal choice: to save Jake from death, or to finally get his hands on the MiB. He chooses the latter, letting his vulnerable young friend plummet to his death in a scene that King makes cruelly swift. Having given the reader a sweet, troubled foil to Roland's measured determination, he snatches the character away from us in a moment. "Go then," Jake says as he falls. "There are other worlds than these." Roland is about to discover how close those final words are to the truth.

His reward for sacrificing his erstwhile companion (and it clearly is intended as a sacrifice by King) is a conversation with the MiB. And yet, because this book is the first chapter of an extended story, the answers he gets are murky and mixed with misdirection. Still, King dripfeeds us a great deal of information during their discussion; and while clearly unable to give the reader the resolution they might want at this early stage, he instead boldly expands the parameters of his tale to include... everything. Roland has been chasing the MiB so that he will lead him to the Tower, which is revealed to be a nexus in time and size, a fixed point that links an infinity of universes. The Tower contains a malevolent being, the MiB's master, who Roland must, in time, face. But not before he defeats an "Ageless Stranger", another minion of the Tower who walks in all universes and times. A tarot reading gives hints about future companions and events, while the MiB makes reference to a past that sounds suspiciously like our present, as well as to the fact that he has been a presence in Roland's life since childhood; he is Marten, the venomous adviser (among other personas). And what of the 'Resumption' I mentioned earlier? Marten explicitly states that Roland is resuming his quest, later explaining, "This is not the beginning but the beginning's end. You'd do well to remember that... but you never do." The implication is clear: this whole story has played out before. Roland wakes the next morning to find himself ten years older and Marten a skeleton. The MiB has played his part, and the next phase of the journey towards the Dark Tower can begin.

As a standalone novel, The Gunslinger sometimes feels like a minor oddity, especially at this point in King's career - it's an episodic fantasy tale that hints at much while delivering a relatively straightforward plot. There are sequences where 'traditional' King holds the reins (examples include the breathless massacre in Tull; Roland's rite of passage to become a gunslinger; the succubus oracle; the creepy horror of the slow mutants) which sit alongside a more controlled, pared down type of writing when we're with Roland, who is something of an enigma at this point. As always, King is great with the detail that makes this world seem like a real, inhabited place, and manages to present the climactic foreshadowing and revelation in a way that is both incredibly frustrating and remarkably successful as a pay-off. As the beginning of a monumental series, the book is certainly strong enough to hook the reader into the world(s) of the Dark Tower. And I am now itching to get to The Drawing of the Three.

Notes: While the metaphysical intrigue of the novel's final section will clearly be explored in later Dark Tower volumes, King would also revisit themes raised here in both The Talisman and The Eyes of the Dragon. Indeed, the talisman in The Talisman is a nexus between parallel worlds, a portable Tower of sorts. And could Jake be a version of Jack? We're through the looking glass here, people.

Next: Different Seasons.

The Bachman Books (1985)

(writing as Richard Bachman)

As I mentioned briefly at the start of my review of Thinner, Stephen King published various early novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. In his introduction to The Bachman Books, King tries to explain this decision.

'Why I Was Bachman' finds King in his usual chatty form. While attempting to give us some insight into the logic behind adopting (and later killing off) the Bachman name, he cites his publishers' concern that he was oversaturating the market under his own name - a pseudonym allowed him both to indulge his inner role-player and "to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King". Tied to this is King's admission that he has "a restless need to publish what I write when I don't need the dough", a statement which I'm sure will be a surprise to almost no one. King's sheer productivity - even today, with around 60 books to his name - continues to be a source of delight to his fans, and yet it's also a stick his critics love to beat him with. Whether you like King's work or not, attacking him for being prolific has always seemed odd to me. As he previously touched on in his introductions to Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, King isn't just grinding out one book after another - he feels compelled to write; it's a key part of him.

Of course, some tales are more successful than others, and King is quick to point out the flaws in this collection. "I was not quite young enough when these stories were written to be able to dismiss them as juvenilia," he states. "On the other hand, I was still callow enough to believe in oversimple motivations (many of them painfully Freudian) and unhappy endings." It would be tempting to conclude that the real reason why King published these stories under the Bachman name was because he didn't fully believe in them, or because they might disappoint his usual fanbase. Certainly, the stories on display here are an odd mix of straight fiction, science fiction and horror. And it is true that Bachman's novels were released straight to paperback (in King's words, "just plain books", "cannon fodder") with very little fanfare, which some might argue smacked of burying slightly shameful early work. King anticipates this interpretation and refutes it - the books might not be perfect, but they don't "suck like an Electrolux". When he was finally outed in 1985, King killed Bachman off ("cancer of the pseudonym") and republished the novels in this collection under his own name (at which point, predictably, sales increased by a factor of 10). As he states near the end of his introduction, "I only published them (and am allowing them to be republished now) because they are still my friends; they are undoubtedly maimed in some ways, but they still seem very much alive to me."

Anyway, let's move on to the stories themselves. The Bachman Books is a collection of 4 novels, running to 865 pages in my edition. As a result of my attempts to deal with the book in a way that did each novel justice, my original review spiralled hopelessly out of control and eventually derailed this whole project for more than 4 years. My (actually quite simple now that I think about it) solution has been to give each novel its own review, tied together by this introduction. Once you've read the posts linked to below, you'll find a brief discussion of the collection's themes further down this page. Elegant, right? You're welcome.

• Rage (1977)
• The Long Walk (1979)
• Roadwork (1981)
• The Running Man (1982)

All done? Ok. Spoilers ahead!

While the novels in The Bachman Books differ in terms of plot, tone and style, there are some clear through-lines, especially when you read them in a row rather than as distinct entities. In reductive terms, the central theme of each book is authority, and the point at which a protagonist finally cracks under the pressure of control. It's therefore also a collection about rebellion - against adults or against the state. How each central character approaches these issues defines and differentiates each book.

Another repeated element is weaponry - the protagonists of 3 out of the 4 novels take up arms against their (perceived or actual) oppressors, although things don't work out especially well for any of them. But there's no doubt that these books highlight King's strength at writing violence, and his skill at holding it back until the time is right to deliver a sharp blow to the reader. They also show his facility for developing a high concept premise into something engrossing and engaging, featuring well drawn characters (some more sympathetic than others, a factor which I think determines which of these books I like best). While The Bachman Books is certainly a mixed collection, it's eminently readable - and sometimes excellent.

As I mentioned above, King is affectionately critical of various elements of the Bachman novels, and I thought I'd end this review by quoting some of the author's own views. Make of them what you will...

"Both The Long Walk and Rage are full of windy psychological preachments (both textual and subtextual), but there's still a lot of story in those novels."

"Roadwork... was an effort to write a 'straight' novel... I suspect Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot simply because it tries so hard to be good and to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain."

"The reverse of this is The Running Man, which may be the best of them because it's nothing but story... and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side."

Notes for the obsessive factfan: Later editions of The Bachman Books contain a new introduction, 'The Importance of Being Bachman', which reportedly contains a reversal of King's opinion about Roadwork quoted above (it's now his favourite), as well as further discussion of the other books. I don't have that edition, sorry. However, an interesting note in this introduction reveals that both Rage and The Long Walk were written before King's first published novel, Carrie, making them his earliest long-form works. Also of interest is the revelation that Bachman was due to follow Thinner with "a rather gruesome suspense novel called Misery", although his death prevented this from being the case.

Next: It.

The Running Man (1982)

(writing as Richard Bachman, collected in The Bachman Books)

The final novel in The Bachman Books, The Running Man, is also the most dynamic. An energetic piece of storytelling (written, as King notes, "during a period of 72 hours and published with virtually no changes"), the book stands in stark contrast to the static character study we saw in Roadwork. Once King has taken the time to set his parameters, The Running Man is almost entirely plot-driven - here, action is king.

We've seen a version of totalitarian dystopia in The Bachman Books already (see The Long Walk), but here King pulls out all the stops - there's nothing subtle about this vision of the world. In 2025, France is under martial law, there's war in South America and cannibal riots in India, and the US is under the effective control of the Games Network, which provides 24-hour entertainment (distraction) on the Free-Vee to its many unemployed, dying poor. And when they become desperate enough, these are the very people who find themselves volunteering for the games - which range from the mildly injurious ('Treadmill to Bucks', 'How Hot Can You Take It?') to the lethal. 'The Running Man', the biggest, most lucrative game of all, is one of the latter.*

Our introduction to this system comes as 28-year-old Ben Richards makes the decision to apply as a contestant. Blacklisted from work for his anti-authoritarian streak, he needs medicine for his sick 18-month-old daughter. As Richards travels through Co-Op City to the Games Building, King swiftly establishes the rules of society - the poor live amid chronic air pollution, urban violence and government informants, while the wealthy live for pleasure in a protected enclave of skyscrapers and decadence. After a series of physical and mental examinations (which serve to introduce his antisocial personality traits in amusing style), Richards finds himself selected for 'The Running Man'. In case you haven't read the book (or only know the very different and very silly film adaptation), here are the rules.

Spoilers ahead! Competitors run for their lives, as a crack team of Hunters and the show's viewers try to catch them. They get a 12-hour head start and some money upfront so that they can travel or buy weapons. Each competitor (or more usually his family) receives $100 for every hour he remains free. If he lasts 30 days, he wins the grand prize of $1 billion. He gets an extra $100 for every Hunter or lawman he kills. He is also given a video recording device and a stack of 60 clips - and must send back two 10-minute clips per day from any mailslot for later editing and broadcast or forfeit his money (though the hunt will continue regardless). Harbouring a running man is punishable by death, although there are better reasons for viewers to give away his position: they get $100 for a verified sighting, and $1,000 for a sighting that leads to a kill. As Dan Killian, the game's executive producer, explains to Richards, in 6 years no one has ever gone the distance. Indeed, contestants are not expected to survive, and it's become a useful way to dispose of potentially dangerous undesirables.

With the formality of a sneering, demonising studio appearance completed, King is finished with his set-up, and Richards is on the run. And once the running starts, the book quickly builds up momentum. Moving around the country with fake IDs and some basic disguises, it's not long before Richards is struggling with paranoia and jumping at shadows. King inserts a few slower sequences into the proceedings to give us a little breathing space - including Richards' initial attempts to go to ground, and a subplot in which he learns the truth about the deliberately poisoned air - but the nature of the plot means that these are necessarily brief interludes; Richards must keep moving, improvising as he goes. The video clip mailing issue is a clever addition in this regard, because it forces the character into movement where he would otherwise have been able to hide out.

When Richards comes into contact with people, we're faced with the question of whether he can trust them. With a bounty on his head, and extreme poverty all around, it is perhaps strange that the most reliable people are those from his own level - after all, they have the most to gain from turning him in. And yet, as King makes clear, the real danger comes from the more affluent segments of society; they believe the fiction they've been fed, and they actively, genuinely hate him (and by extension the vilified, lazy poor). This class distinction is brought home in the final third of the novel, when Richards carjacks and takes hostage a well-to-do woman, Amelia Williams - her view of the world is so blinkered that we finally understand (if we didn't already) the insidious and dangerous power that the Games Network wields. However, while class warfare and the dangers of TV are running themes throughout the novel, we never feel like King is bashing us over the head with them - because he seems far more interested in the actual running.

Major spoilers ahead! Memorable episodes crop up with increasing frequency, beginning with the early jolt of panic King creates during a misunderstanding in a New York bus station. In Boston, Richards' sudden realisation that his hotel is being surrounded leads to a breathless rush to escape into the sewers and the fiery death of 5 cops. His betrayal by the old mother of a supposedly safe contact underlines the fact that our assumptions are shaky at best, and triggers a series of injuries and deaths. A short scene with an innocent, kind country kid contrasts strikingly with the carnage that is to follow. As The Running Man enters its final phase and Richards' hostage gambit leads to a high stake game of poker with the Chief Hunter, King starts throwing everything he has at the plot - bluffs, counter-bluffs, twists and reversals - before events, inevitably, take a turn for the bloody. The eleventh-hour revelation that his family were actually murdered during a robbery while he was waiting to start his game feels like a low blow, and prompts an increasingly gruesome race to the finish, full of shattered heads and unspooling guts. It's truly grotesque - as it needs to be: for the final pay-off to succeed, King needs Richards to have no hope. His desperate attempts to beat the system once and for all, as the seconds tick by and he becomes weaker and weaker, make for an exciting (if rather queasy) climax.

The Running Man reads almost like an exercise in the mechanics of story. The book is even structured so that the chapter headings count down to zero as the novel progresses, making the process of reading it a race against the clock. That it also features a sympathetic protagonist fighting against a corrupt system and liberal doses of sly humour, tension and violence make this pretty much the definition of an action romp. You can see why the book appealed to the high-octane 1980s film industry - it's just a shame they didn't make this story instead of the one they did.

* Other games include 'Run For Your Guns', 'Dig Your Grave' and 'Swim The Crocodiles'. Coming to Saturday nights wherever you live in due course. Don't say you weren't warned.

Next: The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.

Roadwork (1981)

(writing as Richard Bachman, collected in The Bachman Books)

Roadwork, my least favourite of the novels in The Bachman Books, is a rather over-earnest examination of repressed grief. Set against the backdrop of the US energy crisis of the 1970s, the plot follows Barton George Dawes, a 40-year-old man, as his life falls apart over the course of a 3-month period. A new highway extension means that both his home and his workplace are due for demolition. The amusingly clunky tagline on the cover above pretty much tells you the rest (Actually, it doesn't. Spoilers! What it does tell you is what happens about 15 pages from the end, making it a double failure - it sells the book as a tense siege book, when it really isn't, while simultaneously removing any doubt about where we're going to end up. Such an odd choice. But I digress).

Near the beginning of the novel, we find Bart buying two guns - a .44 Magnum and a heavy calibre rifle - for reasons he can't really explain. In King's words, "He kept doing things without letting himself think about them. Safer that way. It was like having a circuit breaker in his head, and it thumped into place every time part of him tried to ask: But why are you doing this?" I'll return to this conceit later, because it's central to why I find Roadwork unsatisfying. For now, let's concentrate on the basics of the plot.

Spoilers ahead! Bart is supposed to be overseeing the procurement of a new site for the Blue Ribbon Laundry, his employer for many years. He's also supposed to be finding a new home that he and his wife, Mary, can move to. Instead of doing either of these things, he's doing neither - which involves an increasingly elaborate framework of lies as the dates of these compulsory purchases approach. For reasons we will come to shortly, Bart is in denial. He therefore lets the 90-day option on the new plant expire, resigning when it becomes clear that he's doomed the company to collapse. His colleagues think he's lost his mind, and it's not long before his wife learns that he's made no effort on the home front. She leaves him, and his world falls to pieces.

This first third of the book has much to recommend it, as King slowly explores Bart's character, and the logic (or otherwise) behind his increasingly erratic decisions. His wilful inability to do the things he must is well captured, and speaks to the stubbornness of depression - he knows he's throwing everything away, but can't or won't help himself. Similarly, his emotional state shows that something's wrong, even before we understand what it is. As we gradually come to learn, his son, Charlie, died of a brain tumour 3 years before, and Bart has never recovered. His inability to account for his actions to any of the people he's letting down smacks of self-deception, as it's clear that he can't face the idea of losing either building, due to their prominence and (up until now) permanence in his life - they are his links to his previous happy life. As the lies build up, and his rage and sorrow begin to undo him, King presents us with a strong piece of car-crash fiction.

The second part of Roadwork finds Bart spiralling into loneliness and drink. He spends his days driving miles on the turnpike, checking on the remorseless progress of the 784 extension every evening, feeding his obsession. He's aimless, wandering, and at times the novel itself seems to have lost its way, too. Repeated conversations with his estranged wife show her drifting further and further out of reach. Bart does a lot of reminiscing and weeping. He gets into a fight with a former laundry employee. And all the while the same questions we've been faced with for the whole book are repeated with (eventually) exhausting regularity: why is he doing this? Is this a final capitulation to some destructive impulse that was there all along? He doesn't know how to proceed, he's keeping his options open, and so on. With a little more editing, this would perhaps be less of an issue, because there are good points here, too. An episode in which he picks up a young hitcher, Olivia, gives him a stranger to whom he is finally able to open up - a welcome glimmer of honesty. Her gift of high-grade mescaline prompts a skilfully delivered sequence which pushes Mary away and makes him reconsider his course of action. However, the story suddenly comes alive when he finally acts.

Major spoilers ahead! One of the subplots of the novel features Bart's interaction with Salvatore 'One-Eye' Magliore, who (in case the name wasn't clue enough) is a shady mafia type. Thankfully he's less of a caricature than Richie 'The Hammer' Ginelli from Thinner, but he serves the same purpose - to drive the action forward. His initial refusal to help leads Bart to petrol-bomb the building site and its vehicles on his own, and the sequence is textbook King: Bart's amateur assault on the road, in the middle of a snow storm, is thrilling and brisk. It's a welcome change of pace. Magliore's later change of heart leads to the siege-based finale, in which Bart rigs his cherished house with explosives, settles in with his guns and waits for the council lawyers to come and take possession of the building. Here, King throws in an interesting stylistic flourish, a chapter of unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness 'stoptime', in which Bart makes his last (and arguably only) major decision. Holding out long enough to attract the attention of the media, he finally takes his stand and detonates the house, bringing his misery to an end. Again, this is another taut sequence, the action rocketing along.

As I suggested at the start of this review, I think my problem with Roadwork stems from King's decision to make Bart so passive - from the beginning, he emphasises that Bart is acting almost unconsciously. He drifts through the novel, unable to comprehend why he's acting the way he does. This is drilled into us throughout - he buys guns, but doesn't know why; he makes Molotov cocktails, but doesn't know why. He's rarely in control, which makes sense given that he's obviously acting out of repressed guilt and grief over the death of his son - he just can't function. As King explains in his introduction to The Bachman Books collection, the story was written in response to the death of his mother, and the representation of grief is well observed and feels honest. But in taking away Bart's conscious motivation and having him wallow in self-pity for so much of the book, he also robs much of the story of momentum - leaving us instead (in my opinion) with an increasingly unsympathetic protagonist whose eventual stand is clearly signposted a long way off.

Perhaps Roadwork would have worked better as a shorter piece. After all, it's perfectly readable, the characters are well drawn and, as I've said, there are sequences that shine through the measured (even laborious) whole. But then again, perhaps it does exactly what King intended, and I've either missed or misinterpreted the point. As a character study of a man cracking under the pressure of despair, I'll admit that it succeeds. But as a story? Not one of my favourites, I'm afraid.

Next: Danse Macabre.

The Long Walk (1979)

(writing as Richard Bachman, collected in The Bachman Books)

Set in an ultra-conservative alt-history version of the US, The Long Walk is, for me, the most memorable novel in The Bachman Books. I still remember the first time I finished reading it, as a teenager, and the stunned feeling of numb horror the final pages evoked. That I was of an age with the protagonists clearly made it all the more affecting - but while time may have dulled my youthful vigour (if I ever had any), the book still packs a mean punch.

The premise is remarkably simple. Every year, 100 teenage boys from all over the US volunteer for and participate in a Long Walk - that is, they start walking at 9am on 1 May and they walk without stopping until there's only one person able to continue. Each boy gets a belt of food concentrates at 9am each morning, and water refills when they request them. If any of the walkers drops below 4 miles per hour, they receive an official warning. If they can walk for an hour without picking up another, they drop that warning. If they breach their limit of 3 warnings, they are "given their ticket" and their Walk is over. The victor's prize? Everything they want, for the rest of their life.

Spoilers ahead! The catch? Being given your ticket is a euphemism, as King craftily reveals after about 20 pages. The walkers are being followed by a military halftrack vehicle which carries monitoring equipment and merciless soldiers with heavy calibre rifles - and when you stop walking, you die. The penalty for not winning the Walk - as 99 boys will discover - is execution.

Our focus throughout the book is 16-year-old Ray Garrety. From the beginning, King uses Ray to lure us in and push our buttons, opening with his nervy anticipation and swiftly moving through shock into outright horror. The sequence in which the first walker gets cramp in his leg and is shot brings home with sudden clarity (both to the reader and to the other walkers) the sickening reality of the situation. Ray's naivety mirrors our own, and his loss of innocence is matched by our growing understanding of what we're reading - a gruelling, relentless struggle for survival. As the Walk continues, we see the devastating effects that trauma, sleep deprivation and physical exertion can have on the human animal. The elements (rain, sunshine, cold, hail) and various afflictions (blisters, cramp, sunstroke, fever, convulsions, diarrhoea) start to take their toll. A boy who faints is chillingly given his warnings while unconscious, and then shot.

The repetitive plot - walk or die - allows King to focus in on the psychology of the walkers, whose hopes and regrets (while explored) swiftly become irrelevant in the face of the crashing of the rifles. Brief friendships and groupings might provide morale and support, but not when the death of one underlines the fact that the others could easily be next. King excels at conveying the escalating hysteria that spreads like wildfire when a walker stumbles, but equally unsettling are the quieter passages where a character retreats into isolation, withdrawing from everything but the road. In this world, a bloody footprint can be as affecting as a violent execution. As the boys learn to step over the fallen without breaking stride or helplessly vomiting in horror, we understand that there's only so much distraction their conversations can provide. In the end, they're alone - with their thoughts, their memories and varying levels of determination.

The question King keeps coming back to is this: why are they walking? Why did they volunteer for this hell? Is it somehow possible that they all have a genuine death wish? Their very participation could perhaps be seen to reflect the sickness of their society, with its death squads that "disappear" loud-mouthed dissidents and its leader, the Major (a "society-sponsored sociopath", as one character describes him) - which by extension would make their almost-certain deaths a form of rebellion (and maybe the only form of rebellion possible). Indeed, the walkers' changing attitudes to the Major, who shifts from glorious father figure to despised betrayer, would seem to represent a final (if far too late) understanding of how wrong this alt-US really is. Their opinion of the crowds lining the road is similarly affected - what starts out as support quickly becomes a faceless, baying wall of noise to be shut out.* Anyway, regardless of exactly why the walkers are taking part, it gradually becomes clear that this isn't about survival of the (physically) fittest, but instead about mental strength - the winning walker is likely to be the one who retains their sanity the longest. The alternative is death.

There are numerous sequences where King cranks up the tension - see, for example, the boy who staggers along the very edge of his final warning, the guns coming down at him, then lifting, then coming down, then lifting again, a moment echoed when Ray later finds himself in a similar predicament - before easing off, giving us a nasty jolt before soothing our jangled nerves. Small things (a pond at dusk, birdsong, a cool breeze) take on greater significance in the walkers' heightened view of the world. Ray's memories similarly come to preoccupy him, with reveries of his girlfriend, Jan, driving him onward.** When the Walk passes close to his home town, he is finally granted his most heartfelt wish - to see Jan again - but King makes the scene as terrible as it is emotional. The experience forces Ray to strive for survival, but it also damages his already frail psyche. Because when you decide you actually want to live, you die slower, bit by bit, desperately hanging on until the bitter end. And in The Long Walk, the bitter end is especially awful. By this point, the Walk has lasted 5 days, and the few remaining boys are almost catatonic, their shoes shredded and discarded. I won't spoil the climax here, but I still find it haunting all these years later.

In the final analysis, the novel confronts us with questions of mortality, strength of character and self-worth - in other words, it's a coming of age story, only taken to a horrifying extreme. Friendships rise and fall, and powerful lessons are learned. As what's left of their lives plays out before us on the road, the walkers occasionally manage to create for themselves rare moments of dignity (even nobility) in the face of casual brutality. Readers of The Hunger Games and its sequels may notice various points of comparison, but The Long Walk is grittier, darker and better. I recommend it.

* Regarding the crowds of semi-orgasmic spectators, King is clear - they exult in the Long Walk because everything in life is better, more intense, when you're doing it in front of dead men. A horrible thought, especially because it might well be true.

** King also returns several times to Ray's most troubling childhood memories, which include the death of a classmate in a car accident and Ray playing doctor with another boy. The latter strikes perhaps the only off-note in the story, because King beats us over the head with Ray's shame and confusion without it ever really leading anywhere.

Next: The Dead Zone.

Rage (1977)

(writing as Richard Bachman, collected in The Bachman Books)

Originally called Getting It On, the first novel in The Bachman Books is also the most problematic - but not because it's bad. The plot follows a high school senior, Charlie Decker, on his final day of school. Called into the principal's office during first period to answer for a previous attack on his science teacher (hospitalised after being beaten with a pipe wrench), Charlie deliberately antagonises the man, throwing down a final gauntlet which leads to his expulsion. This is the early tipping point from which the rest of the book flows - in his own eyes, Charlie has given Mr Denver every opportunity to defuse the situation. "All I wanted was recognition..." he says, "or maybe for someone to draw a yellow plague circle around my feet."

Spoilers ahead! Neither outcome is forthcoming, however, so he sets fire to his locker, returns to class and executes his algebra teacher by shooting her in the head with a pistol. As the fire alarm sounds and the school evacuates, Charlie kills another teacher and settles in with a class full of hostages to see what will happen next.

Whether you buy into the rest of the novel will depend largely on whether you accept the reactions of Charlie's classmates. As a reader, the killing of Mrs Underwood is a genuinely shocking moment, despite several earlier hints from King about what is to come. But for the characters who witness this pivotal act of violence, there is no narrated warning. The killing is over in a horrifying moment. They sit in stunned silence. No one screams, no one tries to run. They are scared, yes, but passive in their shock. King manages to make this difficult section work - which is vital, because the rest of the book builds on the foundations laid down here.

Rage is told in the first person, written by Charlie (as quickly becomes obvious) some time after the events it portrays. This allows King to flesh out Charlie's character, background and opinions both to the reader and to the other characters. While Charlie toys with the various adults who attempt to negotiate a happy resolution to the siege, he and his class begin to open up to one another, sharing personal moments and confronting themselves and one another with some hard truths. The dynamic of the group begins to shift as the confessions continue, until we come to the realisation that the children are now staying of their own free will - that they won't leave even if they have the opportunity.

Early in the book, Charlie explains to one of the adult negotiators: "You aren't playing your game any longer. Understand that. You're playing mine." King turns this brash taunt around in the closing pages, when Charlie suddenly understands that the game has changed once more. His actions have enabled his peers to take control of themselves, perhaps for the first time. That they physically and psychologically destroy the one student who has refused to open up is perhaps inevitable, given the traumatic changes in attitude and awareness that they have just gone through. Their savagery echoes William Golding's Lord of the Flies, a parallel which cannot be accidental. There is also a clear thematic link with one of King's short stories, 'Cain Rose Up' (see Skeleton Crew).

However, Rage isn't without its flaws. Charlie's increasingly troubled relationship with his parents feels a little on-the-nose (see King's "painfully Freudian" comment from his introduction), as does the dislocated rage he feels when embarrassed or mocked by bullies or authority figures. And the mixture of psychotherapy and Stockholm Syndrome doesn't always work as well one might hope. But despite these issues, Rage is as readable as any other King novel, and each of the characters is defined and (mostly) believable. King succeeds in establishing a sinister atmosphere of self-realisation and rebellion, which left me with a lingering sense of unease after I had finished it. It's not a bad novel by any means, just a little bit clunky.

I mentioned above that Rage was problematic. The obviously inflammatory subject matter became associated with a number of actual school shootings in the US during the 1980s and 1990s - with copies of the novel reportedly found among the possessions of at least three young murderers. King was so appalled that he asked his publisher to let the story go out of print. It was withdrawn from later editions of The Bachman Books, and is no longer available as a distinct work.*

At any rate, if you can find a copy secondhand or you've got an old version of The Bachman Books, this is an early curiosity worth reading. While school shootings in the US were certainly nothing new in 1977, the descent into psychological power games that follows the murder of the teachers puts a disturbing twist on a very real (and sadly continuing) problem.

* Many years later, in his introduction to Blaze, King clearly stated his view on Rage: "Now out of print, and a good thing." His decision is entirely understandable. My own view is that while you can't necessarily legislate for unstable individuals, perhaps guns should be kept away from children. But gun control (or lack thereof) is a far bigger debate than I'm willing to get into here - let's come back to the topic when I reach King's Kindle single, Guns. About 3 years from now.

Next: Night Shift.

Finally, an update

Huh. Ok.

It's been over 4 years since I last posted a review here, and I'm sure my dedicated base of regular readers (you happy few) have long since given up on this site. I'm not sure where the time went, exactly. The last thing I remember was getting stuck on my review of The Bachman Books, and then work and life intervened, and then BAM - 4 years had passed by and this project had well and truly stalled.

Well, now I'm back. I'm currently rereading The Bachman Books against my notes from 2009 (which miraculously survived several house moves intact), and will be posting my review in the near future. I guess we'll see if it was worth the wait (it probably wasn't it definitely was).

In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter (@KingReviewed for this blog specifically, or @Dan_Lockwood for other stuff) or subscribe to the blog to keep up to date. And I'll try to keep this thing on the rails this time, I swear.

Oh, and in case you were wondering:

• Yes, I'm aware that someone's now doing the same thing for The Guardian newspaper; and
• No, I'm not reading any of those reviews; although
• Yes, I wish someone was paying me to do this.

Right, time to get back to the reading...

Skeleton Crew (1985)

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)

(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 coverage of his earlier books, see my review of The Bachman Books (1985), which tackles 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)

(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)

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, which 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.