bibliolokust

[bibliolokust]

jeffrey ford’s ‘the trentino kid.’

last night, i found myself pulling out my copy of ellen datlow’s anthology of contemporary ghost stories, ‘the dark,’ and rereading the first piece- ‘the trentino kid’ by jeffrey ford.

almost immediately i was struck by the elegant conversational tone that ford takes with the story, as if we’re seated with him at a booth in the dark end of a bar, or around a campfire, or other such places in which storytelling weaves memory, experience, and doubt together and it’s a perfect example of the sort of shaggy dog story that the best of ghost story (in the british/american sense) can achieve.  by telling us a story that echoes aspects of ford’s own life and working class upbringing, the line between story and storyteller blurs in such a way that the reader can only believe that this is something that clearly ‘happened’ even in as much as it clearly did not.

ostensibly a story about a working class college dropout who spends his day digging clams and his nights writing fiction, ford manages to weave the subtext of class anxiety feelings of failed promise into the narrative in a way that almost disavows the very notion of subtext, putting them on display in order to use the supernatural/speculative elements to create a small world in which such distinctions as ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ have no sway.  his narrator tells us the tale of, when he was younger, a hard life of physical labour out on a dangerous bay and we’re told of the sad fate of the trentino kid, swept out to drown while clamming, his body disappearing, as so many do, beneath the waves (and we’re treated to an incredibly striking scene- the kid’s father showing up to where the clammers tend to socialise and just... being there, heartbroken, and this scene displays a grasp on the paradoxically simple and complex tides of grief that can overwhelm someone.)

but it’s not that simple.

the narrator, during a quickly rising storm, sees a figure struggling in the water and another, more cynical clammer (who we’ve seen as a dishonest braggart, already) ignoring the figure and hightailing it back to shore.  upon investigating, he realises that it’s the trentino kid, dead as doornails but still very much animate.  and remembers the advice an elder clammer had given him- ‘you have to help anyone in trouble.’  so he does.  and the two embark on a harrowing journey back to shore in which the ghostly kid begins to disintegrate, to take on the appearance of a corpse that had been dead for some time, scavenged at the bottom of the bay.  all the while, the boat is thrown about on the waves, falling to bits.

ford’s description of this journey and his narrator’s attempts to come to grips with the horror (or perhaps miracle?) that is happening in front of him is nothing short of breathtaking, a novel’s worth of ideas on the meaning of death and, really, of life itself crammed beautifully into just a few pages of description and narrative, heavy with implication.  when the boat finally fails them and the narrator finds himself saved upon the shore, it’s no surprise.  we expected this much because that’s what this sort of story is and that’s why the narrator is there to tell us this.  as such, it’s also no surprised that downsy (the cowardly braggart who refused to help the ghostly trentino kid) was found dead on the wee island that he would often lie about bringing women to, after his boat failed to make it back, being destroyed in the storm.

but where ford breaks from this, perhaps the world’s oldest literary tradition, is in the after.  in that period of reflection between coming to, wet and bedraggled, and sitting in front of us.  what ford does, here, is an absolute betrayal of the rules of storytelling- after telling us, earlier in the story, that he had been saved once before by john hunter (the older fellow what gave him the advice about helping anyone in trouble) and telling us that he had told the story of his meeting with the trentino kid in the bar that the clammers frequented, what ford does then is extraordinary in how successful it is- he obliquely hints to us that hunter, himself, was a ghost, the implication being that the narrator had just told his tale of ‘saving’ one ghost to another ghost who had, previously, saved HIM.

the layers of murky obliqueness here work in such a way that we can’t ever be sure whether or not hunter was ‘truly’ alive or dead (or neither?) on any of the occasions that the narrator mentioned meeting him and we are left in a world where such notions of death, life, memory, and experience are, at the least, bound in grey haze (if not altogether absent of real boundary and meaning) and ford elevates the shaggy dog story into a work with deep philosophical resonance that is rendered beautifully through the working class elegance of his prose and knowledge of the life of the clammer (and of the lives and bodies of their boats) and we are left, as readers, with no answers.  and, really, no possibility of them.

[bibliolokust]

‘quitters, inc.’

‘When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal.  When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell.  Shall we go?’ king’s ‘quitters, inc.’ seems, on the surface, to be another of his his attempts at hardboiled pastiche and, while it succeeds very well at this, there is a philosophical depth to it that belies the shallowness of its basic conceit- a nonprofit that helps smokers quit smoking through sadism, torture, and potential murder.

richard morrison sees an old friend while sitting at an airport bar, one jimmy mccann and discuss the idea of quitting smoking, which jimmy has done (and looks far better for having done) and everything seems harmless and relatively innocuous as jimmy gives morrison the business card of the group that helped him quit and, he claims, turned his life entirely around (although the notion of signing a non-disclosure contract over it is something that mccann finds slightly puzzling.)  after the two part, mccann swiftly forgets the encounter, only remembering it when the card (for an outfit called ‘quitters, inc.’) calls out of his wallet at the bar.  deciding that, with aspects of his professional life  going poorly, maybe he would give it a shot.  for ‘chuckles.’

after noticing that the group operated out of the entire floor of some prime real estate (signifying a great degree of financial success) what follows is the sort of intake procedure anyone who has gone to a doctor’s office would be familiar with, the routine questions, the awkward waiting with strangers, the sort of  liminal experience which somehow simultaneously bores and frustrates, with morrison already annoyed at not being able to smoke.

after the wait, morrison meets vic donatti, who is to be his caseworker, and is led to  a nearly empty room (with a green curtain in front of a small window) to begin the secondary interview, after having morrison sign the non-disclosure contract, where the series of questions becomes more personal, angering and unsettling morrison before donatti pulls back the curtain to show the room beyond the window.  a room which is empty other than a rabbit and a bowl of food. 

as the rabbit begins to eat, donatti pushes a button on the wall and the rabbit begins to jump as if in pain, it shair standing on end.  morrison realises that the rabbit is being electrocuted and donatti explains that, eventually, the rabbit will choose to starve to death rather than eat.  morrison becomes horrified as donatti, expressing the value of pragmatism, lays out the rules of the program- that his wife and ‘retarded’ son (the description and portrayal of which is deeply troublesome and appalling ableist, even for the seventies) will be tortured, brutalised, and beaten for every cigarette that morrison has.  he decides against the treatment but his attempt to leave is thwarted by the door being locked and donatti explains that he cannot quit the quitting, as it were, as he has already signed the contract and that morrison misunderstands something- at his first transgression it won’t be he that gets put in the ‘rabbit room’ but, rather, it will be his wife and he would be forced to watch and that quitters, inc. will be keeping a close eye on him.

after a particularly tense night where he goes into his study, takes a cigarette, and contemplates lighting it (before thinking he hears a slight noise in the closet, a bit reminiscent of the stark terror that came from the closet in king’s previous story, ‘the boogeyman,’) the days go by and morrison’s resentment and anger shifts into something a bit more pragmatic, the notion that he can actually do this.  until, that is, he finds himself stuck in traffic, tense and furious, believing that no one could possibly see him.  he lights a cigarette (after blaming, in his mind, his wife for not getting rid of them) takes a few drags, and throws it away, disgusted.

as he anxiously calls for his wife when he gets home, the phone rings, donatti on the other line.  he breathlessly asks if they have his wife and he’s assured that they do and that should should come in for a five o’clock meeting.  having no other choice, he goes and is met by donatti and a monster of a man with  a.38 handgun.  they step into the room and morrison watches as his wife is put through the rabbit torture.  after, he sits with her and explains everything and, to his surprise, she is not resentful but, rather, is grateful at him given this opportunity to really and fully quit smoking (and this, to my mind, is another misstep with king defaulting to the caricature of the obedient housewife instead of allowing her any real depth.)

a week later, the phone rings, again, and donatti asks morrison to come in to the office, one more time.  after assuring him that there’s no problem, morrison aggrees and is further unsettled by donatti mentioning the promotion he’d been given and saying that quitters, inc. have been ‘keeping tabs.’  in the office, donatti has morrison get on the scale, and tells him that he is now going to work on losing weight and keeping it off (with the assistance of some illegal diet pill) under the threat of quitters, inc. having someone cut off his wife’s little finger.

eight months go by, and a fit and happy morrison meets an acquaintance who is anything but fit and happy and, after some thought, gives him the quitters, inc. business card.  finally, twenty months later, morrison runs into jimmy mccann and his wife, realising, with horror, that mccann’s wife is missing her little finger.

what’s fascinating about the piece is that each conversation between morrison and donatti is, beneath the threats of the latter and bluster of the former, part of a rich philosophical argument where the surface is shot through with implication, not just of violence and its necessity, but of whether or not that looming threat of violence is what holds the entirety of civilisation together (the likes of which would be echoed in a few years time in bill watterson’s popular comic strip, ‘calvin & hobbes.’)  donatti, through methods that resonate with fascism and notions of the weight of personal responsibility that harken back to john calvin, seeks only to use thomas hobbes’ notion of the social contract to manifestly make the world a better place.

when most people think if stephen king’s ouvre, the notion of ‘philosophical depth’ rarely comes to mind and, when it does, it tends to focus around his use of the supernatural to explore death, the afterdeath, and the notion of a greater world that we can never truly have the means to understand but, when all is said and done, this seemingly simple story of a man using a brutish and nasty service to help him quit smoking is a complex and artful exploration of the nature of choice and whether or not the question of ‘free will’ even matters, in the end.  using tight prose and a deft touch, king manages to create a story that is suffused with such personal resonance (especially in light of his own struggles with addiction) and philosophy of (and in) the world that, even given its few unfortunate missteps, rises to challenge the notion that he’s a writer without depth and it stands among the best of this first collection of his.

[bibliolokust]

‘the lawnmower man.’

from the beginning of his career, stephen king has threaded notions of the comedic through his work and ‘the lawnmower man’ might still be one of his most successful attempts.  as soon as we’re introduced to the luckless harold parkette, king begins weaving a satire of that most commonplace of things- stuffy suburban (white republican) men and their truly bizarre obsession with having well manicured lawns.

it’s one of king’s shortest stories and all the more effective for that.  launching straight into the tale of how parkette’s former lawn boy accidentally ran over a neighbour’s dog and cat belonging to another neighbour that was being chased by the dog and how his daughter had ‘vomited a quart of cherry Kool-Aid into the lap of her new jumper,’ we see king leaning into the sort of gross slapstick that he tends to see as comedic.

as king spends the next few pages elegising harold’s minor misfortunes (his buxom daughter wears thin sweaters and is well liked by the local boys, his former lawn boy has gone to college, he’s traded his lawnmower in for a tire and some gas) we truly get a sense of just how incredible and loathsomely mediocre parkette is, the sort of man haplessly falling ever so slightly upward his entire life (but never enough to satisfy.)  once he finally suffers the indignity of a neighbour making jokes about the lawn, he decides to do something about it by calling a lawn service advertised in the paper.

as he calls the pastoral greenery and outdoor service, he muses (uneasily) that it’s odd for a lawnmowing service to be successful enough to be able to hire someone to answer the phone (in a moment that hasn’t aged well as, for the past few decades, full service yardwork companies have seen a brisk business with the sort of clientele that parkette represents while it can be assumed that, in the mid 70s, it was the sort of thing that catered almost exclusively to the upper class.)  when the lawnmower man arrives, parkette is startled awake from a nap, confused, and instantly feels his masculinity threatened by the fat ‘salt of the earth’ type at the door (whose simultaneous charming and grating use of ‘buddy’ and fast talk that reminds parkette of a used car salesmen puts him at further unease.) 

while the lawnmower man goes out to begin, parkette’s mind circles around the phrase ‘By Circe’ as used by the lawnmower man (where normally something like ‘by god’ would be used) he begins to think about how he had always wished he had better understood ‘the World,’ lamenting that he had once lost a whopping 75$ on an investment that felt like a sure thing.  king deftly uses parkette’s interiority to further diminish anything in him even close to likability as he becomes yet even more unsettled, this time by the loudness of the lawnmower.

rushing out to see the horrifying sight of the lawnmower moving on its own and the lawnmower man crawling quickly behind it, gobbling up all of the cut grass, parkette screams for the man to stop and then is frozen with horror until seeing a poor hapless mole run across the yard, the lawnmower spring after it, and the lawnmower man gobbling the bits of shredded chipmunk as swiftly as he had been eating the grass.  and this all proves too much for the poor bastard, making him vomit and faint only to be awakened by what he first thinks is his wife before realising that it’s the lawnmower man, kindly and caring, worrying about parkette, making sure that he’s okay (while green lawn juice drips from his chin and coats the front of his body.)

the lawnmower man helps him up and says (with a certain notable empathy) that ‘it hits everybody kind of hard at first’ (and with a good deal more of his charming/grating banter) he tells parkette that this is a ‘new thing the boss is trying out’ and parkette, still in shock, gets to his feet, says ‘god bless the grass’ in response (which delights the lawnmower man) and the lawnmower man reveals that his ‘boss’ is pan and mentions a ‘sacrifice’ which parkette takes to be the mole, all of which leaves parkette reeling as the still naked and green lawnmower man goes to mow the front lawn, parkette only managing to squeak out ‘The neighbours...’ before he disappears around the corner and parkette goes inside the house to call the police, which is soon shown to be a fatal mistake as, while he’s explaining that there’s someone naked mowing the lawn, the front door bursts in, the lawnmower chewing through carpet and furniture to get to him, with the lawnmower man reproaching him, saying ‘Shoulda stuck with god bless the grass’ and kindly asking where the sharpest butcher knife is to get this ‘sacrifice business’ over with and parkette tries to flee through the back, but having had ‘too many beers and too many afternoon naps,’ he falls onto the back lawn, the last thing he sees being the blades of the lawnmower and the kindly face behind it.

as an epilogue, we are shown the police coming and investigating, being horrified and sickened by the carnage, finding what’s left of parkette in the birdbath.  what’s so interesting about this is that king leaves so much to the reader’s imagination after being so explicit in his descriptions of the lawnmower man and his strange and sordid landscaping work showing, again, that he has an understanding of the importance of trusting the audience and that allows the piece to stand equally as comedy and horror, an incredibly delicate balance on the best of days.

all of that being said, it is a bit sad that king is, once again, using fatness as a lazy shorthand for evil and villainy (even though it makes more sense than usual, here, parkette even noticing that the man’s belly was getting much larger due to the grass he’d been eating) and it’s a cliche that king will lean on for the entirety of his career, most often to the detriment of the work.  and while it’s use here is more reasonable than usual (and thus less jarring) it’s still a lazy cliche.  at the end of the day, however, ‘the lawnmower man’ remains perhaps king’s best blend of comedy and horror and is one of the most successful of his early stories.

[bibliolokust]

‘the ledge.’

much has been made of king’s tendency to thread connections (and hints of connections) through his work in the past few decades so it was a bit of a surprise to see such a thing happening as early as the mid 1970s with ‘the ledge’ (1976) being connected to ‘battleground’ (1972) by way of a vague criminal network called ‘the Organization’ (capitalisation his.)  in the previous tale, we know only that this crime syndicate is the employer of the main character (an assassin named renshaw that meets his ridiculous doom at the hands of tiny living toy soldiers) and, here, we are introduced to cressner, referred to as an ‘Organization overlord’ by our narrator (one stan norris, a luckless [or profoundly lucky] tennis instructor who has fallen ‘like a sack of mail’ for cressner’s wife.)  by keeping the details of this crime syndicate vague and nebulous, king leaves a raft of unexplored potential that he largely abandons (with only a few other stories, i believe, directly referencing the group.)

‘the ledge,’ however, shares more in common than just this criminal organisation and explores a lot of the same sort of masculinity as the previous story only far more effectively.  cressner, having discovered the affair of his wife and norris (and prevented their attempt to get out of down) holds norris in his high rise penthouse apartment (echoing back to the location of ‘battleground’) and offers him a wager- he can have the wife, 20 thousand dollars, and his freedom if he circumnavigates the ledge below the penthouse, all the way around the building or the police will be notified of a quantity of heroin that one of cressner’s employees had placed within the spare tire in norris’ trunk, after moving the car a suitable distance from the high rise.

king clearly revels in the hard boiled dialogue of cressner and norris and that helps it work better, i suppose, than it should, and the moment when, after realising how cold the wind would be, norris inquires if cressner has a coat is king at his most gleefully sardonic.  what follows is one of the most intense explorations of acrophobia ever written, with cressner popping back up, briefly, to mug like the cocksure antagonist of some brilliant low budget noir (honestly, this is king’s first truly great villain.)  as norris moves along the ledge (which is only a few inches wide) king’s writing becomes remarkably tense and much more tightly controlled than in much of his early work, allowing the reader to feel both the height and nightmarish cold that norris deals with.

as norris is almost startled to his death by a 'raspberry,’ he looks up to see cressner, jovial as ever with noisemaker in hand, king manages to deepen the tension and the sense of urgency as norris steels his resolve and continues.  now, what really strikes me here is how similar this is to the scene in ‘battleground’ in which renshaw, escaping the bathroom of *his* high rise penthouse, manages to make his way along a similar (or, perhaps, the same?) ledge and the success of this scene is in stark contrast to the failure of that from the previous story and i cannot help but think that king, being fully aware of how that previous work failed, saw a chance to take this idea and make something of more value from it.  

and, make no mistake, he does.  norris’ two page confrontation with an angry pidgeon that tries to peck him off of the ledge is a scene that, by all rights, should have been slapstick at best but king manages to make it work and creates a bodily existential nightmare equal to any one of those in which one of his other characters encounters some hideous monster and the implacable naturalness of the bird manages to make it more frightening than a good many of his unnatural antagonists and when he finally manages to kick the poor bird from the ledge, it’s as deeply felt a victory as those in any of his novels (and no permanent harm comes to the bird who returns to his perch with only some ruffled feathers after norris moves on.)

when norris finally climbs back into the penthouse, having won the wager, the sense of relief is short lived as cressner reveals that he has had his wife killed, a thug named tony pointing a handgun at norris.  upon hearing this, norris’ first thought is disbelief and then a cold strength pours through him, he throws the money at the thug, grapples the gun away (cracking the thug’s face with it, felling the large man) and points the gun at cressner, who quickly drops the pretense of world weary mafioso as he believes norris is about to kill him.  while begging for his life (offering up as much as two million dollars) norris, instead, offers him a simple bet (having been told, earlier, that Gentlemen make wagers.  Vulgarians place bets’)- if cressner can make his way around the building on that very same ledge, norris will let him live.  and, as cressner begins to make his way along the ledge, norris thinks that, while cressner has never welshed on a bet, he, himself, has been known to.

an interesting and successful meditation on competing strains of toxic masculinity (or, really, the same strain only seen differently by each man) with an undertone of disgust toward the way both men see the (possibly late?) mrs. cressner, ‘the ledge’ is one of king’s more successful character studies, a work in which the plot is almost absurdly simplistic, leaving room for him to explore norris’ interiority and create a situation where a he is so profoundly changed within the span of four hours and thirty-nine minutes (king does a wonderful job at marking off the time through norris’ views of brightly lit clocks in the skyline) that we can only think that, regardless of whether or not mrs. cressner is dead, surely, a large part of norris is and king’s final touch of not actually letting us know if cressner makes it or not (although norris *thinks* he hears a scream at some point, but can’t be sure) is brave and elegant and manages to elevate the story above the standard revenge plot and the entirety of it is masterful exploration of tension and acrophobia and points the way, more than any of his other early shorts, to the longer explorations of crime fiction and noir that he would engage in in the decades to come.

[bibliolokust]

apologies for the delay.

my deepest apologies for the radio silence, i’m dealing with a broken molar (black ice on christmas even + energetic dog + hard pavement = yowch!) and assorted societal ills and whatnots but should be back in track with this project in the soontime (and, once i’m done with ‘night shift,’ i’ll start on simon strantzas groundbreaking first collection, ‘beneath the surface.’) as ever, i hope this finds you well and in good spirits and i am eternally amazed that bobby london ended up doing a ‘popeye’ newspaper strip.

[bibliolokust]

‘strawberry spring.’

one of the shortest pieces in ‘night shift,’ ‘strawberry spring’ may also be the most willfully oblique (and is all the stronger for it.)

ostensibly a reminiscence of a string of brutal murders that happened one strawberry spring (a fog filled false spring which is said to end with the worst storm of the winter,) it rapidly becomes clear that there’s something... off about the narration.  we’re quickly shown that the the narrator might not be as reliable as he believes himself to be (or, possibly, he understands exactly how unreliable he is) as the circumstances of the murders of four women on the campus of new sharon colleges are slowly, almost languidly, unveiled as if the narrator is playing a language came with both the reader and himself.

there are subtle hints throughout that the narrator might be, in fact, the killer but even more subtle is the undercurrent that something truly strange is happening, something even more irrational than the willful misogyny of the calculated extermination of women.  we’re given a seemingly thrown away line about these murders echoing back as far distant as 1819 and king painstakingly shows us so very little of the pattern of murders that may or may not have been happening in this small new england town for almost two centuries.  and this, coupled with the dreamlike descriptions of the foggy nights, the willfully contradictory descriptions of the victims (is the narrator being willfully obtuse?  is he simply describing the way each woman is seen through different eyes?  are we to believe that he might know them in a way that mere description cannot do justice to?,) and the sense of lost time that the narrator hints at come together in way that, most certainly, implies that it could very well be him that’s committing these murders.

but, if it is, how is it possible that they seem to be part of a greater cycled?  could these moments of lost time, these nights largely unaccounted for outside of the impressionistic and hungry fog, imply something less common, less natural, less horribly rational, than the violent misogyny that happens on the streets of america, every day?  and this, i would argue, is the greatest strength of this strange and poetic piece- the idea, buried beneath layers and layers of fog, that something entirely ELSE is using the narrator to commit these terrible crimes (and this is further implied by the way king uses automobiles in the story, as vehicles of the uncanny, mentioned over and over again.)

as the story ends, the narrator reveals that, here in 1975, as he’s reminiscing about the events (and, moreso, the strange foggy dreamlike nights) of 1968, it seems to have begun, again.  strawberry spring rolls in, with its mist and fog and sea salt smell carried for twenty miles from the coast, and, as it must be, another woman murdered on the new sharon campus.  but now the narrator is married, his wife upset and demanding to know his whereabouts the night before and him not knowing (but fearful of what might be in the trunk of his car.)

‘strawberry spring’ is atypical of the work that’s come in the collection, at this point, in that it’s so willfully oblique and beautifully poetic (the only piece that comes close to the strange elegance of the prose here, so far, has been ‘night surf’) and king steadfastly refuses to give us more than hints leaving a narration that is, itself, as unreliable as the narrator and the notion that the narrator knows as little as we do about what has happened (while suspecting much more than the reader) and when he reveals that the narrator’s wife is upset, crying even, not because she believes he’s capable of perpetrating such a heinous crime but, rather, because she is afraid that he was with another woman it makes the punchline of the final sentence (’And oh dear god, I think so too.’) work so very well and we’re left with the utter horror of knowing that, this entire time, throughout all of these reminiscences that the narrator has so calmly engaged us with, he believes himself a monster, a being capable of such incredible and repulsive acts of violence.

by never actually confirming the narrator’s suspicions (nor ours) and given the story of that strawberry spring, seven years ago, the feeling of an elegy, glimpsed through treacle thick mist with nothing at all being anything close to certain, king allows the entire piece to take on the sort of strangeness that one might find in a story by robert aickman or charles l. grant, rather than his usual more direct tackling of violence and it works so very well and creates such a profound unsettlement that one almost WANTS those wispy hints of the uncanny, the unnatural, to be the ‘truth’ of the piece but, that’s just it- there’s no real truth to be found and that leaves such a weight on the shoulders of the reader that marks the piece as one of king’s bravest.

[bibliolokust]

‘sometimes they come back.’

at thirty two pages, ‘sometimes they come back’ is the longest piece in ‘night shift’ and is also the piece that, i would argue, is most similar to his work in the novella (king is that rare writer that understand that the short story, the novella, and the novel are bound as much by structural concerns as concerns of length) and it contains the first real resonance with his uncomfortable nostalgia for the 1950s of his childhood.

ostensibly a combination ghost story and faustian tale, the story of troubled  english teacher jim norman (and, to my knowledge, the first example of king using teacher as a main character [a bit that he’ll return to with some regularity, often using the figure as a proxy for the more common ‘sad writer’ that he tends to use) coming face to face with literal demons of the past is, in some ways, the most ambitious story in the collection, so far, even if it fails to live up to those ambitions. 

we are introduced to norman, and his wife, in the first two paragraphs as he returns home from his job interview, her anxious and hopeful, him walking up holding some school books.  immediately, there’s a sense of warmth between the two, and of hope, but, just as immediately, king pulls that rug out from under them (and the reader) by talking about norman waking up sweating from a nightmare, ‘a scream behind his lips.’  this sort of transition can often be so incredibly clumsy but king handles it adeptly, here, providing a sort of disorientation that prefigures that bleak downward spiral of haunting (both literal and figurative) that is to follow.

we are taken back to the interview and we’re told that norman had a ‘breakdown’ while working on his teaching degree and student teaching at a school in the city known for violence and criminality and, already, snippets of 1950s slang are seeping into the present creating an uncanny relationship with the narrative and eroding the sense of linear time.  while this sort of thing can, all too easily, undermine the work king begins with a light hand, allowing the strangeness to echo back into norman’s anxiety as he explains his breakdown (which was caused, we’re told, by his mother’s dead and his wife being the victim of a hit and run which left her with a broken leg, broken ribs, and a great deal of agony.  but there’s more to the story and king mentions norman had a brother, older, who also wanted to be a teacher and had died, sometime earlier, and the implication is that something about that death was connected to his wife’s hit and run, even of obliquely.)

as the interview continues, king portrays norman’s growing anxiety in such excruciating and effective detail, focusing on the bodily nature of it over the emotional nature of it in what is, quite honestly, one of the best descriptions of anxiety that i’ve read in quite some time, allowing the anxiety of the interview to thread through itself on multiple levels (the regular stress of interviewing for a desired job, the stress of his previous professional failure and breakdown, and more sources of anxiety that will be revealed through the course of the piece.)  what king does so well, here, is put the reader in a situation in which we absolutely KNOW that norman succeeded in his interview and gets the job but, as the interview goes on, and he becomes more and more anxious, more and more... disassociated, we can’t help but doubt the ultimate outcome as we’re taken on a ride through norman’s bodily state of anxiety.

it’s revealed that, even though other things had been mentioned in relation to it, the ‘real’ source of a norman’s breakdown was being assaulted while trying to stop the violent bullying of a student that he saw as ‘sensitive,’ the bullies smashing the boys guitar with the implication that there was more violence to come.  at this point, we know that norman has chosen to student teach at a school well known for its violent reputation so why should something so commonplace as classroom bullying (and being ‘slugged’ by a student) get him so upset?  king hints that there’s something more to all of this than what it is a relatively straightforward and incredibly common experience in ‘rough’ schools and this is where the story really starts to unfold itself into something darker and stranger.

norman begins teaching (and we see mentions, small echoes, of the fact that the school, even with new desks and the like, holds physical memories of the time of norman’s childhood) with everything mostly okay except for his last class of the day- a remedial english class filled with angry jocks and delinquents (with the requisite pressure to do what he an to pass these kids, making sure that the jocks can stay involved in their chosen sports.  it all goes as well as can be expected, with razzing from some of the kids and a general sense of tension and malevolence, him being seen as something they both deeply resent and need to continue their high school careers as they desire, until, during the winter, he catches a kind named chips osway cheating who then threatens him with ‘We’ll get you, creepo.’  what hangs in the air, here, isn’t just the threat, or the old timey ‘creepo,’ but the heaviness of ‘we.’  who is ‘we?’  there’s a darker implication here than chip just meaning his fellow classmates or jocks.

and this experience leads to norman having ‘that dream,’ again, but this time we’re made privy to it.  as king describes the dream, which seems to be a clear memory from norman’s childhood with his brother (age nine and twelve, respectively,) he shifts person, from third to second, as we’re told of a small gang of troublesome greasers that hand out near a railway underpass that the norman kids have to walk near, frequently, and the moment that these ruffians go from being troublesome to outright violent, assaulting both kids and, after norman’s brother kicks one in the crotch and norman scuttles between their legs and runs off, seeming to murder his brother with switchblades.  with the switch between third and second person, king ratchets up the sense of distorted cognisance and dissociation that he’s been playing with, up until this point, into something entirely new- a nightmare of pure survivor’s guilt that we’re forced to feel along with norman.  it’s a brave choice and it works.

norman’s winter break is largely without incident (although we are told that the had the dream, twice, early on) and he returns, thinking that his unease and discomfort are just the normal stress of teaching angry kids who would rather not be taught.  before he can get to his class, however, he learns that a new student will be joining him, robert lawson, and that one of his favourite students was killed in a hit and run.  he opens the file to see that new student, impossibly, is one of the delinquents that stabbed his brother.  lawson immediately becomes the lead troublemaker in the class, with norman struggling to make sense of it all, resorting to simply trying to ignore it and teach the class.  but soon another student dies (a girl named kathy that seemed to be one of the better students,) with three boys being seen running from the scene of her death.

two weeks pass and norman is, again, handed the file of a new student (reacting with a sort of fatalism as if he already knew how all of this would soon play out) and, while he doesn’t recognise the student at first, he later realises that, like lawson, this david garcia, is one of the gang that murdered his brother.  after a bit, chip osway comes to talk to norman, anxious and nervous, and explains that he had been angry and hanging out with lawson and garcia when they mentioned that they were planning on hurting the teacher, and pressed osway for information, leaving the boy terrified and coming to norman to both confess his sins and relieve his dread (and we’re left recalling his threat of ‘we’ll get you, creepo!’ and wondering if osway had any real understanding of the faustian bargain he was invoking by that) but, the very next day, he disappears (with his suitcase and some cash according to his uncaring possible stepfather) leaving norman to wait for the inevitable- a new student in his class, impossibly from that terrible and fateful day in his past (this time one vincent ‘vinnie’ corey.)

now that the third ‘ghost’ (?) has arrived, they begin to be more explicit about their connection norman and his past, vinnie corey asking how his brother is, for example.  deciding to telephone a police officer from when he was a child, norman gives the retired cop the names of the three students (with one being clearly remembered and another ringing a bell) and there’s a hint that there’s something that norman feels guilty over, aside from his brother’s death, related to the three delinquents and he’s told that there is no ‘milford high,’ which the three had supposedly transferred from, but, rather, there’s a millford cemetary (and as he hangs up the phone, we’re treated with the jump scare of corey’s face pressed up against the glass of the phone booth in a scene that would work far better on film.)

at this point, most of what we’ve seen from norman is an combination of anxiety and cowardice (and, to king’s credit, he never equates the former with the latter) so it’s a surprise when he finally has corey stay after class and directly confronts him.  while admitting that, yes, he and his pals are dead and were responsible for killing norman’s brother, he gets enraged at the question of WHERE he and his delinquent buddies were all this time (with the implication being that they were in hell, confirmed when he tells norman that’s where he’s going, soon.)  what we see in this confrontation is a shift from norman’s being as simply victim to his being something more complex, something with the capacity to be more venomous than the coward we’ve seen up until this point, mocking both corey’s use of outdated 50s slang and his being dead, and it shakes the revenant corey, rattles him in a way that a ghost (?) shouldn’t be, at least not by the living.  it’s revealed that the fourth member of the gang, ‘bleach,’ was, in fact, still alive and the mention of this enrages corey who, before storming off, clearly threatens not just norman but also his ‘little wifey’ (which dulls norman’s anger and sends him reeling, allowing corey to take the power back in the exchange by remarking, after norman threatens to kill him, that he’s already dead.)

sitting at home, anxiously reading a book on raising demons, norman practically begs his wife to take a cab home from wherever she’s going (four blocks away) even making up the story of a girl in his class being grabbed in an attempted rape, nearby.  as she asks if something’s the matter (mentioning that he was mumbling his brother’s name in his sleep,) he gruffly says that it’s nothing he can’t handle and she leaves before the phone rings.  the former officer nell, from his childhood, is returning his call and says that all three boys were, indeed, killed in an automobile accident a few months after the death of his brother but one of the delinquents (the aforementioned ‘bleach’) was alive, having joined the army after what happened with norman’s brother.  as the phone cuts out and then rings again in norman’s hand, we know that something terrible has happened to his wife and it’s in this section that king has so deftly played with the idea of fate that her death comes as no surprise but, rather, as a grim inevitability and when he’s told of her death, after driving to the hospital (and being stopped on the way by a cop who then leads the way, siren and lights on) and he sees a blood spattered orderly that he recognises as garcia we, as readers, have no real way of knowing if it actually *is* the revenant of david garcia or if it’s norman’s fractured and grief stricken imagination.

the stark depiction of sally norman’s funeral and her husband’s grief stricken sleepwalk through it is as discomforting as any bit of violence that king has ever written, norman being consumed with the empty derealisation that such deep grief couple with an enormous can bring but that venomous thing inside norman begins to squirm again, with an idea for revenge and closure, and when corey calls him on the phone to gloat over killing his wife (’Wham and splatter’) he’s already prepared and tells corey to come to the school and bring the others with him to end it all.  when he arrives at the school, however, what we have is not a broken and grief stricken man but, rather, a man with the steely resolve to avenge his brother, his wife, and himself.

grabbing a sound effects record and a portable record player, he reads a passage from the book on raising demons and prepares to meet the delinquents by setting up the stereo in his classroom and playing the record’s cut of the noise of a freight train, and painstakingly drawing a pentagram and, using a photograph and the sweatband from his brother’s childhood ball cap, summons a demon to make his own faustian bargain with by cutting off his index fingers as payment.  the delinquents arrive, all piss and vinegar at first, until a phantom in the shape of norman’s dead brother manifests in the pentagram and the scene of his death is replayed (the delinquents realising that they cannot control what they do and say and are merely puppets, preplaying what they had done those many years ago) and as each of them stab their knives into the phantom, they burn and disappear.  having fulfilled his wish for vengeance, norman tidies up and leaves, thinking that he needs to see a doctor about his missing fingers, and he’s started by a shadow behind him, remembering that the book on raising demons had mentioned that, once a demon is summoned, ‘sometimes they come back.’

unfortunately, this last scene just feels so rushed and forced.  up until this point, the pacing had been fatalistic and measured, as norman’s world falls apart.  as with ‘the mangler,’ we’re given to believe that someone can find real and useful knowledge of demons with ease and, as with that previous piece, it lends a certain goofiness to the proceedings as we’re rushed through the climax.

one of the most striking things about the piece is that king never even attempts to explain how the boys have seemingly come back from the dead.  they are not ghosts in any of the common meanings of the word and nor are they simply the resurrected corpses of the boys.  in their contemporary being, they are dressed and groomed as normal as everyone else (even to the point of contemporary coolness) with the only clue that they’re not of the time being their penchant to speak using decades old slang.  king leaves us with an uncomfortable unbalance between the notion that the loss of youth is something to be mourned as well as the loss of ‘innocence’ (a grotesquely problematic idea grounded in middle class notions of morality and identity) and the idea that the past is something we can never return to but, just like so many ghosts, it returns to us, often unbidden and unwelcome, and we’re shown that king’s rosey nostalgia is covered in thorns as well as blossoms. we have no idea what has drawn them (osway’s rage?  norman’s guilt?  something else entirely?)  and we are, in the end, left only with a recursive notion of the faustian, norman’s vengeance without any real understanding of why any of this has happened or, really, even *how* any of it has and it’s this uncertainty (along with king’s hinting that norman may have more to feel guilty about than just the death of brother) that elevates the story well above the common idea of supernatural vengeance, even though the climax  is so frustratingly rushed and forced. 

[bibliolokust]

the skin of my figertips, dry and cracking from washing brushes and canvas with alcohol and my house smells of roasted peppers and fresh ginger as the cat sleeps on the windowsill and the dog yawns upon the bed and the rest is just thesipence of an early winter evening.

[bibliolokust]

‘trucks.’

it was with a mix of trepidation and vague excitement that i finally sat down to read ‘trucks,’ which honestly contains one of king’s most utterly ridiculous ideas- killer trucks (although, honestly, the idea is not without precedent [sturgeon’s strangely brilliant ‘killdozer!’ immediately springs to mind and king has already done [albeit rather poorly] machinery gone awry with ‘the mangler’ and it’s a notion that he’ll return to throughout his career with the most well known example being the 1983 novel, ‘christine’ [a full decade after the publishing of ‘trucks.’])

opening in media res in a truckstop diner, king describes those inside, mentions that there are seven or eight trucks outside, and gleefully describes the scene of carnage in the parking lot: a plymouth fury (again, predating ‘christine’ by a decade and another example of king using something that seems like a throwaway bit [and very well might have been] in an early short work and building a novel around it, later) that has been ‘battered into senseless junk,’ a ‘blasted Cadillac’ whose dead driver ‘stared out of the star-shattered windshield like a gutted fish,’ and a dead girl in a pink dress who had leapt from the cadillac when she ‘saw it wasn’t going to make it’ and around whom swarmed ‘flies around her in clouds,’ and an old ford station wagon that had been ‘slammed through the guardrails.’

as one of the people inside the truck stop flips his table over and runs outside (with the narrator attempting, and failing, to stop him) he is hit by one of the trucks and king refers to the way he sails through the air as ‘the way a punter kicks a football’ in a scene that’s honestly as successful a bit of comedy as king has ever written which adds to the general unsettlement of the story.  the folks still inside are stunned, a trucker crushing a glass in his hand, and everyone frozen in shock until a girl (one of the passengers of the fury, both of which managed to escape and get into the truck stop) begins to cry, easing the tension with a sort of secondhand catharsis.

 but... we still don’t know what’s actually happening and it’s to king’s credit that he hasn’t told the reader what’s going on until the third page where he reveals, in a single sentence paragraph, ‘There was no one in the trucks.’  this is a moment that could easily have been an absolute failure but the simplicity of the reveal, this late in the story, works incredibly well and is in stark contrast to king’s tendency to spend a lot of ink describing things in great detail.  this minimalist approach to something so deeply uncanny marks a confidence that much of his early work is lacking and it pays off for him, here, as does his decision to never actually tell us WHY or HOW these trucks have seemingly become autonomously animated with will and consciousness (showcasing a sort of animism that doesn’t show so much a distrust of technology as a notion that what is made by human hands is rendered into life [and i can’t help but think that mary shelley’s ‘frankenstein’ is a work that has held a great deal of attraction and influence on king throughout his career.)

what follows is a tense siege narrative in which the trucks, using morse code to demand refueling which the kid from the plymouth, jerry, translates, having learned it in the boy scouts (and what strikes me is that this is done in a way that king shows you just how WRONG this all is instead of causing the reader to simply think ‘how the hell could a truck know morse code?’)  as the survivors vote and argue to see whether or not they’ will do as commanded, with the diner’s counterman calling to attention that it will be enslavement, the siege comes to a head when a bulldozer (a new addition to the growing line of animated vehicles [and a clear nod to sturgeon’s ‘killdozer!’ which i believe firmly inspired this story]) begins to destroy the front of the building while the narrator and jerry use some quickly made molotov cocktails to attack the bulldozer, during which time jerry is run over and killed (leaving a corpse that king calls ‘something that looked like a crumpled towel’) and the trucker, attempting to run to a drainage ditch, is also run down but the narrator does end up destroying the bulldozer.

but it’s a hollow victory as a seemingly endless line of trucks leads out onto the highway and the narrator (and later, the counterman) begin fueling the trucks with the narrator thinking of how this must be everywhere and the collapse of civilisation under new masters with the final line of the story being his grim thought that, seeing planes overhead, he wished he ‘could believe there were people in them.

what king does is build an incredibly effective and deeply chilling piece of cosmic strangeness (what does the animation of these trucks mean for our very notions of intelligence?  of life itself?) out of such a laughable idea and the tension created between the absurdity of the idea and the effectiveness of king’s writing leaves a miniature masterpiece of far more philosophical depth than should be possible in a story about trucks coming to life.

[bibliolokust]

‘battleground.’

king’s first foray into hard boiled territory, ‘battleground’ is something much less than the sum of its part.  in attempting to portray what king seems to imagine is the rugged machismo of a hired killer, the affectations and reliance on clumsy metaphor fall almost completely flat so, rather than the sort of compelling amoral killers that king would become adept at crafting, later in his work, what we have is nothing more than a caricature in john renshaw who is ‘a human hawk, constructed by both genetics and environment to do two things superbly: kill and survive.’

we’re told that renshaw has just returned home to his penthouse after assassinating the former owner of a toy company (which, even with the conceit that he doesn’t know why his targets are picked and that it’s just that someone contacted the ‘Organization’ and then, through his handler, him... still seems like a resoundingly silly for a punchline that completely fails, in the end.)  waiting for him, in the lobby, is a mysterious package that he brings up and then ‘treats like a bomb’ as we’re treated to rumination on what sort of bomb it might be (with the possibility of it being a clock bomb quickly ruled out) and the far fetched realisation that the writing on the address label was the same writing that was on a picture of the late toy magnate’s mother (Best from your number one idea-girl, Mom’) in his office where, presumably, renshaw had killed him.

as renshaw carefully opens the package, it’s revealed to be a ‘g.i. joe footlocker’ filled with toy soldiers, helicopters, jeeps, etc. which proceed to come to life (and it’s to king’s credit that he never states HOW or WHY they are able to do this) and begin to attack him, peppering him with tiny machine gun fire that he likens to bee stings. 

and this is where the entire story, already not very good, completely falls apart as renshaw seems able to completely keep his cool (aside from becoming angry when he’s wounded by one of the helicopters) and we’re treated to more layers and layers of macho nonsense that become ever more cartoonish with him never even seeming to wonder how any of this is possible because, like, he’s just So Cool, Daddio but, finally, he retreats to the bathroom after being the target of a tiny rocket launcher (which misses) and this leads into one of the earliest bits of king’s often troubled relationship to issues of race in which renshaw sees himself in the mirror and ‘an Indian was staring back at him with dazed and haunted eyes, a battle-crazed Indian with thin streamers of red paint drawn from holes no bigger than grains of pepper.’  it’s clear that this image is meant to hearken back to to the stereotypical depictions of native americans as ‘warrior savages’ that king would have enjoyed as a boy and it feels so entirely misplaced and unnecessary.

as renshaw quickly recovers his seemingly supernatural cool, the tiny soldiers slide a piece of paper calling for his ‘surrender’ under the table and he responds by scrawling ‘NUTS’ on the paper and sliding it back under the door (a moment that did elicit an honest chuckle.)  what follows is a barrage of tiny rocket fire that turns the ‘elegant blue tile into a pocket lunar landscape’ (and, here, it’s hard to tell whether or not there’s a copy error and ‘pocked’ was meant, rather than ‘pocket,’ or if it’s the correct word to comment on the scale of it [i tend to lean toward the former but i can’t hold a simple copy error against the writer as, by the time it sees print, the copy is well out of his hands.])

he makes his way out the bathroom window to the ledge (in a scene that seems to foreshadow a later story, ‘the ledge’)  grabbing the lighter fluid (which, i guess we’re led to believe was kept in bathrooms in the 70s?,)  his already fawned over magnum handgun in his waistband (and... i so desperately want to think that this was an intentional character of the over the top masculinity on display but it does not, at all, read that way and nothing in the story reads even slightly critical of the loathsome and absurd masculinity of renshaw), and begins the journey around the corner to the terrace of his living room.

after the short journey which provides the only real tension in the piece, he goes back into his penthouse, taking his shirt of to make a bandage and a molotov cocktail with the lighter fluid (and king makes clear to mention that the rest of his shirt flutters limply to the floor specifically so he can reference it at the end in one of the most clumsy bits of foreshadowing that i’ve ever seen him use) only to, after throwing the burning lighter fluid, have what turns out to be a tiny nuclear explosion kill him, blowing out the door of the penthouse where a couple sees the shirt fluttering down with the nameless woman asking her date, ralph, to call her a cab because she doesn’t want to deal with the police, remarking ‘I ain’t supposed to be out with you.’  and then the punchline- a small scrap of paper lands near the discard shirt that reads, in the toy magnate’s mothers ‘spiky hand,’ ‘Hey kids! Special in this Vietnam Footlocker!  (For a Limited Time Only) 1 Rocket Launcher 20 Surface-to-Air Twister Missiles 1 Scale-Model Thermonuclear Weapon.’

the end result is a story that reads far too long for the joke (even at just ten pages) with none of the skillful prose that king has shown up until this point and what we’re left with is, simply, something that reads like a bad joke without any depth, whatsoever (and i think it’s telling that i only recalled that there were killer toys and a tiny nuclear weapon from when i read it as a youngster.  although, really what else is there in it?)

[bibliolokust]

‘gray matter.’

another that i had clear (yet, it turns out, incorrect) memories of reading, ‘gray matter’ is a relatively straightforward tale of body horror in that long tradition of horror stories in which a human is somehow transformed over the course of time into something entirely Other and it’s the first time king really delves into the voice of grumpy old white new england retirees that he would hone all throughout his career and, while some of the old timey turns of phrase read a bit goofy, it’s surprising how assured he already is with that voice and neither the narrator nor his fellow elderly barroom buddies read like caricature.

while i had remembered the general plot of a child’s drunken layabout of a father turning into something between an amoeba and the inscrutable alien organism from irving s. yeaworth’s 1958 teen horror film, ‘the blob,’ what i had misremembered was the story being told from the child’s perspective and, rather, the narrator hears the details of what has happened to little timmy grenadine’s father, richie, secondhand after the child had told the bartender the story, coming in all aflush and on the edge of a breakdown to get his father his nightly case of beer.  and i can’t help but be struck at how much more assured king is inhabiting the elderly narrator and how much more gravitas that gives the story than how i had remembered it.

as the bartender shows that he brought his massive .45 caliber handgun (referred to as a ‘hogleg’ and a ‘frenchman’s pecker’ in a couple bits of that ol’ new england jive that come together far better than one would expected given how clumsy and... off so much of his simile and metaphor usage was in ‘the mangler’) and explains the sad tale of richie grenadine drinking a bad can of beer and turning into a photophobic grey ‘lump’ we’re treated with a wonderful combination of pathos and hardness that captures, very effectively, that particular sort of old masculinity that king has struggled with, so far, as there’s a general sort of dislike already pointed at richie grenadine that’s tempered with a sort of ‘takes all kinds’ broad sympathy for the man.

before the men reach the apartment building that the grenadines live in, trudging through one of those hellish winter storms that northern new england is famous for, we’re treated to what i firmly believe is another of a few kernels king wrote that eventually grew into his monumental (and monumentally flawed) novel,’ ‘it,’ with the remembered tale of a man named george kelso who worked for the bangor public works department who suddenly quit after coming out of the tunnels with his hair turned white (a biological misunderstanding that, nevertheless, pos up in a number of kings work [although it’s usually forgivable as it adds to the general feeling of folk tales and urban legends that suffuse much of king’s oeuvre]) and sets to drinking himself to death while, at one point, mentioning that he saw a ‘spider as big as a good-sized dog setting in a web full of kitties an’ such all wrapped up in silk thread’ (the titular cosmic horror of the later novel being described as something that, while we cannot truly comprehend it, our brains reconcile as being akin to a giant spider that uses the sewers of derry, maine, to den in and travel through.)  this image, combined with the nature of the boogeyman preying on terrified children in the previous story and the subterranean horror of ‘jerusalem’s lot,’ to me, clearly plant the seeds of ‘it’ (and one can even argue that the ironworks disaster in the novel harkens back, if only slightly, to the machinery gone malevolent in ‘the mangler.’)

right before the men enter the building, henry tells how young timmy saw, through a judas hole (peephole), his father remove a dead cat ‘swole up all stiff’ with ‘little white things crawlin’ all over it’ and eat it, which chills the men even in the bitter cold of the winter storm.  they enter and the narrator describes the stink of the place, likening it to a cider mill in summer, and a dead dog he had once dragged from under the porch and it’s clear that king is taking a certain glee in trying to ever so gently gross the reader out, to unsettle the stomach rather than schock, and it’s rather effective and when one of the men cries ‘look what we’re walkin’ in!,’ we’re treated to a vision of a carpet eaten away by puddles of gray slime (the implication in which being that the poor bastard, richie grenadine, had not just  become something inhuman but something whose flesh, whose very substance, was inimical to life as we know it.)

readying his firearm, henry calls to richie, telling him that he should come out and get his beer and it’s at this point, with richie’s transformed voice being referred to as ‘low and blubby,’ ‘like a mouthful of suet,’ and ‘horribly eager’ as he (it?) tells henry to pull the tabs on the beer and push them inside because he (it?) can’t that henry questions richie by saying ‘it ain’t just dead cats anymore, is it?’ which causes the narrator to recall that two young girls and 'some old salvation army wino’ had disappeared during the night, recently, and richie responds by threatening to come out.

as henry tells richie that he better, we’re treated to the image of the door bulging out before bursting open, echoing back to the biological horror that richie grenadine had become and, as everyone but henry flees (him firing at least three shots from that handgun of his) we learn that narrator caught a glimpse of the richie thing and that it had four eyes, instead of two, and seemed to be undergoing a process similar to the binary fission of bacteria, and he begins to almost obsessively start multiplying in his head (getting to ‘32,768 times two is the end of the human race’ after the men return to the bar to wait for henry’s return.

‘gray matter’ being one of king’s most effective early creepers, it combines the small town working class (that he’s finally getting the hang of properly describing) with a relatively facile body horror notion quite well and his affected prose elevates the piece (and the horror of it) rather than detracting from it and it’s worth noting that, up through this point, every one of the stories in ‘night shift’ have been open ended, letting the reader decide the ultimate fate of the players and this is something that has had varying degrees of success (it works well in ‘night surf’ and ‘graveyard shift,’ terribly in ‘the mangler,’ and just feels sort of tacked on to the end of ‘jerusalem’s lot’ as the REAL last of the boon family moves in) but, here, that open endedness, that uncertainty, of whether henry will win and return or whether he’ll be eaten by richie leaves so much more at stake and creates a truly chilling ending to what just might be one of king’s best short stories.

[bibliolokust]

‘the boogeyman.’

up until reading it, this afternoon, i would have sworn up and down that i had read ‘the boogeyman’ relatively recently, perhaps in an anthology (i even pulled out my copy of haining’s ‘the mammoth book of modern haunted house stories’ only to see that, while it was in later editions, it wasn’t in the one that i had), but, after reading it, now, it’s clear that i hadn’t and that the skeleton of the story had simply stuck with me, somewhere behind my teeth, since i was a child.

what’s so striking on reading this slim story of a man named billings and his appointment with a therapist named dr. harper in which billings confesses that the deaths of all three of his children came at the hands of the titular monster and were, ultimately, billings’ fault for not doing anything, is just how utterly repellant billings is.

a racist homophobe and violent misogynist, it’s clear as he begins his tale that he hated his first two children, denny and shirl, and, moreso, hated his wife for bearing them (and for bearing the one child, andy, that he seemed to have even the slightest attachment to.)  king manages to be a bit deft in the implication that billings was abused by his mother while still not letting billings off the hook for his loathsome attitudes in behavior (such as when he says ‘Can you imagine waking up one morning and finding your kid, you son, is a sissy?’) and his hatred for his own children (and good on king for not falling into that oh so common misogynist trap of blaming it all on the mother.)

as he details the deaths of each of his children, the details become starker and the presence of the boogeyman seems to make him(it?)self stronger in billings mind and life, opening all of the closet doors where it had only seemed to open those of the children it killed, leaving trails of mud, sime, and petty destruction, and generally becoming much more involved in billings’ life than it had been (particularly during the period leading up to the death of andy.)

what king does by playing it straight and showing a an absolutely vile and guilty man confessing to his crimes under the guise of blaming them on the impossible is almost a masterpiece in manipulation of the audience through description (how billings sounds, his physical mannerisms, his appearance, all used to paint the portrait of an absolutely despicable man who simply MUST be responsible for his children’s deaths.)  all of this is done so well that, when the inevitable punchline comes and billings leaves harper’s office and comes back in to find that, indeed, the boogeyman is real and in the closet (which harper had previously opened at billings’ insistence) and holding a mask of dr. harper’s face it still manages to shock effectively (and, just a bit before, king [with a chuckle, i imagine] gives it away by referencing graham ingels’ art from ‘tales from the crypt’ which this story could have come straight from, complete with a description of the thing that is entirely the sort of thing that ingels so relished drawing.)

as one of any number of early king pieces that bore the proud hallmarks of his love of e.c. comics and the like, ‘the boogeyman’ is certainly one of the most successful and that final touch of billings pissing himself the harper/boogeyman saying ‘so nice’ in a voice that sounded like it ‘might have come through a mouthful of rotted seaweed’ is a chilling ending made so much more unsettling because we can only guess and what the creature was referring to.

[bibliolokust]

‘the mangler.’

my only memory of ‘the mangler,’ from reading it as a child, was that it was a story about an industrial laundry machine that had become haunted or possessed and that idea had grown into something so immensely and irredeemably silly in my mind (especially since there have been a series of films revolving around the idea that seem to be the epitome of diminishing returns) so there was a certain morbid curiosity in rereading it.

the first thing that really strikes me, a few pages in, is that ‘pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheated bread’ is such a monumentally bad simile that i had to read the line again, just to be sure.  king has, at present time, a long history of folksy figures of speech and allegories in his work that sometimes fall flat but this has to be damn near the nadir.

this unfortunate simile leads immediately into one of the most grim descriptions of a death scene that king has ever written (a woman getting pulled into an industrial steaming/folding machine) and the combination of the dopey simile and the grotesquerie that follows is somewhat disorienting (and in a way that i’m not entirely sure that king meant, at the time, but it does help ease the story into stranger territory and that combination of goofy affectation and grim descriptions of bodily destruction in order to catch the reader off guard and unsettle them is a tool that king has leaned on quite often in later works [to varying degrees of success].)

what follows is a story of a police officer named hunton (who i had to stop myself from picturing as peter falk in ‘columbo’ even though he’s not actually a detective) and his off the books investigation that leads him to believe this machine, which during the course of the story, blows a steam line severely burning some workers, attempts to kill another man (who is only saved by his coworker lopping his arm off, at the shoulder, with a fire axe) and is revealed to have started its reign of terror after a young woman cut herself, bleeding into the machine (and hunton, with a teacher friend, interview the young woman to ask if she’s a ‘virgin’ in a scene that’s even more uncomfortable than the gory setpieces) leading, ultimately, to a failed exorcism and the demon possessed machine consuming the teacher (a man named jackson who had done the research to discover what time of demon they might be dealing with and how to exorcise it.)

just before this exorcism scene, however, is such a strange failure of a scene in which the ghost (maybe? kinda?) of the woman who was killed by the machine at the beginning of the story reveals (sorta? but not really?) to the reader that she had dropped a box of medicine of which belladonna was a key ingredient (after we’re told, hamfistedly, that belladonna is also referred to as ‘the hand of glory’ in ‘parts of europe’ and that it’s super bad juju to have involved in the summoning and binding of a demon) and , gosh, that’s some bad luck boys.  this scene is so monumentally clumsy and poorly written that it’s almost impossible to understand whether or not it’s meant to actually be the ghost of poor mrs. frawley or just the first example of clumsy vox dei and deus ex machina that king has used throughout his career and it pushed me, as a writer, out of the story entirely and i had to just frown for a bit before continuing.

ultimately, since they two men botch the exorcism (they don’t know about the hand of glory aspect) the thing (no more demon than machine) breaks loose and eats jackson leaving hunton to run to the house of the inspector who looked at the machine and gave it a clean bill of health after mrs. frawley’s death (who had previously told hunton the story of a fridge that seemed to draw animals/children into it to suffocate which sparked the idea in hunton’s mind that the machine might have something supernatural wrong with it.)  the machine follows and we’re treated to it appearing outside martin’s house and left with the notion that martin, his wife, and hunton are going to be next in a scene that king admirably ends before the chaos of a laundry machine smashing into someone’s house like some horrific kool-aid man.

it’s a story that is by turns goofy and creepy and it’s the first real failure in ‘night shift,’ a piece that can be read as a satire on the then very popular possession theme that was launched into the public eye by the rousing success of ira levin’s ‘rosemary’s baby’ and the hit film adaptation of the same by roman polanski but it’s entirely uncertain if that was intentional or incidental and what we’re left with, in the end, is an ambitious failure that’s neither as scary nor as funny as it could be (with the blow of that failure lessened by king’s tight and clear descriptions of the mangler that stem from his time working around such machines when he was younger.)

but it’s also the first appearance of king’s distrust of technology which, as his career continues, becomes more nuanced and less cudgel-like (with some glaring exceptions) and is worth reading for that, alone, if nothing else.

[bibliolokust]

‘i am the doorway.’

king’s first professionally published foray into science fiction (’carrie’ being grounded in popular pseudoscience and not bearing the intent of any real speculation about the world and, rather, detailing the nightmare of repressive evangelical christianity [which, itself, was horrifyingly prescient, i suppose]), i am the doorway is a far stranger story than the pieces before it, detailing the confession of a former deep space astronaut having orbited venus and crashing on arrival and now, quite a few years later, he’s dealing with some sort of alien intelligence manifesting as monstrous (and somewhat beautiful) eyes appearing in his hands that slowly take control of him.

expressing more control over his voice than in previous works, king lets us be as unsure of the origin of this/these intelligence/s as his suffering narrator who remarks that maybe it happened near venus, maybe it happened on his porch, and maybe it happened elsewhere and we, like, him simply cannot ever know for certain and this uncertainty is reflected in his reactions of seeing THROUGH these eyes where everything he knows is not shown just as alien but hatefully and horrifyingly alien (at one point they see a child with a sieve and that tool is referred to as being ‘created of geometrically impossible right angles’ and this line speaks to their being something so fundamentally DIFFERENT as to be irreconcilable with our own existence.)

as the narrator, arthur, confesses to his friend, richard, the destruction of that boy through these new alien eyes causing his head to burst, the sense of the inevitable creeps in and when arthur, whose hands have been bandages up until this point, removes those bandages and those golden eyes bring about richard’s foreshadowed death, the only real surprise is the manner of it as it seems like whatever looked through those eyes manifests an ability to control the weather, forcing lightning into richard.

or do they?  we’re told that, after, the story that had been circling overhead was gone and with it were richard and the dune buggy that brought both out to where arthur had claimed to bury the body of the boy he/they had killed, the sand was ‘virginal’ and, as richard goes inside his small house, lights a fire and burns his hands off, we’re left to wonder (even if the doubt is so very slight) whether richard, the dune buggy, or the boy had ever actually existed.

he closes the story with the revelation that years have passed and he has grown accustomed to the hooks which have replaced his hands and he intends to use those hooks to operate a shotgun to finally end his suffering after finding a perfect ring of twelve golden eyes upon his chest, showcasing a much stronger grasp on cosmic horror than he did in the overtly lovecraftian ‘jerusalem’s lot.’

when i first read the story, as a child, the more philosophical aspects and the subtle notion that, just maybe, arthur was simply insane almost entirely eluded me but, now, i can see the influence of al williamson’s dark sf stories from e.c. comics almost front and center and, honestly, king blends that e.c. comics influence with his own voice far better than usual and there’s a sad thoughtfulness to the inevitability of the piece that puts in mind the previous ‘night surf’ and even some of his later works like ‘bag of bones’ or ‘hearts in atlantis.’

king would often return to sf elements in his work but rarely did they place in a setting that was grounded in science fiction (in this case, a few decades from the dawn of the seventies when he wrote it) and i think that he succeeded better, here, than in those later direct sf pieces by minimising that future setting in, instead, creating a story in which we can’t honestly be sure that it *is* set in the future or if it’s entirely the ramblings of a paranoid madman (and that lack of certainty is a theme which king will faithfully return to throughout his entire career, with mixed results.)

[bibliolokust]

‘night surf.’

all i could remember of ‘night surf,’ before rereading it, tonight, was that it was a dry run for ‘the stand’ and took place on a beach so that first line (’After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went down to the beach.’) was shocking in its nihilism compared to the hamfisted christian allegory of that doorstopper of the of a novel.

essentially a first person rumination on the end of the world, ‘night surf’ takes the darker side of the hippie 60s and washes it out until that bleak nihilism that brought altamont with it and the dropout optimistic nihilism of the drugged up flower power bunch meet in a strange sort of liminal space that connects the dead world of the story with the great Nothing beyond.

here we see king unafraid to spin a tale from the perspective of, let’s face it, an absolute asshole.  a fellow with no real redeeming qualities other than that the may be the last philosopher left alive.  and it works.  

far better than ‘the stand’ (which reads less like a novel and more like a series of bloated ‘chick tracts’ replete with childish notions of Good vs. Evil and some pretty backwards racial and ableist stereotypes [a sadly common thread through much of king’s work,]) ‘night surf’ is less allegory and more a willfully inelegant rumination on the death of everything as the boisterous nihilism of youth gives way to... nothing at all.

it’s far sadder and more thoughtful than i expected it to be and it’s interesting to see, through the course of one of the shortest stories in the collection, that post-altmont bitterness fade like driftwood into a sort of sad acceptance that Everything, in fact, does end and that maybe the irredeemable needn’t be redeemed if it’s simply going to end, shortly.

(it’s also worth noting that this is the first story in the collection where king is really exercising a voice of his OWN, rather than leaning heavily on his influences.)

[bibliolokust]

‘graveyard shift.’

it’s interesting that the second story in king’s ‘night shift’ continues the theme of subterranean horror found in ‘jersusalem’s lot,’ both of which were clearly influenced by lovecraft’s ‘the rats in the walls.’

the vastly different direction and tone of ‘graveyard shift’ is noticeable immediately in the first paragraph and it’s the first time that king really puts forth his (often awkward) alliance with the working class with a lead character that is college educated but avoiding the sort of work that generally comes with a college education.  and the restless millworker, hall, really, is a note for note analogue of king in 1970- embittered by the failure of his generation to really follow through the promise of the summer of 1968, too smart and curious for his own good, and just sort of feeling lost but with all the rage of a thousand summers against the petty tyrants of the world, those men who wield power like a cudgel (and the less power, the heavier the swing) which is apparent in the character of the foreman, warwick- as loathsomely menial a despot as imaginable who resents the world around him for not bending to his every whim (and hall, more than anyone else, sneering ‘college boy’ at him at every opportunity.)

where that first story was a tale of the collapse of the upper class in upon itself, ‘graveyard shift’ is a story of millworkers scraping by in one of those towns that were so common in new england in the early 20th century that revolved around a single mill which, as the manufacturing sector of the northeast dried up to move overseas, into automation, or just generally fell out of need became rarer and rarer while still being, in some of those shrinking places, the only game in town.

in the very first paragraph, we’re introduced to both hall’s ennui and the fact that he works in the town but is not OF it and is planning on moving on, soon, leaving him no real stake in the mill or its continuance.  and it’s this very distance that king uses to propel the story below ground, as a few of the millworkers are tasked with cleaning out the sub-basement during the fourth of july shutdown of the mill.

and what’s most interesting, here, is that where king had used bloch as another touchstone (along with lovecraft) in ‘jerusalem’s lot,’ he takes a cue here from another vaunted pulp author- henry kuttner (and his brilliant creeper, ‘the graveyard rats,’ to be precise) and moves into less overtly supernatural territory as the workers (and their snide bully of a foreman) discover that the dark moldy underbelly of the mill is filled with monstrous rats (and it’s key to this part of the story that the rats may be huge but not unnaturally so, at this point, which leaves the reader an understanding of why the men continue.)

as another sub-basement is found (a trapdoor that had somehow been locked from below) the story takes a turn beyond what’s generally considered ‘the natural’ into a world of rats far more organised (and presented as having the ability and knowledge to form ranks) and more and more strangely mutated as only hall and warwick are left to move forward (another man, a constant victim of warwick’s bullying, having fled at this point) carrying the thick canvas firehose with which to ostensibly clean out the area.

as they push forward and hall begins to show that he has the control in the situation, holding the hose, while warwick is stripped of his authority, a change comes over both of them- warwick revealed to be a mewling coward and hall gleefully stepping into the roll of tyrant, eventually using the hose yo push warwick into a hole with a rat that’s described both as towering over the man and as the size of a holstein calf (and king pulls a very neat trick here, using hall’s break with reality to make the actual size of this legless monster queen rat something we, as readers, can never be sure of.)

leaving warwick to be devoured, hall hurries back but the rats had already chewed through the hose making it useless and he’s attacked by mutate and giant winged rats (king being under the popular misconception that bats are flying rodents closely related to rats [they aren’t]) and is consumed by a tide of rats laughing with a ‘high screaming sound.’

the story ends with a group of millworkers preparing to head down with another hose to help out and what i have always found fascinating is the way this ending is usually interpreted- that more men heading down will just be more food for the rats.  but we’ve already seen just two men get to the queen rat and one get most of the way back so it stands to reason that more men would have a better chance at wiping out the colony of mutant rodents and that’s a fact that i’m relatively certain king was aware of, as the writer, and it’s a testament to the grim horror we’ve already read that most respond with notion that deviated nature will win out.

i’ve mentioned a number of ways in which this tale of subterranean horror differs from the previous one but i think the greatest difference is in the radical shift between exposition and exploration.  ‘jerusalem’s lot’ being an epistolary work, it naturally leans into the idea that it will be almost entirely expository but it falls prey to the inherent silliness of having the indescribable described (in somewhat purple prose) by those who witness it so, in the end, we simply know too much about the thing under the town and its desires (and how to summon/repel it) for it to really be affecting as something inherently abject while the lack of understanding of the increasingly mutated rodents beneath the mill (and the fact that it’s pointed out that the area they inhabit predates the mill and stretches well beyond the bounds of it) leave us with a deep mystery as to HOW all of this came to be.  who built it?  who locked it?  how are these creatures still here and how did they come to exist?  where the biggest weakness of ‘jerusalem’s lot’ is that king leaves us knowing to much, the greatest strength of ‘graveyard shift’ is that he teases and tantalises with questions he steadfastly refuses to answer and this, at the end of the day, is why i think it’s a far more successful work (both as a short story and a work of horror.) . . (note: if i am correct in my estimation, this was also king’s first story that was professionally and widely published and the first of a long run of pieces that would appear in ‘cavalier,’ one of the popular men’s magazines of the mid to late 20th century.)

[bibliolokust]

on ‘jerusalem’s lot.’

the first story in king’s ‘night shift,’ ‘jerusalem’s lot,’ is, on the surface, an almost doggedly straightforward lovecraft pastiche.  with echoes of ‘the rats in the walls,’ ‘dreams in the witch house,’ and ‘the dunwich horror,’ this epistolary story reveals a deep truth about king’s intention in the second paragraph by having the epistolarian narrator reveal himself to be, rather than lovecraft’s self insertion of die hard racists with archaic notions on the subject, an abolitionist with forward thinking ideas on race during the period leading up to the civil war (not to mention that the narrator discussing needing to piss is something that surely would have horrified the old stodger from providence.

reading it as a child, i was enamoured with the willfully antiquated prose, the odd adjectives and phrasings that seemed a rejection of the contemporaneous.  it was, to me, a thin but strong line of waxed twine connecting that past literature of lovecraft with the ‘new’ literature of the late 1970s (even though i was an infant when it first saw print.) 

what i did not realise until this time reading it is that it’s not simply a pastiche of lovecraft but, rather, both a parody of and loving pastiche of OTHER pastiches of lovecraft (most notably those of robert bloch, as the use of his fiction tome ‘de vermis mysteriis’ makes clear.)  king is channeling lovecraft by way of filtering him through the lenses and voices of those that came after and king is willfully adding his voice to a chorus that he was far more aware of than a young .sjb. had any inkling of (perhaps ironically, as i was a fan of any number of other works pastiching and paying homage to providence’s favourite strange fellow but was not mature enough to really understand the layered connections involved and the webs connecting lovecraft and bloch [and derleth and long and and and] and the king story in question.)  all i knew of it, at the time, was that it was a story similar to those of lovecraft and other long dead creepers that i had fell in love with since first learning how to read.

but, here in the cold light of the twenty-first century, it reads startlingly different, simultaneously more as willful (but affectionate) parody and king’s first real attempt (the foundation having existed well before the novel ‘salem’s lot’ [and i’ll get to the strange relationship between the two in a bit]) at creating a horror of place, where some place is not the site of horrible events but is, itself, tainted and ‘evil.’

king has returned to this psychogeographic notion time after time throughout his career (most notably with the novels ‘it,’ ‘pet sematary,’ and the aforementioned ‘salem’s lot’) and it’s clear from this (one of his first written stories to be published even though it was begun a few years before it saw print) that it’s an idea that was already crystalised in the very beginning of his career.  here, however, it falls prey to a rather shallow notion of ‘evil’ that’s a little too grounded in king’s protestant upbringing to really be taken seriously.

this notion, in combination with the somewhat goofy and stagey use of archaic language in an attempt to replicate that of an educated antebellum gentleman, leaves the story being far more quaint than i imagine king meant it to be.  then again, there’s so much willful affectation, and winks and nods to lovecraft and bloch, that it’s entirely possible that, even as young as he was when he wrote it, he meant it to be more parodic than it’s been largely received as.

a willful throwback to the early days of ‘weird tales,’ ‘jerusalem’s lot,’ by way of letters and journal entries, details charles boone’s reclaiming of a family estate along the maine coast and his residency there with his lifelong friend, calvin.  typical to the form, all is not well in this place and he rapidly succumbs to the curse that has befallen his family after his uncle entered into a pact with some vile worm god living under the nearby town of jerusalem’s lot that the previous residents of the town worshipped and, eventually, chose to take that worship to heights (or, i suppose, depths) well beyond the protestant christendom of colonial new england.  it’s a relatively straightforward and hackneyed plot but king manages to create a store that rises above its pulpy origin as a pastiche of work from decades past (albeit only just and, at the end of the day, i think it’s a failed experiment and one of king’s weaker stories, although certainly not bad.)

as to the relationship between ‘jerusalem’s lot’ and ‘salem’s lot,’ in which a vampire comes to abide in the stereotypical scary house on the hill and rapidly consumes the town, aside from the obvious notion of geographical BADNESS and direct narrative connections between the two, there’s a more subtle connection in king’s feelings toward small town protestant new england.  in the short story, we’re presented with a group of protestants that willfully reject the notion of ‘God’ in favour of ‘a God,’ turning away from the established gospel to a new gospel but managing to bring the notion of prosperity gospel with them, simply exchanging the idea of eternal life in heaven with eternal life earthbound and, well, wormlike.  later, he takes this bitterness toward his protestant ancestors to the forefront-  portraying that oh so american idea of small town ‘goodness’ as nothing more than a thin veneer over venal and cancerous evil (both in the notional supernatural sense of the plague of vampires that settles on the sleepy town and the very prosaic sense of the depths that man can sink to.)  this rage comes to the forefront as we see the small town at the center of the american dream eaten from the inside out, like an apple full of worms, and the only way the protagonist of the novel can cure the cancer that has always been rooted there is by literally burning the entire town to the ground.

both works showcase the sort of piss and vinegar liberalism that king was entrenched in during his college years (and that he still holds to some degree even though it hasn’t aged as well or as progressively as i imagine he’s hoped) and it’s easy to see the longer work as an extension of anger and resentment that he merely touches on in the shorter work.

but, at the end of the day, the two sit very uncomfortably together, with far more connections in theme than in narrative and, ultimately, i think it’s a mistake to see ‘jerusalem’s lot’ as any meaningful prequel to ‘salem’s lot.’

going back to the story that’s the subject of this essay, another touchstone of comparison to the work of lovecraft is the old man’s ‘the shadow over innsmouth’ and, while i think that the connection is entirely intentional, i think it’s fascinating that king inverts the very core of that work- the notion that we are genetically predestined due to our ‘racial makeup’ to act in certain ways and BECOME as inhuman as he, himself, viewed people of colour while in king’s work, the congregation that follows the great worm and becomes something ‘other than human’ (and this is another distinction- in lovecraft’s work, they are ‘subhuman’ and ‘alien’ and in king’s they are shown as being inbred and wormlike) all make the CHOICE to do so.  it becomes not the destiny of the base genetic ideas of lovecraft’s notion of ‘impure races’ but the horrible result of those very same white protestants who lovecraft hailed as the most pure race inbreeding for generation after generation which damns the boone lineage.

the end result has a feel that is quaint, fannish, and a little too precious but it’s the beginning of some of king’s more interesting obsessions (bad places, subterranean horror, the toxic nature of the parochial and provincial, and big slimy monsters.)  it’s a failed experiment that, as mentioned above, was somehow the perfect bridge for a young .sjb. to move beyond pulp reprints into the world of contemporary horror literature and it feels like something that king had, and i hope this idea can be forgiven, ‘fun’ writing.