The Girl Who Loved Stephen King

22. 'Salem's Lot' (1975).

2020-05-13T05:55:00.002-07:00

'Salem's Lot - Beware: Spoilers ahead.

I first read Salem's Lot when I was about thirteen, and it was perhaps the fourth or fifth King I had read. I had seen the miniseries before reading the book, and other than the horribly striking scene of Ralphie Glick dragging his nails squeakily down his brother's bedroom window, found the whole thing a disappointing bore-fest, particularly coming from Tobe Hooper.

I have to admit that my first reading of Salem's Lot was probably influenced by my opinion of the miniseries, and I really had to drag myself through it. It didn't help that very few of the major protagonists were women or children, unlike It and The Shining, and at thirteen, my range of empathy didn't extend much further than myself.

I really wasn't looking forward to re-reading this, so imagine my surprise when I found I was thoroughly enjoying it.

I read the much more recently written introduction at the start of the text, just to get a sense of King's own impression looking back on his work. He writes that 'Salem's Lot feels a lot more grown up than some of the writing before it, and I'd agree with him. There is something much more mature in terms of style, a sense that you're reading a work by a fully fledged, experienced author who has already honed his craft.

The novel takes place in the titular town of Jerusalem's Lot, 'Salem's Lot to the locals, where Ben Mears, childhood resident of the Lot, has returned to try to put some of his figurative and literal demons to rest. Most of these demons lie sleeping in the old Marsten House, where Ben had a traumatic supernatural experience as a young boy. His idea is to rent the place out as an adult as a kind of psychic cleansing, convincing himself that what he saw all those years before couldn't possibly be real. A spanner is thrown in the works when Ben discovers the house has already been taken by the decidedly creepy and preternaturally strong Mr Straker, and his unseen partner Mr Barlow.

It's obvious to the reader pretty quickly that Barlow and Straker are bad news, and so when residents start getting a bit pale, dogs are impaled on railings, and children kidnapped, we are solemnly unsurprised. The question we ask is not who, but why?

For those of you that haven't read 'Salem's Lot and somehow have ended up on this site with no idea what the novel is about, it's best you stop here if you're thinking about reading it. I wonder to what extent my own opinion of the novel might have changed had I not been aware of the basic premise of the story, and what Barlow and Straker are all about.

It's not far into the novel that we discover what's happening to the folk of 'Salem's Lot, when poor Danny Glick, brother to the missing child, dies of severe anemia (starting to get it?). Later when the town grave-digger is burying him, he opens his eyes, grins with newly sharp teeth, and claims his first victim,

How does it read?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I struggled with this novel the first time I read it, and have just roared through it at a mad pace twenty years later. Perhaps part of that is to do with the mature style King discusses in the introduction. 'Salem's Lot is an adult book, about adults and for adults. The main characters behave like adults, and strangely, so does the only younger key character, Mark. It was perhaps a little out of my reach at thirteen, and I couldn't quite get my head around the small-town problems and relationships which so spoke to me as an adult.

As a teenager, I gravitated towards King because I wanted to be frightened. I had graduated from Goosebumps, to Point Horror, and had then begun to sneak Kings off my mother's bookshelves because I craved ghosts and gore, and genuine terror. Because of this, at thirteen, 'Salem's Lot left me a little antsy and unsatisfied. I've never found vampires a particularly scary or believable prospect, and didn't here. Even enjoying it as I did this time, I wasn't afraid. It's a great read, pacy and fun with likeable, sympathetic characters, but it's not a really scary book.

If you're alright with that, then dive in. The story is hugely entertaining, rattling on with little room to pause, and King manages to keep an enormous cast of characters under control and specific. I'm not sure you could get through it in one sitting (483 pages in my edition), but it flows more steadily than Carrie, with less to break it up and halt the progress.

There are, perhaps, fewer memorable moments in 'Salem's Lot than in Carrie. The scene I mentioned earlier from the Tobe Hooper miniseries is not as startling in the text, and the scene that King discusses as being particularly shocking to him, where a character falls down a fake flight of stairs and is impaled by knives, didn't have the same impact on me. I also felt that Susan's staking worked better in Hooper's interpretation, left until the end for ultimate shock value.

Who's Who?

What makes 'Salem's Lot as effective as it is, is the characters. There are hundreds of them, and, as you would in a small village, you get to know them all. King knows and understands each one, their mannerisms, motivations, thoughts and feelings. There are occasional bursts of this in his short stories, but in 'Salem's Lot, King's now famous talent for characterisation is on full show.

The minor characters are treated with just as much respect as those we spend more time with. Cheating Bonnie Sawyer and her abusive husband Reggie barely feature, but their relationship is drawn carefully enough that we relish his eventual destruction. We feel simultaneous disgust and sympathy for Sandy McDougall, who takes out the frustrations of the lost potential of her life on her
infant son.

The more significant characters are similarly rounded. Ben Mears is a wholeheartedly nice bloke who manages to not come across as too nice. His relationship with sweet Susan is touching and natural, and her eventual demise is genuinely saddening. My only criticism of the character is that his reaction to her death feels a little off. His lack of emotion may be King's attempt to show the swirling storm inside, but it comes across as cold and out of character.

The rest of the 'Scooby Gang', who make it their mission to stop the domino chain of vampires started by the wicked residents of the Marsten House, are similarly likeable. The fact that they do a pretty poor job actually strengthens the novel, making the whole journey feel more likely and the villains much scarier. The only major issue I had with them, and have with many Kings, is the ease with which they accept the supernatural occurrences taking place. I suppose it's necessary for the novel to take place, but it always felt to me a little ridiculous. Perhaps in a real-life situation you could convince one person to listen to your crazy story without calling the local psych ward. Four or five? Doubtful.

The villains of the tale are weaker than the heroes, and I struggled to feel particularly afraid of either vamp-in-chief Barlow or his super-strength human familiar, Straker. I've tried to put my finger on why I found them so safe, and can only come up with the lack of real, get-down-to-it blood, guts, and gore. You don't actually see Barlow bite anyone, and the worst Straker does openly is give someone a sore set of balls. Perhaps my main issue with the villains, however, is simply that I don't find vampires frightening. Sexy, sometimes. Interesting, maybe. To me, they conjure the same sort of fear as zombies; more a gross out than a real spine-chill.

Small-town Maine

This is the first of Stephen King's settings to feel like a character in its own right. 'Salem's Lot was not the first of King's stories to be set in Nowheresville, Maine, and certainly wouldn't be the last, but it marks a shift in terms of attention to detail. You could draw a detailed map of Jerusalem's Lot based on King's description of it, and become its local taxi driver after.

There is something truly magical and fascinating about small-town America. I have always dreamed about taking a holiday to the US and travelling all around the tiniest towns, make-believing I'm in a King, or a Russo, or an Irving. My itinerary would be less galleries, museums, and wine bars, more diners, porch spotting, and finding the water tower with the town's name on it - they all have that, right? I have it all sketched out in my head (but maybe more on that in another post).

The town of 'Salem's Lot, and later Castle Rock, Derry, or any of the many other small fictionalised Northeastern settings, are classic backdrops for King's work, because they contain and encourage all the things that make his work the best. Close (sometimes too close) relationships, isolation, secrets, nostalgia. In all of them there is a sense of being frozen in time while the world around you continues about its business. As a basis for horror, small towns are ideal, and many authors of frightening fiction know it. A microcosm in which terrible things can happen without anyone really paying attention? Perfect.

As a setting for a vampire tale, it's better than perfect. Where else could you lose so many residents without people quickly noticing? In his introduction, King mentions Dracula, and his conversation with his wife about how the ideas contained in it might translate to a small American town. In a much later interview I remember hearing once, King mentions that many of his stories start with the thought 'wouldn't it be kinda funny...'. In 'Salem's Lot, that casual first thought really reaches its potential.

How do I rate it?

I think the question of how effective the novel is depends partly what you're judging it on. Is it scary? For me, no. If vampires give you the willies, then yes. They're well done and don't sparkle.

'Salem's Lot - 7/10

Overall, although the writing was decidedly better, and the story fast and fun, it still drops just shy of the emotional power and punch of Carrie. The novel is often recommended by Constant Readers to friends looking to get into King. I always lend those friends The Shining first, but this certainly has more of a taste of the small-town beauty of many of King's novels. Read it outdoors in late summer to truly immerse yourself.

Go and get your teeth into it.

21. 'The Lawnmower Man' (1975).

2020-05-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

This particular blog post won't be a long one - from what I can tell there is only one short story separating Carrie from Salem's Lot, and it's not one which has a huge amount to say for itself. It's a bonkers, gruesome, pretty silly story, that I enjoyed in less than fifteen minutes.

The Lawnmower Man

It's difficult to outline the premise of this story without simply spilling the entire thing. It's told from the perspective of a fairly ordinary, suburban family man, Harold Parkette, who is reluctant to get his lawn cut after an unpleasant accident caused his neighbour's cat to be run over by his lawnmower the year before.

When the lawn eventually gets out of control, Harold calls a new service he finds advertised in the newspaper, and unfortunately for him, discovers that the service provided is anything but ordinary.

This is a short story even by short story standards, and I was initially baffled by how anyone could have made a feature length picture out of it until I realised the film has very little to do with the story. If you're reading this expecting the Pierce Brosnan movie, think again.

The brevity of the story adds to its utter madness, and left me feeling as though I'd had a very brief bad trip. The titular Lawnmower Man is grotesque and genuinely frightening in spite of (or because of) the wacky, ridiculous concept of the story. The description of his grass-bloated belly was both hysterical and horrifying, and King, as with The Blue Air Compressor, treads the very fine line between comedy and horror.

King leaves much of the real gore to our imaginations - do you really need to describe what it's like being run over by a lawnmower, or can we imagine it perfectly well ourselves? It's one of those everyday accidents most of us have imagined at some point, like getting your hand stuck in the garbage disposal, or accidentally ironing your arm. The build up from cat, to mole, to human leave us with little doubt that the experience would be painful and traumatic.

I tried desperately to find a point to this story; I felt that there might be one I was missing. There are a lot of little references to strange gods and mythical beasts that seemed to have some hidden meaning that I wasn't quite catching. Who knows, maybe someone reading this can tell me. Maybe it was just a mad dream King had one night.

In summary, this is a crazy, gone-in-a-second story, that leaves you feeling the same way you might if you were overtaken on the motorway by a car full of topless nuns driven by a pig wearing sunglasses. What. The. Actual. F-.

'A Head Full of Ghosts' by Paul Tremblay (2015).

2020-05-05T05:45:00.001-07:00

A Head Full of Ghosts - Beware: Spoilers ahead.

This is my first non-King related post, and I've chosen this particular book because it was one of the first I read as part of my New Year's Book Resolution (part 2). I had heard about this book countless times, and became even more intrigued after listening to Paul Tremblay speaking as a guest on the Books in the Freezer podcast (which is great for your reading list and terrible for your bank balance).

A Head Full of Ghosts is a modern take on the possession sub-genre. At first glance, the premise doesn't sound particularly original; Marjorie, a teenage girl from a comfortable, middle-class family, suddenly starts behaving strangely, frightening her little sister, swearing at her parents, vomiting in her dinner. The usual. Bring in the priests, right? The only difference is that Marjorie's exorcism will be filmed, edited, and played to the nation on prime time television.

The story is told through a mix of flashbacks, present-day interview notes with Marjorie's sister Merry as she revisits the house the 'possession' took place in, and notes from a blog revisiting and reviewing the TV program. I thought the blog posts were the most interesting sections of the book, written in a sarcastic, disbelieving tone which increases the believability of the plot overall.

Who's who?

The main character, Meredith 'Merry' Barrett, is a fairly neutral character, neither likeable or annoying. The majority of the narrative is a story within a story; older Merry relating her memories of the events of her traumatic childhood to an author hoping to create a novel out of it. Telling the story from the perspective of a child notches up the fear factor a little, and the novel needs it - its pace occasionally borders, I think quite intentionally, on glacial.

Marjorie is a much more nuanced, difficult to place character. Tremblay has us questioning constantly - Is she really possessed? Is she evil, regardless of demon inhabitation? Which are lies and which are truths? It's this last question which is the most effectively dealt with, particularly when placed alongside the nastiness of the reality TV madness surrounding the family. It is constantly unclear to what extent the drama and scariness is 'made for television', and to what extent it is genuine.

Tremblay does a pretty good job of writing the two young sisters, I assume in the main because he has two young daughters himself, and is a high school mathematics teacher. You can tell; the reactions and behaviour of the characters feels right; Marjorie is grumpy, rude, sullen, but with occasional outbursts of sweetness, just as teenage girls often are, Merry is funny, a little clingy, and cute, just as eight year olds should be. The relationship between the two is similarly well done, and makes Marjorie's cruelty to her little sister much more difficult to read.

The characters I struggled with more were the parents. I will start here by saying a big part of that was probably more to do with the audiobook than the novel itself. The lady who narrated it had a rather irritating habit of dramatically lowering her voice when reading the father's lines, and rather than making her sound masculine, it turned her into Macauley Culkin doing his grown up impression when he calls the cops at the end of Home Alone. I just couldn't get past it, and the mother wasn't much better; her voice had been dropped significantly to show the difference between her and the girls, and she ended up sounding constantly seductive.

I also didn't really like either of the parents. I understand this is intentional for the father, John, who comes across as a religious nut half the time and an opportunistic bastard the rest, but I didn't warm to Sarah, the mother, either. She feels cold and uncaring, and together as a couple they are an argumentative mess who seem more interested in taking bites out of each other than taking a proper look at their daughters.

Reality (?) TV

The blog, and its blogger, Karen, was, as I've mentioned, the bit I found most interesting about this, partly because I could imagine reading one like it myself. It made me want to watch the show 'The Possession', which then gave me uncomfortable pause about having any kind of moral high-ground. The blog is scathing in its criticism of the show, and provides an interesting balance to the first-hand account, swaying us between believing and not, unable to decide for certain what is real. The eventual reveal of Merry as the blog's secret author adds to our sense of unreality and confusion.

The concept that moves this novel away from the standard possession stories isn't actually explored
enough. There are so many juicy, morally uncomfortable ideas that never quite get a proper airing. What does it say about our society that a show about a group of men essentially assaulting a teenage girl would probably be viewed by millions? What does it say about us, the readers, that we are horribly intrigued by it ourselves?

We are also forced to question the global phenomenon of reality television more generally, and perhaps the timing of my reading made this particularly relevant. In the last few years, several reality TV stars and presenters have died tragic, self-inflicted deaths. It is so easy for us as viewers to fictionalise the lives of the people we watch, and to forget that their mistakes and heartbreak are as real as anyone else's, and broadcast to the world for extra humiliation. To say they knew what they were signing up for is a cop out. TV preys on the vulnerable, and we should know better. In A Head Full of Ghosts, where the main focus of the exploitative show is a child, there is really no excuse, and the making of us, as readers, complicit in her abuse, is very uncomfortable.

How does it read?

Where the book fell down for me was its pacing, which is, at times, tortoise-slow. There were many occasions when I had to make use of Audible's thirty second repeat function because I'd become distracted. Much of this had to do with my own expectations of the book; when I heard 'possession story', I think I was expecting a fast paced, terrifying roller-coaster, and A Head Full Of Ghosts is not that. It's a creepy (very) slow-burner, and is more about the disintegration of the family unit than the mechanics of the 'possession' itself.

What picked this novel and its rating up for me was its ending, which absolutely knocked me for six. The build up to a devastating and yet understated horror is incredibly well done, and when placed at the end of such a subtle, often mundane story, totally threw me. It was the first time in the story that I truly felt for one of the characters - Merry's hopeful calls to her parents and sister were heartbreaking, as was her realisation of the trick that had been played on her. The big question of the ending also haunted me; did Marjorie do it to Merry, or for Merry?

How do I rate it?

This was a tricky one. There were moments in this book I could have ripped out and thrown in the bin without any noticeable effect of the story, and bits that I'd go back and read again. This is a real novel of two halves.

A Head Full of Ghosts - 7/10

Overall, A Head Full of Ghosts is a better than average, original take on the possession theme. That ending, though. That ending stayed with me for days. Because of that, I'm giving it a 7/10. Well worth a read and with enough clout that I'll try another Tremblay.

20. 'Carrie' (1974).

2020-04-27T05:23:00.001-07:00

Carrie - Beware: Spoilers ahead.

King’s first published novel, Carrie, is a rare example of a story that has retained its power over forty years.

It is the story of a high-school outcast with a religious zealot mother, who suffers the ultimate humiliation when she has her first period in the school showers after gym class. Due to her mother’s refusal to acknowledge a woman’s sinful reproductive system, Carrie does not understand what is happening to her, and her terror is compounded by the reaction of the girls around her, who pelt her with sanitary towels and tampons.This mix of fear and humiliation triggers a latent telekinetic power in Carrie, and the activation and growth of this power propels Carrie and her fellow students to a horrific, deadly fate.

Carrie White is an iconic character, recognisable the world over. Most who haven’t read the book have seen one of the movies, and even those who haven’t won't show a completely blank face at the mention of her name. She is an embedded part of our popular culture, so much so that ‘doing a Carrie’ has become shorthand for any violent public outburst by a young woman.

One of the key questions I posed myself before reading this novel for what must be at least the fifth time was, why? What is it about Carrie that got under people’s skin, so much so that a flimsy, just over two-hundred-page novel, has sold more than four million copies? It is well known that Tabitha King, Stephen King’s wife of an incredible fifty-odd years, fished the first few pages of Carrie out of a wastepaper-bin. This female intervention is highly appropriate given the woman-centric narrative of this text. Women are all important both inside and outside the text, and it is likely that without Tabitha’s intervention and perspective, Carrie may never have been finished.

How does it read?

King was anxious that he didn’t have the knowledge or understanding of women to write about women in a way that was authentic and meaningful, and it is true that on occasions King’s naivety comes across. For example, it’s difficult to believe that Carrie, even had she never been taught what a period was, would not have had some automatic instinct that what was happening to her was normal and natural.

A similar clunkiness is also present in the writing of the key male-female relationships in the novel; Sue and Tommy, and Chris and Billy. Sue’s adoration of Tommy feels a little off, a little too much for a girl we are told repeatedly is ‘Popular’ (capitals included). Tommy seems just a bit too nice for a girl like Sue, and Sue’s inability to grasp what Chris would see in a guy like Billy Nolan is, to be frank, utterly unrealistic. Billy Nolan is, sadly, the kind of boy most young women gravitate towards, and I include my younger self in that group. I also, on a couple of occasions, had a good giggle at the sex scenes in the novel, particularly the rather strange way King describes female pleasure – ‘body filled with sunlight, musical notes in her mind’. Perhaps best left hazy, or to the ladies.

For me, that’s where the criticism ends. I tore through this novel at an enormous speed. It is hugely readable, hurtling between the lead up to the prom and the aftermath and investigation. The story is told through a mix of epistolary (newspaper clippings, autobiography extracts, interview transcripts) and King’s more standard third person narration, often from a range of character’s perspectives. I liked this stylistic choice, and can imagine that if you were one of the rare few who hadn’t got some idea of the outcome of the story, this would keep you turning pages to find out how Carrie meets the end we know is coming.

This is the first time I noticed King using his inner monologue italics, where he inserts the characters thoughts in between the rest of the narration. He uses this very frequently in Carrie, more so than I can think of in any other text he has written. Whether you like this stylistically or not is a matter of personal taste, but I’ve always found it an ingenious way to allow the reader into a character’s mind, into the thoughts that they themselves are refusing to acknowledge.

Who’s who?

The characterisation in this novel is really excellent. King mentions in Danse Macabre that he felt that Brian De Palma did a much better job in accurately depicting the students of Ewen High, and I can see why he thinks so; De Palma’s teenagers are grittier, meaner, but in a much more teenage way, and the women are in charge, with Billy Nolan relegated to a fairly laughable side character by John Travolta.

I think King is overly harsh on his own work, however. The villains in Carrie are genuinely awful people, and there’s a different type of nasty for every taste.

Chris Hargensen is the bitch we all knew at school (if you didn’t, you were the bitch), the one who lived to make others unhappy. I never understood why some girls felt the need to do this, and even as an adult I don’t buy insecurity or the intoxicating quality of power. Some people are just mean, even kids. Especially kids. Chris is a dangerous combination of beautiful, entitled, and vicious, and her determination to ruin Carrie is terrifying.

Billy Nolan, on the other hand, I found much less frightening. What is he other than a big, thick lump of muscle, doing as Chris tells him? King writes that ‘he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim’, but Nolan still strikes me as little more than a pawn, and Chris’s sudden turn to submissiveness at the end of the novel feels unlikely and out of character.

The scariest character in the novel is, by a long way, Margaret White, Carrie’s completely bonkers mother. It’s incredibly difficult for me, having grown up in a home with a kind, loving mother, to imagine what a life with someone like Margaret would be like. King paints an image of their history through descriptions of their house, covered in grim religious painting and glow in the dark crucifixes, and Carrie’s closet, Dahl’s chokey taken to its extreme.

Margaret creates Carrie both biologically and emotionally. Carrie is, fundamentally, an abused child Carrie. When Margaret drags her four-year-old daughter inside and is heard clearly, by anyone in close distance, hurting her, nobody acts.

who was ignored and let down by those around her. When the stones rain down on the bungalow, a woman recounting the tale says that ‘everyone on the street that was home had come out’. This is perhaps the most horrifying part of

The only character that makes any effort to do anything for Carrie is also one of the strongest; Sue Snell, who is never saccharine enough to be unbelievable. It’s likely that all of us have, at some point, done something that made someone else feel like crap, and regretted it, but how many of us made an active effort to atone? The importance of an event like the prom to a teenager is very easy to forget or trivialise as an adult, but Sue’s sacrifice, trite as it may seem in the grand scheme of things, is a heartfelt one. It is perhaps the only point which softens the unflinchingly harsh ending of Carrie, that she dies knowing Tommy and Sue were trying to be kind.

A modern tragedy?

One thought that kept occurring to me as I read the novel was the inevitability of Carrie’s fate, and of all the others around her. There is a sense that, as in Shakespearean tragedy, our heroine’s tragic outcome is fated, and that no matter what happened in the lead up, Carrie was always going to end up holding the doors closed on the burning gym before stumbling home to Mama. The epistolary form and regular jumps between before and after the prom ensure that the reader has no doubt of Carrie’s end; it is the journey that is the story.

Carrie’s fall from grace is, in many ways, worse than that of a traditional high-born tragic hero. She is offered a mere glance of the kind of life she could lead, before it is cruelly taken back. It is this brief glimpse of what could be, followed by the crash back to reality, that sends the character over the edge into madness and unleashes her full power. In a traditional tragedy, the undoing of the hero is the basis of the plot, and stretches across the whole story. In Carrie, the transition from queen to blood-soaked ruin is as quick as a tug on a rope.

The deaths of all but a few characters is another obvious tragic convention, with the players left standing contemplating what they have learned from surviving the experience, and what others should learn from it. In Carrie, as in any tragedy worth its salt, the good die along with the bad, and we feel the careless loss of lovely, sunshiney Tommy Ross keenly.

Is there a message from the tragic overtones of Carrie? Some have seen it as a cautionary tale about giving in to anger. Carrie’s realisation of the potential of her own power is sparked by rage, and it could be suggested that her fate comes from ignoring the teachings of her mother, and not turning the other cheek. A more likely message is simply to be kind, with the ending a stark warning about what you may unleash if you’re not. For many young women (and men, for that matter), Carrie’s treatment is all too familiar, and her final, devastating response a sweet daydream rather than a nightmare.

There is potentially a darker, more depressing moral to this story. The characters who have pushed Carrie to the point of no return have no reason to hate her, except that she dares to break out the social cage they’ve put her in. Maybe King is delivering a warning to us all: know your place, or prepare to be knocked back into it.

How do I rate it?

I’ve decided that for longer texts, King’s novels, novellas, and screenplays, I’m going to give a rating. I won’t apologise if there aren’t many I rate below a seven; he’s my favourite, and his worst is better than most writers’ best.

Carrie – 8/10.

I toyed between 7 and 8, and if I were rating purely on the writing style, I’ll admit it is clearly early and a little rough round the edges. But there is something so visceral about this terse, tense little novel, and something so original about its premise, that it deserves an extra mark.

No unsatisfactory ending here, either; King must have started with those later. Carrie’s ending is deliciously dark, promising the inevitable future that comes when people don’t learn from their mistakes.

Now get in your closet and pray.

19. 'Sometimes They Come Back' (1974).

2020-04-20T05:15:00.002-07:00

This next story stands alone for me as a particularly memorable and unusual. Many of King's early stories take inspiration from sources in his childhood and his own favourite authors and filmmakers (Trucks and Duel, Grey Matter and The Blob, etc), but this feels all his own.

Sometimes They Come Back

Sometimes They Come Back is an updated, original take on a haunting, where the 'ghosts' take on a more solid shape. This is one of the best known of Stephen King's short stories, mainly due to the three movies it spawned (one made-for-TV, two straight to video). The material probably is meaty enough to make a movie out of, although the director took significant liberties with the source material, fluffing out a simpler, harsher story that probably would have created a more subtle, streamlined film.

The story is centred on Jim Norman, a young English teacher with a dark history. As a boy, Jim narrowly escaped being killed by a gang of bullies on the way to the local library. His brother, Wayne, was not so lucky. Years later, in his least favourite class of miscreants, Jim's students begin to die. Every time a student drops, they are replaced by another with an uncanny resemblance to one of the gang members who attacked Jim and his brother. Before long, he is teaching the whole gang, and they have unfunushed business to settle.

As a teacher, I found this concept pretty unnerving. It got me thinking what I would do if faced by my own bullies as students years later. I'd like to think that, as an adult with far more self-confidence than I had as a teenager, I would maintain control and show them who was boss. I'm not sure that's really the case. You can try to drown the memories and bad feelings of the past, and it doesn't take much to bring them floating back to the surface.

Losing control of a class is every teacher's nightmare. For me, it's a literal nightmare; I've started a new school, I can't find my classroom, and when I eventually turn up, late, the class are half-rioting and nothing I do, no threats or pleading, will convince them to stop and study. I suppose it's my version of the 'suddenly-realise-you're-naked' dream. Jim's struggle to control the gang members, and their ability to make him feel like a child again, is distinctly uncomfortable. Teachers should be in charge, and Jim isn't.

One could never accuse King of being afraid to kill off characters; he rivals George R R Martin for that, and Georgie Denbrough and Gage Creed are prime examples of King not holding back. Sometimes They Come Back is no exception, and King's unflinching, almost cold delivery of an important character's death is very effective, and adds to the hatred we feel for the gang members, who are almost, but not quite, charicaturish in their extreme villainy. It's interesting to note that Adam Grossman, the director, removed that particular death from the story.

A key success point of this story is its lack of explanation. King doesn't feel the need to justify why or how these dead teenagers have reappeared, or what caused them to do so. We are never entirely sure if they are ghosts, or demons with false faces. What is scary about them is that they are solid, they can touch and be touched, can hurt and be hurt. The story and its ghosts can also easily be read as symbolic - urging the reader to settle with the past in order to move forward and live life fully.

All in all, an enjoyable, unsettling story with a likeable main character and an interesting, original central concept. A decent, clear-cut ending makes this one a winner.

17. 'It Grows on You', and 18. 'Grey Matter' (both 1973).

2020-04-15T05:30:00.001-07:00

The next two stories on my list don't have a huge amount in common, but I've popped these two together because I thought both were a little thin, like snippets of much bigger ideas. Many of these early King stories have felt like practice runs for his bigger novels, and perhaps that's what some of them are.

It Grows on You

It wasn't that I didn't like It Grows on You, exactly, I just couldn't quite work out where it was going. Just as with Night Surf, four years earlier, I felt like this was more a collection of interesting ideas and a concept that King wanted to explore, but couldn't quite get a handle on.

The story is the first set in King's famous fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, and is told through the gossipy old man conversations of a small group in a general store. The town of Castle Rock is dying, but the Newall house, visible from the store, is alive and growing. It's a house with a history of death and devastation; among other things, various people connected to the house have died unpleasantly or mysteriously, and a baby is born horribly deformed. Every time a death occurs, a new wing appears on the house, as though it is literally sucking the life out of the people around it and thriving on it.

It's an interesting idea, but the execution is slow and doesn't really set off at any point. The concept of the vampiric house is something that King would later revisit in Rose Red, a TV mini-series which got fairly poor reviews but which I thought was deliciously shivery. There's something about the maze-like quality of the house and the inability to tell what is real and what is not, that gave me a serious case of the willies.

But I'm losing focus, and Rose Red will have to wait until 2002 - a long way off.

It Grows on You is slow and fairly uneventful, and the characters telling the story lack the usual charm of King's small-town Maine every-men. Nothing really happens, and the only thing that truly unsettled me was the end, where one old gent recalls the lady of the house lifting her skirts at him when he was a young boy. Somehow this utterly inappropriate moment, which seems to have very little to do with the rest of the story, is the only bit that really sticks.

Grey Matter

Stephen King is a big fan of the original creature-feature horror movies he grew up with as a kid, and this story was clearly inspired by those old films like The Blob and The Fly. It relies entirely on King's number 2 'bear' - a fear of squishy things. I'm not sure this story is scary as much as it is gross, but anyone who knows King, knows he isn't proud, and will go for the gross-out when he can get it.

In Grey Matter, the son of permanently injured sawmill worker appears at the local store, terrified and begging the store owner and other men to help him. He claims that his father, Richie Grenadine, who has become a recluse after being placed on workmen's comp, has begun to change into something horrific after drinking a bad beer with some kind of transforming agent added to it.

The description of Richie is a disgusting triumph, really about as mushy and rotten as you could want from a King gross out. It's a description I have tried without success to shake off since reading the story, and comes close to Jack Chamber's (first) death in The Gunslinger, or my biggest King gross-out, the description of Doc's insides literally squirting apart in Black House. Urgh.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note is the (potentially unintentional) It Easter eggs scattered about. Firstly, the characters' names - we have an Eddie, a Richie, a George, a Henry, and a Bill. Pure coincidence? Possibly. But then add the throwaway tale one of the men tells another about an acquaintance who went down into the sewers and came up with white hair, claiming to have seen an enormous spider with kittens in its web.Sound familiar? I do love an Easter egg, even a retrospective, probably accidental one.

My main takeaway? Don't read this while eating dinner. Definitely don't read it while drinking beer.

0.5 - 'Jumper' and 'Rush Call' (both 1959) and 16. The Horror Market Writer and the Ten Bears: A True Story (1973).

2020-04-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd take a brief moment to comment on these three little snippets from my recently arrived hardback, Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing. The first two I mentioned in my first story post; they are where I suppose I should have started - King's first published works. The second is an interesting little essay about how to get your work published as an aspiring horror writer, and the 'ten bears' you can use to play upon the fears of the reader.

Jumper and Rush Call

Oh, so cute! Baby King could write, alright. He was just twelve when he wrote these two stories and put them in his brother's self-published newsletter called Dave's Rag.

The first of the two is a story about a psychiatrist trying desperately to convince his patient to come off the ledge he claims he is about to jump from. Little King has great fun toying with the reader - will he jump? Will he be pushed? The second story is about a close-to-retirement doctor who makes a successful 'rush call' to a car crash and must operate on a young boy trapped inside the vehicle. It's incredibly short, very well written for a twelve-year-old (or a sixteen-year-old, for that matter) and has a much mushier ending than I'm used to from King. Hearing even a pint-sized King talk about the spirit of Christmas tickled me. The bleakness of Carrie and It seem a long way off.

Even at this age you can hear King's voice; young and inexperienced, yes, but King nevertheless. As an English teacher, I can say with some certainty that if one of my year eights showed me stories like these, I would predict big things ahead. The potential is obvious in King's use of language, his understanding of narrative, his playing around with serialisation (Jumper was published across three separate issues of Dave's Rag).

Cute, cute, cute!

The Horror Market Writer and the Ten Bears: A True Story

This short essay is interesting partly because it was written pre-Carrie, and therefore pre-big break. It's a good demonstration of how much work King had actually produced and had published before he hit the big time, and a lesson for anyone wanting to make it big that a lot of luck is involved along with the necessary skill and talent.

King gives us a lot of totally out of date advice, but some of it still stands. The 'bears', for example, are a simplified list of the common fears held by most people, which he then uses in reference to successful writers and their works. I couldn't quite work out what my own personal 'bear ' - a screaming phobia of bats - would come under. Creepy crawly things? Fear of the dark? I don't know many daytime bats.

The main reason I'd give anyone for reading this essay is that it made me want to write. It made me realise that King took his time getting where he was, and had to work incredibly hard for a long time before he found success. His words in this piece show a love for his craft that goes beyond money making, and this is a valuable lesson. If you're writing for the money alone, you shouldn't be doing it. Perhaps if you're writing for the money at all. When I read this, I sensed that King would have been happy staying at exactly the position he was in then. That's pretty admirable.

14. 'The Boogeyman' and 15. 'Trucks' (both 1973).

2020-04-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

The next two stories show what a difference a likeable main character can make. Both The Boogeyman and Trucks are interesting ideas, well executed, but Trucks is, in my opinion, easily the more successful, in the main because the narrator takes us with him. We like him and want him to survive. In The Boogeyman, the final appearance of the monster, come to take away the dreadful Lester Billings, comes as a bit of a relief.

The Boogeyman

We hear this story through the ears of the psychiatrist Dr Harper, who is listening to the wretched tale of Lester Billings, who claims that each of his three children was murdered by an evil monster they called 'The Boogeyman'. This monster, Billings claims, appeared from the children's closets, each time shortly after Billings insisted upon them moving into their own rooms, against his wife's wishes.

Billings is a horrid character, almost entirely unsympathetic in spite of the horrendous trauma he and his family have gone through. He is rude, ignorant, racist, sexist, and talks casually about slapping around his wife. These are traits which, taken alone, are unpleasant. Put them all together and you have a protagonist you are hoping to see die before a quarter of the story is read. He even sacrifices his own child in order to save himself. What a guy.

That's not to say the story isn't successful; in many ways it is. The shadowy, barely seen figure of The Boogeyman is look-behind-you creepy, and gives us an early glimpse of It-like horror, particularly in the scene where Billings actually witnesses the monster killing his last child. The way the creature kills, shaking the child until he breaks, is reminiscent of some of the horrific police report readings in the second half of It. The ending is also fun, if a little predictable.

The main problem I had with the story was actually the realism of it. I couldn't imagine a man like Lester Billings ever going to a psychiatrist. He's the kind of fellow who would think of them as snobby head-shrinkers dealing in academic mumbo-jumbo and nonsense. The dialogue between Dr Harper and Lester is more realistic - Lester is horribly rude to the doctor - but in that case why would he be there in the first place?

Overall, I thought this was an interesting, effectively chilling story. I hugely sympathised with Lester's wife and children, and my heart sank every time he insisted another was moved to their own room. I was, however, left slightly wondering who the villain was, and not caring which one was defeated.

Trucks

I'll start this particular review with a confession: I am a huge fan of Maximum Overdrive. I thought it was one of the funniest, stupidest, most ridiculous films I'd ever seen, and am thoroughly looking forward to revisiting it soon. Trucks was the (very loose) inspiration for the movie, and I enjoyed it just as much, if not for the same reasons.

Trucks is a much more serious take on the subject matter King directed comically in Maximum Overdrive. In it, we join a narrator who is hiding out at a truck stop with a small group of other survivors, most of whom have been run off the road by trucks without drivers. As the story goes on, those who try to escape the truck stop are mown down by various heavy-duty vehicles, all unmanned, until eventually lack of fuel forces the trucks to demand help and refueling through horn blasted morse code.

As with The Mangler, as a premise this may sound a little silly, but, as with The Mangler, it works in a totally unexpected, rather chilling way. This is Terminator with car engines. The trucks are frightening, mean characters. Each has its own personality and style, and particular way of killing.

The deaths we witness in this story are good, solid ones. One man is flung, broken, into a ditch, another steam-rollered by a bulldozer. The killings are both grotesque and somehow very real, and their speed and inevitability heightens the feeling of helplessness for the characters. They aren't going to survive, and if they do, they will be slaves to a far more powerful race.

At the end of the story, rather than stand up to the trucks and refuse to refuel them, the narrator accepts his fate and envisions the grim future ahead as maintainers of this new normal. He looks up into the sky and, seeing planes flying overhead, wonders if they have pilots. Trucks, and particularly its ending, plays upon the realisation that many of us have on a regular basis: we are tiny, and fragile, and can be overcome.

A really enjoyable, interesting story, and if you like this, you'll surely like King's later vehicle-oriented novels, Christine and From a Buick 8.

And about Maximum Overdrive. If you ever happen to read this, Steve, don't listen to the haters. It was a masterpiece.

13. 'The Mangler' (1972).

2020-04-07T05:30:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start this post by making it clear that I fully understand if anyone reading my previous posts is baffled by my admiration and enthusiasm for this particular story. I have, on several occasions, referred to some of the stories I have read as 'silly' or 'ridiculous', and there is very little I can think of that is more ridiculous than a haunted laundry machine. But, like the fairly stupid sounding premise of The Day of the Triffids, for some reason, it just works.

The Mangler

I loved this story.

It's about a detective who is investigating the horrifically grisly death of a woman who worked on 'the Mangler' - a supersized folding and ironing machine - after she was pulled into its workings, despite safety apparatus which should have made this impossible.

The detective soon discovers that this is not the first 'accident' involving this particular machine, and starts to believe that it may be possessed by an evil force.

Now, does that sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It's a totally bonkers and really stupid idea. But perhaps this is where we really start to see King come into his own. because this story is super entertaining, horribly funny, and scary, damn it. I was genuinely frightened of a laundry machine.

So, why is it so good? Let's start with the general execution of the story. The Mangler has a detailed and fascinating history, which is painstakingly drawn out by King. Officer Haunton works as a real detective, interviewing victims and gathering evidence, and through this, the evil and insidious nature of the machine is slowly revealed. The plot unfolds (no pun intended) so cleverly and carefully that you find yourself fully invested in what should be an uninvestable idea.

The two main characters, Officer Haunton and his neighbour, are the archetypal 'ordinary men' that King has made his bread and butter over the years. We like them, we go with them, and we want them to win. Shame, really.

The best part of this? For me, the wonderful gore. As an adult, I find my stomach considerably weaker than it was in my teens, when I could sit through the splatteriest of body horror whilst eating a blood orange. In spite of this, I really enjoyed the over the top, hyper gorey scenes when the Mangler dispatched its victims, or small pieces of them, at least. The description of Mrs Frawley's remains is such a great mix of hilarious and retch-inducing that I laughed aloud even as I covered my mouth in horror.

I only have one complaint about The Mangler. You guessed it: Unsatisfactory Ending Alert. I see where King was going, and I'm not entirely sure where else he could have gone, but the ending out-stupided even this nutty story.

Overall, I still hugely recommend this for anyone who isn't too much of a literary snob. Have fun!

I'm off to do some ironing.

11. 'The Fifth Quarter' and 12. 'Battleground' (both 1972).

2020-04-06T05:33:00.000-07:00

The next two stories on the extensive first list were easy to slot together; they share similar characters, similar ideas, a similar vibe. The only major difference, other than obvious content-based
ones, is that I really liked one and really hated the other.

The Fifth Quarter

I'm going to start this by saying I am a bit of a King purist; I don't gravitate towards work that is out of his normal zone. I haven't read all of the Dark Towers series, for example (don't hurt me, I promise I will!), and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the Bill Hodges trilogy. I like King horror. Of course, there are exceptions, like the unquestinably wonderful Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, but generally, you'll find my favourites sitting comfortably in the horror section of the bookshop.

The Fifth Quarter is a gangster story. In it, Jerry Tarkanian (the first of several ridiculously over the top gangster names) hunts down the men who killed his friend, and attempts to retrieve enough parts of a mysterious map to find the loot he was killed for.

I found the characters in this story pretty caricaturish, from their names to their behaviour. 'Sarge', for example, an enormous, greasy monster who barely speaks but is, obviously, deadly. 'Jagger', a second stupidly named scary-person, who is such a fine figure of a gangster that he trips over a dead body twice rather than killing the much weaker, much less experienced man he has trapped in a bathtub.

My lord, what a silly story. I'm all for experimentation, but I hope Stephen King avoids gangsters in future.

Battleground

It should tell you something about The Fifth Quarter, which I have referred to as both silly and ridiculous, that I much preferred this story.

Battleground is like Toy Story on acid. In it, a hit-man named Renshaw is paid to kill a toy-maker. When he returns to his penthouse apartment he finds a package which has been sent to him by the dead man's mother. In it is a box of tiny soldiers and equipment, which immediately starts to attack him. They have teeny helicopters, little dinky rocket launchers, but these things hurt, even in miniature.

Is this a ridiculous idea? Sure. Is it well executed? Yes, absolutely. This particularly story made me laugh throughout, but still felt much more realistic than the story before. Also, as a petite 5'2" myself, I do like it when the little guy wins.

Renshaw is a great character, well drawn with almost no dialogue at all. He is an animal, focused purely on his own survival, and pitted against tiny creatures who don't care about their own at all. Maybe that's why they ultimately win; their end goal is far more important than their lives, which they were never meant to have anyway.

One thing I particularly liked about this story is that it made me question the potential for a scenario like it. Did the tiny toy soldiers need to eat, sleep, or pee? If you fished their little bullets out of your skin, would they have ballooned and changed shape like real ones? What the hell was the final, penthouse-devastating weapon made of?

Battleground proved to me that writer's should always write what they know. King might like gangster movies, but he understood those little toy soldiers. I bet he had a box-full just like them.

Quick, march! To the next post!

10. 'Suffer the Little Children' (1972).

2020-04-05T05:01:00.000-07:00

This is one of the few stories in this early selection that I remembered just based on the title. With most of the others (Battleground, The Mangler and Trucks being the exceptions), I only realised I'd read them already once I began.

This one, though. Oh, boy. This one gave me nightmares.

I was excited to read Suffer the Little Children again partly just to see if it still had that effect on me. I first read it when I was about twelve, and I knew picking it up this time that my view of it was likely to be shifted significantly by adulthood.

Suffer the Little Children

This little gem is the story of Miss Emily Sidley, and elderly first grade teacher, who begins to feel as though her students have changed and are now watching her with evil intent. The ringleader, Robert, taunts her, even beginning to change and show her his new, real face; a terrifying, alien face which sends Miss Sidley screaming into the streets and almost under the wheels of a bus.

The story ends horribly, and possibly tragically, with Miss Sidnley removing the perceived threats herself with a pistol. Part of the genius of this story is that we are never entirely sure how tragic these killings are. Is Miss Sidley mad, or is a wicked force insidiously taking over her elementary school?

Re-reading this as an adult, a teacher, and a mother was a really interesting exercise. As a child, I really didn't like the character of Miss Sidley, even though I completely trusted her view of the children. As an adult and a teacher, I had huge sympathy with her immediately. I recognised the tricks she used to catch naughty students off guard, and understood the frustrations of sly sniggering behind your back.

As a mother, however, I had a very different reaction the the story. I found the ending pretty unbearable, and much more frightening than the idea of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers style takeover of a first grade class. As a mother, it was much more difficult for me to believe as certainly in the malevolence of the children, and when Miss Sidley screams at the remaining little girl, 'Damn you, change! Dirty bitch, dirty, crawling filthy, unnatural bitch!', I was as horrified as poor Mrs Crossen, who interrupts the killings.

As far as I can tell, Miss Sidley is Stephen King's first female protagonist, and I think, particularly considering his age and experience, he draws the elderly woman extremely well. Her frailty and refusal to give in to it are endearing, her commitment to the classroom is both admirable and sad. She is a Miss rather than a Mrs, drawing a picture of an eternal spinster utterly devoted to her teaching. This makes the horror of the invasion even worse, as the main focus of her life is taken away from her.

The main antagonist, Robert, is a real spook-fest. There are few things creepier than weird children, and Robert is a doozy. Sneaky, sneering, emotionless, he manages to feel both alien and like a mix of all the unpleasant kids you've ever had to teach. Funnily it is his audacity and rudeness, his overstepping of school rules and social boundaries, which is the scariest part of his character, much more so than the horrid, head-stretching changes to his body. For a little child, the rules mean everything. To break them so fearlessly means the child is no longer there.

I've always thought creepy kids were effective in horror stories because kids are supposed to be innocent, but I wonder if it's actually because they leave adults so utterly defenseless. Throw a giant rat at me and I would happily hack it to smithereens with whatever sharp implement I happened to have near me. Ask me to do the same to a child? Not a chance. Evil children are frightening because we are programmed not to hurt them, and therefore we are completely at their mercy.

One of the best things about this story, for a lifelong King reader, is the double whammy ending. Emily Sidney calmly walking her first graders into a cupboard to be shot and piled into a corner would be a horrific and brutal ending on its own, but King doesn't stop there, and the second ending is perhaps more frightening than the first, and is what leaves the reader thinking about this story long after its finished.

I wholeheartedly recommend this one. Spooky, sickening, memorable. A cracker.

Onwards!

8. 'The Blue Air Compressor' and 9. 'I Am the Doorway' (both 1971).

2020-04-04T05:16:00.002-07:00

Apparently, this is an air compressor. Who knew?

I had mixed feelings about the next two Kings on the list, mainly because I am not a big fan of either self-aware fiction, or science fiction. The Blue Air Compressor is more self aware than all the Scream movies put together, and I Am the Doorway is wandering the fine line between horror-sci-fi and pure science fiction. So, neither would be my choice for preferred King style, but they're on my list, so read them I must.

The Blue Air Compressor

This story is pretty ordinary King at first glance. A young man named Gerald Nately writes a story about the enormously fat woman he is living with. The woman finds the manuscript and laughs at it (oh dear), suggesting that she was just too much woman for Gerald to write about. Gerald takes this insult to heart, and murders her by shoving an air compressor (a piece of machinery I had to google) down her throat and essentially inflating her to death.

All in all it's a funny, grisly, fairly typical comedy horror story from King. Except that, at regular intervals King talks directly to us as readers. He includes snippets of speech, ideas for bits of description, comments on the situation unfolding. It reads as though King himself is confessing to the crime.

In many ways, I actually quite liked this. I enjoyed the idea of this story being read by some of the idiots that believe King must be crazy simply because he chooses to write horror. Here's how to give them real pause! I also liked the fact that, just for a moment, I actually considered it myself. It seems likely that if King were going to murder someone, he'd do it pretty well, whatever that means.

It's not a story I would choose to read gain, but an interesting experiment all the same.

I Am the Doorway

I Am the Doorway is a grim, and yet somehow rather funny little piece. I wasn't sure I'd like it initially, as it starts with a space excursion and I'm rarely able to get on board (excuse the pun) with outer space horror, and before anyone screams at me, there are of course some notable exceptions; Alien; 2001: A Space Odyssey... no, that's about it.

The story deals with the aftermath of an exploratory journey to Venus, and the fate of one of the astronauts, Arthur, who is permanently disabled in the bad landing back on earth. Since returning to earth, Arthur's hands have begun to itch madly, and he has the strange feeling that he is looking out at the world as more than just himself. An alien life form slowly takes over Arthur's body and mind, forcing him to do its bidding, and viewing the world through tiny eyes that have opened along his itchy fingers. Ick.

It is the 'ick' of this that makes it successful. It feels like a 1950s or 60s B movie, and reminded me, particularly at the end, of The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. If you know this movie, you'll understand that this does not mean a happy ending. The description of the eyes, particularly the things Arthur does to try and get rid of them, made me wriggle in my reading chair, and I'm not even particularly eye-squeamish. I think if you were a reader for whom eyes were 'a thing', this story could easily give you nightmares. As a lifelong contact-lens wearer, I think I'm just too used to poking and prodding around the ocular area.

One criticism I have of this story is that, to my surprise, I actually found the bits set in space a little too brief. Venus is shown just for a moment, and given the smallest fragment of description, which left me really curious and wanting to see more of its weirdness. I also do prefer King when he writes settings in his Maine comfort zone. I just couldn't quite visualise the sweeping sands of the Gulf in the same way I can see the small towns of Castle Rock, Derry, and Jerusalem's Lot.

Overall, not a bad pair of reads considering my initial assumptions. On to the next one, which has haunted me since childhood...

7. 'Graveyard Shift' (1970).

2020-04-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

It's lockdown week 2. Both reading and blogging have been a challenge this week, as my husband and I juggled setting remote learning, heading into work to look after key worker children, and trying to stop our own child from devouring her crayons. But, I'm making progress, and Carrie is tantalisingly closer every day.

Although this blog post will be relatively short, Graveyard Shift feels like it needs its own entry. It doesn't really fit with any of the other stories just before or after it, and stands alone both in length and in content.

Graveyard Shift

This is one of King's better known short stories, partly because of the 1990 movie adapted from it. I've not seen the movie yet, so watch this space for my thoughts on it. It received a hilariously low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that's a score I've rarely seen beaten. I'm hoping it fits in the 'so bad it's good' category. Fingers crossed.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the story, it follows a mill worker named Hill who agrees to take on extra shifts over a holiday weekend to clear out the basement section at the bottom of the mill. The weather is so oppressive during the day that these shifts will take place overnight - the titular graveyard shift. When the workers begin the job, they immediately notice the vast number of rats, which get progressively bigger and more aggressive as they wade further into the rubbish.

I enjoyed Graveyard Shift, which is one of the most complete of the short stories I've read so far. The characters were well drawn and authentic, and were exactly the kind of men I could imagine volunteering for this sort of job in this sort of town. I quite liked all of them even though they weren't particularly likeable men - all of them, in fact, even the wicked foreman of the mill.

The story builds up well, and the ever increasing size of the rats is unnerving and icky, even for someone who isn't scared of them. Any creature that's three times the size it should be is an unpleasant prospect, whether a rat, a spider, a moth - even a giant sparrow or pigeon would be pretty creepy. Their attacks on the men, and the foreman's refusal to show any concern about them, is uncomfortable even today, when low paid workers are still often told to put up or shut up, or not get paid at all.

The ending is ridiculous and very funny, and I couldn't quite work out if this was intentional or not. In this case, the humour works either way, as the laughter provoked by the enormous Jabba the Hut King Rat the men discover under the basement is mixed with a disgusted horror that stays with you. The image is effective enough to keep coming up behind you and tapping on your shoulder when you're not expecting it to.

I did have a few issues with the story, one of them being the relationship between Hill and the foreman. I couldn't work out what the issue between them was; there didn't seem to be any bad blood between them, any real rudeness, or any reason for Hill to throw him to the wolves (or rats) in the way he does at the end.

My other issue is a purely personal one. I'm not afraid of rats, I know I said earlier that this story still works if you're not, but it does take the edge off. Had this been about spiders, you might have got me. Moths, most definitely. Rats? I dunno. They're kinda cute!

5. 'Night Surf', and 6. 'The Reaper's Image' (1969).

2020-03-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

Lockdown continues, but so does the beautiful sunshine. This is perfect weather for the next two stories, which are real summer horrors. They are, in many ways, nothing alike, but I've placed them together because they feel like trial runs of some of King's later heavy hitters. Both of them have a slightly unfinished quality, which could be intentional, but may result from them belonging as part of a much bigger whole.

Night Surf

Night Surf, collected in Night Shift, is set in the aftermath of a world-sweeping illness called Captain Trips, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same name given to the population-ending virus from The Stand, published eight years later. In this short story, the flu-like illness is pretty much the same, except that victims heads swell to bizarre proportions just before death, which is something I don't recall from The Stand.

It's an interesting snippet which doesn't feel particularly finished, and wouldn't have seemed out of place in the short 'seconds deaths' section in Chapter 38 of The Stand, where we are told of the various accidental or otherwise non-Captain Trips related deaths of some of the immune survivors.

The characters are entirely unpleasant, which is unlike King, and I struggled to feel much sympathy for anyone, particularly given that the story starts with the revelation that they have just burned an already dying man alive in some sort of weird, half-serious ritual. This is almost brushed over, as though the characters have lost all ability to understand the gravitas of the act they have perpetrated.

There isn't an awful lot of narrative, more a collection of interesting ideas and images as the characters wander across a deserted beach in late August - a radio station manned by an increasingly deranged and desperate deejay; a now-pointless lifeguard tower; an abandoned souvenir shop.

I'm reluctant to call this ending out as unsatisfactory because I see this as a practice for a much (much!) bigger project, and so I won't. It's certainly an interesting read for any fan of The Stand, and, in a bleak way, rather beautiful.

The Reaper's Image

King's other book of this year, later collected in Skeleton Crew, is a much sillier affair which is more lightly creepy entertainment than all out horror. It tells the story of the ridiculously named Johnson Spangler (I can't even type that without getting the giggles), who visits a small museum in the hopes of acquiring a very rare, very valuable mirror. The museum's curator is a doom-teller in the style of Gerald Olin from 1408, the gothic trope of the ignored prophet in action.

Whilst I enjoyed this story, and thought it had the potential to be truly frightening, it didn't scare me. There is something too obvious and hokey about the Grim Reaper to really get under my skin, and the build up is somewhat underdeveloped. We never quite understand what the mirror actually does, and so it's tricky to get wound up about it.

I'm also calling an unsatisfactory ending alert on this one. It's as though King had a great, spooky dream about a haunted mirror, but then couldn't remember how it ended once he woke up.

The saving graces for this story are the highly entertaining museum curator, and the wonderful description of the setting, which conjures up images of monstrous mahogany furniture, the sickly scent of polish, and bright shafts of summer light, illuminating dust motes.

Overall, good fun, but done much better in 1408.

Next up, we move into the 70's...

2. 'Cain Rose Up', 3. 'Here There Be Tygers', and 4. 'Strawberry Spring' (All 1968).

2020-03-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

In a busy first week of lockdown, I've been setting remote learning for my students, answering millions of (usually ridiculous) questions, chasing my tiny tornado of a toddler, and ploughing through the first big group of King's short stories.

I'll admit that I hadn't realised just how many short stories King had published before Carrie came out in '74; I even had my copy out and ready when I started compiling my list of his works and organising it. It wasn't to be. King was pretty prolific even before Carrie made him a household name. If you don't include Jumper and Rush Call, by my count he'd written eighteen stories and one essay before his big break.

Rather than dedicating a blog post to every story, I thought I'd put them together into groups which felt connected, not necessarily by theme or subject matter, but by a feel of the writing. Occasionally, where a story really speaks to me, I'll give it its own post.

Cain Rose Up

From the outset, Cain Rose Up feels different to The Glass Floor, more grown up, somehow, and I don't think I'm just imagining that based on the timeline. It tells the story of a depressed college student packing up for a break, before abruptly opening fire on his fellow students from his dorm window.

This is clearly pre-Rage, and even has a character named Pig Pen to jolt the familiarity home. There are more King-esque little touches in this, like the joke statue of Rodin's 'The Thinker' sitting on the toilet, and the main character's cold murmuring of 'good God, let's eat' as he rains bullets on the students below him.

The story is brutally short, not even a full seven pages in Skeleton Crew, but still manages to feel complete. There's a great balance between the just slightly off-kilter normality in the main chunk of the story, and the ending's outright horror, which is delivered with no message or emotion.

Overall, a far more polished story which made me look forward to revisiting Rage come '76.

Here There Be Tygers

What. On Earth. Is this?

Here There Be Tygers, also in Skeleton Crew, is the story of an elementary school student named Charles, who is too terrified to visit the boys' toilets because, well, because there's a tiger (tyger?) in there. Yep.

The first thing that struck me about this bizarre little tale is that it features King's first 'nasty grown-up' character, a particularly mean example called Miss Bird. Later examples include I think we've all known a Miss Bird at some point in our lives, that teacher that despises you for no discernible reason and will do anything to humiliate you in front of the class (and I say this as a teacher myself). We'll call mine Ms G. She was spindly and pointy faced and couldn't stand the sight of me.

We've also all known someone who has a particular phrase or pronunciation of a word that makes us want to shrink up inside ourselves. We feel our skin crawl and our eyes twitch along with Charles at Miss Bird's cringey habit of saying 'urinate' instead of just 'pee' or 'go to the toilet'.

The tricky thing in this story is working out who the real villain is here. I assume we're supposed to feel frightened of the tiger (tyger), but we're also overjoyed when Miss Bird inevitably marches around the corner of the bathroom to her grisly fate, which we sadly don't get to witness.

On that, I'd like to call unsatisfactory ending alert on this one. Although I liked the story, I really wanted to see Miss Bird get chomped. Her chilly comment to Charles, 'why you dirty, filthy little boy', made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It's something about the idea of an adult, especially a teacher, saying such a thing to a small child. She was the darkest thing about the story, and her character sums up the discomfort you felt as a child when you realised that grown-ups, who are supposed to like children and be nice to them, might actually hate you.

Strawberry Spring

Oooo, I liked this one. Strawberry Spring is the dark and moody story of 'Springheel Jack', a serial killer who murders a group of college students during the springtime version of an
Indian summer, an early spring that shrinks back to a grim winter after briefly fooling you with sunshine and flowers.

In this story from Night Shift, King uses an unnamed narrator, who captures the fear and helplessness of the campus as 'Springheel Jack' confounds the police and murders under the very noses of those meant to be protectors. The description of these murders is very subtle and, like the whole story, shrouded beneath a mysterious mist which envelopes the campus and allows the murderer to do his wicked deeds unnoticed.

While I was reading this story it occurred to me that King has actually written very few serial killer stories, a fact that surprised me even as I thought it. The only examples I can think of are his later short story A Good Marriage, his crime novel Mr Mercedes, and Frank Dodd in The Dead Zone. Perhaps it wanders too close to crime to really capture him, but all the same I thoroughly enjoyed his take on it here.

This is the second of his stories so far that has a distinct campus feel, I suppose the closest to his reality at that time. As with all his work, he captures setting in a way few writers can, bringing to life the spooky college grounds in early spring New England.

The ending of this is a fun twist, one I saw coming just before it arrived but enjoyed anyway, and one I'm going to let you have rather than spoiling it.

In conclusion, a 'read-it-by-the-fire' shudder-fest, which has placed the term 'strawberry spring' firmly into my vocabulary.

Onward!

1. 'The Glass Floor' (1967).

2020-03-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

I'll start this post by saying that really, I suppose I ought to have started with Jumper and Rush Call, stories that King wrote with his brother when he was just twelve and submitted to the local paper. I will get to them, but as the book they're found in is on order, I thought I'd start with the first paid piece King wrote.

For those of you shouting 'where's Carrie?', you might be surprised to know that there are a good twenty short stories for me to get through before I revisit that delicious little beast.

The Glass Floor tells the story of Charles Wharton, who, after the suspicious death of his sister, visits the creepy home where she died to interrogate her husband. We quickly discover that her death was, of course, as creepy as the house it happened in.

King himself describes The Glass Floor as 'clumsy and badly written', but with a payoff ending. I think this is harsh. While the story does feel a little awkward in places, there are still some really nice moments, such as when King describes the house as an 'outsized, perverted toadstool'. What an image!

There's something strange about how unmistakable King's voice is in a story which feels so immature. I'm pretty certain that if I'd been given this story without the author's name, I'd have hazarded a guess at a young King. The story has a real 'wouldn't it be funny if...' quality to it, a hallmark of King's work.

For every novel, novella, and short story I read in this challenge, I intend to give an ending rating. King is well known for muddy, murky endings which divide even his most loyal readers. So does this one have punch? Yes, to a point. The idea is a good one - weird, unsettling, sudden. The execution is a bit off, and I was left wishing the story had ended a couple of paragraphs earlier. Sometimes, less is more.

Overall, an interesting start. Onward!

The Stephen King Challenge

2020-03-23T14:54:00.001-07:00

On the 23rd March, 2020, the UK was officially placed on Coronavirus lockdown. All across the country, people wondered what they would do, stuck indoors with only their immediate family for company. Some found themselves anxiously remembering what happened to the Torrances in The Shining. So, what should one do when on lockdown? How does one avoid getting mallet happy?

My name is Beth, and I hate being bored. After an hour stuck indoors, I am cranky. After three, I am bordering on homicidal. After a day, I could give Jack Torrance a run for his money. I knew, as soon as the announcement was made, that I needed was a new, time consuming hobby, something to distract me from the overwhelming urges to run outside and mingle, or throw my husband from a window.

The Stephen King Challenge was born. All of Stephen King's published works, his books, short stories, poems, essays, and screenplays, in chronological order (or as close to it as I could get).

I would hazard a guess that I have read approximately 50 Stephen King novels and short story collections. I couldn't even start to guess the number of TV and film adaptations I've watched. I consider myself a Constant Reader and true fan, but there are some gaps in my knowledge. I've never, for example. read Firestarter, a fact which makes me blush to my roots. I also barely remember some of the first books I read, like Lisey's Story, although I know I loved them.

As a teacher working from home for the foreseeable future, this is probably the best opportunity I will ever have to complete this challenge. I am using this blog to hold me to account, and will post updates of my progress, reviews, and quite a lot of spoilers, so if you do, for some reason, happen to be reading this, be prepared.

I've compiled and ordered my list through a mix of King's official website and a lot of google searching, trying to organise the texts by when they were first published. This will mean I won't always be reading the short stories in their collections, but in the order they were published. I have no doubt some of my dates are shaky, and some will be in the wrong order, but I wanted to get a sense of how King's writing style has developed, matured, and changed, as well as the cultural pressure points he has prodded at different points in his career.

I am both excited and daunted by the enormity of the challenge I've set myself. Wish me luck!

Roque. Stroke. Redrum.