Stephen King: It (1986)

"Can an entire city be haunted?"

In early 1985, a serial murderer is on the loose in Derry, Maine. Several children have been found dead, some mutilated, with limbs missing. Michael Hanlon, the head of the Derry library and the town's unofficial historian, believes the murders are connected to the return of something that has infected Derry throughout its history.

"I think what was here before is still here – the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of Decency; the thing that was here in 1904 and 1905 and early 1906 – at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded; the thing that was here in 1876 and 1877, the thing that has shown up every twenty-seven years or so. Sometimes it comes a little sooner, sometimes a little later . . . but it always comes. . . .

"I think of us standing in the water, handed clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again – standing there almost like Druids in a ring . . ."

It is the story of a group of 11-year-olds – a self-described Losers Club – who in 1958 fought an alien, murdering presence in their hometown. However, they did not succeed in destroying this shape-shifting presence, which they called It. Twenty-seven years later, It's "feeding cycle" has begun again and, fulfilling that promise they made as kids, the friends reunite in Derry and attempt to kill It for good.

As he did in 'Salem's Lot, King reveals the "dark and ruined heart" of a small 1950s New England town. In the case of Derry, evil and apathy – a kind of moral amnesia – has infected the entire community. Derry's murder rate is six times higher than any other town of comparable size (30,000) in New England. Dozens of children – mostly teenagers – go missing each year. Child abuse seems common, if not rampant. Raw sewage is dumped into the Kenduskeag River, and racist and homophobic graffiti is scrawled along the rocky sides of the canal that flows through town. In response to the spate of murders, town officials institute a curfew, but do little else; the investigations into the murders appear half-hearted. One long-time resident tells Hanlon: "Hurtful things do right well in the soil of this town".

Things have never been right in Derry, and we eventually learn why. The town was settled on the exact landing spot of It (from deep space, apparently) tens of thousands of years ago. The dark events and long trail of death associated with the town go back to its founding, when the original community of about 340 English settlers simply disappeared in the late summer of 1741. Four interludes in the book are presented as Hanlon's notes/diary entries for a history of Derry, subtitled "A Look Through Hell's Back Door". (King's original title for the novel was Derry.)

***

King saw this gargantuan novel (1138 pages) as the culmination of the first phase of his writing career, and his magnum opus (at least until the Dark Tower series got rolling). He said that after It, he would not write any more books with children as the main characters. This was his final word on the subject.

[It is] a summation of everything I have learned and done in my whole life to this point. And it's like a monster rally – everything is in this book, every monster you could think of. . . .

It was like a final exam covering this subject. It was a very difficult imaginative feat; not thinking up monsters, because they are easy enough to produce, but . . . reenter[ing] the world of childhood. It had to be a very gradual process to open the time and mindset of my own childhood. The more I worked at it, the more this frame of reference became accessible. . . .

I have always been fascinated with my own childhood. I was fascinated as an adult with the period when my own children were growing up. And I'm interested in the mythic power that childhood holds over our imagination and, in particular, the point at which the adult is able to link up with his or her own childhood past and the powers therein.

King called the novel "a final summing up of everything I've tried to say in the last twelve years on the two central subjects of my fiction: monsters and children".

King began work on It in 1981, shortly after finishing Danse Macabre, his history of the horror genre, and his research for that book, and its bits of autobiography, served him well over the four years he worked on this novel. As he noted, It is a compendium of horror, alluding to numerous books, film, fairy tales, folklore, and to many of King's own novels and stories (for example, The Shining's Dick Halloran makes an cameo as a young Army cook in a 1930 flashback).

The Losers Club – Bill Denbrough, Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak, Stan Uris, and Mike Hanlon – are exact contemporaries of King. They – like their author – were 11 years old during the summer of 1958.

King mentioned some of the autobiographical material shortly after the book's publication:

Derry 1958 is Stratford, Connecticut, where I was eleven. That's where The Barrens were, and Eddie Kasbrak (when we moved back to Maine his last words to me were, "I guess that's all, bastard-ball!"), and Mr. Nell, who used to buy my brother and me apple pie a la mode at the Stratford Diner. There was a dam in the Barrens; my brother showed us how to build it, and yeah, the cops showed up, Mr. Nell among them.

King uses all of this in It. The Losers spend their summer vacation, and build their underground clubhouse (and join together for an epic rock fight against Henry Bowers and his fellow bullies), in a overgrown, wooded area in Derry called the Barrens. One afternoon, a few of the boys construct a dam, which floods the area and brings a cop named Mr. Nell to investigate. And one of the Losers is named Eddie Kaspbrak. (In addition, King based the murder of Adrian Mellon on the actual death of Charlie Howard, a gay man who was beaten and thrown into the Kenduskeag Stream by three teenagers around the time of Bangor's sesquicentennial celebration in 1984.)

King says he wrote It

in two parallel lines: the story of what they did as kids and the story of what they're doing as grownups. . . . I'm interested in the notion of finishing off one's childhood as one completes making a wheel. The idea is to go back and confront your childhood, in a sense relive it if you can, so that you can be whole.

Michael Collings, who has written extensively about King's fiction, says that when the old friends reunite in Derry, they realize they must re-capture the essence and innocence of childhood, "their willingness to believe implicitly in what they know experientially about Pennywise the Clown [It's most common disguise] . . . to return to that state of belief, bolstered this time by adult strength and perseverance."

King makes the connection between child-like faith and the destruction of It implicit. Back in 1958, It realized that the children had

discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one – probably a child – who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet that drives it home.

It has waited until the children have grown up before luring them back with the next round of killings. Destroying It as adults is a daunting task; as one of the Losers says, "our perspectives have narrowed; our faith in the magic . . . has worn off". It assumes that the adults, now nearly 40 years of age, will have lost all contact with the feelings of childhood, and will be unable to generate the force necessary to destroy It.

And now, now that we no longer believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Hansel and Gretel, or the troll under the bridge, It is ready for us. Come on back, It says. . . . Come on back, and we'll see if you remember the simplest thing of all: how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

***

King again explores how kids can incorporate the supernatural into their worldview easier than adults. In this case, that mental malleability makes them better equipped to acknowledge and battle It:

[Ben] remembered that the day after he had seen the mummy on the iced-up Canal, his life had gone on as usual. He had known that whatever it had been had come very close to getting him, but his life had gone on . . . He had simply incorporated the thing he had seen on the Canal into his life, and if he had almost been killed by it . . . well, kids were always almost getting killed. . . . [I]t occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. . . . But when you grew up, all that changed. You no longer lay awake in your bed, sure something was crouching in the closet or scratching at the window . . .

But how does this view co-exist with another theme of King's: of kids being obsessed by/with their fears, of being afraid to fall asleep or even drape their hand over the side of the bed for fear of what might be lurking under the bed? These seem like two very different theories. On the one hand, the inexplicable is readily accepted (Ben nearly dies, but he quickly forgets the danger). But on the other hand, kids cannot let go of their fears and they obsess on them (At the very start of the novel, George Denbrough is afraid to go down into the cellar, fearing that just before he turns on the light, "some horrible clawed paw would settle lightly over his wrist . . . and then jerk him down into the darkness that smelled of dirt and wet and dim rotted vegetables").

***

Collings writes that, in It, King continues his exploration of

the child forced to confront the adult world without any support or understanding. Beginning with Rage [begun when King was in high school], King has continually pitted the innocent world of the child against the harsh, cynical, hypocritical world of adults . . . usually to the detriment of the child.

After Bill Denbrough's six-year-old brother George is killed in late 1957 – the murder seems to kick off It's latest "feeding cycle" – Bill is ignored by his grieving parents. (His situation recalls that of Gordie LaChance in The Body.) Bill understands that he must manage his own grief and "find a decent way to go on", and because his parents are unable to help him, he must do it himself (or with the help of his friends). Bill admits being terrified by the sight of his father crying, which opened up a "frightening possibility . . . maybe sometimes things just didn't go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up".

Likewise, when the reality of George Denbrough's death hits Richie Tozier, he realizes that anyone could die at any time.

[A]ll the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there. I could die! his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror. Anybody could! . . . Shit! Fucking anybody!

It is full of riffs on childhood, like this:

[Ben] understood instinctively, as most kids did, that they lived below the sight-lines, and hence the thought-lines, of most adults. When a grownup was ditty-bopping down the street, thinking his grownup thoughts about work and appointments and buying cars and whatever else grownups thought about, he never noticed kids playing hopscotch or guns or kick-the-can or ring-a-levio or hide-and-go-seek. Bullies like Henry could get away with hurting other kids quite a lot if they were careful to stay below that sightline. At the very most, a passing adult was apt to say something like, "Why don't you quit that?" and then just continue ditty-bopping along without waiting to see if the bully stopped or not. So the bully would wait until the grownup had turned the corner . . . and then go back to business as usual. It was like adults thought that real life only started when a person was five feet tall.

Collings says that as both the 1958 and 1985 battles with It are described, the novel

approaches the mythic, a sense that increases as the adult/children themselves draw closer to their final meeting with It. In describing that meeting, King almost ignores physical violence and force to allow the battle to take on a psychological, emotional, and spiritual nature.

Despite It being an kind of encyclopedia of childhood and horror, the novel has an intimacy and warmth that none of King's previous novels possess. It is a remarkable achievement and is worthy of additional literary analysis.

Next: The Eyes Of The Dragon.

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story - Reviews of David Foster Wallace Bio

D.T. Max's Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, was published in late August. (I have not yet read it, but may write about it after I do.)

Searching the Ashes of an Exploded Life
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author
Craig Fehrman, Chicago Reader

Irony and Its Discontent
Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

A Conversation With D.T. Max About His New David Foster Wallace Biography
Michelle Dean, The Awl

Ned Beauman, The Guardian

Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books

Two excerpts:

Newsweek, "David Foster Wallace on the Brink of 'Infinite Jest'"

The Millions posted the opening paragraphs.

(Many more links to reviews and DFW whatnot here.)

King's Next Novel Will Be Released As Paperback

Stephen King's next novel, Joyland, will be published on June 4, 2013 as a Hard Case Crime paperback.

Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime:

Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book. It's a whodunit, it's a carny novel, it's a story about growing up and growing old, and about those who don't get to do either because death comes for them before their time. Even the most hard-boiled readers will find themselves moved. When I finished it, I sent a note saying, "Goddamn it, Steve, you made me cry."

Doctor Sleep, King's sequel to The Shining, will be published on September 24, 2013.

Stephen King: Exposed as Richard Bachman

In early 1985, Stephen King came clean and admitted that the rumours were true: he was Richard Bachman.

Bachman had published five novels: four paperback originals (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man) and one hard cover (Thinner). It was the increased publicity for, and attention given to, Thinner that heated up the King/Bachman talk.

King's admission came after Steve Brown, a Washington, D.C., bookstore employee, who had read the Bachman novels and believed they sounded an awfully lot like King, did some sleuthing at the Library of Congress.

Brown wrote that Thinner (published in November 1984) was

instantly recognizable as a King novel. It had been written in 1982 by a well-known writer at the peak of his popularity. With the exception of Roadwork (written immediately after the completion of 'Salem's Lot), the earlier Bachman novels had been trunk novels, early works where King's distinctive style was still partially unformed.

That distinctive style finally drove me to the Library of Congress in the fall of 1984. I had read all five Bachman novels and was about eighty percent convinced that it was Stephen King. A peek at the Bachman copyrights confirmed my suspicion. All but one of the books listed Bachman as a legal pseudonym, and listed King's agent, Kirby McCauley, as the holder of the copyright. The one exception, the earliest, Rage, had Stephen King's name on it. I sent King a letter detailing what I had found, and waited for a dissembling reply. Instead, the phone rang.

"Steve Brown? This is Steve King. Okay, you know I'm Bachman. I know I'm Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let's talk."

(Brown's account of his discovery can be found here.)

King ended up giving Brown a lengthy interview, which Brown published in the Washington Post on April 9, 1985. However, Brown was not the first person to publicly make the King/Bachman connection. Exactly two months earlier, on February 9, 1985, the Bangor (Maine) Daily News published some solid evidence, but King did not comment one way or the other.

It turns out that he was getting ready to announce the news himself. From the March 1985 issue of Castle Rock - an official King newsletter:

I don't think I have to tell anyone the big news this month. Yes, Stephen King is indeed Richard Bachman. ... Stephen intended to keep it quiet until March 1, but a local paper decided they would run the story with or without his comment, as they had enough proof, and as Stephen told them, the whole thing was coming apart - he likened it to having a bag of groceries that gets wet and things keep falling out until you can't hold it together anymore.

King was angry at having to admit to the Bachman pseudonym. "I was pissed. It's like you can't have anything. You're not allowed to because you're a celebrity." King hoped to use the Bachman name "for the long haul", but there are clues/hints in the Bachman books that invariably point to King.

The most obvious one comes late in The Running Man, in which Bachman mentions an airport in Derry, Maine, a fictional town created by King.

Also, Bart Dawes (Roadwork) works at Blue Ribbon Laundry and refers to a laundry pressing machine as "the mangler". Carrie White's mother (Carrie) also works at Blue Ribbon Laundry and King's short story "The Mangler" (Night Shift) features a laundry pressing machine at Blue Ribbon Laundry.

The end of The Long Walk reads: "And when the hand touched his shoulder again, he somehow found the strength to run." Late in Pet Sematary, King writes: "... and perhaps a quarter of a mile before the path ran out of the woods and into the field behind his house, he found enough left inside him to run."

In Thinner, one character says, "You were beginning to sound like a Stephen King novel there for a minute."

King, from his interview with Brown: "I wanted [the novels] to go out there and either find an audience, or just disappear quietly. The idea was not to just publish a book that I thought was good, but to honestly try to create another name that wouldn't be associated with my name."

King had originally chosen the name Guy Pillsbury - the name of his maternal grandfather - for a novel entitled Getting It On. But when that information leaked out at the publishing house, King retitled the manuscript Rage, and chose a different name. "They called me up. They asked me what name I wanted on it. There was a Richard Stark novel on my desk and the Bachman-Turner Overdrive on the stereo. So I told them to call him Richard Bachman." (Richard Stark was one of at least 16 pseudonyms used by the incredibly prolific Donald Westlake.)

Kirby McCauley:

[The Bachman novels] didn't fit into his career very well. He was known for his supernatural horror novels, and his fear was that he would lead his audiences astray. Steve thought of Cujo as more of a Bachman book. There was nothing supernatural about it, and it certainly had a downbeat ending. Thinner, retrospectively, should have been a Stephen King novel.

(Thinner's ending is nowhere near upbeat, however.)

King also told Brown that he had a completed manuscript set for the next Bachman book: Misery.

Despite Bachman's death ("cancer of the pseudonym", quipped King), he continued to publish. According to the legend, his widow, Claudia Inez Bachman, found some manuscripts in a old trunk, and decided to publish them, with some editing assistance from his old friend Stephen King. Those books were The Regulators (1996, released in tandem with King's Desperation) and Blaze (2007, an old King novel that at one point was considered as a follow-up to Carrie).

***

King, from the original introduction to The Bachman Books (1985):

I think I did it to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King. I think that all novelists are inveterate role-players and it was fun to be someone else for a while - in this case, Richard Bachman. And he did develop a personality and a history to go along with the bogus author photo on the back of Thinner and the bogus wife (Claudia Inez Bachman) to whom the book is dedicated. Bachman was a fairly unpleasant fellow who was born in New York and spent about ten years in the merchant marine after four years in the Coast Guard. He ultimately settled in rural central New Hampshire, where he wrote at night and tended to his medium-sized dairy farm during the day. The Bachmans had one child, a boy, who died in an unfortunate accident at the age of six (he fell through a well cover and drowned). Three years ago a brain tumor was discovered near the base of Bachman's brain; tricky surgery removed it. And he died suddenly in February of 1985 when the Bangor Daily News, my hometown paper, published the story that I was Bachman - a story which I confirmed. ... I've been asked several times if I did it because I thought I was overpublishing the market as Stephen King. The answer is no. I didn't think I was overpublishing the market . . . but my publishers did. Bachman provided a compromise for both of us. ... This does nothing, however, to explain why I've felt this restless need to publish what I write when I don't need the dough.

I've been asked several times if I did it because I feel typecast as a horror writer. The answer is no. I don't give a shit what people call me as long as I can go to sleep at night. Nevertheless, only the last of the Bachman books is an out-and-out horror story, and the fact hasn't escaped me. Writing something that was not horror as Stephen King would be perfectly easy, but answering the questions about why I did it would be a pain in the ass. When I wrote straight fiction as Richard Bachman, no one asked the questions. In fact, ha-ha, hardly anyone read the books. Which leads us to what might be - well, not the reason why that voice spoke up in the first place, but the closest thing to it.

You try to make sense of your life. Everybody tries to do that, I think, and part of making sense of things is trying to find reasons . . . or constants . . . things that don't fluctuate. Everyone does it, but perhaps people who have extraordinarily lucky or unlucky lives do it a little more. Part of you wants to think-or must as least speculate that you got whopped with the cancer stick because you were one of the bad guys (or one of the good ones, if you believe Durocher's Law). Part of you wants to think that you must have been one hardworking S.O.B. or a real prince or maybe even one of the Sainted Multitude if you end up riding high in a world where people are starving, shooting each other, burning out, bumming out, getting loaded, getting 'Luded. But there's another part that suggests it's all a lottery, a real-life gameshow not much different from "Wheel of Fortune" or "The New Price Is Right" (two of the Bachman books, incidentally, are about game-show-type competitions). It is for some reason depressing to think it was all-or even mostly-an accident. So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again. Or in my case, if Bachman could do it again.

The question remains unanswered. Richard Bachman's first four books did not sell well at all, perhaps partly because they were issued without fanfare. ... [T]he Bachman novels are not the only time such novels have been the work of well-known writers sending out dispatches from deep cover. Donald Westlake published paperback originals under the names Tucker Coe and Richard Stark; Evan Hunter under the name Ed McBain; Gore Vidal under the name Edgar Box. ... I wanted Bachman to keep a low profile. So, in that sense, the poor guy had the dice loaded against him from the start. And yet, little by little, Bachman gained a dim cult following. His final book, Thinner, had sold about 28,000 copies in hardcover before a Washington bookstore clerk and writer named Steve Brown got suspicious ...

I want to close by saying just a few words about the worth of these books. Are they good novels? I don't know. Are they honest novels? Yes, I think so. They were honestly meant, anyway, and written with an energy I can only dream about these days (The Running Man, for instance, was written during a period of seventy-two hours and published with virtually no changes). ... The most recent of the Bachman books offered here, Roadwork, was written between 'Salem's Lot and The Shining, and was an effort to write a "straight" novel. ... I'd only add that two of these novels, perhaps even all four, might have been published under my own name if I had been a little more savvy about the publishing business or if I hadn't been preoccupied in the years they were written with first trying to get myself through school and then to support my family. And that I only published them (and am allowing them to be republished now) because they are still my friends; they are undoubtedly maimed in some ways, but they still seem very much alive to me.

Stephen King: Skeleton Crew (1985)

Terror is the widening of perspective and perception.
Stephen King, "The Mist"

Skeleton Crew is Stephen King's second collection of short fiction (Night Shift was the first). It includes one novella, two previously unpublished poems, and 19 stories.

The tales span nearly 20 years of King's writing career from 1966 ("The Reaper's Image" was written shortly after King graduated from high school) to 1983 ("The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet"). Another story from the late '60s, "Cain Rose Up", is apparently the second piece of fiction King ever published.

The stories are collected from a variety of publications: science-fiction and horror anthologies (Dark Forces, Shadows, Terrors, and New Terrors) genre magazines (Twilight Zone, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Startling Mystery Stories, Weirdbook, and Fantasy and Science Fiction) popular magazines (Redbook, Yankee) and men's magazines (Gallery and Playboy).

"The Mist" (a 134-page novella) gets things started. On the day following an intense, destructive summer storm off Long Lake, Maine - trees and power lines are down - an ominous fog, moving with "lazy, hypnotizing speed ... defying all the laws of nature", rolls into town. Two dozen townspeople, including David Drayton and his five-year-old son Billy, are trapped in the Federal Foods Supermarket. It gradually becomes apparent that there is something very deadly out in the fog, though King masterfully keeps the terrorizing element off-stage until the last third of the story. This is the type of situation King has written about so masterfully many times before (The Shining, for example), exploring the interactions between people isolated in one location. As the thick mist envelops the supermarket, those trapped inside, stripped of any social standing, reveal their personalities. "The Mist" is also another example ('Salem's Lot, The Stand) of people needing to work selflessly together for the greater good, to defeat a multi-faceted evil. The story's real terror, of course, is "the behaviour of human beings who suddenly find themselves confronting adversity and tragedy" (Anthony Magistrale).

At one point, Billy mentions his fear about things in the fog waiting to eat them up, "like in the fairy tales". It reminded me of something King once said:

[Fairy tales] are the scariest stories we have. I think that the stories for children form a kind of conduit leading to what adult call horror stories. To my mind, the stories that I write are nothing more than fairy tales for grown ups.

My second-favourite story in this collection is "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut". It is October in Castle Rock, Maine, and two old-timers, Homer Buckland and Dave Owens, are relaxing in front of Bell's Market. Homer is telling the story of Ophelia Todd. Ophelia is "always looking for a shortcut" and is intent on finding the shortest distance between Castle Lake to Bangor. She explains to Homer, who is doing some repair work on the Todds' cottage, the various routes, which range from 129 to 163 miles. When she says she recently found a route that is only 116 miles, Homer expresses disbelief. Later on, Ophelia boasts that she made the trip in 67 miles - which is plainly impossible, because the straight line distance - as the crow flies - is 79 miles. Fred Porcheddu's insightful essay links this story to the ancient traditional of "pastoral literature", which extends back to the third century BC and the Greek poet Theocritus.

Stories within stories is a theme of this collection. In "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands", we return to the Manhattan brownstone previously visited in "The Breathing Method" (Different Seasons) for another night of storytelling. In "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet", an editor tells of a promising writer who descends into madness when he imagines there are little people called "fornits" living in his typewriter.

In "Survivor Type", Richard Pine, a surgeon, has washed up on a small, uninhabited island with nothing to eat. This story's question is: How much trauma can a human body withstand? With few sources of food on the island, Pine begins amputating his limbs for sustenance.

"Word Processor of the Gods" features a homemade computer where the insert and delete keys have real life consequences. ... Two other offerings - "Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)" and "Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game (Milkman #2)" - are from an unfinished novel.

Several stories show the interconnectedness of the Stephen King Universe. Ace Merrill and Vern Tessio, both from "The Body" (Different Seasons), are mentioned in "Nona". Ace will also make an appearance later in King's career in Needful Things. The narrator of "Gramma" mentions Joe Camber (Cujo) and Henrietta Dodd (The Dead Zone), and Billy Dodd (The Dead Zone) is mentioned in "Uncle Otto's Truck".

Next: It.

Stephen King: Thinner (as Richard Bachman) (1984)

"You were starting to sound a little

like a Stephen King novel for awhile there ..."

In 1982, Stephen King finished a manuscript entitled Gypsy Pie, about Bill Halleck, an overweight lawyer who uses his connections in law enforcement and the courts to evade punishment for hitting and killing an old gypsy woman with his car. The gypsy family's patriarch puts a curse on Halleck, causing him to lose a couple of pounds every day.

Perhaps because of its bleak ending, King decided to publish the novel (retitled Thinner) under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. Each of the four previous Bachman novels – Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man – had been written very early in King's career. Thinner was different; it was a new manuscript. It was also the first Bachman book published in hard cover and the first to receive any real promotion. It was also the beginning of the end of Bachman's writing career.

***

On Halleck's way out of the courthouse, after the charge of vehicular manslaughter has been dismissed, he is approached by Taduz Lemke, the ancient gypsy. Lemke touches Halleck's cheek, and whispers one word: "Thinner". Halleck gives little thought to this encounter.

When Halleck begins losing weight, both he and his wife, Heidi, are thrilled. But as it continues – and Halleck loses 30 pounds in only three weeks – they get concerned. Fearing cancer or some other serious malady, Halleck goes to his doctor. All tests are normal; nothing is wrong.

Halleck notices that even after binging on fattening food to counteract whatever is going on, he keeps losing weight at the same steady pace. He "realize[s] miserably that something has changed in his life, and not for the better".

By the time he's down to 188, having lost nearly 70 pounds, Halleck begins secretly blaming his wife for his condition. It is not until a reader is one-quarter through the book that he learns that Halleck had plenty of time to avoid hitting Susanna Lemke (who, admittedly, walked into the road without looking for approaching cars). At that moment, Heidi was giving her husband a handjob while he was driving and, as he neared orgasm, his attention was not fully on the road.

[A]ll of this could be traced directly back to Heidi. It had been her fault, all of it. He had not asked her to do what she had done ... Yes, it had been her fault, but the old Gypsy hadn't known that, and so Halleck had received the curse and Halleck had not lost a grand total of sixty-one pounds, and there she sat ... The old Gypsy hadn't touched her.

Halleck has a flash of "crude and unalloyed hate" towards his wife. He feels an initial shame, but in the days and weeks that follow, that rough hate returns more and more often, despite his attempts to stop it.

Halleck comes to accept what both his wife and his doctor - the voice of rational thought - believe is impossible. Halleck "suddenly, simply believed ... everything. The Gypsy had cursed him, yes, but it wasn't cancer; cancer would have been too kind and too quick. It was something else, and the unfolding had only begun."

Halleck's weigh continues to drop: 188, 176, 167, 155, 137, 130 ... and he is now so thin that he is drawing looks in the street and strangers are avoiding him. He contacts the police chief and the judge in his case and finds that they, too, have been cursed. The judge's skin is slowly morphing into reptile-like scales and the police chief has an extremely gruesome outbreak of full-body acne. Both men eventually commit suicide.

As Halleck wastes away, he realizes that he has to find the gypsies and make amends, if possible. He wants to tell Lemke there was no evil intent in his actions. He wants to apologize. Before he leaves, Halleck writes a letter to his wife:

It's easy to blame, easy to want revenge. But when you look at things closely, you start to see that every event is locked onto every other event; that sometimes things happen just because they happen. None of us like to think that is so, because then we can never strike out at someone to ease the pain; we have to find another way, and none of the other ways are so simple, so satisfying.

Halleck tracks the gypsies up the east coast, through New Hampshire and into Maine. When talking to the family accomplishes nothing, Halleck contacts Richie Ginelli, a mobster for whom Halleck's law firm has done some work. Ginelli is glad to help out a friend, and he begins several nights of terror against the gypsies in an attempt to get Lemke to lift the curse.

***

As with many of King's books, the idea came from personal experience:

I used to weigh 236 pounds, and I smoked heavily. I went to see a doctor. He said: "Listen man, your triglycerides are really high. In case you haven't noticed it, you've entered heart attack country." That line is in the book. He told me that I should quit smoking and lose some weight. I got pissed and spent a very angry weekend off by myself. I thought about it, thought about how shitty they were to make me do all these terrible things to save my life. I went and lost the weight, and pretty much quit smoking. Once the weight actually started to come off, I began to realize that I was attached to it somehow, that I didn't really want to lose it. I began to think about what would happen if somebody started to lose weight and couldn't stop. It was a pretty serious situation, at first. Then I remembered all the things I did when I weighed a lot. I had a paranoid conviction that the scales weighed heavy, no matter what. I would refuse to weigh myself, except in the morning, and then after I had taken off all my clothes. I remember being so pissed off in the doctor's office, because he wouldn't let me take off my clothes and take a shit before I got up on the goddam scales. It was so existential that the humor crept in after awhile.

***

In Thinner, King considers blame and its consequences. How should the blame for Susanna Lemke's death be apportioned? And what is the proper punishment?

No one accepts any responsibility for what has happened. Halleck blames his wife. Heidi refuses to blame herself. Taduz Lemke refuses to acknowledge that his daughter was careless in walking into traffic. The judge's wife blames Halleck for his condition: "Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us?"

The entire group of gypsies are also being blamed, in a general sense, for being who they are. They are outsiders everywhere they go. When Heidi sees them in the town common before a summer concert, she says bluntly: "Keep your distance. They're all crooks." The gypsies are harassed by the local police for "trespassing" on the common. But don't common areas in a town exist to be enjoyed by everyone? Or can the police selectively choose who is allowed to use public land? In Thinner, communalism collides with human nature, and its myriad prejudices: isolationism, racism, and xenophobia.

The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance. Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.

Later that night, Halleck's teenaged daughter, Linda, asks why the police were bothering the gypsies. "I thought the common was public property ... That's what we learned in school."

Anthony Chase, in "The Mass Culture of Property" (Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2007), writes that Halleck responds "to a series of shrewd questions from his daughter in good lawyerly fashion – trying to give moderately truthful if highly selective answers".

Halleck knows from his own experience with his mother that children never forgive their parents for certain lies, but he cannot help himself in this case. "It had taken having a child to teach him just how tiring honesty could be." Halleck counts his lies in his mind as he tells them, and he also thinks of various legal precedents that would support the gypsies. Chase finds it "peculiarly satisfying to find a popular storyteller like Stephen King unleashing the hard legal history in a thriller that, in a real sense, turns on questions about access to civil justice".

Chase, on Thinner's discussion of "the politics of property rights":

The juxtaposition of these two property notions – that private ownership should remain unrestrained in the name of individualism and liberty versus the conviction that society will always retain a legitimate claim upon private property, an enduring and legitimate capacity to publicly regulate private wealth and power – may not come any sharper in popular culture than it does in Stephen King's morality tale, Thinner.

Access to justice and class consciousness are two other themes. Halleck avoids punishment for his negligence because of his connections, while the gypsies are denied any justice for the avoidable death of a family member. Late in the book, Taduz Lemke tells Halleck:

You run my daught' over in the road, white man. ... Hey, I known who done what. I taken care of it. Mostly we turn and we drive out of town. Mostly, yeah, we do dat. But sometimes we get our justice. ... Justice ain't bringing the dead back, white man. Justice is justice.

***

Thinner was the book that eventually exposed King as the man behind Richard Bachman. I'll detail that in a future post. King has said that if his cover had not been blown, Misery would likely have been the next Richard Bachman book.

Next: Skeleton Crew.

Stephen King: The Talisman (with Peter Straub) (1984)

Adventure. Danger. A quest of some noble purpose.
Dreams of fear and glory.
(The Talisman)

In The Talisman, 12-year-old Jack Sawyer must travel across the United States on foot - from Arcadia Beach, on the Atlantic coast of New Hampshire, to western California - to find and bring back a talisman that will help save his dying mother.

Stephen King and Peter Straub have created a classic quest story, with plenty of fantasy thrown in. With the help of Speedy Parker, a black musician and maintenance worker at an amusement park near the hotel, Jack sets out on his adventure armed with an old road atlas and some baubles that will aid him in his search.

Speedy also helps Jack understand the "Territories", which is another dimension or reality that somewhat parallels our world. The Territories - "an agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science ... they've gone on like that for centuries" - is populated by Twinners, who are doubles or doppelgangers of people in the "real world". Not everyone has a Twinner and most people are not aware of them. Twinners share many of the same qualities as their counterparts, but they are not the same person. One character describes them as two sides of the same coin.

The Twinner of Jack's mother, Lily Sawyer (aka the "Queen of the B Movies"), is Laura DeLoessean, the Queen of the Territories. Where Lily is suffering from cancer, Queen Laura has a strange sleeping sickness. The counterpart of Morgan Sloat, the former business partner of Jack's father, who is pressuring Lily to sell her portion of the business, is Morgan of Orris. While the Morgans are not alike physically, both are depicted as ruthlessly greedy and cruel. (Places and events can also have Twinners. For example, a palace coup and brief civil war in the Territories years ago had a ripple effect that erupted into World War II. As one character says, "I think we're affected all the time by things that go on in the Territories.")

It turns out that when Jack was six or seven years old, he used to occasionally "flip" over into the Territories; back then, he simply called it the Daydreams. (If the allusions to Mark Twain are not obvious enough, King and Straub title the first section of the novel "Jack Lights Out".)

Jack is reluctant to embark on his long journey, but his concern for his mother's health pushes him forward.

Fear and loneliness combined in the sharpest, most disheartening wave of unhappiness he had ever known. ... [A]ll safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. ... [But by] the end of his first days on the road, he seemed to himself to have grown from childhood right through adolescence into adulthood - into competence.

As Jack heads west, he hitches rides from strangers, works odd jobs for a few dollars, and often sleeps outside or in cheap motels. In one interview, King said he wanted to show the underside (a subsociety) of Ronald Reagan's America, "the ebb and flow of an underclass, the dregs of society, the roadies who are put upon by other people, the unhomed and homeless drifting just below everyone's sight."

Anthony Magistrale, writing about Jack's ordeals working at Smokey Updike's Oatley Tap bar and in the fields for the sadistic preacher Sunlight Gardener:

[These chapters] epitomize Jack's experiences on the road. The boy finds himself in a bondage (he keeps referring to the metaphor of the pitcher-plant) that neatly parallels Huck's servitude at the hands of the Duke and King. Huck and Jack are trapped by virtue of their innocence and vulnerability, manipulated by men without scruples who are interested only in obtaining power and lining their pockets.

During his journey in the Territories, Jack befriends a boy-wolf creature named Wolf who ends up flipping back with Jack into what Jack starts referring to as the "American Territories". Wolf is unnerved the bustle of modern society, and repulsed by the horrid smell of engines and pollution. At one point, the American Territories are described as the "smell of too many people running too many motors". As Wolf suffers panic attacks, Jack learns the often difficult responsibility of caring for others.

In discussing The Talisman, Douglas Winter (author of Stephen King: The Art of Darkness) refers to Leslie Fielder's controversial 1948 essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!", which explores the undercurrent of homosexuality in Huckleberry Finn and other classic American novels. Winter believes that King and Straub consciously invoke this sentiment as Jack openly expresses his love for both Wolf and Richard, often holding their hands to comfort them, offering intimacy and encouragement. And that affection is reciprocated. While never sexual, it evidences deep concern and a tight fraternal bond.

The Talisman is blunt statement against, and a warning against further, environmental degradation. The differences between the Territories, where the air is clean and fresh, and the smells of plants and food are alarmingly crisp and wonderful, and Jack's real world, are made obvious.

Straub:

The book does seem to be about the death of the land, the terrible poisoning of the land.

Winter:

The Territories represent that most American of mythical landscapes, and in its fading beauty, we experience a recovered sense of what America, in its rush to wealth and technology, has lost ...

Magistrale:

The Talisman, even more explicitly than Huckleberry Finn, is a discourse on the destruction of the pastoral ideal and its technological aftermath. In America's cities and suburbs, Jack and Wolf cannot dream of honesty and wholeness; only in the Territories is some measure of psychic unity still available. ... Inherent in this perception is a sense of tragic inevitability that somehow is never fully counterbalanced by Jack's personal survival or the Talisman's magical properties. It is, however, this aspect of The Talisman that effectively links the novel to Huckleberry Finn, Walden, Moby-Dick, the stories of Hemingway and Faulkner, and the poems of Robert Frost: all are unflinching, characteristically American examinations of the implacable advance of history.

Later in the book, Jack, now joined on his journey with his childhood friend Richard Sloat (Morgan's son), ends up travelling by slow train through an area called the Blasted Lands, which parallel the vast tracts of American west used by the United States military for decades to test nuclear weapons. There is an acidic taste of rusty metal and rotten fruit in the air, a "stink of missed connections, of blasted hopes and evil desires ... [N]othing seemed to have escaped withering, crippling damage".

Winter notes the transportation link to Twain's steamboat.

[F]or the boys, the railroad, like Twain's steamboat, is the symbol of an older, lost America, supplanted by even greater machines; but in the Territories, it is a symbol of the new order of a secular, technological culture. ... [Sloat] has imported the black magic of modern technology - not simply the train, but automatic weapons and explosives; ... he has infected the land and its people with the diseased world view of sterile rationality. ... Sloat and the cancerous engines of "progress" are superseding the old wisdoms, the intimacies between humanity and its environment.

Magistrale:

Beneath the surface of Twain's adventure story is a subtext concerning America's transition to a new age of industrial capitalism; the novel initiates Twain's skepticism about industrial civilization and his faith in the kind of world that humans create. ... The Talisman, even more explicitly than Huck Finn, is a discourse on the destruction of the pastoral ideal and its technological aftermath. In America's cities and suburbs, Jack and Wolf cannot dream of honesty and wholeness; only in the Territories is some measure of psychic unity still available.

Jack's journey - his "coming of age in a time when the assembly-line mentality of the rational world seems to hold sway over instinct and imagination" (Winter) - also reenacts the westward American expansion.

***

In a flashback we learn that Morgan Sloat and Jack's father, Phil Sawyer, were also able to flip into the Territories. Sloat wants to import modern technology and weapons into the Territories, where he believes he can take over when Queen Laura dies. (Sloat's plan is a nod towards Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.) In a flashback, Sloat remarks to Sawyer: "Can you imagine how much fucking clout we'd swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the rights guys over there? Do you have any idea? I think it'd be awesome. Awesome."

Magistrale:

The American capitalist has been setting the time for society since the start of this country, and in exporting the doctrine of oppressed labor to the Territories, Morgan Sloat represents the most contemporary illustration of capitalist imperialism.

In light of this pessimistic portrait, it is not surprising that both Huckleberry Finn and The Talisman should also highlight the unholy alliance between religion and money. In Huckleberry Finn, the word of God [through Sunlight Gardener] is used to justify even slavery, the most inhuman of acts, while in The Talisman a warped religious vision rationalizes the psychosexual exploitation of children in Sunlight Gardener's home. ...

The climatic scene of Huckleberry Finn occurs when Huck elects to forsake the moral posturing of his society and "go to hell" rather than return Jim to the institution of slavery ... Just as Huck selects human compassion over social and religious dogma, Jacks risks his life and his quest by refusing to abandon wither Wolf or Richard. The journeys down the Mississippi and across America parallel one another insofar as they are really about the moral educations of Huck and Jack. ... [B]efore the Talisman can work its healing magic, Jack must possess a set of moral principles that makes him worthy of its powers.

***

Towards the end of the novel, the talisman is described as "the nexus of all possible worlds", giving rise to comparisons to King's Dark Tower series. (There are clear references to some of King's other books. At one point, the evil Osmond is referred to as "the great and terrible" (Pet Sematary); a building complex is known as the Rainbird Towers (Firestarter). No doubt there are others, and references to Straub's books, as well.

***

The idea of a collaboration between King and Straub began in 1977. Each man had been an admirer of the other's work. King dubbed Straub "the best writer of supernatural tales that I know" while Straub saw King as his "ideal reader" and said that meeting him was like "suddenly discovering a long-lost family member - of finding a brother, really".

In 1981, the two men discussed collaborating on a novel. The idea for the story came from an old project of King's, but it was Straub that injected "enough vitality to make it roll," King says. "So in that sense, it's probably more his book than mine". The Talisman is an amalgam of both men's writing styles - King's "more robust and colloquial style [and] Straub's more reserved delivery" - and, as such, is more mannered and deliberate and lacks the incessant momentum of King's novels.

Straub:

There was no problem working together - our styles seemed to melt together. The book has its own sound; it doesn't sound like me and it doesn't sound like Steve. And that's nice - that's what we wanted. I don't think it's possible, really, for anybody to tell who wrote what. There were times when I deliberately imitated Steve's style and there were times when he deliberately, playfully, imitated mine.

King:

When I worked on my half of the copy editing, I went through large chunks of the manuscript unsure myself who had written what ... In fact, there were several times when I was reading through the thing that I thought I really did a good job, and it turned out it was Peter. And the only way I could tell was the typing style. He will double space after periods and between dashes, and I don't do that.

More comments on the writing of the book can be found here.

***

The novel ends with an epigram from Tom Sawyer:

So endth this chronicle. It being strictly the history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. ... Most of the characters who perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story again and see what ... they turned out to be; therefore, it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.

It would be nearly 20 years before King and Straub would revisit Jack Sawyer (Black House, 2001).

Next: Thinner (as Richard Bachman).

Stuff To Read

Michiko Kakutani reviews D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story.

Newsweek published an excerpt from the bio.

From The New Yorker: Maria Bustillos on Lester Bangs.

From this past April: Stephen King: "Tax Me, for F@%&'s Sake!"

Stephen King: Pet Sematary (1983)

"It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls - as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets another, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity."
Stephen King, Pet Sematary

Those 112 words are a fine summation of Pet Sematary, hyped as a book that, for a time, Stephen King was too frightened to finish writing. However, that claim is not quite true. In 1980, King mentioned he had written a novel dealing with burial customs, but "I have no plans to publish it ... It's too horrible. It's worse than The Shining or any of the other things. It's terrifying."

Sometime later he was asked, "Did you ever write anything too horrible to be published?" and he thought of this unpublished manuscript.

Tabby [his wife, Tabitha] had finished reading it in tears, and I thought it was a nasty book - I still think that it is a nasty book. ... Maybe I don't have the guts for that end of the business of horror fiction - for the final truths.

During a contractual dispute with Doubleday over monies that were owed to him, King agreed to publish Pet Sematary as the final book under his contract before signing with another publisher. He rewrote his 1979 manuscript, and allowed Doubleday to use the "too horrible" quote in its promotional material. The dust jacket states:

Can Stephen King scare even himself? Has [he] conceived a story so horrifying that he was for a time unwilling to finish writing it? Yes. This is it.

Part of King's reluctance to publish Pet Sematary was how personal it is. Back in the early 1980s - the peak of his fame - King said several times that his biggest fear by far was the death of one of his children. Specifics from the novel match details from King's own life. Like Louis Creed, King accepted a job at a university in Maine and moved his family into a big white house that bordered Route 15, a busy truck route. His daughter's cat died and the family buried it in a local "Pets Sematary". (Like Creed, King debated whether to tell his daughter the truth or simply imply that maybe the cat had wandered off.) And one day, King's young son was headed straight towards the road's traffic when King grabbed the back of his coat and pulled him down to safety. In the novel, Louis Creed is not so lucky. Their young son, two-year-old Gage, is hit and dragged by a 18-wheeler.

Because of the closeness of the subject matter, Douglas Winter calls Pet Sematary "one of the most vivid, powerful, and disturbing tales" King has ever written.

***

Dr. Louis Creed and his family - wife Rachel and children Ellie and Gage - have moved from Chicago to the small, rural town of Ludlow, Maine. Creed is starting a job in the health clinic of a local university. After moving in, Louis befriends Jud Crandall and his wife Norma, an older couple who live across the road. Louis is immediately drawn to Jud, and often spending his evenings drinking beers with the older man.

Crandall takes the family back into the woods behind their house to a clearing that the local kids maintain as a pet cemetery. Seeing the cemetery brings the idea of mortality home to Ellie for the first time, and she is upset that her cat, Winston Churchill (or Church, for short), will die one day. While Rachel and the children are visiting her parents in Chicago, Church is hit by a passing vehicle and killed. Jud suggests burying the cat immediately, not in the regular cemetery, but in another, more mysterious burying ground a few miles back into the woods. Two days later, Church reappears in the house.

The resuscitating powers of the burial grounds - once inhabited by the Micmac Indians before the ground went "sour" - is a local secret. When Gage dies, Louis is so overcome with grief - insisting that fathers burying sons is not part of the natural order - that he decides to disinter his son's corpse and bring him to the special burial grounds.

Pet Sematary focuses on the question of moral responsibility for interfering with the natural order. As a doctor, Louis knows that "except perhaps for childbirth, [death is] the most natural thing in the world". Our differences mean nothing to the grave; none of us will escape death. The idea that you or anyone in your family could die at any time is an uncomfortable truth, but it's one "you learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas". But when Gage is killed, Louis does not accept this bitter truth. Rather, he convinces himself that he can manipulate the powers residing in the burial grounds to his advantage and the good of his family.

Louis remains rational in other parts of his life, but he believes he can keep his family safe from the outside world. He recalls moving into the Ludlow house, having the boxes of their possessions act as "a small enough bulwark between his family and the coldness of all the outer world where their names and their family customs were not known". Louis thinks back to the death of Victor Pascow - a jogger who was killed on Louis's first day on the job - as the beginning of this loss of security. Pascow's death seemed "to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck". It is only when Louis awakes the morning after burying Gage and sees little muddy footprints in his kitchen that he feels like "a sucker in some game in which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least".

***

The local secret of the burial ground is just one of many secrets in the novel. Louis does not confide in his wife at all. He keeps Church's death and resurrection a secret, and he has never told Rachel that her father offered to pay for his entire medical education if he broke off his engagement to her. Rachel is consumed with guilt over the death of her young sister, who had spinal meningitis and was kept hidden in a back room; it's a story she has never fully told her husband. Louis's plans for Gage's body is kept a secret from everyone, even Jud, who has chosen to keep some history of the burial grounds hidden from Louis.

Early in the book, Louis says there is so such thing as a true union between two people, that even in a successful marriage, it is impossible to know the secret mind of another person.

He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together ... was their respect for the mystery - the half-grasped but never spoken idea that ... there was no such thing as marriage, so such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. ... And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

***

Anthony Magistrale sees similarities between Pet Sematary and the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom King cited in Danse Macabre as an influence. Magistrale writes that Louis Creed has much in common with Hawthorne's darkest characters, as he is an impassioned but misguided man who fails "to recognize the inviolable distinction separating human idealism from the limitations of reality".

As is so often the case in Hawthorne's canon, the awareness of sin forces King's characters to proceed in one of two possible directions. The first is toward moral regeneration, a spirit of renewed commitment to other human beings that is born from an acceptance of the devil's thesis as postulated in "Young Goodman Brown," that "Evil is the nature of mankind", and that the failure to acknowledge either the existence of evil or its nexus to mankind results in spiritual death. On the other hand, the discovery of sin can frequently be overwhelming; it does not always lead to a higher state of moral consciousness. In Hawthorne and King, the encounter with evil is often portrayed as an experience that leads to isolation and self-destruction. Characters in their fictions commit their worst transgressions in refusing to recognize the evil in themselves, and in failing to exert a greater measure of self-discipline.

***

Pet Sematary "presents an irreconcilable opposition between wilderness and civilisation". During the initial walk to the pet cemetery, Jud Crandall tells the Creeds: "This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. ... I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is. All I'm saying is that you don't want to get messing around in these woods ... God knows where you might end up ..."

Kevin Corstorphine discusses the idea of place ("the politics of territory") in Pet Sematary in this essay. He quotes Thomas L. Dumm, who wrote that "etymologies suggest that fear once meant the experience of being between places of protection", in transit, unsettled. Thinking about Louis's need to keep his family safe, Corstorphone asks: "If [home] does not give us the order we look for, then what place does?"

When Jud takes the Creeds up a hill, they can see the Penobscot River and trees, roads, fields, the town's church spire, and other buildings. Rachel asks Louis is a low, awed voice: "Honey, do we own this?"

And before Louis could answer, Jud said: "It's part of the property, oh yes."

Which wasn't, Louis thought, quite the same thing.

Magistrale:

The journey into the wilderness in Hawthorne's fiction is always fraught with danger. Within the New England pines of Hawthorne's symbolic landscapes we find the powerful rhythms of primordial and uncontrollable forces. Hawthorne's Puritan ancestors fully comprehended that within the uncut trees surrounding their early enclaves lurked elements that were seldom benevolently disposed toward human welfare.

Heinrich Zimmer expounds on this point:

The forest has always been a place of initiation for there the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits, and the forces of nature reveal themselves. The forest if the antithesis of house and heart ... It holds the dark forbidden things - secrets, terrors, which threaten the protected life of the ordered world of common day.

Magistrale:

The events which transpire in the woods behind the Pet Sematary are reminiscent of the narrative pattern which occurs in Hawthorne's fiction. An individual loses his innocence in the encounter with tragic circumstances and is faced with the struggle to redefine himself morally. In portraying the negative results of this struggle, both writers suggest that there are certain mysteries man must simply learn to accept, certain secrets he has no business attempting to discover, and certain ethical barriers that he only transcends at the expense of his soul. Hawthorne's tales and King's novel achieve their power in demonstrating that one's humanity is dreadfully easy to lose, and what we abandon ourselves to possess, we necessarily become.

Rebecca Janicker:

Pet Sematary makes much of the unknown, potentially malevolent, nature of the wilderness in which this young family suddenly finds itself: rural space is continually, and sharply, contrasted with urban and civilised space. Along with this comes notions of bad space; allusions both to ancient evil and the taint of human sin lingering in the landscape abound, suggesting that there exist fundamentally evil places in New England into which it would be better for people not to venture. ...

[T]he wilderness essentially mirrors the human potential for falling into moral darkness; the Creed family's move from civilisation to a precarious existence on the edge of a wilderness mirrors their fall from security to a horrific void.

***

Pet Sematary also includes allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Louis tries convincing himself that the resurrected Church is not acting like "Frankencat". When Gage returns from the dead, his face is described as "swollen, as if he had been terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands". Victor Pascow's first name may be a nod to Victor Frankenstein. (Louis also uses the term "wild work" when referring to digging up Gage's body, a phrase used in Bram Stoker's Dracula.)

Jesse W. Nash calls Pet Sematary "post-modern gothic", a transformation or mutation of the traditional Gothic tale, since it combines King's "own life experiences and fantasies, popular culture, and his reading of archaic burial lore". Nash, in a negative critique of the novel, states that while King may have wanted to write directly about the death of a child, his manuscript detours away.

King's novel does not deal with death. It deals with a fear that replaces the fear of death, and that fear is the fear of the return of the dead. Such a replacement is a defense mechanism no doubt, and that is probably why King's novel is so popular and why the ideas that form the basis for that novel are so persistent in folk and popular culture. Death may well be an issue the American family and society will not face, but then neither will Stephen King.

Magistrale appears to disagree:

[A]s Pet Sematary makes clear, the horror story - at its most penetrating, important moments, those of the immaculate clarity of insight which we call art - is not about make-believe at all. It is a literature whose essence is our single certainty - that, in Hamlet's words, "all that live must die".

King, from Danse Macabre:

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith. That we retain our sanity in the face of these simply yet blinding mysteries is nearly divine.

Next: The Talisman (with Peter Straub).

Stephen King: Cycle Of The Werewolf (1983)

These are uncomfortable times in the small town of Tarker's Mills, Maine.

A killer has been stalking the town, coming out of hiding each time the moon is full. It starts during a January blizzard as railroad worker Arnie Westrum is mauled to death under a snow-choked sky.

In March, before a nameless drifter is killed, several townspeople hear howls and groans - "lonely and savage" - that sound almost like human words. Rumours arise that it is actually some sort of wolf-man doing the killing. The murders continue for six months.

The town council, fearing another attack by the Full Moon Killer, cancels the annual Fourth of July fireworks show. Ten-year-old Marty Coslaw (who uses a wheelchair) is devastated. However, his Uncle Al - the only member of his family that treats him like a regular boy - slips Marty some fireworks of his own and tells him to have his own personal celebration. That night, after everyone has gone to asleep, Marty wheels out into the front yard and sets off a few twizzers.

Suddenly, the werewolf - seven feet tall, with eyes glaring like green lamps - appears out of the bushes. Marty quickly lights a bunch of small firecrackers and throws it at the beast. The injured werewolf flees into the night and Marty's parents, believing the boy has been traumatized by the incident, send him off to stay with relatives in Vermont.

In the meantime, Constable Neary holds court at the barber shop, explaining his theory that the killer is probably someone with a split personality, "what I'd call fucking schizos". No one pays too much attention to the telling detail Marty supplied, that the firecrackers had most likely put out the werewolf's left eye.

When Marty returns home in the fall - as groups of men head out on hunting expeditions, looking for the beast (though most use it as an easy excuse to go off in the woods and get drunk) - Marty believes that whoever the werewolf is during the daytime, that person will likely be wearing an eyepatch. While trick-or-treating on Halloween, Marty finds encounters someone wearing a left-eye patch, and sees "some vital similarity in this man's human face to the snarling face of the animal". Back home, Marty has to think hard about what to do with this "scary, almost unbelievable knowledge".

***

The Cycle of the Werewolf is a short book (128 pages), with illustrations by Berni Wrightson. The original idea for the collaboration was a calendar - but King ended up writing much more than little vignettes, so the project turned into a short book with twelve chapters.

As he did in Christine, King explores the idea of the split personality, of a battle of good and evil raging inside of one individual. This person is a pillar of the community and a religious man, and he ends up rationalizing his murderous behaviour: "I do good here, and if I sometimes do evil, why, men have done evil before me; evil also serves the will of God, or so the book of Job teaches us; if I have been cursed by Outside, then God will bring me down in His time."

The town of Tarker's Mills, much like Jerusalem's Lot, has a seamy side hidden beneath its pastoral exterior: spousal abuse (a man who finds his wife's pain "more amusing than anything"), alcoholism, infidelity. "[T]he town can be a dark place. ... The town keeps its secrets." And, again, it is a child that appears most rational amid the bumbling adults, Marty's patronizing father, and the bumpkin constable.

The Cycle of the Werewolf is an enjoyable little tale, nothing overly suspenseful or truly horrifying, and the ending was satisfying, if a bit pat. (It was made into the movie Silver Bullet in 1985.)

Next: Pet Sematary.

Stephen King: Christine (1983)

Arnold Richard Cunningham, a pimply-faced 17-year-old high school senior, buys a battered 1958 Plymouth Fury for a few hundred bucks from an elderly crank named Roland LeBay. Arnie's best friend, Dennis Guilder, tries to dissuade him, but Arnie, acting "like a man possessed", is frantic to own the 20-year-old damaged hulk, which LeBay calls Christine.

Later on, Arnie tells Dennis:

I saw that car – and I felt such an attraction to it ... I can't explain it very well even to myself. But I saw I could make her better. ... I don't think she's any ordinary car. I don't know why I think that ... but I do.

Arnie's parents are furious at their son's impulsive purchase and forbid him to park it at the house. He rents storage and repair space at a local garage and begins spending all of his free time working on the car, fixing things haphazardly, trying to get it street legal. Meanwhile, his friendship with Dennis is strained, and the two friends drift apart. (Dennis narrates two of the three sections of the book; the middle section is told in the third person.)

As Christine is restored to her former glory, Arnie experiences similar positive changes. His skin clears up, he gains self-confidence, and he begins dating a beautiful classmate, Leigh Cabot. But the transformation soon turns negative: Arnie begins exhibiting personality traits that no one even knew existed. He often looks haggard, he starts limping and suffering back pain, and he begins talking like LeBay (who dies shortly after selling the car), inheriting his anger and fury, referring to various authority figures as "shitters". As Arnie becomes more and more stubborn and possessive over Christine, he alienates himself from everyone around him.

Christine is not an ordinary car. The radio plays only music and news bulletins from the 50s. There is also a thick, rotten smell that everyone but Arnie notices, a lingering whiff of decomposition or "gone over eggs". It is the stench of death. Years before, LeBay's young daughter Rita choked to death on a piece of food in the back seat. Six months later, his distraught wife Veronica committed suicide, dying by carbon monoxide.

Dennis has nightmares about the car, and he realizes that he's afraid to walk in front of it, as though it might "accidentally" pop into gear and run him over. Leigh is similarly wary, and she tells Arnie that when they make out in the car, it feels as though she is being watched, with the green lights of the dashboard resembling cat's eyes, "blazing with hate". Arnie acts less honestly passionate and more lecherous while in the car. Leigh eventually believes the car is alive, and sees her as a rival for Arnie's affection. After she nearly chokes to death (mirroring Rita's death), Leigh realizes that Arnie was slow to help her (as LeBay was hesitant to save his daughter) because "Christine didn't want her to have any help. This was Christine's way of getting rid of her."

When a bunch of hoodlums vandalize Christine – a fight with Arnie led to their expulsion from school and they have promised revenge – Arnie vows to destroy the shitters. He begins repairing Christine again, but this time the repairs are complete in a matter of days. Even Arnie is somewhat mystified, experiencing blackouts where "he couldn't remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn't". Arnie soon realizes that Christine has the ability to regenerate, to fix itself; as its odometer runs backwards - which Arnie initially dismisses as a wiring glitch - it gains power and strength.

Christine begins driving around town in the middle of the night by itself - sometimes with the corpse of LeBay at the wheel - idling outside Leigh's house, and tracking down the vandals and eliminating them one by one. King describes the car in human terms: the grille is "a grinning mouth"; the car sits, "seeming to brood ... engine growling softly". Arnie is questioned by the police several times about these peculiar hit-and-runs, but he has air-tight alibis - and there is never any damage to Christine's pristine red-and-white exterior.

After being questioned, Arnie is sick to his stomach. He understands what is happening, but cannot imagine getting rid of the car. He considers junking it tantamount to committing suicide. But as Christine's death count rises, he battles against LeBay's possession. When he realizes that Christine will likely not stop killing until everyone close to him is dead, he begs Dennis for help: "Sometimes I feel like I'm not even here any more." Dennis and Leigh devise a plan to completely destroy Christine - and save Arnie, if possible.

***

In Christine, King draws upon two classics of the gothic horror genre - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - and the theme of the free will, an individual's choice to do good rather than evil. King uses Stevenson's transformation of personalty and the evil within, while Arnie's restoration of Christine and its deadly results mimic Frankenstein's creation of his monster.

Douglas Winter (Stephen King: The Art of Darkness) states that those older books depict the fears of an "age of imperial decline". King writes about similar cultural fears in the latter half of the 20th century, a time of immense technological advancement. In many respects, people are living their lives according to a pace set by machines, often machines that we are unable to wholly comprehend.

King also uses the metaphor of the machine to describe the uncertainty of adolescence and the search for identity:

That's something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don't know what they fuck they are or what they're supposed to do. There are clues, but that's all. ... [T]hey say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pill you along into a life that's really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside.

King often presents technology in a negative light, as antagonistic to human welfare and values. People seldom benefit from scientific progress in his books – and any progress that is made often becomes uncontrollable. In King's words: "Our technology has outraced our morality." Thus, individuals abdicate responsibility for their actions and creations – and that (in King's fiction) often leads to supernatural manifestations or allows evil to thrive.

University of Vermont professor Tony Magistrale: "[A]s man becomes more reliant on his technological creations, he comes to resemble them in his insensitivity and moral impatience." In Christine, Arnie becomes dehumanized through his unseverable attachment to his car.

Despite the brisk momentum of the second half of Christine, King takes at least one-third of the book building his premise and laying down the back story. The hardcover is 526 pages; it could easily have been whittled down to 326.

Next: Cycle of the Werewolf.

Stephen King: Different Seasons (1982)

In "The Breathing Method", one of four novellas collected in Different Seasons, an inscription on the keystone above the large fireplace in a mysterious private club at 249B West Thirty-Fifth Street in New York City reads:

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

In his introduction to Night Shift, John D. MacDonald wrote:

I do not give a diddly-whoop what Stephen King chooses as an area in which to write. The fact that he presently enjoys writing in the field of spooks and spells and slitherings in the cellar is to me the least important and useful fact about the man anyone can relate. ... [T]he main thing is story. ... [O]nce you know how, you can write in any area. Stephen King is not going to restrict himself to his present field in intense interest.

With Different Seasons, King made good on MacDonald's prediction. Three of the four novellas have no horror or supernatural elements whatsoever. Forget genres, King is saying with this collection. Don't think of me as a horror writer – think of me as simply a writer.

In the Afterword, King states that each of these stories was written after finishing the first draft of a longer novel.

[I]t's as if I've always finished the big job with just enough gas left in the tank to blow off one good-sized novella. The Body, the oldest story here, was written direct after 'Salem's Lot; Apt Pupil was written in a two-week period following The Shining (and following Apt Pupil I wrote nothing for three months – I was pooped); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was written after finishing The Dead Zone; and The Breathing Method, the most recently written of these stories, immediately following Firestarter.

(Douglas Winter, who interviewed King for his book, The Art of Darkness, offers a different chronology: "Rita/Shawshank" was written after The Stand while "The Breathing Method" came after Cujo.)

All four novellas revolve around the act of telling stories.

In "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (Hope Springs Eternal)", Red, a convicted murderer, gathers strands of information from a variety of sources to tell us the story of fellow Shawshank prison inmate Andy Dufresne, an accountant who was falsely convicted of killing his wife and her lover. After 27 years of blind hope, "brute persistence" and seemingly limitless patience, Andy escapes and becomes a folk hero to the other inmates, an avatar of hope against an inhumane institution.

"The Breathing Method (A Winter's Tale)" is a gothic horror story in which a group of older, professional men gather each week at a Manhattan brownstone to trade tales of the uncanny. On a snowy Christmas Eve, a retired physician recounts the tale of an unmarried pregnant woman who came to his office back in 1935.

"Apt Pupil (Summer of Corruption)" is a tense, psychological thriller in which Todd Bowden, a seemingly all-American teenager, blackmails a Nazi war criminal into telling him stories of the death camps. Todd is obsessed with the firing squads, the gas chambers, the ovens, the experimentations – "all the gooshy stuff". Bringing up the past has unexpected consequences and as his relationship with Kurt Dussander deepens, Todd finds that he no longer has the upper hand.

The tour de force of this collection is "The Body (Fall from Innocence)". It is a classic coming-of-age story, a journey from innocence to experience, in which four close friends (all 12 years old) head out from their homes in Castle Rock, Maine, on an overnight trip to see the dead body of a boy their own age who went missing three days earlier. One of the boys, Gordon Lachance, now an adult with a successful writing career much like Stephen King's, is recalling those eventful two days.

Safe inside the confines of a tree house the boys have built near a vacant lot in Castle Rock, the boys - Gordie, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio - play cards, smoke, and look at girly and true crime magazines. Vern relates a conversation he overheard, in which his older brother mentioned the body near some train tracks, roughly 30 miles away. The four boys decide to look for the body – one final summer adventure before trudging back to school the following week - packing sleeping bags and concocting a cover story for their parents.

A common theme in many of King's books - Rage, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Carrie, among others - is the damage (both emotionally and/or physically) that parents regularly inflict on their defenseless children. Each of the four boys has suffered some type of neglect or abuse from their families.

Chris's alcoholic father is always on a "mean streak" and beats him on a regular basis. When Teddy was eight years old, his father punished him for breaking a plate by searing both of his ears on a hot stove. Vern seems to exist mainly as a punching bag for his older brother.

Gordon's parents are still mourning the accidental death of their other son, Dennis, who was ten years older than Gordie. Dennis died five months earlier when his Army jeep was broadsided by another truck. Gordie says he relates to the title character of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book which Gordie assumed was science fiction when he chose it for a school book report. He says he still really enjoyed it. "Nobody even notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him." Like Ellison's nameless main character, Gordie and his friends' identities are in flux. They are embarking on young adulthood and the act of self-creation, searching for their true selves.

Any semblance of a loving or caring environment is one that the boys must carve out for themselves, among themselves. King is a master at portraying the special bonds of young adulthood, and the love that exists between friends. This entire story is testament to that fact, but there are some exceptional moments. One occurs early in their hike, after the guy who runs the town dump insults Teddy's father (who is confined to a veterans mental hospital and who Teddy, despite the abuse he has suffered, still loves and defends). Teddy explodes in anger and tears, and Chris goes to comfort him, holding his hand and telling him:

Lissen, Teddy, what do you care what a fat old pile of shit like him said about your father? Huh? I mean, sincerely! That don't change nothin, does it? ... He still stormed the beach at Normandy, right? Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy? ... He was rankin you, man. He was tryin to rank you over that friggin fence, you know it? No strain, man. No fuckin strain. He don't know nothin about your old man. ... He's just dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?

Teddy apologizes for his outbursts. "Hey if I spoiled your good time, I'm sorry."

Vern suddenly says: "I ain't sure I want it to be no good time. ... [G]oing to see a dead kid — it shouldn't be a party, maybe. ... I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.

Within this tight group of friends, Vern knows he can share his honest fears and worries in a way he cannot do with anyone else in the world.

I'm ascared to look at that kid cause if he's, you know, if he's really bad ... I'll have nightmares about him and wake up thinkin it's him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood ... I can't help it. But I feel like we hafta see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta.

(As King writes in "The Mangler" (Night Shift): "It was the way things worked – the human animal had a built-in urge to view the remains".)

***

Near the spot he overheard his brother describe, Vern spies a single, pale white hand sticking out of the blackberry brambles. Gordie:

It would have been better to see the whole body, all at once, but instead there was only that limp outstretched hand, horribly white, the fingers limply splayed ... It told us the truth of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image of that hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity. ...

Chris and I were the first to reach the body of Ray Brower. He was face down. Chris looked into my eyes, his face set and stern – an adult's face.

The corpse of Ray Brower is death stripped of metaphor. It is the end of life in its most raw form: a lifeless body in the bushes, crawling with bugs. Seeing the corpse brings the concrete idea of death - the reality of his brother's death and his own mortality - home to Gordie for the first time. The idea of death is no longer an abstract thought.

What makes the tragedy brutally real for Gordie is knowing that Ray's Keds were knocked completely off his feet; he sees them hanging in the bushes about three feet away. Earlier in the story, Gordie says that for him, summer will always mean running down to the market on a hot day with some change in his pocket, "my feet dressed in Keds".

***

On the first day, after the boys have set up their camp for the evening, Gordie tells one of his stories: "The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan". (Both this story and "Stud City" are included within the novella; they were published by King while he was in college.)

Hogan - "this fat kid nobody likes" - enters a pie-eating contest. To get revenge on the people who have teased and hurt him, he drinks a bottle of castor oil beforehand. When he gets sick after eating a couple of pies, it starts an epic domino effect of vomiting among both contestants and audience members alike. Hogan then walks home.

"Just goes upstairs to his room, locks the door, and lays down on his bed."

I downed the last swallow in Chris's Coke and tossed it into the woods.

"Yeah, that's cool, then what happened?" Teddy asked eagerly.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Teddy asked.

"It means it's the end. When you don't know what happens next, that's the end."

"Whaaaaat?" Vern cried. There was an upset, suspicious look on his face ... "How’d it come out?"

"You have to use your imagination," Chris said patiently.

"No, I ain't!" Vern said angrily. "He's supposed to use his imagination! He made up the fuckin story!"

The full conversation is actually a sly bit of literary criticism: what makes a story, when is a story complete, the storyteller's responsibility to a reader, how much effort should a reader put into a work of fiction, etc.

A little later, Chris tells Gordie to not pay any attention to Teddy or Vern, that the story was good. "They come outta you like bubbles out of soda pop. ... It's like you could tell a million stories and still only get the ones on top. You'll be a great writer someday, Gordie."

The boys talk about starting junior high in a few days. Chris says, "And you know what, Gordie? By next June, we'll all be quits."

Gordie is shocked. "What are you talking about? Why would that happen?"

It's not gonna be like grammar school, that's why. You'll be in the college courses. Me and Teddy and Vern, we'll all be in the shop courses, playing pocket-pool with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. ... You'll meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys. That's just the way it works, Gordie. That's how they got it set up. ...

"Meet a lot of pussies is what you mean," I said.

He gripped my arm. "No, man. Don't say that. Don't even think that. They'll get your stories. Not like Vern and Teddy."

"Fuck the stories. I'm not going in with a lot of pussies. No sir."

"If you don't, then you're an asshole."

"What's asshole about wanting to be with your friends?"

He looked at me thoughtfully, as if deciding whether or not to tell me something. ...

"It's asshole if your friends can drag you down. I know about you and your folks. They don't give a shit about you. ... It's like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then make I ought to. ... If you go along with us just because you don't want the gang to break up, you'll wind up just another grunt ... Nothin'll get written down. Cause you'll be just another wise guy with shit for brains."

Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colorlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already, that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses.

***

While it is a fool's game to match up autobiographical details in a writer's fiction, I feel safe in saying that what Gordie says about his writing career are King's thoughts as well.

Gordie sees writing as private act – and he remains somewhat embarrassed about it:

I always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to my stories ... I wanted [Richie] to read them and at the same time I didn't – an uneasy mix of pride and shyness that has never changed in me very much when someone asks to look. ... [Richie said:] "You're pretty good at this. Why don't you show these to Chris? I said no, I wanted it to be a secret, and Richie said: Why? It ain't pussy. You ain't no queer. I mean, it ain't poetry."

As an adult:

Me? I'm a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. ... My story sounds so much like a fairytale that it's fucking absurd. ... [T]he writing isn't so easy or as much fun as it used to be. ... And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend". ...

Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little. ... And although no one is going to call me the Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat ... What scares me is how often it hurts these days. Back then I was sometimes disgusted by how damned good it felt to write. These days I sometimes look at this typewriter and wonder when it's going to run out of good words.

***

When the boys get back to town and Chris heads back to his own house, Gordie can't think of anything to say.

Even if I had known the right thing to say, I probably couldn't have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think — that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn't what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those love bites. It's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I've made my life from the words, and I know that is so.

***

Keith Silva, "A Requiem for Ray Brower: Encounters with Death in Stephen King's 'The Body'" (thesis):

Death is a fact of life, just like the facts that parents do not always love their children, adults can often be cruel and hurtful, and friendships that appear at the age of twelve that would seem to last for eternity seldom do. Although "The Body" is imbued with these elements of indifference, despair, and death ... [e]ach death (and life) is remembered and it resonates with the ones that preceded it until finally Gordie can fully realize what mortality actually means and what a joy it is to be living and alive.

Silva points out another of King's strongest themes, the randomness of life and death:

In the end, survival is not a result of heroic triumph, and there is no action that can restore innocence destroyed by experience. In the end, survival is the result of random chance tempered in the end by fate.

All you can do is what Lard Ass Hogan did after his pie-eating contest: Go home, lock the door, lie down on your bed and be glad you are still alive.

Next: Christine.