Stephen King: From A Buick 8 (2002)

Stephen King completed a draft of this novel before his June 1999 accident, but its eventual release was pushed back a few years, apparently because it involves a serious car crash somewhat similar to the one that nearly killed King. He published Dreamcatcher, Black House, and Everything's Eventual before sending From A Buick 8 out into the world.

The story begins in the summer of 1979, when a mysterious man in black abandons a vintage Buick Roadmaster at a rural Pennsylvania gas station. An examination of the car raises questions about its origins: the battery is not hooked up to the unorthodox engine, the exhaust system is made of glass, the dashboard instruments are fake, and the odometer reads 000000. The local police (Troop D) eventually tow the vehicle back to their barracks and store it in Shed B.

Weird things start happening. The temperature is often 10-20 degrees colder inside Shed B than outside. When it gets especially chilly, extraordinarily bright flashes of light (the officers call them "lightquakes") emanate from and envelope the Buick. Troop D officers observing the car through the shed's windows can often hear (and feel) a low humming sound. Finally, various creatures are ejected out of the car's trunk - which is eventually believed to be a portal to another world/dimension.

The book is set during one day in 2002, as various officers tell the story of the Buick to Ned Wilcox, the 18-year-old son of Curtis Wilcox, a former member of Troop D who was struck and killed by a drunk driver when Ned was very young. Ned hangs around the barracks, doing odd jobs; he has numerous questions about his father (who was obsessed with the Buick).

From A Buick 8's message is: life is unknowable, things happen for no particular reason, and we will not be given an answer to every one of our questions. In an Author's Note, King describes the book as "a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them". King says a book's message should "arise naturally from the tale itself", but in this case he hammers his basic point home over and over.

What if you're never able to solve for x? (page 123)

[Curt realized] that he was almost certainly never going to know what he wanted to know. (173)

There comes a time when most folks see the big picture and realize they're puckered up not to kiss smiling fate on the mouth but because life just slipped them a pill, and it tastes bitter. (173)

Sometimes there's nothing to learn, or no way to learn it, or no reason to even try. ... (179)

Nothing. In the end, that's what it comes down to. If there's a formula - some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that - I don't see it. (198)

All he had was a lot of questions, and the naive belief that just because he felt he needed the answers, those answers would come. (212)

The world rarely finishes its conversations. (307)

The authors of The Complete Stephen King Universe call the novel a "subtle triumph". I disagree, though there is a solid short story tucked away in From A Buick 8. At 350 pages, however, the novel is far too long. King includes pages and pages about police procedure, taking great pains to illustrate the familial atmosphere of the Troop D barracks, but all of that is secondary to the main plot.

His tale is repetitious and dull. Several "lightquakes" are extensively described, although the same things happen during each one. Curt Wilcox ventures into Shed B (with a heavy rope tied around his waist in case his fellow officers need to yank him back out to safety) to conduct some experiments regarding the Buick not once, but several times. The creatures that "come through" the Buick's trunk are certainly disgusting, but they don't strike seem particularly horrific. King wants to make these otherworldly beings as repulsive as possible, but his descriptions seem half-hearted.

Along the way, though, there are a couple of descriptions that are pure King:

Matt Babicki's radio was an endless blare of static with a few voices sticking out of it like the feet or fingers of buried men. (89)

The sun, going down in a cauldron of blood ... (106)

If King had truly retired from publishing as he vowed to do while recovering from his accident, From A Buick 8 would have been his final non-Dark Tower novel. Thankfully, his extraordinary career did not fizzle to an end with this pallid offering.

Next: The Dark Tower V: Wolves Of The Calla.

Stephen King: Everything's Eventual (2002)

Stephen King's fourth collection of short fiction - subtitled "14 Dark Tales" - gathers up what feels like a lot of loose ends. Unlike his previous collections, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes, all of these stories had been released before.

Five stories were first published in a signed limited edition called Six Stories, two were previously released on the audio book Blood and Smoke, and "Riding The Bullet" was the first mass market e-book release. Most interestingly, four stories are from The New Yorker, a magazine most readers might regard as an odd venue for King's work.

The two best stories in this collection - "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" and "The Death Of Jack Hamilton" - are from The New Yorker, and have nothing to do with horror or the supernatural. King has done some of his best work when he has stepped outside his usual genres - Different Seasons is an obvious example - and these two tales showcase his talents as a storyteller.

"All That You Love Will Be Carried Away": Alfie Zimmer, a salesman of frozen gourmet foods, sits in a motel room near Lincoln, Nebraska, holding a revolver and thinking about suicide. Beside him is a notebook in which he has collected (over seven years) graffiti from the walls of public men's rooms. Alfie considers ways of disposing of the notebook, fearing being perceived as crazy when it is found. He eventually wanders outside, and contemplates the lights shining in a distant farmhouse.

"The Death Of Jack Hamilton": This brilliant narrative concerns the agonizing death of one member of John Dillinger's gang. Told in the first person by Homer Van Meter, who was in real life part of Dillinger's group, King nails the narrative voice perfectly. It never sounds as though there is a writer behind it. It's an inconsequential story, perhaps, but entertaining and well-executed.

"Autopsy Room Four": Howard Cottrell is bitten by a snake while looking in the weeds for his golf ball. Presumed to have suffered a fatal heart attack, Howard is in fact only paralyzed and unconscious. He awakens on the autopsy table in a morgue and realizes that he must somehow signal to the technicians that he is still alive before they begin cutting him up.

Also: "The Little Sisters Of Eluria" is a light, satisfying Dark Tower tale set after young Roland's adventures in Wizard & Glass and before we meet him on the trail of the Man in Black in The Gunslinger.

Despite the high points, King misses more often than he hits in this collection.

"The Road Virus Heads North" combines two ideas King has written about previously: a painting that both comes alive (Rose Madder) and changes its perspective ("The Sun Dog"). Amusing only for the details King throws in regarding the buyer of the painting. Richard Kinnell, the author of many "numbingly successful [horror] novels", lives in Derry in a mansion dubbed "The House That Gore Built". Mainstream critics compare Kinnell's excessive prose to "projectile vomiting on the page"; however, "most of those folks were ignoramuses, at least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured their ignorance".

"Riding The Bullet": Alan Parker, a student at the University of Maine, gets a message that his mother has suffered a stroke and is in the hospital, and he hitchhikes 120 miles to see her. One of the cars that picks him up is apparently driven by a recently deceased man. (That ride may be a dream, however.) The second half of the story concerns Alan's feelings about eventually losing his mother. King covered similar ground years ago (and with much deeper and personal emotions) in "The Woman In The Room" (Night Shift).

Other ideas - a haunted room in an old hotel ("1408") and a maniacal machete-wielding headwaiter in a cafe ("Lunch At The Gotham Cafe") - are too thin and cliched to truly work, despite King's admirable attempts to give them life.

Next: From A Buick 8.

Stephen King: Announces His Retirement (2002)

In January 2002, Stephen King, then 54 years old, told the Los Angeles Times that he was retiring from publishing books.

King explained he had a few books in the pipeline (Everything's Eventual, a collection of short stories, and From A Buick 8, which he had completed before his 1999 accident, and he wanted to finish the Dark Tower series.

"Then, that's it. I'm done. Done writing books. ... You get to a point where you get to the edges of a room, and you can go back and go where you've been, and basically recycle stuff. I've seen it in my own work. People when they read Buick Eight are going to think Christine. It's about a car that's not normal, OK? You say, 'I've said the things that I have to say, that are new and fresh and interesting to people.' Then you have a choice. You can either continue to go on, or say I left when I was still on top of my game. I left when I was still holding the ball, instead of it holding me."

King had also hinted at retirement back in 1998, after Bag of Bones was published, saying he feared drifting into self-parody.

The Onion weighed in:

Obviously, King never retired. Indeed, he barely slowed down.

In 2007, he explained his comments: "When I said to that lady from the L.A. Times I might retire, I was still recovering from the accident that I was in, I was in a lot of pain, and I was under the pressure of finishing The Dark Tower. At that point, retirement looked good. When the pain went away and The Dark Tower finished up, retirement started to look bad."

Still going strong at age 66, King will publish two novels this year (Mr. Mercedes in June and Revival in November).

Stephen King: Black House (with Peter Straub) (2001)

Seventeen years after co-writing The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub reunited for a sequel. Jack Sawyer is a retired Los Angeles policeman now living in French Landing, Wisconsin. The small town is being menaced by a serial killer/cannibal, and Sawyer - initially reluctant to lend his prodigious talents to solving the case - eventually joins the hunt for the man nicknamed the Fisherman.

Black House is also an offshoot of King's Dark Tower series. The serial killer is also working for (and possessed by) an agent of the Crimson King. In exchange for special powers, including teleportation, the killer has agreed to turn over any special children that can be used as Breakers to weaken the Beams that keep the Dark Tower standing.

While much of Black House sounds and feels like a King novel, there are extensive literary flourishes, especially in the early chapters, that are likely more Straub's style. (Also, Straub is originally from Wisconsin.) The opening is similar to King's Needful Things, with a narrator taking us around the town, pointing out the geography and some of the residents. King later portrays the townspeople as extremely ghoulish as they arrive by the carload at an abandoned shack where the Fisherman has dumped one of his victims, hoping for a peek of something, before being turned away. "What kind of person sets off on a Saturday morning to take pictures of dead children?"

Black House started off strong enough, but the last third was a chore to get through. And since that's when the showdown with the serial killer occurs and Jack and members of the Thunder Five motorcycle gang venture into the infinite space of Black House and try to rescue a young boy from a life of slavery as a Breaker, that's a very bad sign. (Also, although the book is not a mystery, the identity of the killer - who has modeled his crimes on those of Albert Fish - is fairly easy to deduce long before it is revealed.)

King and Straub gives readers very little background information on Jack Sawyer, tossing in quick allusions to people, places, and events from The Talisman. Since settling in French Landing, Sawyer has done everything he can to forget his adventures crossing the country - and crossing over into the Territories - to find the Talisman. He will have to come to terms with his hazy memories, however, and re-visit the Territories again in order to solve this case.

The infamous and well-hidden Black House - "a place stacked with vileness and layered with secrets" - is actually portal to another world (though a different other world than the Territories):

In a very real sense, touring Black House is like touring the brain of a deranged madman, and in such a mental framework we can expect to find no plan for the future or memory of the past. In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions.

Black House recalls the Marsten House from 'Salem's Lot, and through the many threads of the Dark Tower, King links Black House to two other novels. A Mr. Brautigan (Hearts in Atlantis) is mentioned as the leader of the Breakers and the word "opopanax" is mentioned numerous times (it appears in Wolves of the Calla, the 5th Dark Tower volume).

The title recalls Charles Dickens's Bleak House, but not having read the older book, I can't say if there are direct connections, beyond the fact that Jack Sawyer is reading the Dickens novel in installments to Henry Leyden, his blind friend.

Kevin Quigley writes that the literary allusion to Dickens "is not incidental; in fact, one particularly scary section in Black House parallels the foggy opening of [Bleak House]. Also recalling Dickens are the establishing chapters, which introduce the sprawling cast of characters." Entertainment Weekly's review states that "it's no coincidence" that the title echoes Bleak House, because of the book's size and scope and its large cast of characters. (That's really not much of a connection.)

Next: Everything's Eventual.

Harper's Latest Attack On Democracy: "Fair Elections Act"

Stephen Harper's latest assault on democracy is the Orwellianly-named "Fair Elections Act", which the Conservatives are trying to rush through Parliament with as little (or no) debate as possible. They recently killed an opposition motion to hold two months of hearings on the bill.

"We're talking about the rules for a federal general election," NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said during question period on February 24. "That's the foundation of our democracy. That's what they're trying to cheat on."

Far from making Canadian federal elections more fair, Bill C-23 – which Canada's Chief Electoral Officer has called "affront to democracy" – will likely disenfranchise large groups of voters while preventing the Commissioner of Elections from making full investigations into future cases of vote fraud.

Craig Scott, the Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform, said Bill C-23 is "a concerted attempt to disenfranchise those with lower incomes or more transient lives with US-style voter suppression tactics".

Opposition groups state that C-23 violates Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gives every Canadian citizen the right to vote. Jessica McCormick, National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, states the bill "aims to suppress the vote of groups that may not vote Conservative including students, Indigenous people, seniors, and people on low-incomes by eliminating the vouching system". The "vouching" system allows people who may not possess the necessary documentation to cast their vote if they go to their polling station with a friend or neighbour. Marc Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer, believes at least 100,000 Canadians would be disenfranchised if the vouching system is trashed.

While the Conservatives claim C-23 will "increase democracy", it would actually prohibit Mayrand from engaging in any public education or democratic outreach to groups that are less likely to vote. It would also eliminate Elections Canada's civics-outreach Student Vote Program.

After committing widespread voter suppression and fraud during the 2011 election, the Conservatives want to deny Elections Canada the power to compel testimony in fraud cases. C-23 would also place the office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada under the Director of Public Prosecutions, putting the agency's independent and non-partisan investigative powers under political party control.

While C-23 would prevent the commissioner of Canada elections from revealing that any investigation is under way, it would also give any member being investigated notification of such investigation, an unnecessary heads-up warning.

The Conservatives drafted Bill C-23 without any meaningful discussions with Elections Canada. The Tories' confrontational, resentful, and vindictive attitude towards Election Canada has been well-documented; as far back as 2000, Harper referred to EC officials as "jackasses".

Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch says the bill also "hikes donation limits, removes the ban on unlimited secret gifts to election candidates, and allows banks to make unlimited loans to candidates".

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair stated that "it's unprecedented that a government would use its majority to shut down debate on fundamental changes to Canada's election law".

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said, "if we're willing to send international observers to see how the elections in Ukraine are going, we should probably be willing to send people across this country to look how our elections are doing here".

Harper's hostility to democracy is a sign of weakness. His pro-war, anti-environment, austerity-driven agenda does not have the support of the majority of people — so he has to resort to suppressing votes in order to get elected. This is masked by the fact that the Liberals share the Conservatives agenda and the NDP leadership has not provided an alternative. But movements across the country — against pipelines and in support of postal workers — can challenge Harper's agenda and expose the democratic deficit driving his voter suppression.

This article was written for Socialist Worker (Canada).

Stephen King: Dreamcatcher (2001)

Dreamcatcher was the first novel Stephen King published after his near-fatal accident in 1999. Because he was unable to sit at his desk for extended periods of time, he ended up writing the first draft of the novel by hand, in only six and a half months.

King states (in the afterword): "To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven't been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored."

Dreamcatcher takes place over a few days in November 2001. A group of four old friends from Derry, Maine - Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Pete Moore, Henry Devlin, and Gary "Jonesy" Jones - have gathered for their annual deer hunting trip at a cabin deep in the woods of the Jefferson Tract. There have been reports of strange lights in the sky - and things begin going wrong when they find a lost and disoriented hunter named McCarthy wandering through the woods.

McCarthy is in some serious distress - there is an alien presence growing in him that will be expelled only by moving his bowels (hence, the wonderful term for these invasive creatures: "shit-weasels"). King delights in describing McCarthy's (and a few other characters') odious farts and thunderous belches as the alien grows and moves within him: "brutal and meaty", with a "sulfurous rotten-egg odor", "a long, purring fart that sounded like ripping cloth", "a deflating rubber toy", "an untalented child blowing over a piccolo". One character's bad breath is "a mixture of ether and overripe bananas" and a belch sounds like "a factory machine which has been put under severe strain".

The men eventually learn that an alien spacecraft has crashed in the Maine woods and the surrounding area is now sealed off. Everyone in the area - residents and hunters - are rounded up and placed in a military camp, in an operation led by a military madman named Kurtz. Complicating matters is that a fierce snowstorm is on the way. Dreamcatcher is the story of how the aliens' desire to spread the virus across a larger area is eventually defeated. And it is up to the four men - who reunite with an old friend from their childhoods - to stop this murderous contamination.

So: Is Dreamcatcher the tale of five friends who must bond together to overcome an alien invasion? Is it a military/alien thriller? Is it a supernatural, multi-dimensional science-fiction tale with telepathic characters? It tries to be all three. And it has elements of It, The Tommyknockers, and "The Body".

Heidi Strengell, writing in Dissecting Stephen King: From The Gothic To Literary Naturalism:

Including both dream sequences and numerous shifts in time, the complex novel has three levels. It can be viewed as a science-fiction parody, as a tale of horror, and as a comment on the absence of responsibility.

Dreamcatcher never felt parodic to me, and despite the graphic descriptions of the cancerous "shit-weasels", it was neither horrific nor scary. Indeed, the race to prevent the alien virus from being dumped into a Massachusetts water reservoir unfolded almost in slow-motion. It was clear the aliens' plan would be thwarted; it was simply a matter of slogging through the pages to see how it happened.

I would agree with Strengell that King (once again, as he has several times throughout his lengthy career) highlights the government's lack of concern for its citizens and, in this novel, its willingness to murder hundreds of them to keep the true nature of the alien menace a secret. Commenting on both The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher, Strengell writes:

In doing so, he shows how technology for its own sake may not be progress at all and how little the government take responsibility for its citizens. By acknowledging that scientific progress has done little for humans as moral beings, King pleads for the restoration of the dignity of the human being.

Some other random notes:

Jonesy is an assistant professor of history at a small Boston college. He is a "lifelong connoisseur of horror movies, suspense novels, and mysteries" and was struck by a car earlier in the year (suffering injuries extremely similar to what King suffered). Having read elsewhere that King was on-point in his descriptions of Jonesy's pain and rehabilitation, I was surprised that there was so little of it in the novel.

In a nod to It, there are several mentions of how children often go missing in Derry. "There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years ... but nobody talks much about it. It's as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place." That confused me, because I had thought, from reading It, that Derry was a disgusting town. Even in this novel, King says Derry was built on "what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac Indians who lived all around it". (King also mentions Derry's "ancient and incredibly complex systems of drains and sewers".)

King is still capable of some great writing. When Henry Devlin inspires the captives to revolt against the military and attempt an escape, the narrative comes crackling to life, like a small fire after some lighter fluid has been tossed on it. The reader works furiously, taking in the words quickly, feverishly, as the action unfolds. King has always been good at describing utter chaos and the complete destruction of a compound, estate, town, country, etc. And King is an expert at showing the bonds of friendship between boys on the cusp of being teenagers, though his characterizations here remain a far cry from his best work: "The Body" and It.

Jonesy's body is inhabited (taken over, really) by one of the aliens, who Jonesy dubs Mr. Gray. Towards the end of the novel, King intimates that Mr. Gray never existed; he was simply a part of Jonesy:

Mr. Gray is the phantom limb you still feel, the one you could swear is still there. ... They never existed as actual creatures aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human imagination...

This raises several questions about King's narrative, since for hundreds of pages he has been writing as though the opposite was true. This - and other plot twists - gives a reader the impression that King is simply making up stuff as goes along, whether it jibes with earlier portions of the book or not. (Also, the use of telepathy between the characters is extremely convenient as characters can magically know things they have not actually experienced.)

Ultimately, the 617-page book is a dull mess. (One site ranked it #62 of King's 64 novels.) My biggest complaint is the extended Jonesy/Gray sequences do little to move the plot forward. King could have told this story in at least 200 fewer pages, perhaps 300 fewer.

The Stand and It are huge novels, and two of King's best works. (I also have a strange affection for the well-hated The Tommyknockers.) However, since the mid-80s, King's various doorstoppers - Needful Things, Insomnia, Desperation, and Dreamcatcher - have been a big disappointments. Instead, King has excelled only when writing on a smaller canvas: Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, and two-thirds of Rose Madder.

Next: Black House (written with Peter Straub).

Book Review: Building Sanctuary: The Movement To Support Vietnam War Resisters In Canada, 1965-73, By Jessica Squires

Building Sanctuary: The Movement to Support Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, 1965-73
(University of British Columbia, 2013)
By Jessica Squires

Many Canadians wish to think of their country as a peaceful nation, but that vision is an oversimplification, if not an outright fabrication. Author Jessica Squires writes that if Canada was ever a refuge from militarism, "it was a hard-fought and bitterly defended refuge as well as a contingent and partial one, at best".

Building Sanctuary is Squires's detailed academic study of the Canadian anti-draft movement and its fight to allow Vietnam War resisters from the United States to legally cross the border into Canada and apply for permanent residence in their new country. Squires relies on interviews with both activists and resisters, as well as newspaper accounts, police records, and government documents (both public and internal), to present a detailed history of the movement.

Squires defines a war resister in this context as "any American immigrant who came to Canada to avoid complicity in, or out of opposition to, their government's actions in Vietnam". Squires favours this broad, inclusive definition, because it takes in draft dodgers as well as deserters, and women who came north in protest of the U.S.'s murderous foreign policy.

As Squires expertly explains, support and acceptance of Vietnam War resisters in Canada was neither automatic nor unproblematic. While Canada encouraged immigration from the U.S. throughout the 1960s, the issue of draft dodgers coming north towards the end of that decade began to complicate things. While the U.S. was still regarded as a source of skilled workers, the Canadian government did not want to be seen as encouraging war resisters.

The first groups to offer assistance to Vietnam War resisters formed in late 1965 and early 1966 in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, publishing pamphlets with information on hostel accommodations, tips on securing cheap housing and finding employment, information on immigration law, and how to apply for landed status in Canada. Many church groups and clergy also played an essential role, even if their church members did not support the cause. (Opponents complained about "unwashed cowards" and "long haired Johnnies with strong communist tendenc[ies]".)

In August 1967, Pierre Trudeau's White Paper on Immigration introduced a new points system for establishing the eligibility of potential immigrants. Applicants were awarded points in a variety of categories, including age, level of education, vocational training, occupational demand, and destination. Even with a system in place that was intended to eliminate bias from the process, there were reports of "conscious and explicit obstruction by immigration officers". Squires reports that false information was regularly given out at border crossings, airports, consulates, and immigration offices.

In early 1968, proof of military discharge was not required for applicants inside Canada, so deserters would come to Canada as visitors and apply for landed immigrant status once they were inside the country. In July 1968, the Trudeau government secretly ended this practice and allowed immigration officers to use their own "discretion" on whether to consider or disregard military status.

Squires notes that "internal departmental memos indicate that this regulation change was specifically intended to prevent deserters from entering Canada". In some cases, after refusing entry into Canada, Canadian officials then called U.S. border guards to inform them that a military deserter was on his way back. After this information became public - and the government was flooded with letters and telegrams of complaint (some of which Squires quotes) - the government relented and made the announcement in May 1969 that military status was irrelevant at the border.

Building Sanctuary also reports that most anti-draft groups were under constant surveillance for years by both the RCMP and local police forces, even after the border was opened in 1969. There were numerous raids on resisters and their supporters (searching for drugs was a common excuse). There were widespread assumptions in the movement that the RCMP shared information with the FBI; indeed, it appears that plainclothes FBI agents were allowed to operate on their own in Canada.

Squires also discusses some of the internal debates within the movement at the time, including whether some men were avoiding the draft because of anti-war sentiment or personal reasons, whether it was a better strategy for Americans to remain in the U.S. and work to end the war from there, and to what extent should resisters assimilate into Canadian society. One resister explains: "Emigrating to Canada was considered less heroic than going to jail - better than serving ... but still a cop-out". However, Joseph Jones, a draft dodger, states: "Anyone who presumed to judge how someone should resist was just plain ignorant."

The academic writing style of Building Sanctuary lacks the narrative drive of a conventional history, but it's an important work of Canadian political and anti-war history. As the movement to allow Iraq War resisters from the U.S. to remain in Canada begins its second decade, the hard work and successes of a previous generation of activists in shaping Canadian immigration policies can offer inspiration and hope.

This review was also published in Socialist Worker.

Stephen King: Hearts In Atlantis (1999)

According to the three authors of The Stephen King Universe, Hearts in Atlantis is King's "most ambitious literary novel ... an exploration of the many facets of the Vietnam War era and the way it has tarnished America's idea of itself".

Hearts in Atlantis is advertised as "new fiction" as opposed to "a novel". The book consists of two novellas and three short stories; it is a single narrative that spans 40 years and whose parts are linked by various characters.

The first novella, "Low Man in Yellow Coats", is set in 1960. Eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield lives with his mother in an apartment building in Harwich, Connecticut. In describing Bobby's friendships with Carol Gerber and John "Sully" Sullivan, King achieves the same warm, comfortable narrative he did in "The Body" (Different Seasons). Bobby befriends an older gentleman named Ted Brautigan, who moves into building's third floor apartment. Ted hires Bobby to read the newspaper to him and turns him on to various books, including "Lord of the Flies".

But this coming-of-age story takes an ominous turn. Ted also wants Bobby to keep watch around town for "low men in yellow coats", a group of people Ted is apparently on the run from. (Ted's background is connected with The Dark Tower series, and so the story eventually becomes more fantasy than Gothic.) When the terrifying low men finally converge on Ted and Bobby, the boy tearfully chooses to back down rather than fight. That decision is a harsh reality for Bobby to absorb; he may not be the person he thought he was. Also, there is an undercurrent of violence through the entire story. Bobby and Carol are menaced by three neighbourhood bullies (who later attack Carol with a baseball bat) and Bobby's mother is gang-raped by her boss and two other men during an out-of-town convention trip.

In "Hearts in Atlantis" (the novella), Pete Riley, a student at the University of Maine in 1966, becomes addicted to playing Hearts with his dorm buddies. Many of the boys forgo studying for these epic card marathons and miss numerous classes. Those that are on scholarships are in danger of losing them' being kicked out of college will greatly increase their chances of being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

King attended the same university during the same years as Riley, but how much of his own experience is in the narrative is unclear. I would venture that the account of seeing the first student with what looked like a "sparrow-track" on the back of his jacket - a peace sign - is probably close to the author's own experience.

King often refers to the games of Hearts in terms that could also apply to the war, an out-of-control event that is destroying the educational dreams of these boys: "the mad season had begun", "a kind of blind fatalism set in", "the suicidal pull of that third-floor lounge", "committing a kind of group suicide", "quitting the game was the only sane solution".

Pete becomes involved with Carol Gerber, who also attends the university and is active in the anti-war movement. Through her conversations, we learn a bit more about Bobby's childhood. And the three short stories bring the various threads up to the modern day.

In "Blind Willie", one of the boys who assaulted Carol went on to serve in Vietnam and witnessed various atrocities. By 1983, he lives in a suburb of New York City with his wife. Each day, dressed as a businessman, he commutes into the city, changes clothes, and begs for change near St. Patrick's Cathedral. He is consumed by guilt over what he did to Carol ("that occasion of sin has never left his mind") and has filled multiple bound ledgers with expressions of true regret ("penance is important to him").

In "Why We're In Vietnam" (a reference to Norman Mailer's 1967 novel Why Are We In Vietnam?), it's 1999 and John Sullivan is attending the funeral of a veteran he served with. At the funeral, he talks to his former commander, Dieffenbaker, at length about an incident in combat that could have easily devolved into another My Lai. Sullivan has never been able to truly leave his past behind, to truly leave Vietnam. Since the war, he has been haunted by an old woman that one of his fellow soldiers murdered during an attack on a village. While driving home from the funeral, he gets stuck in highway traffic, and suffers a fatal heart attack.

King seems disgusted with what much of his generation did with their anger and disillusionment. After their innocence was shattered during the 60s and early 70s, they simply gave up. Dieffenbaker tells Sullivan:

I loathe and despise my generation. ... We had an opportunity to change everything. We actually did. Instead we settled for designer jeans, two tickets to Mariah Carey at Radio City Music Hall, frequent-flier miles, James Cameron's Titanic, and retirement portfolios. ... You know the price of selling out the future, Sully? You can really never leave the past. You can never get over.

In "Heavenly Shades Of Night Are Falling", Bobby Garfield, now 50 years old, returns to Harwich for Sully's funeral. Carol is also there and we learn that she joined the Militant Students for Peace and was presumed dead after a faulty bomb set by the group killed several people. In truth, she changed her name and went underground. Unlike the other characters, Bobby and Carol each seem to have achieved some closure with their pasts.

In reading reviews of the book online, it seems that many readers felt the title novella was the weakest part of the book. I thought just the opposite. It shows that King can be an exceptional writer even when (or perhaps especially when?) he dispenses with his trademark fantasy and horror, although the fear and reality of being sent to Vietnam did not loom as darkly and intensely over the boys as I expected.

I enjoyed huge sections of Hearts in Atlantis a lot, but I also agree with the Chicago Tribune's review, which stated that the political and social concerns never truly resonate "because the horrors of the Vietnam War are never really confronted in a sustained manner, ultimately diminishing the book's power".

Next: Dreamcatcher.

Stephen King: June 19, 1999 (The Accident)

On the afternoon of June 19, 1999, ten weeks after the publication of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King was seriously injured (almost fatally) when he was hit by a minivan while walking along the side of a road in North Lovell, Maine. King, 51, was struck from behind when the van's driver was distracted and lost control of his vehicle.

Stephen King, On Writing:

The extent of the impact injuries is such that the doctors at Northern Cumberland Hospital decide they cannot treat me there; someone summons a LifeFlight helicopter to take me to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. At this point my wife, older son, and daughter arrive. The kids are allowed a brief visit; my wife is allowed to stay longer. The doctors have assured her that I'm banged up, but I'll make it.

The lower half of my body has been covered. She isn't allowed to look at the interesting way my lap has shifted around to the right, but she is allowed to wash the blood off my face and pick some of the glass out of my hair. There's a long gash in my scalp, the result of my collision with Bryan Smith's windshield. This impact came at a point less than two inches from the steel, driver's-side support post. Had I struck that, I likely would have been killed or rendered permanently comatose, a vegetable with legs. Had I struck the rocks jutting out of the ground beyond the shoulder of Route 5, I likely also would have been killed or permanently paralysed. I didn't hit them; I was thrown over the van and 14ft in the air, but landed just shy of the rocks.

"You must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second," Dr David Brown tells me later. "If you hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation." ...

My lower leg was broken in at least nine places - the orthopaedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to "so many marbles in a sock."

The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions - they're called medial and lateral fasciatomies - to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies (or if the fasciatomies had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle; the technical term for the injury is "comminuted intra-articular tibial fracture". I also suffered an acetabular cup fracture of the right hip - a serious derailment, in other words - and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took 20 or 30 stitches. ...

I came home to Bangor on 9 July, after a hospital stay of three weeks. I began a daily rehab program which includes stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On 4 August, I went back to CMMC for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. I could bend my knee again. Dr Brown pronounced my recovery "on course" and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. And in the midst of all this, something else happened. On 24 July, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.

Hearts in Atlantis was already in the publishing pipeline and was released in September 1999. At the time of the accident, King had completed From A Buick 8 and was in the middle of On Writing. Dreamcatcher would be the first novel he wrote post-accident.

Stephen King: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)

"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted."

On a early Saturday morning in June 1998, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland becomes separated from her mother and older brother while hiking on a portion of the Appalachian trail.

Trisha leaves the trail to relieve herself, and then, after trying to retrace her steps for ten minutes, she is uncertain of where she is. "In that tender place between her chest and her stomach, the place where all the body's wires seemed to come together in a clump, she felt the first minnowy flutter of disquiet."

Trisha believes she is walking in a straight line, but is actually "turning more and more to the west without realizing it, turning away from the Appalachian trail and most of its subsidiary paths and trails, turning in a direction where there was little but deep second-growth woods choked with underbrush, tangled ravines, and ever more difficult terrain."

As the hours - and, eventually, the days - go by, Trisha tries to fight off both a disquieting inner panic and a "cold and scary voice" that speaks of her worst fears. When she hears on her Walkman's radio that a search party has been sent out to look for her, she is unaware that she is "nearly nine miles west of the area the searchers considered their highest priority".

Trisha keeps her fears at bay by listening to Red Sox games at night. Her favourite player is relief pitcher Tom Gordon, who as the team's "closer" comes into games with the lead to record the final three outs. In fact, Trisha secretly considers Gordon "the handsomest man alive"; she is wearing a shirt with Gordon's #36 on it, as well as an autographed cap. Hearing the cheering crowd at Fenway Park makes Trisha feel less alone. "The radio was her lifeline, the games her life preserver. Without them to look forward to, she thought she would simply give up."

After a week in the woods, during which time she actually crosses the border into New Hampshire, Trisha has lost about twenty pounds. Despite growing more and more physically weak, Trisha "discovered deep and totally unexpected reserves of strength within herself". She survives on berries, beechnuts, fiddleheads, and water (some of which makes her violently ill). She contends with multiple wasp stings, a long trek through a swampy marsh, and (possible) hallucinations about something in the woods that may be stalking her.

She dreams of Tom Gordon at night and he appears to her, in his blindingly white home uniform, during the day, as she tries to find her way to safety. Trisha tries praying, but does not have sufficient faith to do so. She recalls a conversation she once had with her father about God. Larry McFarland told his daughter he didn't believe in a God "that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die", but rather in something he called the Subaudible, "some insensate force for the good".

At one point, Trisha hallucinates seeing three hooded men in long robes. The main one, dressed in black, calls himself the God of the Lost. "The world is a worst-case scenario," it tells her, "and I'm afraid all you sense [that much of life is sadness] is true. The skin of the world is woven of stingers, a fact you have now learned for yourself. Beneath there is nothing but bone and the God we share."

Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism:

The question of the nature of God is intertwined with fate in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. While musing on her parents' divorce and her brother's recurring question why the children have to pay for what their parents do wrong, Trisha draws the same conclusion as a number of other King characters: just because. She survives because she accepts the facts of life and eve the role of fate in it. ...

Throughout King, God requires human assistance. ... Good often triumphs over evil both in King's mythical works related to The Dark Tower series and in the works that explore the existence of good and evil in traditional terms. In both, responsibility and compassion for one's fellow human beings can overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles. Also, despite God's seeming passivity, he comes to the aid of those who help themselves.

Similarly, as Tom Gordon tells Trisha in one of her dreams, "it's God's nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth" - after the person has done everything she can do for herself. Trisha survives her ordeal through her own inner strength and wits. It is on her ninth day (inning?) in the woods that she finally faces down what she believes is the God of the Lost, in the form of a huge black bear.

Though The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is billed as a novel, it is shorter (219 pages) than some of King's novellas.

Next: Hearts in Atlantis.

Stephen King: Bag of Bones (1998)

Shortly after the sudden death of his wife, novelist Mike Noonan develops a severe case of writer's block. He also begins having recurring nightmares that eventually draw him back to the summer cottage he and his wife frequented on Dark Score Lake in western Maine. (Wikipedia's entry includes a detailed description of the supernatural plot.)

Early in Bag of Bones, Noonan offers his thoughts about writing and (especially) the publishing industry as his agent pushes him to sign a multi-book contract. It seems safe to assume that some (or many) of Noonan's opinions mirror those held by Stephen King, as Bag of Bones was his first book under a new three-year contract with Simon & Schuster. (King had been associated with Viking since 1979 and The Dead Zone.)

However, King left when Viking balked at his request for significantly higher advances. Also, King was said "to favor the idea of switching to a house with more literary cachet". Bag of Bones is leaner than the usual King novel. Although it is still a sizeable tome - at 529 pages - there is not a lot of extraneous material. Much of the fat that marred King's previous books (like Insomnia and Desperation) has been trimmed away.

After his wife's death of a brain aneurysm, Mike finishes his latest novel, but is unable to begin any new projects. Indeed, the prospect of sitting down at his computer at times makes him physical ill. Noonan says that what a publisher wants,

especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of each novel in hardcover and a million more in paperback, is perfectly simple: a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York have determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months ...

Less than a book a year and you're screwing up the publisher's investment in you, hampering your business manager's ability to continue floating all of your credit cards, and jeopardizing your agent's ability to pay his shrink on time."

This sounds a lot like what King wrote back in 1985, in "The Politics of Limited Editions":

If the idea of a writer having an economic responsibility to publish what he writes seems absurd to you, I can assure you it does not seem at all absurd to the booksellers of America, or to a writer himself after he has been told that his seemingly whimsical decision to publish a book in a small-distribution format had actually taken the bread out of children's mouths or might have been a contributing cause to the closure of an independent small-town bookstore that might otherwise have turned the corner ... or at least staggered on a while longer before collapsing.

Noonan is referred at one point as "V.C. Andrews with a prick".

You've seen my name on a lot of bestseller lists ... if, that is, your Sunday paper carries a list that goes up to fifteen instead of just listing the top ten. I was never a Clancy, Ludlum, or Grisham, but I moved a fair number of hardcovers ... I stood just outside the magic circle of the mega-bestsellers ...

A writer of Noonan's mid-list stature needed to publish every single year to maintain his visibility. According to Noonan's agent,

Grisham could afford to take a year off. Clancy could. Thomas Harris, those long silences are a part of his mystique. But where you are, life is even tougher than at the very top, Mike. There are five writers for every one of those spots down on the list ... If Tom Clancy were to go on hiatus for five years and then bring Jack Ryan back, he'd come back strong, no argument. If you go on hiatus for five years, maybe you don't come back at all.

Fortunately, Noonan is able to keep his publisher satisfied by sending in older manuscripts he had written years before and stored away. He mails off four novels this way and is thus able to have a new hardcover on store shelves every autumn "just like clockwork", all the while actually writing only "notes, grocery lists, and checks". Amusingly, these books - one of which was written nearly 12 years earlier - are very well-received, heralding what the critics say is a more mature phase of his writing.

King once described himself as "a girl of easy virtue" when it came to writing and Noonan likens his role as a professional author of mass-market fiction to working as a prostitute:

Critically ignored, genre oriented ... but well compensated and with the shabby acceptance accorded to state-sanctioned whorehouses in Nevada, the feeling seeming to be that some outlet for the baser instincts should be provided and someone had to do That Sort Of Thing.

"Perception is everything," Noonan says at one point. He understands very clearly that how he is marketed by his publisher is the way he will be perceived by the general public - and people will read or not read his books accordingly. This perception often has very little to do with the actual book(s) he has written; it all happens before any engagement with the text occurs.

King had claimed he doesn't care what critics say; he loves to write, and he is grateful that so many people want to read his books. But reading Noonan's comments - and scattered statements by King about being typecast as a genre author - it is clear that King cares quite a bit about his reputation, perhaps more than he wishes he did. All of this would reach a head (of sorts) in 2003, when the National Book Foundation presented King with its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

***

In BoB, the unincorporated township of TR-90 is another of King's small Maine towns with dark secrets. Roughly a century earlier, Sara Tidwell, the singer in a travelling blues band known as the Red Tops, was raped and murdered by a group of boys from the TR. Sara's eight-year-old son witnessed the attack and was drowned in the lake by the gang. Sara's spirit has haunted the TR ever since, and has exacted some measure of revenge by orchestrating the deaths of several children (and grandchildren) of the young men involved in the crime. It falls to Noonan to break Sara's hold over the town.

Amy Joyce Palko, Charting Habitus: Stephen King, the Author-protagonist and the Field of Literary Production (2009 thesis):

King has often expressed an unease over the division between folk and mass culture, and has found himself in need of defending his choices to produce work that contributes to this ideal of folk culture rather than being aimed at the mass market. ...

King is keen to assert his folk culture credentials; he wants to highlight the affinity between his work and an idealised, nostalgic, even at times pre-technological fantasy of folk cultural production. In this way, he attempts to distance himself from the detrimental aspects experienced by one typed as a commercial best-selling writer. ...

Through the figure of author-protagonist Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones, King investigates the dialectic between popular and folk cultural production by comparing Noonan's participation in the field with that of his wife, Johanna, and the long deceased blues singer, Sara [Tidwell]. Noonan's positioning within the field and his methods of production reveal that he is a popular, best-selling author who, unlike his wife and Sara, competes for economic capital.

King contrasts Noonan's writing career and the publishing industry with Tidwell and the Red Tops' raucous blues, and examines the differences between mass and folk culture, the high and low. Tidwell's past and musical style/presentation may be idealised, but it still acts as a foil for a contemporary mass culture driven by powerful economic forces.

Sara and her band never recorded, and thus never became part of the music industry. Tidwell is described as "frank and free", unencumbered by commercial concerns, unlike Noonan, who has become a slave to the "hierarchical realm of book lists, market shares and target audiences".

Next: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

Chris Floyd: "The Unlearned Lessons of American Atrocity"

Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque (January 14, 2014):

Just over nine years ago, in November 2004, the United States military carried out an atrocious war crime at the behest of its civilian leaders. Having already committed what America's chief jurist at the Nuremberg trials called "the supreme international crime" -- aggressive war -- the American military now declared a whole city full of innocent civilians to be a "free fire zone" and proceeded to pulverize the town with bombs, missiles, chemical weapons and finally a ground attack by thousands of troops. This came after the American military had cut vital supplies of food and water to the city -- another brazen war crime. ...

The vicious, murderous, criminal attack on Fallujah was a microcosm of the vast atrocity of the invasion of Iraq -- an atrocity that continues today. A fake reason for an act of aggression was sold to a gleefully gullible media, and through them to a docile public raised on the potent poison of "American exceptionalism," to provide a "justification" for an action whose real purpose had to be concealed. And what was that purpose? To demonstrate and advance the bipartisan American elite's unslakeable desire for domination -- and to demonstrate that anyone who resists that desire will be punished, tormented or killed. ...

[T]he Iraq war was an atrocity from the beginning -- from long before the beginning, in fact. Its very conception -- the idea of launching an act of aggression against a broken-down country which posed no threat, could not defend itself, and which had already seen more than half a million of its children killed by American-enforced sanctions -- was an atrocity. And the brutal -- and brutalizing -- atrocities on the ground began long before the attack on Fallujah.

Just as a brief reminder, let's go back in time with -- who else? -- the New York Times, which carried this report about our Marlboro Men and their crusade for truth and light just a few days after the invasion began.

At the base camp of the Fifth Marine Regiment here, two sharpshooters, Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, 28, and Cpl. Mikael McIntosh, 20, sat on a sand berm and swapped combat tales while their column stood at a halt on the road toward Baghdad. For five days this week, the two men rode atop armored personnel carriers, barreling up Highway 1.

They said Iraqi fighters had often mixed in with civilians from nearby villages, jumping out of houses and cars to shoot at them, and then often running away. The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterized as ill trained and cowardly.

"We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people."

... But in the heat of a firefight, both men conceded, when the calculus often warps, a shot not taken in one set of circumstances may suddenly present itself as a life-or-death necessity.

"We dropped a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?" ... He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.

"I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."

"The chick was in the way." I've carried this story with me for 11 years. Less than two weeks into the war, it seemed to sum up the whole shebang. It embodied the amoral philosophy that has guided the bipartisan American elite -- and its media enablers -- not only throughout the Iraq War and its still-churning aftermath, but in every action undertaken to advance the agenda of domination. This is what it all comes down to, this is the blank, inhuman, heartless heart of the imperial enterprise: "The chick was in the way."

***

Stephen King: The Dark Tower IV: Wizard And Glass (1997)

For fans of The Dark Tower, it had been six long years since The Wastelands (the third book of Stephen King's epic series). In September 1996, King included a gift in the combined sets of Desperation and The Regulators: a 59-page paperback containing the first two chapters of the next Dark Tower novel. Then, in November 1997, the 787-page hardback Wizard and Glass appeared.

At the end of The Wastelands, Roland of Gilead and his ka-tet (Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers) were aboard Blaine the Monorail, travelling along the Path of the Beam, towards the Dark Tower. Blaine is insane, however, and was threatening to crash itself, killing everyone on board, unless Roland et al. could stump it with a riddle.

As W&G begins, they do, naturally; otherwise, there would be far fewer than 787 pages in this volume! Blaine lets them off in what appears to be a deserted railroad station in Topeka, Kansas. A discarded newspaper (dated June 1986) reports that an epic flu nicknamed "Captain Trips" is currently decimating the country's - and the world's - population.

This is, of course, the world of Stephen King's The Stand. However, since Eddie is from New York City in 1987 and has no knowledge of a deadly super flu, this must have happened in another world, or a parallel reality. Roland explains that as the Dark Tower weakens, boundaries between these different worlds are breaking down.

Henrik Fåhraeus:

In King's epic tale, the world has "moved on"(2), and the whole multiverse is in danger of collapsing. [Roland Deschain] is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, which supposedly exists at the very center of creation. ... [H]is purpose is not primarily to save the world, but to ascend the tower in order to find out if the room at the top is inhabited by God or if God has abandoned his creation.

(2) A term frequently used throughout the seven novels, meaning that the world has changed in fundamental ways. Civilization is crumbling, science is a lost art, and even the laws of physics seem different.

Since I did not enjoy The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands - the second and third books of the series - I was looking forward to Wizard and Glass about as much as a heaping plate of liver and spinach. However, W&G was pretty good, certainly the best of the series, so far.

The novel does not move Roland's journey forward very much. It is mostly a long flashback that tells in great detail Roland's first test as a young gunslinger. As his ka-tet travels along I-70 in Kansas, Roland tells them his story during one long night beside the fire. Roland also recounts the heartbreaking story of finding, and then losing forever, the love of his life, Susan Delgado.

Wizard and Glass recounts what Joseph Campbell called the "monomyth" or the "hero's journey". In Campbell's 1949 book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, he described the monomyth:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Wizard and Glass contains a myth within a myth. Roland and his two friends, Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, are sent from Gilead to the small town of Mejis. While there, they uncover a conspiracy, led by John Farson, in opposition to the baronies of the Affiliation. Farson's men are stockpiling horses, oil, and weapons for a possible revolution that threatens to lead to all-out war. The three young gunslingers must foil these plans.

Along the way, Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado and, towards the end of his adventure, realizes he must make a choice:

Susan, and my life as a husband and father of the child she now carries ... or the Tower. [...] I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go ... and we will go. [...] I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else - she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.

Henrik Fåhraeus:

Believing Susan to be safely on her way to Gilead, the ka-tet proceeds to deal with the rest of Farson's men. ... Afterwards, when the blood red moon rises, Roland realizes that Susan is far from safe. In the Wizard's glass, he watches how the frenzied and superstitious townspeople of Hambry "celebrate" the reaping festival by burning Susan at the stake. ... Though Roland is not directly responsible, he did abandon Susan for his "greater quest" ... Fate teaches him a horrible lesson, but it is one that still does not heed, for he will keep sacrificing friends and companions in order to reach the Tower.

Despite the foiling of Farson's plot, things look bleak for Mid-World:

There is a sense - inarticulate but very much there - that things have gone amiss ... For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World's last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here.

Unfortunately, it would be another six years before King's fans would learn of Roland's next steps. Spurred on by his 1999 accident (which nearly killed him), King would publish the final three volumes of the series in rapid-fire succession in 2003 and 2004.

Next: Bag of Bones.

Stephen King: The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) (1996)

Stephen King explains the genesis of The Regulators, which was published on the same day (September 24, 1996) as Desperation:

As I neared the three-quarter mark on Desperation, I had a scrap with a single word printed on it: REGULATORS. I had had a great idea for a novel, something that had to do with toys, guns, and suburbia. I didn't know if I would ever write it - lots of those "printer notes" never come to anything - but it was certainly cool to think about.

Then, one rainy day (a Richard Stark sort of day) as I was pulling into my driveway, I had an idea. I don't know where it came from; it was totally unconnected to any of the trivia tumbling through my head at the time. The idea was to take characters from Desperation and put them into The Regulators. In some cases, I thought, they could play the same people; in others, they would change; in neither would they do the same things or react in the same ways, because the different stories would dictate different courses of action. It would be, I thought, like the members of a repertory company acting in two different plays.

Then an even more exciting idea struck me. If I could use the rep company concept with the characters, I could use it with the plot itself - I could stack a good many of the Desperation elements in a brand-new configuration, and create a kind of mirror world. I knew even before setting out on this course that plenty of critics would call this twinning a stunt ... and they would not be wrong, exactly. But, I thought, it could be a good stunt. Maybe even an illuminating stunt, one which showcased the muscularity and versatility of story, its all but limitless ability to adapt a few basic elements into endlessly pleasing variations, its prankish charm.

***

I did not much like Desperation and I enjoyed The Regulators even less. The story at the heart of these two books - the evil machinations of the supernatural being, Tak - does not seem strong enough to have muscularity or versatility.

This is Wikipedia's synopsis of The Regulators:

The story takes place in the fictional town of Wentworth, Ohio, a typical suburban community. On Poplar Street, an autistic boy named Seth has gained the power to control reality through the help of a being known as Tak. Soon, Poplar Street begins to change shape, transforming from a quiet suburb into a wild west caricature based on what Seth has seen on his television. Meanwhile, the other residents of the street are being attacked by the many beings that Seth's imagination is creating, due to Tak's control over them. These residents are forced to work together to stop Seth and Tak from completely transforming the world around them and stop Tak before he kills anyone else.

Seth's imagination is heavily influenced by a western called The Regulators and a cartoon called MotoKops 2200.

King gives what feels like minute-by-minute descriptions of what the block's residents are doing as they attempt to figure out what is going on and how they can stop it. It's neither exciting nor scary nor interesting.

King's Bachman books are supposedly darker or bleaker than the typical "Stephen King" novel, though that point can be well-argued. However, there is nothing to mark The Regulators as anything other than a King novel. The writing style, the use of brand names and pop culture references - it's throughly "King". In fact, one reason why the early Bachman books were not published as King novels is that they avoid the supernatural completely, and it was thought fans would not support King writing outside his established genre. The Regulators would be the first Bachman book to focus on the supernatural (if you ignore the Gypsy's curse in Thinner, that is).

Even the opening of The Regulators, a lengthy description of a hot July afternoon in suburban Ohio - kids playing with a dog, a man washing his car, someone strumming a guitar on a porch, another boy delivering the weekly paper - are presented with a "gee whiz" attitude that seems like the antithesis of Richard Bachman. And just because a lot of people get shot - and we get lengthy descriptions of the bullets' damage - does not necessarily make a book dark and bleak.

One of the obvious weaknesses of both Desperation and, especially, The Regulators, is their excessive amounts of description. Very little of it is important to the plot or any meaningful characterization. Does a scene of four people climbing over a fence really need to be stretched out to more than five pages?

In Desperation, there was a battle of good versus evil. King apparently wants to make a commentary on good/evil as it relates to television as an American religion, but I got absolutely nothing from this novel in that vein. Seth/Tak watches a lot of television and is able to use what he sees to transform Poplar Street into the wild west, but there was no moral against the evils of television. (King is usually pretty heavy-handed when it comes to such messages.)

King has a writing tic in both Desperation and The Regulators. It came up so often that at times I wasn't really concentrating on what I was reading because I was anticipating its next appearance. From The Regulators:

How in God's name could the sound of breathing on the telephone be familiar? It couldn't, of course, but all the same - (page 67)

... made it impossible not to accept. He didn't know why that should be, but it was. (69)

None of this is funny, but he laughs just the same. (94)

There's no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same. (214)

"It's only chambered for .22s ... but it's a damned fine gun, just the same." (240)

Collie thought Old Doc was mostly talking to himself by this point, but he listened intently just the same. (244)

Understandable, maybe, but Johnny was furious with her, nevertheless. (246)

... but most of what she had to say from this point on would go in one ear and out the other just the same. (249)

Steve didn't like to admit it, but he did. (271)

... but the giggles poured out of him just the same. (387)

... but they were up there, just the same. (389)

He didn't want to understand ... but he thought maybe he did a little, anyway. Like it or not. (400)

It's a small one, but every round from it sounds like a bazooka shell, just the same. (415)

It is only for a moment, as Audrey bolts by, but it is a moment which seems all but eternal, just the same. (443)

Johnny doesn't know how he can know this, but he does. (448)

... and he supposed that was good. He didn't know why, but he supposed it was. (462)

And the phrase "just the same" is used in a similar manner 20 times in Desperation. Even in the introduction to The Bachman Books, when King mentions writing these two novels:

Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV. I guess that makes them both about higher powers, but very different ones just the same.

Next: The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass.

Stephen King: Desperation (1996)

Stephen King published three novels in 1996. The Green Mile appeared in six monthly installments, from March through August. Then, less than one month later, King published Desperation under his own name and The Regulators under his Richard Bachman alias.

Desperation begins on Highway 50, a lonely stretch of desert road in Nevada. Collie Estragian, the sadistic police officer of the small town of Desperation, is terrorizing travelers along the highway, arresting them under false pretexts and jailing them. He also kills two of them, pushing a young girl down a flight of stairs and shooting a man in front of his wife. (He has also killed most of the town's residents.)

After the prisoners escape from their jail cells (with some spiritual assistance), they learn that there is an evil spirit (referred to as Tak) in the town. It was let loose from an abandoned mine that collapsed in 1859, trapping and burying alive more than 60 workers, most of them Chinese immigrants. Current mining in the area - by a company named Diablo - uncovered the old pit and let loose the evil spirit. Once Tak is out, it inhabits a series of human bodies, including Estragian, but the various vessels literally fall apart over time, quite gruesomely, and another host must soon be found.

Another reader making his way through King's canon complained about the choice and presentation of the book's villain:

King's overused-villain-tropes collide in the character of Entragion/Tak. He's got the seeing-through-animals/mind-reading of Flagg with the inexplicable-racism/anti-semitism/what-have-you of ... well, of every other King villain. Why would an ancient demon sound like a MSNBC caricature of "the enemy?" If it's meant as an amplification of latent prejudices in Entragion himself, a) we get no text-support for that, b) why is it an aspect of every King villain, novel to novel? and c) why do these attitudes remain as Tak leaps from body to body?

The presentation of Tak is not the book's only weakness. King has usually been able to create strong, believable characters, but he falters here.

Johnny Marinville is referred to (at least a half-dozen times) as a National Book Award winner and someone who had sex with a famous starlet, as though King had only a few ways of reminding readers who he was. Cynthia Smith (who was also a minor character in Rose Madder) is often identified by her orange-and-green-dyed hair. Steve Ames has long hair, so he gets called a hippie. King gives readers the bare bones of a character sketch before moving on, and thus does not have much to offer when it comes time to refer to them again. King also continues to repeat plot points, though there is little chance of readers forgetting them. I'm not sure exactly when he started doing this in his books - maybe when he got sober - but he did not do it early in his career.

Stuart Allen Morris, "Morality in the American West: The Origins of Evil in Stephen King's The Stand and Desperation":

[Desperation is] a work that is explicitly concerned with morality and faith, which thinly operates under the guise of a horror novel. ... If one works within the Judeo-Christian conception of morality, which King does, there is no better way to test faith than the way God does in the Old Testament. ... [W]hile Satan may have a place in The Stand and Desperation, his part is no bigger than it was in the Old Testament. When it came to evil things not brought by humans in the old Testament, it was God who was most visible - and that is how King portrays Him in these two novels.

Desperation purports to be King's most direct look at the battle between good and evil, and his most blatant exploration of man's relationship with God. After King's exploration on those themes to great effect in The Stand, I was looking forward to this novel. I was disappointed, however, as King has comes up short. His ruminations on the cruelty of God - the deity in this novel is clearly the wrathful and vengeful Old Testament God - never amounted to much.

Leading the group of survivors is 12-year-old David Carver, who began studying the Bible after his prayer apparently brought his best friend out of a coma sustained after being struck by a drunk driver. David made a vow that he would do something for God if his friend could somehow remain alive. In Desperation, God is extremely intent on making David live up to that promise. Through the course of the novel, David undergoes trials and tribulations similar to those suffered by Job. By the time the forces of good have prevailed, David has lost both of his parents and his younger sister, and has questioned God's will and even His existence.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God's existence. ... People could make shadows that looked like animals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn't it likely that God was the same kind of thing? Just another legendary shadow?

The refrain "God is cruel" is repeated throughout the novel. (It is also a motif King used in The Green Mile. Narrator Paul Edgecombe, recalling the random death of his wife in a bus accident, states that when we tell God, "I don't understand", God says, "I don't care.")

While David Carver may be a little self-conscious about praying in front of people, King has no such hang-ups about portraying Carver's beliefs. He presents his religious themes without a shred of irony or condescension. As Kev notes: "The persuasive, straightforward narrative does not equivocate on the subject of religion, much as prior books do not equivocate on the paranormal or supernatural; King simply asserts, and the reader chooses whether to accept."

King also makes scriptural allusions throughout the novel, either to Biblical passages or events. One of the more obvious: David finds a small bag of sardines and crackers while the group is hiding out in the town's abandoned movie theater. The bag gets passed around and there is, like the loaves and the fishes, more than enough food for everyone.

One of the book's main characters is Johnny Marinville, a famous writer and recovering alcoholic. He is riding his motorcycle across the country (something King did to promote his novel Insomnia) in the hopes of gaining inspiration for his next book. Marinville's interactions with Tom Billingsley, one of Desperation's town drunks, afford King the opportunity (as he has in many of his novels in the late 80s and 90s) to write a bit about addiction:

Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had contracted some awful form of poison ivy - a kind that affected one's brain instead of one's skin.

Next: The Regulators (as Richard Bachman).

Stephen King: The Green Mile (1996)

One of Stephen King's most famous novels, The Green Mile was published in six monthly installments during the summer of 1996.

King: "[T]he idea of a novel in installments [came] at what was, for me, the perfect psychological moment. I had been playing with a story idea on a subject I had always suspected I would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair. ... What, I wondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric chair, knowing you were going to die there? What, for that matter, would it be like to be the man who had to strap the condemned in ... or pull the switch? What would such a job take out of you? Even creepier, what might it add?"

When the prospect of serial fiction was pitched to King, he was intrigued. King liked the "high-wire aspect" of writing a novel in installments, since when the first volume was published, the novel was "still far from done, even in rough draft, and the outcome remain[ed] in some doubt".

Most of the novel is set during the Depression, a few weeks in late 1932. Paul Edgecombe is superintendent of E Block at the Cold Mountain penitentiary. E Block is the prison's death row, where men were held in the weeks before their execution. Edgecombe, in the present day a resident of the Georgia Pines nursing home, is writing a memoir of sorts, recalling what happened after a prisoner named John Coffey, a black migrant worker convicted of raping and murdering two nine-year-old girls, arrived at Cold Mountain. (E Block is also referred to by the guards as the Green Mile, because of the lime-coloured linoleum hallway that extends from the cells to the room in which the electric chair - nicknamed Old Sparky - sits.)

At first, there is little doubt about Coffey's guilt. He was found with the bodies of the dead girls. "I tried to take it back," he says when discovered, "but it was too late." His words are accepted by everyone as an admission of guilt, but as the novel continues, Edgecombe becomes convinced of Coffey's innocence. Part of his change of heart stems from Coffey's supernatural gift of healing. Edgecombe's urinary infection is cured when Coffey takes hold of Edgecombe's hands. Coffey also breathes life back into a mouse that another prisoner, Eduard Delacroix, has adopted as a pet.

While guards Brutus Howell, Dean Stanton, and Harry Terwilliger take seriously their boss's edict of keeping the prisoners calm and comfortable until their execution dates, one employee takes sadistic glee in physically and emotionally tormenting the prisoners. Percy Wetmore, an arrogant young man who secured his job only through nepotism, is the clear villain in the novel, as he purposefully botches Delacroix's execution so the man is not so much electrocuted as burned alive in the chair.

That scene, which could probably have been even more gruesome that King portrays it, is one example why The Green Mile can be read as an anti-capital punishment novel. Coffey's execution is the last one (the 78th) over which Edgecombe presides, and Coffey's case seems to have turned him against the death penalty in his later years. Setting the scene early in the first chapter, Edgecombe uses the phrase "state sanctioned murder" and wonders "if execution is a proper punishment". Later on, he writes: "Fragile as blown glass, we are, even under the best of conditions. To kill each other with gas and electricity, and in cold blood? The folly. The horror."

Coffey is rather obviously presented as a Christ figure, weighed down by the hate and cruelty he sees in the world. Tired of the pain he hears and feels, tired of being alone, tired of people being ugly to each other, he accepts his fate.

During the rehearsal for Coffey's execution, Howell admits that this is the first time in his life he feels in danger of hell.

We're fixing to kill a gift of God. One that never did any harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job? My job?

As Edgecombe comes to understand that Coffey is innocent of the crime for which he is to be killed - and that nothing can be done to stop the impending execution - Edgecombe feels he must atone for the sin of playing a part in the murder of an innocent man.

Only God could forgive sins, could and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of his crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility of His children to atone for those sins (and even their simple errors of judgment) whenever possible.

When Coffey cures Edgecombe of his urinary infection, Edgecombe knows that he has witnessed a miracle.

For one to rejoice at the sick made well is normal, quite the expected thing, but the person healed has an obligation to then ask why - to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will. ... What did God want of me, in this case?

Edgecombe devises a plan for smuggling Coffey out of the prison late one night and bringing him to the home of Warden Hal Moores. By having Coffey heal the warden's wife of a brain tumor, Edgecombe attempts to balance the wrong he will participate in when Coffey is put to death.

Paul F.M. Zahl, writing in Christianity Today, called The Green Mile "an imaginative and dense parable of the triumph of sacrificial love over wickedness and false accusation".

I read The Green Mile in 1996 as each installment was published, feeling that King had produced an excellent first draft - which perhaps made sense considering the schedule he was on - but that the story needed tightening and punching up. Reading the novel 17 years later, I was more accepting of King's framing device of Edgecombe looking back on these momentous few weeks. However, the added supernatural aspect of Mr. Jingles the mouse at Cold Mountain and the Percy-esque character in the nursing home that terrorizes Edgecombe - still seemed superfluous.

Next: Desperation.

Stephen King: Rose Madder (1995)

Rose Madder is the third book in Stephen King's feminism trilogy (which includes the earlier novels Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne) and is his most unflinching look at spousal abuse.

Rose Daniels has been married to Norman Daniels, a decorated police officer, for fourteen years. During that time, Rose has suffered broken bones, cracked ribs, lost teeth, and, during one particularly horrendous beating - which opens the novel - suffered a miscarriage. She has been punched in the kidneys so often, she barely notices the blood in her urine anymore. Through those fourteen years, Rose "existed in a daze so deep it was like death ... [as if] her life wasn't really happening."

And then, one day while making the bed, a single drop of blood falls from her bruised nose. Something awakens in Rose's mind and - with her husband at work - she realizes she must flee in order to save her life. She grabs his ATM card, and walks out the door.

King does a superb job of articulating the conflicting thoughts and fears in Rose's head as she eventually makes her way to the bus station. She fears being alone in the world - she initially seems nearly agoraphobic - but she knows with certainty that she cannot return to her abusive marriage. But she also knows that Norman will not rest until, using his police skills and connections, he tracks her down and kills her.

Rose Madder is the story of how Rose McDaniels (she begins using her birth name again) comes out of the fog of the abusive relationship and begins to re-create her life. She finds a women's shelter, Daughters and Sisters, where she is given a room and a job at a local hotel. "You can be free if you want to," she is told. "Free of his hands, free of his ideas, free of him."

A trip to a pawn shop to sell her wedding ring becomes a momentous event in her new life. Rose learns that the big diamond is fake, but another customer in the shop hears her voice and offers her a job recording books on tape. The proprietor of the shop, Bill Steiner, falls in love with Rose. And on her way out of the shop, Rose is captivated by a painting of a woman in a rose madder-coloured toga, with her back to the viewer, gazing at a ruined stone temple. It is not a particularly good painting, Rose admits, but it seems to call to her. It is "the first meaningful purchase of her new life".

Meanwhile, Norman has taken a leave of absence from the force and is in pursuit of his wife. Using his skills as an investigator (and what seems to be some supernatural ability to imagine where Rose might go), he arrives in Liberty City and begins tracking her down. There will obviously be at least one confrontation between Rose and Norman before the novel is over.

Rose's painting is the true supernatural element in the novel. The painting is a portal to another world, and one night Rose enters that world. A woman she meets there (Wendy Yarrow, a prostitute that Norman and his partner beat and raped, and then killed after she filed a lawsuit against the department) tells her she must perform a dangerous task for the woman in the painting, rescuing a baby from a temple guarded by a one-eyed bull named Erinyes. King's use of Greek mythology was lost on me - and dragged the story of Rose's new life and Norman's pursuit to a halt.

Michael Wood, The New York Review Of Books:

What's going on here, as Rose learns when she visits, is a mixture of the myths of the Minotaur in the maze and of Demeter looking for Persephone, her daughter by Zeus, after Persephone has been abducted into the underworld. ... The creature in the maze [in the novel] isn't exactly the Minotaur, since it's a bull, and it's called Erinyes, a name which means fury, and is one of Demeter's epithets. Later the bull becomes Norman, or Norman becomes the bull: the monster is a metaphor for the less-than-human male.

Kevin Quigley, Charnel House:

The sudden appearance of the mystic (and mythic) seem almost intrusive, as do the supernatural overlays in otherwise mainstream novels like Cujo, Blaze, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and even the out-of-context psychic flashes in Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game. However, where the supernatural in those books could have easily been excised (improving the stories in most cases), in Rose Madder, the painting and the world through it become intrinsic to the plot. Here, King seems to be experimenting with magic realism, a genre of writing in which fantastic elements are introduced into an otherwise straightforward realistic story.

King also tosses in a few elements of The Dark Tower. During Rose's initial journey into the painting, Wendy Yarrow mentions the concept of ka and refers to the dead in the City of Lud.

Years later, in On Writing, King stated that Rose Madder and Insomnia are "stiff, trying-too-hard novels".

***

Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner, writing in The Complete Stephen King Universe, note that the theme of spousal/child abuse has appeared in many of King's novels. In retrospect, "it seems as if Stephen King had been building toward Rose Madder his whole career."

James Ronald Guthrie, "Three Decades of Terror: Domestic Violence, Patriarchy, and the Evolution of Female Characters in Stephen King's Fiction" (2009):

The horror of domestic violence and a harsh criticism of American patriarchal society have been the dominant tropes in King's novels from the beginning of his career. ... For King in the 1990s, domestic violence in the private sphere is a metaphor for the ultimate violence of American patriarchal society, the public sphere that condones, enables, and sometimes even rewards violence against women.

Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne, Insomnia, and Rose Madder - four consecutive novels in the early 1990s - feature "a depressingly long line of abusive males King would introduce to readers": Gerald Burlingame, Joe St. George, Ed Deepneau, and Norman Daniels. Daniels is by far the most psychopathic, the most abusive, and, by the end of the novel, clearly insane.

In these recent novels, as King writes stronger and more vivid female characters, his portraits of the men in their lives slip into caricature. Norman Daniels has absolutely no redeeming qualities. King describes his sadistic abuse of his wife (and a few criminal suspects) in such stark detail that even knowing Norman was beaten and sexually abused by his own father (and his father's friends) fails to generate any sympathy for him. On the other end of the spectrum, Bill Steiner is the ideal man. As his relationship with Rose deepens, Bill does no wrong. He is always thoughtful, never less than completely understanding; he is careful to not pry, not to ask too many questions. He is too good to be true.

***

Guthrie (2009):

In all three novels [Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder], Stephen King examines the effects of domestic violence and, in a broad sense, patriarchy on women through the eyes of his female protagonists. However, he does not do so in a sensationalist or one-dimensional way; rather, he attempts with his realistic style to delve deeply into their individual psyches to demonstrate how the traumatic events in a woman's life can and will have lasting effects that often split, confuse, and entangle her personality in ways that can make her unrecognizable even to herself. ...

[O]ne can argue that the inclusion of the supernatural in Rose Madder detracts in some ways from the full development and believability of Rose ...

[A]fter creating such a well-developed community of women in Daughters and Sisters, King disappoints by allowing them no essential role in repelling Norman in the end. Instead, a supernatural power must intervene to rescue Rosie. Yes, a female supernatural power rescues her, but in terms of a feminist novel and King's despite to create strong, believable female characters, King thwarts his own goal and potentially disappoints his readers with the deus ex machina element of Rosie's victory.

Next: The Green Mile.