Tag: horror

Inconstant Reader: Cell

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! Warning: we’ve phoned in a few spoilers.

We always knew that mobile phones would kill us. At the time CELL was published in 2006, Stephen King did not own a mobile (or a ‘cell phone’ for our US cousins). Looking back, nor did I – and I even went so far as to write a ‘prizewinning’ short film that made several ‘amusing’ cracks about them. Oh, how times have changed.

With this horror thriller, King takes technophobia one step further by placing cell phones at the centre of a potential world-ending event. The protagonist this time is another writer, Clayton Riddell, having just sold his breakthrough graphic novel and its sequel. Then the Pulse happens.

It begins with seemingly random acts of violence, but it soon becomes obvious that something is happening to people everywhere. Riddell deduces that it is a signal emanating from people’s phones that are turning them into a kind of ‘zombie,’ and there is a ‘pulse’ that’s driving them in a kind of hive mind. Hoping against logic that his wife and young son are still alive, he eventually meets up with the middle-aged Thomas McCourt and 15-year-old Alice Maxwell. The triptych escapes their native Boston and heads out into a ravaged New England.

CELL picks up pace almost immediately, distinguishing itself from King’s occasionally measured and expository openings. The introduction of other elements and characters are rapidly interspersed throughout the short chapters, as though the narrative points themselves were survivors left by the side of the road. Chief of these is the ‘Raggedy Man,’ a zombie-like creature in a Harvard sweater who appears in their collective dreams. Acting as the primary antagonist, he drives the survivors to a location that will be familiar to readers of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Bag of Bones (and later Under the Dome).

King name-checks George A. Romero and Richard Matheson on the dedication page, but others might also find similarities to The Stand: the apocalyptic events, the mass deaths, and two parties being inexplicably led to an inevitable conflict. Yet King’s little ‘ka-tet’ doesn’t have the same sense of moral certainty. There’s no Mother Abigail putting them on god’s path, and these folks are willing to get their hands dirty in the name of survival. Indeed, one of the inciting incidents involves our heroes slaughtering a group of the turned flock. The flock psychically marks them untouchable, so that they are even shunned by other survivors.

John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabelle Fuhrman and Owen Teague in Tod Williams’ 2016 adaptation.

This moral ambiguity is arguably the result of the political environment in which the book was born. Five years after 9/11, the world was still on high alert for terrorism. When the Pulse first hits, many characters are heard commenting that it could be extremists at work again. While King was on record a few years later as calling the war in Iraq a “waste of national resources,” he also vaguely references “Muslim teenager[s] who…strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives.” Whether CELL serves a second purpose of commenting on the wave of conservative sentiments following the attacks is debatable. Regardless of intent, it’s clear the world as it stood in the early 2000s was at the forefront of King’s mind while writing this.

It all builds to a fast-paced conclusion, and the page count falls away as rapidly as zombies to a shotgun. The literally explosive climax is bookended by one of King’s more poignant death scenes, and a bittersweet reunion for Riddell. King doesn’t provide all of the answers, nor does he labour the denouement. The ambiguous finale may leave some readers frustrated, but I found it somewhat refreshing.

King’s stance on phones still seems to be in the ‘sceptical’ camp. Indeed, in the 2020 short story ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ (published in If It Bleeds), he refers to a more recent iPhone as a “high tech Del Monte can” and concludes that “I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.” So, in some ways CELL is even more relevant now than it was in 2006, with the ties between humans and our devices/accounts making us even more vulnerable than ever. They still haven’t brought about the end of the world though. At least not yet.

When Inconstant Reader returns, we’ll set this site alight with Richard Bachman’s Blaze, a book that King found in the attic somewhere.

October 22, 2022
Review: The Black Phone

While THE BLACK PHONE is not the first of Joe Hill’s works to be adapted to the screen, it may be one of the most unnerving. Which is saying a lot when those adaptations include Locke & Key, NOS4A2, In the Tall Grass and Horns.

Based on a 2004 short story, republished in the 20th Century Ghosts anthology, it arrives in cinemas filtered through the minds of screenwriter C. Robert Cargill (Doctor Strange, TV’s Into the Dark) and skilled horror director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister). Shifting the setting to the late 1970s, it opens with a serial child abductor nicknamed “The Grabber” (Ethan Hawke) stalking the streets of Denver in a black van.

Young Finney (Mason Thames) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) live with their abusive and alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies). Gwen is especially terrorised by him as she claims to see visions in her dreams, something that ultimately drove their mother to suicide in the past. Days after the abduction of a friend, Finney is taken and thrown into a soundproof basement by the Grabber. All seems lost, except for a mysterious black phone on the wall. It isn’t connected, but somehow it connects him to something otherworldly.

THE BLACK PHONE is a genuinely unsettling film — in all the best ways. Derrickson prepares us early, showing some truly uncomfortable scenes of domestic violence, almost going too far in this regard. Yet this forms the foundation of Finney and Gwen’s strength for the trials ahead. Then, even in the claustrophobic confines of the basement, Derrickson finds new ways to terrify us. Most of those scares come from the camera panning away and something bad being there when it pans back, but it got me every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Given the lean set-up, Derrickson relies heavily on the strength of his cast and they are all magnificent. Hawke, mostly disguised by a series of masks, vacillates between eerily friendly and straight-up Pennywising. Finney, who we spend the most time with, convincingly carries the emotional weight of the terror and desperation of the situation. Yet it’s the young McGraw who really stands out, disarming us with well-placed barbs while guiding the audience through the more supernatural elements of the film.

With its desaturated colours and 1970s setting, Derrickson’s film feels lived-in at all times. Filled with soon-to-be-iconic imagery — such as the casual vision of a shirtless Hawke guarding a door with a sinister casualness — Derrickson mostly opts for a ‘less is more’ approach. The precision sound design maximises the limited space as well, wholly immersing the viewer from moment to moment.

After a brief foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Derrickson reconfirms his mastery of the horror film. Sure to please fans of his previous work, and Joe Hill’s constant readers alike, it’s destined to be a cult classic with countless imitators.

2022 | USA | DIRECTOR: Scott Derrickson | WRITERS: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill (based on a story by Joe Hill) | CAST: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, James Ransone, Ethan Hawke | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 21 July 2022 (AUS)

July 20, 2022
Inconstant Reader: Everything’s Eventual

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! Warning: spoilers are eventual.

Stephen King’s seventh compilation of short stories and novellas is proof positive that the man is non-stop. Bringing together pieces originally published between 1994 and the anthology’s release in 2002, EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL is arguably King at his most eclectic.

“What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14,” said King in an introduction. “I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers.”

The opening salvo, ‘Autopsy Room Four,’ is a classic bit of Twilight Zoney suspense. In fact, there’s an explicit reference in it to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of the short story ‘Breakdown’ by Louis Pollock. Like those stories, a man is about to undergo an autopsy after being bitten by a deadly snake on a golf course. The only problem is that he’s not dead yet, but is paralysed and unable to tell anybody. The goofy ending, in which a doctor rushes in to let them know he’s not dead – only to discover that the lead doctor has found herself holding her patient’s erect penis – is as macabre as they come. (Coming full circle from its influences, it was later adapted into an episode of the anthology series Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which takes its name from another King collection).

From here the book does have a definite fascination with death or near death experiences. In both ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ and the novella Riding the Bullet – originally published six years apart – a son is visited by the vision of a dead mother and races to be by her side. In the first, originally published in The New Yorker in 1994, it’s about a boy who’s brother died from a bee sting. Years later, when he goes fishing, a man who is quite possibly the devil himself appears to him to tell him that his mother is dead and his father intends to molest him. The gripping story won an O. Henry Award, putting King in such prestigious company as Raymond Carver, John Updike, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Walker to name but a few.

The Gate of Eluria by Michael Whelan

The three novellas – the title story, Little Sisters of Eluria and the aforementioned Riding the Bullet – are the tentpoles of this strong collection. King states in an introduction that the premise of Everything Eventual came to him in a dream about a person pouring change into the storm drain. It concerns a shadowy organisation who gives lead character Dinky Earnshaw, a 19-year-old high-school dropout, everything he wants in the house they keep him in. It’s slowly revealed that Dinky can influence people with his mind, a skill that Dark Tower fans may recognise as the skills of a Breaker, like Ted in the novella Low Men in Yellow Coats (found in Hearts in Atlantis). Both characters turn up in the Dark Tower novels. (There are foreshadows of Gwendy’s Button Box in this tale too).

For Dark Tower fans, Little Sisters of Eluria is the more direct tie-in with the grand saga. Focusing on an adventure of Roland Gilead, it acts as both a prequel to the whole story as well as a follow-up to The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass. In the course of pursuing the Man in Black across the desert, he is attacked by mutants and rescued by a group of strange nuns who call themselves the Little Sisters – but they are actually vampires. It’s a terrific vignette that may be a good place to start your Dark Tower journey, even if it’s way more fun on your second time around the wheel.

As the penultimate story in the collection, Riding the Bullet – which earned King his seventh Bram Stoker Awards (of 15 to date) – started its life as the world’s first mass-market e-book in 2000. It follows a University of Maine student as he hitchhikes the 120 miles (200 km) south after learning that his mother had a stroke. Like ‘The Man in the Black Suit,’ he encounters an undead presence that gives him a choice between his mother’s life and his own. In a moment of terror, he chooses the latter. It was adapted into a movie starring Jonathan Jackson, Barbara Hershey and David Arquette.

Scene from the 1408 adaptation

Speaking of adaptations, ‘1408’ is arguably the best know story in the set thanks to the 2007 Mikael Håfström film starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. A haunted house story of sorts, or ‘ghostly room at the inn’ as King puts it, the short sees a writer spend 70 minutes in a cursed room at a motel – and is irrevocably changed from the experience. Then there’s ‘The Road Virus Heads North’ which despite the title, is not a secret sequel to The Stand. It is, however, about a successful horror writer who buys a painting that begins to disturb him in ways that would make Dorian Gray and Rose Madder blush.

These collections also offer us a chance to see a different side of King. While the vast majority are horror stories, the shuffled deck turns up some literary cards as well. ‘The Death of Jack Hamilton,’ the most recent of the stories in the collection, is a true crime story based on the death of John Dillinger, told from the perspective of Homer Van Meter, a member of John Dillinger’s gang. ‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’ is a sad story of a travelling salesman at a crossroads, banking on the lights of a farmhouse to determine his own fate. ‘Lucky Quarter’ is about single mother Darlene Pullen, who finds the titular quarter and it starts to pay off – or is it all in her head? It’s a wistful twist on the monkey’s paw trope.

There isn’t a dud in the bunch. One of my favourites is ‘L. T.’s Theory of Pets, an often hilarious story told from the first-person perspective. It’s about a couple who buy pets for each other that instantly take a disliking to their respective owners, and it all ends in a grim and bloody finale. If you get the audiobook version of this collection, which I highly recommend, you’ll hear King reading the story live to a very amused audience at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Similarly, ‘Lunch at the Gotham Cafe’ follows a couple on the verge of divorce who are attacked by a waiter having a psychotic break. Something this homicidal shouldn’t be this funny, but it really is.

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL may be one of the best collections of King’s short stories. It’s certainly the one that showcases the length and breadth of his writing talents. It’s the kind of book you want to hand to people who have pigeonholed him as a horror writer of a certain era. Plus, it’s so eventual, man.

When Inconstant Reader returns, we hit the road with 2002’s From a Buick 8, King’s second book about a supernatural car.

April 24, 2022
Review: Sissy

It’s been a few years since filmmakers Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes last collaborated on their feature For Now, a film about some twentysomethings travelling across California to find themselves. For their follow-up SISSY, they return to their native Australia for a unique horror-comedy filled with characters that you could find in all of our shared pasts.

Cecilia (Aisha Dee) has long since moved past her childhood nickname of Sissy, finding success as a social media influencer (called @sincerelyceclia) and her new age self-affirmation positivity. Yet all of this hides her crippling anxiety, and feelings that come to the fore when her ex-childhood best friend (Barlow) invites her away for a bachelorette weekend.

Tension mounts when Cecilia is confronted with her childhood bully Alex (Emily De Margheriti), who is physically and emotionally scarred from an incident Cecilia had long since buried. Stuck in a remote cabin in the bush, it isn’t long before someone acts — and things just start cascading from there.

SISSY is not the first film to examine the gap between social media image and the reality that sits behind it, and nor is it the first to do so through the lens of the horror genre. Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West, for example, is a great dissection of the lengths people go to be liked in a social world, yet stopped short of actual psychotic violence. So, from the contrast of the super clean, bright pink opening of Cecilia’s videos — ones that hide an apartment in shambles and a life lived on the edges of breaking — it’s clear that Barlow and Senes have a unique point of view and a wickedly dark sense of humour.

While much of the first half of the film deal with the social awkwardness of bringing these former friends together, it doesn’t take long before some more traditional horror and thriller cues take place. Hints come early that Cecilia’s state of mind is haunted by some past trauma that lurks on her periphery, and her repeated mantra of “I am special” and “It’s not my fault” speak to a denial of another self. Genre fans can rest assured that it all builds to the requisite amount of bloodshed and gore one has come to expect from people visiting cabins in the woods, but the path there may not be an expected one.

Dee, known to international audiences from her role in The Bold Type series, is terrific in a role that constantly asks us to change our allegiances. If you react against her influencer positivity at the start, you may find yourself still siding with Cecilia when Alex attacks her for being ephemeral. As the chaos begins, I found that I was constantly cheering her on while watching aghast at her actions in equal measure.

Even when SISSY falls back on some familiar thriller tropes, it never completely loses sight of satire. Barlow and Senes have tapped into that part of us that loves to hate, or perhaps hates to love, the pressures of social media while crafting a solid thriller that touches on the legacy of bullying. Not to mention some wonderfully gory revenge moments to boot.

2022 | Australia | DIRECTOR: Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes | WRITERS: Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes | CAST: Aisha Dee, Hannah Barlow, Emily De Margheriti, Daniel Monks, Yerin Ha, Lucy Barrett, Shaun Martindale, Amelia Lule, April Blasdall, Camille Cumpston | DISTRIBUTOR: Arcadia, SXSW 2022 | RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11-20 March 2022 (SXSW)

March 16, 2022
Inconstant Reader: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! Here a proud baseball fan explores faith through an unconventional thriller.

WARNING: The girl also liked to spoil plot points.

In 1998, Tom “Flash” Gordon was a closing pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. It was the year that the team won the American League wild card. In the same period, Gordon had set a club record with 43 consecutive saves. Gordon was so popular in Boston that New England neighbour and Sox superfan Stephen King quite literally deified him in print.

The slender tome follows the nine-year-old Trisha, separated from her family while hiking along a portion of the Appalachian Trail. Conserving what little food she has, Trisha gets increasingly lost when she tumbles off the main path. With only her Walkman to keep her company, her hunger and thirst lead to hallucinations. Some of these are in her mind, but it’s possible there’s something else in the woods as well.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because there’s shades of some earlier King in there. While some may point to The Body, the 1982 novella that became the film Stand By Me (1986), there’s some weird parallels with Gerald’s Game, published only six years earlier. Both deal with the inner world of a young girl experiencing trauma, and while Gerald’s Game has some decidedly adult content, both play with the ambiguity of things seen in extreme isolation.

Pages from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon pop-up edition.

Like that earlier book, the main hallucination is both figurative and literal. As the title of the book would imply, Trisha’s hero is Tom Gordon. He begins to appear to her by way of encouragement. Yet she’s also convinced that she’s seeing the God of the Lost, a wasp-faced entity that seeks to claim her for itself. Ambiguous for much of the novel, she ultimately encounters a bear on the outskirts of civilisation. She believes it to be a manifestation of the God of the Lost, but riddled with pneumonia as she is, we’re left with answers far less tangible than the ‘Space Cowboy’ from Gerald’s Game.

The other parallel can be found, strangely enough, in Desperation (1996). In that book, there was a young boy who seemed to have a direct conversation with God, something that sustained his faith for the duration of an ordeal. While Trish’s god is not quite of the capital G variety, and may be entirely in her head, the end product is the same. It’s about faith in something to sustain you through the bad times. (Those came months after the release of this book King, when he was involved in a severe car accident). Which is probably why baseball was a logical thematic fit for King. Here the chapter headings mirror the innings of a ballgame, almost acting like the stations of the cross for young Trish.

King’s faith in the game would later see him publish the short story ‘A Face in the Crowd’ and his fan exploration of the 2004 Sox season in Faithful (both with Stewart O’Nan). These weren’t the first times, or the last, that King would write about baseball either. The essay ‘Head Down’ (1990), originally published in the for New Yorker followed the a season of his son Owen’s little league team. When it was republished in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, it was accompanied by the baseball-themed poem ‘Brooklyn August.’ Seriously: the man owned a sport-talk radio station.

King would continue to explore baseball in more detail with the novella Blockade Billy in 2010, and remains a vocal fan to this day. His local paper the Bangor Daily News speaks proudly of how he and his wife Tabitha’s support for local teams has sustained the community. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON is ultimately a thriller about faith and survival, and how far this nine-year-old mind can be pushed before breaking. As a Chicago Cubs fan, I can relate.

When it returns in 2022, Inconstant Reader will dive deep into King’s process with Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing. While you’re in the mood, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

December 11, 2021
Inconstant Reader: Bag of Bones

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! A ghost story inspired by Rebecca? Ayuh.

WARNING: There’s a bagful of spoilers from here on out.

With Desperation, Stephen King ended his longstanding relationship with publisher Viking, who he had been working with since 1979’s The Dead Zone. So, in 1997 he signed an initial three-book deal with Simon & Schuster, and off the back of a multi-million dollar advance he published BAG OF BONES the following year. It is born of a desire to write “one more good scary story” before turning 50.

Partly inspired by Rebecca, and filled with allusions and references to Daphne du Maurier’s classic, this 1998 novel unsurprisingly focuses on a writer. Mike Noonan is a successful genre writer, but following the sudden death of his wife Jo, he succumbs to severe writer’s block. After fooling his publisher with a stock of old manuscripts, he finally heads to his Maine vacation house on Dark Score Lake, a place known as “Sara Laughs” in the unincorporated town of TR-90.

Yet his fate takes a turn when he meets the 3-year-old Kyra and her 20-year-old mother Mattie Devore. Her father-in-law, tech mogul Max Devore, is trying to wrestle custody of the young girl by any means necessary. Mike finds himself rushing to their defence, using his own means to hire Mattie a lawyer while becoming involved with the family. Yet his persistent bad dreams and visions and personal and physical assaults from Max complicate things. Not to mention the ghost of his dead wife helping him solve the mystery of Sara Tidwell, a blues singer who haunts the house he is staying in.

Initially reported to be around a thousand pages, the final product comes in at a little over half that length. It’s still a complex and often dense novel, clearly a mixture of a writer working through projections of personal grief while balancing the twists and turns of a ghostly mystery. This is the kind of writing King excels at, combining an eclectic group of characters with a rich and vivid depiction of idiosyncratic Maine as only King knows it. As he says in the Q&A in the backmatter, possibly paraphrasing Edwin Arlington Robinson, “a place is yours when you know where all the roads go.”

There are a few problematic aspects to the book though. Mattie is largely objectified as a character: she’s the object of affection for both Mike and her own lawyer, and a target for removal by Max. Through fantasy sequences and some later implications, King normalises an age-gap in a relationship that would typically belong in a Woody Allen film. Yet King also spends a passage discussing the “strange midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching…or without thinking, way down deep in the sewers of our psyches, that there probably is something lecherous in it.” Suffice it to say, the tone is occasionally baffling.

“Ghosts can’t hurt anyone. That’s what I thought then.”

There’s also the matter of King once again using race and identity as a shorthand to progress the narrative. In this case, it’s historic racial violence in Maine (where almost 95% of the population identifies as White, and less than 2% of the population is Black). It’s dealt with here as the curse of Sara Tidwell, who has killed every descendant of the town residents who did her wrong (and whose names all start with ‘K’ for some reason). It’s a step forward from magic characters like Mother Abigail, Dick Hallorann and John Coffey, but it is still another example of King investing a person of colour with mystical powers beyond the grave. It’s an echo of Pet Sematary in that sense, as New England’s inherited colonial crimes travel down through the generations. Hell, there’s even a few coy references to the Micmac tribe here.

This is all the base stuff of throwback horror stories, and King genuinely scares various amounts of bejesus out of readers at regular intervals. Starting out with fridge magnets that spell words of their own accord, it culminates in a back-heavy maelstrom of past and present tragedies coalescing in a classic haunted house narrative. That said, sometimes it’s the human element that frightens more. There’s a scene in which Max Devore and his right hand woman attack and nearly drown Mike, and it’s tense as any scene King has written over the years.

For Constant Readers, there are a plethora of references to The Dark Tower and the King multiverse more broadly. A thoroughly Maine story, from ayuh to zyuh, there’s passing references to Bill Denbrough (of It) and Thaddeus Beaumont (The Dark Half). The house, Sara Laughs, is the Twinner of Cara Laughs, a house the fictionalised King moved into on Turtleback Lane in the Keystone World. There’s an argument that Mike is King’s Twinner, which does make the relationship with the significantly younger Mattie all the more pointed.

Pierce Brosnan, Melissa George and Caitlin Carmichael in the 2011 miniseries adaptation.

This also goes some way to explaining why the air around several locations is ‘thin’ — typically an indicator of Todash space — allowing for the appearance of various entities. Indeed, at least one is referred to as ‘the Outsider,’ a term that continues to be used to describe Todash creatures in modern King literature. The number 19 turns up in multiple instances, from crossword clues to other less subtle instances. Our old cop pal Norris Ridgewick turns up in the denouement.

Of course, BAG OF BONES isn’t just one of King’s most literary novels because of the intertextuality with his own work. With references to Bleak House and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, and a backbone made of solid Rebecca, it’s one of the cleanest examples of King’s keen (and often encyclopaedic ) knowledge of literary horror history. It is, in the author’s words, a “haunted love story” that speaks to his constant passions for writing and his wife Tabitha. It’s a theme that carried through to the later Lisey’s Story. After all, as Mike Noonan comes to realise, “Marriage is a zone too, you know. Marriage is a zone.”

In the last one of these for 2021, Inconstant Reader explores King’s love of baseball in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

November 23, 2021
Inconstant Reader: The Regulators

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! A ‘mirror’ novel with Desperation, it comes from deep within Richard Bachman’s archives.

WARNING: We can’t regulate the flow of spoilers in this here article, pardner.

Richard Bachman was dead to begin with. Following his outing in 1985, her alter ego Stephen King brutally killed him off like so many of his creations. His official bio stated that he died suddenly from “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.” The incident inspired The Dark Half, but the legacy of ‘twinning’ remains strong in THE REGULATORS.

Released as a novel in late 1996, the official line was that the manuscript was discovered by Bachman’s widow in a trunk (foreshadowing some of the basis of the later Lisey’s Story). In reality — at least our version of it — the book started its life as a screenplay called The Shotgunners for filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, the luminary behind such classics as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. Of course, Peckinpah died during the creative process, which would put the last version of that screenplay at around 1984.

The book came out over a decade later, opening in Wentworth, Ohio with the bloody vision of a paperboy begin gunned down by someone in a red van. The other residents of the street seek shelter, while author Johnny Marinville finds that his attempts to call the police are mysteriously blocked. As the book unfolds, it becomes evident that a being called Tak — currently in possession of an eight year old autistic boy named Seth — is causing the event. The vans are derived from his favourite show MotoKops 2200, while the street transforms into an old west town based on Seth’s love of the western movie The Regulators.

If you’ve not read Desperation, which was published earlier in 1996, then THE REGULATORS may seem like it has stepped straight out of the ether. In fact, it’s probably stepped out of something closer to the todash space that exists between King’s universes. Desperation — which also involves a small ka-tet of people battling Tak — ended with the destruction of a space around an ini, or well of the worlds. All of the main characters return here, except they have been recast or take on new physical forms. David and Kristen Carver, who were young siblings in Desperation, appear here as husband and wife. Collie Entragian is still a former cop, but he gets a heroic redemption before meeting another ill fate here.

The concept of a ‘mirror’ novel is one King has played with several times, from the eclipse-based twinning of Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne so the more directly multiversal companions of The Talisman and Black House. Yet where Desperation was infused with a kind of spirituality, there’s a definite mean streak to its mirror. Indeed, the Bachman pseudonym lets us partly recall Rage, another King book that was built around a shooting spree. However, while King has deliberately let Rage go out of print, the western motifs and connects to The Dark Tower have perhaps kept THE REGULATORS closer to the hearts of Constant Readers.

There still a lot to like about THE REGULATORS. It’s a book about a psychic vampire from outside our world, a ka-tet of good guys, a mirror universe and the concept of fate. It’s a Stephen King book through and through, and an interesting experiment in telling parallel stories.

Next time, Inconstant Reader digs into the dark half of King’s Bag of Bones, an award-winning spin on Rebecca. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

October 15, 2021
Inconstant Reader: Desperation

Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! A twin novel with The Regulators, it’s another reminder that there are more worlds than this.

WARNING: If you’re desperate to avoid spoilers, stop here.

Stephen King is one of the more prolific novelists of our time, but 1996 was a particularly busy period for the Maine native. Following the release of The Green Mile as a six-part serial novel, King also contributed to writing Michael Jackson’s Ghosts. Then there were the twin novels DESPERATION and The Regulators, expanding his multiverse of mythology and creating a small pile of bodies in the meantime.

The main inspiration for DESPERATION comes from two moments in King’s life. The first was when he drove his daughter’s car cross-country in 1991, and came across a seemingly deserted town in Nevada. The legend goes that his inner dialogue told him the town was dead, and the sheriff had killed them all. The other was from 1994, when King rode his motorbike across the US for the Insomnia book tour.

Which brings us Peter and Mary Jackson, driving along their own stretch of the Nevada highways before they are pulled over by apparent cop Collie Entragian. Taking the couple to a police station, it’s soon evident that he isn’t quite right and kills Peter.

He’s one of several people Entragian brings to the empty mining town of Desperation. There’s the Carver family, whose daughter is killed by Entragian. There’s writer Johnny Marinville, who (just like King) is riding across country on a motorbike for inspiration. His assistant Steve Ames trails behind him in a van, and picks up hitchhiker Cynthia Smith (who you may remember from the trauma of Rose Madder). In town, they also come across Tom Billingsley, the alcoholic town vet.

Don Maitz – ‘The Well’

If you’re at all familiar will King’s oeuvre, you’ll recognise that’s a ka-tet assembling there. The term, originating in The Dark Tower books, refers to a group of people drawn together by fate (or ‘ka‘) for a purpose. Although never overtly said here, this is unquestionably what we are seeing. At first, they band together for the simple act of escaping from Entragian. As it becomes clear that he’s actually been possessed by an ancient being named Tak, the focus shifts to stopping his machinations

Like The Stand, or contemporaneous The Green Mile, it’s an often spiritually inspired narrative. Much of this comes from the young David Carver, a 12-year-old boy who seems to have a direct conversational relationship with God. It’s a force that brings this group together and gives them belief, just as much as Mother Abigail in The Stand, Roland’s ka-tet in The Dark Tower and arguably the forces that brought the Derry kids together in It. Indeed, Tak is an extradimensional entity much like the creature calling itself Pennywise, right down to feeding on fear and having a form of deadlights. (In some apocrypha, it’s referred to as ‘Tak the Outsider,’ further drawing connections with another being).

“I’m not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can’t even get our minds around him.”

There are more direct connections to The Dark Tower. From the first time Entragian/Tak refers to animal minions as his can-toi, which we’ve heard before in relation to the Low Men in Yellow Coats (see: Hearts in Atlantis), we’re in multiversal territory. Tak’s guttural tic, repeating the language of the dead at regular opportunities, infuses the whole piece with the speech of Mid World. There are references to the fictional Misery in Paradise, and the Tommyknockers are mentioned by name. The mine where Desperation is located is in the Desatoya Mountains, the same location as The Gunslinger prequel The Little Sisters of Eluria.

That China Pit mine, previously thought to be the site of a cave-in involving Chinese miners, actually houses the ini, well of the worlds. It’s the most direct references to there being ‘other worlds than these,’ and is one of the links to the The Regulators. The latter, published as a lost Richard Bachman novel, recasts the same players in suburbia, where Tak has possessed an autistic boy and created a divergent timeline.

In many ways, it’s typical of mid-to-late-90s King. It’s filled with violence and religion in equal measure, occasionally revelling in the gore more than necessarily. (Case in point, several children are dead before we even get to the town of Desperation). Horror here comes not just from Tak, but partly results from the evil than men do in the absence of a divine faith. Taken together with The Green Mile, in which the divine figure is ‘crucified,’ it’s fair to say that it’s part of a thematic continuum King was experiencing at the time.

So, DESPERATION is a book that gets deep into the weeds of King lore, cross-referencing his own works and expanding on that universe. Yet it can also be enjoyed as a standalone novel, albeit a twin with The Regulators. It’s a massive blockbuster style book about small-town horror that also appeals to a niche audience, and that contradiction just about sums King up to a tee.

Next time, Inconstant Reader flips worlds and looks at The Regulators, the ‘twinner’ novel to Desperation. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

October 5, 2021
Inconstant Reader: Rose Madder
Welcome back to Inconstant Reader, the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published — sort of! Containing one of King’s strongest female characters, here’s a book that confirms there are other worlds than these.

WARNING: We don’t want to make you madder, but this article contains spoilers.

‘rose madder‘
noun
1. a pigment derived from anthraquinone and hydrated oxide of aluminum, characterized chiefly by its reddish color and permanence: used in painting.
2. a horror/fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995
It was happenstance that led me to reading ROSE MADDER so close to 2006’s Lisey’s Story. The current rate of Stephen King adaptations to the screen — and an almost obsessive need to the read the book before the movie or show — has led me to reading some of his books out of order. Yet these books are twins in more ways than one.

Actually, ‘echoes’ of each other is a more accurate statement. While the women who lead the two books are not cosmically connected like Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, their experiences across space and time form the kind of comfortable parallel that keeps turning up in King’s bibliography. Both are wives of men with violence in their blood, and each woman finds herself walking in a world that is not her own.

On its most basic level, ROSE MADDER is about a woman escaping from an abusive spouse. In 1985, Rosie Daniels is beaten by her husband Norman and miscarries. Due to Norman being a cop, she chooses not to run away. However, nine years later she spots a drop of blood on the sheets from a beating the night before, and she finally makes the decision to leave.

“One miscarriage. One scratched lung. The horrible thing he’d done with the tennis racket.”

After escaping and making her way to a big midwestern town, Rose discovers that she can depend on the kindness of strangers. A kindly man named Peter Slowik directs her to Daughters and Sisters, a women’s shelter that helps her get back on her feet. Rose also trades in her wedding ring for a painting she likes, a powerful image of a woman in a rose madder dress, and begins to date store owner Bill Steiner. Yet Norman isn’t through looking for Rose — and is it possible that the painting is growing?

Rose Madder reproduction fan art by TitanaCrotu

The narrative is split into two intersecting perspectives from this point. The primary story is of Rose’s new life, her blossoming relationship with Bill and the emotional scarring she continues to live with. Running next to this is an unnerving narrative of Norman hunting Rose, with his violence growing and past crimes coming to light. It’s arguably the most uncomfortable aspect of the book, featuring King’s uncanny ability to get inside the head of his most despicable characters — complete with all the racist, homophobic and misogynistic traits.

Yet Rose is unquestionably one of the best female characters King has written. Her rich interior life is layered and draws on the notion of ‘multiple selves’ that King has played with in several books. Take Mrs. Practical Sensible as an example: while not an active voice like Jessie’s ‘Goody Burlingame’ in Gerald’s Game, the interior persona is a recognition of the code-switching Rose has consciously and unconsciously adopted over the years. Then there’s the more literal other self in ‘Rose Madder,’ the dark rage that lives in the painting and mirrors Rose’s own growing anger.

“Should we rage against ka? No, for ka is the wheel that moves the world, and the man or woman who rages against it will be crushed under its rim.”

Which brings us to the connections with other King works. Boy howdy are there some connections. There’s some minor ones, of course, such as several references to Paul Sheldon’s books as seen in Misery. The contentious appearance of ‘bools’ (later seen in Lisey’s Story) dominate the final act. The entire existence of a secondary plane is reminiscent of The Talisman or The Dark Tower saga, especially given that both the city of Lud and King’s repeated idea of ka (or fate) is mentioned multiple times. For those who have been around the wheel before, you might recall that Cynthia Smith is seen again in Desperation, itself full of connections and threads between King and alter ego Richard Bachman’s other works.

King has often been critical of this work, and in his memoir On Writing he calls ROSE MADDER (along with Insomnia) “not particularly inspiring” and “stiff, trying-too-hard novels.” Far be it for me to disagree with the writer’s intent, but arguably one of the strongest threads of this book is the theme of empowerment. It’s essentially about victims escaping, about “battered women” who “start accepting the blame…for everything.” Yes, it culminates in a potentially on-the-nose ending inspired by Greek mythology (specifically Theseus and the Minotaur), one that’s a heightened set-piece that speaks to King’s cultural influences. Yet Rose is also given the option of forgetting, but chooses to remember everything and move forward anyway. By any definition, that is particularly inspiring.

The ultimate fate of Rose — or ‘Rosie Real’ as she is often called throughout — reflects this. King doesn’t opt for the easy way out, nor does he offer simple solutions and perfectly happy endings. If ka is a wheel, then it has rolled all the way back around for Rose by the final chapter: she inherits Norman’s rage, but releases the seeds of that rage to grow a literal and figurative tree through which she can release it. It’s an ambitious tale of destruction and renewal, and perhaps in these troubling days it’s the book that found me at the right time and place.

Next time, Inconstant Reader takes a long walk down 1996’s The Green Mile, a serial novel released over the course of six months. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.
July 1, 2021
Inconstant Reader: Lisey’s Story

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published…sort of! Except this one, read out of order to tie in with the release of the new Apple TV+ series.

WARNING: you can’t tell a full story without spoilers.

There’s often a feeling that all of Stephen King’s strongest characters are some variation of male writers. This isn’t true: some of them are wives of writers.

Flippancy aside, 2006’s LISEY’S STORY is one of a handful of King’s novels written specifically from a strong female perspective. In the tradition of Rosie McClendon (Rose Madder), Jessie Burlingame (Gerald’s Game) and the titular Dolores Claiborne — the spousal Avengers of the King Literary Universe — here King introduces us Lisey Landon, the recently widowed wife of the famous novelist Scott Landon.

Reflecting on his own recent illness, King’s inspiration was allegedly imagining what his studio would look like when he was dead, and the things his own wife Tabitha would have to go through. In the novel, the titular Lisey (pronounced ‘Lee-see’) is still going through her late husband’s manuscripts two years after his passing. Academics and fans alike are pressuring her to release unpublished material, and one scholar is particularly persistent.

“To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon.”

Enter Zack McCool. At least that’s what he calls himself. Hired by that one academic to muscle Lisey into submission, he becomes an unstoppable force unable to be called off. The remainder of the book is not just Lisey fending off “Zack’s” attacks, but also recalling memories she’s either repressed or forgotten. A major one is the memory of her saving Scott from a near-fatal shooting by a crazed fan. Others are how Scott’s family history of mental illness has manifested, either through violent mania (what he calls a “bad bool”) or a deep state of catatonia. Sometimes these memories are so painful she’ll break off mid-thought and move onto something else.

Scott’s abusive relationship with his father emerges, along with the tragic fate of his brother. Lisey’s begins to find connections with with her older sister Amanda, insitutionalised after the latest of several suicide attempts. One of those connections is another world that Scott called the “Boo’ya Moon,” a place that served as both a literal “pool” on inspiration and a source of healing. Lisey discovers, or perhaps remembers, that Scott’s habit of bouncing back from gunshot wounds was his ability to travel to this other world.

“SOWISA, babyluv. You’re bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap it on nice and tight.”

Another backbone of the book is the secret language that couples and families share. At this stage in his life, King had been married to Tabitha for 36 years, so there’s a great deal of the duo in Scott and Lisey. Shorthand phrases and keywords serve as totemic markers and clues throughout the book, most significantly “bool,” “yum-yum tree” and the repeated mantra of SOWISA (or ‘Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate’). There’s a point where it feels as though great swathes of the text are glancing off your eyeballs, and the secret language becomes an impediment. Yet King ultimately pays this off with a firm message about the importance of spousal secrets.

Sharp-eyed Constant Readers will instantly see a thematic connection to previous King works. In The Talisman and Rose Madder, the protagonists of those books visit a parallel plane in times of trouble. Indeed, The Talisman‘s Territories are mentioned here. (Rose Madder is also a tale of a wife and her husband, although Rose McClendon’s attacker is closer to home). Similarly, East Stoneham, Maine appears here as well as Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah. Of course, the whole thing takes place near Castle View, and Deputy Andy Clutterbuck (The Dark Half, Needful Things) appears due to Sheriff Ridgewick being on his honeymoon.

At the time of writing, five episodes of director Pablo Larraín’s (No, Ema) eight-part adaptation have been released on Apple TV+ — and so far it’s pretty good. Created as more of an artistic interpretation of a horror thriller, it further proves the universality of King’s themes of spousal secrets and personal resilience.

During the production of the Under the Dome series, King categorically stated that LISEY’S STORY was his favourite of his published novels. It certainly feels like one of the most personal, and ultimately one of the most rewarding. As King mentions in the author statement for the book, “there really is a pool where we…go down to drink and cast our nets.” By the time we reach the end of this deceptively layered novel, we get the sense that King has let us have a small sip of that liquid inspiration.

Next time, it’s back to irregular programming with Rose Madder, a novel where King combines domestic horror with Greek mythology, nods to the Dark Tower saga — not to mention some connections with Lisey’s Story! While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

June 28, 2021