Tag: horror

Inconstant Reader: Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published…sort of! This collection of stories is as satisfying as it is unnerving.

WARNING: these dreamscapes are a nightmare for spoilers.

If you find yourself enjoying Stephen King in small doses, then you’re in luck.

Over the course of his prolific writing career, his six collections of shorts have showcased well over a hundred stories to date — and counting. In his introduction to 1993’s NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES, King’s third published collection of shorts, King declares it to be “an uneven Aladdin’s cave of a book, one which completes a trilogy of which Night Shift and Skeleton Crew are the first two volumes.”

Collecting all the self-described “good stories,” King’s third official compilation is arguably one of his strongest to this point. At the very least, it’s his most diverse collection. Consisting of stories published in various places between 1971 (‘Brooklyn August’) and 1992 (‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’), King has also included a handful of hitherto unreleased stories too.

The first few entries feel like they are solidly in ‘traditional’ King territory, if such a thing exists. Opener ‘Dolan’s Cadillac,’ for example, is one that King says he “absolutely loathed” when he first finished it. Yet time has been relatively kind to the piece he calls an “archetypal horror story, with its mad narrator and its account of premature burial in the desert.” Once you get through the weirdness of ‘Suffer the Little Children’ — a Ray Bradbury style piece that King says has “no redeeming social merit whatever” — we’re on even firmer ground with ‘The Night Flier.’

First published in the 1988 anthology Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror, ‘The Night Flier’ follows a tabloid reporter for Inside View as he investigates a would-be vampire. The taut mystery-cum-horror tale will appeal to lovers of ‘Salem’s Lot, but the King connections don’t stop there. Inside View turns up repeatedly in the Dark Tower multiverse, while the character of Richard Dees first turned up in The Dead Zone (1979) a decade earlier. Indeed, the next story in this collection — ‘Popsy,’ a story of a kidnapping gone wrong thanks to the identity of the boy’s father — features a bat-like creature that King says is connected to his Night Flier.

Indeed, there’s metatextual links all throughout the anthology. The Boston-based ‘The Ten O’Clock People’ — a tale that seems to call out the demonisation of the smoking class — features creatures that fans have said are not dissimilar to the Can-toi of Low Men in Yellow Coats and the Dark Tower. The evil house in ‘It Grows on You’ is situated in Castle Rock, and serves as an epilogue to Needful Things. Two stories are from worlds King didn’t originate: the Lovecraftian ‘Crouch End’ was originally spotted in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980) while ‘The Doctor’s Case’ first found readers in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1987). (If you get the audiobook edition, Tim Curry is the mellifluous voice behind both tales and that may be worth the price of admission alone).

It’s fair to say that King wanders all over the sub-genre map in NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES. There’s the claustrophobic and genuine body horror of the Poe-esque ‘The Moving Finger’ and the cursed doll antics of ‘Chattery Teeth’ (itself recalling King’s own short ‘The Monkey’ in Skeleton Crew). There’s post-apocalyptic visions in both ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ and the George Romero inspired ‘Home Delivery.’ Rock ‘n roll heaven becomes hell on Earth in ‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band.’ We see King play with form too — ‘Sorry, Right Number’ transcribes a teleplay from the Tales from the Darkside TV series, while ‘Head Down’ is a nonfiction essay for The New Yorker about the 1989 season for his son Owen’s Little League baseball team. The latter is followed by a companion poem (‘Brooklyn August’) that reminds us of King’s love of the sport.

One of my favourites is ‘Umney’s Last Case,’ a previous unpublished work that combines the hardboiled fiction of Raymond Chandler with the metafictional leanings of King’s later sagas. Opening with the titular private dick in Los Angeles of the 1930s, Umney discovers that his unravelling life is the work of a writer in the 1990s who wants to take his place. What’s most appealing isn’t just the easily imitable Sam Spade voice, but that the same voice is opening up a dialogue between the writer and his creations. It speaks to the transportative power of fiction for both creator and characters. Years later, King would actually transport himself into his own fiction, rewriting his own fate in much the same way Umney’s creator did. A TV adaptation of the episode earned star William H. Macy an Emmy nomination.

A still from the ‘Sorry, Right Number’ episode of Tales from the Darkside, transcribed into this collection.

There’s a stack here I haven’t even mentioned, not because of their artistic merit — although I suppose if they’d stood out one way or another I’d have written about them — but mostly because time is wearing on and there are other books and films to dissect. Yet that’s the thing about King: even when you think you might be done with him, you’ll find yourself returning to the germ of one of these stories or boldly declaring you’ll reread the entire Dark Tower saga by Christmas. (Even if the year is to be determined).

Boldly stating that “all the good stories have now been collected; all the bad ones have been swept as far under a rug as I could get them,” King’s kept that promise to date. With the exception of a few short stories that have resurfaced in the odd collection or magazine, and the scores of unpublished pieces we may never see, King’s continued dedication to the short form has all been new material since this volume. Yet if this volume proves anything, it’s that long forgotten treasures can be given new life with fresh eyes, and the line between nightmares and dreamscapes is thinner than we might imagine.

Next time, Inconstant Reader hits up Lisey’s Story ahead of the Apple TV+ series. Then it’s back to irregular programming with Rose Madder, a novel where King combines domestic horror with Greek mythology and his Dark Tower saga. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

April 24, 2021
Review: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched

Folk horror is having a bit of a revival at the moment. If that seems odd to you, then look no further than the recent successes of Midsommar and the Pet Sematary remake. Yet the tradition of folk horror is as deep as the land from which it draws its power, something horror expert, writer and festival curator Kier-La Janisse explores in her debut film.

“Folk horror,” explains the first of many voices we hear throughout the film, “is based upon the juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny.” It’s the intrusion of old religions in the modern world but often the other way around. It’s “strange things found in fields,” as well as the “Devil having a cup of tea with you.”

Few stones, bubbling brooks or hollowed out trees are left unturned in this comprehensive examination of one of the most enduring genres in horror films and literature. Taking just over three hours, Janisse guides us through the origins of folk horror films, from the more common British folk horror of the 60s and 70s through to more recent examples from around the world.

The Wicker Man (1973)

Starting with what Jonathan Rigby terms the Unholy Trinity of folk horror — being Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and, of course, The Wicker Man — the film draws out the threads of old religion and aristocratic corruption found in each. Robert Eggers (The Witch) argues that there are more tropes out of Britain than anywhere, as he and fellow commentators hold up Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James and the film adaptations of director Lawrence Gordon Clark (A Ghost Story for Christmas) as seminal creators in the space.

So pervasive are the elements of folk horror in Britain, they bleed out of fiction and into the everyday. There’s David Greene’s serial killer thriller I Start Counting (1970) starring Jenny Agutter, for example, which is not as overtly about spirits or witches. There’s a compelling argument that David Gladwell’s documentary Requiem for Village (1975), in which a Suffolk churchyard keeper laments some lost from the rural past, also gets to the core of this tradition.

“We don’t go back. It’s the fundamental tension of folk horror.”

Juxtaposed with scenes from Quatermass and the Pit (“It’s in the computer!”) and Doctor Who‘s ‘The Daemons’ episode, Janisse draws a line through to the likes of Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and Prevenge (2016). A large chunk is also spent on witchcraft and American traditions, examining Puritans and the ontological status of indigenous peoples in many of those films. The pervasive trope of the ‘Indian burial ground’ (like in The Shining) can only be eroded when more films from First Nations filmmakers (such as 2018’s Edge of the Knife) come to the fore.

Midsommar (2019) is “deeply informed by a fear of cults.”

In addition to the complex history of American fiction — which incorporates everything from Children of the Corn and The Wind‘s prairie horror to the urban folk legends of Candyman — the exhaustive analysis includes films from Japan (Shikoku, Onibaba, Kuroneko and Kwaidan to name a few), Brazil, and South Africa, as well as a fairly deep look at Australia’s rich horror history. Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discusses The Last Wave (1977), Lake Mungo (2000) and Tracey Moffat’s BeDevil (1993) to find connections between invasion, colonisation and place-based stories in Australian folk horror.

By the end of the picture, WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED: A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR (to use its full title) makes a convincing case as to why this particular genre continues to have its day. “You bring your horror in with you,” remarks one pundit in the final moments, citing parallels between our own traumatic times and a fear of the future with the golden era of the genre in Britain’s 1970s. After a year of a pandemic, political turmoil and murder hornets, it’s hard to disagree.

2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Kier-La Janisse | WRITERS: Kier-La Janisse | CAST: Robert Eggers, Alice Lowe, Emma Tammi, Mattie Do, Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas | DISTRIBUTOR: Severin Films, SXSW 2021 | RUNNING TIME: 193 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16-20 March 2021 (USA)

March 17, 2021
Inconstant Reader: Four Past Midnight

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published…sort of! King’s second collection of novellas is pure horror – and a little familiar.

WARNING: this article is way past spoilers.

“Well, look at this – we’re all here,” says the master of horror by way of introduction. “We made it back again. I hope you’re half as happy to be here as I am.”

The same could be said for this Constant Reader – and less than constant writer. While it’s only been just over a month since I last checked in to the Inconstant Reader saga, with a not-so-little tome called The Dark Half, time seems to be going a bit wrong. The month of September felt somehow longer than most, but I also can’t help shake the feeling that we just finished August. Or was it March? We may never know.

Which brings us to this month’s Stephen King pick, 1990’s FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT. Like Different Seasons, it’s a collection of novellas that don’t entirely have a home elsewhere. If Different Seasons was Stephen King’s proof positive that he can write culturally influential material outside of horror, then this is a reminder of his greatest hits. As King puts it, “all four of the tales in this book are tales of horror.” Ostensibly written during King ‘retirement period,’ for any other writer any of these tales would be a standalone volume.

Take the opening gambit The Langoliers, for example, a story that’s well over 300 pages. One of King’s more successful ‘science fiction’ stories, dealing with time travel in this case, it’s all about character. Structurally it’s a bit like The Mist: a group of unlikely folks gather in a confined space while the world goes a bit wonky outside. There’s even a nutjob who is making it decidedly difficult for our hero, off-duty airline pilot Brian Engle. It’s a solid opener that intrigues more than it straight-up frightens, but it’s also one of the strongest of the bunch. (The same cannot be said for the mini-series of the same name, starring Cousin Balki as a direct-to-video Patrick Bateman).

Actual dialogue from The Langoliers, six full years before 22 Short Films About Springfield.
It really is time travel.

Next up is Secret Window, Secret Garden, which feels incredibly familiar. Not just because it was turned into a film with Johnny Depp but because I feel as though I’ve read it before. Just last month in fact. Yup, the (other) Dark Half sees a writer’s darkest fears come to life when he’s accused of plagiarism by a hillbilly. As the paranoia and otherness of his accuser heats up, it would be an incredibly tense mystery if it didn’t feel like a literal retake of The Dark Half. I guess Mr. King and Mr. Bachman still had some unfinished business.

The Library Policeman cuts where it hurts for me. It’s about the dark fears people have of librarians and, as a career librarian, I’m aware that ‘library anxiety’ is a real thing. Still, I remain unaware of a secret police force at our disposal. It’s a problematic story though: overlong and a little too dark at times. The denouement involves memories of a traumatic child rape as well which is as uncomfortable to read as I hope it was to write. The creature under the librarian’s mask is an emotional vampire feeding on fear, the kind that. If you were in doubt, check out this passage:

“She has to take lives to get through her time of change…There’s something not human, some it hidden inside her skin. It’s inside…but forever an outsider.”

Sound familiar? So the working theory is that librarian Ardelia Lortz is some kind of ancient eldritch creature like a Dandelo/Pennywise thing, or at least a similar kind of interdimensional creature that terrorised the children of Derry. (Similar creatures were spotted in The Dark Tower and perhaps even The Outsider).

So, is Mr. Bookman also a Todash monster?

The Sun Dog is hands-down my favourite of the bunch and makes a solid case for its own film adaptation. Set in Castle Rock, it’s arguably the most overtly Kingian of the crop. A young boy gets his hands on a Polaroid camera (the Sun 660 of the title) from Reginald “Pop” Merrill (who you might recall as the uncle of “Ace” Merrill’s from The Body and later Needful Things). When he starts taking photos, he spots an angry looking dog in all the images – and he’s getting closer. Apart from being creepy as hell, this also serves as the middle chapter (King calls it a bridge) between The Dark Half and Needful Things. They were meant to be the final word on Castle Rock, but King could never completely stay away from it.

These stories have two major things in common. Thematically, they are linked together by playing with the inky horrors that lurk just on the fringes of our mind, irrationally keeping us awake at night. All four deal with those terrors becoming manifest, whether it’s the stories of the bitey Langoliers Craig Toomy’s cruel father told him as a child, guilt and paranoia personified, or the lurking dread that the library cops are out to get you. Indeed, Sun Dog quite literally has a creature trying to burst through from a two-dimensional world into something more tangible.

The other thread, as we’ve seen, is that each is analogous to other King tales, or at least connected in some way. Whether consciously or not, King has reworked The Mist, The Dark Half, and It, along with effectively writing a prologue to another novel. All things serve the beam, after all, and there are other books than these.

Which isn’t to say that this is straight retread so much as a distillation of the form. While the two middle novellas in here take a little bit more work to get through, the opener and closer are such great stories. It can also be seen as a farewell to the 1980s, the era of Peak King, and a pathway into a decade that saw even greater experimentation than every before.

Next time, Inconstant Reader takes a look at The Stand, as the Complete and Uncut Edition was released this same year Four Past Midnight. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

October 3, 2020
Inconstant Reader: The Dark Half

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published…sort of! Art imitates life as a writer’s alter ego is unveiled.

WARNING: this article is half-filled with dark spoilers.

So we return to Castle Rock, the scene of so many past and future horrors. The middle chapter of a loose thematic trilogy with the short story “The Sun Dog” and the later Needful Things, THE DARK HALF is one of several King books to rip inspiration from the real world.

For years, King led a secret life as a writer. Well, as a different writer. Richard Bachman, who debuted with Rage (1977) and gave us classics like The Running Man (1982), was outed as King by Steve Brown around the time of Thinner (1984).

King “killed off” his nom de plume, although cheekily referred to him in the third person from time to time. Indeed, THE DARK HALF is dedicated to “the late Richard Bachman.” This is where life and art intersect: just as fan outrage over The Eyes of the Dragon gave us Annie Wilkes, King’s outing as Bachman directly led to the creation of George Stark.

“The world would be a more efficient place if everyone in it came out of a pop novel.”

In King’s novel, first published in 1989, Thad Beaumont is a recovering alcoholic known for his literary fiction. After being outed as George Stark, a crime writer known for his Alexis Machine novels, Thad and his wife Liz stage a mock burial for Stark.

So, it’s surprising when Castle Rock’s Sheriff Alan Pangborn, introduced in this book as a successor to the late George Bannerman (The Dead Zone, Cujo), turns up on his doorstep convinced of Thad’s guilt in a recent murder. Yet as more deaths occur, and Thad’s alibi gets tighter, it becomes apparent that someone else with Thad’s DNA is on a revenge rampage. Thad soon finds that he’s connected to this figure, one that literally crawled from the grave of the ‘late’ Stark.

THE DARK HALF is something of an anomaly in King’s oeuvre to this point. On the one hand, it pulls on themes that we’ve seen before: a writer held hostage (Misery), the duality of self (The Talisman, The Shining), and small town cop facing an unknown entity in Castle Rock. It’s undeniably a King novel, yet there’s a lot more ink to the darkness this time around.

The 1992 DOS game was a reasonably faithful point-and-click adventure game (Symtus/Capstone).

Beginning with the graphic description of young Thad’s surgery, where the eyes and teeth of a twin devoured in utero remain lodged in his brain, this is possibly King’s most gruesome piece of murder fiction at this point. There’s a particularly sticky sequence where a woman is murdered in her apartment. In another, a man is killed by “splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke.” Perhaps, like the connection Thad and George share, King was channelling the deceased Bachman. Or at least borrowing his mask for a time.

Indeed, there’s more of a structural similarity to a mystery thriller than a straight horror novel at first. King credits Donald E. Westlake and his pen name Richard Stark as an inspiration. It’s interesting that I always considered Mr. Mercedes (2014) as one of King’s first forays into pure crime, but there’s a lot of modular elements in here too. Pangborn’s arc is effectively that of sceptical detective, staying on the fringes of supernatural doings until necessary. For Constant Readers, there’s only hints of the family whose absence would form part of the catalyst for later adventures.

“He has ALWAYS been two men…The one who exists in the normal world…and the one who creates worlds. They are two. Always at least two.“

Where things get really interesting are in the broader myth-making at play. Sparrows form a recurring motif, later identified as ‘psychopomps’: “the harbingers of the living dead” whose “job is to guide newly dead souls to their proper place in the afterlife.” Constantly swirling like something out of a Hitchcock film, Stark’s inability to see them – and Thad’s growing understanding of them – fills the back third of the book with a tension that rips along at a pace.

King would return to these themes in the short story “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (in the Four Past Midnight anthology) but also decades later in The Outsider (2018), a narrative that is an almost mirror image of this one. Similarly, it’s been pointed out to me that the the psychic connection Thad and George share – one gets stabbed in the hand, the other feels it for example – turns up again in Doctor Sleep (2013). Pangborn himself would return in Needful Things, picking up on a few threads here, and in many ways conclude his arc in the TV series Castle Rock.

THE DARK HALF has been adapted multiple times, including the 1993 George A. Romero film and a strangely accurate 1992 DOS game from developers Symtus (released by Capstone Publishing and pictured above). Yet it’s the print edition that has the most power in its exploration of the literary doppelgänger. While not strictly metafictional in nature, it preempts the inter-textual collaboration of King/Bachman in Desperation/The Regulators (1996), along with King’s insertion of himself into The Dark Tower saga.

Next time, Inconstant Reader synchronises its watches for Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

August 25, 2020
Inconstant Reader: The Tommyknockers

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published…sort of! Is one of Mr. King’s least favourite books as bad as he thinks?

WARNING: this article knocks on the door of spoilers.

When an author refers to his own work as “an awful book,” you have to take it with a grain of salt. After all, if you find a writer who has switched off their inner critic, then they are probably six feet underground.

First published in November 1987, King has stated that this was one of the last books he wrote under the influence of drugs and alcohol. I won’t get into this well-covered territory again here – having necessarily discussed it already in my looks at The Shining, Cujo, Needful Things, Doctor Sleep and On Writing to name a few – but it is worth noting from the outset. After all, one of the lead characters is an alcoholic on a path to literal self-destruction.

King’s books have always been infused with Lovecraftian horror, but with the exception of a handful of shorts he’d never gone completely into supernatural sci-fi. THE TOMMYKNOCKERS wastes very little time getting into The Colour of Space-inspired tale, introducing writer Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson shortly before her discovery of a long-buried metallic object that turns out to be a spaceship.

“Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don’t know if I can ‘cuz I’m so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.”

The fictional town of Haven, not too far from Bangor and Derry, begins to experience a series of transformations, personality shifts and disappearances as the ship exerts its influence. In a moment worthy of Dick Halloran himself, the alcoholic poet James Eric Gardener (or simply ‘Gard’) senses that Bobbi is in trouble and comes running. Thanks to a metal plate in his head, he’s less susceptible to the influence of the creatures he dubs ‘Tommyknockers.’

Japanese cover from Bungeishunju Publishing

There’s a lot here that King does very well. Splitting his book into three distinct sections, Book II is where we see the best and worst of his style. As he did in the thematically similar ‘Salem’s Lot, King introduces us to the town via a series of vignettes. Some pay off immediately, with a character under the influence creating a battery-powered time-bomb, while others sew the seeds of things to come in the book’s concluding section.

King would rework this basic structure a few years later in Needful Things, a book King says was the first written after his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol use. The irony is that both books are hamstrung by their dedication to a formula that mostly succeeds in expanding the volume’s page count.

I do not understand what’s going on here.

Unlike the societal microcosm of Jerusalem’s Lot, or the inherent darkness of Castle Rock, the town of Haven feels created to be dispensable. Entire characters are introduced with complex backstories only to be removed pages later. Bobbi’s sister is a great example of this, while the young David Brown and his amateur magician brother Hilly only serve as a more sympathetic set of characters than the problematic Gard.

Gard is something of a William S. Burroughs figure: a blackout drunk who has a reputation for having shot his wife in the face, as Burroughs did with Joan Vollmer. We might sympathise and semi-root for Gard’s initial attempts to help the transforming Bobbi. Yet it’s the latter who could have been the more interesting character. Instead, she’s another wasted opportunity for a study in body horror. There’s not enough of a hook to keep constant readers focused. While sharing some of his moral failings, Gard’s no Father Callahan – although it’s yet to be seen if his fate is as epic as that of the wayward priest.

“He thought he saw a clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole – a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.”

While Gard may not end up in the Dark Tower saga, there’s an almost aggressive amount of intertextuality present in THE TOMMYKNOCKERS. There’s casual references to ka, the spiritual sense of guidance from King’s vast multiverse, but more specific callbacks as well. Arcadia Beach from The Talisman is visited, and there is a boy named Jack there. The Arrowhead installation from The Mist is mentioned, and later The Shop from Firestarter serves a role. There are nods to Jack Nicholson in The Shining movie and even Stephen King himself at one point. The Micmacs from Pet Sematary are invoked. In the most overt moment, one character spots a “clown grinning up at him from an open sewer manhole” with “shiny silver dollars for eyes and a clenched white glove filled with balloons.” As Men at Work once sang, who can It be now?

All of these references are nice for us Constant Readers, but they do come at the cost of length. Long bits of description without any signs of editing, coupled with passages that meander off down side-streets, many of which deflate building tension. More than this, King seems to revel in a sea of bodily and other fluids, a grotty texture of passages that litter variations of “squirt” more than a dozen times. Even the most ardent of fans – you know, the ones that have made it through the 823 pages of The Stand or 1,138 pages of It – may find their minds wandering by the midway mark.

The cast of the 1993 miniseries live in hope for some more character development.

So, is THE TOMMYKNOCKERS an “awful” book? Definitely not, although its reputation has made it the subject of some essays on sloppy storytelling. The finale is a blockbuster series of sequential moments, each building on the last in one of King’s most “cinematic” of endings. Indeed, the novel was adapted into a TV mini-series a few years later with Jimmy Smits as Jim Gardner and Marg Helgenberger as Bobbi Anderson, and it didn’t fare much better critically. In 2014, it was ranked the third worst King mini-series. Variety was more succinct. They called it “hokey whoop-de-doo.”

Next time, Inconstant Reader explores the war inside every writer with a pseudonym as we head back to Castle Rock in The Dark Half. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

July 14, 2020
Inconstant Reader: Skeleton Crew

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published! (Sort of!) His third collection of short stories is his more diverse – but is it his best? WARNING: members of this crew get into spoiler territory.

Every book finds a reader in the most unexpected places. Released in 1985, between Thinner and It, this was arguably the height of Stephen King’s publishing power. It showcases King’s flexibility as a writer, delving into sci-fi and poetry for the first time.

For me, it will always be one of the books that I read during the third month of a global pandemic, and that does really strange things to one’s brain. Look it up: it’s science.

Following a wonderful introduction, one in which King calls short stories “a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger,” this hefty volume rolls out like a train of thought. Indeed, the stories span about 17 years worth of King’s creative thoughts, from his second professional sale (‘The Reaper’s Image’ from 1969) to ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ completed in 1983. In total, there’s 19 short stories, two poems and a novella.

The latter opens the book, and is arguably the most well-known of the stories in this assortment. ‘The Mist’ was published three years earlier in the Dark Forces anthology, and has since been adapted into a film and TV series. Having read it relatively recently, I skipped over it this time because it takes up a quarter of the text! Yet it’s worth remembering that it’s a straight-up horror piece, incredibly taut and straightforwardly told. One of the handful of instances where King uses first-person perspective, the siege genre adds urgency while emphasising Lovecraftian gut-horror.

King’s fondness for Lovecraft emerges more directly in two other stories. In ‘Gramma,’ a boy left alone with a not-quite-dead grandmother is overtly tied to the Cthulhu Mythos, while the Castle Rock adjacent ‘Nona’ follows a Lovecraftian theme of rats in the walls. (Which is actually the title of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, not to mention subject of King’s ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (1978) and ‘Graveyard Shift’ (1970) shorts).

Frank Darabont’s The Mist (1999) made the King connections obvious.

Unlike previous shorts collections Night Shift and the four novellas of Different Seasons, this is more of a grab bag of ideas. ‘Here There Be Tygers,’ for example, is written from the perspective of a boy who believes there’s a tiger in his school bathroom. ‘The Monkey’ is King’s spin on a cursed doll tale (someone set this thing to evil!), and is an idea he continued to explore over the years. ‘Cain Rose Up,’ about a depressed and homicidal college student on a shooting spree, somehow remains in print despite King’s self-censorship of the thematically similar Rage.

For Constant Readers, things get a little more interesting with ‘Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,’ ayuh. Along with referencing Cujo, the story of a woman who finds shortcuts in highways (like a folded map) has been largely interpreted as a reference to the todash space in the Dark Tower series as well as the travel methods seen in The Talisman. A strange creature found in the grill of her car may also have you crying out ‘Oy!’ at the inhumanity of the roadkill. (Outside of ‘The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands,’ which is set in the same club as ‘The Breathing Method,’ it’s the most undisguised intertextuality in the book). At any rate, it’s the most Kingish tale in the first half of the collection.

In fact, there might be some of the most singularly dark offerings of any King book found in SKELETON CREW. ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ is about the intense passion of the paranoid, as an old man stares vigilantly at an abandoned truck he is convinced is slowly moving, and his death is no less gruesome. ‘The Raft’ puts four college kids in the middle of a lake before they are devoured by a mysterious inky-black substance, a proper 80s horror story complete with a non-sequitur sex scene.

“I got to thinking about cannibalism one day…”

Then there’s the properly dark stuff. ‘Survivor Type’ is potentially one of the most gruesome stories that King has ever written, as a disgraced surgeon stranded on a desert island slowly starts devouring himself. In some notes in the backmatter, King begins that he “got to thinking about cannibalism one day…” which probably sums it up nicely. The kicker of a final line is finger licking good, y’all.

Less successful is ‘The Jaunt,’ the title of which refers to the common practice of teleportation in the future. One of King’s rare forays into straight sci-fi, it spends much of its time explaining its own premise before leaving us on a twist (it was first published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, after all) that is outrageously dumb. Yet King has a more solid sci-fi adventure with ‘Beachworld,’ a completely enveloping tale of some stranded spacemen who become enraptured by sentient sand dunes. It feels a bit like a Kōbō Abe story in some ways.

“Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles of sewer to surface in my toilet…”

It was a delight and a surprise to find some poetry in this collection as well. While I’d read some of King’s verse before (such as ‘The Dark Man,’ published as a standalone illustrated volume), it was nice to turn the page and find it here. Indeed, ‘Paranoid: A Chant’ alludes to the ‘a dark man with no face’ (tying it to The Stand and The Dark Tower series) in its hypnotic ramblings of a madman. ‘For Owen’ is a more personal affair, written as a conversation with his son about sentient fruit attending a school!

There’s certainly a overall lower ‘hit rate’ in this collection that some of King’s earlier anthologies, yet we always get the sense that he was trying to stretch himself here. Two fragmentary shorts with the sub-labels ‘Milkman No. 1’ and ‘Milkman No. 2’ were from an abandoned serial killer novel. On the other hand, ‘The Wedding Gig’ is rife with fat-shaming, something we’ve seen before.

In fact, we see it again in relation to the wife of the protagonist in ‘Word Processor of the Gods.’ As the title would imply, it’s already a somewhat dated story further hamstrung by a ‘twist’ in which everybody comes off as jerkish. King being King, there’s a bit of writerly introspection as well. Likewise, ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ has some great story-within-a-story musings on madness, and is perhaps a part confessional on how deep a writer gets into his own work.

The original title of SKELETON CREW was Night Moves, and somehow that seems more apt. This is a collection that moves in and out of those shadowy places like a thief in the night, occasionally sneaking up on you unawares. Yet for long swathes of time, I was unaware of its machinations entirely. There are stories I’ve not even mentioned here.

At other times, it grabbed me by my shirt collar and shook me out of my isolife malaise. It’s difficult to be completely objective about a book read in such strange circumstances. Yet perhaps this abstract feeling adds to the experience. As King says in an afterword, “I don’t know about you, but every time I come to the end, it’s like waking up.”

Next time, because I’ve now read a couple out of order, Inconstant Reader heads straight to 1987 and The Tommyknockers. King calls it “an awful book.” Can’t wait! While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

June 11, 2020
Review: If It Bleeds

WARNING: in order to fully digest the book, this review bleeds into spoiler territory.

Stephen King has published more than 60 novels, many of which have permeated the public consciousness in their many iterations. Yet the crossover hits like The Body (Stand by Me) and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption have often come from his short stories and novellas, a tradition followed by IF IT BLEEDS.

Like Different Seasons or Full Dark, No Stars, this latest collection is made up of four parts. Three of them – ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,’ ‘The Life of Chuck’ and ‘Rats’ – are standalone pieces, while the titular story follows King’s Bill Hodges novels (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) and features Holly Gibney, who also appeared in The Outsider.

‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ is arguably the most traditional of the shorts, where young Craig reads to the eponymous Harrigan, a former tycoon with a minor aversion of technology. When the elderly man passes away, he finds that he can still send his wishes to his friend via the phone tucked away in his funeral suit.

It plays like kind of Twilight Zone episode filtered through King’s own Apt Pupil and Gwendy’s Button Box. Even the narrator is a writer looking back on his salad days. So, it’s not only well-travelled territory for the author, but also starts to show a few signs that the 72-year-old writer may no longer have his finger firmly on the pulse of society. Indeed, it’s hard to pick a single tone in this short with an unclear motivation on the part of any of the main players.

Filled with anachronisms, and a young character who feels like he stepped goggle-eyed out of the 50s into the 21^st century, it’s seems to be King’s own wistful musing about making America great again. After all, it has a teen boy calling his iPhone 5C 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.”

King seems to carry this pseudo-technophobia over into ‘The Life of Chuck,’ which opens “just before the Internet went down for good.” At least that’s the premise for a head-scratcher of a story that is arguably the most ‘different’ thing that King has done to date. In an afterword, King explains that it’s a three-act structure about the life of Chuck, “presented in reverse order, like a film running backwards.” As the world around him crumbles, King explores the idea that in each of us there is a world containing multitudes. It’s a positive message that, like 2018’s Elevation, is needed in these troubled times.

‘If It Bleeds’ is the main attraction in every sense of the word, headlining the book and reuniting Constant Readers with Holly. She’s one of the few characters, aside from the Dark Tower saga, that King has kept returning to and it’s clear he’s attached to her. In her first solo outing, she spots a reporter covering a school bombing. Holly’s instincts tell her that he’s not what he seems and has a chance to road test the assertiveness she’s been working on.

I could be really picky and suggest that if you haven’t read The Outsider, there’s a good possibility that many of the intertextual references will go sailing over your head. Yet as a Hodges/Gibney devotee, this was like slipping on your favourite t-shirt. It’s a solid supernatural thriller with an action finale that leaves the door wide open for more Holly adventures, with the possible connections to another King creature more solidly connected to this psychic vampire.

‘Rats’ is perhaps the most perplexing of the bunch. Like many of King’s protagonists, the lead here is another writer. Having spent a career in short stories, a sudden idea for a western spurns him to head off to the family’s cabin in the woods. Defying advice from the weather bureau, his wife and the flu that’s brewing as fast as the coming storm, he ploughs on into writing his first novel. A rescued rat offers him a Faustian bargain: is it his fever talking or something more supernatural.

So, an isolated writer is offered success in return for the death of someone he knows. Naturally my mind turned to The Shining. Apart from being significantly shorter and with seemingly lower stakes, it culminates in a series of rat puns – and some of those are truly frightening.

As a collection, it’s a mostly satisfying group of stories that are sure to please all but the most critical of King fans. As a Constant Reader (or an Inconstant one if you prefer), I’m still amazed that King continues to play with the form as much as he does. Yet as the title implies, if it bleeds it leads: and King has been leading for a long time.

2020 | US | WRITER: Stephen King | PUBLISHER: Scribner (US), Hachette (Australia) | LENGTH: 448 pages | RELEASE DATE: 21 April 2020

April 27, 2020
Inconstant Reader: Thinner

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published! (Sort of!) The last Richard Bachman book before his ‘outing’ is a slice of body horror pie that gets slimmer as it goes. WARNING: in order to fully digest the book, this article bites into spoiler territory.

Weight is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. Even while sitting down to write this, five months of consistent and healthy weight loss are still unreasonably consumed by feelings of self-loathing for a body I desperately want to muscle into submission. It’s an anxiety that many share, and as the basis for a horror novel its both disturbing and uncomfortable.

The setup is simplicity itself. Billy Halleck is an overweight lawyer. I say this up front because he is established – by ticking chapter headings – as 246 pounds (about 111 kg) and 6 foot 2. Which is obese by the ol’ BMI scale. It’s important to remember this in objectivity because King has historically been a bit guilty of some casual fat-shaming, most notably in It (1986) and as recently as Mr. Mercedes (2014).

We meet this man shortly after getting off scot-free for the vehicular manslaughter of an elderly “Gypsy” woman, another dated term used liberally (along with ‘gyp’) in the text. Succumbing to uncontrollable weight loss, he soon finds himself alternatively distrusted by and horrifying to his nearest and dearest, especially as he insists that he is the victim of a “Gypsy curse” by a man known as Taduz Lemke.

Strangely, this is where THINNER works best, as a psychological horror tale of one man’s descent into motivated madness. We learn that those who encountered the ever-looming figure of Lemke, foreshadowed by constant descriptions of his cancerous nose, have each succumbed to physical ailments such as body scales and extreme acne. Billy’s constant denial of his own culpability in the death of Lemke’s daughter – it was his wife’s fault for giving him a hand job while driving, or the old woman’s for jaywalking – are classic setups begging for a comeuppance. “The definition of an asshole,” reflects one character later on, “is a guy who doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.”

“You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there, but it’s not like that…”

When we last encountered Bachman (in 1982’s The Running Man) he was concerned with the lone man against the system. Indeed, all of King’s Bachman books have followed this theme to some extent: Rage’s visceral high school shooter, the relentless individualism of The Long Walk, and most definitely the grief swallowed up by the machine in Roadwork. This is the most King-ish of the Bachman releases to this point, the trademark Bachman unlikeable lead notwithstanding, and that’s possibly because it’s the most personal of the batch.

King once commented in an interview that when he was “236 pounds, and…smoked heavily,” he was ordered by his doctor to lose some weight. The perceived imposition saw King reflect on notions of the body, perceptions of self, how society views and judges the so-called overweight and underweight, and America’s obsession with food. There’s an uncomfortable truth that gets to the heart of the body horror aspects of the narrative. King has been playing with these ideas at least since his debut novel Carrie, in which the titular character’s menstruating body is told to contain itself (“Plug it up!”) before being unleashed in a telekinetic rage.

Thinner, Carrie, and Dreamcatcher are just some of the King tales dealing with body horror.

Reflecting on my own difficult relationship with my body, I recognised some of the passages King uses in my own self-defeating thinking. Likewise, the obsession with weighing, the way “people would stare at you” and all the self-talk that comes with it. One becomes convinced that every look is a judgment, when the harsh reality is that most people are thinking about their own damn selves and you’re just something that passed in front of their eyeballs. Of course, I recognise that none of this is rational.

“Billy Halleck discovered a crude sort of ritual had attached itself to his procedure for weighing himself…”

Yet despite this resonating with me on some level, or at least ‘getting’ some of King’s thinking, THINNER is a book that aptly loses substance as it goes. The character-based first act gives way to a slower second half. Attempting to combine Billy’s pursuits with some of the supernatural elements of (imagined?) Gypsy culture, it feels like King wrote himself into a corner, much as he did with Christine. Case in point is the late introduction of mobster Richie “The Hammer” Ginelli, who bizarrely takes over the narrative with a side story of how he tried to muscle the Gypsy camp.

The finale comes full circle, relying on a carefully constructed privilege to lead Billy to the Twilight Zone conclusion. Lemke gives our thin man a simple choice. Actually he gives him a pie. Billy starts to gain wait again, but he’s threatened that his curse will return if someone doesn’t eat the dessert within the next few weeks. He doesn’t eat it himself, of course, still refusing to take responsibility for his own actions. Leaving it for his wife, it’s also consumed by his daughter. Oh the irony! The pie-rony!

The heavy-handed ‘humble pie’ conclusion (or ‘just desserts’ if you will) makes this feel more like a winking short story than a novel. Pile on a liberal dose of cultural stereotyping, and you have something that doesn’t quite weigh up 36 years later. Yet there’s moments of genius in here, representative of the brief window between Bachman’s anonymity and the sales spikes from his outing. In fact, Misery was originally planned as a Bachman book before the reveal. Sadly, Bachman died in late 1985 of “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.”

Bachman will return…in 1996’s The Regulators! Until then: it’s all King, all the time! From THINNER to Skeleton Crew, the next instalment of Inconstant Reader rolls on in chronological order for a change. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

March 4, 2020
Inconstant Reader: Cycle of the Werewolf

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published! (Sort of!) A calendar turned short novel, can this also be seen as King’s experimental art project? WARNING: this gets into spoiler territory.

Writing for The New York Times in 2015, Stephen King defended the reputation of prolific writers. It’s a moniker he’s certainly earned, and 1983 was the first of several years where the the author would publish three or more books. CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF is arguably the most experimental of that year’s output.

Following the doorstop of Christine and the sublime Pet Sematary earlier in the year, King could have happily sat on his laurels. So, this short novel, clocking in at less than 130 pages including the gorgeous Bernie Wrightson illustrations, is King purely having fun in pure horror territory.

Having started its life as a calendar, King found the allotted space too limiting and expanded the vignettes into a larger piece. Each chapter tells of a werewolf attack on one of the townsfolk, slowly revealing the identity of the wolf in human clothing as the population diminishes each full moon. Like ‘Salem’s Lot, it’s just as much about the Lovecraftian tapestry of the county as it is about the attacks.

Some of the originally framework is retained, with monthly chapter headings the clearest indication of its intended origin. While the whole book can be devoured in one sitting, each of these could also be read in isolation, at least for the first few months. Yet just as the book threatens to tip over into wash-rinse-spin-repeat cycle, King injects a through-line in the form of the 10-year-old, wheelchair-bound survivor Marty Coslaw.

Some may find this traditional approach somewhat expected. After all, by this stage King had ticked off vampires, demon cars, angry dogs, and multiple psychic children. If it didn’t sit between Pet Sematary and 600+ page The Talisman (co-authored with Peter Straub), perhaps I wouldn’t think of this as a slender book. When it was released in 1983, the hardcover volume may have felt like an expensive collector’s item.

So let’s not consider this as something “lesser” for its size, especially from an author who has increasingly embraced the novella throughout his career. As someone who reads a lot of comics, I prefer to think of this as the product of an artistic collaboration between an established horror writer and the legendary artist Bernie Wrightson. Perhaps best known for co-creating Swamp Thing at DC Comics, I’ve long admired Wrightson’s detailed horror art on adaptations of Poe, Lovecraft and many other Victorian ghouls.

Wrightson’s artwork dominates the book, telling its own visual story that both compliments and sometimes overtakes the text. In addition to the stunningly rendered colour plates, each of the months opens with pencil and ink sketches that become increasingly spartan and macabre as the year progresses. I occasionally found the images distracting, as they revealed key plot points a page or two before they take place. (They was especially true of the gripping finale).

It’s funny: the 95-minute film adaptation Silver Bullet (1985), directed by Dan Attias with a screenplay written by King, may actually take longer to watch than this does to read. One has to wonder what this book could have been if King had expanded this even further. King would be beholden to his various addictions for more than half a decade after this, and this frenetic pace was almost emblematic of his output at the time.

Indeed, the ultimate reveal that Reverend Lowe – telegraphed as the monster from about April – is a figure at war with himself: he can’t control his inner demons, nor can he remember his actions when he is lupine. King more directly addressed alcoholism in ‘Salem’s Lot (with another priest) and The Shining, but it’s hard not to see parallels here. At the height of his addictions, King famously has no memory of creating his own demon dog, Cujo.

King was no less prolific in 1984, dropping another triple threat with The Talisman, the fantasy book The Eyes of the Dragon and Thinner (as Richard Bachman). For the record, he’d do it all again in 1987 and 1996. CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF remains an interesting artefact in heart of this output, one that bares a little of King’s soul while remaining a ripping yarn.

Having read The Talisman and The Eyes of the Dragon as part of my Dark Tower journey in 2017, the next instalment of Inconstant Reader will skip straight to Thinner. While you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through this Stephen King adventure with me.

February 1, 2020
Inconstant Reader: Christine

Welcome back to the feature column that explores Stephen King’s books in the order they were published! (Sort of!) Here’s the one about the demon car that made Constant Readers feel like backseat drivers. Roadwork warning: SPOILERS AHEAD NEXT FIVE MILES.

Whenever I happen to tell someone that I’m reading yet another Stephen King book, non-fans typically respond in the same way. A knowing eye-roll signifies a ready-made assumption about genre books, caring little for how easily some of them could slip into the ‘literature’ section without much fuss. Yet CHRISTINE is a different beast entirely, one that pushes the limits of fandom. For a book about a car, it’s wholly on rails.

At this point in King’s bibliography, he’s delivered some frightfully clever spins on psychic children (Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter), vampires (‘Salem’s Lot), devil dogs (Cujo) along with several stabs at epic fantasy (The Stand, The Gunslinger, The Eyes of the Dragon). After sharing his non-horror side with the novella collection Different Seasons, CHRISTINE was the first of three books released in 1983 – and arguably a sign that the writer was stretching himself a little thin.

On paper (which is where most books of the era tended to be written), it’s got all the elements of a classic. Set in the summer of 1978, best friends Dennis Guilder and Arnold “Arnie” Cunningham spot a rusting 1958 Plymouth Fury. After some wrangling with owner Roland D. LeBay – a grizzled war vet who calls the car ‘Christine’ – Arnie purchases the car and begins restoring it. His hobby turns to obsession, as Dennis, friends and family think that Arnie is neglecting his life. Soon it becomes obvious that not only is the car changing, but Arnie is as well.

Yet despite this straightforward setup, to say that the book is structurally messy is generous. It starts off with the first-person perspective of Dennis, perhaps the first time King had employed that narrative approach outside of a Richard Bachman novel (see: Rage) and a handful of short stories. Bachman is a good comparative touchpoint, as there’s a narrative distance from the start, almost as if King was going through the motions and taking himself out of the equation.

Dennis is a bit of a wet narrator too, reacting rather than acting his way into the story. In fact, for a book about a killer car, CHRISTINE spends a lot of time spinning its wheels. After Dennis has a football accident a little shy of the halfway mark, King abruptly shifts to a third-person perspective where he floats between Arnie and his beautiful new girlfriend Leigh. In a 2001 interview, King spoke about this left turn as an attempt to get out of a narrative jam that almost killed the book entirely:

“For a long time, I tried to narrate that second part in terms of what he was hearing, hearsay evidence, almost like depositions. But that didn’t work…I tried to leave enough clues, so that when the reader comes out of it he’ll feel that it’s almost like Dennis pulling a Truman Capote. It’s almost like a non-fiction novel. I think that it’s still a first-person narration, and if you read that second part over, you’ll see it. It’s just masked, like reportage.”

Was this a lack of self-editing or too much commercial pressure to leave it on the shelf? After all, King still had two more on the pile ready to go in 1983, the superb musing on grief in Pet Sematary and the shorter Cycle of the Werewolf.

Even with the broader narrative perspective, the book lacks any immediacy to the drama or characters. Almost everyone except for Arnie knows there is something wrong with the car, and Arnie is certainly not someone we can care about. The ‘other’ female love interest (other than Christine) is Leigh, who serves as a nothing more than a story object for both male leads. When we return to Dennis for the (somewhat predictable) blockbuster conclusion, and get a recap of almost everything in the middle section, we are told that Leigh “managed to look both practical and sexy.” Talk about a Mary Sue, eh?

The other issue, of course, is the general acceptance of the notion of a demon car. I’m willing to accept pretty much any scenario, but most sentient cars (not named Herbie) tend to leave me cold. It’s probably why I never really got into the adventures of Lightning McQueen in Disney’s Cars series. (Sidebar: if there are no humans, why do they have doors?!?) It’s not even King’s first foray into manic motors, with his superior Trucks short story published a decade earlier in Cavalier magazine (and reprinted in the Night Shift collection).

Like the eponymous ’58 Plymouth, the bones of this beast are solid but it takes a fair bit of love to see the shiny treasure underneath. “I thought it would be a funny short story-a kind of American Graffiti,” King says of the inspiration. “Instead, a fairly long novel came out, a supernatural tale about girlfriends, boyfriends, and Christine.” Spawning a John Carpenter movie only months after the release of this book, CHRISTINE has become an iconic emblem for evil cars everywhere. Yet for Constant Readers, this may not be the joy ride you were looking for.

We’re back on track now! Next, we howl at the moon with Cycle of the Werewolf! Hey, while you’re here, go check out Batrock.net, where my buddy Alex Doenau is running through Stephen King with me.

January 6, 2020