The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 16: I Can Bear It

Well, here he is. The elephant in the room. Talking around Stephen King for the last half month (or month and a half, if you count last year) seems not only a little snooty -- I want to talk about real horror, not that commercial trash! -- but also completely dishonest, because as a kid, my gateway into horror fiction, as well as a whole lot of other kinds of fiction, was Stephen King. I don't remember what urged me to finally want to read his books -- it was probably a movie adaptation -- but I know that I was around ten years old. It's very possible that the first King novel I read was Cujo, because even in those days it was one of the shortest books he'd written (he could be verbose even then, but that aspect of his fiction hadn't yet gone wildly out of control). Cujo is a mighty strange book for a ten year-old to be reading. As I remember it, not a hell of a lot happens of a particularly horrific nature for about the first half, and there's a great deal of stuff about failing marriages, and children's breakfast cereals that cause kids to throw up red and terrify their parents. There is also a sexual reference in the book that, while not graphic, describes a particular act that I've long since learned is common, but which my pre-pubescent self had never even considered, and it freaked me out. But that's neither here nor there.
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I would move on through all the early books, becoming very excited every time a new novel was set to drop -- I honed in on the typically big, bright red STEPHEN KING on the front cover of the Viking hardcovers when I entered the bookstore (or Price Club, as the case may be) -- and until some time in college I would say there were very, very few of his books that I hadn't read (The Tommyknockers was, and remains, one of the major exceptions). Despite this, looking back now it's a little difficult to pinpoint what, exactly, I found so overwhelmingly appealing about King. Well, the books were almost guaranteed to be violent, and that didn't hurt at all. I think the promise of graphic violence is typically what draws young folks, mostly boys, to the horror genre, especially in the 80s, when I was growing up. But obviously that wasn't all -- King hit big with audiences other than teenage boys.
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What it is exactly that King has is something that has been much discussed over the years, and the reason anybody cares to ask such a question is that, in the modern world, no other writer has had such enormous commercial success for so many years (what I think he has or doesn't have might as well be saved until I eventually get around to talking about the stories I read for tonight). We're at thirty-five years and counting, and a new King book still has the potential to be a major event. His upcoming novel, Under the Dome, is being hyped so breathlessly that the cover has been publicly unveiled in pieces. Because to reveal the entire book jacket at once would simply be too much: brains would fry in their skulls, the seas would dry up, the land would lie fallow. Now that, bit by bit, the whole cover has been exposed, everybody just has a boner, I guess.
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But all that's not King's fault. Or probably not, anyway. The essential, positive fact about King is that he writes because he loves it, and because he can't not. And when he says that, I believe him, which I don't necessarily believe about other writers who've enjoyed something akin to his level of commercial success, because I've read King, and I've read them (a little of them, anyway), and brother, the differences are really striking. The guy can, or could, tell a hell of a story -- Stanley Kubrick said that one of the reasons he chose to adapt The Shining was because the novel was so meticulously worked out -- and he's also the one bestselling author I can think of who is willing, and even very much wants, to experiment. Not in a Joycean sense, of course, but you open up one of his early collections of stories -- I'm thinking here of Night Shift or Skeleton Crew -- and you'll find a pretty wide variety of styles and stories. You'll see traditional horror like "Gramma" and "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands"; quiet stories of grief like "The Woman in the Room"; surrealist nightmares like the giddily bizarre "Lawnmower Man", or the reasonably inexplicable pair of "Milkman" stories; and pure pulp gore like "The Mangler" and "Survivor Type". In his longer work, you'll find science fiction (The Running Man), fantasy (Eyes of the Dragon, the Dark Tower series) and non-genre fiction (the novellas in Different Seasons), as well as the horror and suspense novels he's best known for. You'll also find Gerald's Game, a book that is, essentially, about a woman handcuffed to a bed for 300 pages. And The Regulators and Desperation, two novels released on the same day that feature the same cast of characters in entirely different stories. And by the way -- and quite possibly I shouldn't even be mentioning this, in case my antennae are all out of whack -- I believe that, in the later Dark Tower books, King does something that, right now, as we speak, J. M. Coetzee is being called audacious for doing in his new book Summertime.

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So all that, in my view, is pretty damn impressive. But of course there's a problem. For instance, I have no idea how ultimately successful the Desperation/The Regulators gambit was, because I couldn't get through the wildly turgid Desperation and therefore never bothered with The Regulators. The last two I actually finished, Cell and The Colorado Kid, were, frankly, disasters. Neither one was any less tedious than Desperation for being considerably shorter -- the only difference is that at the point, by which I mean the page number, in Desperation where I eventually crapped out, Cell and The Colorado Kid were already over. And he seems to have an incredibly stubborn cluster of stock characters, as well as prejudices, that he is either unwilling or unable to put to pasture: the good old boy who hates authority; the manic Christian hypocrite; the Orwellian US military figure; the young, but not-too-young, woman who struggles against this Man's world; the magic black person; the cute kid who is brave as shit, and so on. Not to mention his exhausting and aggravating tendency to have his characters say things like "fiddley-fuck", and then have the balls to expect us to laugh.

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But while his novels seem to have entirely skipped into orbit, his short stories actually have remained fairly strong. I know, because I occasionally read them -- Everything's Eventual, from 2002, contains at least a good handful of excellent stories (The O. Henry Prize-winning "The Man in the Black Suit", "Lunch in the Gotham Cafe", etc.). Which, at long last, brings us to tonight's reading.

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I chose two stories, one from his 1993 collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and another from Just After Sunset, which came out last year. This proved to be a fortuitous pairing, because the earlier story, "Home Delivery" is fairly typical of the kind of fiction King is broadly known for, while the later story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates", is more in line with what might be referred to as his more contemplative phase, which is a phase he's been in and out of for a good couple of decades now (it produced Gerald's Game, for instance, which, for the record, I liked), though lately it appears to be a style he's become more comfortable with, and, with Lisey's Story, he's actually getting some recognition for.

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"Home Delivery" is a zombie story. Pretty much all zombie stories are zombie apocalypse stories, but what makes "Home Delivery" unique is that it focuses on the experiences of a Northern rural lobstermen community located on two small islands off the coast of Maine. Most of you are probably aware that the vast majority of King's work takes place, in whole or in part, in Maine, but what's interesting here as that the two islands -- one called Little Tall, the other called Gennesault Island, or Jenny, for short -- are more or less completely isolated. In other words, they're protected from the apocalypse. They each deal with their own little part of it, but it's actually fairly manageable. Gennesault Island, as a matter of fact, contains only one small graveyard, and since many of the men buried there were lost at sea, not a few of the buried caskets are empty.

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Told through the eyes of Maddie Pace, pregnant widow of a recently deceased lobsterman named Jack, "Home Delivery" is an unusual and occasionally infuriating story. Growing up in an environment so old-fashioned and insular ("[O]n Jenny and Little Tall," King says, "you had your choice when it came to religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that didn't suit you, you could be a lapsed Methodist") as to be considered backwards, Maddie is a woman who has needed to have a man in her life to keep her not only grounded, but even capable. When her father died (while bowling, mid-roll, in typically too-colorful King fashion), both Maddie and her mother were completely at sea. It wasn't until Maddie met Jack that she was able to exist with some direction again. However, after Jack dies, and after the zombie apocalypse is in full swing, she finds herself able to cope, finally, on her own. Even though the men of the town take it upon themselves, excluding the women, to deal with the zombies, Maddie discovers that she can handle herself just fine. At the same time, she loves the men of the town for their bravery and sacrifice, and overall "Home Delivery" shows King celebrating small-town ways, with the occasional wry knock towards the downside.

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As usual when King is in this mode, his prose takes on the local color. Sometimes, this is effective, as in this passage describing the rising of the first reanimated corpse in Gennesault Island's small cemetery:

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Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night, and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier's boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen (bad go, that had been...)

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Elsewhere, however, King's love of broad stereotypes and colloquialisms practically kill the story. There's a lengthy section of "Home Delivery" describing the zombie apocalypse as it applies to the rest of the world, and here he describes one of the final US news reports, delivered by a young man who had been "pressed into service as a CNN reporter":

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"I want to repeat this," the accidental reporter had said..."I want to repeat that a bunch of corpses have just lunched up on the President and his wife and whole lot of other political hotshots who were in the White House to eat poached salmon and cherries jubilee."

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I would say that this is in keeping with the only half-serious tone of the story, if King hadn't been doing this sort of thing for the entirety of his career. And in fact, King's mocking (some would say "satirical") approach to the world outside of Little Tall and Jenny has the residual effect of making his beloved rural lobstermen, including Maddie, look cold-hearted. Their islands are more or less safe, so damn the rest of humanity. Still, this is generally a sharp, well-paced and engaging story, with a truly new spin on a horror subgenre that, as I read it in 2009, would otherwise seem to be entirely played out. Judging from King, though, maybe not.

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The next story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" (a title which will make no sense to anyone only reading this summary, but which completely works in context) is quite a bit different. Collected in Just After Sunset, it also appears in the 2009 edition of Stephen Jones's anthology series Best New Horror, and in his introduction to the story, Jones says:

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After twenty years I am delighted to finally welcome the world's most successful, popular and influential horror writer to these pages.

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You gotta love that "finally". Does Jones think that, in his tenure as editor of Best New Horror that King has been churning out two decades worth of dreck? For one thing, in the short fiction form, King has, as I've said, done some very good work, and some of it is much better than the story that finally forced Jones to cave and include him. All of this is a bit of a digression, except that I truly am a bit perplexed over why this is the story that broke the dam. It's a pretty good story, but it's not actually horror, but more of a melancholy, spiritual fantasy, dealing, once again, with a widow, named Anne, learning to deal with the loss of her husband.

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In this case, she doesn't have to do it in the context of a zombie apocalypse, but rather as any other human being would: through simple grieving. Except, of course, while breaking away from the funeral planning to take a shower, Anne gets a phone call, and it's from her deceased husband, James. James died in a plane crash, and he seems to be calling from Heaven's waiting room ("'Well, I tell you what', he says. 'I don't know exactly where I am.'"). James doesn't seem too terribly upset about his own death -- a feature of the afterlife that I hope would be common -- and he speaks to Anne in a calming, off-hand fashion that has the effect of making her, at the same time, relatively at ease, and somewhat manic. But when and if the reader is able to buy into the reality of the conversation, King is able to achieve a kind of simple poignancy through little details that, at his best, has always been one of his main strengths:
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"Jimmy, did you know?" This idea has been the hardest and most terrible part for her -- that he might have known, if only for an endless minute or two. Others might picture burned bodies or dismembered heads with grinning teeth; even light-fingered first responders filching wedding rings and diamond ear-clips, but what has robbed Annie Driscoll's sleep is the image of Jimmy looking out his window as the streets and cars and the brown apartment buildings of Brooklyn swell closer. The useless masks flopping down like the corpses of small yellow animals. The overhead bins popping open, carry-ons starting to fly, someone's Norelco razor rolling up the tilted aisle.

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"Did you know you were going down?"

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"Not really," he says. "Everything seemed all right until the very end -- maybe the last thirty seconds. Although it's hard to keep track in situations like that, I always think."

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Situations like that. And even more telling: I always think. As if he has been aboard half a dozen crashing 767s instead of just the one.

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I love this passage -- particularly that "instead of just the one" -- because King somehow manages to recognize the common quirks of human speech in a conversation that no one on the planet has ever had before. At his most reined in, King has this kind of gift. Unfortunately, in this story, he also adds a subplot about James enigmatically warning Anne of future disasters that she needs to avoid. These disasters aren't of the global, mass-death variety, but more intimate tragedies -- even so, it's a completely unnecessary element that seems to be there just to convince Anne that she really had the conversation. But since I was already convinced of it, for the purposes of the story, James's prognostications were a tired distraction from an otherwise simple and moving story.

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Oh well, I guess. It only proves something I already knew, which is that Stephen King is a legitimately talented writer who sometimes -- often, even -- can't get out of his own way. But he's also, at his very core, a born storyteller, and for that reason alone I can never really dismiss him. Well, obviously, since I keep buying his books, with every intention of reading them. It's just that lately, I don't. Except for the short stories. Which is interesting.