As I was rereading this I kept getting flashes of study halls of yesteryear. One (in the art room) is where I first read "Survivor Type;" another (in the home ec room) was where I first read "The Monkey." Fascinating stuff, right! I only bring it up because I had a totally random detail get pushed to the front of my brain while re-reading this: someone had defaced one of the desks in one of the study halls with the Twisted Sister logo and someone else had defaced that with "royally rot" underneath it. I can see this clear as day now in my mind despite not having thought of it in likely over 30 years.
I'll stop there (although there's way more! Screw you, Mrs. Sullivan!) I'm just always surprised what associative memories pop up.
Other memories that came to the surface: I remember being baffled by the Milkmen stories, bored by "The Monkey," and frightened and disoriented by "Survivor Type." (Oddly enough, it was all the seagull details that did the trick with that story back then; I had a similar reaction to the "Black Freighter" parts of Watchmen, I'm realizing just right now. Something about doomed shipwrecks and eating seagulls raw unnerves me.)
SOME GENERAL THOUGHTS ON
THE COLLECTION AS A WHOLE
Not bad indeed. Take out "The Mist" and it's still pretty good, but "The Mist" definitely anchors things. Mostly it's another one that could pass as a Haunt of Fear or other EC annual: pretty easy to see "Survivor Type," "Nora," "Here There Be Tygers," "The Jaunt," "Beachworld," "The Raft," The Reaper's Image" or "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" drawn by any artist under the EC umbrella, and the stories all have the twists and motifs associated with them or Creepy or something. ("Beachworld" could be The Outer Limits, perhaps.)
I didn't like the "Do You Love?" motif. It felt shoehorned into the stories where it appeared and was / is just never as profound as King seemed to think it was when putting this together. But it did result in lodging "Do You Feel Loved?" by U2 in my head for a few weeks, which is never a bad thing. Pop is underrated.
SOME REMARKS ON SPECIFIC STORIES
"The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" - I mean, is it possible this man had never touched himself - even accidentally - before the night of his death? Highly unlikely. Then again, so are curses from peasant villagers in colonial outposts. This whole Storyteller's Club thing with Stevens as the butler seemed like something King was going to spend more time on than he ended up doing.
"Word Processor of the Gods" - I still think this one ends too abruptly, but this time around I was able to enjoy its ending more than any other time.
"Cain Rose Up" - A former reader of this site once praised this one as "No backstory. No motivation. No triggering event. Some dude just starts opening fire from the window of his dormitory." These are the qualities I actually don't like about it. It feels like a younger writer's story, where "OMG he just starts shooting people" is a shock-twist. And it is - and it's certainly the point, but the title suggests he was going for something deeper and only hints at it. A writer with considerable powers flexing muscles he doesn't quite know how to use it. But look at these guns, bro - two tickets to the show. (No grisly pun intended given the subject matter.)
"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" - so many cool things in here but good lord: the central conceit unworks it for me comprehensively. King too often has one character tell stories for unfathomable amounts of time. This is something writers do sometimes; after all, what is writing anything but one person (the author) telling a story for unfathomable amounts of time? But it just doesn't work when you picture people actually doing it. Wizard and Glass is the exception that proves this otherwise unassailable rule: if your story rests on one character telling a story, think of it like a game of tennis. There's a net, there are boundaries, and there's someone on the other side hitting the ball back to you. If any of these things aren't there, it's not tennis; it's a guy with a ball machine. Or worse, standing at the baseline, talking to himself, holding the ball, probably pausing to finish another martini or take some snuff, while the crowd and the opponent shuffle about uneasily.
Put another way: it's easy to fade out/ "I remember it like it was yesterday..." in TV / film, but to do so in a book means the characters are just sitting there, listening, while another character writes prose in front of them. It's a delicate game of trust with the audience, and stuff like "Flexible Bullet" (or, later, "Dedication") abuses it.
"The Jaunt" - I remember liking this one a bit more than I did this time around. The central idea is still okay and realized pretty well, but again, the conceit of one guy telling a story in this detail and in this manner seemed a little odd to me. I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio and the set-up is straight from that. "You see, Jimmy, old inventor guy had a thought, and here's the amazing story of electricity..." Still: it's a good one.
Finally, the delights of King's poetry ("Paranoid: A Chant" and "For Owen") continue to elude me. Although I could relate to "For Owen" a lot more on this read than any other.
MY TOP TEN
10.
"The Milkman(s)"
"Tales of the Laundry Game" should've been its own anthology of some kind. I don't think King could write it now, but back then, when it was fresh? Absolutely. It could have been anchored by Roadwork, even. Or maybe King could've just commissioned laundry-oriented prose from his writer friends. It's a great title.
Back in high school, I thought the level of drunkenness on display in the 2nd of these two stories seemed unrealistic. Maybe I still do, but it's less about realism and more about discomfort. It's brought to life uncomfortably well. There are guys like these in every forgotten town in America, and some not-so-forgotten.
9.
"The Reaper's Image"
Mark Pavia was supposed to make an anthology movie of some kind about this, but it's unfortunately looking like it fell by the wayside.
Great atmosphere in this one, although I suppose it's somewhat slight of a story. I like it very much just the same.
8.
"The Monkey"
I'm surprised this one made my list, but this time around I kept thinking what if this was the only thing the guy ever wrote? What if this was just one of the stories in Dangerous Visions or some other anthology? I think its reputation would be improved. I think people might say things like "Gee, that King guy sure seemed like he had a grasp on the genre and this sort of thing; I wonder what kind of book he could put together?" I wouldn't consider it one of my personal favorites, but I admire how he uses traditional genre elements here.
There's a bit of Duma Key in this tale. Or perhaps it's that I didn't realize how much of "The Monkey" was in Duma Key. Although what I may be responding to are simply repurposed genre elements shared by both stories.
7.
"The Reach"
Dorrit's on Goat Island, burnt down in 1958: is this referenced elsewhere? Has King ever returned to Goat Island?
Little bit of Ray Bradbury in this one. A couple of these, actually. That's never a bad thing to be reminded of more than once in a short story collection.
6.
"Survivor Type"
I'm always surprised when I meet people who don't know this one, as for me it's one of the first 3 or 4 things I think of when King is brought up. The image of a guy eating his feet to stave off starvation in a doomsday scenario made a deep impression on me as a lad, I guess. (As did the whole nightmare with the gulls.)
The voice of this one gets a little too King's-diary-voice-y, but the events described and the slow breakdown of the narrator is something to witness. This story is an achievement for sure. Definitely a Harvey Kurtzman special - I can see it illustrated by him quite easily in my mind's eye. I wish I could screencap it for you.
5.
"Beachworld"
I still wish King would go all-out one day and write his own sort of Martian Chronicles book. Maybe it could be this planet right here. ("Return to Uncharted Six!" Or whatever its uncharted designation is.) There might not be anything of startling originality here, but does there need to be? It's a cool story, well-visualized, well-characterized, suspenseful, and eerie.
There's also (if you care for such things) a rather sad undercurrent of King's realizing his immersion in drug dependency in the prose. If only as an involved metaphor for sinking into addiction and getting trapped - even if it's unintentional - it's a good one.
4.
"Gramma"
I never liked this one as a kid, nor the the Tales of the Darkside episode adaptation that I remember seeing on some Saturday afternoon back in high school. (A sidenote: whenever I remember seeing something in high school without remembering the exact occasion, it always turns into a Saturday afternoon. I don't do this purposefully, I guess it's where my brain just shoves and stuffs all its less-than-certain memories.)
This time around, though, I thought it was pretty much a master class in effective writing. Perhaps, like "The Monkey," not a personal favorite, despite its high placing here, but you have to admire how it's put together. On a short list of underrated-King-fiction for me. If I did a Ten King Stories They Should Teach in College and Why blog, this would be on there. That'd be a lot of work, though; I hope someone else writes it so I don't have to.
3.
"The Mist"
The first time I heard of this one was I believe in the first edition of George Beahm's The Stephen King Companion. I must have read it around the same time - in fact, I can remember where/when I first read it: the summer of 1989, over 2 nights, right before bed. Another 80s memory bottled and added to the collection! Of dubious vintage, perhaps.
Anyway: "The Mist." A well-deserved classic. Its reputation has gotten stronger over the years. I cannot ever recall hearing it was overrated or bad, just that it's perhaps a tad overhyped by 2019. A first time reader might wonder what all the hullabaloo was about. It's a great example of King's taking a traditional b-movie set-up and writing about it realistically.
The Mist 3-D is sort of a radio play on audiocassette that was done in the 80s. (Available on youtube here.) I remember reading about it in the Beahm book and asking my local Waldenbooks if they had it (they did not), but then it fell off my radar for three whole decades. I was happy to hear it at last about a month ago. Pretty fun - worth tracking down. Is it a better adaptation than the movie? Maybe, maybe not. Than the TV show? Abso-friggin-lutely.
2.
"Uncle Otto's Truck"
I love this one. Unfortunately that's the sum total of what I scribbled down on my notepad - no quotes or larger context than that. It deserves a better breakdown than what I'm giving it. That goes for all of these. King takes what could be an absurd premise (as he does in so many places, though the one that's coming to mind right now is "Chattery Teeth") and imbues it with such an abundance of color and momentum that it verges on iconic.
Uncle Oren sure left an impression on young Steve, didn't he? Sounds like a real character. I imagine he laid the foundation for all Uncle-Oren/Uncle-Otto type characters in his catalog to come.
1.
"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"
I'd written down a whole bunch of quotes from this one, but they all seem kind of flat out of context - or worse, like King was trying too hard. But they don't read that way in-context. This is a lovely and quirky little story, emblematic of its author for me. A good eye for detail, "local color," and lots of romance, even the split-head of a monster or two splayed across the grill of a luxury car.
King identifies his wife as the real Mrs. Todd. I often think Tabitha and her extended family provide more than a few real world analogs for some of King's more memorable female characters. And probably some of the male ones too. Cheers to you, Spruce family.
~
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| See you next time for Nightmares and Dreamscapes on this exciting re-read down the ol' King's Highway (closed for repairs) |
(1) I find myself wanting to know more about the kind of thought process that drove your initial reactions to "The Monkey" and "Gramma".
ReplyDeleteThere's an obvious difference in terms of how I reacted to reading both the first time. In both cases, my reaction was, and continues to be, one of whole-hearted enthusiasm. I do wonder if part of the reason though has to do with what might be called "aesthetic upbringing", for lack of a better word.
In other words, does the art one grows up with become the determining factor in how art is judged as an adult? It just sounds like there's some truth in that idea somewhere. For instance, in my case, the continued enthusiasm may stem from the fact that it was the Horror genre that got me interested in reading. I sort of owe my whole sense of literacy to John Bellairs and R.L. Stine, of all ironies.
However, no two aesthetic upbringings are alike, so it makes me wonder how that effects the reception of either the "Monkey", or "Gramma".
(2) A similar question centers around the reception of "Flexible Bullet". This time it seems like a question of where one's "Belief Suspension Threshold" lies.
In the case of "Flexible Bullet" the bar seems set pretty high. It's as if the very trope itself of having a story narrated within a story is enough, in this case, to shatter all suspension of disbelief.
This is a reaction I have never had with "Bullet", not even when the kid pulls out a sci-fi zap laser. Instead, I always found myself totally invested in the story. When it's over, nothing seems out of place, either.
Again, this could be a question of "Aesthetic Upbringing". It could also be a question of whether one believes stories need realism to function properly. I've always been leery of realism in fiction. Everything is too heightened to take in on a normal, everyday level. As an example, take Heathcliff and and Elizabeth from "Wuthering Heights", and place them in the middle of a supermarket in the middle of the day. The contrasts are so glaring they are downright comical.
That same contrast always seems to have been at work with "Bullet". Somehow I knew without having to be told that it can't be taken either all that seriously, or at face value.
(3) "Beachworld" is a story I started, then got side-tracked away from for some reason. This just makes me want to get back to it. I also hadn't considered the thematic alcoholism angle. Good catch.
(4) I agree, it does sound like and EC annual, and now that I think about it, one of the greatest shames in the world is that the Usual Gang of Idiots" never made a comic adaptation of "The Mist". It just lends itself so perfectly to that kind format, especially if you set it all back in the 50s.
ChrisC
(1) Good question(s). My own aesthetic upbringing definitely involved horror, although I didn't get to King until I was a teenager. Mainly I was into comics and boys-adventure stuff (and I always gravitated towards older things like Tom Sawyer or what not) and anyeverything my older brother was into, which was basically metal, dungeons and dragons, medieval history, stuff like that. (We grew up in then-West Germany for the first half of the 80s and a young lad with an interest in medieval stuff could certainly do worse than growing up around the corner from places like Rothenberg. Awesome place: check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothenberg_Fortress)
DeleteBut yeah, mainly metal and comic books - but an awful lot got in my head through those twin avenues! Anyway at the time I read "The Monkey" and "Gramma" I think (honestly) they just didn't grab me the way the others did and so I thought they were boring, not (as was actually the case) that I was just skimming them or that the problem was with me as a reader, not King as a writer. But I don't specifically recall my objections. I spent my adolesence (like most adolescents) thinking I was smarter than I actually was, so if asked, 14 year old Bryan would probably say something like "Because they're lame" and actually think he was instructing us all about something. Ah well! Learning curves.
(2) I get to about the 5th page of "Flexible Bullet" before I start picturing standing there at this party and this blowhard going on and on and that's where I start wanting a character to say "You're drunk and you're rambling."
(4) You're absolutely right. Sheesh I haven't checked in with MAD in a long time; I wonder if they ever DID do a Mist send-up of some kind? I wish it'd been the old Al Feldstein-produced crew (ie the MAD I grew up with) but I'd read any MAD parody they wanted to give me.
(1) That does begin to make sense of things. My case seems to have work from an inverted opposite trajectory. If Horror is where my reading started, and interest in Fantasy fiction is one that is still a relatively recent enough phenomenon.
DeleteIt took a while for me to arrive at authors like Tolkien, believe it or not. For instance, I can remember seeing previews for something called a "Hobbit" on the Disney Channel back in the late 80s/early 90s. I remember I was surprisingly underwhelmed by just the commercial, and when I had the opportunity to watch it, I remember I tuned out after just a few minutes. It was like I just wasn't interested.
Cut to some years later, in early high-school. My English teacher brings up both "The Hobbit" and "LOTR" as something to read. I'm surprised to here some old thing from the corner of my childhood brought as if it were something worth taking seriously. However, the teacher must have been pretty good, as I remember it as the first time a bit of curiosity got planted in my brain.
Years later I take down an annotated copy of TH, read it, and I'm left wondering why I ever thought this stuff was uninteresting?
I guess this amounts to a partial explanation for a growing interest in Victorian Fantasy. It seems to be an inversion of the stuff you read growing up. The biggest upshot in my case seems to be a willingness to see how far you can take things in terms of narrative boundary lines before disbelief kicks in. I think it comes from the modus operandi of Horror, where breaking taboo lines is kind of like the norm, or something.
ChrisC
(A) "I didn't like the "Do You Love?" motif. It felt shoehorned into the stories where it appeared and was / is just never as profound as King seemed to think it was when putting this together." -- I'm with you. It doesn't hurt the book for me, but it makes me wonder why King thought it was a good idea. Mighta been the cocaine.
ReplyDelete(B) "Pop is underrated." -- It's got a couple of my least-favorite U2 songs on it, but on the whole it's awesome. Not, like, "Achtung Baby" awesome or nothin' like that, but what is? Talking about associative memories, man do I have some for that album. Nothing special, any of 'em; but powerful within my own mind for sure.
(C) "This whole Storyteller's Club thing with Stevens as the butler seemed like something King was going to spend more time on than he ended up doing." -- I'm the weirdo whose favorite novella in Different Seasons is "The Breathing Method," so if he'd return to the Club someday, that's be fine by me.
(D) "to do so in a book means the characters are just sitting there, listening, while another character writes prose in front of them." -- This is a completely valid point, but it doesn't bother me in general or in relation specifically to "Flexible Bullet." I just chalk it up to one of the conventions you sometimes get with prose, like how sometimes a character -- in, say, "Dracula -- will write a letter that is a complete narrative, up to and including pages upon pages of supposedly-accurately-remembered dialogue. I roll with it, like how I roll with the fact that everyone on "Star Trek" just speaks English. When I think about it, it bothers me, so I just don't think about it, and end up happier!
But if others get tripped up by it, I certainly don't blame them.
(E) "the delights of King's poetry ("Paranoid: A Chant" and "For Owen") continue to elude me" -- I get virtually nothing from the former, but kind of love the latter. I'm sure it does work on you a bit more; heck, you've got your own Owen, even!
(F) Those "Milkman" stories are evidently excerpts from an unfinished novel. Glad to have 'em, but they're not particular favorites of mine. That said, would I eagerly gobble up the rest, whatever that might be? You know it.
(G) Digging the "skeleton crew" photo inserts.
(H) Interesting thoughts on "Beachworld." It's from the right era to be prime-time drug-mania writing, for sure. A quality story, either way; that's one that seems better to me every time I visit it.
Delete(I) "whenever I remember seeing something in high school without remembering the exact occasion, it always turns into a Saturday afternoon." -- The argument could be made that all one's life prior to a certain point (whatever that is -- it varies by individual) is one long Saturday afternoon. It certainly feels more and more like that to me!
(J) Fuck, what if I run out of letters...?
(K) I can easily imagine someone thinking "The Mist" is a bit undercooked. Part of me feels that way about it, too, as if it's a 400-page novel that's been condensed down by three quarters. But I deeply love what's there, and likely always will.
(L) That gif of busking skeletons is delightful.
(M) "Uncle Otto's Truck" is a very fine story indeed. I just recently tracked down -- for fairly cheap! -- a copy of the original magazine appearance. Happy to have it, too! It's one of the stories in King's bibliography that works (as I recall it) based almost solely on mood and tone. Good luck to any poor sod tasked with making a movie out of it.
(N) "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" is probably on the shortlist for being my favorite King short story. This has become even truer than it already was after reading a few of Tabitha's novels; Mrs. Todd herself doesn't remind me hugely of her work, but the fella who takes the rides with her does.
Regardless, it's a beaut of a story.
A) Cocaine, like ka, is a reliable go-to when asking any questions of King's work.
DeleteB) I have a friend who was going through a divorce when POP came out and another who had similar personal issues going on at the time of its release, so I have a memory of that summer of '97 playing my double-vinyl of it over and over and both of them moping around, ha. I should write them later and see if the remember. What are the least favorites from that one if you don't mind me asking? Maybe I'll throw that one on later and figure out my own rankings. I have an opening for a Russian front WW2 movie that involves "Mofo" that I'd pay stupid money to actually be able to film and see for myself to see if it matches the scene in my head everytime I listen to it.
C) I love that one, too. I wonder why he just gave up on the idea?
D) This is a good example and certainly true. (For the record that always kinda bothers me, too).
F) Man that would be one dark, ugly book. On the other hand it might've won him a Pulitzer. I forgot that these were excerpts from an unfinished book - I think that was / is mentioned in the Beahm book now that I think of it.
G) I had fun with these.
N) "Mrs. Todd herself doesn't remind me hugely of her work, but the fella who takes the rides with her does." That's very interesting. I really want to read some of her stuff soon.
(b) I just found two albums that fit right in. One is "The Nightfly", by Donald Fagen. The other is Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man". Both albums are meant as tributes by the songwriters to the musical styles of their youth. Both are about looking back to the 50s and 60s era, with heavy emphasis on doo-wop from Joel's album, while Fagen retains the jazz styling of his Steely Dan days.
Delete(c) The Club is interesting as a concept. The trouble is I'm not sure how far you can go with it as a concept. I think I remember George Beahm or someone else mentioning that the whole basic setup was inspired by the Chowder Society in Peter Straub's "Ghost Story".
(j) Well, if anything, there's the ultimate reason for sticking with numbers. You can goes as high as you need with those things.
(m) "Otto's Truck" is one of those kinds of simple fright stories that are both artful and impacting at the same time.
I wonder how many storytellers today can match that sort of thing? I've been listening to creepypastas on and off this whole time, and while a lot of it is good, I do notice an eagerness to get right to the shock effect as quickly as possible. in contrast, King is willing to take his time and build up the story, so that when the moment of fright occurs, it delivers in spades. It's made all the more notable for how low-key it all is. The story leaves its readers on a brilliant note of quiet unease. That's a level of sophistication I've seen from just a few of these modern kids.
That book had a finished conclusion, whereas King's Club seems more suitable for the host segments of an anthology series, or something like that. While that sounds about right, it also perhaps shows the limitations of the concept in and of itself.
(d) Yeah, pretty much what he said.
replying to Chris --
Delete(B) Now, Chris, don't you be bringin' no Steely Dan talk into a U2 conversation.
I do love "An Innocent Man," though. That was one of the first albums I ever bought! Bought it, "Purple Rain," and the soundtrack to "The Muppets Take Manhattan" (all on vinyl) all in the same shopping trip.
(C) Might be that's why King essentially never returned to it!
(M) I know creepypastas are a thing, but unless King or some immediate family-member of his begins writing them, the odds of me ever reading one are nil.
replying to McMolo --
Delete(B) I did a fair amount of moping to that album myself; didn't have a particularly good reason for it, but that's never stopped me. And I bought it the same day as Nick Cave's "The Boatman's Call," which is a mope-record for the history books.
The songs off "Pop" I dislike are "Miami" and "The Playboy Mansion," and to a lesser extent "Wake Up Dead Man." Used to dislike "Mofo," but it grew on me considerably.
Everything else is pretty much gold, though.
(D) It's a device that very much puts the artifice of it all right in your face. I doubt many writers think of it this way, but it strikes me as being almost a dare for readers to still buy into the story. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't.
"Flexible Bullet" isn't a fave of mine, by the way. It's alright; a bit too long, but alright.
(N) When and if you do, I recommend skipping "Small World" and going straight to her second novel, "Caretakers." It's terrific.