If It Bleeds (2020)

Hey, look what came in the mail the other day:

Bless you, Amazon.

Four new novellas from Stephen King. Just finished last night. You? 

No? Caution: there be spoilers ahead. Yes? Let's boogie. 

"Mr. Harrigan's Phone"

A teenager finds that a dead friend's cell phone, that was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave.

That’s the wiki plot summary. I was going to use it because I was having trouble coming up with my own and got sick of trying. But really, Wikipedia? That’s terrible. All of their summaries are terrible for this book, actually. Have a look:

The Life of Chuck: As the world around him crumbles into oblivion, a man realizes that he contains multitudes.

If It Bleeds: Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog when she sees footage of a school bombing on TV. But when she tunes in to the late-night report, she realizes there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene. Soon, she will find that she is not the only one to have suspicions about the reporter.

Rat: A writer with writer's block, seeks a devilish bargain to help him finish a novel.

Each is somewhat accurate, but... not quite. And what details are accurate are haphazard. Also grammatically dubious. I can only assume since it's brand new they didn't want wikipedia to put too much in the entry. But still! Mainly I'm just annoyed because now I have to do it. So here goes: 

Craig, a preteen living with his widower father, is hired to read to Mr. Harrigan, a retired rich guy with whom he strikes an unlikely friendship. He buys the elderly man an iPhone - one of the first models - as a present, and when the old man dies, he slips it into his shirt pocket to be buried with him. 

When he calls the phone to hear his friend's voice, he ends up leaving a message out of habit, mostly to unburden himself, about a kid who was bullying him. Days later, he discovers the bully has hung himself. Craig (last name not given - I don't think) has received his first text message from beyond the grave...

Better? A little.

The set-up starts as straight out of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" but doesn't stay there. Except - we've seen this before haven't we? What story am I thinking of? Isn't it one of the ones in Bazaar of Bad Dreams? Not the specific cellphone in a dead man's pocket but the wishing death on people and people killing themselves? Maybe I'm just thinking of Dinky and "Everything's Eventual." 

Whatever the case, I thought this was kind of underwhelming. Perfectly fine, I mean, if it was King's only story, you'd read it and say hey, that guy had a pretty natural style, that was pretty good. Wonder what else he would've done? But having written so much and having covered any theme coming up in here any other number of times, it felt a bit perfunctory to me. Not much to distinguish this protagonist from others, this set-up here from that set-up there, etc. 

I like to try and figure out which novella was written after which book, as he's talked about how they're sort of working out different angles of the work that is (then-currently) cooling in first draft mode.  He says in the Author's Note that he's had the idea since he was a kid watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and it re-fired in his imagination when a friend died and King called his cellphone to hear his voice one last time. Kind of sad, that. No kind of about it. Anyway: my guess is after after Finder's Keepers. Possibly Revival, maybe. Just a hunch.

Much of the action takes place in Gates Falls, so of course I'm wondering if there’s a Graveyard Shift (or Kingdom Hospital) connection I missed. 

"The Life of Chuck"

Novella number two is split into three sections: (1) Marty and his ex-wife grapple with the impending apocalypse. As the world around them shuts down, little by little, they keep seeing strange tributes to an unknown accountant named Chuck Krantz, first on billboards and marquees, then on Netflix, then projected onto people's front windows. (2) Chuck Krantz dances to a busker boy in Beantown. And (3) Chuck remembers the haunted room at his grandparents' house where he grew up, where his grandfather saw his grandmother's death and where Chuck sees a vision of his own. 

“The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. The storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth that minds have conceived.”

The above is kind of the theme of each of these stories in If It Bleeds, except the title one. It's made perhaps a little too explicitly in the 'I contain multitudes' motif running through these, mainly because I'm not sure if Chuck as presented does contain multitudes. While true of every human, every life (as mentioned in the previous novella, that old proverb: "When an old man dies, it's like a library has burned down.") ... I mean, what are Chuck's multitudes? A divorced couple? A busker boy and a random woman from the crowd? It just doesn't hold together as the unifying metaphor he wants it to, I don't think. Maybe for life, but not for this story-cycle.

It is sort of a meditation of King on his life/ life in general. “Why did you stop to listen, and why did you stop to dance?” but when he forgets all else, he will remember: “how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.” Or as the drummer-kid says, ‘you lose the beat if you stop and think too much.’ King's said the same thing about writing, plenty of times. 

Thing is, like I say, for me this just isn't very compelling fiction. He made the same dancing-as-Shiva-gestalt point more effectively elsewhere. (11/22/63, "Willa", et al.) There's no meat here: I mean the story is literally: kid plays drum on street, business-guy dances, woman from crowd dances, the three talk about how "wow, we were dancing" and then there's all this wordy reaching around it for cosmic revelation.

Part three is pretty cool. (Although it reminded me a bit of one story from Skeleton Crew, or maybe from another collection. I must resume my King's Short Fiction project one of these days.) Parts one and three are pretty great, actually; part two just isn't. It's just not an interesting set of events, no matter how you dress it up. I'm reminded of Kerouac's dictum 'it's not whatcha write, it's the way that you write it." But the way he told it part of the problem; it's just a lot of wordy reaching for cosmic resonance. Sort of like Elevation (which is my vote for what he finished writing before finishing this one) was, although no one would call that work "wordy." 

Too bad, as parts one and three could've worked well on their own, but hobbled together with part two and as a trilogy of interlocking revelation, they do not. I was reminded of Hearts in Atlantis, particularly the stories that aren't the title novella or "Low Men in Yellow Coats." The chase is interesting but unsuccessful.

"If It Bleeds"

I won't hazard a guess as to when this one was written. Clearly after The Outsider, but from his "I wonder what's happening with Holly Gibney?" remarks in the Author's Note at the end of the book, I don't get the impression it was written immediately after. 

This one is mostly fine. It's an effective little mystery, I guess, although there are some aspects that didn't work me. Namely: (1) the cross-cutting at the end, to "build suspense." These sections of King’s work, almost always at the end of a story, where it’s just a couple of paragraphs of slow-moving cross-cutting that sometimes occupy up to 50 pages of text, replete with big white spaces between all the sections, would take four or five seconds of screen time. It’s not all about economy, but one wonders who finds this stuff exciting. Same can be found in each of the Hodges books as well as the agonizing last 100 pages of Dreamcatcher. (2) Most of the denouement, which is like a bad Garrison Keillor pastiche (Christmas with the Robinsons, Holly and her Mom) but not all of it. Not terrible, just a tad overwrought. And (3) The heavy hand of the author, not in a political sense but in the "I am telling you a bunch of things about the elevator, very conspicuously, so get ready for the elevator to come back into play" sense. More than once. Early on, when it was spending so much time (and by that I mean, only a page and a half or so) on Chet's back and forth with the CNN anchor it felt like he was waving something in the air behind the character's heads, then you turn the page and oh: there it is. King is weird about stuff like that. On one hand, the elevator-details / Chet-aforementioned are so conspicuous, then on the other, he buries little things, like Holly's imaginary name for the killer, obliquely referenced once again at the end. He's too cagey about some things and way too much of a "tell" with others. 

I mean, I mostly liked it fine. It's better than any of the Hodges books (maybe not the middle one actually) but frankly that's not too hard. It's not better than The Outsider, so why would you do it? I get trying, but why release it, I mean? Like "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" (or Doctor Sleep) this would be a delightful posthumous discovery, but I can't see why he'd feel the need to publish it. I guess he's beyond not publishing stuff; what he writes gets published, end of story. If I were his editor, I'd be more cautious. But hey. 

Part of what makes The Outsider work is the characters having to reconcile reality and unreality, piecing together a conventional murder mystery (evidence, counter-evidence, motive, lawyers, etc.) with a conventional horror story (the monster, etc.) But none of that happens here, just a huge (and somewhat improbable) info dump from an old guy who (somewhat improbably) has been "tracking" the monster for decades. Which is fine: I mean, it makes sense for any continuation of Holly's story to not cover the same ground of convincing the world the supernatural exists. But, not as effective storytelling, for me. He comes up with a clever way to get Holly and the old guy together, but the old guy isn't very believable.

Speaking of, her contention that she has found "another Outsider" is kind of weird, isn't it? I mean it's another doppelganger type, sure, or as she says, different breeds for different dogs. But a cocker spaniel has the same gestation period and endocrine system as a german shepherd. Or a gray wolf, for that matter. Whereas this Outsider can change wily-nily to pre-set people: a completely different operation than the creature she faced in the other book. If she wanted to say this was some distant cousin of said creature, okay, but no such distinction is made. That seemed odd for a character like Holly.

A word on the central motif of this one, wrapped up in the title: there are certainly those (and making them media people is apt) who feed on fear and panic, and who thrive on the fear and panic of others. It's just weird that real-world-Steve is so fine not just cozying up to them but actively and aggressively enabling such a thing. In his media-life, absolutely, but perhaps, to a point, in his fiction, as well. I won't argue with you if you disagree, but it seems pretty obvious to me that he has no problem stoking fear and loathing and undoubtedly draws sustenance from doing so, both individually and in a group. 

I had a lot more written on this point, but long story short: King is a bit of an Outsider himself, but he's also - perhaps the greater part of him - Holly Gibney as well. 

"Rat"

A would-be novelist is seized by an idea he must complete. He heads to a family cabin in the unincorporated townships of Maine to flesh it out, just in time for a big-ass storm and an encounter with a wish-granting rat. 

Long story short: it was all rat.

Nah, it was more than that. I was a little let down by the ending. Kind of fizzles to a close, this one. Also, in the haven't-we-seen-this-before side of things, it brought to mind both "Fair Extension" and "Gerald's Game," and, despite taking pains to distinguish him from others, many other King protagonists. None of these were hills to die on, but perhaps it needed a kick-ass ending to distinguish itself somewhat and didn't get one. 

I avoided reading my buddy Bryant's review of this one until just now, but as he points out, making Drew Larson a writer and "Rat" another story about a writer writing: "King's writer protagonists form one of the elements of his career that can sometimes be used satirically; if you're trying to write a King pastiche, it's probably going to contain an evil clown or a rabid dog or a haunted ___________ (e.g., car), and the main character is going to be a writer in Maine. Thing is, King writes writers pretty damn well."

And that's also the long and short of it. Not just write what you know, but write what you know well. I think novellas and stories are (by his own admission) a sort of post-novel cleansing of the palate/ yoga stretch for King, and it's probably good for his writing muscles to just do some twelve bar blues for a start and see what develops.

I did chuckle that this self-pastiche also included a big-ass storm at the end and at least one character talking telepathically. 

And another one (like the first part of "Life of Chuck") where real-world verisimilitude creeped me out while reading. Had I read this a month ago - when I was waking up in the middle of the night sucking for breath with my lungs aching and wondering if my kids were going to find me dead in the morning and the world ending in anger and fear and the crazy Chicago winds and rain hitting the window and voices in my head droning on about the vast unfulfilled promise to myself about writing a book anytime up to now - I'd have thought King was speaking directly to me.

You hear that from a lot of King fans, that feeling of being spoken directly to, of writing directly commenting on your situation. It reminds me of something Chuck Klosterman wrote about Billy Joel. It's a lot harder to write something that appeals to a broad cross-section of the world (and all their individual multitudes) than it is something that simply  expresses the uniqueness of the author. Many people have that backwards in their estimation of artists. Hats off - all the hats off - to King, once more. 

~

Which brings me to the end. I always feel a mix of melancholy and gratitude when I get to the inevitable "And you, Constant Reader, thanks to you" line before closing the book. 

There's a new feeling these days, which I wish did not exist but there's no point pretending otherwise, this feeling of  "how long do I have left to count myself among these ranks?" Not in the death-and-oblivion way, but in the pointed-exclusion/exile-from-Constant-Reader-land way. There's such cancel-culture pressure going on these days - over optics, not of substance - where anyone's fandom/ affection can suddenly be un-personed. Put baldly, it sure feels like King/ other Constant Readers are saying more and more these days "If you don't think a, b, or c, then you are not welcome here." 

This is the main reason why I avoid social-media-King. It's painful to be reminded of this and to feel such an indelible part of my life and imagination could be taken from me - and I mean taken, not given up voluntarily - with just one thoughtless tweet or smug appearance on Colbert, as cheered on mercilessly by all in that loop of thinking. As if it were actually in the power of even the author or my fellow readers to “cancel” anyone's Constant Readerhood. 

It's not that it's incredibly difficult to do this, but it's an extra step, and it's a segregation-minded step, and to be honest I really have grown to resent it. The opposite - to float downstream of One True Narrative, with God on your side (so to speak) and think problems outside the stream are self-inflicted or imaginary - this strikes me as comparatively easy. Moreover - and irritatingly - it is exactly this sort of difficulty/ examination that works like "If It Bleeds" purport to examine; what is the media doing and what are its consumers doing? Who is exploiting it, and to what purpose? For whose benefit?

Meh. It's a note I'd rather not end on, friends. But it's what the last line of the Author's Note brought to mind. 

I also, however, feel another way, which still - thankfully - overridesany other: like I’ve made it to another rung on a ladder that stretches back to my childhood and hopefully up into the unforeseen horizon.