King's Highway pt. 35: Backroads and Mist

We have reached the point in our trail guide where we diverge from the Dark Tower series for an extended foray into other King works.

First up, we return to

for another look at "The Mist." I first covered this one here, but it has the following connection to the Dark Tower mythos:

"..the cause of the Mist is alluded to be a tear between universes, similar to the Todash Darkness, a concept explored in the series, both of which supposedly renders its inhabitants "blind" and contains horrible creatures which prey on them. Additionally, several creatures described are physically similar to some of those shown in the series. In the film adaption, David Drayton can be seen painting a portrait of Roland in the opening scene."

Totally missed this, the first time around, how fun. I wonder what people who noticed this but didn't recognize the gunslinger make of this? i.e. "Establishing shot of main character, painting some kind of Clint Eastwood/ fantasy world pastiche..."

So, I guess The Arrowhead Project, alluded to but never explained in the text, is some kind of military attempt to harness the power of Thinnies? Close enough, at any rate. But, as so often happens with such attempts, something went awry and unleashed the strange beasts of this Todash Darkness? (Something I haven't gotten to yet, so I won't worry about it.)

Cool.

This remains a quick and entertaining read. My impressions of it didn't change much, but in the same way something like The Birds is even more entertaining when you bring Freud/ Oedipus into it, "The Mist" works even better when you project Dark Tower onto it.

A comment on The Stephen King "Goremet" Book Club post re: the Dark Tower "road-map" brought "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" to my attention as a Dark Tower tie-in.

I didn't comment on this story in my original post on Skeleton Crew, but it's a fun read. Another Castle Rock adventure!

Both the title and the content brought Wind in the Willows to mind.

The plot for this is fairly straightforward. Mrs. Todd, one of Castle Rock's "summer people," (i.e. not a year-round Maine resident) is a student of short-cuts and backroads. She strikes up a conversation/ friendship with Homer Buckland, the caretaker of the property she and her husband rent in Castle Rock, about shaving off time/ distance on the commute to Bangor. Homer accompanies on one such journey, where she flies through ominous backroads where the trees seem to swat at them as they drive underneath. With each short-cut, she seems to grow younger and younger. At the story's end, she has long disappeared, and Homer is seen getting into a car with a woman in her teens, off for points unknown.

The connection to the Dark Tower is (potentially) in the backroads. Mrs. Todd is accessing a network of "thinnies" in her short-cuts. I don't think she is alluded to in the Dark Towers to come, but I like to think of her and Homer, rocketing in-between the worlds on an omniversal road trip. (Additionally, the creatures she scrapes off her windshield and grill bear some resemblance to Dark Tower/ creatures of the Mist)

I quite like the following passages from the story:

- There's something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home. getting there quick is often for the birds, although no one holding a Massachusetts driver's license seems to know it. But knowing how to get there quick - or even knowing how to get there a way that the person sitting beside you don't know... that has power.

- Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

- Olympus must be a glory to the eyes and the heart, and there are those who crave it and those who find a clear way to it, mayhap, but I know castle Rock like the back of my hand and I could never leave it for no shortcuts where the roads may go; in October the sky over the lake is no glory but it is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I sit here on the bench, and think about 'Phelia Todd and Homer Buckland, and I don't necessarily wish I was where they are... but I still wish I was a smoking man.

Amen, King's-Reoccurring Constantly-Quitting-Smoking-Character, Amen.

Next, we circle back to 'Salem's Lot, to re-acquaint ourselves with Father Callahan.

Played by James Gallery in the original TV adaptation and by Zefram Cochran in the remake, Father Callahan will play a major part in the Dark Towers yet to come. All we need to remind ourselves, now, is that at the end of Salem's Lot, rather than kill him, the vampire Barlow forces the faith-wavering priest to drink his blood, thus cursing him to walk between the worlds/ live the life of the undying.

Finally, I noticed "The Reploids" is listed among the major works connected to The Dark Tower. I don't know how major of a work it is; it's only ever been published in the anthology book Night Visions 5.

Google-image searching it only brings up images from Megaman.

But it, too, is a fun read. America tunes into The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1989) but instead of Johnny pantomiming his golf swing and making fun of Doc's crazy-shirt, what America gets is some guy named Ed Paladin. Ed has never heard of Johnny Carson but acts like he belongs there, even calling out to Ed McMahon by name. He is interrogated by the cops for trespassing/ suspicion of kidnapping America's favorite late-night talk show host. The story ends with the cops discovering the currency in his wallet is different. The Fed Reserve Notes are blue and the one-dollar-bill has a picture of James Madison instead of George Washington. Roll credits.

Its connection to the Dark Tower is only that Ed Paladin appears to be from one of the worlds Father Callahan mentions traveling through in the yet-to-be-blogged Dark Tower V: Wolves of Calla, a world distinguishable by different colors/ Presidents on its US currency.(I keep waiting for President Chadbourne to get mentioned somewhere else. JULY 2013 EDIT: "Under the Dome" would be perfect!)

'It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its end.'

NEXT

IT

King's Highway pt. 3: Salem's Lot and more

I wandered over to Ravenswood Used Books earlier this afternoon (leaving myself plenty of time to arrive back home for the Champions League Final, of course) to see what they had to contribute to this Stephen King project. Unsurprisingly, they had quite a few things. For a grand total of $26 I got hardcovers for Everything's Eventual,  Just After Sunset, and Full Dark, No Stars, and the paperback for Skeleton Crew. Very pleased with that!

'Salem's Lot, "Jerusalem's Lot," and "One for the Road."

I never read any of these as a tweener/ teen. I remember reading a few pages of my old copy of Night Shift - oh wait, here's my old copy of Night Shift:

 

I was rarely without a Stephen King paperback in 7th through 9th grade. This cover describes a story therein "I Am the Doorway," which was recently made into a Russian short film. Anyway, I'll get to the rest of Night Shift in a moment, but "Jerusalem's Lot" and "One for the Road" begin and come-near-the-end, respectively, of this collection of short stories. And they take place as respectively-chronologically to the events of the novel 'Salem's Lot. 

I remember making an attempt with "Jerusalem's Lot" once and perhaps I even finished it, ditto for "One for the Road." But if so, I forgot everything therein, as I found it all new to me here in the far future of 2012. I enjoyed both quite a bit. The former is set in 1850, upon possession of family property, and the story bounces between what they discover about its past and what they discover about its surroundings. (Not to mention what's in the cellar...) The mythos are definitely Cthulhu, but it also relates to events that occur in 'Salem's Lot.

"One for the Road" is about an out-of-towner who gets lost and leaves his wife and child in a parked car in 'Salem's Lot, as he goes for help in a snowstorm. The locals that he encounters don't think much of his plan, and they trek out to see what can be done. The unspoken superstition and certainty of the locals comes across really well.

Neither of which would have hit me as much if I hadn't finished 'Salem's Lot at the same time I was reading them. Now, this was one I actually never read as a kid. (Kid sounds better than tweener/ teen, so I'll just use that. But, really, my big King reading years were 1986-1989 or so. By the time Misery came out in the theaters, and definitely by the time I was working at Waldenbooks and unloading endless boxes of The Green Mile off the trucks, my interest had waned.) But I remember the paperback on my brother's shelves:

Maybe it was my mother's actually. At any rate, I was so freaked out by the little bits of the Salem's Lot mini-series I saw when I was 10 or 11 that I never wanted to try my luck with this one. (I'd say I spent at least 40% of my time between 1984 and 1989 scaring the crap out of myself. I miss those years. I'm so happy I didn't spend my 10-15 years watching stuff like Saw, Cabin Fever, or Wrong Turn. Totally different vibe.)

Here are some pics from the mini-series:

I suppose it's a bit dated now - well, more than a bit. A used copy of the DVD is en route to my house as I type this. I was going to wait to incorporate a review of it into this blog, but it's probably the sort of thing you can review without seeing. If you're nostalgic for the era or time of your life, you'll find something to like. Perhaps it'll be a hidden gem. Anyone of a certain age remembers the kid scratching on the window and floating there - that got a lot of on-the-bus currency.

(I never saw the Rob Lowe version from 2004, but I've heard universally bad things.)

It was so refreshing to read an old-fashioned vampire's story. Crosses and holy water. No sexual metaphors wagging the dog. No labored layers of artifice. Sometimes that sort of thing is fun, but there's just been too much of it since Anne Rice, for my money. Now stuff like this is the exception and not the rule: Just an evil inhuman presence that spread its virus through human hosts until he consumed them and moved on. But these things come in waves, so we'll likely see a return to the more traditional "monster's tale:" A few dashes of satanic or psychological ritual (both also fleshed out further in "Jerusalem's Lot") and some "old-fashioned" murder, but mainly it's about having the outwit and then stake a bunch of bloodsuckers, turned by one master bloodsucker, and his human assistant. It's told in an engaging way, giving a bird's-eye view of the sort of fictional town in Maine I normally associate with a Stephen King book: a place where people are quitting smoking and others are smoking, people are drinking beer, and a lot of guys are slapping their wives around and where the main character goes to either reconnect with his past or get over a profound loss in his life. (In this case, both.)

I guess Father Callahan, who suffers an ignoble fate here, appears in some Dark Tower stuff, and I understand Wolves of Calla is a sequel (of sorts) to this. I joined the Stephen King forum and there's a lot of discussion of it over there. I'm saving all the Dark Towers, perhaps not for the end, but to read as a whole, so I won't get to those for a bit. But, if you're ahead of me here but have no reason to wait, see Dark Tower V: Wolves of Calla for more information...

Night Shift

Ahh Night Shift... I was very pleasantly surprised with this collection, and it was my enjoyment of this that led me to select the purchases referenced earlier. I'm curious to see how his 21st century short fiction holds up.(And why I picked Skeleton Crew from the other books available - figure if I don't like the new stuff, I can always enjoy that. That was another paperback that traveled to a lot of different study halls, back in the day.)

The only story in here that I felt didn't really work as a story was "Night Surf," which was likely just a napkin-sketch for what eventually became The Stand. Not necessarily a bad read, but I tried picturing it as an episode of Tales from the Crypt or something, and had it been, it wouldn't have had much of a plot or point to it. (Probably more of a Tales from the Darkside.) The rest run the gamut from not-bad-but-not-amazing ("The Man Who Loved Flowers" or "The Last Rung on the Ladder") to surprisingly good/ better-than-I-remembered (Pretty much all the rest, but particularly "Battleground," which was made into a really wonderful episode of Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and "Quitters, Inc." which I always remembered as inferior to the James Woods segment of Stephen King's Cat's Eye, but this time around, I found much better. And I love that segment, don't get me wrong. Although the film deviates substantially (pretty much altogether, keeping only the "man quits smoking via mysterious all-powerful organization" part of the plot) from the story, but it was recently made as the Bollywood feature No Smoking) to the wow-that-was-fantastic, which I reserve for two of its better known ones, "Children of the Corn" (made into a crappy but fun 80s movie, which spawned several diminishingly-fun sequels, and an underwhelming, rather-pointless recent SyFy remake) and "Trucks," which saw life on the big screen as Stephen King's directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive, but which reads here as actually pretty wild. It ends right when it would be getting interesting, as a book (and depending on your reaction the film, it might end exactly where it should have), but the images and logic and scenario remain. "Trucks" is definitely "one of those stories."

I enjoyed "Sometimes They Come Back" but mention it here mainly as an excuse to share the poster for the film:

Which I remember distinctly from a video store I used to rent from. (Never saw it. But I like the poster.)

This has been a little longer than I expected, even after editing, so I'll save Firestarter and Four Past Midnight for next time...