King's Highway: Garage Sale

Well, well, look what I found at the back of the garage: two unfinished posts meant for the King's Highway. One of them is for Roadwork, the other is for Just After Sunset. Neither is finished, just notes and quotes, but I'm looking at these last few blogging months as not just finishing up certain projects but emptying the tanks / chambers before heading back to base for good.

I wanted to do proper reviews of the below - and finish all of King's short fiction re-read - but looks like the work will have to be done by others. But perhaps they'll be of some interest just the same. 

Either way! Bombs away.

Taxi Driver / in the air at the time. American New Wave fiction.

"He was hypnotized by the coming explosion, almost lusted for it. His belly groaned in its own juices."

Sally One-Eye Magliore. (King's gangsters. An interesting group. How much of Magliore is in the Thinner guy whomever? He has his go-to "voices.") "When Gabriel trumpeted in the Apocalypse, Sally One-Eye would still be patiently explaining the invulnerability of all systems everywhere and urging the old whore on him."

On TV Merv Griffin was chatting with celebrities. (The refrain. Again: like Taxi Driver with the crap daytime TV he's always watching.) 

Positioned as it is, with mega-corporations buying everything (and the fate of Vinnie), the energy crisis, mindless expansion and credit, etc. American life was fundamentally changed in ways few realized at the time, focused as they were on rude animal pursuits like bellbottoms, bussing, and heroin. 

"That would be the end of the whole, self-pitying mess." (Wants to commit suicide-by-energy-wasting.) Alcoholism. He thinks about things "until the alcohol blotted out the ability to think." A reaction against all the above and his Mom dying, R.I.P.

"A lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer."

Fred and George (and Charlie and trauma.) "Deep in Charlie's brain was a collection of bad cells roughly the size of a walnut. If you had that collection of bad cells in front of you on the table, you could squad them with one hard hit. But they weren't on the table. They were growing deep in the meat of Charlie's mind, still smugly growing, filling him up with random strangeness."

(Don't like "random strangeness" - too vague, though the paragraphs that follow provide more examples.)

Rolling Stones - Paint It Black.

The woman who dies at the Shop'n'Save, and the doctor who looked scared "as if he had just realized that his profession would dog him to the grave like some vengeful horror monster."

A mystery: Albert says "Do I know you from somewhere? Why do I keep feeling I know you?" I missed the reason for this. Anyone?

The Guardian re-read (and mock them for their pace - note: this is a reference to their re-read of King taking FOREVER. I was lapping them constantly when I was doing the King's Highway. And they were getting paid to do it! Pathetic.)

"In it he says that Roadwork is "(his) favourite of the early Bachman books". I don't know what changed his mind, but perhaps it was the peace afforded by time; of being able to stand back and see what he (or, rather, Richard Bachman) had done. In the novel, that's the problem: Barton can't. He's always there, with the house and the laundry and his wife, everything reminding him of the way that things were. I'm pleased that King is at peace with Roadwork, because it sits comfortably alongside some of his best non-genre novels: a story about a real person who has been ruined by the true horrors of real life."  

In 2021, it seems the pendulum has followed a more banal-woke take on everything Roadwork. I hope it comes back around to re-appreciation if we ever survive this neo-Maoist struggle session being inflicted on us by a few and enabled by far too many.

From the outro: "There is no rational response to miracles. And no way to understand the will of God - who, if He is there at al, may have no more interest in us than I do in the microbes now living on my skin. But miracles do happen, it seems to me each breath is another one. Reality is thin but not always dark. I didn't want to write about answers. I wanted to write about questions. And suggest that miracles may be a burden as well as a blessing. And maybe it's all bullshit. I Like the story, though."

Lovely description of "Ayana." But that's not one of my favorites.



A Very Tight Place - Dolan's Cadillac. Graduation Afternoon, all "B"s.

Cat from Hell. "B" or B -"

NYT at Special Bargain prices feels like it'd make a good beginning to something. B-



Gingerbread Girl  B+  (Perfectly fine, perfectly well-done and all, could be a great movie, but not much to it. Run, (name) Run was already kinda taken as a title, I guess. This genre of women running away/ escaping rich abusers really consumes some people. 



Mute  B+  (I remember when I read this in Playboy it was the first King I'd read in years. I enjoyed revisiting it. I often speak of this genre of King's stories as something unrealistic, the one-character-telling-another. It's almost like he heard me, or some similar criticism, and came back with this story. "You can't fault the set-up here, jackhole!" )



N  A-  (This is a fun one.)

Things Left Behind  A-

Stationary Bike  A-  (I love this one, kind of, but it doesn't really go anywhere. ha - see title. Anyway the idea of people in my stomach pissed at me for trying to give up cheeseburgers is probably genius.) 

Willa  A

"Sometimes they were in the mirror and when they slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a neon mountain range."

Love this one. Not a tremendous fan of the name/ title, though I love all the "King loves his wife" stories.

~

Billy Summers (2021)

Man oh man, folks, am I in the wrong room with this one.

So, Billy Summers is about a guy (Billy) pretending to be dumber than he actually is while taking assassination contracts from mobsters, only for people he thinks are bad. He suspects he's being double-crossed, and sure enough he is, but he hits the mattresses and bides his time. Until a girl is deposited right outside his hideout, who has been gang-raped by some MAGA-heads from the nearby college. So Billy decides to track them down and avenge her. He puts on a Melania Trump mask, sodomizes them and lectures them, then tracks down the big enchiladas who double-crossed him, all the way to Mar-a-Lago and/or Jeffrey Epstein.

Honestly, I think this is the end of the line with King and me. I've felt increasingly "in the wrong room" for years, but I hoped he'd snap out of it, "it" being this Twitter fear and loathing spiral he's in when it comes to MAGA rape fantasies and the like. But, he is not. Hoo boy is he not; the problem has deepened considerably. And from the reviews I've looked at, no one in the King community is batting much of eye, when they're not openly cheering on for more of it.

Which hey - I mean, I'm the guest, really, here, so maybe I just stayed too long at the party.  I've struggled with how to put this because the last thing I want to do is make any of my friends/ King fans feel the way King and many King fans make people like me feel. Or that voting for King (you get me) makes you fair game for rape fantasies and the like. 

I mean, that's kind of nuts - not going to lie, here. But it's the kind of nuts inflicting most people right now. I knew it was getting bad, years ago, but Billy Summers is like that episode of Cheers where Cliff has progressed from growing vegetables in his garden to cross-breeding (and dressing) them to resemble political leaders. Cliff had Norm to take him to one side and snap him out of it ("You've gone way off the deep end on this. You've dressed a potato like Richard Nixon, and you actually want people to come and know this." Paraphrasing from memory.) King has only Twitter, egging on his worst instincts, and providing him with desktop notifications to rally his spirits (or plot points) when they flail

Hell, that's what Twitter is good for. 

Like I said, it's not going to get better. I knew this, truthfully, before Billy Summers. You can't get a little woke; you're in for a penny, you're in for the whole rape MAGA fantasy pound of it all. Unless you consciously free yourself from it, you are just a hapless passenger on Blaine the Mono. With all that entails. In the Barony coach or no. (From what I can see, actually, the Barony coach is the place to be, but the pressure to partake in this sort of thing is much more intense than in coach.)

So, here we must part. It's not me, it's you; it's not you, it's me. 

And really, it's unfair of me to suggest King has gone off the deep end. The King of Billy Summers is really no different than the King of Under the Dome (if you voted for Bush, the idea there was you were a crystal meth warlord energy baron necrophile, or at least adjacent to such) or the King writing Henry Bowers or maybe all the way back to scrapbooking serial killer stories as a kid. Like the oft-told story of the scorpion who will sting because it's his nature, no surprises here. It's just getting old to be stung so monomaniacally, and with such little grace, and with the amount of scolding and violence that's coming with it. 

I get it, man! Let's call the whole thing off, as smarter people than me once sang. 

So it's been nine years since I decided to catch up with the favorite author of my youth. I regret nothing. But for me, after finishing this one (really quick: Nothing "Billy" writes  -  because since this is 2021 of course at the end the male's agency has to be busted down to merely co-authoring his own story, to raise the agency of the woman. That's just good manners! (And we see what happens to bad mannered boys. Kick his ass, sea bass; Twitter notifications are definitely not finding their way into your story) -  feels authentic except the "I'm a bad man" part. Which didn't even happen. This was after one-hundred-sixty pages of Quarry and central casting cliches. Fuggedaboutit. But I believed it - after everything we'd seen, this was King's confessional, not Billy's) I put all but three of my King books into bags to distribute to the free libraries in my neighborhood. Some kid is going to be very happy. 

(What did I keep? Duma Key and The Tommyknockers - those were my "discoveries" from the past nine years, and I've fond memories of that, plus I want to read both of them again and know they're not going to make me feel like the man wants me or my family gang-raped - and The Stephen King Companion, which contains within it all the warm and wonderful Stephen King feelings of my youth, way back before I knew the guy had such strong feelings about raping me and my family and giving aid and comfort to those who do. The joy of these three books, in other words, is safe and unable to be retconned from whatever Twitter rant awaits or has slouched off already, its hour come round at last.)

(Oh, I kept The Outsider, too. I didn't mean to, actually, I just forgot it and noticed it after. I don't feel strongly motivated to read it again but nor do I feel like giving it away, either. For the moment, over on the shelf it sits.)

I had a nice interaction with my neighbor down the block while loading up the books. He grabbed a bunch of them and was so happy for a Misery to give to his daughter. We laughed at the oddness of that phrasing/ idea, which I understood completely and chatted about reading King in the 80s and down to now. (I did not mention any of this other stuff. Didn't want him to run into the kitchen and come out with a cake mixer! Just totally normal stuff.)

He asked me, holding up The Regulators, "why have I never heard of this one?" I told him that was one I almost kept, that it deserves to be rediscovered both by the King community and the world at large. I stopped there. Why tell him I have to leave that fight for someone else? My heart is no longer in it. I think I convinced my neighbor, though, to come at it with fresh eyes. 

So there's my last little act of positivity for the King community - spreading joy one book at a time - which, the last few years of rape fantasies and such aside, has been a fun few years. I liked that it began where it did and led where it did and ended on a nice conversation of book-gifting to a neighbor.

Billy Summers itself I gave to a different friend, at his request. This particular friend has no problem that I can see with MAGA rape fantasies or Twitter fear and loathing; like King I suspect that deep down he thinks anyone who voted for Trump - like women in short skirts perhaps, but I'd really like not to think so - is just asking for it. It's getting hard to navigate these sorts of things politely. I guess I can sympathize with King on that front. Writing, he once said, is an act of willed empathy.

Or was, once upon a time. May it be that again, and soon. 

I realize some of the pronouncements above may seem unconducive to conversation, but all y'all out there that don't want to rape me, please feel free to let me know your feelings on the book, positive or otherwise. 

But: I mean, who are we kidding here? Has a single review mentioned this revenge rape fantasy of King's? Or anyone's over the past few years? Like I say, King's always had this side of his work, it just too much resonant frequent with our present cultural moment. This is a terrible addition to our current cultural moment. And from the guy who pulled Rage, it's baffling. What possible conclusion could possibly be drawn other than King is indeed just fine with certain types of violence against certain types of people? A book is not a confessional; a book timed with this cultural moment that includes all of the above isn't, either, it's just... tasteless. Stupid. Unbelievably irresponsible and banal. 

That it's not a good book is more forgivable than being some weird MAGA rape fantasy that seems a-okay in the mainstream reviews of it. That strikes me as not just abnormal but really kind of dangerous and sad.

~

So ends the King's Highway! And I wish it was a better part of town. 

I'd like to end with three pics of this little Barrens-area (much cleaned up nowadays, as evidenced in the first pic below with a nice fence to keep you from falling in the reservoir, luxuries unheard of back when I was biking down here to read whatever King I checked out of the library) central to the King-reading of my youth and all subsequent nostalgia. If you're ever in Slatersville, RI, stop on by the library, walk on down to the water, and sit for a spell. 

There's graffiti of hedgerow animals galore down there. Mostly benevolent. Sometimes it's only visible from the corner of your eye, not when you look at it directly. Other times it sneaks up on you when you're not looking.

Cheers.

The Colorado Kid (2005)

“A man doesn’t get to the age I was even then without getting his ass kicked a number of times by fools with a little authority.”

I didn't have much to say about this book when I reviewed it the first time, but my opinion had fallen a bit by the time I reviewed it again in 2019:

"It's tough to tell what the point of writing an unsolvable mystery is outside of a classroom exercise of some kind. King's at a point, both careerwise and talentwise, where he can write such a thing and get it published and even make it compelling. But why would he want to? And how could anyone tell if he succeeded or not? He famously derided Nicholson Baker's Vox as a meaningless fingernail paring, but what is this, then? I can only assume there's something here I'm missing."

Still fair, I feel, but as a result of this re-read, I’m going to bump this one up, from 63rd (of 65) to 46. I’ll get to why that is momentarily, but there it is up front. Lest we forget, though, this is not some King's Highway adjunct project, but another episode of:

Also, I’ll break from previous entries in the Hard Case Crime Chronicles and delve into
plot details and spoilers, below. 

2005
HCC-013-I

There'll definitely be at least one more of these (King's Later comes out in early 2021) but the Hard Case Crime Chronicles will be slowing down for the foreseeable future. Like From Novel to Film or Friday Night Film Noir or Twilight Zone Tuesday or any once-frequent-feature here at the Omnibus, the HCCC will join the Legion of Inactive Series. I don't really consider these series "closed" in that I exist in a permanent state of wanting to take up any old series and continue; hell, I'm still plotting storylines for fan-fic comics written with friends from the 80s, in some part of my brain. (True story.) So, same with Hard Case Crime Chronicles. I mean, I'm keeping the books. Which is actually part of how the project was a failure. 

I had two objectives: (1) to read the fifty-ish Hard Case Crime books on my shelf to (2) determine whether or not I was keeping them or donating them. I failed the first part by thirty-five books so was unable to determine the second part. On the other hand, I enjoyed myself, mostly. So hey. I'd not like to make a habit out of enjoying failure, but it's a victory of sorts (not the scoreboard - or electoral college - kind) when it happens. Because reading’s cool, Beavis.  

So let's jump in. First, the new cover. Great composition, but the girl needed some work. (The shoulders, the left leg: ugh.) This juxtaposition of idyllic seaside Maine with murder works well, and it’s the sort of thing that specifically holds anchor for King. As he mentions in the afterword, the islands off the coast of Maine like Monhegan or Cranberry fascinate him with their “contrasting yet oddly complimentary atmospheres of community and solitariness.” It’s a fascination that has minted mucho dinero for El Maestro Rey, and much readerly delight among his fans.

He’s also sketched out the Maine-r of the American species many times. He does here as lovingly as anywhere, although he burns off some of the good will he engenders by indulging a bit too much. He’s tried this sort of thing (two locals relaying a long quasi-mythological tale as interrupted and augmented by their folksy mannerisms, their unsurpassed empathy, and their wisdom) many times in other places, but I’d say the way he does it in The Colorado Kid is mostly a net-positive. Some of the broader strokes work better (“That in the winter the wind on the mainland side of the island was sometimes a terrible sound, almost the cry of a bereft woman, was a thing she did not know, and there was no reason to tell her” than others “Then they were all laughing. Stephanie * thought she loved those two old buzzards. She really did.”)

* Stephanie/ Stephen. Draw your own conclusions. At one point, the other two characters kid Steffi – “That’s pretty good. You should be a writer.” I do not suggest Steffi is a one-to-one avatar for the author (what Grant Morrison has called the “two-dimensional diving suit”) any more than Vince or (the other guy) is. But are the author’s characters / inner monologues cracking on him? i.e. is that what his characters are telling King, the faithful transcriber/ excavator of the characters in his stories? Yes. In other places in the book as well. 

A parable is delivered in the first chapter re: the monetary ecology of a closed island community and perceptions vs. reality that probably doubles as King’s statement on the Schrödinger’s Mystery aspect of The Colorado Kid itself. Vince answer’s Steffi’s question (“will (the waitress) know who put the money in her purse?”) “If she didn’t know, would that make it illegal tender?” They might as well have put a picture in after that chapter of everyone looking directly at the reader.

Speaking of the pictures, there are plenty new ones in the second printing. I didn't include them all below and can't provide specific credits since neither the publisher (Charles Ardai, in his intro) nor the author in his Afterword, nor anyone at the respective sites for the book (for shame!) or wiki, did, except to state that one or two of them are by Kate Kelton, the actress who played Jordan on Haven (allegedly based on TCK) and others are by Mark Edward Geyer, Paul Mann, and Mark Summers.

Paul Devane in foreground, whose father-in-law's cigarette habit provides an important clue. 

This looks more like a photo that was traced over, to me. (A problem with having more than one artist do the pictures is lack of consistency for character models. Steffi, Vince, and "Dave Bowie" (ugh) look differently each time they appear.

I assume this is the Colorado Kid's widow? Kinda vampy, eh?

I also don't recall Steffi wearing a mini-skirt and pumps. Then again, I don't recall her looking as shown on the original cover. I'm the kind of dumb animal who says "hey wow, legs!" either stupid way.

I like this one. Don't mind Herman up there, my desk gargoyle; he was helping hold the book open for me.

The Russian coin that does not exist in our world. (Is that President Chadbourne on the $5 bill? Does that look like Lincoln to you?) 

This is from the bit from the Joyland excerpt at the end. Who's this lady supposed to be? I suppose it's the Mom before her thank you tryst with our young hero. This picture makes it looks like she's some boardwalk floosie waiting for a thirteen year old boy, FWIW.

This reminds me of that scene near the beginning of Blue Velvet: "Yep. That's an ear all right."  

Let's chat about the mystery, shall we? I took note of a few things while reading:

- "Tea for the Tillerman" comes up more than once, in one of those flashes of inspiration from Steffi that seem rather conspicuously placed. She at first thinks it's Al Stewart, then remembers it's Cat Stevens. It's Cat Stevens in our world, but as other things suggest, this whole takes place in another.  The lyrics suggest tea for the tillerman and "steak for the son." Our mystery dead man does have a piece of improbable steak lodged in his throat. How or why, who knows? This is a tantalizing line of inquiry, but I can make nothing of it. 

-      "This has been a long time coming" or "Lidle's got it coming" are what the (unreliable drunk) tillerman hears from our possible-mystery-dead man as he crosses the sound. What does this mean? Zero clue. Who is Lidle? 

- The time difference between CO and ME is two hours, and the final sightings of Mystery Dead Man (Cogan) are 10:30 am CO time and 5:30 pm ME time. 

- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is referenced. Is this a clue? Is there anything in the plot which speaks to TCK? 

- The pack of cigarettes has only one missing. Twenty cigarettes come in a pack. Twenty minus one is FFS obviously the dude went Todash.

- No Starbucks in 1980, nor Blockbuster, yet both are mentioned. And there apparently is no such Russian coin as the one Cogan has, the Chervonetz. These are deliberate clues, so we must accept the idea that this is an alternate timeline/ dimension than the one we inhabit. Steffi and Vince make no mention of the incongruity of Starbucks/ Blockbuster, so they too inhabit one we do not. These are not minor things, I'd say. (Would it make the story/ mystery more compelling if they had? That is to say, if they were of our timeline, where these things are incongruities? I think so. Instead we're left with another mystery. Unless: the Colorado Kid is actually from our own future-present and somehow warped into the 1980-Maine of the titular story. That's what I lean to.) 

That brings me to my only real problem of TCK. Which isn't so much a problem with the book itself but with King's remarks about it. He originally suggested that there is a solution. Then he started saying, well, there only might be; "my solution," (he says) "is supernatural." This annoys me. Is King's solution only one of many solutions? It's one thing to say "hey some of my fans might not like my not solving this one" and another to be all "maybe there is one; maybe there isn't." You either included the clues needed to solve the mystery, or you didn't. 

And "supernatural" covers so much ground that it muddies the point of the perfectly readable but to-what-purpose what-ifs in which the novel engages. What's the point of eliminating the impossible to arrive at the improbable if "gone Todash" is ultimately the answer even though you need to go beyond the book to even get the clue? Does it undermine the whole point of living our lives in cogent defiance of the nightmare-fuel-of-unknowns that existentially envelop us all? To borrow from King's allusion at the beginning, it decreases the purchasing power of the legal tender in circulation. 

I said this is a story about telling stories, but really the plot is even simpler: it’s simply a story about the day Steffi joined the staff ("crossed over the river") of The Weekly Islander. Tea for the tillerman. All the relevant details to tell that story, to achieve that goal, are present in The Colorado Kid. As Vince says, life is 99% mystery and 1% conceptual re-framing to stay sane. Then again, this is drama, folks. I can’t see why it can’t be both a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and how we use them to accept/ exclude and a puzzle box with a more traditionally satisfying conclusion: The Mystery of the Riddle’s Enigma plus Steffi solving it, even if she (or the reader) is unaware she's done so. 

Actually, I guess such a book would probably look something like The Outsider. King's the one who gets us into this mess by the Starbucks/Blockbuster thing. I think when it comes to whatever mysteries remain in King's works, we likely have gotten all the answers we're going to get. It's frustrating, but that's life.

Perhaps there's a lesson there.

"And on the mound the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds, as if to touch that mystery, and bring it close, and open its heart, and know its story."

Herman is happy to have helped. 

King's Highway pt. 23.5: Cell (Revisited)

"Can you hear me now?" 

- Verizon Guy

"'I'll a-babbalah your a-kazzalah, you fuck!'"

- Clay Riddell

Here are some supplemental remarks to my original King's Highway entry for Cell, written four years ago and towards the beginning of my blogging career. (Well, "career.") I hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet, as that post attests to, so it seemed a good candidate for this here King's Highway Bridges and Infrastructure Renewal Summer Project.

Here's what I wrote for my brief description of Cell from my recently-revamped King's Rankings:  

"If you are at all literate in what King does, you must recognize that this one is the Matisse painting of King's catalog - everything's bold colors and stripped down to its essential lines. Plus, as we go further and further into the internet age, the idea of society descending into weaponized chaos - equalized at last in pure hivemind-y hatred of "the other" - as triggered by some ghost in the machine seems less and less sci-fi and more just like everyday life in 2016."

And after an additional re-read, I stand by both points. Particularly that last one. Couple of bullet-points along those lines:

- Early on, when the first pulse is sent out over everyone's phones, a girl Clay calls "Pixie Dark" receives only a half-dose. As a result, she staggers around, screaming "WHO AM I?" before self-inflicting serious harm to her own face. I hesitate to deconstruct this further as it just seems as perfect a metaphor all on its own. Pixie Dark is half of the online community, on any trending topic, on any given day. It also made me think of the practice of "tagging." Without the external validation of one's identity by others, Pixie Dark loses her sense of self.

- The gibberish of the phoners reminded me of the "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER"-speak. Remember when everyone went out of their minds a few years back with adorkably-misspelled gibberish on funny cat photos? Is there any real difference? 

- Says The Head at one point: "By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army - an army that's literally afraid of nothing because it's insane - and you break down the infrastructure." The online mob and the media-academe that feeds it have broken down the infrastructure of network programming, elections, and journalism. 

There's even more, but I don't want to get carried away. I think it's remarkable that the behavior of the phoners and some of the situations that develop in Cell have parallels to everyday online behavior in 2016, and I think it's even worth exploring on a deeper level. But I lack either the sociological or psychological know-how to be the Neil Armstrong of the bunch. I hope someone smarter than myself delves into it. That said, I don't think King sat down to "predict the future" or anything - let's call that a happy (or rather a decidedly unhappy) accident.

"That country (the old U.S.A.) was now out of service, off the hook, so sorry, please try your call again later."

The breakdown of society that follows the first pulse is seemingly as all-pervasive as Captain Trips in The Stand. And similar to that work, the survivors begin to receive visions in dreams as to where they should go: Kashwakamak, as it turns out, a fictional resort town in Maine's lake country first seen in Gerald's Game. 

There the Stand parallels break down. Clay and his newfound companions (first Tom McCourt and teenager Alice Maxwell; then Jordan, the surviving pupil of the Gaiten Academy, a prep school where they perpetrate their first act of vengeance against the phoners; and finally Denise, Ray, and Dan, fellow "flock-killers") are ostracized by both the phoners (led by "Raggedy Man," aka the President of Harvard) and the non-phoner survivors, whom the phoners telepathically turn against them. (When a pair of redneck survivors don't get the message, they are dealt with brutally as a warning to all.) 

Clay is motivated by trying to find his son on the off-chance that he can save him. Things come to a head up in Kashwakamak, and everyone parts ways. Does Clay find his son? Is his son beyond saving? What happens to the world? In the words of a popular Time-Life commercial from yesteryear, read the book. 

As always with King, there are several sentences that struck my fancy. Such as "Clay Riddell believed he might be witnessing the first reluctant scurry he had ever seen in his life," in reference to the hotel clerk who reluctantly assists them in the immediate aftermath of the pulse. Or "survival is like love; both are blind."

The only thing working against the novel - and "against" is relative, of course; I actually think they're rather endearing qualities - is its dated-ness. Something tied so specifically to a technology breakthrough that's already undergone so much evolution always runs that risk, of course. (Not for the first time in King's bibliography. Witness the great lengths The Running Man - a novel set in the future - goes to with analog recording equipment.) But I had to chuckle at a couple of Clay's observations:

- While watching someone talk on the phone while at the counter of the ice cream van, he thinks: "He was watching an act which would once have been considered almost insufferably rude - yes, even while engaging in a small bit of commerce with a total stranger - becoming a part of accepted everyday behavior." I can relate to this 100%. I made the same observation to all my cellphone-using friends in the first few years they appeared. I recall vividly the first time someone interrupted our conversation to answer their cell and how rude I thought it was. 

But: I think this vestige of manners from a bygone era might puzzle modern readers. The practice has become too ubiquitous. 

- Also, the idea of Clay being a "cellphone hold-out" is more and more anachronistic with each passing year. I'm still a smart-phone / tablet holdout (more out of habit at this point vs. any sensible objection) and would totally be a cellphone hold-out if such a thing were possible. But I'm feeling the squeeze. Verizon keeps discontinuing their non-smart-phone choices for mobile phones, and even the land-lines you can get now are part of cable bundles, etc. 

Does it matter for the year in which the story is set? Not at all. It's a nice snapshot of the early years of the 21st century. Speaking of: 

- Clay refers to 2004 as "the year the Red Sox won the World Series." Not so fast! Which World Series? The window of time where said year would be nailed down as 2004 was brief, as unfathomable as that sentence would seem to any pre-2004 Red Sox fan.

- Also, Clay remembered thinking "too good to be true" about recordable CDs. Me, too! But hell, a future edition of Cell will probably have to include a footnote explaining what the hell a CD even is.

"Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People."

Finally, Charles Ardai (the headmaster of Gaiten Academy and a name-check of the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime) has this Glen-Bateman-esque summation of events re: the phoners:

"If all conscious thought, all memory, all ratiocinative ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible. (...) Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or a single line of written code which cannot be stripped. (...) At bottom you see we are not homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule this planet not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago."

Not sure if The Head's use of "motherfucker" is entirely in keeping with his other dialogue, but otherwise I tend to agree. I don't even consider it pessimistic. Like Freud, I find it a fundamentally optimistic pursuit in mapping out the ways in which the human default is irrational and violent, as it presupposes we can figure it out and change it.

Save to System. 

Underrated book and a gem of late-innings King.

~