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) |
