King's Highway pt. 11: On Writing and the SK Companion

I got The Stephen King Companion as a Christmas gift in 1988 or 1989. Maybe 87? I can't recall.

This goes for some wild prices on eBay, but keep searching, there are some $.99 first editions out there.

I got rid of all my books when I left Dayton in 1998, and this was one of them. I re-acquired it for the sake of this project. How does it hold up? Kind of flimsy, I guess, but for me, it was a treasure trove of memories. I found this site while gathering materials for this blog, and especially when set aside some of these other overviews, it comes off as a bit fan-club-ish. Not that that's a bad thing, just, if you're looking for King analysis, the best thing in here is the reprinted Playboy interview (more on that at the end of this blog) and the text for An Evening with Stephen King from Virginia Beach, VA.

As for On Writing, this can be read in two ways. One of which I will concentrate on here, and the other, which is probably more along the lines of why it was written, i.e. tactile lessons from one of the most successful writers of our age, which I will not.

This book came across my radar on 2000, when I was a tutor at The Writing Center at Rhode Island College:

Craig-Lee, my oft-Base-of-Operations 2000-2003.

At the time, I flipped through it enough to get the gist (I thought) of it, which seemed more or less like the same advice Mrs. Wimms gave me in 10th grade from The Lively Art of Writing. Or later, from A Moveable Feast or Papa Hemingway or just from reading Salinger. That was my reaction to it at the time, you understand. (After this - neither here nor there - the only person I wanted to listen to on fiction was Fitzgerald from The Crack-Up.) This time around, I found it full of very practical advice, not the least of which is:

Put your desk in the corner and remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room... Life is not a support-system for art; it's the other way around. 

Which led me to an interesting 4 hour adventure yesterday afternoon re-arranging my room, which involved two-prong adapters, extension cords, some creative problem-solving, and lots of hands-and-knees scrubbing and annihilation of germs heretofore unrealized. 

But, as alluded to above, I connected much more with the biographical material and perhaps projected a bit upon it. King's work has been a part of my life for as long as anything else. Thinking about it - doing these blogs - can't help but bring some other things to mind, certain signposts along the way.

Nice Corgi. (It was a rescue.)

The sections on his accident and recovery were chilling. Real-life horror recounted faithfully. In a lot of ways, King's trained himself so well as a writer of horror (as he says in the Playboy interview, 'I'm not above thrusting your hand in the maggot-infested innards of a long-dead woodchuck") that when he discusses the rational horrors of mortality, it comes across like Khan's effortlessly chilling sudden appearance in Wrath of Khan.

Okay, so Star Trek 2 is on, here, during my Sunday night blogging. So it goes!

Couple things:

- The Playboy interview from the 80s is interesting for many reasons. He speaks of knowing some tragedy awaits him in the near future (easy enough to chalk it up to his paranoid/ besotted state of mind at the time, but still, rather chilling, especially given his ongoing preoccupation with pre-cogs, etc.) and of his writing deconstructing himself/ his own therapy. He talks in On Writing how he knew he was an alcoholic as early as 1975 when he wrote The Shining - that his muse, as it were, cried for help the only way it could.

Danny isn't here right now, Mr.s Torrance... He's shot-gunning beers in the garage with tissues up his nose to stem the coke-induced beating with his heart going 130 beats a minute.

And he gives us some other insight into The Tommyknockers and Misery and Cujo, all very interesting, as well. But it is this passage that really resonated with me:

The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of desk that would dominate a room... In 1981 got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, sky-lighted study (it's a converted stable loft at the rear of the house). For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

First, it is weird to imagine all the output of this period (good God, just look it up) as the result of someone who describes himself that way. Second, I can relate in some stupid ways, except moving the timetable a few decades later. (And, you know, subtracting the monetary and creative success of the relative six years in question.) And third, just... what an image. I almost see it as a signpost on the edge of true alcoholism/ addiction. Turn back here. 

Not King, but the first alcoholic I ever met was Tony Stark. My brother had to explain what an alcoholic was to me.

On Writing is a humbling book to read. If you are a writer or aspire to be one, this is a great kick in the ass. If you're an admirer of the memoir genre, it's a fun read. It fits all the criteria of any book-blurb you ever read... Inspiring, a tour-de-force, 'King writes with an honesty and energy unsurpassed,'... Blah blah yadda yadda. And, it lives up to it.

- It's wild to read these recollections of authors Joe Hill and Owen King as children. Re: Joe, "The delivery was easy; nothing else with him was." (Said with affection.) I can see that; Joe Hill seems to be a rather ornery dude, quick to deride/ project on Twitter. But, maybe that's how come he writes so good, to paraphrase Vonnegut.

FINAL VERDICT: Shelf-worthy. Amazingly readable, helpful, illuminating. It is not an exaggeration to say this may be the best book of its kind to come out in the past few decades. I hope it remains in the stacks of the Writing Center at Craig-Lee for several generations.

King's Highway pt. 10: Rose Red

We Say haunted, but what we mean is, the house has gone insane.

Tonight, we address what SK refers to in the preface of Everything's Eventual as one of his "visual novels," the 2002 TV mini-series Rose Red.

I don't really remember this being on the air, but that's par for the course those years in my life. I didn't watch a lot of contemporary tv from 2000-2003 or so. (Except for Dawson's, which is far afield of this particular blog series, but an interesting horror tale of its own...)

Going in blind, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the familiar faces... David Dukes, Jack's Dad from the aforementioned Creek, who died during filming of a heart attack; Sawyer's Dad from Lost who had one of my favorite lines but I didn't write it down, but it's what he says directly after his precognitive powers are displayed at the bar in episode 1; Emily Deschanel from Bones; Liam McPoyle from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia; and what's-his-name from The Aviator and Big Love... (I figure why write a blog containing nothing but google-able information.)

Matt Ross is his name.

His performance is a bit haywire, actually, going from malevolent in the SK-tradition of Harold from The Stand to goofy and broad to more restrained.

It's not his performance that undoes some of the pleasure of this story. (It clocks in at 254 minutes, by the way, so when I say it's a pleasure, it must be, if I wanted to watch it all.) But it's mainly the lead, Nancy Travis. I have to agree with this from the Rose Red wiki:

It's hard to say whether or not Travis is simply the wrong choice for Reardon or if she just took the wrong approach. For the entire mini, the actress grimaces like a rabid dog; her character frothing at the idea of recording psychic anomalies at the expense of everyone around her. Most important, however, she never convincingly demonstrates the kind of power of persuasion it takes to win over strangers to do her character's bidding.

^-Fries, Laura. "Stephen King's Rose Red." Daily Variety. January 24, 2002.

I can only add that she seems to play the part whimsically at odd times, and strangely-intense at others. A lot hinges on her as the bedrock of the proceedings, and I found myself constantly wondering at her motivations. I get that the house acted as a catalyst for her psychological unhinging, but ultimately, I was unconvinced. Her "break" as the house accumulates on her might've been a bit cooler had I had a bond with her of some kind.

Help us or die.

The rest of the cast is believable enough, with extra props going to Julian Sands. Not a brilliant performance, but one with the ol' gravitas. Always helpful for a suspension-of-disbelief tale.

Really, most of the cast, plot, and design are not incredibly original, but neither do they come off as particularly stale. Far from it, I'd say - it's one of those things you can always refer to as "fun to watch." There will always be Saturday afternoons or three-am-sleepless-nights where you'll be happy to have it at the ready. Like SK mentioned in his 1980s Playboy interview, "...new wine from old decanters." Fair enough.

Tsidii Le Loka (standing)'s the maid/mistress/ghost, part and parcel to a haunted house tale, as well as...

"this chick," played by Yvonne Sciò. There always seems to be a ghostly brunette in these things. I don't know why. Theories are welcome. (the dark hair/ ghostly skin contrast maybe?)

Some things I liked:

- The set was cool. The interiors were fantastic. A good-perhaps-excessive amount of time panning over the house and the set, but I can see that as part of the "visual novel" aspect. Something separate from novel, separate from tv.

- The sound design, while perfunctory, was pleasant enough. I took a nap during episode 2 (don't worry I went back and watched it) and there were long stretches where I couldn't quite get to sleep due to the haunted-whispering or tone-poems going on.

- The Glenn Miller and other tune are always used for these things, but I never get sick of them. I wonder when that'll trail off, as the 21st century goes on. I mean, Glenn Miller was 74 years ago, now.

- This was inspired by the tale of the Winchester Mystery House. A couple of fun photos:

The Door to Nowhere!

- I like this:

Houses... are alive. This is something we know. News from our nerve endings. If we're quiet, if we listen, ...it's as if they were having bad dreams. A good house cradles and comforts, a base one fills us with instinctive unease. Bad houses hate our warmth and our human-ness. That blind hate of our humanity is what we mean when we use the word 'haunted'.

In my experience, this is 100% true. Don't need a poltergeist putting maggots in the fried chicken to know when a place is just plain haunted.

- A book tie-in to this, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, came out and is still in print, I think, but I haven't read it. I like when shows do that, though. Anyone remember Bad Twin, the lost tie-in? I still think Paul Artisan is a great name and/or character for an ongoing series.

- And finally, the man himself has a brief appearance as the pizza guy:

Looks like an Investigation Discovery re-creation, doesn't it? "But he came armed with more than pizza..."

Filmed only a couple of years after the near-fatal encounter with Bryan Smith. I imagine it was a welcome public appearance, after something like that.

NEXT: The "something like that," On Writing and The Stephen King Companion.

King's Highway pt. 6: Way Too Damn Much about Maximum Overdrive

This is the theatrical trailer, which is better than the tv one I remember seeing a hundred times in 1986.

But I only ever saw the movie itself on video. My friend Chris brought it over. His grandmother would call him up on Monday and ask him what movies he wanted, and he'd call me and we'd discuss. Then he'd give her the list, and she'd go rent the movies from Victor Video and tape them. The following weekend or whenever we hung out next, we'd have three movies to watch. This was one of them. All we ever wanted to watch was stuff like From Beyond, The Shining, or, Evil Dead 2. 

This was right before the age of video-guards. I'm probably opening my family (not to mention Chris's) to FBI investigation, but yes, folks, there was a time when video and audio terrorists ran amok... where tapes were borrowed and taped, and mix tapes were made.

Quality? Well... different story. But as I recall a different friend saying when I mentioned getting the Dead Kennedys on CD, Just got to have that low-fi punk production digitally mastered, huh? I kind of think the same here, with Maximum Overdrive. Context is everything.

With that said, why is this film so reviled? King himself has never had a kind word to say about it. I've always wondered if that had more to do with bad memories of its production, or if he felt perhaps not out of his element but discovered he'd rather employ his considerable talents back on his home turf. (If that was the case, considering the amount of material he's done in its wake, he should take these detours to cinema more often, if only to unleash the writing-Kraken.)

It's aged unkindly in spots, sure. But the top-grossing films in 1986 - Top Gun, The Golden Child, Star Trek IV, Ferris Bueller's... hell, even Platoon - all have aged unkindly in one aspect or another. Granted, no one would compare Maximum Overdrive to any of those, but its real genre/trope competition is more Police Academy 3: Back in Training or Friday the 13th pt VI, so judge it by that. Or by Night of the Comet, which while not released in 1986, is perhaps its truest mirror. Sit it side by side to any of these, and I'm much more forgiving.

Now that I've talked myself into loving it enough to watch the rest of it...

I thought the story this is based on, "Trucks," didn't need much fleshing out, although I was curious at its end where things would go. Would it go and on? Were humans doomed only to pump gas and replace transistors and tighten screws for a malevolent machine race until they couldn't do it anymore? (This idea was explored with equivalent lunacy in The Matrix sequels. Bring that up the next time someone starts banging on about The Matrix. Actually, take my word on this - bring up Maximum Overdrive, stubbornly, whenever horror films are brought up, and never waver.)

I liked how "Trucks" ended - kind of staring off into a bleak future. I like fiction like that carries an unspoken but urgent message of WE might be screwed, but this is a message from an alternate world... It's not too late to save yourselves. Like the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The film adaptation goes a different route and places the narrative in a bust-out-of-Dodge then survive the 8 days til the comet passes sort of deal. We don't see the end part of that, but it is alluded to in the odd and hilarious coda, with the AC/DC blaring, which, to me, is what separates this flick from the others - I mean, the whole cranking AC/DC intermittently is a sound template for a movie, if you ask me. More films should do this, and with KISS, too. You'll know you've woken up in a world suddenly run by me if this starts to happen everywhere you look.

Anyway, let's not make too much of the trucks-gone-wild movie. Here are my bullet-point observations from my notebook.

- The game room sequence goes for a bit of a blaxpolitation feel, but it comes across a bit awkwardly. Perhaps even offensively. Par for the 80s course, alas. (I'm alone in this, but I levy the same charge at Tarantino. Future generations will agree with me here.) But, that aside, that Star Castle game looks so awesome, doesn't it? What I wouldn't give...

- 16 minutes in: Jack Chick tracts??! Seriously? Awesome.

- Around 44 minutes in, we see a truck full of toilet paper explode. The camera pans over a field of burning rolls. I don't know... a cry for help? A wry smirk? A fun image? What are we to make of the gratuitous destruction in general? 

- Elsewhere, the soda machine, the ice cream machine: I mean, in 2012, we know high fructose corn syrup is trying to kill us; isn't the soda machine a bit of a wink-wink from the past? (Probably not, but it is kind of funny.)

- I always get such a kick when movies reference the title of the film in the dialogue. "At least that's where I was going before all the machines kicked into Maximum Overdrive..." If I ever write a script - which is one of those things that sounds sometimes like "If I ever perform brain surgery" - I will do this at least once a half hour. Until someone edits those lines out of the movie.

- I'm not a huge fan of Pat Hingle. I think I bear him (and Tim Burton) a lifelong grudge for his being cast as Commissioner Gordon.

Yeardley Smith from The Simpsons provides the girl-screaming-at-everything part.

- Gratuitous explosions and demolition and car smash-ups of the slow-motion variety et. al are a fun hallmark of 70s and 80s films. No wonder why CGI is so goddamn cost-effective. The production design of something like this (or a more polished production like Midnight Run) to something nowadays like Sucker Punch is worth considering. Anyway, back to the 80s - no montage here, but the end credits play out to "You Shook Me All Night Long," which is a total (and fist-pumpingly appreciated) 80s move.

- 'Hell's Bells' during the endless gas pump made me think about Peak Oil and Michael Ruppert.

- I don't quite get why the rocket launchers and guns don't gain sentience if things like the electric-cutting-knife do, but hey! LOOK IT'S BARNEY FROM THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS!

I really regret the lack of commentary track. I had to buy this from Amazon as no Netflix disc available. $.99, by the way! That's only one dollar more than what I paid watching my friend Chris's grandma's copy back in 1986, which was, of course, free. Not to be morbid, but this was the 80s and she was ancient, then... I wonder if she has passed, which seems likely. If so, what did her relatives made of the trunk-full of VCR tapes? Did my friend Chris awkwardly shuffle between his feet? I picture them looking them all over and puzzling over the three titles scrawled in faded blue ink on the text strip along the side. Reading them aloud. Every tape with two or three schlocky horror films. Every word a mystery...)

Anyway, re: the commentary, given King's account of his state of mind alluded to in On Writing, during the time-frame of production, I imagine it might bring up some bad memories, so too bad. I imagine a King-family commentary track might get heated in spots. Good thing people from Maine have (usually - I'll die inside when they start doing "Maine Shore" or "New Hampshire Hillbillies" shows) more common sense than airing their dirty laundry for public consumption.

Air your linens in your backyard, not the media, is the lesson of Maximum Overdrive. RIGHT? RIGHT? Oh...

If I were an eccentric gazillionaire, I'd offer obscene amounts of money to anyone willing to make a sequel that details how the gang's weathers the rest of the storm. Maybe I'd sub in KISS for AC/DC. Perhaps someone out there in blog-land will read these words and plant a flag on this golden shore.

King's Highway pt. 5 Duma Key

The cover to the paperback that I bought at Myopic. $3.50. Nice.

First a confession... Many of you probably remember the "Numa Numa" viral video from a few years back. As a result of over-saturation of that in those days (thank you, Bill Terranova) everytime I picked this book up when I was leaving my apartment or work, I got the song in my head and had Du-ma KEY, Du-ma KOO-OO... ringing a four-alarm-fire in the brains all day. Whew.

Another confession: I'm an idiot. I can't believe I've let so many King books go by (This is blog #5 and we've covered Salem's Lot, Night Shift, and Firestarter, but I've been reading far ahead of that and need to catch up, verdammt) without catching at least a couple of lines I really liked and writing them down. I have corrected my trajectory. Here's one:

"If you keep your focus," (paraphrasing Nietzsche) "eventually your focus will keep you."

Spoken by Wireman, one of my favorite King's-elder-guys I can ever remember reading. Poor bastard. Well, sort of. Anyway - I'm starting to see a bit of a pattern in the male relationships in King's work, or at least the smart-ass sidekick who lapses into 60s-TV-isms. Mainly guys who talk in accents you'd hear on 60s tv, I mean, or their speech is peppered with catchphrases. It might be a little repetitive, but why try to reinvent the wheel/ construct a huge spider's-web when you've got something that reads real and works? Anyway.

Hello Dali you're still swinging, I'm still singing

This is a mountain range of a novel. I was about 200 pages in before I realized I was walking this mega trail through them. Now that it's done, as I told Dawn earlier, and I meant it, I miss the crap out of walking it for the first time.

It is a novel about loss, and recovery, and more loss, and more recovery. Supernatural inspiration and the toll it takes on you. And relationships and how powerful and mysterious they are.

Not that it's a perfect book or can cut diamonds when recited at hyper-speed by a baritone, as the crazy uncle I never really had used to say. But it's more than perfect enough for me. And should be for you, too. If I was writing for a reputable magazine, I might say, "Well, Wireman's dialogue is a bit repetitive. He calls Edgar 'muchacho' more than Mary Jane calls Peter Parker 'Tiger' in those old Stan Lee scripts." Or I might bring up Nan Melda and find something there (though, perhaps not? I actually wouldn't mind reading some analysis of that character. Seems to me, she comes off not quite well but quite real and quite an important plotting refraction/ relay-point for the theme of it all.) But who gives a crap, really? I'm so glad I don't have to pretend I don't actually find it all quite lovely and evocative and wonderful to read.

The last act reminded me a little of Salem's Lot - they race the sunset to kill the monster, which inserts itself in the protagonists' heads and uses human and animal proxy to keep an eye/ run an audible. I got swept up in it, I cared about the characters, I envisioned everything described, I got mad and I got sad, and now I miss them. These things tip the scales in the balance of a life-worth-examined, you ask me.

Little things I loved: the still-growing ghost-fingernails digging into the ghost palm and forearm, the storms and the flora, the paints.

It makes sense when you read it.

And also, my now-reigning favorite description of Sharpies:  

"In my old life, I'd hated Sharpies for both the smell of the ink and their tendency to smear. In this one I'd come to love the fat boldness of the lines they created, lines that seem to insist on their own absolute reality."

It's 11:05 pm on a weeknight and give me a rake, Ma Bell. (Cross-connect! It makes sense when you read it.)

One final note - when Perse made her first appearance, I was caught unawares...

Stop now or I'll take the other one, too.

but I almost made the "yes" gesture. 

You know the one, where you make a fist  and turn it to your chest, then pump it up and down and silently nod along? That one. But: with my ghost arm.

See you next time.

(EDIT: I google-image searched all images in this post and did not appropriately credit the artists of the last two. I did so again just now, hoping I could find and cite them, but no luck. I apologize for my half-assedness in originally posting them without proper credit and for my having no further information to give.)

King's Highway pt. 4 Firestarter

I actually finished this one a few weeks back. I've gotten way ahead of myself. Which is fun - it always feels good to be reading at a good clip. Like sailing with a strong headwind. A comparison I am perhaps unqualified to make - more accurate to say, What I imagine is like sailing with a strong headwind. In reality, put me on a boat, and I spend the entire time waiting to throw up. Unfortunately, as I love the water.

Anyway - I have to remind myself that these little informal reviews and notes-of-my-progress down the King's Highway of the mind are mainly for me, so not to fret, just write. When I get paid to critique novels and film, I'll adopt a more scholarly approach, but this whole thing is just a way of leaving markers, breadcrumbs, graffiti. Something visible as I attend to this project. Something I don't want to spend a lot of time editing, in other words.

And sometimes it won't even be about (as we have seen already in this series) the books themselves and more just about the memories the re-read is triggering. Ask Dawn - pretty much my favorite thing to do is time travel via re-connecting to something that made an impression on me as a youth. Sure, my period time travel is limited to the late 70s to the early 90s or so, but you play the hand you're dealt.

For some reason, the movie version of Firestarter freaked me out completely back in 1985.

In the basement of our row-house in Weiterstadt, I watched our VHS copy of this movie as many times as I could. I knew each viewing would deprive me of a night's sleep, but I persisted in this madness, to the growing puzzlement and anxiety of my mother. Watching it again the other night in 2012, I couldn't for the life of me connect to the panic of my 11 year old self. What was it that freaked me out so?

The idea that there is a branch of an allegedly democratic government that behaves as Secret Police, above the law, unstoppable in their pursuit and accountable to no one? A frightening idea to be sure, and I'd certainly begun to form a political viewpoint by 1985, as eleven-year-old-ish as it was. But I can't say with any honesty that this aspect of a government-out-of-control was on my mind in a coherent way.

That your parents can't protect you? Maybe.

In meditating on the subject, the two images that come most clearly to mind are the guy who bleeds from his eyes and his screams of torment, and the one shot of George C. Scott deftly driving Dr. Wanless' nose into his brain with the back of his hand. But surely that's not it?

I admit, though, I spent a lot of time as a teenager, terrified by (and perversely fascinated) by hallucinogens. I don't know if Firestarter was the start of it or not, but that Lot Six experiment scene imprinted itself deeply on my imagination. It lit the fuse (no pun intended) for the way my mind later approached things like Go Ask Alice or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Another image from the film, that of Andy MacGee bleeding from his nose, also comes to mind when I close my eyes and think of the movie.

Perhaps that's not the best selected image, but on we go.

So beyond the personal connection to the single greatest bug-out of my overactive imagination as a child (I think the period of insomnia related to this film was 2 months. I spent years afterward, literally, worried I'd scare myself into another such period of sleeplessness and three-a.m. terror.) how does the movie stand up now? Well, not very good, I'm afraid. It may enter the history books only as trivia. (Drew Barrymore had a drink of champagne at the wrap party and credits this as the catalyst for the subsequent years of binge drinking. I saw that as part of the on-screen trivia/ entertainment they show before the movies sometimes.) But yeah, the special f/x (particularly at the end, which is staged like a bad episode of The A-Team, where the bad guys basically wait, one-by-one, to charge out from hiding, attempt the same take-down of Charlie that has been unsuccessful (and fatal) for each previous member of their bad guy team, then some explosion or yet-another- guy-flailing-around-on-fire,) are bad, and everything has a superficial-production sort of film.

I disagree with Harlan Ellison's take-down of the performances. (I'd provide a link, but my first two attempts were unsuccessful, so, moving on. His review can be found in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching or in The Stephen King Companion, which will be reviewed as part of this series, sooner or later.) The performances aren't bad. Nothing Oscar-worthy, but no one embarrasses his or her self.

It is amusing, as well, to imagine this film as a prequel to The West Wing:

 
President Bartlett's first job! Actually, I might even enjoy The West Wing if it had adopted this as back-story.

There is one really beautiful shot, taken from the middle of the bridge at the lake right after Charlie and Andy are hit with the darts. I tried to find a screen-grab, but no luck, unfortunately.

January 2013 edit: Here it is.

But it really stands out. First we see only the woods, and then the men in haz-mat suits emerge from their hiding places. Otherwise, the film isn't much for great images. (The screaming man with the bleeding eyes notwithstanding.)

January 2013 edit: Here's that one, too.

Having just finished the book, I was in a good spot to pick up on the changes/ compressions to scenes from the novel. There are many. But the one that is most jarring and, to me, so inexplicable that I can only think it was the result of inattention, is in the translation of John Rainbird to the screen. Although Rainbird's interest in Charlie is explicitly described as non-prurient/ pedo, they leave that open as a motivation for Rainbird in the film. Maybe even suggest/ nudge along this perception? Why? Wry commentary on the cult of pedo that some ex-child-actors says is Hollywood's dark secret? (Why is a pedo ring cover-up always part and parcel to the shadowy network of elites, be they political, religious, or Hollywood?)

HOMEWORK: It is worth considering how the depiction of fire has progressed on film. Next time you see an old movie that has a lot of burning flame on-screen, like The Alamo or Jason and the Argonauts, to name only two, pay close attention to how it looks. It's quite different-looking, isn't it? Now think of a film from the 80s, like this one, or something like Temple of Doom. Contrast that with the primarily-CGI flickering flames we see these days. (THEN: contrast bad-CGI flame (from something on SyFy) to big-budget-CGI.)

Finally, I leave you with these words from Irv Manders when the shadowy operatives of The Shop descend onto his property to capture Charlie and to murder Andy. After first asking to see their warrant and being told they don't need one, he answers "You do unless I woke up in Russia this morning." Afterwards, once the carnage has been unleashed and their home is up in flames, (quick note - at some point in a lot of King's work, someone's house will burn down. The guy will say "It's insured." The woman will say "That doesn't replace my Mom's dishes/ dresses/ mementos," etc. It happens here, in "Secret Window, Secret Garden," and in The Mist, off the top of my head, but elsewhere, too. I digress.) Afterwards, Irv Manders, when questioned by his wife why he wants to get himself involved any further in helping these fugitives with awful powers, says:

"Those men came with no warrants nor blue-back paper of any kind and tried to take them off our land," he said. "People I'd invited in like it's done in a civilized country with decent laws... What do you want me to do, Norma? Sit here and turn them over to the secret police if they get their peckers up enough to come back? Be a good German?"

I'll leave it to you to ponder the changed implications in this bit of dialogue from the early 1980s to 2012 and what new things it might bring to mind. But how much you want to bet, if they re-made this film (or whenever they inevitably do) the special f/x will go through the roof, but the subtext of this exchange/ raid on the farm will be watered down?

Extinguished or smothered, in other words, ahem.

Next-up: Not sure! I'm reading Duma Key now and have just finished Skeleton Crew/ Everything's Eventual as a planned two-for, though I might throw in Just After Sunset into that, too. Do I save all the short fiction for one mega-short-fiction blog? I'd like to pair up Full Dark No Stars with Four Past Midnight, as well, i.e. keep like-with-like. We shall see. On Writing and The SK Companion will be another one. We shall see!

Thanks for reading.