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. 28: Danse Macabre

Hey, wasn't I taking August off? Yes, I was/ am. But over the course of a few plane and train rides, I polished this one off and figure it won't fit so smoothly into the Dark Tower blogs I have planned for next month. So, roll another number for the road and let's take Danse Macabre for a quick spin.

It's kind of fun to read a book like this in 2012, when so many blogs, including this one, are devoted to the sort of discussion King orchestrates here. It's tempting to say the internet makes books like this (or list-books, for that matter) obsolete. But who knows? Is print dead? Aspects of it, sure, but overall, I doubt it. Either way, it's beyond our scope here.

This book is part autobiography, part overview of the films and books King thinks best inform the horror landscape in America, and part overall-philosophy-of-horror. It comes across as a breezy lecture course, delivered by a professor who may or may not have been drinking before class (or during). One might say it does for American horror circa 1950-1980 what Chuck Klostermann did for 80s metal in Fargo Rock City. 

I remember my brother (or mother) having this on the shelves in the 80s. I tried to read it then, but I didn't know any of the films or books he was talking about, so I never did. I've spent an awful lot of time in the years between getting to know the material, though - not consciously, i.e. at no point did I say Okay, time to make my way through the recommended reading/ viewing/ listening from Danse Macabre. But as suggested elsewhere, certain books and movies are gateway-drugs to certain other books and movies, and once you go down the EC path (to pick one of my own entry points) you end up taking in things like It, The Terror from Beyond Space and Lights Out. So this time around I knew first-hand or was familiar with most of the stories under discussion.

Arch Oboler, showrunner for Lights Out, and Joan Crawford.

I was particularly interested to see King devote some time to the golden age of radio. (Which, he quite rightly notes, was actually the twilight-age of radio; the programs he remembers listening to with his grandparents in his 1950s living room were the dying sounds of the once-unstoppable-entertainment-of-choice. Video may have killed the radio star, but TV was what drove all the radio actors and showrunners to NPR et al.) My apartment in Chicago is in one of the few areas that gets audionoir over the airwaves, and for the past few years, I put that on when I'm cooking or doing dishes. As a result, I started tracking down a lot of Old Timey Radio. There is tons of it out there, for free, if you're interested. (Any sci-fi fan will enjoy Dimension X; trust McMolo.)

One last bit of radio-reverie: I have a very clear memory of being 6 or 7 and huddled around a battery-operated radio in a tent in a campground in Frankfurt, Germany, listening to both an episode of "The Shadow" on Armed Forces Network Radio and a dramatization of Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace." And Bill Cosby used to talk about "The Chicken Heart" (which King discusses here) on one of my Dad's old records. (Records that I incidentally melted on the radiator. Not on purpose, of course.)

This was originally published in 1981. King had a bit of an ax to grind with the academic/ lit-critic establishment during this phase of his career, I think it's safe to say. He addresses it explicitly in his Playboy interview, discussed elsewhere, but there are several passages along these lines from DM that are worth reproducing here.

On the overall-futility of over-analyzing things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "Like endless discussions of breath units in modern poetry or the possible intrusiveness of some punctuation in the short story, it is really a discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and not really interesting unless those involved in the discussion are drunk or graduate students - two states of roughly similar incomprehension."

On the pretentious critical establishment: "...no one is so humorless as a big-time film critic or so apt to read deep meanings into simple doings. 'In The Fury,' Pauline Kael intoned, apparently, in all seriousness, 'Brian De Palma has found the junk heart for America.' It's as if these critics feel it necessary to prove and re-prove their own literacy; they are like teenage boys who feel obliged to demonstrate and redemonstrate their macho... they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a high school education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers, any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America."

Probably very true.

And on the narcissism of the intelligentsia: "I can't imagine... anyone trying to scratch out a subsistence-level existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently, Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album. For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book: the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaii - the seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples."

The book's chapters covering the radioactive-panic movies of the 1950s and their evolution through the subsequent decades are particularly fun reading.

"Once you've seen enough horror films, you begin to get a taste for really shitty movies. Films that are just bad... can be dismissed impatiently, with never a backward glance. But real fans look back on a film like The Brain from Planet Arous (It Came From Another World WITH AN INSATIABLE LUST FOR EARTH WOMEN!) with something like real love. It is the love one spares for an idiot child, true, but love is love, right? Right."

A few pics from the film in question.

He mentions how horror film fans like mining the dirt-bins for the discarded nugget of gold, and how every true fun usually has one film they uncovered before any of their friends or for which every true fan is an apostle. King's is Tourist Trap: 

Which made me happy, as I, too, have proselytized, independently of King's recommendation, for this movie. True, he wrote of this in 1981 so I am late to the party, but it was news to everyone to whom I mentioned it. Ditto for The Brotherhood of Satan. 

Among other things, it is produced by and stars the multi-talented L.Q. Jones.

"If we share a Brotherhood of Man, we also share an Insanity of Man."

You mean Brotherhood of SATAN!

"...I see the most aggressive of (horror movies) as lifting a trapdoor in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath."

"When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in. When we cut off one avenue of sensory input, that sense simply shuts down (although it never shuts down 100 percent, of course; even in a dark room, we will see a trace pattern in front of our eyes, and in the most perfect silence we will hear a faint hum... such "phantom input" only means that the circuits are open and standing by."

"Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested, they love life. They do not celebrate deformity by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety... for a little while, anyway."

He devotes some text-time, rightly so, to George Romero's classic. Which if you haven't seen, shame on you.

"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection)... but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists. We will, perhaps, link hands like children in a circle, and sing the song we all know in our hearts: time is short, no one is really okay, life is quick and dead is dead."

The section on horror-on-TV is also great reading. The whole book is, really, but the last hundred or so pages devoted to ten or eleven horror novels was less captivating to me, personally, as I had only read a handful of the books discussed. Not so with the TV section; tho it was all before my time, I grew up watching most of this stuff.

King's analysis of the horror films of the 1970s is too comprehensive to sum up accurately here, but as it's my favorite era of film-making, my ears always perk up when it comes under the critical eye.

"This is like a sinister Woody Allen film" may be the most accurate review of Rosemary's Baby I've ever read. As an artifact of the "Is God dead?" era, it is first-rate archaeology, as well as a great flick.

"They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature - to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed."

A film I once heard described as "drenched in a menstrual panic," a phrase I've never gotten out of my head.

I quite liked this description of the "dead zone" one must dispel when bringing a story to life:

"In his marvelous novel The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams tells us that writing a long work of fiction is like gathering characters together on a great black plain. They stand around the small fire of the writer's imagination, warming their hands at the blaze, hoping the fire will grow into a blaze which will provide light as well as heat. But often it goes out, all light is extinguished, and the characters are smothered in black. It's a lovely metaphor for the fiction-making process, but it's not mine... I've always seen the novel as a large black castle to be attacked, a bastion to be taken by force or by trick. The thing about the castle is, it appears to be open. It doesn't look buttoned up for siege at all. The drawbridge is down. The gates are open. There are no bowmen on the turrets. Trouble is, there's really only one way safe way in; every other attempt at entry results in sudden annihilation from some hidden source."

The final section is a nice summary of King's personal philosophy-of-horror and, as with most of the above, is quoted directly from the text:

"The danse macabre is a waltz with death. This is a truth we cannot afford to shy away from. Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to examine what's going on behind doors which we usually keep double-locked. Yet the human imagination is not content with locked doors. Somewhere there is another dancing partner, the imagination whispers in the night - a partner in a rotting ball gown, a partner with empty eyesockets, green mold growing on her elbow-length gloves, maggots squirming in the thin remains of her hair. To hold such a creature in our arms? Whom, you ask me, would be so mad? Well... Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or windo willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not... and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever."

Colored engraving of the dance of death, from 1483.

"It is not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third level here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then it's strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination - just one more pipeline to the infinite."

I don't think the films of Mario Bava/ screen presence of Barbara Steele get much text consideration. (None of the giallos do, actually, though there may be some in the recommended-viewing in the back.) I suppose enough has been written elsewhere about them, but Mario Bava straddles the Hammer-knock-off era and the slasher-giallo era better than most. I'd have included a chapter just on him, were this my own Guide to Horror. But hey!

Finally, King shares a personal anecdote near the end that interested me. While a student at the University of Maine, he attended a lecture given by a couple of Black Panthers:

"These Black Panthers were suggesting an umbrella of conspiracy that was almost laughable.. except the audience wasn't laughing..." (He stands up to ask them if they were actually suggesting Nelson Rockefeller was orchestrating the Vietnam war from some shadowy room under the Pentagon, perhaps in cahoots with UFOs.) "The audience began to shout angrily at me to sit down and shut up. Which I did posthaste, blushing furiously, knowing how these eccentrics who mount their soapboxes in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons must feel. I did not much relish the feeling... It is impossible for those of my generation, propelled harum-scarum through the sixties... without a belief that someone - like Nelson Rockefeller - is pulling the strings."

I don't know if it's all that generational. The same crowd/ conspiracies exist today, as well as the same sit-down-and-shut-up angry-mob (and furious blushing embarrassment) when assumptions are challenged.

For any fan of horror (or King), Danse Macabre is a rewarding and accessible read.

NEXT!

We begin our exploration of Dark Tower National Park, following the route suggested by The Truth Inside the Lie, with... The Gunslinger.

King's Highway pt. 24: The Dead Zone

Written during "a depressed state of mind," according to SK.

This is a quirky little novel. I don't use quirky condescendingly. It's just a bit odd, both in how it stands out from King's other books and how the plot unfolds from other would-you-kill-Hitler narratives.

Why doesn't anyone ever go back in time to kill Stalin? I've always wondered that.

The epilogue ("Notes from the Dead Zone") and the way the sections fit together/ unfold... the character arc of "John Smith..." It almost seems like a strange version of Don DeLilo's Libra, but I'm sure that's not what he was going for. Interesting, though, that the two ideas, there, kind of converge later in 11/23/61, but I'll get to that way later.

(I'll get to my Castle Rock thoughts, later, too, and the lasting impact of Frank Dodd et al. when I see the exits for The Dark Half and Needful Things.)

I was reminded both of Duma Key and of On Writing, both which came much later in King's career, of course. But the accident and physical recovery section of TDZ brought to mind the similar section in OW, and the first two acts of TDZ brought DK to mind: accident, severed relationship, psychic ability, used on serial killer, and ... then the two novels diverge, but you see what I mean.

If you haven't read it or seen the movie or the tv show, you're probably still familiar with the essential elements of the story. Like a lot of King's work from this period (Cujo, Christine, Pennywise, The Stand, Redrum, Carrie White Burns in Hell, etc.) the core ideas have taken enduring root in the collective unconsciousness.

Once it's on The Simpsons, it can be considered as belonging to all of us.

King has said that he likes the movie better, and I agree. The changes in the material that the conversion process necessitate definitely work to the story's advantage. The relationship between Sarah and John is more romantically-doomed as it stands in the film, as is the undoing-of-and-apocalyptic-visions-pertaining-to-Stillson scene(s). I think the book is good, don't get me wrong. I just like the way the film handles the elements better.

I suppose it's not that uncommon a practice, but I like how the same font design is used for both the book and the international markets for the film.

That tunnel by the way - which I remember as the main picture that ran with the Fangoria article I read (it might have been Starlog, but that seems wrong - I don't remember clearly) at the time it came out - is called Screaming Tunnel:

Creepy first date...! Creepy any date, maybe.

There's a good review of the film here. Simply put, it's a great film. I don't think "masterpiece" would be unfairly applied. It always seems to be the undiscovered Cronenberg film or King-adaptation film for a lot of people. I don't know why that is. Christopher Walken and David Cronenberg are certainly well known enough. Yet it rarely pops up as the number one King adaptation, or on a short list of Cronenberg's best. (Or, hell, best of the 80s, for that matter.)

This title design is just such a treat. What a way to set the mood. If you haven't watched the movie in awhile, watch those credits again; hell, if you haven't seen the movie at all, watch it, too. It works as a trailer, granted a murky one. The score by Michael Kamen is haunting and used to great effect, particularly the music cues for Sarah.

And of course there's this:

I grew up watching The Dead Zone and even as I discovered the rest of both his and Cronenberg's catalogs, Walken's portrayal of Johnny Smith has remained a Katahdin among Appalachians.

Odd fact I came across while googling for this entry: Bill Murray was considered for the role before Walken.

Martin Sheen's portrayal of Greg Stillson is great, as well. Another role (like Firestarter) where it's fun to think of this as some bizarro previous-work-experience on President Bartlett's cv.

I did enjoy the evolution of Stillson's career in the novel, as well as the friendlier relationship he had with Chuck's family, both of which are changed considerably for the film.

I'm always amused when we cut to a scene where the President has his finger on the button vs. a boardroom in the middle of the night with a bunch of bankers flown in straight out of the movie Margin Call... 

The wolf is loose...

Sheriff Bannerman is played here by Evan Drake from Cheers aka Viper from Top Gun (like he'd be Viper from anything else) aka Tom Preston from The Devil's Rain:

Bannerman pops up or is referenced in several of the Castle Rock stories. Not to mention the Dead Zone tv show, where he's combined with Walt Hazlett and George Bannerman to create Walt Bannerman. Whew. Anyway. Cujo eats him, eventually. So it goes.

Chuck's Dad, Roger, is played by Anthony Zerbe aka that-one-guy-from-Insurrection, not to mention

The Omega Man:

Which, now that I think about it...

is another film where a cult leader must be put down with a rifle via heroic self-sacrifice. (And look at that outfit! Not to make this a review of The Omega Man, but man, that movie.)

Two quick words on the Frank Dodd serial killer sequence: 1) my friend and I have the same lingering-audio-OCD-ness from this film. Anytime we see a gazebo, we say, either out loud or in our heads, "gaa-zee-booh." Try it - you may never stop. And b) now that I think about it, I think it was Fangoria...

and not Starlog. The twitching in the tub was a real fine touch for me. It made the difference to me in the 6th grade and still does today.

As for the tv show, I know many people who enjoy it. I watched the first two episodes to see how they'd handle the origin story and the Frank Dodd bit. I can see it being a fun show. I know they deal with the Stillson stuff as an ongoing subplot. Characters are added or, as aforementioned, fused. I prefer the way the film handles the material, so some of those changes are hard to roll with. But, what I saw wasn't bad, just not my thing.

One thing I noticed in there, though - the fictional 3rd district of New Hampshire was changed to the 2nd district of Maine. Which is an actual district. This district encompasses (I think) the fictional towns of both Derry and Castle Rock.

Has King ever introduced a congressional character from that district? There could be a whole new novel in that. I hope the idea has occurred to him.

I guess not every adaptation keeps the font design.

King's Highway pt. 23: Can You Hear Me Now?

Not too much to say about this one - it's very straightforward:

There's a nice review here, with no real spoilers, and I will observe the same with this post. You should read it, if you haven't. Perfect way to pass some time in an airport, lounge-chair, train, etc. I don't mean to damn by faint praise; it's a damn-near perfect example of a story finely-tuned to those experiences (during which, for me anyway, reading a book is the only thing I want to do.) It's not too long, starts off with a bang, and takes some wild twists and turns.

I like the paperback cover a bit better than the hardcover. The "911" and tagline are fun commentaries on the events within, as is one of the three inscriptions before the story begins: Can You Hear Me Now?

It reminded me a lot of "The Mist."In both stories, a crisis-event happens and is not explained (ominous references to "The Arrowhead Project" in "The Mist," notwithstanding); survivors band together and hi-jinks ensue (among them, a religious-crazy-survivor who descends on the protagonists); the main character is preoccupied with the unknown fate of his loved ones back home; fact-finding missions are made into the lion's den; and both end ambiguously.

Of course, there are plenty of differences, too. In "The Mist," the m.c. has his kid with him, in Cell we get a glimpse of what the monsters/crazies are doing, and many more.

Frank Darabont added an ending to his film version of "The Mist," and I imagine a film version of Cell would do the same. (Why this hasn't been made, sequeled, and rebooted is beyond me.) I can sympathize with allegations of "cop-out" for the ending, but I for one was more disappointed with how the phone-crazy convention in Kashwakamak wrapped up. That was it? Not that I was exactly "disappointed," more surprised.

A view from the actual Kashwakamak, in Canada, that is.

Pretty good boogeyman in the character of The Raggedy Man aka The President of Harvard

Neither here nor there, but I liked the references to Dark Horse Comics, as well. I'll probably remove Dark Horse Presents from my pull-list in the months to come, but it's been something I've looked forward to for the past fourteen months.

Survival is like love; both are blind.

I couldn't help but think of the TV show Dollhouse, which also depicts an apocalypse triggered by a remote activation, a sudden and ubiquitous paving-over of the neural topography. Opinions are divided on the show...

Full disclosure - I love it.

but the central conceit of Cell (i.e. a pulse was generated over mobile networks and whomever answered the call went wack-a-doo) is pretty much said verbatim by Topher in "Epitaph One." I found a You-Tube clip of the particular dialogue, but it's a whole lot and not the isolated five-second clip that I was looking for. (Here it is, at 1:02, should you want a look)

I don't mean to suggest Dollhouse is derivative of Cell. Only that certain ideas suggest certain tributaries, independent of who observes them.

I found your friend...

I couldn't help but like the idea of old-timers who never quite embraced the change in societal customs and manners that the intrusion of cellphones demanded. I'll never forget the first few times someone answered a call in the middle of conversation and how exasperated I felt. And I still crease my eyebrows when a cashier (or even a cabbie) divides his or her attention between me and the phone, or I overhear the most personal/ ridiculous conversation on the train or bus.

Par for the course, now.

Considering the amount of dropped calls and the inability of Dawn and I to have a phone conversation when she's in her apartment, I remain as unconvinced of the superiority of the cellphone age to the one I grew up on as the author.

I get the same thing when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and he speaks of how the world he grew up in would be/ is constantly offended by the world he died in. It's not unique to him, by any rate; it's an authorly observation passed down in every generation. But viewed through this perspective, this novel is a bit more of a gut-punch of a "get off my lawn" than others.

Great stuff - on the King recommendation/ readability scale, it's a Gjallarhorn.

I leave you with this, which I feel relates to all of the above, from Neil Gaiman's excellent interview with SK:

"I start to tell King my theory, that when people in the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973 and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there, behind the monsters and the night, making them more real."

His answer: "King is sanguine. “You know what you can’t tell what is going to last, what’s not going to last. There’s Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. McDonald saying “200 years from now, when people want to know what the 20th century they ll go to John D. McDonald”, but I’m not sure that’s true – it seems like he’s almost been forgotten.  But I try and reread a John D. McDonald novel whenever I come down here."