King's Highway pt. 42: From a Buick 8

I had no idea this novel existed when I started this project five months ago. During the years I wasn't reading any King, I'd click on a link or two or read the odd newspaper story, but it wasn't until 2012 that I took a close look at his post-Tommyknockers bibliography.

The hardcover comes with this poster, as well.

I first heard about it in On Writing, when it was then only a first draft. King summarizes it as follows:

"A mysterious man in a black coat - likely not a human being at all but some creature inexpertly disguised to look like one - abandons his vehicle in front of a small gas station in rural Pennsylvania. The vehicle looks like an old Buick Special from the late 1950s."

In the final draft, it's a '54. But, like our mystery-man in the black coat, it is not exactly a car but... something else, inelegantly masquerading as one.

"(It) falls into the hands of some State Police officers working out of a fictional barracks in western PA. 20 years or so later, these cops tell the story of the Buick to the grief-stricken son of a State Policeman who has been killed in the line of duty." (pg. 229)

That's the bare bones of the plot. I was very intrigued by this description. The first thing I thought of was That would make a great sequel to Duel. 

I mean, someone had to come along and clean up that mess, right? And who's to say the driver of the truck wasn't a Can-Toi?

He goes on to relay how it was between drafts at that point (1999) and the dot-your-Is/cross-your-Ts part of it - i.e. traveling to Pennsylvania for some ride-along time with actual Western PA state troopers - was delayed by his car accident and recovery. He made it, though, and he thanks them for their patience and instruction as he hopped after them on one crutch, learning everything he needed to learn in order to make it all believable.

(I enjoyed this section of On Writing a lot. Well, the whole thing's amazing, but it was fascinating to peek behind the curtains at SK's process. Write the whole thing first, let it "cool" for a few weeks so you can edit it with fresh eyes, and then do your research and make sure you haven't put Pittsburgh in Ohio or got the real-life details too mixed-up. After all, "It is a story about monsters and secrets, not about police procedure in western PA." I tend to get too bogged down in research-details when I write; it can really delay and derail things.)

This is a pretty typical view from the thruway in western PA.

But once you get off the turnpike or away from the cities, it varies wildly...

from this

to this. Just wanted to give you folks who haven't been there an idea of the setting, which like many of King's settings, is fictional but next-door to real places. I've always loved the look of western PA.

While I have you here, he mentions how he set this story "down the road" from K.C. Constatine's series of "increasingly philosophical" detective novels centering around chief of police Mario Balzic.

Great, more stuff to read, thanks, SK! This author sounds like a real character, and I loves me a good ongoing series... But! One thing at a time.

Back to "America's schlockmeister," this time from the author's afterword to the book itself. "(From a Buick 8 is a) meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find coherent meaning in them."

Unsurprisingly, the author nails it; that is exactly what the novel is about. I think one's enjoyment of this will depend on how comfortable one is with that perspective. The Buick and the troopers are just the delivery mechanism. As Kev notes in his review, "In the early 2000s, Stephen King began experimenting with uncertain endings in more depth and with more frequency than ever before. While books like Pet Sematary, 'Salem's Lot, The Waste Lands, and Christine featured cliffhanger finales, these were mostly done for effect rather than ambiguity. Starting with From a Buick 8 and continuing through The Dark Tower, The Colorado Kid, and Cell, King is fascinated by the way books generally offer a sense of completion, in ways that real life rarely does. With From a Buick 8 on, King seems far more interested in the nature of mystery than closure, and how questions without answers affect his characters."

Art by Berni Wrightson

Post-modern, in other words, for us lit-nerds. Anyway, does it work? I'd say so. About halfway through this, our narrator - well, our main narrator; the book is split between several narrators, each with his/her own particular way of speaking, which makes for a fun read, tho I can see how it might irk some people - begins to get frustrated with Ned (the grief-stricken son, mentioned above) for wanting the story delivered in bullet-point form, marching logically to its conclusion. But there is no conclusion. It's the journey, not the destination; it's the mystery, not the solution. Kind of an anti-Agatha-Christie attitude... I think I'd be unsatisfied if this was his approach to every story, (I don't think King is cut out to be David Lynch; hell, David Lynch might not even be cut out to be David Lynch) but as a meditation on "life's unknowables," it works here.

This theme is expressed most clearly in two motifs that appear throughout the book like counterpoint in a Brandenburg concerto. One is "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back:" the Troop D mantra, stated in various ways by all of the characters at some point. The other: "I didn't know about reasons, only about chains - how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you're lucky. F**king strangled, if you're not." (pg. 13) Chains are Sandy's (our main narrator) main metaphor for life/ time.

The only part that might work against this (I'm not sure how I feel about it, after only one read) is the dissection scene. But I guess I have to give you a bit more background to discuss that. The Buick, once it's stored in the shed behind the barracks, gives off "lightquakes" from time to time, always preceded by a hum and a drop in temperature. Sometimes, but not always, these lightquakes result in either something from our world disappearing (as is the case with one unfortunate trooper) or something from some other world appearing...

as is the case with this weird-ass wanger-chested thing, as imagined by Tanem at ConceptArt.

Among the other things that appear is a bat-like creature, which Curtis (the grief-stricken son's father, in flashback) dissects. Both the dissection and the lead-up to it take up a bit more space in the narrative than may be necessary. But, it's wonderfully gross, so that's a plus.

As we've come to expect from Sai King, there are some lyrical flashes of description/ turns of phrase worth noting:

"It's funny how when you look back at disasters or love affairs, things seem to line up like planets on an astrologer's chart." (pg. 13)

"It was the early afternoon on the sort of day that's common enough in the Short Hills Amish country during midsummer; overcast and hot, the heat magnified by a syrupy humidity that hazed the horizon and made our part of the world, which usually looks big and generous to me, appear small and faded instead, like an old snapshot that's lost most of its color. From the west came the sound of unfocused thunder." (pp. 18-19)

"This young fellow, twenty-two years and untold thousands of beers later, would come along and kill the feather of a boy who was not then born, crushing him against the side of a Freuhof box, turning him like a spindle, unrolling him like a noisemaker, spinning him almost skinless into the weeds, and leaving his bloody clothes inside-out on the highway, like a magic trick. But all that was in the yet-to-be. We are in the past now, in the magical land of Then." (pg. 25)

"We smiled at each other, the way men do over love or history." (pg. 67)

"Curt handed out Polaroids... the best had that odd, declamatory quality which is the sole property of Polaroid photographs. I see a world where there's only cause and effect, they seem to say. A world where every object is an avatar and no gods move behind the scenes." (pp. 96-97)

"When desire drives, any fool can be a professor." (pg. 128)

And I quite liked this bit from the end:

You don't know where you came from or where you're going, do you?" I asked him. "But you live with it just the same. Don't rail against it too much. Don't spend more than an hour a day shaking your fists at the sky and cursing God."
"But-"
"There are Buicks everywhere," I said.

Someone on the SK Forum took that to mean there are all these portals to other dimensions, everywhere, which, while certainly true in the King-verse, is too-literal a read of that line, for me. I don't think King meant there are specifically a whole bunch of magical Buicks everywhere (though that's an amusing thought.) Much more likely that what-the-Buick-represents vis-a-vis man-and-eternity/unknowable-mysteries is everywhere for the pondering.

"If there could be some sort of test at the end of this... some way in which Ned could demonstrate new maturity and understanding, things might have been a whole lot simpler. But that's not the way things work nowadays. At least not by and large. These days it's a lot more about how you feel than what you do. And I think that's wrong." (pg. 143)

Yeah, but what about The Dark Tower, you ask?

Maybe I'm not done looking at old cars... I mean, seriously, these things look pretty bad-ass. I want to watch American Graffiti now.

- Sandy's last name is Dearborn. Probably just a fun coincidence, but Dearborn is the alias Roland assumed during his time in Mejis (in Wizard and Glass).

- The original driver of the car (who disappears, leaving the car in Troop D's hands) certainly seemed to me like a "Low Man," aka one of the Can-Toi. I don't know if its subsequently revealed what the hell he was doing in Western PA or where he went, though. (Didn't look it up.) I also don't know if any of the creatures the Buick coughs up are mentioned for their absence, elsewhere, not that that really matters. (But I wouldn't put it past him, if they are.)

- At the end, Sandy peers into the other-dimension on "the other side of the car" and sees a landscape that reminded me of The Drawing of the Three, though I think it's meant to be something else. (The Todash Darkness, i.e. the land of "The Mist," most likely.)

Anything else? If so, I missed it. I didn't look into these too closely. I'm so close to the end that I figure, why spoil anything.

One last thing. This bit: 

"Sandy's opinion was that when the Feds did show the occasional flash of intelligence, it tended to be self-serving and sometimes downright malicious. Mostly they were slaves to the grind, worshipers at the altar of Routine Procedure." (pg. 98) 

should be printed on currency right next to Annuit Coeptus and Novus Ordo Seclorum.

As a certain Vulcan scientist of my acquaintance might put it, "I would accept that as an axiom." (As my wife might put it: "...NERDS.")

NEXT!

OUR TRAIL GUIDE BRYANT BURNETTE JOINS US FOR A DISCUSSION OF THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. MARK IT, DUDE!

King's Highway pt. 39: Bag of Bones

OOPS. I checked my trail guide and realized I skipped Desperation and The Regulators. Damn, I'll have to circle back to those after-the-fact. If I may abuse my Dark Tower National Park and Wildlife Reserve conceit, these trails were temporarily closed for maintenance/ due to bear attacks. I also want to get the two hardcovers with the connected-covers, and neither of my local shops have those. So, two for the proverbial rainy day, sometime before the end of the Highway. "Everything's Eventual" will be covered next time, though.

Okay, let's start with the book itself.

"Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones."- attributed to Thomas Hardy.

I think this is a well-written, well-plotted, well-paced, richly characterized work, but when Maddie mentions (on pg. 467) that she suspects her daughter might have psychic insight, I surrendered to the nagging feeling that I'd been served another casserole of stock-King ingredients. I don't mean to make too much of it. One, I enjoyed it (and, to continue the metaphor, well, he's feeding me and all, so I'd feel a bit like a dinner guest criticizing the menu when no one asked me to sit down in the first place); two, it's not something unique to King - all writers tend to mine similar material, over time; and three, King is certainly aware of this tendency on his part and plays around with it. 

So, not that it really bothered me, but does any of this sound familiar? A grieving writer (Mike Noonan) returns to rural Maine (his cabin at Dark Score Lake, called Sara Laughs), forms a psychic bond with a child, receives supernatural assistance via dreams, bangs his head against the taciturn natives, and then uncovers the source of the supernatural trauma (the rape and murder of the namesake of his cabin, a woman from the town's past). A whopper of a storm pounds the town as things are wrapping up, and then all lingering questions are mopped up to a peripheral buddy-character in the last ten to twenty pages. 

Regardless, this is quite an enjoyable book. It's interesting to speculate what people would make of this one were it the only book King ever published. My guess is it would be hailed as a masterpiece from quarters that normally don't praise King's work. I'm not sure where it fits in to my own personal rankings (but I look forward to that; that comes after the Highway is fully traversed, so, ye lovers-of-lists, make a note on your calendar)

 Couple of notes: 

- There may be a bit too much about Mike's erections; I mean, seriously. If that's your thing, you're in for a treat. (The only thing missing was him comically knocking things off the table with it as he tried to get around Sara Laughs. In fact, that may even have happened once or twice.) I have a joke that would be perfect here, but damn it, our trail guide Bryant Burnette beat me to it... but I'll link to that later.

- Some of King's difficulty in portraying well-rounded non-white characters comes into play here. Unless you think every black person ends each and every sentence with "Sugar."

- Much was made of the pre-publication history of this novel. (As discussed here, among other places.) The short version is, King parted ways with Viking after 17 years and 44 titles, over money; Bag of Bones was his first book with Simon & Schuster, with whom he still publishes. Viking, it is said, balked at his asking price for Bag of Bones, something he laments in On Writing, which is too bad. In general, I think King is often too nice of a guy for his own good. I think people hear things like, "He wanted $17 million and 50% of the profits" and think Oh, here we go; greedy-ass writers/ prima donnas... without taking into account how many people get rich off the labor of artists who in no way contributed anything to the process. Like John Lennon said about the Beatles early career, "We held on to as much of it as we could, but we made a lot of millionaires along the way," i.e. guys in suits with MBAs who get chunks of the publishing/ syndication. Numerous examples abound. (Can you believe long-retired/ only-barely-connected producers still get residuals on All in the Family reruns? It seems criminal.) Anyway, on this score, my sympathies lie 100% with the artist. Particularly when said artist is a writer, without whom... (Along these lines, I quite enjoyed the glimpses behind-the-publishing-world-scenes in the first hundred pages.)

- As for the Dark Tower connection, i.e. how we ended up on this trail at this point in time:

- From the Dark Tower wiki: 'Bag of Bones features a house named Sara Laughs. This house is the Twinner of Cara Laughs, the house on Turtleback Lane that was the center of the walk-in activity. By extension, Mike Noonan is also the Twinner of Stephen King, both being writers who own a summer house name Sara/Cara Laughs.' And lest you ask, I'm not sure what some of that means, either. While reading, I assumed the connections were to The Outsider (the malevolent being that seized upon Sara Tidwell's rage to piggyback its own evildoings) and to...

- The Green Lady (i.e. that tree, there). I thought this might relate to The Green Man from Insomnia, who helped our protagonists in that story, as it helps our protagonist in this one. (Green Man? Crimson King? Power of the White? The Man in Black? Cuckoo for Color Motifs!)

- King mentions in the afterword, "Hope this gave you one sleepless night." Did anyone anywhere get scared sleepless from this? I'm not knocking its "scare" elements, just seemed an odd novel on which to hang that particular sentiment. It's more literary fiction than horror, for me. Perhaps I'm too jaded when it comes to horror. The last work of horror to upset my sleep was The Shining back in junior high, and I'll save all attendant-anecdotes for when I get to that one.

- As per usual, Kev has a fantastic review out there. Just wanted to quote this part: "Perhaps more than in any other novel, Bag of Bones is rife with symbolic names. Mike Noonan's maid is Brenda Me-serve and his handyman is Bill-Dean ("building"). Mattie's evil father-in-law is Max Devore - an echo of devour - and two of his emissaries are George Footman and Rogette Whitmore (King is adamant about pronouncing her name with a hard g, making her a rogue in the feminine). Rather than merely being a playful detail, both the extent and obviousness of symbolic names are actually clues. Names are of vital importance to the deeper mysteries of Bag of Bones." I didn't catch any of that; well-played, Sai King.

 - There are a hell of a lot sponge-worthy passages/ turns-of-phrase in this one:

'Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.' (pg. 94)

'Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never quite be the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.' (pg. 109)

'My first editor used to say that eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to writers. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it's generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That's blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.' (pg. 245)

'Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive - minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.' (pg. 317) (Low Men in Yellow Coats?)

'This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time... We turn from all we know, all we fear. We study catalogs, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT-and-T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.' (pg. 361)

(on writing) 'It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.' (pg. 384)

'The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October.' (pg. 492. 'Smutchy' is perfect, sort of like when he nails the sound a Polaroid makes as it spits out its image as 'squidgey' in The Sun Dog.)

'I could see through him, but I could also see into him: the rotting remains of his tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skill. Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes.' (pp. 647-648)

'One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a flourescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud.' (pp. 707-708)

Whew!

Okay, so there is a film adaptation of this one...

and I have tried to watch it four separate times. I never make it to the end. Luckily, a very entertaining overview and book-to-film comparison already exists at our aforementioned trail guide's site, and I highly recommend any of you who have seen it check it out post-haste. (See if you can find the joke I wanted to use, above - not that it's all that, ahem, hard.) I will say, of what I have seen, it is a very fair takedown of the changes from page to screen. io9 also has a good one. And lest I focus only on the negative, here is one positive review, though I should mention I disagree with just about everything in that one, particularly "He is faithful to the flow of the story, the characters behavior and the tone of the book itself." I couldn't disagree more, on that score. Here are some pics.

Jason Priestley, Matt Frewer, and Pierce Brosnan. I felt bad about my 'Donna Martin Graduates' crack from my Children of the Corn blog, but I also didn't want to erase it, as just typing those words makes me chuckle. So, you get two pics, Mr. Priestley; carry on.

William Schallert (Max Devore) and Anika Noni Rose (Sara Tidwell)

One final note: do answering machines exist anywhere except for in movies, these days? I wonder when that will change. It's a convenient plot device, to be sure, one that has proven quite resistant to the advent of cellphones/ voicemail in the real(er) world. Anyway, it was nice of everyone who left Mike Noonan a message in the movie to leave long-enough pauses for Mike to make comments aloud as he listened to them.

NEXT:

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL
and THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA

King's Highway pt. 38: Rose Madder

The title of this one put the theme from the old Roadrunner cartoon in mind every time I picked it up:

Rose Madder (meep meep!) It's fun to beat your wife!

Rose Madder (meep meep!) But it might cost you your life!

And so on. Sorry if that gets stuck in your head. (Welcome to my world, and if you come up with any fun variations, please share.)

NOTE: Don't beat your wife, or anyone, please. Thank you.

The plot: Rose Daniels née McClendon escapes the torture of an abusive marriage and with the help of a battered woman's shelter, begins life anew in a city far away. Her husband, Norman Daniels (a villain that I can only describe as Henry Bowers (from It) on steroids and armed with (from the description on the back cover) "a cop's training, a cop's technology, and a cop's bloodhound instincts") gives chase, determined to teach her a lesson she'll never forget. (In the parlance of the novel: 'talk to her Up Close.')

In the pawn shop where she hocks her diamond (fake, of course) engagement ring, she meets Bill, a new (and non-abusive) love interest, and she is mesmerized by a painting identified only by a single name on the back: Rose Madder. From the New York Times review: "After hanging it on the wall of her room, she notices that it (begins) to change in peculiar ways. Soon she finds herself able to enter the world it depicts.... She gets caught in an eerie play of mythic forces that reflect and eventually resolve the conflict between her and her husband."

Rose Madder by chaniilame from Deviant-Art. 

The bits leading up to her physical immersion in the painting are well-handled. First she hears crickets, then she opens the back of the painting and grass and dead bugs fall out, then she hears the storm from within, sees the glow of the moon, etc. I quite enjoyed the build-up.

King separates this story into several sections: Sinister Kisses (the prologue), One Drop of Blood, The Kindness of Strangers, Providence, The Manta Ray, Crickets, The Temple of the Bull, Picnickers, Viva Ze Bool, I Repay, Rosie Real, and the epilogue, The Fox Woman. I'm not always enamored with King's chapter/section titles, but I love these.

Got this from here - great picture.

So, beginning with Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, King began a five book spree exploring the psychology of sexual and domestic abuse. It's tempting to guess at his motivation here, but I think he was simply coming into a different phase of his art, one where he was more earnestly exploring horror genre tropes. Perhaps some of the feminist criticism of his female characters (such as Adrienne Barbeau in Creepshow) got him thinking? I don't know; ask him, not me.

I don't, for the record, consider his earlier work misogynist. True, there are a lot of raging-bitch-queens and ingenues, but he's employing certain genre tropes (more on that below). I'd argue King's work displays quite a strong (and consistent) feminist sensibility. But, for whatever reason, he decided to explore these concepts more directly in the early-to-late 1990s. (To the chagrin of some fans.)

(That link mentions "Before Gerald’s Game, every book King wrote was certain to be a best seller. After Gerald’s Game, his books struggled to make the best seller list." That strikes me as way off... I did some looking myself; according to Ms. Mod, the caretaker/ King-confidante at the Stephen King forum, "No one has such a list that I'm aware of. I even checked with his business agent at one time, but they don't keep a running list. It would be a daunting task to keep track of, considering how many sources would have to be reporting that information, if you added in all the foreign translation sales, etc.")

The horror genre certainly has its fair share of misogynistic tropes, as true (if not truer) today as it was back then. What started as an effective way of eliciting the strongest emotional response in an audience (thus ensuring bigger box office/ book sales) i.e. "show a woman or a baby being terrorized, and the audience is more emotionally involved" turned, by the 70s, into a cottage industry of violence-against-women. Horror became synonymous with nubile co-eds menaced by faceless male killers, until saved (usually) by men. As with anything, success begot repetition and intensification. This is a one-size-fits-all description, you understand; many books and documentaries go into much greater detail and I encourage you to seek them out.

Not that it started with Hollywood, of course; it can be traced all the way back to the Greeks, Judeo-Vedic myths, you name it. Something on which I believe King to be explicitly commenting, here.

Theseus kills the Minotaur
Athenian black-figure vase, ca. 550 BC

Now speaking of the Dark Tower, let's check in with our road map and see where we're at:

"I may as well tell you: I'm not a fan of this novel.  However, it does feature some mild connections to The Dark Tower (specifically, to Book III), and some concepts that feature into the series.  Also, Stephen King includes it on his official list of books related to the main series.... Who am I to dispute Stephen King?"

Indeed. I mean, I don't like it is fine; King shouldn't mix fantasy with gritty realism is not. Not because I say so, but again, because it's what King does. And while I liked it better than our Trail guide did, it's not one of my favorites. There are some moments where he could've been a bit more subtle (particularly the line wrapping up Norman's character arc), but I rolled with it. I'd like to see what someone like Jane Campion would do with it. (Although I find her work to be pretty erratic, she might make a kick-ass film out of it.)

Anyway: the Dark Tower connections are pretty thin:

1) Rose Madder (i.e. the vengeful fury within the painting) says "Men are beasts... some can be gentled and then trained. Some cannot. When we come upon one who cannot be gentled and trained - a rogue - should we feel that we have been cursed or cheated? Should we sit by the side of the road... bewailing our fate? Should we rage against ka? No, for ka is the wheel the moves the world, and ther man or woman who rages against it will be crushed under its rim."

2) Dorcas (Rose Madder's aide) mentions having seen heads on spike in the city of Lud. (She does not mention having done the Velcro Fly.)

That's it, unless I missed something. Perhaps the story doesn't need these Dark Tower connections, but I'm a fan of the way King ties his work together, so, I dug it. Does it harm anything? Not in the slightest. If one is unfamiliar with Lud/ ka, it just deepens the sense of mystery and other-worldness of the world within the painting; no harm, no foul.

As with any King novel, there are some lovely turns of phrase:

Once you got started killing people it never seemed to stop; the first one spread like ripples in the pond.

and lyricism:

What had she expected from that face? Now that she was looking at it in the waning moonlight, she couldn't exactly say. Medusa, perhaps.  Gorgon. The woman before her was not that. Once... her face had been one of extraordinary beauty, perhaps a face to rival Helen of Troy's. Now her features were haggard and beginning to blur. One of those dark patches had overspread her left cheek and brushed across her brow like the underwing of a starling. The hot eye glittering out of that shadow seemed both furious and melancholy... Underneath that beauty was madness... but not just madness. It's a kind of a rabies (Rosie thought) - she's being eaten up with it, all her shapes and magics and glamours trembling at the outer edge of her control soon, soon it's all going to crumble...

Finally, King has said of the tree-symbolism of the epilogue: "Rosie discovers that rage doesn't go away just because a person no longer needs it... by planting the tree from the poison seed she is making an effort to externalize her anger and neutralize it. Think of it as symbolic of therapy, or confession."

Spoken like one who knows.

King's Highway pt. 37: Insomnia

You may have noticed a few design-changes here at DSO. Web design and blog formatting are not my strong suit, as is likely obvious from previous posts, or the gargantuan size of this new cover photo, and/or the endless-scrolling-slash-sprawl of each blog post... one of these days, I'll figure it all out. I look around at other blogspots, and they all look nice and organized, so I know it can be done. But in the meantime:

This is the cover to the paperback I have. This book in particular has many alternate designs/ covers.

The original hardcover Viking edition was issued with dust jackets in two complementary designs. This was the first,

and this was the second. Incidentally, it is this second version that I more frequently see in used bookstores. Ye book designers, take note.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN?

The novel begins with Ralph Roberts, a widower/ "I-guy" narrator familiar to many a King story, witnessing his friend Ed Deepneau get sideswiped by a truck, at which point Ed lunges from his car and accuses the trucker of trafficking baby corpses under his tarp. Ralph intervenes, and Dorrance, a quiet, odd man always reading books of poetry, (and who in the words of Bev Vincent from his Road to the Dark Tower book (which I haven't read) "wanders through the novel like deus ex machina personified") warns Ralph "not to get mixed up in long-term business."

A beginning custom-designed to hook me. Starts off with a bang, and gets my Huh? Must know more RPMs a-revvin'.

After Ralph helps apprehend Ed after the savage beating of Ed's wife, he begins to suffer from the kind of chronic insomnia where you start to see things unseen by others: "colorful manifestations of life-force surrounding people (auras), and diminutive white-coated beings that he calls "little bald doctors", based on their appearance." (from the wiki) He perceives other planes of reality (other levels of the Tower, more on that below) and their influence upon the "real" world.

He finds that Lois Chasse, who is referred to as "Our Lois" a few too many times for this reader's liking, is also losing sleep/ seeing these auras. Insomnia also bestows them with the ability to "drink" from other people's auras (as inexhaustible as the oceans) and get bursts of energy/ reverse aging. (They also develop the ability to fire magic missiles.) Their insomnia is induced by "long-timers," i.e. those from a different level of the Tower, where time flows much differently: Lochesis and Clothos, the two little bald doctors, who serve The Purpose, and Atropos, an agent of the Random.

"Ed is a blank card, up for grabs by either Random or Purpose. Only Short-Timers like Ralph and Lois can oppose Atropos. Dorrance tells them that the work of the higher universe has 'almost completely come to a stop as both those of the Random and the Purpose turn to mark your progress.'"

This Random/ Purpose stuff is the heart of the mystery of the novel, and King's meditations are best discovered en route and on one's own. For our purposes here, it's enough to know that this struggle also involves our old friend the Crimson King, who continues to seek the destruction of the Tower/ mastery of... well, I can't say, really, as I don't know yet. But the struggle of the Dark Tower has spilled over - not for the first or last time - into Derry, Maine.

(I forgot to mention - this takes place in Derry, ME.)

With the help of Clothos and Lachesis, Ralph and Lois thwart Ed's plan, and the Tower, presumably, still stands.

WHOM YOU'LL MEET

The aforementioned Dorrance as aided and abetted by his ka-tet companion Dr. Wyzer (who used to be "Dr. Wyze but now is older and Wyzer") - fascinating folks who apparently know more about this short-term/ long-term business than they let on. The way they appear/ are used here makes me think they'll be back. (Or, if they do not, King is keeping some Dorrance/ Wyzer tale-to-come in his backpocket.)

Similarly, Patrick Danville, the boy whose survival is so paramount to stave off the end of the omniverse that the folks who occupy the penthouse suites of the Tower send Clotho and Lachesis into Ralph and Lois' lives, plays a pivotal role in the Dark Tower series, but I won't know it til I get there. All he does here is sit by his Mom and draw Roland, the Crimson King, and the Tower, near the end.

Susan Day, the lady whose imminent speech at the Derry Convention Center is the source of all the friction in town, is not to be confused with the Partridge Family/ L.A. Law alum:

Tho I wondered throughout if the big reveal was going to be that they were one and the same.

I was criticized in a creative writing class I took as an undergrad for not allowing a female character to "speak" in one of my stories. That story was about how break-ups and divorces leave this wake of silence in the men's lives affected by them, so for me, it was a sound construction choice. Nevertheless, I added a section where the main character discovers a letter from his ex, and maybe it improved it, I don't know. Anyway, I thought of that here, as Susan Day is discussed/ fretted over/ planned for/ causes so much upheaval, but we only get a long-shot: a snippet of her speech and that's that. I didn't mind. Maybe the advice we get as undergrads isn't so much something to live by as it is a jumping-off point. But I always chafe at the idea of approaching a story not by what works for it but what works for the agenda one-thinks-all-stories-should-promote.

Lesson learned: never take advice on women's-voices from a professor who habitually wore mini-skirts with flame-red panties to class. Or, always. (One or the other, I am sure.)

And, Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis, the long-timers. Complicated characters. Ralph's rage at the latter two sometimes come across as a bit forced or unnecessary. Not that it's is unjustified, just it slows things down in spots.

Ralph names them after these three ladies from Greek mythology, the Moirai, aka "the three fates." Curiously, these figures appear more or less the same across a variety of cultures. Collective unconscious at work? Or evidence of a pre-Ice-Age civilization that seeded the world? Both? Neither? ALIENS?

They also play a rather pivotal role (as The Kindly Ones) in the end of Gaiman et al's The Sandman.

They almost always appear as female. I thought it was a great choice for King to turn them into men, here, (well, not that he's saying Clotho et al. are the Three Fates, that's just what comes to mind for Ralph and we see it via his perspective) considering the gender-concerns of the narrative.

Atropos, particularly, is written very well. Petty, creepy, mysterious, gross. He is described at one point as "the joker in the deck." I thought that was a great metaphor; to anyone who's ever sought meaning in someone's random death or undeserved/ unearned misfortune, it makes sense. The joker was drawn.

From DeviantArt by dger-dem

He also collects things from those he marks:

(Ralph's) feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of maroon stuff - maybe paint, maybe blood - on its steel shaft... Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had been written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hailed off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Also:

The place was more than a museum or a packrat's lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion - grief for bread, tears for wine.

There are, as Kev notes in that review linked-to below, some interesting parallels and connections with It - this bit in the underground, quasi-dimensional lair of Atropos reminded me of the Losers Club's descent into the sewers to fight It. "I can taste your fear on my tongue!"

I should mention Fringe before we move on. People have often made the connection between the Observers and the Watchers from the Marvel Universe, and I understand further revelations re: their purpose to Fringe obscure the connection a little, but I can't help think JJ Abrams took a bit of inspiration for them from King, here.

TRAIL DIFFICULTY

I always cast around for good book review to link to for these things, and I agree with Kev's general take on Insomnia, particularly his verdict that this is a difficult novel to assess but not a difficult one to access. Two bits from his review are worth reproducing here:

"If the opening of the novel is a rumination on age and death, the book now becomes an exploration of purpose."

and

"King approaches the pro-choice/pro-life issue judiciously, never letting his authorial voice take a side. Much of Insomnia tackles contemporary topics - feminism, spousal abuse, and homophobia among them (this latter most interesting, specifically addressing the murder of Adrian Mellon in It) - without allowing the novel to become mired in them, broaching them only in service to the plot. One interesting sequence involves Ralph attempting to save a group of feminists who resist him because he is a man; later, they are decimated by a pro-life extremist they trusted because she is a woman... the issues are not black and white, and King never seems to be soapboxing; Insomnia is served well by showing, not telling."

This last point is important, I think. Before I started reading this, a friend cautioned me that I wouldn't like it "because of the politics." Presumably, he thought I'd feel King was being preachy, or proceeding from false premises, but I didn't get that from this at all. I can think of few more hot-button topics than abortion, so it'd be easy/ perhaps-tempting to do, but I agree with the above. King shows us crazies as well as reasonable folks on both sides of the issue. When it comes down to it, Ralph Roberts says it best: he might not agree with abortion but he damn sure agrees with protecting a woman and her child from getting murdered over it.

And it even has Connie Chung! My father-in-law will be pleased, if he reads it.

I was worried one side of the debate would be privileged over the other, but outside of the pro-abortion people all being described as "intelligent, stunning-looking" and the anti-abortion people all being described as redneck toothless crazies (a bit leading, tho one would hardly notice these days, where it's done every night on the news, for God's sake), I think reasonable perspectives are given all around and I doubt anyone will feel insulted, regardless of his/her beliefs.

A few years back I finally got around to seeing The Gift with Cate Blanchett. I'd heard from friends for years that Oh yeah Katie Holmes gets naked in it. (Presumably, this was meant to entice me, but I don't really have the hots for Katie Holmes, I have to say. She's obviously not unattractive, but two words: Joey Potter, i.e. a creation, like mustard gas, designed to inflict pain and agitation) But, no one told me this happened at the very end of the film, so up until that point, she keeps appearing naked, but only as a corpse. So, until I got to the non-corpse nudity, I kept thinking, Man, I've got some really sick friends...

I felt something similar while reading Insomnia (and most particularly Rose Madder, for which I received the same caveat) - at what exactly did my friends think I'd balk? Sympathizing with women getting the shit beat out of them? Wanting their abusers to face justice/ get what's coming to them? Promoting the idea that women's shelters should be protected from crazies/ vengeful exes? As I said above, I'm sure they figured I'd think King was being too preachy (and not to put anyone on the spot; this particular friend doesn't even read this blog, the bastard), but just the same, for future reference, folks: Bryan McMillan is 100% and unwaveringly on the side of people who don't bomb abortion clinics, beat their wives, or plot mass destruction of innocents to make any political point. (And he remains in the "Naked dead chicks aren't something to ogle" camp.)

The townsfolk of Twin Peaks might disagree with me, but that's okay.

Anyway, to get back to the first quoted bit, above, I made note of this section from Chapter 17:

No buzzers went off, no lights flashed, no orderlies came sprinting down the hallway, pushing the crash-wagon ahead of them. No one cried "Stat!" over the loudspeaker. Death was too common a visitor here for such things. Ralph guessed that it was not welcome, even under such circumstances as these, but it was familiar and accepted... He had died with the dignity that simple, expected things often hold. One or two moments of consciousness, accompanied by a slightly wider perception of what was going on around him, and then poof. Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye.

That comes at about the halfway part of the book, maybe a little more. But it seemed to be a good statement-of-purpose. This is a novel that looks death in the face, how to accept it, why to accept it, and, along the way, we get ruminations on the purpose of life/ the survival of children, and taking delight in these other temporary-containers-of-DNA with whom we share this sliver of spacetime.

Whom do you serve, the Purpose or the Random? Or the Crimson King? Good stuff. All of these threads intersect in the last thirty pages or so, and this reader was taken by surprise by the poignancy of the ending. Very sweet, sad, and satisfactory; not ashamed to say some tears were shed. (Had I known this, I wouldn't have finished reading it on the way home from work. Luckily, in Chicago, some dude sniffling/ getting teary-eyed over a novel is nothing compared to the sideshow from other commuters.)

- The way info is delivered/ deliberately-truncated to keep the reader on his or her toes is a tad irritating. As a result, I didn't really know what to make of several sections (the goo/ bugs around the civic center? Ralph's bomb/forearm? Some other bits.) But this is probably all cleared up with a re-read. (See KING'S HIGHWAY 2030: BRYAN RE-READS ALL THE KINGS! And then gets kicked out of the house by his long-suffering wife...)

TRAIL NOTES

- At one point, the Rosicrucians are mentioned. I will never be able to see or hear that word without thinking of William Cooper, who was so moved by the esoteric meaning of Bette Midler's "The Rose" that he devoted something like three hours of his old radio show to playing it over and over, whispering reverently at its beauty and depth.

Incidentally, after I made my way through the 40 hours of the show dubbed "Mystery Babylon," I wrote the guys who administer the site now to see if they sent out a bumper sticker, "I survived Mystery Babylon" or something. No response. Come on guys, not even a keychain? Lots of fascinating stuff in there, to be sure, (not the least of which: it was herein I discovered Dungeon, Fire and Sword) but taken with a silo of salt.)

- Save the Child, Save the Tower put me in mind of...

from Heroes, before it went screamingly-yet-so-boringly off the rails. (With apologies to any of its later-seasons fans)

- Auras have always fascinated me. A so-called psychic once told me mine has a "rosy-pink glow." I can't find a clip for it or I'd put it here, but something similar was said to Norm on Cheers once, to which he responded, "Well, I eat right." That always cracks me up. Wish I'd thought to reply the same.

- Ralph Roberts will return (briefly) in Bag of Bones, and we see Mike Hanlon and Ben Hanscomb (only mentioned, as the architect of the Derry Convention Center) from It make an appearance here.

- Someone posted this over at imdb. At first I thought it was the actual cast for a film I simply had no idea existed, but it's just dream-casting. Some bizarre choices. (Apollo from BSG as Joe Wyzer? He'd be a more interesting choice for Ed Deepneau, I think... though not my first.)

The appearance of Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins on this list makes me think its author may have just watched Stepbrothers before making it. Although Mary doesn't quite match the "large Spanish eyes" given to Lois in the novel, she actually would really work as Lois, I think. Are you listening, Hollywood? If so, greenlight this! And DREAMCATCHER 2: KILL, DUDDITS, KILL!

NEXT!

Rose Madder