King's Highway pt. 54: The Dark Half

This one has quite a few "variant covers:"

Probably my favorite - simple and effective. Nice colors.

Also good.

Actually, I like them all except for the generic one I bought. Which I won't even reproduce here. But here are some others.

There's even more, but I'll stop there.

Some fun fan art.

Before we get into the book and then the movie, ask Mama if she believes this... did you know there was a videogame? I sure didn't.

I'm on record as wanting an It NES game. But, really, most everything King's done could and should be available to play as a game, NES or otherwise.

The Dark Half is a simple enough plot. As a child, Thad Beaumont suffers from a brain tumor. He hears sparrows when the headaches/ seizures come on. The tumor is removed, and he grows to adulthood and becomes a teacher/writer. The novels he publishes under his own name don't sell all that well, but the novels of his pseudonym, George Stark, sell pretty well. A "creepazoid"figures out that Stark is Beaumont and tries to extort Thad and his family. Rather than acquiesce to this, the Beaumonts decide to "kill" Stark and release the story to People magazine, replete with a fake-burial and fake-tombstone (Here lies George Stark - Not a Very Nice Guy.)

Only, Stark doesn't want to stay dead. He materializes in the grave, escapes, kills everyone that was involved in the farce of his death, then terrorizes Thad's family directly. But Stark is coming physically unglued:

"Something seemed to be wrong with the underlying structure of the man (Stark)'s face. It was as if he were not simply decaying, but mutating in some horrible way."

Stark demands Thad help him write a new novel and holds him and his family hostage to accomplish this.

 "It was his eye that Stark wanted - no, demanded. That odd third eye that, being buried in his brain, could only look inward."

Sparrows gather ominously around "the cabin in the woods, Stark is consumed by them and sucked into the sky ("a black hole that bore the unmistakable shape of a man struggling.") Thad and family (and Sheriff Pangborn, who we'll see next in Needful Things) burn down the house and move on. (Tho they do not, as readers of Bag of Bones know, live happily ever after.)

The above set-up is a negative-print-image of King's own experience in interesting ways. His own novels sold quite well, but those of his pseudonym's (Richard Bachman) sold poorly. Until he was approached by one Stephen Brown, who was, by all accounts with which I'm familiar, not a "Creepazoid." Bachman was then said to die of "cancer of the pseudonym." (This didn't stop him from publishing a few more books, though, as we'll get to next time or the time after that.) And - as was mentioned by ChrisC in the comments last time for Tommyknockers - King's own relationship with Bachman and what it meant to his own frame of mind/ inner-psychology is certainly interesting and has some obviously-non-literal parallels with the grisly struggle between Thad and George.

As he mentions in On Writing, "Traditionally, the muses were women, but mine's a guy; I'm afraid we'll just have to live with that."

Does it work as a novel? Yes and no. "Work" might be the wrong word. It's a fun enough read, to be sure; it's a page-turner, the characters are believable, etc. For me, it was an interesting reversal of the traditional-King-book complaint, i.e. that he "loses steam at the end." Here, it is the beginning that has some trouble finding its pace. (In particular, the People piece just doesn't read like a People piece, to me, and the scene at the table reading it, as interspersed with Thad-and-fam joking, never really "clicks." Maybe just for me; so it goes.) Whereas as the last act is where the writing really "hums."

Speaking of the fam, the twins never really seem like more than message-indicators to me. (i.e. when someone said something about the duality of Thad's situation, the twins bump into one another, or cry out suddenly, or cry or laugh, etc. Set dressing.) King doesn't let their subtext work on its own without calling attention to it like that, which is interesting given the novel's other concerns, but a little distracting. When George puts them in danger, I am less emotionally invested in them. Still, the "twin" motifs running through the book are fun, and I didn't think to start noticing them until well-into-it, so that's my bad.

The incidental characters are fun, as per usual. Rawlee (more on him below) and the FBI wiretap guys do more than just fill plot-shoes; each is brought to life with real economy of word.

Where it fails-to-excite-me is on the question of how exactly George Stark came to be, or rather the discussion of this, throughout.

King loves the ECs, and so do I. And had this plot been published therein, I don't even think I - or anyone - would even ask this question. But an EC-tale in novel-form, which this feels like in some spots, and especially one where characters say things like "It's not like this is some EC comic," provokes different concerns and questions of its author.

Actually, given the whole split-self/ psychic-toilet-externalized spirit of the piece, maybe this is a better EC cover.

The novel spends a little too much time having characters ask (understandably, sure) "how can this be?" without getting anywhere, or offering suggestions/ denials as to how George might have materialized in the flesh. There's more fat to trim than usual. (And it's one of his shorter books.) Should we just go with it, like in other King works? I'm not bogged down in why/ how Carrie has telekinesis, for example; I'm happy to accept it as metaphor and let King tell the story he wants to tell. And as George himself says at one point, "How it happened doesn't matter - what matters is that I'm here."

While true we don't really need to know from a psychological-reading-standpoint, (i..e George is just a fictional metaphor for property dualism or anything of that nature; the umbrella's kind of large here and I don't mean to pin it down by that name) it does matter if characters keep asking questions that work-against-themselves. The glandular-deterioration thing is a good example. It suggests that George's physical existence is tied to Thad's. Sort of like "The Enemy Within," another exploration of this sort of thing, from Star Trek: TOS (that's "The Original Series" to ye unenlightened out there) but there's no transporter-malfunction in The Dark Half. How George gets into this predicament is never really explained, and it kept putting in mind how he came to be in the first place. Each time it's addressed, its haziness grows a little more urgent.

The Truth Inside The Lie has this to say:

"...Maybe he's a ghost; maybe he's the ghost of Thad's never-born twin; maybe he's a Forbidden Planet-esque projection of Thad's subconscious, a Monster From The Id with a southern accent and decomposing flesh. King never quite manages to spell that out one way or the other, but I'd argue that he gets away with the omission ... barely."

(That's from a review of the film, actually; here's the review of the novel. Both are worth reading, particularly the bits on the connections to King's other work such as Pet Sematary and "The Crate," and the overlap of Wilhelmina Burks and Rawlee.)

The character of Rawlie is turned into "Reggie" in the film and is played with considerable gusto by Julie Harris. She hams it up, sure, but as the "eccentric English professor," she definitely adds to every scene she's in.

Does it need to be addressed? Maybe so, maybe not. I think your answer to that depends on how swept-away you are in the prose. It's a fun read and all, but for this reason, I find "Secret Window" to be a more compelling take on similar subject matter. 

 Here's what the New York Times book review has to say:

"On the whole, Mr. King is tactful in teasing out the implications of his parable... No character in the novel comes right out and says, for example, that writers exist (at least to readers) only in their writing, that each person (at least to himself) is his own fiction, that the writer's imagination can feel alien to him, a possessing and possessive demon, a Dracula arisen to prey on the whole man and his family. Nor does anyone in the novel say outright that reality inevitably leaks fiction, which then floods reality, that reality and fiction feed on and feed each other, that they are at war yet they are twins - so identical that attempts to say which is which only lead to more fictions. Such things are better left unsaid, anyhow. Stephen King is not a post-modernist. "

I'm not sure I agree with this last bit (emphasis mine) at all, though it's important to recognize this review was written around 1990, before King started appearing as an explicit character in his work. Still, it seems odd to me to approach the story this way, almost dismissively, as if the idea that SK might be self-consciously-commenting-on-his-role-as-a-storyteller-in-the-telling-of-this-story can be dismissed so totally. That tells you a lot about how critics were viewing his work in 1990, and how changed the situation is in 2012. (Now critics take aim at his post-modernism.) 

"Thad closed the eyes God had put in his face and opened the one God had put in his mind, the eye which persisted in seeing even the things he didn't want to look at. When people who read his books met him for the first time, they were invariably disappointed. This was something they tried to hide from him and could not. He bore them no grudge, because he understood how they felt... at least a little bit. If they liked his work (and some professed even to love it), they thought of him beforehand as a guy who was first cousin to God. Instead of a God they saw a guy who stood six-foot-one, wore spectacles, was beginning to lose his hair, and had a habit of tripping over things... What they could not see was that third eye inside his head...

"That eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade... that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it. If they could, he thought many of them would try to steal it... even if it meant gouging it right out of his flesh with a dull knife."

(Particularly interesting in that this is precisely what happens to Thad at the novel's beginning. "In addition to the eye, they found... two teeth. One of the teeth had a small cavity in it.")

Now, on the subject of "Writers and Metafiction in King's Texts," here's a good article. (I hope throwing these links at you isn't bad form; if you want more than the meager bits presented here, have at them) It's tempting to speculate where King's head was "at" when he wrote this. A common aspect of recovery-therapy (assuming this was written in that period after The Tommyknockers when he was "drying out," as I think it was) is coming to terms with "flushing the psychic toilet," i.e. externalization of all-negative-traits into a different persona. It's a huge topic, beyond my ability to relay concisely enough for this blog, but if we read George as a literal example of this, it makes a certain amount of sense.

"'But do you kick the guy out?' Thad went on. 'No. For one thing, he's already been in your house for awhile, and as grotesque as it might sound to someone who's not in the situation, it seems like he's got... squatter's rights or something."

Learning to "re-integrate the negative" is part and parcel of the process. No two recoveries are exactly the same, but certain roadmarks on the road to recovery are. Relapse is avoided by learning what makes the addict tick and what his/her triggers are. Getting to a point where negative emotions don't provoke someone rushing to the psychic bathroom to vomit up their "bad vibes," or place them wholly on someone else, etc. Looked at through this lens, George Stark is like the revenge of the therapy doll, i.e. that pillow/ sock puppet a therapist will have you yell at to come to terms with beating yourself up.

It's possible (not a given, obviously) King simply transposed some aspects of this into fictional form, here. I looked around for specific interviews with the author that might address this but didn't find any, alas.

The idea of "parasitic twin" - overtly - and "doppelganger" - less overtly, but still above-ground - is all over the text, of course. Basically, it could be all of the above in a Cuisinart. Or none of it; it could just be King writing a "Hey, this is a cool idea" tale.

Stark - again, like Kirk's evil twin in "The Enemy Within" - is perfectly happy with himself, while Thad - and Kirk - realizes in order to survive, he has to defeat-but-reintegrate the bad with the good. There's a Germanic (I think) pagan tradition of vomiting up the nemesis that seeks to destroy you. Can you believe in this day and age I'm having trouble finding it for you? Googling those search terms is interesting, though; I'm on the wrong side of the algorithm.

George Romero adapted the novel for the screen in the early nineties.

I only saw this for the first time a few months back but watched it again last night to re-familiarize myself. (Unfortunately, I fell asleep towards the end, which is becoming a real damn problem in my advancing years. But! YouTube to the rescue.) I like it. The same problems that exist in King's novel re: wait-now-how-did-George-come-to-be-in-that-grave exist here, as well, but it's visually-striking and moves the story along well.

It clips off the very end of the book, which may be a bit sudden, but it also seems like it tells everything it sat down to tell. I didn't need to see the Beaumonts walk back to the world; ending on the swirling-psychopomps taking Stark to pieces and swirling away worked for me.

Timothy Hutton in particular really shines. Thad is characterized well, and he imbues Stark with a menace not seen in any of his other roles. Arguably his best performance, but for me, his second-best. (For many years, The Falcon and the Snowman was my Fourth of July-viewing film, though I've skipped it the last few. It's an underrated film, though, as is his performance in it.)

The sparrows of the film deliberately invoke Hitchcock's The Birds

Unfortunately, Romero's film is shot rather darkly - a new release with color correction would probably do wonders for its reputation - and my prntscrs of good-sparrows-examples are too unreadable. But here's a great shot from The Birds.

This may put some strain on the whence-this-menace Stark-metaphors of the book by doing so, but it didn't bother me. Unless the film is hack work - and this isn't - any visual-recall to Hitchcock is always welcome.

A young Thad works on "Here There By Tygers" at his typewriter; again, my prntscrn failed me. But a nice touch.

Michael Rooker as Pangborn is another selling point. Rooker's played a variety of roles over the years, but usually he's the villain (and usually inept) or duplicitous in some way. He brings a humanity and accessibility to Sheriff Pangborn that he doesn't normally get to showcase.

"Slow Cooker" is not among the featured selections of my old band's MySpace page, but as a result of its chorus, I to-this-day mentally rhyme 'Michael Rooker' with 'Slow Cooker' whenever either term crosses my path. MICHAEL ROOK-ERRRR...!

Romero and King don't seem to work much together anymore, do they? Romero's an interesting director. Night of the Living Dead is an acknowledged classic, to be sure, but does his uncompromising "maverick" status seems to prevent him from the kind of widespread appreciation many of his contemporaries enjoy? The Dark Half may not be as daring and iconic as that one, or Martin or The Crazies or Dawn of the Dead, but it's a solid "mainstream" pic. It's a shame it didn't seem to fare too well with the critics or at the box office.

(And then there's Knightriders, which I've tried to watch a few times. What the hell is going on with this movie? King (and Tabitha King) are in it, briefly, as spectators, towards the beginning. I have a feeling somewhere in this movie is at least the suggestion of a masterpiece, but it seems to be mining similar ore as Electra-Glide in Blue, and that "obscure indie American-70s * generational-commentary knights-errant-on-bikes" spot is already taken in my DVD folder. One of these days, though, I have to finish it.)

(* It wasn't released until 1981, but let's not kid ourselves: Knightriders is a 70s movie.)

NEXT:

(King as "Bachman" in Sons of Anarchy)
BLAZE/ THINNER

King's Highway pt. 53: The Tommyknockers

(The below was written in December 2012. I revisited both novel and mini-series for the King's Highway Bridges and Infrastructure Renewal Project Summer 2016, and you can read that here. Carry on, friends and neighbors.)

I tried to read this book when it first came out and never made it all the way through. This time around, though, I absolutely loved it. I'll use pictures from the mini-series throughout this blog, but let me state up-front, while it (the mini-series) was better than I remembered, it is an inadequate representation of this book, which I feel is arguably among King's best. But! Where it does follow the book, it does so quite faithfully, and well:

(I hope this is a nod to Tourist Trap, but who knows.)

Here's King describing both the basic plot and his state-of-mind-while-writing-it from On Writing:

"In the spring and summer of 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.

"(It) is a forties-style science fiction tale in which the writer-heroine (Bobbi, along with her poet-friend Gardener, aka "Gard") discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the ground. The crew is still on board, not dead but only hibernating. These alien creatures got into your head and just started... well, tommyknocking around in there. 

"What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence (Bobbi creates a telepathic typewriter and an atomic hot-water heater, among other things). 

"What you gave up in exchange was your soul. 

It was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with."

In addition to being perhaps-the-80s-best-metaphor for cocaine-addiction, it's a) fantastic sci-fi, though maybe everyone's cup of tea, and not really emblematic of the 1940s-style sci-fi King says it is. It struck me more as an 80s-specific take on the radioactive-panic movies of the 1950s, more than anything, b) almost an ideographic history of late twentieth-century background gadgetry, from the batteries whose "molecular decomposition technology" make an ongoing appearance, to toy-ray-guns, pocket calculators, to Simon:

Future generations need look no further for a comprehensive overview of the sort of "tech" that collected in the corners of countless American households in the pre-internet age. I think both Tommyknockers (and aspects of the Dark Tower books) really capture what it felt like to grow up (for me, as a child; for King, as a parent) with this stuff permeating our lives. (Not to mention, Chernobyl/ nuclear power humming away in the background) and c) a novel so well-constructed it absolutely boggles the mind that it was put together under the circumstances King describes. While substance-abuse is not an altogether-uncommon bedfellow for sharp prose, I'm just saying: this book hits on all cylinders: the language, the scope, the characters, and the 'engineering.' Tommyknockers shares a similar structure with It, in some ways, including lengthy sections about the town's past, a massive cast of characters, and a town slowly swallowed up by the monster(s) who live beneath it. 

Also, like It, it ends with the town's destruction.

Unlike Derry, though, Haven never seems to have "bounced back." I'd been under the mistaken impression that the SyFy show Haven took place in Haven ME, and as I was reading this, I kept wondering how the hell the show addressed the events of the novel. My blogger-BFF (just kidding, BB!) set me straight:

"Haven the television series makes no mention of the Haven, Maine that is in The Tommyknockers, nor does it make any mention of the events of that novel (makes sense, given that they'd have to have the rights to that novel to deal with it any way other than giving it a shout-out); and, as far as I can recollect, King himself has never returned to Haven in any way.

It's not the same town.  Literally.  It's like how there's a Paris, France and a Paris, Texas, and this is the one in Texas, except the show never even acknowledges that there's one in France.

That's part of what's so grating -- hemorrhoidal, even -- about that show.  It's this supposed Stephen King story, yet the producers were not even knowledgeable enough to know that King's fiction already had a Haven, Maine ... which is NOT on the coast.

I watched the video of a con panel with the producers, and that fact got mentioned very obliquely; reading between the lines a bit was necessary, but it seemed pretty obvious that the producers were made aware of The Tommyknockers and just shrugged it off.

The more I think about it, it's a really terrible show."

I've only seen bits and pieces of it, but I have to agree, particularly in light of all the above. And what a waste! The town of Haven - again, like Derry - is fleshed out so well, here; it's a damn shame it seems to be confined exclusively to this novel.

Anyway, back to the book. 

(Actually, one more digression. Hit play on this, if you would. The band - if you can call a bunch of tech-nerds with samplers and laptops a "band" - is The Orb. Like the Magic Theater in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, they are probably "For Madmen Only." But, back in the "heady" days of 1993 and 1994, I was obsessed with this album (Pomme Fritz) and played it an awful lot. Although my only experience with The Tommyknockers at that time was from half-reading it at the tail-end of the 80s, this song always struck me as the perfect accompaniment for Bobbi's finding the UFO in the woods. It captures the mysterious, alien quality of the aliens of the novel/ the townsfolk's possession, if you ask me. If I was making a Tommyknockers movie, I'd have this playing pretty much throughout.)

As with Misery, evidence of what King mentions in On Writing (the mental exhaustion of minds-in-(ahem)-maximum-overdrive, the physical-deterioration of the characters (something that would make a movie adaptation of this a little disgusting, with all the bloody puking and teeth falling out and all; though Star Trek: Voyager managed to construct a compelling and infinitely-watchable episode around a visually-similar theme, in "Course: Oblivion"), the "power source" that must be kept a secret, from state troopers (and wives and families, of course) is throughout...

"Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galzanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger."

"They would begin the dance of untruth. The "becoming" would demand many lies. This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all."

"(Ruth) slept, but her sleep was not easy... that part of her which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years, but those of outsiders. They were the voices of The Tommyknockers."

"She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales."

Cocaine excites the "power and paranoia" centers of the brain. The Tommyknockers seem to, as well. "He had come out feeling ten feet tall, ready to make love in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers." (I'm sure Dennis Hopper or Oliver Stone could relate to that one.)

"Don't make me mail you like some letter addressed to nowhere."

The Haven towns-folk build all sorts of new gadgets. Especially ones to guard the town-line. One of these is: 

As with any of these metaphors, they don't have to have been chosen consciously to work for either the plot or the cry-for-help deconstruction. Sometimes, as King alludes to in that On Writing quote and elsewhere, the unconscious screams any way it can. Ergo, a killer "Coke" machine, floating off the ground, attacking any who try to get in or separate the Havenites from their "power supply."

"The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardner's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect."

"When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore."

At the beginning of King's career, (especially in Salem's Lot) I thought some of the quotations he used at the beginning of chapters, etc. weren't especially relatable to the events in-text. Not so, here. Take the passage that starts Book 3 from The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing:

"I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognized in the dream that those other dreams we all have when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction."

Very appropos for the "becoming" of the Haven-folk into the Tommyknockers, as well as for the relationship between Bobbi and Gard in the novel. (It's worth mentioning that Book 3 comes charging out of the gate. I found the whole book to be compulsively readable, but there's a strong "second wind" in the whole last act.)

The Tommyknockers are described as an "interstellar band of Gypsies," great sky travelers but as vulnerable as mosquitoes breeding in a shallow pool. They "crashed" in Haven, ME centuries ago and have been lying dormant in their ship (which is huge - three football fields in diameter) awaiting discovery. Once Bobbi trips over one small edge of the ship, they lock onto her and through her, the town, transforming everyone into versions of themselves.

"We have no history, written or oral... Guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. 'God' is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4."

"Tommyknockers" is a term plucked from Gard's mind, as is "Altair-4," i.e. stand-ins for the aliens/ their homeworld. Altair-4 is, of course, the name of the alien world in Forbidden Planet.

"Are there more of you out there?"

Bobbi shrugged. "I don't know." And don't care, the shrug said. We're here. There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

"That's really all you are?" (Gard) wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long... but he had to make sure. "That's all?"

"What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?"

"Frankly, yes," Gard said. "You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life, because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're... Homer..." He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. "... and discover you were... Captain Ahab all the time."

The scene where Gard and Bobbi enter the ship is one of my favorite bits of King's writing, ever. Tense, atmospheric, disgusting, and brilliant. The aliens use humans/ humanoid-lifeforms as slaved-living-batteries. Which reminds me:

Poor Peter! (Bobbi's dog.)

Gardener and the Dallas Police

Played by the future President of the United States Jimmy Smits

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on." - William S. Burroughs.

When Gard shows up at Bobbi's house, it is after a monumental-blackout-binge/righteous-piss-up. We are introduced to both his anti-nuclear politics and his alcoholism in cringeworthy, powerful passages that are are brutally-honest depictions of a mind-besotted. Gardener wakes up one morning suddenly possessed by his own Tommyknocker, a need to consume all the booze in the world. Aided and abetted by one of his fellow poets, he attends a post-poetry-reading party, where a pro-nuclear blowhard triggers his rage on the topic. He ends up, several days later, on a beach in New Hampshire. (More on that, below)

Bobbi is able to sell Gard on the whole yeah-they're-aliens-and-we're-keeping-it-secret-so-what? angle by a) enabling his need for booze, and b) invoking "the Dallas Police," as in "Do we want the Dallas Police in charge of this?" Something instantly-recognizable to not just liberals of Stephen King's/ Gard's-and-Bobbi's generation: that beyond-the-law establishment-buffer-zone, the sort of folks represented by "The Shop" in Firestarter. (Who also make an appearance, here, towards the end)

Here's Gard:

"Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big, hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until twenty-fifth-century archaeologists dug up a load of this shit!"

"You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out, the liars said "Oh geez, I forgot, sorry" - and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave...

"You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P.T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers... when you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language."

I miss this King. I don't think he's necessarily speaking through Gard, here, but there was a real anti-establishment streak in his earlier stuff. I mean, there still is, but he seems to have placed his faith in the same sort of folks he once (correctly) identified as crooks. I don't want to go too far down this path, but it's ironic to me that the guy who wrote all this/ created the Shop ended up on the side of the Dallas Police, at least on the topic most-closely-associated with them.

"I've read all the conspiracy books so you don't have to; Oswald acted alone." - Stephen King, 2011.

Gardener manages to put the proverbial monkey-wrench in the works, and the last we see of him, he is taking off into outer space, flattened to the floor as he makes the jump to hyperspace.

"Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood... and smiled."

Godspeed, sir.

DARK TOWER ALERT!

Not really, but it's worth mentioning that in the first hundred pages, "Ka" and "Palaver" both appear, and "The Arrowhead Project" (i.e. that strange military experiment from The Mist that seems to have poked a whole in the Todash Darkness) is mentioned. Plus, when Gardener wakes up from his blackout, he runs into Jack Sawyer from The Talisman. Plus, Pennywise, that age-old foe/sibling of The Turtle, makes a cameo, as well. (Briefly, on pg. 510)

Is Altair-4 (where Dave Hillman spends most of the novel, here, having been inadvertently transported there by his brother) the same destination to which the Buick from From a Buick 8 transports people? Doubtful, I guess, but an intriguing possibility.

Some Final Thoughts 

Both Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok are mentioned a couple of times. Google-image search them; you may enjoy it.

Liked this line: 

"Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury... but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate."

The very last line is great. I won't reproduce it here, but after the 746 pages that lead up to it, I felt like standing up and saluting. Again, I started this novel thinking I might not even finish it; I ended it believing it to be among King's finest work.

Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers knocking at the door.
I want to go out, don't know if I can
Cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

 NEXT!

The Dark Half!

King's Highway pt. 52: Misery

The Film

I think most people know the plot of this one, so let's just dive in.

One of the more successful King-adaptations, both in terms of box office and faithfulness-to-the-text (more or less), Misery was released in 1990 and was the second (and to-date last) Rob Reiner-helmed King project, after Stand By Me proved a breakthrough for both Reiner as a director and for King's exposure beyond "just a horror writer." (Not that perceptive fans of his work needed that last bit, of course, but in the eyes of mainstream film audiences.) Misery, though, is unreserved suspense/ horror, and it's done pretty well. It pops up frequently on best-King-movies lists, and King has referred to it as one of his personal favorite adaptations.

Easy to see why. Well-paced, well-directed, competently-scored, and strong performances from the leads:

James Caan as Paul Sheldon. (A bit of a "comeback" role for Caan.)

And Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes. (Her breakthrough performance)

And although they don't appear in the novel, two familiar faces for the audience:

Lauren Bacall as Paul's agent (alluded to in the book but given lines and a place in the plot-proceedings for the film)

and Cliff Claven's Mom/ Irene-from-The-Mist and Richard Farnsworth as the outside-authorities looking for Paul.

William Goldman - no slouch in the writer department, himself - adapted the book. I think both Paul Sheldon's addiction/ injuries are watered down a bit...

Understandable, I guess.

...as is his interior world. But Caan/ Goldman still bring the role to life. He effectively conveys the character's helplessness/ rage, and you root for him to escape.

Bates-as-Wilkes is not quite as iconic, for me, as Tim Curry from Pennywise, but she gives an exceptional performance. She captures Annie from the novel pretty perfectly, actually. When she lapses into the "cock-a-doodie" twisted-Disney-character sort-of dialogue, she sells it; when she needs to intimidate/ express-explosive-rage, she sells it. One of the better on-screen depictions of the bi-polar with violent-tendencies personality, for my money.

Unlike in the novel, Paul manages to keep both his thumb and his foot in the film, though as the above illustrates, he doesn't exactly have a smooth ride of it. The other changes and additions all make sense (a just-missed-chance to kill her and escape with the drugged wine, the aforementioned outsiders-searching-for-him stuff, etc.)

One additional change is the very ending, where, instead of Paul dealing with PTSD and taking the first few "hobbled" steps on the road to recovery, as it happens in the novel, Paul meets with his agent (Bacall again) at a restaurant, where they discuss his non-Misery new book, The Higher Education of J. Phillip Stone, and Paul sees a waitress that reminds him of Annie (played by Bates). The waitress tells him she's his number-one fan... roll credits.

I don't mind the changes, here, except I wonder why that name/ project was chosen? Is there something I'm missing? Or did they just invent a title/ new book for Paul to write? Not that it's a misstep, just curious how these things come together.

The collector's-edition DVD has no deleted scenes, which is unfortunate. Kathy Bates has mentioned a cut-scene where she runs over a police officer with a lawnmower, which, in the novel, was the fate of the first young trooper who comes to Annie's house and whom Paul alerts (tragically, for the young trooper) to his presence. But that character is compartmentalized in the film to Farnsworth, who is "merely" shot, a death that sets up the final act. This is common for many films released in the pre-DVD era, though; in those days, what was left on the cutting-room floor was often destroyed, alas.

Additionally, I discovered there's a Tamil adaptation of this as well called Julie Ganapathi. As with No Smoking, I believe it's an unsanctioned adaptation. I wonder what other non-sanctioned Bollywood-King films are out there? I also wonder what kind of money/ legality-issues arise from stuff like this.

I haven't seen it. Netflix is down at the moment of this writing, so I don't know if they have it. If they do, I'll give it a whirl.

The Novel

Misery and The Tommyknockers (the subject of our next blog) are King's last novels written "in the Dead Zone," i.e. coked/doped/sauced. He describes his state of mind while writing it as highly-disturbed, and in On Writing, refers to the plots/horrors of these books as cries for help from his unconscious-mind, the place where the monsters come from, given metaphorical form. (i.e. "Annie Wilkes is coke, Annie Wilkes is booze, and in the end I was tired of being Annie's pet writer.")

I noted a few passages that seem to describe this:

"Fact is, you're getting worse, Annie, aren't you? A little worse every day. Psychotics can cope in the world - after a fashion - and sometimes, as I think you well know, they get away with some very nasty shit. But there's a borderline between the lands of manageable and unmanageable psychosis. You're getting closer to that line every day... and part of you knows it."

"'Do you remember Brer Rabbit telling Brer Fox about his Laughing Place?'
'Yes.'
'That's what I call my place upcountry," (Annie says). "My Laughing Place... Sometimes I do laugh when I got there. But mostly I just scream."

"His stints at the typewriter grew gradually longer as the pain slowly receded and some of his endurance returned... but ultimately he wasn't able to write fast enough to satisfy her demands. The gotta which had kept them both alive - and it had, for without it, she surely would have murdered both him and herself long since - was also what had caused the loss of his thumb. Have a little irony, Paul - it's good for the blood."

"There was no Annie because Annie had not been a goddess at all, only a crazy lady who had hurt Paul for reasons of her own. (She) had managed to pull most of the paper out of her mouth and throat and had gotten out through Paul's window while Paul was sleeping the sleep of drugs... She had actually died of the fractured skull she had received when she struck the mantle, and she had struck the mantle because she had tripped. So in a way she had been killed by the very typewriter Paul had hated so much."

and

"...he yearned for Novril. Sometimes he thought it would be worth being back with Annie just to have the dope. His doctors had weaned him from it. The booze was his substitute."

I don't think it's a coincidence that his last few novels of this period in his life give us inside-views of a man trapped/ addicted to dope, or the raging alcoholism and physical deterioration of the main characters in Tommyknockers. (I'm reminded of his "Alcoholics / addicts build defenses" line; it's certainly true. And a writer of King's caliber is going to build his out of stories.) But let's not over-focus on it. Misery is a book about a writer held captive by a psychotic nurse; his dope addiction and the violent-imprisonment aspect serve that plot. I can see him picking this stuff apart in therapy in the years after he cleaned up, and as well he should. More power to him; I'm sure it's instructive. But I'm not his therapist; I'm just some guy who enjoys reading his stories.

What I'm trying to say here is, I make note of this kind of stuff (and will for Tommyknockers, as well) but if that's all there was here (just an I NEED HELP metaphor) it wouldn't interest me so much. And if that's the only thing people root around these things for, that strikes me as kind of ghoulish. But hey, since he brings it up himself, it's worth mentioning.

The plot of Misery is straightforward enough. The three-people-trapped-with-one-another scenario of The Shining has become two here (and will become one in Gerald's Game, still-to-come at the time of Misery's publication), and the isolation/ inner-torment of Paul is fleshed out quite well. His despair, setbacks, addiction - all illuminated as well as anything else on which King has turned his considerable writerly-spotlight over the course of his career. Annie Wilkes is characterized perfectly, from her backstory to her mannerisms to the "dull disinterest" she has in things like the mechanics of how the story is put together. Her triggers to rage (and Paul's desperate dance trying to stay ahead / afield of them) are, again, pitch-perfect.

And I liked the epilogue. A happy ending (our hero escapes, the monster's dead) but no easy-breezy walk into the sunlight. Paul's ordeal has taken the kind of deep toll on his state of mind that anyone could reasonably expect: PTSD is in full bloom here. But, inspired by a random observance on his walk home, he finds "the hole in the paper" again and begins to write... a flower grows in the gloom.

Couple other lines I liked:

Describing writing-something-to-completion: "For each little success, he had paid a toll of absurdity."

and

"In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most critical conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?"

The Novel-within-the-Novel (Misery's Return)

Any resemblance between cover-model and author must surely be coincidental. :-) This picture cracks me up.

The excerpts from the book Annie forces Paul to write (and which becomes his ultimate salvation) at first struck me as just too much. Why the hell is he including so much of this stuff? I wrote in my notes while reading. Ditto for his central, ongoing metaphor of "Africa." Near the beginning of the book, Paul remembers going to the zoo as a child and crying uncontrollably over an African bird he sees there, its wings clipped, captured from its homeland for display "in captivity." It works enough as a metaphor / touchstone for Paul's situation, but it threatens to become the "Beep Beep Ritchie" of Misery through over-use in several spots.

Then, at the end, when Paul brings the Misery's Return story to its conclusion, I ended up reading it (I'd skimmed the previous excerpts from it) and tying together the Africa-described-therein with the Africa-motif-of-his-drugged-out-thoughts. I then went back and read all those sections again, and it all clicked. Misery's Return is to Misery as the "Tales of the Black Freighter" sections of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen are to that main narrative.

i.e. an ongoing seemingly-unconnected story that actually works as counterpoint to the main story.

Not that there aren't other examples, I just like bringing Watchmen into anything I can.

I'd noted something similar about the play Jack is writing in my blog for The Shining (novel), but alas, that one was lost to the Blogger ether, as lamented elsewhere. (Still smarts, damn it!)

Some Final Thoughts

The book is dedicated to "Stephanie and Jim Leonard, who know why. Boy, do they." Stephanie Leonard was for many years King's secretary and the editor/publisher of Castle Rock; I'd love to hear some of her anecdotes from her time as King's front-line-defense between him and his rabid fans.

As reported in The Stephen King Companion, in 1980, King signed a book for a stranger, who referred to himself as King's "number one fan." Something about the fan struck King as unsettling, but he thought nothing more of it until a few months later, when he was watching news footage of John Lennon's assassination. King recognized the assassin, Mark David Chapman, as the same fan for whom he autographed the book... Creepy.

Speaking of the Beatles, this got in my head everytime I picked up the book or saw the title along its spine:

King mentions both John Fowles and Alexander Dumas and some other writers who have explored the captivity narrative. As The Occasional Review-er notes, "King clearly respects the tradition (in which he's) writing... he has a fine sense of what needs to be left out to maintain his claustrophobic atmosphere - we get almost no backstory about Paul, and certain questions, like what became of Annie's brief marriage, are pointedly left unanswered."

I liked that.

Solid stuff all around.

NEXT!

THE TOMMYKNOCKERS