King's Highway pt. 62: Christine

Bad-ass cover, is it not?

This wasn't one of my favorites. I enjoyed reading it as a teenager but found my eyes skimming over some pages, this time around.

While it's certainly true that the novel "plays to one of King's greatest strengths: making broad characters human and making the uncanny believable," as mentioned here, and that there's nothing technically wrong with the book, or unbelievable, it's just rather lightweight. There is no real dramatic tension; the insights into adolescence, parental/familial relationships, girlfriends, and sex would be no one's idea of "the definitive portrayal of..." such. Again, not that they're bad, just that they're functional and that's about it. They're as believable as they need to be, but all of it could be cut-out or diminished with no harm done. 

And as mentioned in this review from a defunct King-re-read blog that I wish its author would resurrect, "It's almost as if the B-movie trappings are getting in the way of the Grade A horror I have come to expect." I think this would have been better served as a short story or a novella. All of the best bits could be preserved in such with no loss of velocity.

You likely know the plot, but I'll relay it just the same via images from the movie.

(L to R) Arnie and Dennis buy the car from loathsome old man Le Bay.

Arnie begins to notice strange things about the car, like how the car seems to repair itself and only really hum when it plays the oldies station.

The odometer runs backwards, as well.

Dennis doesn't like the car and has reservations about its influence on his friend.

Alas, he breaks his leg, so he can't do much as Arnie falls increasingly under its spell.

Nor can he protect Arnie from the bullying of one Buddy Repperton, who looks a little old for high school, but so be it.

Owning the car improves both Arnie's complexion and his confidence, and he begins to date new-to-school Leigh Cabot.

Christine does not approve. Leigh survives this attempt, but it's enough to break her and Arnie up. You know, that old chestnut, We were in love, but my car kept trying to kill her.

Christine starts to kill people, starting with the "shitters" (rather literally) led by Buddy, who attacked her in the airport parking garage where Arnie keeps her. Before they die, they each see the ghost of LeBay behind the wheel.

As does Arnie.

Leigh and Dennis hatch a plan to destroy the car.

Harry Dean Stanton's the cop on the case.

The novel ends with Dennis and Leigh crushing the car to smithereens. An epilogue finds Dennis four years older and reflecting back on the events both of the novel (Arnie and his family all die) and after (he and Leigh date, then break up, now he's a schoolteacher.) He reads an article on the vehicular homicide of the last of Buddy Repperton's gang, in Los Angeles, and wonders if LeBay's ghost is back... The last line is His unending fury. 

Actually, that last line speaks to the "meh"ness I felt upon completing this one. LeBay's "unending fury" felt more-told than shown. But beyond that, Dennis's narrative voice is inconsistent. At times he seems wise-beyond-his-years, as in these two passages from the epilogue:

"I carried a torch for her, but I'm afraid I carried it self-consciously and dropped it with an almost unseemly haste."

or 

"A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes. And although I did love her, all the kisses, all the endearments, all the walks arm-in-arm through blowing October leaves... none of these things could quite measure up to that magnificently simple act of tying her scarf around my arm."

I mean, he's 22. But, of course, let's give the 22-year-olds the benefit of the doubt, here, okay fine, but nevertheless, it's just too flowery, for both his established-character and the subject matter. Here's a case where the kind of narrative-characterization evident in, say, Blockade Billy, would have worked better. You don't get anything special from having the novel told by Dennis, and his characterization is inconsistent as a result of it.

Speaking of such things, when the p.o.v. changes in the second book ("Arnie - Teenage Love Songs") I thought, "How much more interesting the book might have been had it been structured like Hearts in Atlantis?" Normally, I dismiss such speculation (anything can be "what-if"d but that doesn't make it a compelling means-of-evaluation,) but in this case, I thought now that really could have been something. If Christine was ever re-booted as a pair of novellas and a couple of wrap-up short stories, the canvas-stretching might do wonders for the subject matter.

As it is, I simply cannot agree with this enthusiastic and often-spot-on reviewer, who says "his supernatural story would perfectly complement the eroticism of JG Ballard's Crash, another book about a bloke and his crush on cars." I'm not a huge Ballard fan, but even so, it's a stretch to put this in the same league. (I'll take From a Buick 8 over either of those, thanks, and I'll take Spielberg's Duel over either Cronenberg's Crash or Carpenter's Christine.)

Before I move on to the film, I thought the song-excerpts that start each chapter add little (and there's way too many of them.) Another shrug. I normally jot down phrases or passages that resonate with me to include in these blogs, but outside of the two above (from the epilogue) nothing really jumped out at me.

The movie is about the same, for me - not good, not bad, but nothing special.

Came out the same year the book was published in that deluge-of-King-material from 1983 to 1985 or so. Carpenter was at the height of his cinematic powers, then, arguably.

I prefer the book if only because the story works better if the car is haunted by LeBay's unsettled-spirit/ unending-fury. The movie jettisons this and makes it clear from the opening sequence alone that the car is just "Bad to the Bone." Incidentally, according to the commentary, this was the film where that song makes its first appearance.

It's certainly noteworthy, though, for its lack of miniatures; an untold number of cars (few of them actually Plymouth Furies, just dressed to look like them) were demolished for this film. Probably more than even Maximum Overdrive. And this sequence where the stunt driver (Kerry Rossall) drives an actually-flaming vehicle (with gasoline in its tank) is from a crazy-dangerous-stuntwork-era we'll likely never see again.

The film's other most-memorable sequence is likely the Christine-repairs-itself "Show Me" scene:

Achieved by turning the cameras upside down (note to aspiring filmmakers - this doesn't work with digital cameras, but doing so in olden actual-film days made the film run backwards. For more obsolete filmmaking know-how, call me.) while the car was pulled downwards by a compressor-sort-of-device. (I forget what these specific things are called, but it's not a crusher.) All special effects are supervised by longtime Carpenter collaborator Roy Arbogast.

The commentary track for this is kind of fun. I'd say it and perhaps the soundtrack (it is a Carpenter movie, after all; while I'm here let me say the transition of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" to the 70s-Tanya-Tucker-version was a nice touch of bringing the movie from then-to-now. Well, the "now" of the film. Now-ish.) are the best parts about owning the DVD. It's by John Carpenter and Keith Gordon, i.e. Arnie from the film, who later went on to direct the film version of one of my favorite YA novels The Chocolate War. (John Stockwell, who plays Dennis but will always be Michael Harlan from My Science Project to me, also went on to direct, but I think Keith's probably got him beat as far as worthwhile material. Still, I tip my cap to anyone making a living in Hollywood, regardless of where they cast their respective nets.)

I wanted to include a screen-grab of the end of Arnie's driveway, particularly in one night scene. It's just about the most evocative shot of driving around to pick up your friend I've ever seen. Alas, couldn't find one.

Here's a young Kelly Preston, though, as Dennis's cheerleader girlfriend, all but forgotten for the rest of the film. (Likewise for the novel, though she gets a bit more mention)

Is it worth seeing? Sure. Worth reading, too, I guess, but neither are high up on my list of personal favorites of King or Carpenter.

The car looks wonderful, though.

Though how could you go wrong filming such a work of art as the Plymouth Fury 1958? Seriously, what an automobile. Check out this site for a complete history (and awesome pics, if you're into such things.)

A quick word on John Carpenter before signing off.

This guy's run from Halloween (1978) to They Live (1988) is just amazing; ten years, nine masterpieces. (Well, I'm including Christine, so ten years, eight masterpieces and one not-bad-one. I'm also perhaps-unfairly not including his tv-work, but whatever.) In the twenty-four years since, he's produced seven movies and - my affection for Ghosts of Mars notwithstanding - no masterpieces. Here's hoping he knocks my socks off again, and soon.

(For those who like both worst-to-best lists and John Carpenter, check out this excellent Truth Inside the Lie post. And no, I'm not getting paid to promote that blog, or any of the ones I link to so-damn-often. What can I say? When I find something I like, I stick with it.)

NEXT:

GERALD'S GAME

King's Highway pt. 58: Pet Sematary

THE NOVEL

Although it was nominated the year after it first appeared for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (1984), neither Pet Sematary nor its author was reviewed particularly-favorably at the time. The New York Times expressed disappointment that "the horror, which, when the last drop of blood finally spills, (is no) worse than the experience of reading a 373-page version of W. W. Jacobs's famous short story, 'The Monkey's Paw.'" 

The reviewer also observes: "What has always made Mr. King so effective as a storyteller is his instinct for subtly exploiting the unconscious hostility and consequent guilt that men and women feel in the routine of living with each other and raising their children." True. This is as accurate as the previous comment re: the-experience-of-reading PS is off-the-mark.  

Kirkus also mentioned "Monkey's Paw" in its review, adding that "King's 400-page version reads like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable."

Its reputation has improved considerably over time - thankfully, as it's a funereally-good read, steeped in moral relativism and American Gothic Horror. I don't think it's perfect, but it works because it doesn't cheat: it ticks off each box of said genre with no apology and doesn't let you skip over any of the nitty-gritty. No, you have to dig the graves, climb the deadfalls, walk through the woods, and stay up grieving with no commercial break. 

I was unaware of the above reviews back in 1988 when I read it. At the time, it enjoyed the reputation of King's best novel among everyone I knew that had read it. Which was basically my buddy Chris and his older brother, my dentist, and my optometrist, all with whom I discussed a lot of King in those days. 

Reading this in 2012 "brought me back," no pun intended, and I had a strong associative-memory of being driven back and forth to those appointments and listening to Metallica's And Justice for All. At the time, the arrangement with my mother was that I could play my cassette on the way home after an appointment; on the way to, it was always Oldies 103.

Cover to the UK edition I read this time around. A side-note: it was cheaper to purchase this from a used-bookstore in UK, including the price of shipping, than it was to buy it locally. Always bizarre when that happens.

The story is like some negative print of A Christmas Carol. Where Ebeneezer Scrooge learns what he needs from his supernatural visitations to realize his salvation, Louis Creed, from the moment we meet him, is doomed. As is his family: of the four Creeds we meet (five, if you count Church the Cat, which I think we certainly should, so, five) all but one are dead by novel's end. (And the lone survivor is in the hospital, traumatized, under heavy sedation.) And where Scrooge's ghostly visitors are benevolent, Louis's are increasingly malevolent. Both works propose an epistemological system where supernatural forces from beyond the grave offer warnings and opportunities to the living; how they are heeded (or unheeded) determines everything else.

...Unaware of these other happenings, like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where (Louis) was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be...

It's a story that, from the dedication page to its last few sentences, is concerned with buried things, most particularly buried things that rest uneasily in the ground or in the unconscious. It's divided into three parts and an Epilogue. Part One, "The Pet Sematary," contains all that will resurface in parts two and three. The Creeds arrive at their new home in Ludlow, Maine. It lies between The Road, which is really an ominously-established highway where huge trucks barrel down the freeway, leaving a trail of dead animals on either side of it, and The Woods, through which a trail leads to the Pet Cemetery of the title. (The variant spelling comes from the crude, childlike scrawl on the weather-stained arch at its entrance) Beyond a deadfall-barrier at its edge lies a trail to the title for Part Two, "The Micmac Burial Ground," an otherworldly stony plain atop an ominous hill that lies under unrecognizable constellations. It is a supernatural place, where one hears horrifying lunatic laughter on approach and where time bends around itself. 

"It may sound like voices, but it's just the loons," Jud Crandall tells Louis. Although Jud is providing false assurance, here, loons are crazy-sounding, to be sure, and their mad cries reverberate through the North Woods.

Burial ground from the movie. Actually pretty much exactly how I pictured it from the book, so well done, movie.

And the Sematary itself. (I'll just stay with that spelling.)

What is buried there returns... though not like it was before. From a mixture of the burial ground and the buried-trauma of Rachel Creed comes the title for Part Three, "Oz The Gweat and Tewwible."

King says of this one:

"That book was pretty personal. Everything in it—up to the point where the little boy is killed in the road—everything is true. We moved into that house by the road. It was Orrington instead of Ludlow, but the big trucks did go by, and the old guy across the street did say, You just want to watch ’em around the road. We did go out in the field. We flew kites. We did go up and look at the pet cemetery. I did find my daughter’s cat, Smucky, dead in the road, run over. We buried him up in the pet cemetery, and I did hear Naomi out in the garage the night after we buried him. I heard all these popping noises—she was jumping up and down on packing material. She was crying and saying, Give me my cat back! Let God have his own cat! I just dumped that right into the book. And Owen really did go charging for the road. He was this little guy, probably two years old. I’m yelling, Don’t do that! And of course he runs faster and laughs, because that’s what they do at that age. I ran after him and gave him a flying tackle and pulled him down on the shoulder of the road, and a truck just thundered by him. So all of that went into the book. 

And then you say to yourself, You have to go a little bit further. If you’re going to take on this grieving process—what happens when you lose a kid—you ought to go all the way through it. And I did. I’m proud of that because I followed it all the way through, but it was so gruesome by the end of it, and so awful. I mean, there’s no hope for anybody at the end of that book."

Indeed. I suppose the last line is ambiguous enough where you don't know if Louis really lives or dies. (Though he is most certainly going to prison, if he does.)

The movie ends on a more definitive - but equally tragic - note.

There are many viewpoints on the phenomenon of sublimation, but the reader needn't concern his or her self too particularly with them. All that you need is spelled out or hinted-at-strongly-enough in the text itself.

"Louis thought [Rachel] might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long... he knew that there are half-buried things in the terrain of any human life, and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they are cut. Tonight, Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, its nerve infected..."

Trauma that is not successfully excavated tends to come back with extreme prejudice, which is exactly what happens when Louis exhumes and re-buries their son Gage - run down in the road - in the burial ground beyond the Sematary.

I sympathize with the filmmakers, here; it's more or less impossible to convey on screen the Killer Gage of the novel.

Still, it leads to some unintentional comedy, as this clip demonstrates. His "signature giggle," in particular, is grating.

Gage Creed may be gone, but his sneaker will return in Insomnia.

The passages of the novel that describe the journeys to and from the burial ground are my favorite bits. King shines when he's walking in the woods. The grave-digging scenes are fine examples of suspense-writing. It's difficult to see how this tale could be told without them, though my thought while reading them was that they took up perhaps too much space. Speaking of, Louis got everything he needed to dig up his son's grave for $58.50. It'd be interesting to price the same items now; I bet it would be twice that.

The Micmacs themselves serve the story's themes of uneasy-burial and landscape-ghosts, as well. Jud describes them:

"They (were here) for a thousand years, or maybe it was two thousand - it's hard to tell, because they did not leave their mark deep on the land. And now they are gone again... same way we'll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But (this place) will stay no matter who's here, Louis."

The Wendigo, that terrifying spirit of the North Woods, is the Trauma That Endures. Jud refers to Timmy Baterman - one of the "three ghosts" that visit Louis (in some form) - as "something that has been touched by the Wendigo. We "see" it in the shadows through Louis's eyes on his way to the burial ground with Gage. The Wendigo as a concept has always fascinated me, as has the tale of Jack Fiddler, who claimed to kill several of them; I've always wondered if he was just a serial killer who exploited the myth or if he was the Cree's real-life Van Helsing. (Cree/ Creed?) It is used to great effect, here, by King.

An illustration by Matt Fox for the Algernon Blackwood story, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, 1944.

SOME OTHER THOUGHTS

- The book is dedicated to Kirby McCauley. Whatever happened to that guy?

- Interesting fan theory on Norma Crandall can be found here on the SK Forum. If that doesn't open, the gist of it is that Norma died and returned to life via the burial ground and that this is Jud's secret (and ultimate doom). I don't think it's what King intended, myself, but it's a fun idea.

- At one point, Ellie mentions Little Black Sambo and Louis thinks "I'd have thought that would have become an un-book by now," i.e. something removed from schools in our thankfully-more-aware-of-offensive-racial-iconography era.

I don't think it's brought up here to deliberately evoke that idea of past-trauma buried in consciousness returning to bite you, though it's certainly worth noting how often this book "re-surfaces" (ahem - I've got digging things up on the mind) in King's work. It may even be mentioned as many times as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." I don't have a running count or anything, or even a list of examples. That it's an incidental detail that resonates so well with the theme is probably just coincidence or luck, but we all know what Obi-Wan Kenobi has to say on that subject.

(Sambo's creator, by the by, is Helen Bannerman. Whether or not she's related to the late Castle Rock Sheriff is unknown.)

- Poor Church!

As far as abused-Creed-family-members go, Church wins hands-down. He's neutered, run over, covered in stank, kicked repeatedly, and then killed again. In the film, Church comes across as more malevolent; in the book, he's more a victim of circumstance. (I guess he does trip Louis when he tries to rescue Gage, but at that point, Louis has already abused him enough; I was cheering him on.)

- Poor Ellie, too; that kid's going to have quite a time getting over all this crap. Maybe she'll show up in Doctor Sleep.

- I didn't get a chance to listen to the radio serialization of the story, but it's out there.

THE MOVIE

Miko Hughes, then

Miko Hughes in Tropic Thunder (2008)

I somehow never saw this movie when it first came out (though I did have the Ramones tape that had the title-track; not one of their best. I loved it at the time) or any of the thousands of times it's been on cable since. A good overview of the recently-released Blu-Ray can be found here. "With a $57 million domestic gross, (it) became the most successful King film (up to that time), and it has only been eclipsed by three such efforts since (Misery, The Green Mile, and 1408)."

Successful at the box office, sure, but as an adaptation of the book, it's not-very. Dawn and I watched it last night. It has its moments. Judged against some of its contemporaries, it's probably more-than-acceptable. The burial ground/ cemetery/ real-Maine setting is cool, and the menace of The Road is conveyed well:

And Fred Gwynne gives an eccentric performance which is a little off-in-spots but still easily the best part of the movie.

The "Dead is Bett-uh" thing has definitely lived on in pop-cultural memory, for better or worse.

Mainly, the problems are these:

1) King's script makes some weird changes to the story: No Norma, but a maid-character named "Missy" is added (actually, the Creeds may have a laundry-lady, I can't recall offhand), and her death takes the place of Jud's wife's; what purpose does this change serve? Victor Pascow gets the "The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis" line; why? It makes little sense in its new context and is not reflected-back-upon by Louis at any point. Other puzzling changes: It is Jud and his friends who murder Bill Baterman and son and burn their home to the ground. (With no devilish smack talk from Tim before they do) Victor Pascow shows up, again, to warn Louis at the graveyard (And this daytime visit to the grave is a little odd... he ends up going back at night to exhume Gage's body, but we clearly see him throw a pick and shovel over the fence during the day. Huh? It seems needlessly confusing. I guess it's done to convey he struggled with the decision, or something, but it's not handled all that well.) Also, Steve Masterson is introduced only obliquely (he just sort of shows up at the funeral to restrain Louis) and his just-barely resisting the call of the Wendigo at novel's end is excised completely.

2) The casting. The girl playing Ellie is painful to watch in spots (or at least just annoying) but okay, maybe that's a judgment call. Doesn't dilute anything, really, for her character or place in the story. Rachel Creed, on the other hand,

is de-sexualized completely. If you recall from the book, she and Louis get it on a lot, which, I feel, adds good counterpoint; it helps sketch the humanity they slowly lose. But okay, maybe they were trying to keep it PG-13... except wait, it's rated R. Okay, well, maybe no one wanted to see Tasha Yar getting busy on fifty-foot screens. (Maybe Data. Maybe.) More importantly, her problem with death/ buried-trauma with Zelda is handled too breezily; it makes the scene where she recounts her sister's death seem like window-dressing rather than essential-characterization/establishment-of-theme. 

Speaking of Zelda, most everyone I've talked to about the movie mentions how scary the sequences with Zelda seemed to them back in the day. I can see how these scenes would have seemed creepy at the time, definitely, but they haven't aged well. 

Part of it is Perry Farrell's never-quite-disbelief-suspending performance as a little girl...

Okay, so it's not Perry Farrell, but Andrew Hubatsek. The "twisted sister" aspect is indeed gruesome in spots, but... I mean, it's far too obvious this is a guy in drag. Even for 1989 standards. Apparently, he was chosen because they couldn't find a girl "that skinny." This seems ridiculous to me

Zelda comes across as a pop-out scare (spinal-meningitis-'sploitation?) rather than a vehicle for Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.

Finally, Dale Midkiff is not a good choice for Louis Creed. Not only does he not seem like the character from the novel, he just isn't convincing as a doctor or a grieving father. The novel spends time making Louis's actions and his motivations, ambivalent as they are, believable; the film doesn't. He just mumbles and squints a lot.

3) The editing is erratic in key spots. Two scenes stand out: the sudden-switch to Victor Pascow being brought into the clinic at the University, and the sudden-switch from home-to-Gage's-funeral. They are too jarring, not in a gasp-inducing jump-cut way but in a deprive-the-scene-of-impact way. Establishment shots that could have gone a long way to better set the mood are missing, most particularly for Louis's ordeal at the graveyard and his journey back to the burial ground. The atmosphere from the book is lost, as a result, or at least much-watered-down. Not sure if this is a problem of the screenplay...

Another argument against a writer adapting his own material? GRRM seems to do ok. (shrugs)

or the director, Mary Lambert, whose other work is mainly in music video, though she did recently give the world Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid, memorable mainly for starring former 80s-"rivals" Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. There seems to be some historical revision going on whenever this comes up nowadays. The story becomes about what women directors in Hollywood have to overcome, and the work becomes brilliant/ visionary, no matter the content. Gosh, it's almost like that's a major, relentless problem these days, this sort of narrative framing/ conditioning. I realize there'll be those who just can't see that ever happening, and so it goes. Nothing I say or write can convince them, and the mere fact that I do is all they need to hear, yadda yadda. But, I'm sorry everyone: one's gender does not make one's filmmaking bad or good, the same way it doesn't make one's ideas any less/more brilliant (or awful.) People have just lost their minds. Not, again, like any of the so-afflicted would ever even consider the idea.

Whomever's fault it was, it definitely should have been fixed. As it stands, the film reads like a story with pages missing.

And 4) although this is admittedly very, very minor, during Rachel's flashback, she runs down the stairs screaming "Zelda's dead! Zelda's dead!" just like in the book, only she passes several "neighborhood kids" gathered around the door... what? Why are these kids here? Who are they? How did they get there? What's the point of adding them and introducing them this way?

So, final verdict, the power of the novel awaits effective realization onscreen. Not the worst thing I've ever seen and far from the worst-King-adaptation there is. Acceptable lazy-afternoon-fare. But with a little tightening up and some more thoughtful casting, it could have been so much better.

NEXT: Zeroing in on finishing/ ranking all the novellas and all the Bachmans. Or the "with Stewart O'Nan"s. Which will be complete first? Tune in to see, true believers!

King's Highway pt. 57: "Black Ribbons" with Shooter Jennings

From the inside-packaging of the album Black Ribbons by Shooter Jennings/ Hierophant. For a song-by-song breakdown and for all of the packaging, see here, and for some more good reviewin', see here and here.

This was on my radar well before I started the King's Highway project. A friend with whom I share an affection for crazy conspiracy theories gave me a copy back when it came out. I listened to it once or twice, enjoyed it, and put it away. At that time, I only had ears for The Teaching Company lectures and Bill Cooper's wildly-erratic-and-misanthropic "Mystery Babylon" series. (Link does not represent endorsement. RIP, Bill, just the same.)

Dusted it off and listened to it a couple of times over the past few days, though, for inclusion here.

Some celebs-info-context, for those who don't know, and I was among them - the last time I was something remotely near musically hip" was circa 2004 - Shooter Jennings is a) the son of country-legend Waylon Jennings, b) as Ron Burgundy might say, "kind of a big deal,"

 c) engaged to Drea "Adrianna from The Sopranos" De Matteo, with whom he has a couple of kids,

and d) author of this spot-on evaluation of John Mayer.

Black Ribbons is a concept album, sharing conceptual space with Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime and musical space (as described pretty well here) with artists as diverse as Roger Waters, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Faint (particularly on "Fuck You I'm Famous"), And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Nine Inch Nails, and The Doves (particularly on "The Illuminated.") That it accomplishes this without sounding derivative of any of them is no small feat. Stephen King enters into things by way of providing the voice (and adding to the text originally written by Shooter) for "Will o'the Wisp," a DJ who has barricaded himself in the studio. We hear his last rants in-between songs he plays by the band Hierophant that bemoan the fate-of-the-world , and then the feds break down the door and gun him down.

So what is this thing? A vanity project? Paranoid rants around which some tunes were thrown together? Or is it a collection of songs given a false "through-thread" with the paranoid rants?

I'm happy to report that no, neither of these is the case; it's a kick-ass album. The rants are great, the songs are great, and it holds together as a solid effort as well as any other concept album you could mention, from The Who's Tommy to Kiss's The Elder. 

One of the above endorsements might be a bit tongue-in-cheek.

When I first heard this a few years back, I concentrated mainly on te rants, not because King was doing them - like I say, this was out of context for the King's Highway project - but because they're well-written and not entirely unreasonable. Taken to an extreme, no doubt, but I love this kind of stuff. This time around, I tried to evaluate how well they integrated with the rest of the album, as well as giving the songs a few listens apiece. And focused a lot more on the fact that this is Stephen King delivering this performance. I love radio, radio programs, audiobooks, you name it, so add all this together and each spin was a focused beam of acoustic appreciation. 

I won't break it down song-by-song, but here are my observations:

 - Well, first, here's the wiki, if you want a garden-variety breakdown / some quotes on Shooter's approach and inspiration.

- I know at least one reader of this blog will enjoy the shout-out on track ten to Carol Pearson. I've never read Pearson's book The Hero Within, but, as has been mentioned elsewhere and many times, I'm familiar enough with the concept of the archetype and as sympathetic to it as I am to eff-the-NWO rants.

- King's role in the album's origination was minimal. It is my understanding he simply altered a few of the lines he was given to read (and, according to Shooter, improved them) and suggested the feds-bust-into-studio-and-shoot-him-down ending, which Shooter was happy to use. I'm actually surprised to hear it was planned a different way. I assumed it  was a nod to Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron" or something comparable. Isn't it the natural / archetypal ending for The Martyr, to tie it in with Pearson's stuff? But King's line delivery is so good. I love listening to him in interviews or on audiobooks. And here, his flat and world-weary tone of voice, with the ominous computer-sounding background accompaniment, is perfect.

- I had a great mix tape "back in the day" full of stuff like Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys, and his collaborations for NoMeansNo and Lard) and this:

which I mention for no real reason except Black Ribbons would have fit quite-well in that mix. (I still don't know why this tune ("Goofy's Concern") never became a classic, cult or otherwise.)

- It would be interesting to do a back-to-back of this and then Pump Up the Volume.

which is a movie that was dated about five minutes after it came out. But, man, when I was 14...! A comparison of the two might demonstrate the many ways the paranoia/defiant-last-stand of Black Ribbons succeeds (or at least comes across more compellingly) where Volume fails. Sort of the difference between the indictment of the suburbs in All That Heaven Allows vs. American Beauty. 

With Black Ribbons being the All That Heaven Allows of that scenario, which is kind of funny, when you consider that's a Rock Hudson/ Jane Wyman movie. You'd figure nothing subversive could arise from such casting. But there it is.

- The NES-chiptune accompaniment that swirls in the background of several tracks (most notably in "Everything Else is Illusion" and "When the Radio Goes Dead") is pretty cool.

FINAL VERDICT:  Pretty damn great. Great tunes, great audio experience, great concept. Listen to it before mentioning things like "Bohemian Grove" gets you on a 21st century blacklist. (If it doesn't already.) (JULY 2013 EDIT: Redacted.)

NEXT: Probably Pet Sematary. If I could show you the behind-the-scenes at-this-given-time of the King's Highway, you'd see me with four or five different books open, the Kindle glowing, and Under the Dome humming away on the stereo, and flipping between them all like Spock from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home... How do I feel? How do I feel? HOW DO I FEEL???