From Novel to Film pt. 25: Logan's Run

Here is the epigraph to the novel:

The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength.

By the early 1970s over 75 per cent of the people living on Earth were under twenty-one years of age.

The population continued to climb - and with it the youth percentage.

In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 per cent.

In the 1990s, 82. 4 per cent.

In the year 2000 - critical mass.

And here is the epigraph to the film:

Most people if they know the story at all - future society where no one is allowed to live past the age of 30; as that age approaches, the life clock crystal in your palm turns color and then starts to blink - know it as the film with Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, and Peter Ustinov. Ryan Britt, in his review of the novel for Tor, wrote: "Calling Peter Ustinov’s appearance in (the film) a 'memorable performance' might be pushing it a little bit. When Logan and Jessica encounter him in the ruins of Washington D.C. the crazy old man rambles about cats for nearly five hours. My favorite part of this rant is when he claims * all cats have three names; a regular name, a fancy name, and name only the cat itself knows. While totally bonkers, this little philosophy sort of sums up how the world thinks about Logan’s Run. Everyone knows about the movie (the cat’s regular name). Some people know about the TV show and comics (the cat’s fancy name). But few seem to have read the book!" 

* Actually quoting T.S. Elliot, of course.

I like this analogy, and it's true to my experience as well. I plan to spend a little time with at least one episode of the series at some point, but today we're only going to look at the film and the book - the original book, that is, not any of its sequels.

(1976)
Directed by Michael Anderson. Screenplay by David Zelag Goodman.

First published 1967.

There are significant differences between the novel and film, perhaps the biggest being the age of Last Day: in the book, it's only 21. Which lends things a more Lord of the Flies vibe than "Don't Trust Anyone over 30." As mentioned here, "You have a society run by people who are just beginning to know themselves. The powers that be have set up a society of voluntary euthanasia at age 21 since it was a youth revolt that took over the world. Growing older is what led to the corruption in the first place so no more old age. Wisdom has been forgotten. Only the vitality of youth can be trusted." 

The book opens with Logan 5 at work. He is a Sandman, whose job it is to terminate runners, i.e. those who fail to report for voluntary euthanasia. After, he indulges in a little free Lysergic Foam and free love. 

The film originally opened the same way, as well, but the sequence was cut after test audiences didn't like it, apparently. Instead, we see Logan 5 addressing a newborn as "Logan 6" through protective glass. He is chided for caring by his fellow Sandman, Francis 7.

"You know who her seed mother is?"

"Of course not. I'm curious, not sick." 

This is all we see of the Nursery in the film. It plays a much larger role in the book, and there is an extended sequence set there at the end, as well as plenty of flashbacks to life there from both Logan and Jessica. More on Jessica in a minute. 

From there, the film goes to Carrousel (sic), the ritual that takes the place of the voluntary euthanasia centers (sleepshops) of the book.

Those on their Last Day don robes and hope to "renew" (which the crowd chants wildly).

In reality, no one renews. They just float upwards into some kind of human bug zapper with really trippy music.

Logan and Francis are called away to chase a Runner ("Run, runner!"), and Logan removes an ankh from his body before it is disposed of.

The book has no ankh. Instead, the Runner that Logan terminates presses a passkey into his hand and whispers "Sanctuary" to him. Logan knows this word; all Sandmen do. It's the mythical place all Runners are trying to get to, beyond the reach of Sandmen and their life-clocks. As in the film, he is tasked by his superiors to pose as a Runner and infiltrate the underground railroad for Runners seeking Sanctuary. He does this by tracking down the sister of the Runner he killed (Doyle 10):

Jessica 7.

In the film, there's no familial connection - only the ankh that he recognizes as the same thing he took off the Runner but doesn't know its significance. 

Jessica is tasked by the Sanctuary people to lure Logan to his doom.  

In the book, being a sexual voyeur is a sport of sorts, or something people freely - and directly, not via the screen - engage in, and it is at one of these clubs where Logan meets Jessica. In the film, you need only plug into "the circuit" to see who is available for some consequence-free (consensual of course) sex and they materialize right in your home. The sexual climate of the 60s and 70s definitely informs things here. It's difficult to sort fact from fantasy for those of us who didn't live through it - and of course, this sort of sex-circuit idea could spring from any era, not just the 60s or 70s - but this is a projection of a sexually-liberated future from a pre-AIDS era. 

When Logan first turns it on, a dude appears. They share a look that could mean either "Oh sorry, my mistake" or "Not this time, thanks." Either way - there's a distinct lack of homophobic reaction.

Jessica says she felt sad as a friend of hers died at Carrousel, so she put herself on circuit. But now she's changed her mind.

"What's your name?"
"Jessica."
"That's sad enough. You're beautiful. Come on, let's have sex."

She's still not up for it. After Logan talks with her a bit more, in comes Francis with these two ladies.

Seconds later, lysergic mist fills the apartment, and they all fall on the couch, as Jessica shows herself out.

Marvel's comic book adaptation makes one of the ladies black. And possibly a trans? I don't mean this flippantly - looks like a man's face to me. But who knows/cares.

This aspect of the future is further fleshed out, no pun intended, shortly after Logan and Jessica begin their run and escape the city via a drugged-out orgy room. 

Which apparently abuts, again no pun intended, the outskirts of the Dome.

But I've gotten slightly ahead of myself. After the scene in Logan's apartment, the film cuts to him checking in at work. It's here where he learns the meaning of the ankh and is tasked with finding Sanctuary. 

One of my favorite whispering-female computer voices in all sci-fi. And I love all the pauses and silences and curt "That question has been answered, Logan 5"s.

As in the book, this necessitates a visit to New You:

the Dome's premiere Instant Laser Surgery clinic.

If it's the 70s, Farrah Fawcett-Majors is going to show up sooner or later.

Things don't go quite as planned.

Francis gives chase. From here, book and film diverge pretty widely. Sticking with the book first, Logan and Jessica go through Cathedral and fight with some "Cubs," i.e. teenage hooligans who take "Muscle," a drug which gives the user a brief surge of super-strength but has unpredictable side effects. From there -

via the maze-cars which connect the Domes all over the world -

they search for Ballard, "the old Man of Sanctuary," rumored to be the head of the underground railroad. Their search takes them to Molly - a vast underwater complex that once farmed the oceans for food - and to Box, " an insane half-man living in a self-created world of fantasy." Said world is "Hell", an Arctic wasteland, where Box immediately tries to kill Logan and Jessica, but not, helpfully, before telling them how to escape.

These elements are combined in the film, somewhat.

Box is a robot who collects "fish! Plankton! Protein from the sea." Which means whatever runners escape the Dome. And then he tries to kill them.

A scene where Box asks Logan and Jessica to pose for him was cut as it dramatically increased the amount of on-screen nudity.

Back to the book: Logan and Jessica next go to Crazy Horse (the monument begun by Korczak Ziolkowski, still incomplete in real-world-2015) under/within which is the computer that controls all civilization. 

"They beheld the Thinker, the final realization of the computer age. A direct extension of the electronic brains at Columbia and Cal Tech in the 1960s, it was a massive breakthrough in solid-state technology. Computer was linked with computer in ever-widening complexity. 

President Curtain was the first to suggest that the Thinker be moved from Niagara to the Crazy Horse Caverns, and with the death of the Republican Party in 1988, the Crazy Horse bill was passed without opposition. Estimated final cost: twenty-five billion dollars." 

It's difficult to tell which party is being lampooned, there.

At Crazy Horse, they discover Francis is waiting for them and escape and go through some hot-rod-futurist-jalopy-racing (devilsticks) with a gang of desert teenage crazies. (Manson Family?) Who poison him and Jess with super-sex drugs. Logan has seven orgasms, we're told, as he and Jessica maneuver their bloody escape.

They then go through a Nursery and then into a robotic recreation of the Civil War, the Battle of Fredericksburg to be exact. This is the second or third Civil War reference of the novel. (Abe Lincoln log-splitter was one of Logan's apartment screensavers.) Makes sense given the 60s context. Then, into a grand Maze, then off to Washington, DC.

They go to DC in the movie, too, though it's all quite different. Having never stepped foot outside the Dome, they are momentarily taken aback by the sun.

"What is it?"

"I don't know... but, whatever it is, it's warm."

Along the way they discover their lifeclocks have gone blank.

 

They explore the ruins of Washington, DC.

And then meet "the Old Man" in the ruins of the Senate.

And here's where we have another major deviation from the book. As they talk with the Old Man, they slowly realize Sanctuary is a myth. Not the case in the book. Sanctuary exists - it's a previously-abandoned space colony near Mars. At the end, Logan and Jessica board a rocket (having taken a maze-car from DC to "Cape Steinbeck") and blast off for it.

This is on the heels of meeting Ballard, who turns out to be a decoy; the real Ballard is actually Francis, who is the leader of the rebels. He tells Logan the Thinker has been malfunctioning and all life is threatened; he is posing as a Sandman to shepherd as many people away as he can. He stays behind to keep fighting the good fight. 

Not the case with Francis in the film, who's just a Sandman.

Having Francis brandish a tattered flag as a weapon is a nice touch. Really, all of the above is nice symbolism, even if it's mainly a pastiche of Planet of the Apes and maybe "The Omega Glory." Quite a different ending than the movie, eh? In it, Logan and Jessica return to the city, bringing the Old Man with them, who wants to see young people after so many years living only with his cats. (After so many years in the wilderness, he can be forgiven for his absurd delusion that a horde of millennials would, in any combination or state of dress, be preferable to the company of cats.) 

Logan tells them the whole systems's a sham: they can live, live!

Do they listen? Do the kids ever listen? No. They only listen when things start blowing up.

Which begins to happen shortly after Logan is debriefed by the computer that gave him his assignment. In classic sci-fi tradition, the computer cannot handle the information that Logan gives it ("There... Is... Noooooo... Sanct-u-ary...") and the entire house of cards come crumbling down. (Also thanks to some errant disruptor blasts.) 

Logan and Jessica lead everyone outside the Dome, where the youth surround the Old Man and pet his beard.

The End.

I've always loved the movie and still do, but this time around, the ending made me chuckle. What the hell are these people going to do? How will they live? A sequel exploring that might have been very interesting. A sequel to the film, I mean. As aforementioned, there were a few sequels to the book, none of which I've read. The book ends so differently, though, that any continuation of the story would proceed from an equally different place.

Logan's Run was filmed almost entirely in Texas, most notably at the Dallas Market Center
and Forth Worth Water Gardens. 

All malls are similar, I guess, but it reminded me a little of Providence Place Mall back in RI.

Typical afternoon at the food court outside the IMAX.

The sets are all pretty striking. Full list of locations here.

Logan's swanky pad.

The scenes at Sandman HQ are pretty cool, too.

FINAL VERDICT

  
The Book: (again from comicsgrinder, afore-linked) "Nolan and Johnson don’t concern themselves so much with fleshing out these characters and that is purposefully done. You know only what you need to know. They speak in a rather clipped fashion but not in an amateurish stilted manner. And they are thrown into numerous situations but they’re not an awkward jumble. It’s more like a grand opera or monumental painting. It’s good to keep in mind that Nolan and Johnson have been around the block a few times. These men are part of science fiction legend dating back to the Southern California Writer’s Group. They go back to a tradition of working together on projects, projects that included, among other things, scripts for The Twilight Zone." 

The Film: Definitely quite a bit different than the book, but undoubtedly a classic of multiple genres. Dated, sure, but its datedness (much like another 70s vision of the future, Rollerball) works for it not against it. As John Kenneth Muir put it: "Instead of aging the film and rendering it irrelevant, the disco-era visualization and tenor of Logan's Run - the aura of hedonism and 'anything goes' - continue to ably support the didactic narrative. The glittering, sexy-but-shallow production design - abundantly rich in neon and mini-skirts - originally helped to define the City of Domes culture in terms of Me Generation-style self-centeredness. However, in the 21st century and the vanity-driven Age of Facebook, that 'Me Generation' looks rather quaint by comparison. Therefore in 2009 viewers can still easily and immediately recognize the City of Dome-ers as a surrogate for 'us.; In fact, we are much closer to the callow youth culture of Logan's Run today than we were in 1976." 

Indeed. Truer, even, for 2015 than it was for 2009. Especially this week. Let's just hope we don't start to resemble "Wild in the Streets."

Gaa - I forgot where I nicked this from. I downloaded it months and months ago in anticipation of this post but neglected to write down where I got it. My apologies.

King's Highway pt. 79: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

"I shoot from the hip and keep a stiff upper lip."

- AC/DC (author's epigraph to:)

King's latest - his sixth collection of short fiction - came out last week, and for the first time in my history of pre-orders with Amazon, it was in my hands the same day it was released. Fifth or sixth time is the charm!

This was the first time in buying one of King's short fiction collections where I was already familiar with most of the material within. (Well, just-under-half: 9 out of 20.) Of the ones I'd read, "Ur" was heavily revised for its publication here, but not enough to make it seem like a radically different story or anything.  (Cemetery Dance discusses the changes here for those interested.)

I always look forward to King's introductions and Authors Afterwards and was happy to discover Bazaar came with both a foreward and personalized intros for every story. But there's little in any of these preambulatory remarks that Constant Readers haven't seen or heard a few times before. But, I mean, the guy is almost 70 years old. I repeat myself constantly at 41, so I can only imagine.

Thematically, King repeats himself a little, as well, but who cares so long as the stories are good. And these are. I cared about some more than others, as is the nature of horse races, and I can't tell you much about the two poems King included, "Tommy" and "The Bone Church".  I'm the wrong guy to evaluate poetry, despite having minored in the subject as an undergrad. There are some poems or poets I like a lot. And then there's everything else. Stephen King would be in the everything else category. 

Some nice illustrations by Phil Hale accompanying "The Bone Church" though. (Playboy, November 2009.)

"Drunken Fireworks" is the penultimate tale of the collection and was previously available only as an audiobook. Which I've yet to hear, so this was a first-time-read for me. It's the story of a newly-rich drunk hillbilly couple on one side of a lake and their Fourth of July fireworks competition with the rich summer folks across the way. He says in the intro that he bristles at the term "local color" for such a tale, but if someone ever did publish a Stephen King's Local Color collection, this would be front and center, next to things like "It Grows on You," "Uncle Otto's Truck," et al. Harmless but not much to it besides its voice and agreeable pace. 

Ditto for "Summer Thunder," though that one has the added pleasure of evoking The Stand and "Night Surf." It seems like a late-innings reflection on the latter, especially.

Ditto for another story, "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive." It was published in The Atlantic and won the Bram Stoker Prize for Short Fiction in 2011. With that pedigree, I expected a bit more and was underwhelmed. It tells the story of two old poets who have stopped for a picnic at a rest stop on the way to the University of Maine and witness the fiery death of two drunk women and their seven children. I'd have liked it better, maybe, if the two poets were Gard and Bobbi from The Tommyknockers. (I know Bobbi wasn't a poet, and I know how that novel ends makes their appearance problematic. Don't bother me with the facts.) The title relates to things only in the vaguest sense. I didn't need for it to relate in a literal sense, just to point the way to some larger theme more than I perceive it doing. Not one of his best - I guess that puts me at odds with the general critical consensus. 

Two others that only half-worked for me were "Premium Harmony," about a bickering couple's visit to the Wal-Mart of Castle County, and "Under the Weather," about a man's breakdown in the wake of his wife's illness and the grossness that ensues. I shouldn't say "half-worked." Both of them are very well-written, but the endings were too easy to guess. I don't think stories are just about not being able to guess the end, of course, but it can rob a story of its ironic counterpunch if such a thing is too clearly forecast. That aside, they're finely crafted tales.

A little Dark Tower Easter Egg in "Under the Weather," though, which is always nice to see.

Two stories are damn-near-perfect until their very last paragraph: "The Dune," about an old man who has spent a lifetime visiting a small island off the coast of Floria where he finds the names of those about to die written in the sand, and "Bad Little Kid," about a man convicted of gunning down a child in cold blood who gives a bizarre confession to his lawyer shortly before his execution.

"Bad Little Kid" was previously only available to King's French and German readers.

What is it about these endings that didn't land with me? I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, so feel free to skip this paragraph if you don't want to know. (Tick... tick... boom.) The ending of "The Dune" is the kind of simple-twist that isn't even a twist. Harvey is unsettled because of the last name he saw on the beach. His lawyer assumes it was his own name he saw. It wasn't. The end. We're left to assume it's the lawyer's name he saw. Big deal. Everything leading up to it is vintage King, expertly letting the slack run out of a supernatural thread, but when he tightens the line, the fish is lost. It turns from a Twilight Zone episode to a Night Gallery episode right before our eyes. As for "Bad Little Kid," this one was even more disappointing, as the rest of the story is so damn vicious. The lawyer leaves the prison after the execution and finds his car keyed. (Good) Then he finds the bad little kid's beanie with a note. Bad. Bad bad bad. For one thing, it's the same ending as "Sun Dog" or other King stories and should have been avoided just for that reason. Moreover, though, it torpedoes the effective horror of the Bad Little Kid in the lawyer's client's life, which was earned so painstakingly sentence after sentence.

Okay, as for The Best of the Rest, let me count these down least-to-most-favorite.

"Mister Yummy"

Plot: A man in a nursing home knows he is going to die when he sees "Mister Yummy," a David-Bowie-looking young man from his past. 

Not much to this one, but it reminded me of some of the better moments from Hearts in Atlantis. Which I keep telling myself I'd like to re-read soon. Just a nice contemplating-the-angel-of-death-through-the-artist's-prism sort of story. 

"Obits"

Plot: A young man joins the staff of a Gawker-esque site to write snarky obits for celebrities. He discovers he has the power to visit death unto anyone he chooses by writing their obituary before he or she naturally dies. When his boss learns of his power, there are complications.

This is a bit of a retread of "Everything's Eventual," but not really. Where "E's E" is a little all over the place, this one is more restrained. 

"Morality"

Plot: A married couple's financial problems lead them to accept a lucrative offer from an eccentric ex-priest who wants to feel what sin is like before he dies. As he is too physically weak to do it himself, he must participate it in vicariously. The sin? Randomly attacking an innocent child in the park. After the deed is done, they receive the money, but their marriage slowly disintegrates.

First published Esquire July 2009.

Winner of the Shirley Jackson award for Best Novelette - what the hell is a novelette, now? As previously discussed, the criteria by which King's stories are determined to be novels, novellas, short stories, etc. is highly arbitrary. Anyway -  this is one is a tad on the improbable side, but it resolves itself quite well. Any story that takes morality as its theme is best served by a subtle touch, which King deftly employs here. 

"Mile 81"

The Plot: Pete Simmons drinks vodka and looks at porn mags in an abandoned highway rest area before falling asleep. Outside in the overgrown parking lot, a mysterious mud-splattered station wagon of undetermined make/model rolls to a stop and eats a variety of folks who venture too close to it. 

If "The Dune" is a Night Gallery episode, "Mile 81" is a 70s / 80s Movie of the Week. And it would've made a great one. Same way Roadwork and The Long Walk would have made fantastic American New Wave films. As the LA Times wrote in its review, "To call 'Mile 81' a coming-of-age story is not exactly accurate; it unfolds over a single afternoon. But for its protagonist, grade-schooler Pete Simmons, the mysteries of the world, both pleasurable and terrifying, bring him to a point of reckoning, after which he will never be the same."

The story ends logically enough, but what a bummer for Rachel and Blake, the other children of the tale, whose parents are the car's third and fourth victims. 

"The Little Green God of Agony"

The Plot: Katherine is a RN for a wealthy man whose recovery from a plane crash is going too slowly (and painfully) for his liking. When conventional rehabilitation fails to end his agony, he calls upon the Reverend Rideout, who looks at pain as possession and himself as an exorcist.

This was adapted into an e-comic in 2012, which is where I first read it. I didn't think much of the e-comic, not only because the art is terrible -

but for all the reasons described in this lengthier review at The Truth Inside the Lie. It's just a very sloppy mess. YMMV, of course, but for me this is everything a story told in sequential-art format should not be. 

The story, though, is great. The Rev reminded me a little of Reverend Jacobs from Revival, but not redundantly so. 

"Afterlife"

The Plot: William Andrews dies after a painful fight with cancer and discovers what comes next.

As mentioned here "In this particular King story, 'what comes next' isn’t filled with angels or demons, gold-paved paradises or smoke-choked hells. Instead you get a dreary office and one of King’s classic blue-collar types: the overworked, underpaid stiff who has to eke his way through a literally endless workday. You also get doors (a King staple, as any Constant Reader worth his salt will tell you) and decisions." 

King premiered the story during a talk at UMass Lowell.

I like these sorts of stories - always have and always will, I suppose. I was particularly tickled by this one because I wrote a very similar story (called "The Soul Cages") when I was 18 or 19. I'm not saying mine was as good as this one or anything, but it made me happy to think of us working out the same premise in a similar way.

When William demands to know why / how life and afterlife is the way it is, his case manager relays the story of Job as an explanation, ("Where were you when I made the world?", more or less) a parable King has returned to often over the years in interviews. That story really resonates with him.  

"Blockade Billy"

The Plot: Granny Grantham, long-retired manager of the now defunct New Jersey Titans, relays the tale of "Blockade" Billy Blakely to a writer, "Mr. King." (Whether it's the real-life Stephen King or the one from the Dark Tower books or some other-dimensional counterpart is not revealed.)

"The game was played hard in those days, Mister King, with plenty of fuck-you."

When I originally reviewed this, I wrote: "I’ve criticized King in the past for unsuccessful attempts at the tale-told-by-one-character-to-another ('Dedication' or 'Ballad of the Flexible Bullet'), but here is one perfect example of how it can be done. I think giving the narrator a particular way of speaking and plenty of asides is the way to go."

This time around, I liked it even more. I agree with the WaPo's assessment: "(it) works as well as it does for a couple of reasons. The first is the narrative voice that King has conjured up for Granny Grantham. Funny, sharply observant and casually profane, it is the voice of a quintessential baseball insider who happens to be a natural raconteur. Equally important is the lovingly detailed evocation of the game as it was played in 1957."

"Batman and Robin Have an Altercation"

The Plot: Doug Sanderson is visiting his Alzheimer's-ridden father at the nursing home. He and his father reminisce as best they can about an old Halloween they trick-or-treated as Batman and Robin. On the way back to the nursing home they are sideswiped by some joker (sorry) in a big-ass truck. Things don't go well from there.

First published in September 2012 in Harper's.

King is circling themes of aging and losing control of your mind and body and watching it happen in family and friends more and more in recent years. Which is good because he has a firm handle on the subject. This is, all hyperbole aside, an airtight piece of short fiction; all details serve the theme. All things serve the Beam.

"That Bus Is Another World"

The Plot: An Alabama man is racing across New York City to make an appointment with an ad firm that just might be able to help the Gulf Shores Oil Company he works for rehab its image after a devastating oil spill. As he's stuck in traffic, he looks into the bus that has pulled parallel to his taxi cab and muses on the peaceful look on the woman whose face he sees through the window. As he's doing so, the man seated next to her pulls a knife and slits her throat. Traffic resumes. 

This one is really a masterpiece, kids. The next three, really, but this one is an intersection/ traffic jam of unsettling themes. Ecological disaster, the murders that happen in front of our faces (and what else is an oil spill, when you think about it?),  time is money, the 24-7 cable news advertising spin, and how easy it is to convince yourself that all / any of the above is some grand illusion.  

"A Death"

The Plot: Jim Truesdale, a local simpleton in old-west South Dakota, though it is never explicitly stated to be the case, is arrested by Sheriff Barclay for the murder of one Rebecca Cline. Jim denies having anything to do with her death, but circumstantial evidence and a lack of any better suspect leads to his conviction. Along the way, the Sheriff comes to believe in his innocence. 

Another masterpiece. If it was just the tale of an innocent man hanged for a crime he didn't commit, it'd still be a pretty good tale: not a sentence wasted, everyone with a distinctive voice, great economy of description. That it elects to peel back another layer in the last few pages makes it great. I'll save the surprise for you - you'll like it better that way.

And finally:

"Ur" 

First published as an e-book exclusive to the Kindle 2009.

"He thought he would lie sleepless for hours, thinking of all of those other worlds, but in the dark they seemed as unreal as actors when you saw them on the movie screen. They were big up there - often beautiful - but they were still only shadows thrown by light. Maybe the Ur-worlds were like that, too."

The Plot: Wesley Smith, an English teacher at a college in Kentucky, is trying to get over a break-up with his girlfriend, the coach of the college's Ladies Basketball team. He purchases an Amazon Kindle online, but what arrives is a device from another world. The Dark Tower world, for those readers in the know. Not only can he download books from authors in this dimension, he can access millions of dimensions, as he discovers when he finds "Hemingway's last novel, Cortland's Dogs." (More on that in a minute.) He can also access news stories of alternate realities but also stories of his immediate localized future. Upon discovering his girlfriend and all her students are to be killed by a drunk driver as they return from a tournament, he and his friends (who resemble Wireman and Jack from Duma Key) race to prevent that from happening. In so doing, they draw attention to themselves from mysterious Low Men in Yellow Coats, who arrive to reclaim the Ur-Kindle.

Garrison Keillor has an ongoing routine on Prairie Home Companion about English Majors (here's one example) that always makes me laugh, partly because the preoccupations of English Majors are so uniform from region to region, college to college, even country to country in some respects. (English-speaking respects, I guess). I sure hope someone brings "Ur" to his Mr. Keillor's attention, as I'd love to see King invited on the show to contribute to one of these sketches. The two are clearly on the same page.

Keillor aside, this is one of King's most enjoyable works, even if you're not an English major. Though I suspect if you are, even moreso. Take this, the beginning to Hemingway's "last novel:"

A man's life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland's winter dog was Negrita, but he thought of it only as the scarecrow dog...

Okay - this is not just good Hemingway pastiche, it is perfect Hemingway pastiche. (Oh and "Negrita" was indeed Hemingway's real-life dog, though he's called only "Black Dog" in A.E. Hotchner's bio. Also: Black Dog appears to have been killed by Batista's men in whatever level of the tower "Ur" inhabits; in ours, though, it was Castro's folks who clubbed him to death, which is what lit a fire under the Hemingways' ass to flee country before a similar fate befell them. Too bad, as Hemingway sympathized more with Castro than Batista, but revolutions are ugly business where a lot of lines get blurred.)

Almost all of the English-major-y asides in this one are equally delightful. Here's another one:

Whatever dimension (Wesley) looks in, Hemingway always wrote A Farewell to Arms. (And usually The Old Man and the Sea.) He tried Faulkner.

Faulkner was not there at all.

He checked the regular menu, and discovered plenty of Faulkner. But only in this reality, it seemed.

This reality?

The mind boggled.

I love that.

Reading through some reviews at Goodreads for this, I'm shocked to discover this isn't universally loved. I have the same reaction to Duma Key, so maybe I'm just an anomaly among King fans. Whatever the case, though, I absolutely love "Ur." It's a love letter from start to finish, even if it's a bit of an odd one.

"What seemed real in this post-midnight hour was the sound of the wind, the beautiful sound of the wind telling tales of Tennessee, where it had been earlier this evening. Lulled by it, Wesley fell asleep, and he slept deeply and long. There were no dreams, and when he woke up, sunshine was flooding his bedroom. For the first time since his own undergraduate days, he had slept until almost eleven in the morning." 

~

So how does The Bazaar of Bad Dreams rate against King's other short story collections?

Quite well, I'd say. I mean, it's not a contest, I know, but were I to rank them, I think Everything's Eventual might be the best, with either this or Nightmares and Dreamscapes in second.

Always a pleasure to re-open the Highway for another entry - thanks for reading!