King's Highway pt. 39: Bag of Bones

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

Okay, let's start with the book itself.

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

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

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

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

 Couple of notes: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whew!

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT:

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL
and THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA

King's Highway pt. 38: Rose Madder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose Madder by chaniilame from Deviant-Art. 

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

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

Got this from here - great picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway: the Dark Tower connections are pretty thin:

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

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

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

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

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

and lyricism:

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

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

Spoken like one who knows.

King's Highway pt. 37: Insomnia

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

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

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

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

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHOM YOU'LL MEET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From DeviantArt by dger-dem

He also collects things from those he marks:

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

Also:

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

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

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

TRAIL DIFFICULTY

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAIL NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT!

Rose Madder

King's Highway pt. 36: It

"This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free.

NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen;
JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve;
OWEN PHILLIP KING, at seven.
Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists."

Not only is that a nice dedication, but it's a useful sentiment / mission statement to keep in mind as you make your way through these 1138 pages.

Wraparound cover to the 25th anniversary edition

From the FearNet review: "It marks a deliberate shift in King's career, a stated conscious decision to sum up everything he had to say about children and monsters and functioning as a statement of intent as to what he hoped to accomplish with his later novels: explorations of adults and the dual natures of creativity and creation.  It is a massive undertaking, not only addressing and expanding upon the themes in his earlier fiction, but also transcending those themes, uncovering and creating something new."

And how! Here's another good review.

WHAT YOU'LL SEE

Chances are, if you're reading this, you know what It is all about, so I won't devote too much space to the plot. For those who don't know, though, here is Library Journal's summary: "Moving back and forth between 1958 and 1985, the story tells of seven children in a small Maine town who discover the source of a series of horrifying murders. Having conquered the evil force once, they are summoned together 27 years later when the cycle begins again."

That's all you really need to know, though one of the top-rated comments on Its Amazon page goes a bit further:

"It is two stories being told at once. One is the story of their childhood, of their first encounter with Pennywise the Clown, their troubles with the local bullies, the impact of It upon their lives, their own personal struggles, and (Its) eventual defeat. This is told from the beginning of the book to the near end of it. At the same time, the story of the return to Derry, of the research done to see what It was, the memories that were now urging to return, and subsequent events that followed which I won't spoil here. Both timelines alternate in their tellings to fit one another perfectly, even if not in perfect chronological order, and they're even further juiced with quick points of time long before their own, dipping into what else It has been up to. This construction is utterly beautiful in how it's placed, and completely builds the story up for all its plot points and climax."

I have to mostly-agree with that last sentence. Whatever else one might say of it, It is beautifully structured. (These pronouns are going to screw me up; apologies in advance) The events of 1957-1958 flow seamlessly with the events of 1985-1986, and the intermittent sections (narrated by Mike Hanlon) about Derry's past complement them perfectly, adding depth and nuance. Their collective amnesia about their interactions with It works to the story's advantage, as well; the reader discovers as they re-discover. (I also quite like how the adults all more or less ignore what goes on in their town every twenty-seven years; it adds to the children's feeling of loneliness and solidarity) Although it's one long-ass novel, it never feels bloated.

"Its true form as perceived by the human eye is that of a female spider that houses Its essence: namely writhing orange lights (termed "Deadlights"), looking directly into which can either kill a person or drive them insane."

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And the only way to defeat an evil spider/clown that feeds on fear ("fear salts the meat") is to give yourself 100% to your inner child/ utilize that magical imagination that only truly exists when you're a kid. As one other Amazon reviewer notes, "What is scarier: Pennywise or the reality of what happens to us once we leave childhood behind?"

But in some ways, of course, the reality is we want to leave childhood behind. It can just as easily be viewed as the terrifying deep from which we're relieved to escape, a Maurice Sendak pit of horrors, colonization, and sublimated panic.

And speaking of Sendak, It melds the sensibilities of  The Goonies with Where the Wild Things Are. At the same time that childhood/ innocence/ imagination is a comfort and that the solidarity formed during that time endures in a way like no other, it's also the source of all our terror. You are never more vulnerable than when you are a child, but, It argues, perhaps you're never better-equipped to deal with what life can throw at you, either.

As The Turtle tells Bill in the last act, "What can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again."

This site never fails to crack me up. Worth enlarging for a better view. All clowns are the minotaur.

WHOM YOU'LL MEET

I originally planned for It to be the last stop on the King's Highway. (All roads lead to IT, or some such thing.) But as it introduces a rather important character/ concept to the Dark Tower series, it was bumped up the queue on account of...

At the time of publication, Maturin (aka "The Turtle") had not been introduced in the Dark Tower.

I was 13 when I read It. It was the first new King book I'd read. (I remember a radio campaign on 92PRO-FM and WHJY, but I can find no internet evidence of this. I can't be making that up, can I? Perhaps it's the search terms I'm using.) I recall my friends being amused at how quickly and steadily my bookmark moved centimeter-by-centimeter from front to back over a succession of study halls. (Maybe they weren't even amused, actually. Speed-reading is a useful skill to have, but it's a bit like being the guy on the X-Men whose mutant power is... well, speed-reading.) The Turtle is introduced during the Ritual of Chud.

No, not this 80s "classic." But bonus points if you knew what the letters stood for without being told.

From StrangeHorizons: "This Himalayan tradition, the Ritual of Chud, requires the shaman to meet the taelus, the shape-changer, face to face. After the holy man and the monster each stick their tongues out and overlap them, "you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye" (675), Bill explains. The two then engage in a riddle contest."

(More riddling! Blaine the Mono would be happy.)

Anyway, so there I am in 8th grade, reading this, and suddenly the main hero mentally "bites tongues" with the main villain. Like something out of Marvel's Secret Wars, they then rocket through spacetime towards something called "the Deadlights" beyond all conception of reality. Before they get there, Bill speaks with a giant, cosmic turtle who, it is revealed, created the universe once by vomiting it up. He tells Bill, basically, Nice to meet you and all, but you better get your head in the game, and I take no part in these affairs...

And, then he's done. When Bill, Ritchie and Pennywise Chud-it-out for a second time, Pennywise tells them the turtle is dead. (But, he isn't, don't worry.) And that's that. Wait, what? Yep. I remember thinking 'What the hell is this cosmic turtle stuff?' when I read it in the 80s. And probably would have this time, as well, had I not been reading the Dark Towers. Still, this is kind of... stoney stuff.

Speaking of being stoned, I got this image for Turtle Island (aka North America according to Gary Snyder and others) from a site for "Uniting the Indigenous Peoples to Create the Indigo Bridge." More power to them and all (sincerely) but damn! BLAAOW! I think Rusted Root's CD sales just shot up from my typing those words.

So, we don't really learn much about the Turtle here except that he exists, floats in the space beyond all rational meaning, maybe created the universe while he was hungover, and, you know, maybe he just sort of died. If I sound critical or mocking of this, let me also say I look forward to finding out more about the Turtle in the last few Dark Tower books, but it's clear it's a benevolent force that, despite what it tells Bill, does help King protagonists from time to time. I kind of love the cosmic randomness of the Turtle's introduction and would have it no other way.

Next, one of King's most popular creations, Pennywise the Clown aka IT. There is a good summation of what exactly it is at the SK wiki. But "evil shape-shifting clown" works as a placeholder.

Part of Pennywise's popularity is due to Tim Curry's performance in the TV adaptation.

Funny, disturbing, memorable. (And that clip above is rather shockingly suggestive, isn't it? Creepy.)

A performance equal to Dennis Hopper's "Frank" from Blue Velvet.

Not that I'm comparing it to Blue Velvet.

Overall, the TV adaptation is a failure, I think, but we'll get to that momentarily. It has its moments, to be sure, but it is only a dim echo of the novel. Tim Curry's Pennywise, though, seems to have settled comfortably into the collective unconscious, another constellation next to Cujo, Christine, Children of the Corn, and Red Rum.

Why, h-h-h-hi, B-b-b-b-b-b-ill!

As I mentioned when I covered "The Library Policeman," Pennywise may or may not be related to some other King villains. (Mr. Linoge from Storm of the Century? I'd like to see a Deadlights family tree.)

And The Loser's Club, our heroes.

Top row: Ben, Stan, Ritchie, Pennywise (photobomb!) and Eddie. Bottom row: Mike, Beverly, and Stuttering Bill.

As kids.

All richly-drawn and detailed, and each serves the plot/ brings a unique weapon to the fight against It.

Guest cameo: Richard "Dick" Halloran: A chef in Derry Army E Company. He's only in it for a hot minute, saving Mike Hanlon's father at the fire at the Black Spot. I'd forgotten all about this (and if I ever learned it to begin with, I forgot that, too) so this was a pleasant surprise. And if you're asking yourself Who the hell is Dick Halloran? you're going to kick yourself once you find out. You almost wish you could reach in the novel and tell him to never under any circumstances accept a job in Colorado.

TRAIL NOTES

- Okay, this came out in 1986.

Here's the cover of the copy I had back then.

Here's the copy I got this year for $3.50 at Myopic.(The Shakespeare and Co. of Chicago! The That's Entertainment of Used Bookstores Everywhere!)

Open to the publication page of this last copy and what do you see?

First Signet Printing 1981?

I have it on good authority that "there must have been some misprints; the novel was unquestionably NOT published in 1981... an excerpt from it -- called "The Bird and the Album" -- WAS published (in the program for that year's World Fantasy Convention, which was called A Fantasy Reader) in 1981.  So maybe that's where the confusion comes from. I've got three copies of the book, and they all say 1986.  So if yours says 1981, odds are you are the owner of a potentially valuable misprint."

Or, I have one that was published on a different level of the Dark Tower, which is the theory I prefer. I'm tempted to write 'PROPERTY OF JAKE CHAMBERS' on the inside cover.

To complicate matters, go to Amazon and they list the book as being published in 1987! Get it together, internet.

- The band Shark Puppy from Duma Key is not a real band, but King quotes one of their "songs" a few times in the text. If you look at the copyright page at the beginning of the book, you see: Permission to use lyrics from "Dig" by Shark Puppy (R. Tozier, W. Denbrough), granted by Bad Nineteen Music, copyright 1986. R. Tozier and W. Denbrough are, of course, Ritchie and Stuttering Bill. Nice touch.

- Who wouldn't watch a 'Tales from Derry' ongoing show? I sure would.

TRAIL DIFFICULTY

Fans of short reads (or short blogs) will not be pleased... but, for what it's worth, the book reads pretty quickly. It is definitely the proverbial "page-turner." I was on page 800-something before I realized Crikey, I'm on page 800-something! 

"Beep Beep, Ritchie!" appears in this novel around 100,000 times. I'd like to think whomever made this clip below is commenting on that.

Along those lines, although it didn't bother me, Bill's stuttering might be a stumbling block for some readers. It's an essential part of his character, so I wouldn't change a thing, but the stutters plus the 'Beep Beep's really add to the page count.

Henry Bowzer, the bully/psycho of the book, is one of those flush-the-psychic-toilet-type villains. Everything negative is loaded up and dumped on him. An Alpha Male of racism, anti-semitism, etc. He does come off as truly menacing, though, which is no small feat when you're sharing bad-guy-center-stage with Pennywise. But for my personal taste, Henry was a bit overdone.

And, well, let's just look it straight in the face. At the end of the book, after the final confrontation/ egg-stomping with It, the Losers Club loses its way in the sewers. Beverly steps up to the plate to save them. And by that, I mean, she has sex with everyone, one at a time. Everyone settles in for a nice old-fashioned romantic sewer gangbang.

King's explanation: "I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."

Strange Horizons' take: "Beverly, the only girl in the circle, presents a special case; she employs no material talisman, but the power of her awakening sexuality. When the circle threatens to fall apart after the first defeat of It, causing the children to lose their way in the tunnels beneath the Barrens, Bev, like a priestess, recreates the bond by coupling with each of the boys. King here seems to allude to the familiar magical motif of a virgin sacrifice, but again he sets the image in a context of personal spiritual power, not the rituals of an organized cult. "There was power in this act, all right," Bev reflects, "a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep" (1082). When she experiences her first orgasm (with Ben), "she feels her power suddenly shift to him; she gives it gladly and goes with it" (1084), forging the necessary connection."

Samuel L. Jackson's take:

I really don't know what to say about this one. I guess there are aspects of both explanations that make sense to me, but at the end of the day, this still strikes me as wrong. Not in the won't someone please think of the children sense, but in the not-sure-if-this-actually-works sense. This sequence is the only thing (not counting the random wtf-ness of The Turtle) that keeps It from being an unreserved masterpiece. (Though really, how could you put it up against anything that doesn't have a cosmic turtle/ pre-teen sewer gangbang? It's a category of one.) But flippancy aside, it truly is both a remarkably well-constructed novel and a wholly absorbing read.

I wonder, actually, why it's never been targeted by angry groups, of any variety (it's easy to imagine both hardcore feminists and hardcore offended-about-un-Christian-values/communism uniting on this front, something as rare as the transit of the Venus). Not even so much why but how. (shrugs)

(I'd love it if Chris Columbus revealed this was his original idea for the ending for The Goonies. If I were him, I'd have been telling that joke since the late 80's.)

SCENIC VIEW 

Like The Stand, but even more-so, this suffers from an attempt to PG-ify definitely-R-rated material. (Hell, X-rated: unsurprisingly, the filmmakers chose not to portray the tweener sewer get-down in their adaptation.) Whereas Pennywise, as aforementioned, comes across in all his lunatic glory, Henry Bowzer does not. This was a time on American TV where you could still use "the n-word" if you put it in the mouth of a racist, but even so, Henry's effectiveness is nullified somewhat.

That's perhaps the problem. Excising the material of anything not-ready-for-prime-time fatally injures the story. (Although this:

is very funny to me.)

The casting is good (I remember being truly surprised by John Ritter in this back in 1990; I'd only ever seen him in Three's Company and Real Men); the direction is fine. Excepting the above, everything hums along fine for the first hour or so. So what ruins it? Basically, this:

Not only does it look cheesy as hell, but it ret-cons the whole damn story. All it takes is a couple of rocks to kill It? What the hell you so worried about, then, Losers? And without any of the Ritual of Chud stuff, what are we to make of the scary clown suddenly being this spider-creature? Just a terrible filmmaking choice. I don't know if they ran out of time/ money or what, but damn. I sympathize. I'm curious as hell as to how Cary Fukanada plans to pull it off.

Finally, I should mention that Jonathan Brandis, the actor who played Stuttering Bill, committed suicide at the age of 27. From his wiki: "Paul Petersen, president of A Minor Consideration—an organization that deals with issues affecting child actors—stated, 'Speculations as to the underlying cause of this tragedy are exactly that: speculations. It serves no purpose to leap to conclusions for none of us will really know what led Jonathan to his decision to take his life.'" True enough, so I won't offer any. Just my condolences.

RIP, buddy; you were a good Stuttering Bill.

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

NEXT!

INSOMNIA