King's Highway pt. 68: 11/22/63

11/22/63 is the tale of one Roy Winston, a successful real estate agent, who comes into possession of new evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Cubans, and the Russians all vie for control of this evidence, and Roy is thrown into a world of…

…What’s that? That’s not what the book is about?

Right you are, of course. The above description is for 11/22/1963: New Evidence by Roy Widing. I mistakenly read about half of this on the Kindle before realizing my mistake. In my defense, the Kindle came to me pre-loaded as a gift, but I somehow convinced myself the different-author's name on the menu screen was either a glitch or referred to something else, the way an iTunes or Windows Media menu selection will sometimes list the publisher/ author and not the artist in the artist-column. 

I'd like to think I'd have realized the mistake sooner had I had to take the physical book off the shelf every morning, but, as you Kindle readers out there know, once you move past the menu page, each power-on/power-off takes you to the last page you read. Unless you make a point to go back to the menu page, in other words, you can miss the author's name once and never see it again, if you're just charging through the text. As I was. 

First World Problems, as the kids say today... or, perhaps just a McSpace-Cadet Problem. As the percentage-completed bar moved along the bottom of the screen, I started wondering both when the time travel was going to come into play and how the hell I was getting through it so fast. Also, why characters were speaking in such un-King ways. (Lots of characters spending half a page hanging up a phone, i.e. “Anything else?” “No.” “I'll speak to you soon.” “Good.” “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” And speaking aloud, i.e. “The first thing I have to do is call a lawyer,” Roy said aloud.) Not to mention the general And now I'm attacked by the Russians! sort of stuff. Nothing against Mr. Widing's style or story - it's fine for what it is, it's just not King. The tone really struck me as “off,” while reading. Well, no wonder!

I'll get to the King novel momentarily, I just wanted to say I am in no way trashing Widing's book. He didn't, after all, set out to write a Stephen King book, so my reaction going through it proceeded from false premises.  If you like JFK-fiction/ordinary-guys-caught-in-spy-suspense sort of stuff, it's a fine read. I admire the self-publishers of the world and wish him and the book all success.

With no further ado, then...

THE PLOT: Jake Epping, a recently-divorced Lisbon Falls, ME schoolteacher who is “not a crying man,” is recruited by Al, the proprietor of a local diner that has a portal to the past in its stockroom, to travel back in time and assassinate Lee Harvey Oswald. Al has taken extensive notes on Oswald's life and fervently believes preventing the JFK assassination will save hundreds of thousands of lives and change the world for the better. Jake accepts and as “George Amberson,” steps into the past (the time portal opening always onto the same day in 1958) armed only with Al's Oswald notes, a suitcase filled with silver-certificate dollars, and a list of sports-winners from '58 to '63. 

Shades of Biff Tannen from Back to the Future II, that last part.

Before I go any further: I managed (as my Roy-Widing misadventures illustrate) to steer clear of almost all spoilers for this book, so let me say: if you have any inkling to read this book, please read no further. I won't be offended, and if you're anything like me, you'll enjoy discovering how the story unfolds for yourself.  It's a great book, and not knowing how things turned out kept me reading at a feverish pace. I'd hate to dilute the same experience for you, but there's little point in my discussing it here without revealing key twists and turns.

Still with me? On with the show, then: Jake (as George Amberson) ends up in Jodie, TX, where he keeps eyes on Oswald in Ft. Worth while teaching first part-time then full-time at the high school. He ends up making friends and falling in love. (I'm skipping a lot of the sub-plots, here, not because I didn't like them - I actually loved them and think they're the heart of the novel - but just to keep it moving) 

“The past is obdurate,” Jake notes throughout, and it seeks to protect the universe from unraveling by throwing everything it can in Jake's way. 

He succeeds, nevertheless, at his mission...

but at great cost. Sadie (the woman he meets, with whom he falls in love, and who ends up a full partner in his mission) is killed, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Each trip to the past creates a new “harmonic chime” that didn't exist before. The more pronounced the chime/ changed event, the stronger the repercussion. By saving Kennedy, he discovers upon returning to the present, he's doomed the world to dissolution. Earthquakes, nuclear fallout, political chaos: the world, like a pane of glass beset by a thousand powerful tuning forks struck at once, is shattering. All of the positive changes he and Al hoped would result from saving Kennedy do not come to pass. “Bombay never became Mumbai. What it became was radioactive ash in a cancer-wind.”

To save the world, therefore, he must travel again to the past, which acts as a “re-set.” He does so, and the timeline is restored. Jake, now no longer “an un-crying man,” travels to Texas to see Sadie on her 80th birthday, and he asks her to dance.

Dancing is a major theme of this book. Which, given the other themes of the book, brought to mind the Nataraja, i.e. Shiva's dancing form. For a quick summary, see here. 

 

Time travel is theoretically possible in the realm of quantum physics, and as noted QP author Fritjof Capra in his fascinating book The Tao of Physics (which I read on one horrendous bus journey from Georgia to Ohio several years ago) “every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction…without end…For the modern physicists, then Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena.” Someone more learned in Hinduism should dissect the book from this angle; I imagine it would be quite illuminating.

THE ASSASSINATION

“Who killed Kennedy? Can't you see that it was not me? I wasn't here in 1963!” - Boat Chips, Richard Nixon? (1999)

When it comes to the Kennedy assassination, you're talking to a guy who has a postcard from Dealey Plaza tacked to his cubicle wall at work. * You're talking to a guy who watched all nine hours of Evidence of Revision. You're talking to a guy who watched an entire three-hour lecture by Jim Marrs author of Crossfire: the Plot that Killed Kennedy filmed from one static angle off-stage, which is like watching a Powerpoint presentation from the hall, or something. All of which, so far as knowing anything about “what really happened,” means nothing, just that it's been a hobby of sorts for years. More than a hobby: the 60s assassinations in general - from JFK's to RFK's to Malcolm X's to the tens of thousands of the Phoenix Program, (these days they call it “the disposition matrix”) as detailed in Alan Moore's and Bill Sienkiewicz's Brought to Light (aka The Secret Team) or Bill Moyers Secret Government - are essential American history and a pivotal foundation of my political worldview.

* Certainly not because of any ghoulish anti-Kennedy stance or anything, just have been fascinated by the various conspiracy theories ever since I saw JFK in 1991.

So, you'd figure I'd blow my top at all of the above being dismissed out-of-hand by King in this story. “Nah, Oswald acted alone; if you think differently, you wear a tinfoil hat” is more or less his position in the afterword. (Amusing, too, since he admits his wife believes there was a conspiracy; I hope she slapped him upside the head for that one.) But, you'd figure wrong. I mean, if the Warren Commission is a work of fiction, a) I'm hardly a “man in the know;” I'm just some guy, b) King is free to think anything he damn well pleases, naturally, and c) well, 11/22/63 purports to be nothing but a work of fiction, so, what difference does it make? My only concern reading this was if the story worked, not whether or not King's position on the Kennedy assassination dovetails with my own. 

Sure it would have been a blast for such a high-profile author as King go even deeper into the shadowy world of George DeMohrenshildt...

or his intriguing connections to George Bush, Sr. and what he might know/ have known. (And no, I won't link to any sites; I'm probably on enough lists already, thank you very much) But is it necessary to do so to tell the story he wants to tell here? I don't think so.

This isn't really a novel about the Kennedy assassination. I mean, it is, certainly, but it's less about who really killed him and more about our interaction with the past, nostalgia vs. reality, and the dance of spacetime. Not to mention just the idea of time travel itself. As such, it has more in common with Hot Tub Time Machine than it does with something like Don DeLillo's Libra.

Quite a different take on Oswald in this one.

But, before moving on, I will go on record as saying Occam's Razor i.e. that famous axiom that states “All things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably correct,” something with which I nine times out of ten agree and that King quotes a few times as rationale for his approach, is not the most apt axiom to keep in mind when thinking about JFK/ Oswald. 

The problem is precisely the “all things being equal” part of that equation. If only they were/ had been! 

TIME TRAVEL

I couldn't help but think of “City on the Edge of Forever” a few times while reading this story. 

Not only are several of the plot points similar, it also involves the sacrifice of the main character's one-true-love upon the altar of changing the future for the better.

Star Trek has given us more mechanics of time travel stories than any sci-fi franchise this side of Doctor Who. Interestingly enough, Roddenberry's enduring idea for a Trek movie was to have Kirk, Spock and the gang travel back to 1963 and stop the Kennedy assassination. Apparently, the Paramount folks stopped taking his calls on the subject, after a certain point.

One of the most intriguing time travel tales of the last few years is this Spanish film, Los Cronocrimenes. Just wanted to mention one of them; there are, of course, hundreds.

It's easy to see why time travel stories have such a hold on our dreaming unconscious. The tug of What if...? is powerful, probably as powerful as the suspicion that if we could go back and change something, we'd somehow make things worse, no matter how carefully we plan things out.

All right, one last Trek reference, damn it. (Tapestry, ST: TNG, s6, e15)

As an entry in the time travel fiction genre, 11/22/63 is as solid as they come. It evokes both the pleasure (real soft drinks, Elm trees, trust and politeness as something to be expected...) and the poison (...so long as you're Caucasian, that is; sexual repression, etc.) of the late fifties and early sixties. As a love story, it touches your heart; the end has real pathos, and the epilogue, “Citizen of the Century” (suggested, according to King, by his son Joe Hill) is as moving as anything King has ever written. As an engaging narrative, for me, it's first-rate. Some reviews I read suggest too much time is spent fleshing out Jake/ George's time in the past. We see him putting on school plays and touching kids' lives and placing bets and buying spy equipment, etc. With all due respect, these readers are mistaken. Not only are these plot points pretty-unsubtle-manifestations of the themes and motifs of the larger story (all the world's to me a stage and we are merely players, as someone (ahem) once said) they also play to King's greatest strength as a storyteller: his abiding interest in people over plot, of taking his time and letting the reader settle into a setting, of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. 

One quick thing - in the days following Jake/George's saving Kennedy, an earthquake hits Los Angeles, killing thousands. My first thought was to wonder what Hollywood/ baseball luminaries would've been among the victims and whether or not King looked through such a list to make sure no one was taken out whose absence would cause problems for the plot. I then went cross-eyed... Time travel is hard, man. 

SOME GREAT QUOTES IN THIS ONE

Too many to include but here are a few:

“Moxie, that weirdest of sodas.”

“Living in the past was a little like living underwater and breathing through a tube.”

“Explanations are such cheap poetry.”

“'Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?'

(Al) stared at me, baffled. 'Why the fuck would you do that?'”

“Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.”

“Humans were built to look back; that's why we have that swivel joint in our necks” 

And has King ever so poetically and comprehensively summarized the theme of one of his works as he does with the following?

“...for a moment, everything was clear, and when that happens, you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? it's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms, men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who mistrust what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.” 

DARK TOWER CONNECTIONS?

- Upon returning to the present, Jake sees a Takuru Spirit, a car familiar to any Dark Tower readers. (He does not, unless I missed it, see any evidence of Nozz-a-La soda.)

- The chimes throughout and the “thinnie” of the time portal reminded me of Todash. 

- Naturally, Vermont Yankee (a nuclear power plant) exploded on June 19th, 1999. 

- I couldn't help but wonder if the ending of Ur, where the Low Men visit Wesley Smith, confiscate his Ur-Kindle and scold him for interfering with the timestream, came to mind while plotting/ writing this one. It almost works as an alternative-ending to 11/22/63, one which would place it more conspicuously in the Dark Tower verse. Just a thought/ speculation, certainly not something I felt was missing or anything.

For more on the Dark Tower connections, check out this interesting discussion over at The Truth Inside the Lie. 

THE YELLOW CARD MAN

Outside of the portal in Al's diner, we meet the Yellow Card Man, so called for the color of the card tucked into the band of his hat. We learn at novel's end that this character is a guard (of sorts) to the portal, but proximity to the harmonic-strings-in-flux scrambles his brains. As Jake returns to the past, the color of the card changes, first from yellow to red...

In football, of course, a yellow is a warning; a red is hit the showers.

... and then from red to black, when Jake discovers the Yellow Card Man dead on his second-to-last trip to the past. Jake speculates that the color represents the state of harmony (or disharmony) of the guardian's mind vis-a-vis the correct timestream.

I'd very much like to read this story of the same name by Paolo Bacigalupi. I imagine some fun parallels to 11/22/63 await discovery therein, but I could be wrong. Either way, (chime).

DERRY

From Kev’s review:

“Most interesting for readers – aside from running into some favorite (and least favorite) characters from It – is witnessing Derry from an adult perspective in 1958. While It never glossed over the dangers of its child characters, readers experience their adventures through the mostly naïve eyes of children and, later, through the sheen of nostalgia. An adult from 2011 (and, maybe more importantly, an outsider), Jake Epping quite adeptly senses the past Derry as a Bad Place, as tinctured with bad feelings and intent as The Overlook in The Shining, the Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot, or the eponymous Black House. In this way, 11/22/63 becomes a more vital continuation of It than either Insomnia (set in Derry and featuring an older Mike Hanlon) or Dreamcatcher (featuring the ominous graffito PENNYWISE LIVES.)”

Interesting. Though, I must confess, I didn't see Bev's and Ritchie's appearance as adding all that much to the plot, here. It is perhaps the only section I'd cut. It doesn't ruin anything, just doesn't add much, for me.

Great book. One of the King's best, to be sure.

King's Highway pt. 67: Desperation

"Life is more than just steering a course around pain."

THE NOVEL

Mining operations in the town of Desperation, Nevada unearth Tak, an ancient "outsider" demon imprisoned deep within the earth; its physical form is too big to escape, but its anime can possess human hosts and foment murder and chaos. Unfortunately, for it (and those unlucky enough to host it) it first alters and ultimately burns them out in the process. A group of passers-through (and the survivors of its rampage through town) are captured by Entragion, the lunatic-Sheriff possessed by Tak... or are they gathered together by God for the purpose of stopping Tak / keeping it holed-away far under the earth? Either way, hi-jinks, as they often will, ensue, Tak is re-sealed in his prison under the earth, and the survivors recycle back to the world.

"Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV." - Stephen King.

In the 90s, three themes dominate King's work: his recovery, "feminist consciousness," and God. At least two of those themes intersect in Desperation, and one of them (God) gets center-stage. And was, for this reader, handled a bit more compellingly in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. While Desperation is by no means a bad book, it went on a bit too long for this reader, and some of the "God" discussion (though not all of it) is a bit creaky. Between it and its "companion star," I prefer The Regulators. Though I don't think either would qualify as my go-to exploration of the themes their author assigns to them. (Evaluated together as one work examining God and Television, even less so)

Still, it's a fun read, at least most of it.

King examines this movie a bit in Danse Macabre; one wonders if its themes percolated in mind for years before sitting down to write Desperation. I don't know it well enough to speculate, though.

This one, on the other hand...! Granted, the "mining operations uncover ancient evil" trope is hardly unique to King's novel, but there are more than a few parallels between the two works. (And Nevada could be a stand-in for Mars; ask anyone who's ever flown over it)

The title comes both from the story's setting and something The Man with the Yankees Cap (grrr) says during David Carver's (i.e. the boy who talks to God) brief foray into The Land of the Dead, near novel's end:

"The opposite of faith is unbelief. The first (disbelief) is natural, the second willful. And (...) the spiritual state of unbelief is desperation."

This state is perhaps best encapsulated by the character of Johnny Marinville, whom we'll get to in a bit. 

TAK 

The novel charges out of the gate with Entragion's gathering of the protagonists.

"'That's when I started to think he must be crazy, because (nothing he said) made sense.'

'I see holes like eyes,' Mary said.

Billignsley nodded. 'Yeah, like that. My head is full of blackbirds, that's another one I remember... They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person."

Played with considerable relish by Ron Perlman in the 2006 TV adaptation.

Perhaps it's just a bit of King Fatigue (i.e. that inevitable feeling after tearing through the guy's catalog like this over the last eight months), but King's overused-villain-tropes collide in the character of Entragion/ Tak. He's got the seeing-through-animals/ mind-reading of Flagg with the inexplicable-racism/anti-semitism/what-have-you of... well, of every other King villain. Why would an ancient demon sound like a MSNBC caricature of "the enemy?" If it's meant as an amplification of latent prejudices in Entragion himself, a) we get no text-support for that, b) why is it an aspect of every King villain, novel to novel? and c) why do these attitudes remain as Tak leaps from body to body? 

The bottom line is, King's villains need more variety; they all tend to act either like Norman Daniels from Rose Madder / Big John Rennie from Under the Dome, or like Flagg/ Leland Gaunt, wherever and however they appear. That and the alien-presence-throwing-a-tantrum/no-emotional-control appears way too much. (One can almost hear the Star Trek voice-over... "These bodies... these emotions... how do you humans stand it?" In fact, doesn't Mister Gray say as much, in Dreamcatcher?)

At other times, Tak is less predictable, and therefore far more interesting, as when he tells Johnny Marinville after his capture:

"You have never written a truly spiritual novel. (...) It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx."

(Although it's a bit odd, considering later he seems as ignorant of "the God who created (Marinville)" as he claims Marinville to be here.)

That aside, Entragion's sporadic violence and non-sequiters are certainly menacing. (His addition of "I am going to kill you" to the Miranda read-em-their-rights speech is particularly effective.) I also enjoyed the can-tah, i.e. the wood carvings unearthed that are talismans for the evil spirits.

The Dark Tower connections come in two forms: Tak itself (the Outsider/ Todash demon, similar to the Outsider spirit of Bag of Bones) and the Desatoya Mountains. Also the setting for "The Little Sisters of Eluria," and the spiders of Eluria are very much in evidence here, as well. As given broader discussion here:

"Both stories take place in deserted, demon-haunted mining towns located in the Desatoya Mountains.  In both tales, the demons desire bloodshed and death.  But most remarkable of all, despite the differences between the demons of each story, both speak the same language."  (Furth) (...) Between that and the brief mention -- in both the novella and the comics -- of "Tejuas" being some 200 miles away, it seems that The Little Sisters of Eluria has major hints about how connected Roland's world is to our own.  At the very least, it seems it must be some alternate-universe version of it, probably one in the future."

That's something my mind kept turning back to while reading this. I wouldn't mind another book elaborating on these connections/ this chronology. (Added to my wishlist for further Dark Tower projects.)

Finally, what would one of my blogs be without a word from Kev:

"The imprecise nature of Tak is important. King suggests that Tak might be the literal Devil (going so far as to name the mining company that disturbed Tak's prison Diablo, meaning devil in Spanish) and that Tak exists in Hell. But suggestions and sketches are all King allows, unwilling to define Hell in literal terms. This is to the book's credit."

Agreed. Although assigning Tak the usual anachronistic prejudices as all-other-King-villains takes a chunk out of said credit. The temper tantrums are more understandable, but still somewhat repetitive.

Perlman with Matt Frewer (David Carver's father) in the TV adaptation.

GOD

Upon its release, The New York Times observed:

"God is the edgiest creation in Desperation. Remote, isolated, ironic, shrouded behind disguises, perhaps "another legendary shadow," this deity forms a sly foil, and an icy mirror, to Tak. The adjectives frequently attached to God (here) are 'strong' and 'cruel.'"

True."God is cruel, and God's cruelty is refining" is a recurring motif, particularly in the last act. Continuing from the Times review:

"Mr. King boldly refracts his supernatural horrors against some haunted American legacies. Tak, we are told, was released from the earth when modern strip miners of dubious legality accidentally blasted open an old gold lode, site of a fabled 1859 cave-in that buried alive 57 Chinese laborers. After accumulating the bitter freight of 19th-century racism and capitalist greed, Tak slides forward to the Vietnam War: David Carver's dream scrambles together an Ohio tree house his friends call ''Viet Cong Lookout'' and a Saigon bar of the same name where John Marinville drank as a correspondent in the 1960's. (...) When Tak, near the end of the novel, lodges his spirit inside an eagle, his equation with the alien impulses within the American psyche appears complete.

Yet just when Mr. King convinces us of the intensity of his Gnostic meditations, (...) he tosses everything away. Desperation concludes with an uplift that is entirely false to its own dark energy. David Carver has God all wrong, we discover in the final lines. For "God is love." How this bromide dispels Vietnam, the enslaved Chinese miners, the devastated earth or the massive millennial fervor of nearly 700 pages devoted to a ''cruel'' God and his rival demiurge, Mr. King doesn't say."

Except, he does. I'm not sure how the reviewer, here, missed the explictly-spelled-out wrap-up that God is all these things, but the rosy "Oh, God is love" ending described here is simply not the way the novel ends. I'm not saying King is entirely successful with this (he is a bit more elegant on this topic when he returns to it in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) but throughout, it is quite obvious that the "nature of God" here is more Taoist than anything. It's a mixture of the personal-God of Catholicism, interacting with humans and helping them along within the "free will" covenant, and the sort of emptiness described (among other places of course) in the Tao Te Ching:

"There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally Present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao.

(...)

Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe.

The universe follows the Tao

The Tao follows only itself." (ch. 25)

So, like or dislike King's thoughts on the subject, but the NYT reviewer is simply incorrect. Compare with the "The Other" mentioned in It, or in other places such as "The Beggar and the Diamond:"

"Uriel looked at God (as nearly as anyone - even an archangel - can look at that burning face, at least) uncertainly. "Have you given me a lesson, Lord?"
"I don't know," God said blandly, "have I?"

Or from the end of TGWLTG:

"How much of it was real?"
"All of it," he said, as if it didn't really matter. And then, again: "You did a good job."
"I was stupid to get off the path like I did, wasn't I?"
He looked at her with slight surprise, then pushed up his cap... He smiled and when he smiled, he looked young. "What path?" he said.

False idols also come into play. Tak's can tahs and can taks "reveal people's baser natures and devolve them into dangerous, obsessive behavior." (Kev again)

In this way, they are the opposing idol to the Sköldpadda seen in the Dark Tower books.

Personally, I see this sort of "God" as just another character/ deity/ presence of the Dark Tower-verse and not a theological assertion, but, as with anything that deals with faith, the supernatural, or religion, one's own views will color one's interpretation. I don't know if an atheist or a Jesuit (or a Buddhist, or a snake charmer) would have any trouble connecting to the story, and that is certainly a testament to King's storytelling abilities.

"As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer... People could make shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn't it likely that God was the same kind of thing? Just another legendary shadow?" (David Carver, pg. 458)

I could've done without the miracles performed by David Carver aspect, as well as the Communion via Three Musketeers wrapper. But meh.

Shane Haboucha (David Carver) and Annabeth Gish (Mary Jackson)

"Your God loves drunks and hates little boys!" - Brian Ross's Mom (I didn't write down the page, sorry.)

JOHNNY MARINVILLE

aka Tom Skerritt aka George Bannerman from The Dead Zone aka Evan Drake from Cheers

"Once you'd been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on publishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they will let you swing the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their asshole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what's-his-name." (Johnny Marinville, pg. 72)

That cracked me up. I don't see it (or Johnny's parting shot: Fuck the critics) as a self-assessment of any kind, but it's an insight that means more to me coming from a bona fide literary lion such as King.

Marinville's is an interesting case to consider. On one hand, his character-arc is rather straightforward. He is on a quest of redemption and realizes his salvation in heroic self-sacrifice. The traditional Christian motif, in other words. On the other, he is King's "in recovery" talisman for the novel, and in several sequences, the recovery-thoughts dovetail nicely with the God-thoughts:

"Above that - and all sides as well - the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood... but he could not deny the fact that there was something strangely attractive about it. God made you hear that sound. That sound says quitting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of emptiness and the pleasure of zero." (pp 369-370, emphasis mine)

Emptiness here meaning both the oblivion of intoxication and (perhaps) the Taoist emptiness of God.

I was rather lost by the late-innings "reveal" that Marinville was killed in Vietnam. I guess it wasn't meant as literally-killed, but it was unclear enough for me to go back and re-read several sections. I guess it has something to do with the omnipresent timespace of "God," i.e. the Vietnam-connection between Marinville and David Carver, but it just was unclear to me.

MIRROR, MIRROR

As I'm sure no one here needs to be told, this was released simultaneously with The Regulators by Richard Bachman. For a side-by-side comparison of each character, see here. Ultimately, though, I didn't find there to be any illuminating connection between the books. One reader mentions how Desperation details Tak's revenge for the events described in The Regulators. Could very well be. But if there is one explicit and defining rationale that ties the books together, I didn't find it in either text; one gets the impression it just "seemed like a cool idea."

THE MOVIE

Perlman with Henry Thomas (Peter Jackson) and director Mick Garris.

Here we have the typical directed-for-TV-by-Garris/ adapted-by-King collaboration, i.e. way too literal/ uncompartmentalized and all-too-sanitized-for-mainstream-dissemination. (My above comments re: stereotypical-King-villain-attributes aside, the material is improved by changing "New York Jews!" (i.e. what Entragion angrily calls the Jacksons) to "unisex Blue State swingles." It makes as much sense for an ancient demon to give a crap about red state/ blue state as it does for Jewish/Gentile, but the phrasing cracks me up. Changing "Fuck the critics!" to "Fuck Ann Coulter!" (or whatever exactly Johnny Marinville says) is less successful, though no less amusing.

The shots of the American Southwest were quite nice, so a (rare!) tip of the cap to Mick Garris, or more accurately, Christian Sebaldt, the cinematographer. 

And both Annabeth Gish

and Steven Weber (Steve Ames, here with Kelly Overton as Cynthia Smith) were fine.

The NY Times review of this contains this interesting observation:

"In one of movie's several climactic scenes, Tak — a Chinese demon, remember, though at some point sense has been abandoned — booms at Marinville, "The heart of the unborn commands you to stop!" To which Marinville shoots back: "Adam Sandler demands you stop! Ann Coulter demands you stop!"

Like the iconography, and the vocabulary, and the tone, the ideology of "Stephen King's Desperation" is all mixed up. This first-rate movie is also a chthonic mess. Mr. King has once again slammed his hand flat on all the buttons, and everything is lit up."

I agree that lines / juxtapositions like that work against the film rather than for it. But to characterize this as a "first-rate movie" is a bit wild. For example:

Man, that's funny. I recommend watching that first ten or twelve seconds multiple times; the hilarity is cumulative. Mick and Stephen, when they get together, just can't resist that bad  make-up and pop-out crap like this but here, it's a real LOL. I must have said "TAK-A-LA!" in response to my cat's endless-meowing a million times this past week.

That's almost an "I Am Kirok!" moment, i.e. a perfect storm of an actor doing seventy-five in a schoolzone / plain-ol' sci-fi weirdness. Almost but not quite - neither the script nor the rest of the film is hitting on "I am Kirok" cylinders. Still, as evidenced below, someone else has at least begun the process of "meme-ing:"

Perlman does a bang-up job as the psycho-sheriff, and a less (or a lot more) self-consciousness film could sincerely transform the whole thing into a cult classic. But, in its present form, it's just not there.

Finally, I enjoyed this:

An effective (and unexpected) way of demonstrating the backstory. All in all, it's probably the best thing Mick Garris and Stephen King have ever collaborated on, or that the former has ever done. 

But, as an adaptation, however unofficial, of the book, I'll stick with Ghosts of Mars.

NEXT: Under the Dome or 11/22/63. (The End of the Highway approacheth.)