Night Shift Part Two

Night Shift continues in much the same vein as before, providing chilling accounts of the ordinary, with some paranormal or alien plots thrown in for good measure.

Sometimes They Come Back is a horrific tale of a man haunted by ghosts – both literal and figurative – from a night when he was younger and a group of boys killed his older brother.  Jim Norman is an English teacher – for a change – troubled by the incident involving his brother when he was nice years old, walking home and being jumped by a group of ruffians with a switchblade knife.  After he starts a new job in a new town, he is terrified to come face-to-face with one of the perpetrators, who somehow has not aged a day since the incident.  As more and more pupils disappear from his class, to be replaced with all of those responsible for his brother’s death, he realises that he must face his demons once and for all.  What is startling about this short story is the fear it produces, not only of others, but of the power within each of us.  He summons the spirit of his brother, who deals swiftly with the attackers – but it ends on a haunting line that whilst you can summon the dead, and “perhaps cause them to do your work... But sometimes they come back.”  He is still haunted, even after all he has been through, by the thought that “maybe the nightmare wasn’t over after all”.

Strawberry Spring is a bit of a hit-and-miss story, an account of a serial killer in the vein of Jack the Ripper walking the foggy nights on a University campus.  Told from the perspective of one of the students on campus, the cliff-hanger is somewhat predictable, showing that perhaps it was an unreliable first-person narrative after all.

As in Battleground before it, The Ledge tells the story of a man, forced by the husband of his beloved, to compete in a “wager” for money, freedom and the woman.  The narrator, Norris, is a tennis coach who has fallen in love with Cressner, a man from the “Organisation” – much like the anti-hero from Battleground – and is challenged to walk around the edge of the building, forty-odd stories up.  With no choice but to do it or face life in prison, he accepts the wager.  It is a Hitchcockian thriller, one man facing his fears for all that he holds dear.  The kicker here is in the ending, where the truth comes out and Cressner is forced to do the same thing, with the open ending “Cressner said he’s never welshed on a bet – but I’ve been known to”.

One of the most obscure and disturbing stories in this collection is The Lawnmower Man, thankfully nothing like the dreadful film created and apparently inspired by the short story – a claim which King refutes vehemently, and took the publishers of the film to court over.  Principally about a man realising he is unable to continue mowing his own lawn after an horrific event involving a neighbour’s cat and hiring help, it centres on the so-called Lawnmower Man, a huge man with a tremulous stomach and bizarre methods.  The description of the Lawnmower Man is disgusting, but we are lulled into a false sense of security as Harold realises “now he had placed the man, and everything was alright”.  The scenes on the lawn, however, are anything but alright – the eponymous grasscutter is naked, devouring all that the lawnmower automatically produces as it mows the lawn, following it on hands and knees as his stomach swells, green juices running down his chin.  The description is nauseating, and the explanation is bizarre – the boss, “Pan”, likes things to be done this way...

Quitters, Inc. is a fantastic piece on the power of addiction and the lengths to which some go to manage their own will power.  Ostensibly through emotional blackmail and the threat of physical danger, a company ensures that people quit smoking – for if they don’t, their loved ones will be tortured and maimed, and they will be murdered if they lapse more than nine times.  Whilst it is an outrageous premise, deplorable considering the stance on human rights it neglects, it works fantastically well.  After their treatment, the ‘victims’ feel hugely improved, and are responsible for spreading word of the company by word of mouth.   The scenes within the office, as Mr Donatti proclaims the truth about Romanticism and Pragmatism, are exquisitely crafted.  This isn’t horror – it is a psychological warning which rings true throughout – worryingly so.

The next story sees King return to his typical genre – I Know What You Need is the tale of a girl wooed by a boy’s apparent knowledge and understanding about everything to do with her, and pleasing her exactly as she wants.  Following her first meeting, she is haunted by the thoughts of Edward Jackson Hamner Jr, and following the death of her fiancé in a car accident, falls utterly in love with him.  Of course, there is more to it than meets the eye, and the discovery of voodoo dolls and mystical tomes in his wardrobe proves that he was manipulating her all along, having loved her since he first saw her in primary school years before, but who she has no memory of.  The sense of eeriness around Edward’s character is fantastic, as his past is dragged up by Beth’s roommate Alice.  Her exclamation that it is not love, rather “rape”, is disturbing.  When she invades his home, with doubts in her mind, there is a whisper of The Shining about it, as she recalls the Grimm tale of Bluebeard and his wives.  Likewise, it harks back to Strawberry Spring’s locations, set on the same campus.

Children of the Corn is probably King’s best known work from this selection of stories, principally due to the incredibly good film adaptation – a young couple stumbling across a town devoid of adults and wrapped up in religious mania – but here it is shorter, more succinct and as such even tenser.  Unlike in the film, the couple in question are not a loving couple, but a bitter, resentful pair, desperately trying to make their marriage work by spending some quality time together, knowing full-well that it will make no difference whatsoever.  From the discovery of the dead child on the road, through to their trip into Gatlin, their marriage deteriorates further and further – where the tragedy should have brought them together, it is the stubbornness of each party which causes the rift to widen and as such leads to their demise.  In particular, Burt’s stubbornness to accept that his wife, Vicky, was right all along leads to her being trapped in the car as the children swarm, armed with jack-knives, rocks and hammers – “Rural weapons”.  Dressed in Quaker clothing, they sacrifice the adults to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”, a concept which will be further expanded upon in The Stand.

The next story, along with the final one, seems so unKing that they seem to have no place in this collection whatsoever, and yet they are two of his finest pieces.  Where others rely on shock and horror to create discomfort in the reader, here it is the breakdown of the family unit, and guilt over lack of connection, which preys on the reader’s sensibilities.  The Last Rung on the Ladder tells the tale of a brother and sister brought together by courage, as they perform daring stunts in the hayloft of their barn.  When the ladder collapses, leaving Kitty dangling seventy feet above the bare wooden floor, it is the speed of the brother’s quick-thinking which saves the girl from certain death.  This act brings the two closer together than ever before, but it is the gradual distance – which Larry feels responsible for – which has torn the two apart again, and the suicide note from Kitty at the end of the story is filled with remorse for a life wasted – “it would have been better for me if that last rung had broken.”  It is hauntingly desolate.

The Man Who Loved Flowers is a short and bittersweet tale of a man in love, buying a gift for his beloved before meeting her in a dark alleyway, and smashing her skull in with a hammer.  She isn’t his Nora, and never will be – but he is trapped in a never-ending charade where he goes to see her anyhow.  It is depressingly vivid, a tale of the broken-hearted, and the language used is particularly effective – it is described in simple, gentle prose, with heavy use of repetition for dramatic effect – the “spill of flowers fell out of his hand, the spill spilled... spilling red, white, yellow tea-roses” along with the blood of the innocent young girl.

One for the Road works as an effective end-note for ‘Salem’s Lot, reinforcing the work of Ben and Mark at the end of that novel.  Set during a blizzard some years after the novel, in a neighbouring town, it is a tale of courage as two locals go out to face the demons of the town in the hopes of saving a young family.  The descriptions of both mother and child, beautiful and perfect in their death, standing “on top of the snow, no tracks in any direction” are superb.

The last story in the novel shows the true versatility with which King can write – as with The Last Rung on the Ladder, The Woman in the Room features nothing atypical of the horror genre, and yet is still haunting in its desolate description of the love of a family, and the hardship faced by a son who wishes to put his mother out of her cancer-enforced misery.  The disconnected narrative flows through a series of events, leaving one to move onto another event with flickering ease, like the disconnected thoughts of someone in their final moments.  He hates that he must watch his mother in her endless suffering, paralysed and uncomprehending in her final days, weeks or years, and so decides to commit euthanasia.  Matricide, even,  The love which he has for this shell of a woman, this ghost in her bedroom, is what makes the story all the more poignant – and after the pills are administered, that he considers forcing her to vomit them back up, to save her, before realising “he could never hit his mother” is an emotional tour-de-force.

Night Shift Part One

Night Shift is one of those Stephen King books that I have very, very fond memories of acquiring.  Whilst I’ve always loved his writing, and grabbed his material with both hands whenever possible, this particular collection, and his novel Duma Key, are two which I will always hold in fond memory.  They were each purchased whilst I travelled Europe with my partner – a passage around Europe which began with a clapped-out camper van and ended with us both in a tent for the 3 months we travelled due to engine troubles.  Whilst in Amsterdam, only the second stop of our journey, I had already devoured two-thirds of the books I had taken with us (just over a week in) and so I was delighted to discover in a service station not only a Stephen King book, but one which I had never even heard of – it was a new release, and so there was no hype about it.  This was Duma Key.  And it went down in solid chunks, read within a day and a half of buying it, with the ferocity with which I usually approach King’s new material.

My second purchase, and the only other of that holiday, was Night Shift, a collection of short stories which, somehow, I had never stumbled across before.  This was in the south of Spain, nearing the end of our journey – I had already been reduced to reading The Stand for the third time in those three months as I had nothing new to approach – my supply of Terry Pratchett, James Herbert and, of course, Stephen King, had dried up, so I was resorting to reading and rereading the same old things.  Oddly enough, in Europe, whilst they have an impressive number of literary releases, very few of them are in English.  I was screwed – marooned in foreign lands with nothing fresh to read.  So when we stumbled across this campsite, a veritable village in its own right, utterly self-sufficient with shops, bars and restaurants, I hit a goldmine – there, peeking between tattered copies of Mills and Boone semi-porno novels and tatty classics like Dracula and Frankenstein, it stood, begging for me to absorb it into my consciousness.  And I did.  My god, how I absorbed it.  Because I knew this book!  I had never read it before, but most of the stories had already been burnt into my cerebrum, through gossip with other fans and through film.  A huge number of these stories have been put onto film – short stories adapted by the master himself.  Three of them were instantly recognisable because of other works I knew – two were a prologue and epilogue of sorts to ‘Salem’s Lot, and one was linked to my most-thumbed King edition, The Stand.

But I get ahead of myself.

My intention is to look at each of these gems, in turn, starting with Jerusalem’s Lot, the first of the collection.  As we can tell from the title, the plot of this little gem is closely linked the third novel released, and officially the last King title if we discount the ‘Bachman’-penned Rage.  A prequel of sorts, it tells the story of Charles Boone, our narrator, and his discovery of dark rituals and mysterious goings-on in the town of the title.  Told in an epistolary format, addressed to “Bones”, we follow the discovery of vampires and a worm from the 18^th century which has enveloped the town in a shroud of death and pestilence.  This story works as an effective prequel specifically to any that have read ‘Salem’s Lot, but works as a stand-alone tale of fear too.  The endnote of the story is particularly haunting, as we discover that Boone is not the last of his line, and as such the misdemeanours of his family are set to be repeated further down the line.  The narrative flows like a HP Lovecraft wonder, rich in intrigue and striking a perfect balance between language and mood. 

Graveyard Shift is one of those darkly sardonic little gems which you can’t help but love.  Whilst the characterisation is a little scant, and motives are left mostly uncovered, it doesn’t affect the piece at all, with a snappy pace.  In the end, though, the motive is irrelevant – it’s a dark tale of a man pushed by senior management to commit what turns out to be his undoing.  He is desperate to prove his worth, no matter the cost.  Unlike Rage before it, though, we do actually side with Hall – Warwick is a despicable man, a typical middle-management type with a bee in his bonnet, and an understandable loathing of rats and bats – “gah!”   Some nice touches from this story include Wiskonsky’s “sour prophecy ‘Somebody’ll get hurt’”.  Also, the Orange Crush Thermometer which reappears later.  As I have said in earlier blogs, for King, it is these touches which make him a cut above the other writers of the genre – we are, as an audience, asked to make connections.  When locations are mentioned in brief passing, we must remember where we’ve heard the name before.

Night Surf served as the inspiration for The Stand¸ and tells of an evening for a group of late-teens who have hightailed to the beach to get away from A6, a virus killing off the population in droves – also known as Captain Trips – which seems like “flu – he’s all swelled up”.  It works almost as a coming-of-age story, like those of The Body, but with a particularly morbid twist – the discovery of a man stricken with the illness is pulled from his car and the group set fire to him, offering a sacrifice.  As our narrator and his pal discuss it, Needles shrugs about the agony suffered by the man as he dies – “Doesn’t matter”.  The bitter realisation that they are not immune, despite their earlier thoughts that having had A2 meant they wouldn’t catch it because one of their own has the tell-tale signs is dreadful, imagining themselves as the last people on Earth, but that the world will continue to spin anyway, the tide will continue to lap the beach as the corpses all pile up.

I am the Doorway is a beautifully crafter little sci-fi shocker, as an invalid astronaut returned to Earth realises with growing horror that after five years, his body has been harbouring an alien intelligence that is growing through his skin and committing atrocities.  One of King’s trademarks is the way in which he copes with the evil inside a man – whether psychological or, in this case, physically reaching through the charade of our human mask.  We, as humans, are all capable of evil acts, but we, for the most part, manage to hold it together, and choke down that evil.  Here, though, it is Arthur’s very inability to contain it, to defend himself from it, which is most startling.  As a first person narrative, we are recounted the events as he remembers them, including the death of his friend and the murder of a young nameless boy, and his subsequent removal of the eyes growing through his hands by soaking them in kerosene and burning them off, leading to their replacement with hooks.  Now, though – and this is the truly horrifying part – seven years later, the eyes are growing again, this time in a perfect circle through his chest...  He hasn’t stopped whatever force it is, and there is no telling that he ever will, even in his suggested suicide as the story comes to a close.

The next story in the collection, The Mangler, is typically Kingsian in tone – a possessed machine, much like the Buick 8 and Christine from later stories, is hungry for blood.  The fear of the ordinary, and the trusted, is the central creepy premise to this.  An inanimate object, a clothing flat-press in a laundry, has caused a number of accidents, the first involving the blood of a virgin, which has sated its taste for blood and led to it wanting more.  My only issue with this is Jackson, the English teacher who is a friend to John Hunton, the central character.  As always the English teacher in King’s work is well-educated, but here, the knowledge all seems a little too forced.  Unlike Matt Burke in ‘Salem’s Lot, who we witness educating himself in the more specialised areas of fiction and folklore from a hospital bed, here Jackson can knock off any number of causes and signs of demonic possession all too readily.  Whilst it is clearly an issue irresolvable in short story, this is one which would perhaps have been better suited to a longer piece in one of King’s specialised collections like Four After Midnight or Different Seasons.  Given greater pagination, it is a plot which could have enthralled and mystified, but sadly here it all seems a little too rushed.  It is great – just not the best of the bunch.

Also a weak point of the collection, The Boogeyman is principally about a man dealing with his own skeletons in the closet, following the deaths of his three children, and his own responsibilities for them.  Lester Billings is not a particularly pleasant man – he lies on a psychiatrist’s couch before professing to the murder of his children – “All I did was kill my kids.  One at a time.  All of them.”  He is a typical man of his time, and his loathing of “sissies” and “niggers” is unnerving, but it does ring true with the setting of the book – indeed, in many of his novels, including ‘Salem’s Lot, homophobia is commonplace in small-town America.  Billings has had ideas drummed into his head from his parents and is hard-headed enough to follow them regardless of what his gut tells him.  As such, when the children beg to be taken from their room due to “the Boogeyman”, he refuses, and when their bodies are discovered, he notices the cupboard door open “just a crack”.  The story itself is fast-paced, but my issue comes with the ending – “so nice”.

Grey Matter tells the tale of Richie Grenadine, a man who, for no understandable reason, has begun to transform into an amorphous grey blob, and the men from a local bar that must go to face this monster.  Told from first person narrative, Henry the bar owner recounts Grenadine’s son Timmy’s story as they approach his apartment.  What makes this short story so effective is the slow burn of information – as the three get closer and closer to the house, the story becomes even more obscene – “a dead cat, all swole up and stiff... with little white things crawlin’ all over it... then he ate it” – but upon arrival, they must face up to whatever lies in wait.  The appearance of Richie, as the door bulges outwards before bursting through, is particularly effective, as is the cliff-hanger at the end “I surely do”.  Also, there’s an Orange Crush thermometer.  Just saying.

Battleground is an oddity of a story, but an entertaining one too – the story of a hit man who works for The Organisation, returning home to a parcel which contains toy soldiers, possessed and alive and wanting to fight.  Whilst it may feel silly and childish, the description in this piece is terrific, and as it builds to its shocking conclusion – “He never knew what hit him” – it rattles along at great speed.  King’s use of language is superb – before the reveal of the toy soldiers, Renshaw stands on his balcony, “as a general might survey a captured country”.  The ledge upon which he has to crawl to safety is “no wider than a child’s train track”.  These linguistic tricks are purposeful, engaging and relatable.  Renshaw considers to see the whole affair as a game even when the soldiers are attacking – “”I’m losing!”. 

Trucks is the short story which inspired one of King’s best, and silliest, films, “Maximum Overdrive”.  As with The Mangler and Battleground, it is the ordinary becoming something extraordinary which is the root cause of this fear.  Here, as the title no doubt gives it away, it is a tale of trucks which have gained a murderous life of their own.  That most trusted of things, our modes of transport, are fighting back.  The story starts part way through the siege of the gas station, throwing the reader straight into the action.  The world is ending, and there is little anyone can do about it – the trucks themselves understand engines, and “frozen uniform joints” but not about the exhaustion felt by the trapped humans as they are forced to endlessly pump gas for them, to keep them running, slaves forever. 

Rage

Rage is something of an oddity within King’s bibliography, for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it was the first (chronological) release by Richard Bachman, rather than King himself.  King wrote for many years under the pseudonym of Bachman, as it allowed him to publish a higher number of books each year.  He was also intrigued to see how these releases would go down with the public.  Secondly, it is the only novel he ever released which is no longer available.  King himself removed it from print, as it had been tied to a number of High School shootings and he didn’t want his work to become synonymous with such.  Rage is, to all intents and purposes, a non-book.  Yet, some lucky people (myself included) have copies, buried deep within the pages of The Bachman Books, a joint release of this and 3 other stories published under the Bachman name.  It is probably also available in some libraries, and in a first-hand edition possibly circulating the likes of Ebay and Amazon. 

It is, by no means, a brilliant book.  It is written in King’s typical style, but minus some of his more inspired flairs which make his writing so great – as he was writing under a pseudonym, the aim was to avoid making it too clear that Bachman was King at all.  It is funny, then, that this novel sounds so much like him.  Whilst a number of other writers, Dean Koontz for one, try to emulate King’s style, here, Bachman is King.  It is difficult to believe that it took so long for him to be found out, before killing him off with ‘cancer of the pseudonym’. 

The novella starts with Charlie Decker’s rambling direct address to the reader, a first-person narrative which reminds us of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Decker is bright, achieves well in school, and whilst not popular, seems to manage – he has had girlfriends, he has a few close friends.  He is a typical high-school student.  From the outset, we know that he has issues – he imagines, on his way to the principal’s office, his Math teacher chasing him, “hands raised into twisted claws” telling him that they “don’t need boys of your type around here”.  The first hint that Decker provides a threat to his classmates and his teachers is as he reaches for the “pipe wrench that was no longer there”.  He is evidently unbalanced, and as his imagination tells him, he should not be in a public school, but an institute. 

The scene in Mr Denver’s office is horribly tense – the principal is trying to do his job, to care for the welfare of students.  It becomes evident – although we are not yet told the specifics – that Charlie Decker was involved in violence which hospitalised a teacher.  He has been allowed back into school on the condition that he reports to a psychiatrist each day – a fair condition, all things considered.  Yet Decker becomes a depraved monster, spouting guttural cruelties and then partially undressing himself before emerging into the administrative office accusing the man of rape.  He is subsequently expelled, effective immediately.  So he goes to clear out his locker, but instead tears up his text books, sets fire to the contents of his locker, and calmly walks into his Math classroom and shoots his teacher at point blank range, “spilling Algebra” all over the floor.

Quickly, the school is evacuated, except Room 16, and the hostage situation rolls out its course.  And this is where the book has its major failing.  Whilst Decker is despicable, a rebel without a cause committing two murders in cold blood and then holding his 25 classmates hostage, he is written as an anti-hero, someone we are expected to identify with.  But it is impossible to feel anything for him.  As he tells his tales of woe to his rapt hostages, of his abusive father, of his bullying because he once wore a suit to a children’s birthday party, of his failed sexual exploit, and of his attack on his Chemistry teacher with the aforementioned pipe wrench, it is impossible to side with him.  His father was a prick, a nasty man who beat him – but he deserved it.  At the age of four, for “something to do”, he destroyed every window of his own house to kill the boredom.  It is right that he was hit by his father.  When he tells us of the birthday party at which he got into a fight, one almost feels pity for him – and then he fights back and calls the woman who arranged the party a “fat old bag”, losing all sympathy.  Sure, he couldn’t get a hard-on during sex – but it would have been an illegitimate affair, and he was off his face on pot.  So no sympathy there.  And as for the pipe-wrench incident – it is inexcusable.  The fact that he had a pipe wrench in his pocket at all is a sign that he was unhinged anyhow; that he uses it to smash the face of a teacher because he “baited” him, calling him up to answer a question on the board, is preposterous.  Decker is a bastard, a horrible, unstable, malicious child who looks for sympathy from the reader, but shouldn’t get it as it undeserved. 

But the failing of this book is that he does get sympathy.  During this “circle jerk” of self-pity, all of the children, bar one, side with him.  They have just witnessed two murders – executions, even – yet cheer for him, tell him it isn’t his fault.  They all sympathise with him, as they each have their own cross to bear – Pig Pen’s mother is tight-fisted and won’t buy him new clothes, but will spend money on shitty pencils.  Sandra’s sex life is terrible, and her first sexual experience was with Ted, the boy who won’t join in these discussions.  She regales of how it was quick, it didn’t hurt, and she didn’t enjoy it; she then goes on to tell us that she then tried to have a one-night stand in a car park to “feel something”, and orgasmed without the stranger even “getting it in”.  That these children can see something of themselves in Decker is horrifying – Stockholm Syndrome is proven to happen in hostage situations, where the hostages fall in love with the criminals, understanding their case and siding with them due to the conditions and situation the find themselves in.  But here, in a matter of two hours, 24 children are jeering and cajoling along with the boy with the gun.  It isn’t believable.

After four hours, it is agreed that they will be released, and Decker tries to bring about his own death at the hands of a police officer.  However, before this happens, the entire scenario descends into a modern Lord of the Flies, as the children gang up on the outsider, Ted Jones, the boy who refused to partake in the “nasty little masturbation fantasy” of Decker’s making.  He is beaten, has ink thrown in his face and hair, is bitten and has a high heel forced through his foot, making “something crunch”.  This group-consciousness created by Decker’s hate has led to an act of disgusting degradation, as each of the children has begun to stoop to his level – not to commit murder, but to physically assault someone for ‘being different’.  Their empathy with his story has caused them all to devolve into a grotesque caricature of evil themselves.

Ultimately, then, Rage is unlikeable for the very reason that it effective.  Whilst King’s fiction is predominantly focussed upon the idea that we are all good people with the potential for evil, and that it is the act of not committing atrocities that defines us, here, writing as Bachman, he eschews that moral standpoint for a scene of horrific value – that children could possibly all commit these acts, but they need a ringleader to provoke what they crave.  As charismatic as Charlie Decker may seem, I simply cannot believe him, as a character, and that he has the potential in him to provoke such acts. 

The Shining

It is difficult, nearly impossible, to read the book of The Shining without picturing Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance.  Likewise, with invisible ghost party-goers in the ballroom, the grand unmasking, the cellar filled with every piece of paperwork ever accumulated by the hotel, the topiary animals and the creature in the playground, one tries desperately to place them into the film.  The two have become intertwined, woven for all times in the conscious of anyone who has both read the book and seen the film.

And this is a great shame.  King’s novel is perhaps one of his finest – the characters are wonderfully drawn, and it works as a four-pronged piece, with only the four integral characters, and very few bit-players added to this.  Indeed, one of the four, Hallorann, is also barely in the novel.  As such, the entire plot hinges on the Torrance family; Jack, Wendy and Danny.  I shall try to avoid referencing the film at any point hereafter, as it is derogative to the quality of the novel – whilst Kubrick’s film is remarkable in many, many ways, heralded as one of the greatest films of all time, it is a very different beast to the original story.

The characterisation is the one of those principle differences, and one which makes King’s tale a far more powerful thing.  Jack Torrance is a good man, haunted by his alcoholism and “the Bad Thing” he did one night, drunk, to Danny.  He broke his arm, and is haunted by remorse ever since. After a long night of drinking with a friend, Al Shockley, Jack and Al hit a bicycle, but could find no trace of the child from it.  This event forces the pair to dry out, go cold turkey and kick the habit of drinking.  A teacher and writer – those staples of King’s heroes and antiheroes alike – he lost his job by beating a student nearly to death for slicing the tyres on his old Beetle.  All of these things have led him to the state he is now in, desperate for work, and sat in front of Mr Stuart Ullman, a “shiteater” grin across his face as he mutters a mantra “officious little prick, officious little prick” to himself.  Jack cares for his family greatly, and is determined to do what is best for them.  He sees the job at The Overlook as a form of sabbatical, a break from his normal life in which he can finish his play, continue to dry out, and come the Spring, hopefully return to his old job teaching, when they realise the loss they have suffered letting him go.

Wendy is likewise a strong, likeable character.  Unlike in the film version, she is powerful, also haunted by memories and doing her best to get over them.  She is troubled by her memories of the night Danny’s arm was broken, the stench of gin on Jack’s breath night after night, even imagining it after he kicked the booze for good.  The word DIVORCE is still nagging somewhere in her subconscious, an unspoken thing that would have happened had Jack never given up drinking.  Her family haunts her too – the obsessive and repugnant woman determined that she knows best, a destructive power which Wendy fears she will one day become herself.  As the book progresses, she fiercely stands up to everything threatening her family, and more specifically her child.

Danny is magnificently drawn – children are characters that it is so easy to write wrong.  The tone of voice, the vocabulary, the level of understanding shown can so easily be scrawled in a way that writers clearly do not understand them.  King writes them wonderfully, though.  As with the children in ‘Salem’s Lot, their stunted vocabulary works wonders to create truly believable characters – in The Lot, children misconstrued words like “preevert”, and the threats they held for them.  Here, Danny’s ability allows him to read the minds of others, yet rarely fully comprehend what it can all mean.  The scenes in the doctor’s office in Sidewinder are beautifully touching, as Dr Edmonds encourages Danny to reach out and read the mind of his mother, but when he retells those cognitive processes, the reader is asked to draw lines between the dots as he simply cannot.

The Shining of the title is Danny’s gift, one shared by precious few, and it is explained to him by Hallorann the cook in the first act of the story.  Danny is gifted, able to read thoughts, and sensitive to his environs.  His imaginary friend, his sole comfort when he was younger, is gradually causing him nightmares, leading Danny into dark worlds he doesn’t want to see.  The danger of Danny’s presence in the hotel is evident from his first tour of The Overlook; he can see the blood and brains of a past occupant smeared up the walls of the Presidential Suite, there and gone quickly.  Hallorann’s warning forewarns the reader of the danger, but Danny is simply too innocent and naive to fully appreciate it.

Much of the actual ‘danger’ of the novel is subconscious – and as such it becomes so much more terrifying than twins in a corridor and blood in an elevator.  Some of the incidents, such as the endless stream of wasps despite the bug bomb, and the topiary animals attacking, or sitting back on their haunches to watch the attack, are terrifically described, and one almost feels that we are there, surrounded by the encroaching snow, isolated.  Many of King’s telltale signs are there, including the use of the (bracketed thoughts) but here, some thoughts are (interrupted by)(other thoughts), giving the narrative a delightfully tangential edge, as thoughts about (?party?) are suddenly interrupted with (??What party??), and we can sense the gradual decline of each of the characters as they doubt themselves as well as their surroundings.

Jack’s desperation to prove himself as a loving father and husband is the central driving force behind the entire narrative, and what is so powerful about this is that he is a good father.  The ‘Bad Thing’ was long ago, far behind them, and whilst Wendy fears it may happen again, Jack himself is certain that it will not.  Everything he does is for them.  The evil isn’t inside Jack – it is the pervading force of The Overlook itself.  The building radiates evil, permeating anything and everything in its quest to be sated.  It hungers for power, and Danny is a shining beacon in the wasteland, one which must be consumed.  As Jack gradually unravels, it is only because the hotel gives him all that he needs.  He longs for a drink, and so upon walking into the ballroom he finds Lloyd there, waiting, with a martini in hand.  What is interesting is that the first time we meet Lloyd, he is evidently a figment of Jack’s imagination – he never directly speaks for us to hear, but we are told, through Jack’s perspective “Lloyd said it was” so.  He can feel the gin sliding down his throat, smell the acrid scent of gin and olive, yet when he returns to Wendy, there is no smell, her nervous tic of smelling him as he enters proves fruitless.  As the hotel increases in power, though, these figments become a reality – streamers remain despite the absence of party-goers, and Lloyd becomes real, conversant directly to us.  Likewise, the spectre of Grady could be shrugged off as an hallucination, but he is able to open the door to the pantry, releasing Jack on a promise that he will “educate” his wife and child, killing her “if necessary”. 

The hotel manages itself, and it deals with any problems in the only way it knows how – through the corruption of the weak.  We could be excused for believing that Jack gives himself willingly, but I don’t believe that is the case – although he does hand himself over to The Overlook (after all, “it’s me!” the hotel wants), he is able to put on one final, desperate show of love for Danny, telling him to run and leave before bludgeoning his own face into an unrecognisable pulp, with a roque mallet no less.  The grand unmasking happens then, one which has been hinted at throughout, reinforcing that here, all times truly are one, and life is an endless masked ball and we are all merely players waiting to show our true face.  That Jack’s true face dehumanises him so completely is apt.

'Salem's Lot

‘Salem’s Lot, King’s second novel, is utterly brilliant.  Essentially a book of two halves, it takes the mythos and legends of vampires, and transplants it into a modern (well, the 1970s) small-town America.  As we gradually get to know and love – and hate – the locals, an impending sense of doom gradually creeps over us, as we build up to the explosive final scenes.

As with Carrie, much of this book is concerned with character.  As I said in the introduction to my King Quest, for King, character is all.  It is essential that we have an image in our minds of everything and everyone therein before we can truly engage with, or care about, the way in which the story ends.  ‘Salem’s Lot features a theme King will return to, time and again throughout all of his work – creating a town which lives and breathes, inhabited by an array of characters creating a full spectrum of society.  There are loveable characters, such as kindly teacher Matt Burke, and Eva, trying to manage her B&B, when every room is rented by older men with drink problems, right the way through to the bitter new mother, who beats her child to stop it crying, and the husband who flushes the pills down the toilet and then proceeds to rape his wife every night.  We have deformed men who run the town dump, mocked by everyone.  There are busy-body old women who sit in their houses with binoculars next to them, the phone at their elbow as they eat their meals.  Any human flaw is represented in one or another of these characters, and as such, we identify with their needs, their problems, and so we grow to care about them – even those most despicable of characters can somehow create a sense of empathy.

The main character, though, is The Lot itself.  In long, flowing narrative, King expands on his descriptions at points throughout the novel.  “In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot:” begins one chapter beginning only 100 pages from the end of the story.  As carnage is ensuing, and chaos breaking out, King takes a breath, and reminds us that this town should function like every other.  There are processes, protocols, for this time of year, ones which should be followed to the letter.  But as all hell breaks loose, it seems that only King is interested in these systems.  In ‘Salem’s Lot, one line rings true over all others: “There’s little good in sedentary small towns.  Mostly indifference, spiced with an occasional vapid evil”.  This summarises much of his work perfectly.

In the chapter “The Lot (III)”, we see this darkness within all of the inhabitants.  We are able to glimpse at the horror within each of them.  But we are not asked to judge, as the town does not judge.  We are not reading the book to make fleeting judgements of society.  Rather, we are here to learn.  We are spectators, as we must always be with novels.  We cannot interfere – as with Carrie, we know that many of these people will die.  Most, in fact.  Indeed, the only two who we know definitely survive are “the tall man” and “the boy”, as we see them in the prologue.  Which means that, regardless how these people live their lives, they are doomed.  Over the course of the 598 pages, we are to see the genocide of this small town, eaten apart by its own depravation.  Again, this theme will later be revisited, in stories like The Stand and Under the Dome.  There is little that anyone can do to change these events, although a brave few try.

Ben Mears is the aforementioned ‘Tall Man’, and he is what we presume is intended to be the main character.  Tall, handsome in a far-off way, he is the outsider to the town.  He has his own ghosts, but he is in the Lot to try to cleanse some of those demons.  In the first half of the book, we see his new-found relationship with Susan Norton; pretty, harmless, innocent.  We see him being regarded with curiosity and disdain by the locals.  We see him make new friends, drive around town looking for inspiration for his next book.  He is a writer.

Writers are one of the most frequently revisited characters in all of King’s works.  From Misery to The Shining, principle characters are authors, trying to understand the world around them as it falls apart.  This could be seen as laziness on King’s part – writing what he knows – but instead, he uses these characters as devices to understand the events happening.  Whilst a more literal man, a worker or engineer, would try and fail to appreciate the threat, a character like Ben gets it.  From the beginning, he understands the dangers.  He attempts to excuse it, looking for practical ways in which to test theories, hoping that he is wrong.  But deep down, he knows that he isn’t wrong, and that the whole world has gone to hell.

Another of the atypical Kingsian characters is that of Mark Petrie, the ‘boy’ of the prologue.  The boy is smart, world-wise and likeable.  He is a little effeminate, but deep, and courageous.  He is the sort of boy we all wish we had known – or indeed, been.  His fight with the school bully, Richie Boddin, has the readers praying that he wins.  Bullies like Boddin exist in every walk of life, every environment.  Not necessarily through physical harm, but regardless, they torture and taunt, believing, as Boddin does, that the “ground shook beneath his feet”.  Petrie’s courage seems to know no bounds – he knows what must be done, and so does it.  He visits the Marsten house, with a gun and a stake, and singlehandedly defeats Straker.  His understanding of the world, and his focus, are enviable.  Whilst hogtied in the lair of the vampire king, as it were, he simply thinks.  Practically and methodically, he frees himself, and is able to cripple the bad guy quickly and calmly.  This bravery of the young is revisited by King in multiple stories, from It, The Stand and The Body through to Dreamcatcher and Black House. 

As I mentioned, this is a slow-burner of a book, a book of two halves.  As the darkness is hinted at, but characters go on with their lives unknowingly, we are introduced to each of these characters.  Then the shit hits the fan, and the darkness takes over.  Each and every one of these characters commits the most heinous acts, fulfilling their darkest fantasies.  Characters get their comeuppance so quickly that we can barely breathe before the next murder.  Babies are slaughtered – “one leg stuck up grotesquely, like an inverted exclamation point” - dogs are mutilated, dark rites are performed in the nude with the corpses of children, a gravedigger desecrates a grave and opens a coffin to reveal the stench of death and the hunger of the Undead. 

It is unrelenting, as Ben, Mark and their small band of Van Helsings fight back, having to ram stakes through the hearts of loved ones, until the blood gushes “black in this chancy, lunatic light: heart’s blood”.  As Matt Burke lies bedridden, powerless to move, he sends his crew off to do the work of the Light – a writer, a priest with failing faith, a doctor forced by his own evidence to believe, and a boy who has just seen his parents murdered.  As the crew grows smaller, we cannot help but mourn them.  Each of these characters has shown such courage in the face of evil – or Evil, or EVIL, depending on your perspective.  That Matt dies of a secondary heart attack, rather than in battle, seems unfair.  For Jimmy Cody to plunge down the stairs onto knife blades, having survived the first vampire attack in the morgue, is unjust.  These people simply do not deserve to die. 

Through use of clichés, ones which are openly acknowledged and discussed, the reader is almost on the same page as the characters.  We know the stories of stakes through hearts, garlic, sunlight et al.  As such, Barlow’s ability to always be one step ahead cheats us too.  For such clichés to then be suddenly unfounded – with Barlow’s death, we expect his hordes of Undead to simply fade away, but no such thing happens, and they must be individually vanquished – throws us a curveball and leaves us desperately clinging on to the few facts that we do know for certain.  King has us guessing, right to the last, and that’s refreshing.  He doesn’t simply make do rehashing an old story.  It is fresh, and original, and absolutely horrific.