The Dead Zone (1979)

It's not just a simple fact that this is Stephen King's final book of the 1970's. Even more interesting is that this is his parting tribute to the decade. Aside from the introductory material, the book begins in the first year of the decade and ends in the last. If we really want to run with this, King is saying we (as Johnny) spent the first half of the decade asleep and the second half wide awake. During Johnny's coma, King chronicles the progression of the decade, from Kent State through Watergate and the end of Vietnam. Even though long by coma standards, Johnny wasn't sleeping to Rip Van Winkle proportions, yet the slip from 1970 to 1975 is almost as jarring. And the world continues moving forward in the second half of the decade, in a direction that Johnny grows increasingly uncomfortable with. Although the novel is populated with a lot of recent history and current events, it is the fictional doomsday politician Greg Stillson that personifies everything Johnny fears.

As was definitely the case with The Stand, one could argue this is a double novel. It easily could have cut out the Greg Stillson plot and remained a tighter, more localized story about how a reluctant psychic gets recruited to fight crime and the very act of doing good proves to be his downfall. Needless to say though, the gift, unwanted or not, can't just be shut off at will. Everything Johnny dealt with until encountering Stillson was local in nature, and then suddenly he is confronted with a future national emergency that sends him back down the rabbit hole. He spins over the age-old question of "if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you do it?" to the point where he cannot dislodge from what he sees as a modern-day version of the dilemma. All the while, the memory of his mother indicating his "gift from God" would guide him keeps him going through the elaborate plot of assassinating Stillson.

Some tendencies that were particularly noticeable in the later stories of Night Shift show up here. Unlike his earlier novels and stories there isn't a lot of blood and guts in this one. In fact, some of the plot points are downright tender, such as Johnny's doomed relationship with Sarah. Or heartbreaking, such as Vera's downward spiral into pseudo-science cults masquerading in the name of the religion she built her faith on. Also there isn't a lot of wild unexplained paranormal stuff flying around. Greg Stillson is a bad man, but he isn't Randall Flagg. Johnny isn't blowing things up with his mind, he just gets partial reads off people and is constantly frustrated by the "dead zone" preventing him from getting the complete picture.

The resolution of the novel is also clever on the scale of all of King's novels thus far. He could have had Johnny carry out the mission successfully, but in the end somebody like Greg Stillson doesn't have to die. They just need to be bumped off course. Kind of like paying off an art gallery owner to sponsor Hitler and divert him from the whole Third Reich obsession. I'm not sure Johnny intended to resolve things in this third way. From the letters of the final chapter it is clear he knew this was a suicide mission, but he probably also realized his brain problems would bring his life to an early conclusion even if he did nothing at all. Having gotten to know Johnny over 500-plus pages, any reader will know it is very good news that in his dying breaths he can no longer get a read on Stillson. Mission accomplished. No martyrs were created. You did well, Johnny.

In Progress: The Dead Zone

We've finally made it to the final Stephen King book of the 1970's! For the first time in his publishing career he actually wrote a novel that is shorter than the one that came before it, but this one is still a pretty hefty tome. I know next to nothing about this book, and probably less about this book than any of the previous ones I have read, so this should be interesting....

November 9 (Page 17): Prologue complete. Authors, if you want to establish somebody as a truly evil bastard, then have them kill a dog. Greg, I hate you already. Meanwhile, who knew that a head injury could give you ESP? John, I'm expecting great things from you!

November 14 (Page 92): Dang it, Johnny, when I said I was expecting great things from you I didn't mean get into a car crash! But seriously, this speaks to me going into this book so blind I didn't even read the back cover, so I thought when it said Sarah didn't talk to Johnny again for four and a half years that she must have eaten a cyanide hot dog or something.

November 21 (Page 279): Almost halfway done and so far this has mainly been the story of Johnny. Greg shows up from time to time just to show he's still a jerk, albeit a jerk with considerably more power each time we see him. Those who have no faith in politics shouldn't be surprised to learn he became the mayor of some unfortunate town in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, I hear that a psycho killer is still on the loose....

November 27 (Page 379): Part One, which is considerably over half the book, is in the bag! While I lack the psychic powers of Johnny Smith, going into the final chapter of this part I got to thinking that the serial killer plot would be resolved by the end of this part. Needless to say my non-psychic prediction did not anticipate how it would resolve. However, it seems fitting that the first part of the book should end with Johnny's greatest accomplishment to date, which also puts him into the lowest place he's been in so far outside of coma.

November 30 (Page 422): If there's going to be an epic Stillson-Smith showdown, it better happen soon! I think we may have witnessed the first appearance of a historical figure when Johnny meets pre-President Carter in New Hampshire. Of course he gets vibes off Carter that he will be the President, but strangely gets no read from Reagan. I guess even in 1979 that was considered a bit too strange? Back in the fictional arena, and speaking of seeming far-fetched for its time, is it me, or does Stillson reek of Donald Trump?

December 4 (Page 561): The battle has ended and the loser depends on your definition of what losing entails. If you say "death", then goodbye Johnny. If you say "irrelevance", then goodbye Greg. I feel like the novel is effectively over at this point, but like any normal person, I did a quick preview of the final, small section ("Notes from the Dead Zone") and perhaps the text of the letters Johnny mailed out prior to his attack on the town hall will shed a little more light on things.

Movie: The Stand (1994)

Will we ever see a theatrical release of The Stand? Until that day arrives, or if it ever does, we have the somewhat-flawed miniseries from 1994 to tide us over. As I've been conditioned previously by some of the other made-for-TV content featured here, I give this one a fairly large degree of latitude. Only until recently have TV production levels been anywhere near those of the big screen, so I was prepared for all the signs of poor aging when revisiting this almost-25 year old series.

With King's longer works the TV miniseries was, back in the day, the only practical mode of adaptation. In our post-Lord of the Rings world this seems a little narrow. Nowadays it seems more plausible that some kind of multi-movie approach could be used (think the new IT), or a more extensive TV series with a big budget (think Under the Dome). Prior to The Stand, network TV had shown adaptations of 'Salem's Lot, IT, and The Tommyknockers, all with middling amounts of success. With the 1990 re-release of The Stand in it's uncut/overwritten glory, which officially made it King's longest work ever, there must have been a renewed interest to finally get his magnum opus to the screen, even if it was the little screen. By 1994 it was actually one of the very few non-Bachman non-Dark Tower novels that remained unadapted (for comparison, Christine the movie hit theaters just a few months after Christine the book).

About halfway through watching this miniseries (my second time around), I realized that the production strongly caters to fans of the book. In fact, if you haven't read the book some parts probably seem incomprehensible. Some of the motivations of the characters that were more evident in the book are glossed over, likely for the sake of squeezing over a thousand pages of material into eight hours. Even with a teleplay by King himself, who unsurprisingly tends to be faithful to the source material, edits and changes were necessary. For example, the character of Joe is relegated to almost nothing and passed off to Lucy, who is also diminished. This is because Nadine, who found Joe in the book, is merged with the Rita character, wiping out the Joe origin story. Also, in general, the characters seems to cross the country with great ease. Even Stu and Tom's epic journey back to Boulder doesn't seem that onerous here.

Given this is television, the acting is all over the place. Some do a great job (Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen, Gary Sinise as Stu Redman), some miss the mark (Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg, Adam Storke as Larry Underwood), and Molly Ringwold (playing Fran Goldsmith) delivers one of the worst performances of her career. The production work shows a lot of corner-cutting, like it was all filmed either on soundstages or within a ten square mile patch of Utah. The cornfield scenes were particularly jarring, and I later learned that they actually grew their own cornstalks to save money because the prop cornstalks were a total ripoff. Who knew corn was such a big deal in Stephen King movies?

While The Stand was successful enough to spur on the burgeoning Stephen King television presence that bloomed in the 1990's and continues on, the Mick Garris/Stephen King director/writer partnership showed considerably more weakness when they returned with an adaptation of The Shining, that was far worse than the 1980 movie. They would later do another miniseries, Bag of Bones, in 2011, as well as a bunch of made-for-TV movies along the way. We'll be seeing more of these; after all I don't have a choice, do I?

Movie: The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Let's be clear right from the get-go that The Lawnmower Man movie has nothing to do with the "Lawnmower Man" short story. This didn't stop them from apply Stephen King's name to the original movie title, in a sad attempt at a cash-grab. Only after a threatened (?) lawsuit did they end up dropping King's name. Since I have shown a great resilience in watching bad movies for the sake of this blog, I figured what the hell, why not watch this one anyway.

Well, this movie is pretty damn awful. I won't quite go to the point of saying this is as bad or worse than Graveyard Shift, but at least that one tried to capture the gist of the short story and primarily failed because the source material was so weak. In all fairness, if they had tried to stick to the original short story here, it probably wouldn't have been any better than this. I mean, was anyone clamoring to read about a naked freak who mowed lawns by eating them and killed all the animals in his path?

In perhaps its only smart move, this movie completely rejects the short story and instead tells a tale of science gone haywire. Pierce Brosnan in pre-007 mode plays Dr. Frankenstein Lawrence Angelo, a frequently-shirtless scientist who somehow invented a way to make people smart a la Flowers for Algernon though the use of virtual reality. Needless to say, a few of the middle steps between "put on VR helmet" and "become smart" are hidden from the viewer. After a monkey goes completely...uh...apeshit...after a little too much time on the VR machine, he does the safe thing and takes advantage of a gardener's assistant who can barely live independently, but is able to build lawnmowers, to take the monkey's place. Predictably, he gets fabulous initial results, but then the Lawnmower Man becomes smarter than him (and apparently more virile) and eventually self-brain-transplants into the machine. While the quasi-government lab in charge of these experiments that never would have passed any unbribed review board is officially horrified by Dr. Angelo's actions, some secret government dude named the Director sanctions it all as a way to, you guessed it, fight better wars. In the end, the Lawnmower Man is able to slip out of not only his flesh body, but also his computer body and infiltrate the "network" (this is before anyone knew what an "Internet" was). Add this to Dr. Angelo finding an unauthorized way to continue his work, and you can already see the plot of the sequel, Bride of Lawnmower Man. Of course I made that title up; they went with Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (yawn), which from what I can tell had little in common with the original in terms of either plot or cast.

As for the cast, Pierce Brosnan turns in a decent performance, given the material he was working with. His accent kind of falls somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic, a little British, a little American. Jeff Fahey bugged me through the whole movie as I racked my brain wondering where I remembered him from. I felt kind of stupid because he's been in zillions of movies, but the connection I was grasping for was the TV show Lost, where is in older and grayer, but unmistakably Jeff Fahey, with his unique face and voice. The only other interesting cast note is the appearance of Dean Norris, sixteen years before Breaking Bad, who was bald even back then, and I won't even begin to attempt a rationalization for whatever accent he was employing.

I think the movie probably got a better reception back when it was released because stuff like "virtual reality" was still considered pretty exotic circa 1992. Then again, considering this was released the same year as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, it suffers a lot in the special effects department. Whereas that movie still seems pretty edgy and cool today, this one seems especially corny. The other day I referred to this as "opposite Tron" is that nobody could figure out that movie upon release, but times caught up with what it was trying to depict, whereas Lawnmower Man feels increasing like reading old science fiction where scientists used slide rules to plan trips to Mars.

The Long Walk (1979)

I've run a marathon. It was five hours, and much of it was grueling. Arguably, walking 26.2 miles would actually be harder, because it means far more time on your feet than running. Walking more than a hundred miles nonstop is just plain inconceivable. Welcome to the world of The Long Walk.

After the clunker that was Rage it wasn't long before I was back to Bachman. Before going anywhere with this, I do want to point out that this was one of three Stephen King books I had read prior to last year, so, other than forgetting the finer plot points over time, nothing here shocked me. But the first time? Oh my....

To the best of my understanding, the original intent of the Bachman alias was to allow King to publish more than one novel a year, which was and still remains the industry standard. Initially it gave him the freedom to dust off and introduce some of his pre-Carrie work. This is the case with this book and Rage, as well as Blaze if you believe the back story behind it. Since you may know how much I despised Rage, I likely would have gone into this book with very low expectations had I not read it before.

Fear not, The Long Walk is no Rage and thank God for that. Where the previous book was blunt, this one was clever. In fact, this book was so clever that I awarded it a higher rating than anything I've read on this project. I think this partly has to do with the nature of the story being more science fiction and less horror. Don't get me wrong, the plot is absolutely horrifying and downright nihilistic, but there is a subtlety, found in the very gentle exposition that clicked very well with me.

What makes The Long Walk so great is that is makes the blunt rules of the event very clear, but the world in which such as event could happen stays vague. No reality show in our world would be so harsh as to kill the losers. It is a poorly kept secret that those unlucky folks that don't win The Amazing Race or Survivor don't actually go back to their vanilla lives, but instead are whisked off to some luxurious destination where they are sequestered in comfort for the rest of the show. This is why, except for acute embarrassment, those initial losers don't exactly seem crushed about their failure. They are probably wondering how many mai tais they can drink before blacking out while the host delivers the bad news to them. Our world is built on the mantra "it was a privilege just to make it here."

Something went seriously astray in the world of The Long Walk. It is made clear pretty quickly that the world in which is takes place is not our own. There is nothing complex about the Long Walk. One hundred teenage boys walk from the northern tip of Maine to the southern point at which only one is left standing. The only rules are that you cannot drop below four miles an hour. You get three warnings and the fourth comes in the form of a bullet, euphematically called a "ticket" much in the same way the soliders bought farms in Starship Troopers. Oh, and there is another rule: no quitting. You either win or get a ticket. The ticket comes with no warnings if you try anything goofy like attacking the soldiers watching your every move or slipping off into the crowd. Readers don't get any clear exposition about the state of the country or the world. This makes perfect sense, as teens are not likely to spontaneously discuss American history and political affairs in detail, even if they aren't walking for their lives. Little clues pop up along the way: April 31st, German bases in Chile, 51 states, and meat concentrates. Bigger clues are there for your consideration as well: The Major, a Khadafi-esque character who is clearly in charge in spite of his modest military rank, and a heightened sense of militarism throughout the book. Even the grand prize is fairly open-ended: anything you want. In the final pages you wonder how the survivor will be in any condition to even ask for anything other than a month-long nap in a hyperbaric goo-filled sleep pod to repair all the damage. The creepy thing about all of this is that in spite of the vagueness, for the most part the boys featured in the book have lead familiar-sounding lives. Most of the common social structures are the same in our world and that of the novel. People have families, jobs, and routines, but they all exist under a different political super-structure than ours.

We will revisit the Bachman books a few tomes down the road with Roadwork. I get the sense from various criticisms I've read, that The Long Walk may very well be as good as it gets for Richard Bachman. The next three were written while the secret of his identity was safe, while the later ones used the name out of convenience. By the early 1980's, as we shall see, Stephen King was able to generate enough heat under his own name to publish about as frequently and diversely as he wished.

In Progress: The Long Walk

September 6 (page 140): As this is one of the very few books I've read before, I can't say if the book is a natural page-turner or if it's just my familiarity with it. Usually I wouldn't let this many pages slip by without a check-in, but oh well. Over one-third of the book is done and about one-quarter of the Walkers are done as well. I'm surprised this book was, along with Rage, a "proto-Carrie" novel, mainly because Rage was such a lousy book and this one is compelling. If you scratch at it a little, you can spot some of the things that infest King's early writing, like a juvenile tone and some character-hate, but it isn't obvious. Around page 50, I thought of making a chart with each name and number and on what page they bought their ticket, but some OCD person already did it for me more or less.

September 8 (page 187): The halfway point of the book (in terms of pages, not Walkers!) seemed like a good time for an update. They just crossed mile 100 and it was only now, well into my second reading of the book, that I realized these guys eat a lot of "meat concentrate" for snacks. It's just another subtle reminder from the book that this isn't our world, but something slightly dystopian. Another observation with the quotes that head up each chapter: most of them are kind of dumb, usually just a familiar phrase from a classic game show (e.g. "Come on down!" - Bob Barker). Two of them stick out: (1) the Chuck Barris quote about the ultimate game show being where somebody gets killed, and (2) the Sale of the Century host discussing his TV persona.

September 15 (page 302): I've been really bad about updates, but in my defense this book reads pretty quickly. There has been some major character death (Olson) and the Walkers are down to the hardiest third or so. More slight-dystopia weirdness continues, as April 31st is mentioned twice and there are 51 states. I'm certain the latter was no typo, but I did a triple-take on the former. Especially since it was right next to a actual typo, where the word "blackout" was used instead of "backout", as April 31st is cited as the last chance for prospective Walkers to decline their invitation. I guess if some shady dude like the Major seizes the reins of power and wants an extra day in April, well damn it we're getting a 31st of April.

Movie: Cat's Eye (1985)

I exhausted most of my channels for finding free Stephen King movies, and I noticed over a month has slipped by since the last post. So with a newly repositioned router for the best streaming experience possible, I have started rent-to-stream through Amazon. While I can't say I'm too excited about spending any money on some of the dreck produced from Night Shift, I didn't feel too bad about throwing a few bucks out there for the privilege of streaming Cat's Eye for 48 hours.

Cat's Eye is a horror anthology film, a sub-genre that was enjoying a great deal of attention in the 1980's with titles like Nightmares (1983), The Twilight Zone: The Movie (also 1983), and Stephen King's own dream project directed by George Romero, Creepshow (1982), plus dozens of others. Unlike Creepshow, which adapted either brand-new or uncollected story content, Cat's Eye adapts two of the better tales from Night Shift, "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge", and packages them with a brand new story, "General", which holds the overall plot framework together. They are brought together through the multi-state misadventures of a cat (later christened "General") who is adapt at riding in trucks, boats, and trains across the Eastern seaboard.

All in all, Cat's Eye was an enjoyable 90 minutes and probably the best adaptation work to come out of Night Shift. It isn't the greatest movie ever and definitely shows its age in places, but perhaps they were smart to stick to turning short stories into short movies. As each story only got half an hour of screen time, the temptation to add a lot of filler was removed. That filler wrecked most of the other movies. On the other hand, the two adapted stories are very faithful to the original works. Neither one feels the need to warp its original plot to satisfy the needs of the anthology film. Normally, when it comes to novel adaptations, a faithful depiction means a more boring presentation, but both were fun and engaging. Neither story's depiction was too far removed from what I had pictured when reading the stories. The only real changes involved the presence of the cat, who obviously wasn't in the original unrelated stories.

The third and final story, "General", wasn't that great, although it seems like everyone remembers the weird little troll getting chopped up in the fan. "General" is serviceable though in that it ties the entire plot together, and darn it, I wish my cats were half as cool as General (I still love them, but come on, this is General the Hero Cat). Incidentally, General's meowing and hissing isn't actual cat sounds, but rather the voice talents of Frank Welker, who voiced Fred in just about every version of Scooby-Doo. He also did the troll voices for what it's worth. I've noticed my cats tend to ignore any non-authentic cat noises that come from the television, and that was certainly the case here, though through no fault of Mr. Welker.

Cat's Eye was released at what one may think of as the "golden age" of Stephen King, where the movies and books were coming out at a torrential pace and everything was safely in the realm of horror and pop culture. Therefore it is littered with references to other works: General is chased by a dog named Cujo and nearly hit by a car with a "Christine" bumper sticker, and later on the mom in the last story is reading a copy of Pet Semetery. This movie was filmed in North Carolina, as was the next King movie to grace the silver screen, Maximum Overdrive, so perhaps the drawbridge scene from "Quitters, Inc." foreshadows the movie yet to come. Who knows what else might have slipped in there.

The Richard Bachman Story

I often consider Mental Floss to be smarter-than-average clickbait, as much as I like knowing what the most popular hashtag is in each state, but this recent article is quite relevant to what I'm doing here. It just so happens we will be going "back to Bachman" soon, with his second book, The Long Walk. As previously noted here, one of the needs for the Bachman pseudonym was to get around publisher hesitations to publish more than one book a year by the same author. Nowadays, King is one of the few exceptions to the rule, but it took him some time to work up to that level of prestige. Hence, with this blog in the relatively early phase of King's career, there's a lot of Bachman titles coming up.

The Stand (1978)

One daunting thing about this project is that Stephen King didn't mess around when it came to writing really thick novels almost right out the gates. Sure, Carrie was relatively thin (ranging from 200-350 pages depending on what edition you read), but 'Salem's Lot and The Shining cranked up the page count considerably. The Stand is the fourth novel he published under his own name, and would be the longest novel he wrote, even in it's "abridged" form, until the release of It in 1986, and still hold the #2 position (again, in abridged form) until Under the Dome in 2009. I'm actually looking forward to a shorter (albeit not short) novel when The Dead Zone shows up here later on.

The big question about The Stand is this: Is the original version too edited, or the uncut version too bloated? The jury is split nearly down the middle, but I sense some favoritism, probably induced by the author himself, toward the 1990 edition. In the interest of full disclosure, I have read the uncut version, but it was so long ago I had forgotten major plot points going into this one, so I don't feel I can confidently make comparisons. Bigger doesn't always mean better. Two of his most reviled books, The Tommyknockers (brought to you by booze and coke) and Dreamcatcher (by Oxycontin) are among the largest. However, the readers generally uphold The Stand in any version to be among the best of his books. As I detail below, I count myself among the fans, with really the only strike against the book in its original form being the over-edited feel.

Enough about page counts, let's talk about the book itself. I consider The Stand to be a double novel. You have your global epidemic story, a scientific apocalypse, in Book One, "Captain Trips", followed by a supernatural "classic" apocalypse" story in the other two books, "On the Border" and "The Stand". The first part was new territory in Stephen King's writing, much more science fiction than horror. The second part falls more in King's wheelhouse, focused more on action and suspense than the science. It isn't a hard break, as the second book straddles both parts. Therefore it would be hard to actually break the double novel into two discrete parts. Not that it is necessary to do so.

King did not invent the plague novel. There are more examples than I can think of from further back in history than I probably realize, but a few examples come to mind. Freshest in my mind is Earth Abides by George Stewart. Stewart, who wrote all kinds of books, took a hard scientific angle at how society would or could rebuild after a plague wipes out most of humanity. He spends a lot of time first describing the collapse of the old world, and then analyzing all of the challenges of rebuilding, right down to mundane stuff like education and agriculture. In other cases, like in Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, readers are treated to a scientific explanation of a disaster that is warded off. Then you get crazy stuff like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, where it is one "normal" man against a race of plague-altered mutants. King follows Stewart and Matheson in the "world failure" scenario. The government and its scientists are either idiots or monsters, not Crichton's heroes, and they are to blame for everything. Stewart doesn't bother to explain the real cause of his plague, and Matheson omits the birth and spread of his completely.

King and Stewart part ways in their approach in Book 2 of The Stand. Stewart obsesses deeply about how one rebuilds a society. While King also believes that people are more likely to pull together into large communities in the wake of disaster, he doesn't worry too much about the details. While certainly not advancing a Walking Dead-style Hobbesian anarchy, he is able to gloss over community building challenges in a way Stewart could not thanks to the character of Mother Abigail and her godly abilities to bring people together through dreams. When it comes down to the minutiae of running the Boulder Free Zone, nothing seems to be too difficult. Need a committee? Start a committee. Turn on the power, and eat from the largesse left behind. Only in the very last pages does King allude to future challenges, mainly in the form of undesirable leadership coming into power. Meanwhile, Stewart's protagonist (whose name escapes me, although I recall it was unusual) is wrestling with faltering education system and constant crop failure and other assorted agricultural issues.

Book 3 is what separates The Stand from its peers. I think it could even stand (no pun intended) on its own, but with 620 pages of buildup, the reader probably cares more about the characters than if they went in cold. First, it is our first real chance to see how the bad guys operate. The big surprise is that, in spite of Randall Flagg/The Walkin' Dude/The Dark Man/Actual Satan Himself driving their bus, most of the people there are not bad people. They just do the work they are assigned to do, like change lightbulbs and maintain military equipment for their defense. This opens the door to a host of theological questions a la King, as Flagg and his top men (Lloyd, Trash) are clearly evil or at least seriously deranged. If you distill the entire Las Vegas settlement to its basics, you soon realize that the community was destroying itself from within, even though a nuclear blast did most of the work, ultimately. Even though they were doing things that Boulder could only dream about, Las Vegas was morally empty, with no trust between the leaders and workers, or even between the leaders themselves.

As spectacular as the demise of Las Vegas is, the final hundred pages are really the heart of the drama. Glen, Larry, and Ralph go off to martyrdom (and no, I have no clue what the whole "hand of God" thing was), but what about Stu and Kojak? And even if they survive against all odds, what are they returning back to in Boulder? Even having read the book before, I was still riveted over how Stu pulls himself out of what should be a certain-death scenario and finding out if the ingenuity of Boulder is enough to protect a new generation from Captain Trips. At this point, Captain Trips is kind of a background nuisance, only coming out of hiding when a child with at least one non-immune parent is born. However, although he doesn't come right out and say it, it is clear one cannot simply "kill" Randall Flagg, not even with nukes, and he's out there somewhere. I guess I get to wait until the Dark Tower books to explore those avenues further.

In Progress: The Stand

Thanks to vacation and other fun things, The Stand, Stephen King's magnum opus, is coming up quicker than expected! If you were disappointed to not yet see an excoriation of Lawnmower Man or one of the other not-yet-seen movies from Night Shift, don't worry. I'll be watching and reviewing as I track them down. Admittedly I'm not putting much effort into this, but just think of future reviews as little surprises down the road.

June 4 (page 93): Even in its original shorter version, this book clocks in at over 800 pages, nearly double that of The Shining. Therefore, what would normally be considered good progress barely makes a dent here. The plague is getting started, but nothing serious outside of the army base where it burst out from. Especially impressive in this section are the character back stories, even the ones that are early Captain Trips fodder, and in particular the chapter sections describing the wild vectors the virus is taking through the country.

June 20 (page 260): I've been juggling some other books this month, so the updates aren't exactly copious. However, I finally reached the end of Book 1 ("Captain Trips") and figured it was time for some quick reflection. Stephen King has managed to kill off 99.4% of the world's population in the space of a short novel, inadvertently making the previous three books substantially less scary. So far the book has read more like a warped version of Earth Abides, but the Dark Man has appeared twice now and the dreams are beginning, which will sort out the survivors. The next book ("On the Border") will physically bring the groups together, something that has barely started at this point. The last sentence ominously portends the conflict ahead between Harold and Stu.

July 3 (page 428): Maybe my recall of the long version, which I read years ago, is not so great, but much of the focus has been on the "good guys" in Boulder. Randall Flagg has been pretty infrequent and Lloyd has been minimized. True, Trashy has gotten quite a bit of coverage, probably more than the rest of the baddies put together, which I don't really consider a good thing. Trash Man makes me feel dirty just reading about him. As I continue through Book 2 ("On the Border") it feels like King is wrapping up the scientific part of the book and getting a lot more theological and/or paranormal. While I don't prefer the supernatural, I understand it comes with the territory when reading Stephen King, and therefore the narrative is actually becoming more engaging. Yet, here we are halfway through the book, and no sign of confrontation yet. Harold's on the edge though. Just add Nadine and....kaboom. (I've also moved this post back to the top so it isn't buried by Graveyard Shift and Children of the Corn....you're welcome.)

July 9 (page 621): I've been picking up speed, and reached the end of Book 2 last night. For about the last 300 pages, the focus has stayed entirely in the Boulder Free Zone, but I sneaked a peak at the beginning of Book 3 ("The Stand"), and we're finally going to get a look at how the other half lives. While I still contend that King's theology is nothing special, it certainly is driving the second half of the book. Those we think of as marginalized in regular modern society have inherited the Earth, as represented by society in Boulder. Nobody was really powerful before the plague. Stu was just one of the guys, Fran was thinking about what to do with her life, and (looking to the other side), Trash and Lloyd were in and out of jail. Nick (deaf and mute) and Mother Abigail (108 years old) by their very conditions were not valued in the previous world. Only Larry, who had the dubious honor of performing the last hit (?) song of the old days, carries any modicum of fame with him, and he has been pretty good at denying that ever happened.

July 13 (page 747): This will probably be the last update and I'm now reaching the part where the pages fall out. Since all copies of this version are old and this is a mass-market paperback, even with heavy tape, the last few pages are literally falling out. Unless this version is drastically different, I continue to be surprised by how little I remember from my first reading of the novel. For such a giant book, the real confrontation doesn't even get underway until the last 100 pages. Also, where Book 2 was almost entirely about the Boulder Free Zone group, Book 3 hasn't even devoted one page to how things are going since Stu, Larry, Ralph, and Glen took off. Only Stephen King could write a book longer than all his other previous books combined (eh...maybe half anyway) and still have me feeling like he is rushing the narrative. No wonder he gave the world the unabridged edition 12 years later.

Movie: Graveyard Shift (1990)

While there are many interesting stories in Night Shift, "Graveyard Shift" wasn't really one of them. It was one of Stephen King's first stories to appear in a professional magazine. Though Cavalier wasn't exact renowned for its stories, you go where the work is, I suppose.

Translated verbatim, "Graveyard Shift" would make an (even more) terrible movie, so substantial changes needed to be made to create a convincing 90-minute movie. First off, the mill staff is entirely male, which could never work in a feature film that isn't about war, so female characters are inserted, and one of the existing characters, Wisconsky, is now female. Warwick, who wasn't exactly in the running for "world's best boss" in the story, is twisted up into a real monster with no regard for his employees (or OSHA for that matter), verbally and physically abusing them constantly through the movie. Hall is cast as an exceptionally good character, who in short order hooks up with Wisconsky. And there you have it: the hero, the villain, and the damsel in distress roles are all filled. Oh, and there is also an actual graveyard awkwardly stuffed into the narrative.

I will give very feeble credit to this movie on two counts: (1) it is one of the few to actually be filmed in the state of Maine, and (2) the sets were actually pretty well done. If their intention is to depict a cleanup operation of a hopelessly decrepit facility, they succeed admirably. However, if your factory is so far gone that you need to put a fire hose to the rodent problem, destroying your (probably worthless) assets in the process, you may want to consider fire instead and take the insurance money!

Much to my surprise (and horror), the movie actually made money. Somehow they managed to recoup the millions it cost to make the movie, and then some, opening the door to further cruddy adaptations of marginal Stephen King works. The director, Ralph Singleton, however, never directed another film after this, his directorial debut. Davd Andrews (Hall) has enjoyed a fairly robust career in television since this movie. Stephen Macht (Warwick), who has the most garbled Maine accent I've ever heard in my life, is also mostly in television (soaps and basic cable stuff), as well as some truly regrettable movies. Supposedly he was supposed to be Capt. Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which obviously didn't happen.

On a side note, I ended up watching an edited version of this movie, complete with awkward commercial interruptions, on the Sundance channel. You may think that because the channel say "Sundance" it shows award-winning cutting-edge stuff without editing for time, content, or to fit your screen, but you'd be wrong. Apparently that all went away in 2007 and it is now on par with sister channels AMC and IFC, meaning the original series stuff is probably decent, but the movies they show are just a bunch of garbage filler. Lessons learned. I probably didn't miss a whole bunch here.

Movie: Children of the Corn (2009)

Let us take a moment to sort out the vast Corn franchise. The original short story appeared in Penthouse in 1977, to the delight of those select few who were reading for the stories. A year later it was anthologized into Night Shift. Seven years later it broke out on to the big screen, the first of many movies from Night Shift to receive the movie treatment. In the 1990's no less than five sequels were cranked out, all straight to video except for 1992's Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, which proved yet again a proud tradition of horror franchises that using the word "final" did not mean anything of the kind. Even bringing back Isaac (played by then 40-year-old John Franklin) couldn't reverse the sagging fortunes of the franchise and it seemed that 2001's Children of the Corn: Revelation (the seventh time around) marked the end of the road.

Enter SyFy, the network that proudly serves up big heaps of Sharknado movies every weekend, to bring Children of the Corn back to life in 2009 with a complete reboot. I'm not sure if this was the reboot America was crying out for, but it happened and I watched it.

The 2009 version is part of a larger trend in Stephen King movies to be more faithful to the source material. Especially in the case of short stories, where the sin of padding instead of cutting occurs, this would seem like a welcome development. Unfortunately, the result is a much more boring movie. If you loved the original short story, watching this will make you think you've already read the shooting script, as, for the most part, they play things very close to it. Vicky and Burt bicker, they get killed by the children, and the fateful decision to lower the death-ceremony age to 18 is played out.

On one hand this version is surprising in that it keeps the action in the mid-1970's, meaning the production team decided to keep everything relatively period-specific in terms of fashions and cars and so forth. They could have copped out and just made it present day. On the other hand, they are so obsessed at driving that point home that they added a bunch of padding about Burt struggling with his tour of duty in Vietnam that gradually overwhelms the entire narrative. They also make an executive decision to make Vicky African-American, casting Kandyse McClure in the role. Faithful readers of this blog may remember her as black Sue Snell in the 2002 Carrie, while everyone else knows her as Dee from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. She never really bothered me in those shows, but here she is generally obnoxious, more so than Vicky was in the story, plus throughout she is wearing a yellow dress the size of a large cocktail napkin. Not exactly the gear you want to sport to battle the Old Testament kids.

A big change in this version is that the kids are much younger. While the 1984 movie, for example, cast a 25 year old man as 13 year old Isaac, this one goes the other direction, casting a nine year old that bore a strange resemblance to Joe, the little kid from Modern Family. Even if  you can get around the fact they probably cast him too young, it gets pretty clear the actor was being forced to utter a bunch of Old Testament prophecy that made no sense to him.

Finally the producers decided it was necessary to show how the children of the corn made...uh...more children of the corn. I guess I could have filled in those blanks on my own, but apparently the creepy death ritual performed on the 19 year olds doesn't shock (or titillate?) modern audiences. I guess the 1980's were a more innocent time after all.

Movie: Children of the Corn (1984)

Although the page-to-screen time was a little lengthy, the Children of the Corn movie franchise is now up to nine, with a tenth on the way! Needless to say, I'm going to limit myself to two, this one and the 2009 TV remake (which I am already aware is awful), otherwise I may be stuck here for a good long while.

Like a lot of the Night Shift screen adaptations, it was hard to see how one would stretch Children of the Corn into a 90-plus minute feature film. Like observed with Maximum Overdrive and anticipated with all the rest, extra padding of the story plot was needed. Whereas the story drops a bickering couple into a mystery, the movie portrays a mostly-loving couple (though Peter Horton stops things short of wedding bells) entering a situation we the viewers already know is going to be dangerous thanks to the helpful flashback tacked on to the beginning. While the flashback is certainly educational, it sucks the Twilight Zone feel out and replaces it with stock "don't go in there!" horror tropes.

Also in the padding department is the development of the child characters. In the book, they are mostly just a bunch of Old Testament names and all corrupted. In the movie, Malachi is propped up as the diabolical one, Isaac as the clear leader (yet flawed and overthrown), and the brother and sister Job and Sarah, who are salvageable and are, in fact, rescued by the heroic couple (and in all fairness Linda Hamilton was about to become Sarah Connor, so it only makes sense they will save the day). This is quite a turn from the story, where the couple is flat out killed in the cornfield.

Finally, maybe because there was special-effects money to burn, the movie posits that there is some creature along the lines of the Tremors monster that is making all the kids do these things. Again, this serves to make the mysterious scary and sets a different tone from the story. Obviously what seemed like a nuclear detonation in the cornfield didn't stop this creature permanently, otherwise we wouldn't have the five direct-to-video sequels. Or maybe some other shenanigans take place later on. This all goes past my concern, though.

As I mentioned, there was a little more lag in page-to-screen between the appearance of the short story in Night Shift and the release of the movie. The first three novels all received adaptations four years or earlier from their book date of release. Children of the Corn was the first of numerous movies spawned from Night Shift, but took over six years to make it (add another year if calculating from the story's first appearance in Penthouse). After this, however, it would be a torrent of mediocre to outright-awful movies being barfed out almost annually.

Here's a weird factoid to leave you with. John Franklin, who played 12 year old Isaac, was 25 years old when the movie was released. I guess this makes him the white Emmanuel Lewis, but it should also give great hope to aspiring actors who look very young for their age!

Movie: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

My theory that the worst movies are the most frequently shown on television was absolutely crushed, when, of the entire smorgasbord of Night Shift adaptations, only Maximum Overdrive was readily available. In the interest of full disclosure, I've seen parts of this movie, as it seems to always be on one premium channel or another, but I've never actually intentionally sat down to watch it from start to finish. There is such a high amount amount of unnecessary profanity I can only imagine how this would have played on network television, especially the cursing ATM and marquee at the beginning.

According to the library listings at stephenking.com, Maximum Overdrive was the twelfth Stephen King movie to be made (unless you don't count Creepshow, and then it's number 11). This means, by 1986, the "Stephen King Movie" genre had really started to settle in, which isn't necessarily a good thing if you're holding out for Oscar nominees. Just to be extra special, Maximum Overdrive is directed by Stephen King himself, right at the height of his coked-out phase. The result is nothing short of craptacular.

It's hard to know where to even begin with a critique of this movie. It was only the second movie (following the still-warm Children of the Corn) to be based entirely on one short story. Therein lies part of the problem. Whereas a novel-based movie must slash, a short story-based movie has to pad. The source material, "Trucks" really doesn't offer enough to go feature-length, although I contend it would have fit nicely into a Twilight Zone episode (maybe one of the one-hour versions). So, in comes the padding. Extra characters abound, and, of course, an explanation about what is causing the machines to go haywire. Apparently a comet's tail can cause many (but not all) machines to malfunction. Trucks are the most impacted, becoming almost sentient, while smaller appliances just misbehave. And electricity isn't a requirement, as sprinklers also malfunction. Don't worry about regular cars, though. They are unaffected, although one can't rule out a freak car window rolling up unexpectedly and trapping your hand (complete with massive diamond ring), causing you to despair and die.

I digress, but clearly there are some inconsistencies here. From reading some secondary material, I suppose the intention of the film was to be "good-bad" so that people would appreciate that it is actually a clever movie that makes fun of other scary movies. Unfortunately, though the thick lens of cocaine, it came out more "bad-bad" - ridiculous is some ways, and just boring in others. Perhaps the whole "standoff at a truck stop in North Carolina that just happens to sit on a huge cache of weapons" plot line didn't work for me. The cast in general hovered somewhere between dislikable and forgettable, and lead man Emilio Estevez didn't have a lot to say, even it was because he spoke to trucks. Pat Hingle, who we met in the Shining remake, is here as a gun crazy, fast-drawling chauvinist station manager, who makes firing rocket launchers look surprisingly easy, almost like he modified a toy to shoot actual missiles. One fringe benefit of bad movies like this one is catching an actor or two before they were really famous. In this case, look sharp for Marla Maples (playing "Woman #2") and Giancarlo "Gus Fring" Esposito as an ill-fated video game enthusiast. Do they make the movie worth watching, though? No. Maybe better to watch a Breaking Bad marathon. At least Esposito has some lines in that!

To be clear, this was a bona fide bomb. I have gained some understanding that a lot of Stephen King material from the mid and late 1980's, both page and screen-based, are not particularly top notch, and probably reflected the bad place King was in mentally and physically. It should be acknowledged however, that these works can also be comfort food of a sort, if it reaches one in the right state of mind at the right time. Therefore, I wouldn't necessarily say this is a movie that never should have been made, but there is a time and a place for these things, and I just wasn't there in either sense. Perhaps it will be (or was) different for you.

Night Shift (1978)

For this post, which will probably be shorter than the ones on his first three novels, I'll be discussing more "big picture" concepts about the collection rather than delving into individual story details. More by accident than design, that kind of thing can be found in the previous post.

Believe it or not, one part of this project I was looking forward to was tackling the volumes of collected short stories by Stephen King. Some have, for better or worse, become part of the pop culture fabric of the last half century. However, as was evident with Night Shift, that wasn't a fully-formed development. All great writers take time to find their voice, and King is no exception (and we can argue elsewhere about the "great" label!).

If I had approached this in the strictest chronological order possible, about half of these stories would have kicked off the project, beginning with "Strawberry Spring" from 1968. I think some of the later collections might have thrown in some early stories as well, but my mind isn't there yet. To make matters even more confusing, the publication data provided in the back of the book masks a couple of the stories, "Strawberry Spring" and "Night Surf", which were originally published in Ubris, a student literary magazine, but are given the later dates (1975 and 1974 respectively) of their publication in Cavalier, presumably in slightly reworked form.

The stories are laid out in publication order, but not strictly so. Given that 'Salem's Lot was still pretty fresh in 1978, the temptation to kick things off with a "previously unpublished" story related to that universe was probably overwhelming. Most of the stories published prior to the publication of Carrie fall in the first half of the book and exhibit the developing author. From "Sometimes They Come Back" onward, the stories are those of an author with one well-known novel on the market and in general are more solidly written. The last few stories are either originals, or published outside the men's magazine market, showing King's growing appeal on the mass market.

King was a pretty regular contributor to Cavalier, and just over half of the stories in this book appeared in their pages. Two were published in Penthouse and one in Gallery, which means those few people that read these magazines for the stories were richly rewarded, or at least provided a more believable cover story for what that pile of magazines was doing under their bed. Writing forty years in the future, it seems pretty crazy that he would publish in men's magazines best known for their photos, but it really shines a light on the author King was perceived to be in the 1970's. This is very pre-Green Mile and still a couple years in front of the time in which anyone would suspect a director like Stanley Kubrick would take an interest in adapting one of his novels. You go where the money is, I suppose!

As I've alluded to, Night Shift would provide the fodder for no less than ten movies, six to the big screen and four TV adaptations, and this does not take into account the gazillion sequels and remakes of said movies. Short stories are more tempting to adapt, I think, because you don't need to cut out stuff to make it fit into a feature length running time. However, sometimes you need to pad, and that's where the problems begin. I'll gradually explore some, if not all of these, as I can find them, and appropriately bemoan all their faults. Stay tuned for the most prevalent and ghastly of the bunch...Maximum Overdrive.

In Progress: Night Shift

For this one I'll go story by story rather than the usual random page numbers. Since there are twenty stories, this should make for a reasonably long post when completed, unlike Rage. As is frequently the case, this post may be rife with spoilers as it is updated, so consider yourself warned!

"Jerusalem's Lot": Stephen King had been dancing around with the idea of writing something in the epistolary format, and it finally happens here. We saw a little bit of it in Carrie (through not the whole way through), while with 'Salem's Lot he mentions the influence of Dracula and its epistolary format, yet writes his vampire book as a straight narrative. It is tempting to call this a prequel to its shortened-namesake novel, but there is very little holding the two together and some major differences that would make a same-universe situation hard to explain. For instance, the notorious haunted houses have different names, and everything feels much closer to the ocean than the novel. Although this is one of just four of these stories to be original to this collection, I get the feeling the original notion for this story predates 'Salem's Lot and was "fleshed out" for publication here. As for the epistolary format, it is also arranged into Russian nesting dolls, which quotations within quotations within quotations. And if that isn't enough, the last piece effectively wraps itself around the entire story...and drops a pesky "unreliable narrator" on us!

"Graveyard Shift": This is one of the first short stories by Stephen King to appear in a professional magazine. As noted in my journey through the early novels, his style was still developing. While there is a little bit of primal thrill in finding out just what the heck is in the "sub-basement" of this disgusting mill, the whole story is primary a gross-out festival. So of course they based a movie on it, which should be a delight to watch. I'm still confused about how eager Hall was to let the critters kill his boss, and yet just a few paragraphs down said critters take him out as well. It was a touch of the "blind cruelty" that marred Rage, but, hey, this is the early stuff.

"Night Surf": A proto-Stand short story, originally published in 1969 and re-published professionally in 1974. I'm not sure if King adjusted the original, either in 1974 or for publication here, but if not it means the seeds for what would become his magnum opus had been in place for quite some time. If I hadn't known this I probably would have written this one off as largely forgettable. As is the case with his earliest writings, the main character, Bernie, is a total jerk, which doesn't help.

"I Am the Doorway": King did a little science fiction here, but don't worry, he manages to make it properly horrifying in a hand-destroying ending. I am hesitant to call him an optimist, but when it came to the space program, he was predicting Mars landings and Venus fly-bys before 1980. But was it worth it to bring home a bunch of alien eyes?!

"The Mangler": Gee, and I thought I'd have to wait until "Trucks" to get a good possessed-machine story. In spite of a heavy reliance on gross-out descriptions of people getting attacked or eaten by a rogue machine (in the case an industrial laundry ironing machine), there is a good story here, which makes it the standout in King's pre-Carrie literary output thus far.

"The Boogeyman": This is more dialogue-driven piece, all taking place within the confines of a shrink's office. Unlike pretty much all the previous stories, this one has no section breaks, which on one hand keeps the story moving fluidly, but on the other it doesn't allow any good stopping points if you are just trying to sneak in a few pages. The reveal felt very Twilight Zone-ish. I suppose that isn't a strike against it.

"Grey Matter": This may be the grossest one yet. Nothing like drinking a bad can of beer and slowing transforming into a contagious (?) gelatinous mass. Good times! Nevertheless, the story had a good flow and suspense. Like many of the stories, the end was abrupt, but I've come to accept that is the nature of a short story in the horror genre.

"Battleground": This one was probably my favorite yet. It's as if the Small Soldiers script got a seriously dark reworking by King. I was a little tired when I started it, so I though "oh great a boring hitman story from the early days", but all of that got thrown sideways when the main character started being attacked by toy soldiers. Again, I think this one owes a good deal to the Twilight Zone, because these tiny guys are very good at what they do...and they have a little help in the form of bonus items.

"Trucks": Here it is, the inspiration for the greatest movie ever, Maximum Overdrive. That is a post I'm looking forward to. Things obviously are a little more condensed here. In some ways this is better, because the story doesn't feel any obligation to "explain" (lamesplain?) why trucks are taking over the world. They just are. The enslavement of the human race isn't a matter of if, but when. Indeed, the whole scenario is pretty far-fetched. I mean, it's all told from the perspective of a random truck stop in Anywhere, USA. But do we read Stephen King because of his realism?

"Sometimes They Come Back": It's the story that launched the hit TV-movie franchise! This is one of the longer stories here and was published just around the time Carrie hit bookstores. I'm trying to save the "big picture" analysis for the next post, but in the first half of the story it is clear that King's writing has matured from the "Graveyard Shift" days. The main character is very sympathetic and clearly drawn from King's own challenges of family and career. Of course, nothing is at it seems, and around the final ten pages the whole thing dissolves into a crazy satanic ritual that seemed completely detached from the rest of the story and left the door wide open for still yet more weirdness. Why do hands have it so rough in this book?!

"Strawberry Spring": This is another one of King's early stories, originally published in 1968 and republished professionally in 1975. Having done time in Southern California, I know all about Indian Summers and the Santa Ana winds that accompany them and tend to make people crazy and set the hills on fire. Strawberry Springs are their counterpart on the flip side of the year, and yes, it makes one particular person very restless. I've said too much.

"The Ledge": This is one of the two stories adapted into the movie Cat's Eye. From what I've seen and heard, Cat's Eye is probably going to be the best of the movie adaptations from Night Shift. Anyway, the premise is kind of absurd, making a wager (bet?) that the main character will not be able to circumvent a tall building on its tiny top-floor ledge. However, that's the fun of it. Then you realize that both characters are actually pretty awful people and nobody means what they say. Classic King!

"The Lawnmower Man": What a gross story. It's bad enough to envision of fat naked man mowing a lawn (in more than one way), but the vivid descriptions of the poor animals who get in the way of said lawn-mowing man? Yuck. I would actually be more concerned about watching the movie if it even borrowed one iota more than the title only.

"Quitters, Inc.": The other part of Cat's Eye, and one of the more imaginative stories here, this one will really make you think about what lengths one might go to kick a habit. As with "The Ledge", the premise is bonkers, that some company will watch your every move and physically harm your family if, god forbid, a cigarette touches your lips. Again, that's the fun! I almost winced when he thought he could get away with it, just the one time, somewhere he thought he couldn't be seen.

"I Know What You Need": The sole story in this collection that was published in Cosmopolitan of all places, is one of the strongest of the set. Like many of the later-published stories, there is a little more tenderness than in the earlier stories. But don't worry, there is plenty of hair-raising moments at the end. Remember, nothing is as good as it seems.

"Children of the Corn": Somehow this story managed to spawn something like nine movies, most of middling quality. The story itself is at the same time horrifying and a bit of a shrug. The couple that has the honor of strutting into this Twilight Zone scenario is thoroughly dislikable, harkening back to the older stories. The last part of the story takes a pretty hard turn away from the usual Night Gallery fare, as let's just say the kids aren't going to let these schmoes report them to the wider world.

"The Last Rung on the Ladder": This is the second of the three "previously unpublished" stories in Night Shift. While "Jerusalem's Lot" was an epistolary exercise by King, this one and the last one (see below) I think are more reflective of where King wanted to be with his writing at that point in time, or at least in some label-free future. There isn't an overt supernatural moment in the story, which is actually kind of nice after "Children of the Corn".

"The Man Who Loved Flowers": Just when you thought it was all tender Stephen King until the end of the book, we get this wacko short piece, I think the shortest of the entire book. In this case, the tenderness is all a trick. This guy is psycho.

"One More for the Road": This is a sort of "farewell" to the 'Salem's Lot universe, I suppose, even though I know the Dark Tower books will try to tie everything together. For God's sake people, just stay away from that town. It's for the vampires now. This story probably spews out the most Maine place names, so it should be surprising that it was published in Maine magazine!

"The Woman in the Room": As with "Last Rung on the Ladder", King brings Night Shift to a close with a tender and bittersweet tale of loss. Whereas the other story was about youth, this one is about death. I can't help but think this story emerged from the author's own struggles with losing a parent. However, I hope he didn't reach the point where he needed to take matters into his own hands.

Whew! That's twenty tales for you!

All the movies that come from Night Shift

I've been bogged down in a bunch of other reading, so Night Shift is still waiting in the wings, but I can promise there will be forward progress next month. This update is just to whet your appetite for mostly bad movies. After three versions of Carrie and two each of The Shining and 'Salem's Lot (and mercifully none for Rage), I'm hoping I've received enough of an inoculation to withstand what lies ahead. Night Shift would ultimately yield a bonanza of ten movies, six theatrical and four for television. None of them are anywhere near the level of Kubrick, but many enjoy a high degree of notoriety. The more ill-advised ones may be a little hard to track down, and I was clear in my opening manifesto that I won't spend large amounts of money to read or watch something. So without further ado, here is the Murderer's Row of Movies, with Rotten Tomatoes scores as of March 2017:

Children of the Corn (1984) - 38%
Cat's Eye (1985) - 69%
Maximum Overdrive (1986) - 17%
Graveyard Shift (1990) - 13%
Sometimes They Come Back (1991, TV) - 50% audience score
Lawnmower Man (1992) - 38%, and yes I know it has zero relationship to the short story
The Mangler (1996) - 27%
Trucks (1997, TV) - 30% audience score
Battleground (2006, TV) - an episode of Nightmares & Dreamscapes, with a 7.9/10 rating on IMDb
Children of the Corn (2009, TV) - 17% audience score

If you are a fan of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast, then I'm sure you will find the upcoming posts for these fine adaptations at the very least amusing.

King on the art of short stories

As we prepare to read Night Shift, the first story collection published by Stephen King, here's some advice from the Master of Horror himself:

Rage (1977)

It only took four books to reach what may very well be the most controversial book of the King oeuvre, his first Bachman book, Rage. Up until this point everything with Stephen King has been on the up-and-up. Carrie was pretty good, 'Salem's Lot was better, and The Shining hit "classic" territory (but the movie was better). Then comes Rage.

To put this book in the same continuum as the other three is probably unfair on a number of levels. First off, this book wasn't intended to be the proper fourth novel, but since novel #4 would be the magnum opus The Stand, it was necessary to throw something out there to tide folks over until then. While the short story collection Night Shift filled in for early 1978, King realized that some of his earlier unsold works may now actually have a market that they didn't have in the early 1970's. However he wasn't at the point in his career where his publisher was prepared to break the "one-per-year" rule, and thus Richard Bachman was born to skirt this little problem. Therefore, no one living at this time was probably aware of the pseudonym. Bachman was just a sick and twisted paperback writer in no way related to the rising star known as Stephen King. So they thought.

I don't have the details handy and I'm just writing off the cuff, but Rage probably dates back to the early 1970's, written well before Carrie. Undoubtedly the book was heavily edited for its paperback-original publication, but the juvenilia shines through nevertheless. Even before Stephen King himself decided to yank Rage from publication in the late 1990's, not because it's a poorly written book, but out of concern (guilt?) that he may have inadvertently inspired the recent uptick in deadly school shootings.

So, yes, if you haven't figured it out yet, Rage is about the not-too-uncommon adolescent fantasy of blowing up your school. For those who are (usually) male and were not in the top 5% of the popularity scale in high school, it is more than likely you had a passing fancy of one day being the great equalizer and cutting your more-popular peers and clueless teachers down to size. Of course you didn't act on it, but the thought probably flittered around in a hormonally-clouded weak moment. And then you fall back into the healthier and safer "it'll get better" mode of thinking. Charlie Decker, the "protagonist" of the story, however, has decided that thanks to his miserable past it will most definitely not get better and it's time to settle accounts. He starts off guns blazing, taking out two teachers, and then holding a class hostage. Unlike the more horrifying real-life school massacres, Charlie threatens, but never kills a fellow student. Instead he submits them to horrific examinations of consciousness. Meanwhile, the adults get to bear the real brunt of his rage, either through bullets or harsh interrogation.

One thing I've grown to accept in reading any given novel by Stephen King is that there is some kind of supernatural element. Richard Bachman, however, has no room for this. It is all deathly real in Bachman's world. Everything that made Charlie the deranged psycho he turned into were all things that could happen to anyone. Among his struggles with his parents and social life, there are episodes that anyone can relate to or perhaps experienced themselves. Few of us are cursed enough to experience all the struggles Charlie went through, and of those, most probably wouldn't lash out as he did.

And oh my is Charlie a cruel guy. But perhaps the cruel one is the author. While I was reading it I felt like it was coming close to violence porn, where the characters were created simply to hurt each other as part of the amoral world they were made to populate. Certainly in the beginning with the shooting of two teachers and before that tearing into the principal in the most callous imaginable way, it all felt very icky. However most of the act is holding a classroom of his peers hostage and, as he puts it "getting it on". Not like that, but rather getting everything out in the open. People crack and true selves ooze out. It ends up feeling like an awkward delusional fantasy, where the loser tears the masks from the trendy kids he suffered under for so long. The class is strangely interactive with Charlie. I don't know about you, but if I was held hostage I shut up tight as a clam and only speak if my life depended on it. These kids started acting like they were on Springer or something, bickering and fighting with each other,

Ultimately, to nobody's surprise, following the incident Charlie is sent away to an institution for the criminally insane, because, according to the rules of polite society, he's completely off his rocker. If the book had been better written, I think the reader would be more sympathetic to his lifelong ordeal and seen him as more justified. Unfortunately, I saw this as a fitting end for an ultimately unlikable character. I never really saw him reaching the point where the standoff ended either victoriously, or in a total bloodbath topped with a suicide. Sadly, that latter seems to be the more likely scenario in the headlines of recently.

As a final note here, I implore you NOT to spend large amounts of money to get this book. If you aren't a completionist you can live a perfectly normal life without it, because it really is not a good book (in either quality or disposition). If you are, do what I did and find a modestly-priced edition of  The Bachman Books. At least you get The Long Walk included, a much finer effort (to be discussed about three books from now!).

In Progress: Rage

February 9 (page 23): This Richard Bachman guy is one sick puppy. I'm not ready to label this violence porn yet, but it is definitely toying with the limits of violent behavior right out the gates.

February 11 (page 76): I can't wait to be done with this book. Maybe I've just been hardened from news stories of myriad school shootings, but Charlie's interactions with the rest of the class just seem a little too cozy. On the other hand, if it's an adult, it's cruel and/or fatal.

(Note: I later finished the book. I guess these updates work better for stuff like The Stand. Review to come.)

Early intermission

I know it's probably bad blog karma to let a whole month slip by without a post, but I promise the next entry is coming up soon. Just in case you don't have the list handy, it will be Rage by Richard Bachman, the first book by Stephen King's now-widely-known pseudonym.

If I was being respectful of King's wishes, I would be skipping this one, which has been effectively out of print by request of the author for the last twenty years. This article from Business Insider provides some background as to why. However, I am not a respectful person, so I've got my unexpurgated copy of The Bachman Books ready to go. I believe that whole collection is now out of print, with the other three novels being returned to individual publication.

For the curious, here is the essay "The Importance of Being Bachman", which I am skipping (for now) since it is riddled with spoilers, and I am but an innocent lamb. What is interesting to keep in mind is that he effectively had the public fooled through the early Bachman books, so one must approach the reception of these stories as being from a deranged mind with no relation to the by now venerable Stephen King. I believe it was a crafty librarian that was finally able to crack the enigma.

After three straight novels under King's own name, this will be a bit of a divergence. There is no movie based on Rage, but the next entry in this mad quest is Night Shift, a short story collection that spawned no less than ten movies of varying quality.