It was truly a joy to read my first 5-star Stephen King book since The Long Walk. For the most part the books typically are 4-star territory while the movies average around 3. Longtime followers of this blog will know we've gone through some real dogs, such as the other Bachman books, or books that cater to way more die-hard King junkies than I think I'll ever be (Dark Tower). Of course, there are some unexpected gems along the way, like Cujo. Given my unexpected enjoyment of that book, I suppose it isn't a huge shock that I'd go for this book pretty strongly.
I think we are hitting the first nexus in the Stephen King writing career story. Given his early success with just about every 1970's novel he wrote under his own name, any publisher would be perfectly content to pigeonhole him into horror fiction. He writes about people with supernatural powers that cause them pain and trouble (Carrie, Firestarter, The Shining, The Dead Zone) and monsters in our midst ('Salem's Lot, The Stand). All of these depend on the reader accepting that there are things more powerful than our boring old physics will actually allow. In the case of the former, these folks will ultimately triumph over adversity, while in the later they will largely be suppressed by "regular" people, but not destroyed.
In Danse Macabre, King stepped away from the veil of fiction to reveal a writer not comfortable with simply producing stories that run one way or the other. Nor did he feel that writing "literary fiction" meant something boring. We got an inkling of what else he could do in the mixed-bag Night Shift story collection, but Cujo was probably the first effort under his own name where he left the supernatural behind. Although you could run with the monster-in-the-closet concept and graft the idea of supernatural possession on to a dog, that is a stretch. He was ultimately a rabid dog thrust into a web of poor decisions by fallible humans. Nothing supernatural here, the cereal professor might say.
Therefore, Different Seasons is a continuation of King stretching out beyond horror, but not stepping into the dull. Unlike the last collection of stories, these are all original and "novella" (he mocks the term) length. Aside from the last story, it is all regular people, albeit in unusual situations. Shawshank is just your basic prison, featuring a guy who didn't do the crime he's serving the time for. A kid obsessed with Nazis decides to have a little harmless fun teasing an old man trying to hide his past indiscretions and both end up going more than a little deviant. Four boys in Maine want to see a dead body, a story captured in the reminiscing of a "serious" fiction writer. Finally there's a place in New York City where one can escape to hear a good story, even if the story is a bit strange.
As you can see, these can all be played straight, just from reading the single-sentence summaries. King takes them all in directions only he can do, so none of these turn into boring works of serious literary merit for serious literary journals. They aren't hack jobs though, which is the whole point King is trying to make here. There are no crutches to be found. The boys don't accidentally cross into Jerusalem's Lot and meet up with vampires. The warden isn't into black magic. Even when the final story, "The Breathing Method", breaks the boundaries into horror territory, one can easily say it's just a story within a story and no more real than the last campfire story you heard as a kid.
Having not read ahead, but being aware of what's to come, it is clear that King wasn't ready to leave the supernatural behind altogether. We'll take a break and prepare ourselves for the return of the possessed vehicle in the next book.
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