Cujo (1981)

Cujo is one of those Stephen King books that probably has an out-sized notoriety. The name has become virtually synonymous with rabid, or just plain mean, dogs. Most people will know that Cujo the book is about a dog gone bad, and they might even know that King wrote it, even though legend has it that King himself, in the throes of drugs and alcohol, has almost no recollection of writing it. So, I was a little surprised to discover that in many ranked lists, Cujo falls somewhere in the middle of the King oeuvre, well below the other novels written in his name prior to this. I was more surprised to read this book and see it not so much as a violent rabid dog story, but as a compendium of human failings.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Cujo is sold as a story about a dog holding an entire town hostage, killing on a mass scale under the sadistic influence of rabies. This really isn't the case though. Sure you get some high-octane gross-out dog mauling scenes, but the first two victims of Cujo are morally bankrupt and pretty much useless. It is only when you get to the last pages where the sheriff and Tad fall victim (the latter more indirectly) that you really feel like Cujo is a super-villain animal. The real tragedies before the final pages come in the separation and hopelessness felt by family members. Vic is away on a business trip, while Brett and Charity are on a short vacation away from Joe, a handy guy who is awful to his family. Their tragedies are having no idea what is happening to their family while they are away. Furthermore, they are actually in many ways glad to be away based on what they do know. Vic is dealing with the fallout of Donna's affair with the charming Steve Kemp, and Charity, a surprise lottery winner, is thinking of escaping her miserable home life with her newfound fortune...but can she convince Brett, who takes after his father? What is heartwrenching about all of this is that they have no idea what is happening back home until it's too late. Also heartwrenching is Cujo's fall into rabid insanity. King occasionally makes Cujo the POV character, so readers experience him first healthy and loyal, then sick and confused. It's as if another demon dog overtook Cujo's body. King never expressly makes this the case, but by intertwining the monster-in-the-closet subplot with Cujo's car siege, he leaves the door open to readers wanting some kind of supernatural connection between them, that a monster lives in Castle Rock, be it Frank Dodds, or Cujo.

Cujo is the first non-Bachman book to have no major supernatural plot element. No characters can read minds, cause things to blow up, communicate telepathically, change form, or teleport. This is more the hallmark of the three Bachman books released thus far. However, Cujo is a little more deft than the Bachman books in that it is more willing to crack into the psyche of its characters, in particular Tad and his convictions of the monster in the closet, so strongly held that the narrative actually supports it. Also, Cujo is directly linked to another King novel, The Dead Zone, which is firmly in the supernatural zone, albeit without the explosiveness of a Carrie or Firestarter. Therefore, I would suggest to those that are inclined to dismiss King's use of the supernatural as a crutch that keeps him stuck in "genre" fiction, to give Cujo a closer look. There is really nothing here that couldn't actually happen. Sure, the fears of monsters in the closet and the thoughts of a dog losing his mind are a bit speculative, but these aren't original to King, as any child or textbook entry on rabies will tell you.

Where Cujo does fall short is in the surprise department. I could see from a mile away how all the character paths would intersect and how Cujo would be involved enough the warrant the title of the novel. All of the elements leading up to the climatic Cujo v. Car showdown were pretty clear from the early part of the book. All told, though, the novel still holds up as a thriller that relies on natural, everyday terror to carry its plot.

In Progress: Cujo

The combination of some slow-reading non-Stephen King books and school responsibilities on top of full-time work meant an unscheduled October break from the blog, but at long last we've reached Cujo. Here are the usual running thoughts.

November 23 (Page 41): I knew going into this that this was one of the Castle Rock books, but Cujo forms a direct connection to The Dead Zone in the opening pages, referencing the middle section of that book. About 25 pages into the book, I also realized there are no chapters in this book, so all I'll say at this point is thank God for paragraph breaks.

November 26 (Page 124): The nice doggy is starting to turn, no surprise there. The description of poor Cujo losing his mind is totally heartbreaking though, like somebody where all the things that used to give them pleasure now only give pain. The real drive of the story right now is more centered on the other (human) characters, most of them awful, some of them powerless.

November 30 (Page 268): I knew going into this book that there was going to be a dog that kills people. My initial uninformed vision was one of a rabid dog indiscriminately taking out helpless townfolk, but the book hangs more on the suspense than gore. If anything is really gross about this book, it's jilted Steve Kemp the Homewrecker leaving a little "surprise" for Donna. As for Cujo, after killing off Gary and John (no tears there), he's been spending most of the time assaulting the Pinto, the only thing stopping him from eating Tad and Donna.

I pretty much finished the book too quickly for another update!

Danse Macabre (1981)

One of the joys of this Stephen King project is that I'm not just reading the "regular" novels. While the sequence of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and Firestarter is a fine illustration of King's early career, one cannot get a complete picture without the inclusion of the Bachman books and other less-than-standard fare. By 1981 that expands to include the first of just a few non-fiction works such as Danse Macabre, our featured book, and will go on to add collaborations, original novella collections, and something called "The Dark Tower" sequence. Loyal readers of the blog know we've had Bachman interruptions since almost the beginning, but now we're entering a phase where all these new projects get into the hopper as well. In 1981 alone two works got stuffed in between Firestarter and Cujo and 1982 has no "regular novel" as we will see in the months ahead here.

Danse Macabre touts itself as an overview of the horror genre, which makes it sound way more academic and tedious than it really is. In some ways it is more fair to think of it as On Writing written during the height of King's drug and alcohol binge days. With six novels under his belt (plus three more he wasn't admitting to just yet), he was a well-known author at this point, but with a reputation of being a writer of "pulp" and strictly confined to the horror genre. This book represents his opportunity to both embrace the genre and refute the critics. He does this fairly deftly and really the only thing that holds this book back is its age (more about that at the end). He tackles horror from all angles: the movies, the literature, television (pre-1981 television, mind you), and even radio. For the most part he confines discussion from 1950 to 1980, essentially from his earliest personal memories to the present day.

To get the ball rolling he steps back in time a bit. After a preliminary chapter about "the hook" which sets the parameters for what constitutes horror, he identifies three horror classics from well before the time period he is to discussion: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Taken together they form the "tarot" by which all other horror spawns: the Thing Without a Name, the Vampire, and Apollonian/Dionysian Split Personality. Henry James is a bonus unofficial card as The Ghost, for his novel Turn of the Screw, but King routinely downplays the centrality of The Ghost to the others.

The movie discussion is divided into two chapters, which he admits from the outset is nowhere near enough ink to plumb the depths of the genre on film. I must say that he brings up a lot of truly awful movies in this section, with the second chapter even calling them out as "junk food" in its title. It seems like the main engine was the notorious AIP, the studio that handled the bulk of the Roger Corman oeuvre. That should give you an idea of what level we are working with. For the most part the first chapter says we shouldn't settle for only high-quality films, but then the second part cautions against a diet of pure junk food when it comes to movies.

The television and radio stuff was kind of a blur, as radio horror was pretty much DOA by 1960 and television even by the 1980's was nowhere near what we now come to expect in the heady era of "Peak TV". This takes us to a monster chapter on horror fiction, which is really where I make a point of listening more closely to what King has to say. Rather than attempt to cover a lot of material at a very shallow level, he uses some exemplary titles to illustrate horror fiction during this thirty year window. Some authors are no surpise: Shirley Jackson, future co-author Peter Straub, and Ira Levin. Others are a bit odd for being better known in other genres: Anne Rivers Siddon, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. He also devotes some space to two authors I've never heard of: Ramsay Campbell and James Herbert, both British and very much entrenched in the genre. It is here though that King makes a tripartite distinction in fiction. You have literature, genre, and pulp. Exclusive readers of the first consider all the rest to be mere "genre" (using the term derisively), but King points out there is a middle ground for true non-derisive genre fiction, above what he calls "pulp" but not up in the pretentious heights of "literature". Throughout the book I kept in mind that as of 1981 much of the world considered King genre-phenomenon at best and the notion of him writing a non-fiction work seemed a bridge too far. Therefore I see this book as King's way of both proving his chops to those above, but also a platform for attacking the critics who see no value in genre or pulp. It is a bit of a tightrope act for King not to accidentally for to one side or the other. On one hand he seems to like to name drop a lot of required reading books, but almost in the same breath he lashes out with pride that he writes "genre" books.

In Danse Macabre, we hear Stephen King in his own voice, something previously relegated to prefaces and forwards of his earlier novels. Also, for this particular edition of the book there is a 40-page introduction called "What's Scary?" and this makes it pretty clear King is a much snarkier writer now than he was in 1981. However the preface is essential reading for anyone reading the book now, as it is your only chance to let King update his discussion on movies, moving past the state of the genre in 1981. Not to get too spoiler-ish, but he will challenge you with his take on The Blair Witch Project 2.

In Progress: Danse Macabre

July 30 (page 18): There's over forty pages of prefatory material here, so I'm actually more into this book than it would seem. Stephen King has definitely gotten more snarky with age, if the criteria is a comparison of the 2010 introduction with the original. He has some pretty weird thoughts on what constitutes a good horror movie, though I generally agree with him on what constitutes a bad one. And your fun fact for the day: Dawn of the Dead was the movie that knocked Passion of the Christ out of the top spot at the box office!

July 31 (page 50): The first chapter is all about movies. King's got some interesting theories about what is scary and how the times impact the popularity of the horror genre. Also, I have this strange desire to watch garbage AIP movies now.

August 6 (page 102): I thought it would be nice to check in after each chapter, until I noticed a later chapter is about one-third of the entire book. I'm somewhere in the "autobiographical" chapter right now, which reminds me a lot of On Writing, but somewhat less lucid. The previous chapter was on the Big Three classics of horror: Frankenstein (definitely read), Dracula (might have read), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (definitely have not read). An interesting observation: for two of these, the author is really only known for that particular work. Good work, Mr. Stevenson.

August 17 (page 300): I'll do the mature thing and blame it on a final exam, but I let the updates slip. No worries. The two chapters on horror movies were fun because many of the films discussed were so ridiculously bad, yet getting a rather serious treatment. I then turned into the slog of a chapter about horror fiction. I feel like King is trying to distance himself from the authors he was getting lumped with at the time by name-checking Faulkner & Co. as often as possible. However, two of the books he reviews admirably are by Peter Straub and Anne Rivers Siddons, which are at a more even keel as his own work.

August 21 (page 403): The book is about done. This long penultimate chapter (150 pages) is getting wearisome and should probably be called "Ten of My Favorite Books in the Past 30 Years" of which probably not all will resonate with the reader. To King's credit, his list is pretty solid. Some are of no interest to me, but I do feel more than a little shame about neglecting Harlan Ellison, and not reading more Ray Bradbury. Also of interest is King's tripartite division of fiction into "literature", "mainstream", and "pulp" and he most certainly holds to the middle category, but is happy to show he is knowledgeable in all three.

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

We've finally made it to the end of the Night Shift mostly-awful movie marathon! While Sometimes They Come Back wasn't total dreck like Graveyard Shift and its ilk, it fell short of some of the better adaptations such as Cat's Eye. Actually, the original short story was a fair bit better than most of its companions, written around the time Carrie was published, so it straddles King's juvenilia and more professional short work. This probably made it more tempting than the others to get the movie treatment. Unfortunately, the original plan to integrate it into Cat's Eye, something I have a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around, didn't pan out and six years later it ended up on the small screen as its own movie.

The original story is a bit of a puzzler. It starts off fairly heartfelt, about dealing with loss and change and not even all that scary, like King was trying to bust out of the genre. That doesn't last as it becomes clear the old bullies are inexplicably coming back (as they sometimes do) into Jim's new classroom. So much for the non-genre story, but it moved the story more in line to what King does best. Then the story goes completely off the rails, with his wife being killed, Jim doing a deep dive into the occult, and the suffering reader chucking the book in bewilderment.

Needless to say, a straight-up adaptation of the story would be nothing short of box office tragedy, but one way or another, this one was going to get the treatment. The small screen ended up fielding it, resulting in a better-than-average TV movie for the 1990's, but another mediocre attempt overall. First off, the scenery was changed to the Kansas City area, and the town is Jim's old hometown. That way when he experiences the flashbacks everything is conveniently close by. Also, no family (wife or son) were killed in the movie, because it was primetime network television and that's not cool. Finally, the occult element is dialed way back. While there are still demons and afterlife matters, there are no real rituals (like cutting off fingers, etc.) beyond just having to reenact the past murder to push the demons officially into hell. As a quick sidebar here, I get it that "greaser" bullies like to be mean and hurt little kids, but murder? It seems a little casual for these guys.

Out of curiosity I looked at the plots for the two sequels and they are completely bonkers. Both unsurprisingly are straight-to-video gems that have nothing to do with the first movie. Number two is a similar incident, but with way more occult. Not to be outdone, the third takes place in (wait for it) Antarctica....and don't worry, the occult is still there!

The Mangler (1995)

I wish I could say that we saved the best for last, but if you've read anything here you should know by now that Night Shift is guilty of inflicting the world with some of the worst Stephen King adaptations ever. The Mangler definitely scrapes the bottom, with some out-of-left-field humor being one of the movie's few saving graces. This review will be shorter than most, only because I watched this over a month ago and just couldn't work up the inspiration to give it a thorough recap.

Having watched this on the heels of reading Roadwork, I can only assume Stephen King had some unpleasant experiences with industrial laundry facilities. While in Roadwork, it was just an unpleasant place to work, in this story it is home to a terrifying machine that eats people when properly "woke". But this is no Exorcist knock-off, as John and his occult-knowledgeable brother-in-law discover the hard way; the machine works on antacids! I should say antacids and body-part and virgin sacrifices. Sure, why not.

Like many of the other adaptations from Night Shift, this movie also suffers from trying to pad a substance-lite story. The machine monster is stuffed full of CGI and the blood spray effect is in full use, making the movie's tone more violent and thrilling than the mysterious and lower-key one of the original story. Then again, if you have Tobe Hooper in the director's chair, you're probably expecting something a least a little bit gross.

Needless to say this movie bombed pretty hard and further diminished Tobe Hooper's already-sagging fortunes as a horror-movie icon. Speaking of horror-movie icons, Robert Englund gets top billing in this movie even though he isn't in it a whole lot, although I'll grudgingly admit his portrayal of a disgusting old disabled owner of the Laundry Shop of Horrors is pretty good.

Roadwork (1981)

This is our third trip to the Richard Bachman ouvere. If we learned anything from the past two visits, it is that Bachman is either really good or really bad. While I don't think that Roadwork quite plumbed the depths of writing that was Rage, this was definitely not The Long Walk. In fact, this book was so mediocre (as in not awful, not great) that it sort of killed that theory off altogether. So what makes a Bachman book different than your regular old Stephen King monograph? I think it's the lack of the supernatural element. That's not to say that nothing weird happens, but you won't meet anyone that can start fires with their minds, perform telekenesis, or communicate via telepathy. Well, what's the fun in that? When Bachman works, it means a dysfunctional world that could happen, but usually it ends up being thinly-plotted sketches that don't age well.

Roadwork is billed as "the novel of the first energy crisis" and is firmly set in 1973, eight years before the book's actual publication date. With Bachman, there is that chance that the manuscript may have been kicking around in a primitive form for years prior, making the novel's original intent to be timely. With gas lines, stagflation and other maladies of the 1970's, it seems like having both your workplace and your house tagged for demolition in the name of progress is the bitter cherry on top of an antifreeze sundae. While most of us would take the stoic's view and accept the buyouts and move on, our anti-hero Bart decides to wage a one man war against the inevitable. The 1970's were certainly not the dawn of the man versus machine scenario, but the 20th century in a nutshell reaffirmed the story that began in the previous century, that there are things too big for any one person to stop. Bart, however, decides to make a delusional wager that with enough firearms and bombs, one need not give in. His focus becomes so intense that he doesn't realize everything else in his life is destroyed in the process and the outcome of his self-defined final battle is no real surprise.

By the description of the plot alone, this does not guarantee a bad book. At times it even seemed like this book would break and mold and do something interesting, but all hopes for that turned out to be in vain. Roadwork is hampered by an unbelievable main character. I feel the intention was for us to identify with him, but instead he repels. Like the anti-hero of Rage, he is a jerk that appears to get pleasure from hurting others, physically and emotionally. He also strikes up the most bizarre relationship with a random hitchhiker and since she is female, of course they end up sleeping together for no plausible reason. All and all, this is a bleak story.

Finally, for the curious, there is no (nor was there ever) "Interstate 784". If we play along with the numbering system, if it did exist it would be a spur of Interstate 84, which is split into two parts, one that runs from Oregon to Utah, the other from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts. So the mostly-anonymous city this book takes place in would be somewhere between Scranton and Hartford, or (less likely) Portland and Salt Lake City. In fact, the descriptions of the city put it in the Midwest. The lesson here is don't read too much into this....or just about anything in this book.

Battleground (2006)

One of the quirkier adaptations, as well as one of the last original adaptations from Night Shift, "Battleground" is not a movie, but the pilot episode of the short-lived limited basic cable series Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. Anyway, this should not be confused with the story collection of the same name that King published in 1993, even though most of the episodes actually do come from that book.

In both story and movie, "Battleground" is largely a single human character, played here by William Hurt, interacting with no-longer-inanimate objects. While there is some room for dialogue, particularly at the beginning when he carries out his hit on the toy-maker, the entire episode is dialogue-free. This works pretty well for the main section of man-versus-toy soldiers (even though I'd be hollering holy hell at those little green men), but elsewhere it is a little forced.

At times the action seemed a little silly. For example, nobody in his luxury apartment building seemed bothered by the fact he was shooting up his furniture with an assault rifle or wrecking their elevator. However the well-done special effects (under supervision of director Brian Henson....yes of that Henson family) helped to smooth out the instances of the incredulous. Of course, the fun of the story is not knowing what bonus surprises are hiding in the toy solider box. So it is possible that those who never read the original story would be more floored by the outcome than those who are waiting to see what a miniature hydrogen bomb will look like on screen.

Given the mediocre nature of some of the other adaptations from Night Shift, especially the later ones, this was a little breath of fresh air. It is certainly something to look forward to when this project advances thirteen years further in Stephen King's publishing history.

Trucks (1997)

Trucks is one of the stragglers in the ten adaptations that come from the Night Shift stories. For reasons that should become abundantly clear as this blog post unfolds, it isn't one that gets shown on TV much anymore. It also is another victim of the "let's try it again" phenomenon of the 1990's and beyond that needlessly dulled movies in the interest of attempting to stay faithful to the original written story (e.g. The Shining, Carrie).

Now I can understand the motivation to update some of the oldest Stephen King movies, be it to modernize them or fix the perceived flaws of the original. However, I'm scratching my head a little over the decision to re-do Maximum Overdrive. It seems like perhaps they wanted to "get back" to the original concept, seeing that they even returned the name of the original short story. Surprise, surprise, though, this version defied the trends of the day and actually wandered further away from the original. In fact, I dare say this was a remake of Maximum Overdrive that gave no consideration to the original story, like they hadn't even read it.

The short story "Trucks" never revealed exactly where the truck stop was situated, while Maximum Overdrive put it in North Carolina (home of most of the Dino-era movies), and this one moved the action out west into some kind of Roswell/Area 51 hybrid area. Conveniently, this accommodates the natural beauty of the Canadian prairie where the movie was shot.

The agony or beauty (you choose) of "Trucks" was that you never know how or why the trucks became sentient and the readers are left with the bleak feeling of a world where humans must now serve their new truck overlords. This would understandably make a terrible movie (or an Oscar winner, depending on the director), so Maximum Overdrive went through the trouble of explaining how the whole situation arose. Since it was a (spoiler alert!) comet, the intrepid band of humans pretty much just had to wait it out and things got back to normal, a fact relegated to a paragraph stapled on to the end of the movie. Clearly, Chris Thomson, director of Trucks and other mid-grade TV projects, felt this was half-measure and laid out possible causes like military projects gone wild and toxic spills, which the humans could fight against and fix.

An interesting difference in Trucks is what is affected by the "sentient truck" bug. Maximum Overdrive used an expansive approach that impacted all kinds of equipment, like electric knives and ATM's, and even sprinklers that have no motor I've ever seen, while regular cars were surprisingly immune. Trucks sticks pretty much to just actual trucks, but doesn't bother to distinguish among trucks. This scene, for which I cannot improve with commentary, says it all:

Other than being kind of boring, the main problem with Trucks, and with most pre-2000 television movies, is the obvious cut corners. Leading man Timothy Busfield probably didn't wreck the budget. But most telling is that a situation where a group of humans are trapped by trucks at a truck stop requires more than three trucks. I never got the feeling they were really trapped. Instead it just felt like the whole crew suffered from bad timing, always venturing out of safety right when a truck happened to be cruising by. Ultimately it is stuff like this that made Trucks not so much a blown opportunity as an unnecessary production. Why mess with "perfection"? 

Firestarter (1984)

The Dino Di Laurentiis film festival continues here on Under the Tome. Admittedly he wasn't directly involved as a producer in this one (unlike The Dead Zone, Cat's Eye, and Maximum Overdrive, our previous feature presentations), electing to delegate to Frank Capra.....Jr. However, Firestarter fits very nicely into the sequence of these movies, which I think are best described as mediocre films with underachieving casts. It is pretty impressive that they managed to squander the talents of Drew Barrymore (fresh off E.T.!), Martin Sheen, and George C. Scott, and even more impressive that they attracted these actors in the first place. I suppose they were doing two-film deals with Martin Sheen, who is following up his turn in The Dead Zone, while Drew Barrymore returns in Cat's Eye. If those movies were really good, I suppose we could chalk this one up to contractual obligations. As for George C. Scott playing "evil Indian" John Rainbird, I've got nothing (actually, keep reading). This is also where the director chair falls into no-name territory in Dino's world. Mark Lester would go on to direct Commando the following year, but really didn't have much of a C.V. coming into this movie. Future directors Lewis Teague and Stephen King himself didn't do anything to reverse this trend, making it all the stranger that a director like David Cronenberg was ever involved in these projects.

In relation to everything I've watched so far for this project (Dino or no Dino), this one is actually mostly faithful to its novel. However this is not a ten-hour movie, so some things had to be cut, and that's where I think the movie hurt itself. Obviously the back story had to be boiled off, and that decision was fine, but it seemed like the dark humor of the novel was also left on the cutting room floor. For example, Andy doesn't get to use his powers of suggestion to make people ignore a screaming blind government agent, make a scientist stick his arm in a garbage disposal while wearing women's clothes, or make Captain Hollister become completely OCD about golf and snakes. Losing these elements made the movie much drearier than it could have been. Finally, probably also in the interest of staying compatible with the under-two-hour running time, the movie dumps the book's drawn out pacing. For example, instead of Charlie and Andy hanging out at the cabin all winter long, they get sussed out almost immediately. If any time passed at the Shop they made no effort to indicate it, as David Keith didn't need to wear a fat suit to satisfy the book's way of indicating a passage of time.

Racial stuff aside, I have to credit George C. Scott for doing the best he could with this material. When John Rainbird fakes being nice, he really does a convincing job that he is this sensitive janitorial type that Charlie cannot resist. It's just too bad that he gets tripped up by curious production decisions, forcing him to be scared of the dark, but the place is completely lit up as if they put a night-vision goggle rig in front of the camera when filming. I mean, the point of the blackout is for everything to be completely dark to the point of not being able to see your hand in front of your face, right? I get the whole "conveniently located outdoor lights", "bright moonlight", or good old-fashioned "day for night" strategies when filming night scenes, but it is really hard to feel bad about somebody who is afraid of the dark with so much light on the set. Maybe Drew Barrymore could have lit a fire?

Firestarter (1980)

With the publication of Firestarter, it was probably getting hard to ignore that Stephen King was settling in to a pattern, writing about special people, often of a youthful age, that are not understood by the population around them. In fact, especially in the case of the younger ones, these special people do not fully understand themselves. Quickly reviewing his first six books (Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and the featured book of this post), this applies to all of the books except 'Salem's Lot. Additionally this gives some more justification to "the importance of being Bachman", as those books don't follow this pattern, giving King a chance to flex a different literary voice. Also, I'm leaving out Night Shift because it's not a novel and covers a wide spread of King's early literary career.

Now writing about the same subject repeatedly isn't a bad thing, keeping in mind auteur theory and all that, but in the case of Firestarter there wasn't quite the thrill that King delivered with his earlier novels. The idea of a shadowy government outfit trying to reverse engineer and exploit supernatural powers seemed a little to much like the plot of an X-Men movie. The government as the antagonist is no new thing for Stephen King (The Stand, The Dead Zone) but never so directly cast in the role as they are here. Also, another annoying crutch reappears here in the form of young children speaking with adult voices under the pretense that they are exceptionally smart. I'm deliberately trying to stay away from talking movies, but it forces adaptations to either use much older actors (see 'Salem's Lot), or, as the movie version of this book did, make the original dialogue more "child-like". One thing new to a Stephen King novel, but a bit of an obnoxious trope in other works of fiction is the "evil Indian", a Native American character who has decided to use his special native powers to manipulate and kill in ways the white man would never understand. While this is disappointing, let's just say I had never imagined George C. Scott in the role of John Rainbird. (We'll save this for the next post.)

If one thinks too hard about the plot here, this is probably one of King's most preposterous novels. In the case of the aforementioned X-Men, the insurmountable problem is that they were born that way. While Charlie was born into her frightening power of pyrokenesis, Andy and Vicky were just normal people who, thanks to one drug test gone wild, not only acquired (or became able to express) special powers, but also could genetically pass along their new skills! Then again, perhaps that's the fun of it. I found this to be one of his funniest books. Seriously? No, bear with me here. First off, the Shop is run by a bunch of morons. They played up the evil role to nearly hyperbolic proportions, which played right into Andy's power of suggestion, bringing out darkly hilarious skeletons from closets involving intersections of women's clothes with garbage disposals and golf with snakes. Even earlier in the book, Andy's suggestive powers caused people to calmly converse while standing right next to a Shop agent screaming that he was blind.

I will say one great thing about the book is the pacing. For most of the second half of the book I thought it was going to be any minute that Charlie blew the Shop to fiery bits and the anticipation of the moment kept me turning the pages. Darn you, Stephen King, I had to get past page 500 before the fireworks started! But the unraveling of the Shop was handled very well. By the time things started exploded, the whole operation was pretty much on its last legs and probably wouldn't have survived even if Charlie left the place standing. It's important to remember this isn't a mystery novel, so the possibility of the Shop actually succeeding at anything never got on my radar, and it was really more the act of witnessing their undoing that made reading this book enjoyable.

In Progress: Firestarter

With Firestarter we continue (and probably end) a trend of knowing less and less about a particular book going into it. Unlike The Dead Zone, this book is far less likely to be a response to "name one Stephen King book". In a recent ranking of every Stephen King novel this one comes in at #12, lacking the hallowed status of The Shining (#1), but also the notoriety of, say, Cujo (#39). Perhaps it the bias of the list author, but the earlier novels completely dominate the top ten, so it may be a wild ride ahead for his project.

February 6 (Page 87): So far so good, but it feels like King took a step back for this one in terms of plot. Since Carrie he's been rolling out increasingly complex works and here we have something that reads closer to Carrie than any of the previous books: a child with powers she cannot control and doesn't fully understand. At least it seems like her parents are a bit better adjusted than poor Carrie's, but come to think of it, outside of the flashbacks to 1969 we don't know where Mom is. (The book nominally takes place in 1981, but the Padres didn't make the World Series until 1984. Bah, nobody's perfect.)

February 9 (Page 198): If you needed some kind of demonstration of just how bad Charlie's pyrokenesis can be, you get it here in the "Incident at the Manders Farm" chapter. One sinister character (Al Steinowitz) turned out to be a paper tiger, and an inflammable one at that, while a new psychopath (John Rainbird) is getting ready to start his vision quest. Rainbird reminds me of the psycho Native American from the second season of the TV show Fargo, so I guess it's a trope now to have these guys that are extra dangerous because they can use their special Native American skills in the most horrific ways possible. All the while, am I the only one who find it strange that two normal people take a trial drug that not only give them psychic powers, but all can then pass it off exponentially to their offspring?

February 11 (Page 289): This must be one of those books with a definite mid-point, or at least an act came to a close. From the bad guy perspective, it looks like Rainbird made a power play on Cap, and managed to become even more creepy in the process. From the point of view of our heroes, I guess all good things must come to an end. It turns out the shelter in Vermont was all an illusion pretty much from the moment Andy and Charlie arrived. I've already sneaked a peak at the start of the next chapter and it looks like the chronology advances further. Add to this the lengthy flashback to what started the whole chase, plus the season spent at the cabin, and it shows a broader perspective than a Carrie-type novel would have. So although I still contend this is a step back for Stephen King, it isn't all the way back to basics.

February 15 (Page 431): Any time you encounter a chapter called "Endgame" you know things are about to get real. Taking a really long term perspective, even not having finished the book yet, these government dweebs never had a chance against fully-aware Andy and Charlie. Even Cap seemed to indicate that the Shop had more than a little Keystone Kops flavor to it when he was pushed/hypnotized by Andy. The only thing keeping things from being a blowout already is that these special powers don't come for free. More on this for the main post coming soon.

The Dead Zone (1983)

Welcome to the movie version of The Dead Zone, one of the last movies I watched in 2017 and my first blog post of 2018! As time permits I will include the remaining movies tied to Night Shift, and I'm sure when the next story collection hits there will be plenty more to review.

I know I've steeled myself in the past for bad movies based on at-least-not-awful books and short stories, but The Dead Zone left me disappointed. First off, although the novel was Stephen King's shortest work since 'Salem's Lot (and about a third the size of The Stand!), it carries a more epic feel to it, spanning a whole decade. Aside from some stray preludes or codas, the previous novels, even The Stand, were far tighter on timelines. Nevertheless filmmaker David Cronenberg squashes it into just over 100 minutes, which actually is a little longer than average for King adaptations. Of course many of those were based on shorter works, either by page count or timeline. As we'll see, this fundamentally alters the flow of the movie.

As I had noted after reading the novel, The Dead Zone is an end-of-decade novel, a chronicle of the 1970's. The movie, on the other hand, is virtually divorced from any historical backdrop. The beginning part, before Johnny's accident, is very rushed and features a truly strange date at a seemingly abandoned amusement park, or at least it featured a roller coaster nobody wanted to ride except for them. There is no Wheel of Fortune, something key enough to the book that it only warranted naming the entire first half after it. The coma also passes in a snap. Maybe Cronenberg wanted viewers to feel like Johnny had have no record of what happened for five years. And for five years, nothing much looks different except for Johnny and Sarah's hairstyles, being wilder and shorter, respectively. Also, everything before and after still looks like 1983.

As with the book, Johnny's psychic journey takes him into an extremely brief but ultimately unsatisfying career in law enforcement (psychic services division), before he retreats into a life of private tutoring. This is about the time we finally meet Greg Stillson, who is background-free in this movie and comes off as somewhat unhinged and Trump-like, but not the sociopathic nutjob from the novel. I mean, this is Martin "President Bartlett" Sheen, after all. Just to add a really poignant twist on things, Sarah is now an active supporter of his campaign. I don't think it was long after this that I saw the writing on the wall. The kid that Stillson uses as a human shield will of course be her child and she will witness Johnny's final showdown. Finally, it feels like some subtlety from the novel was lost when Johnny gets one final read on Stillson and sees the "suicide scene" in his future, thereby knowing that the Stillson-initiation nuclear war threat had been averted. In the book he just gets no read at all and that's enough for readers to know the future is safe. Even in the movie earlier, with the weird fatal hockey accident vision, Johnny's confirmation of a no-read is used, so I guess the filmmakers just wanted everyone to be really sure Stillson was finished.

Unfortunately, I fear that Christopher Walken may have undermined his career through extensive self-parody. Check out this classic Saturday Night Live skit which is nothing short of a full-on hilarious mockery of this movie: Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic. The unfortunate side effect is that it also causes a serious work like this one to come off a little silly. I'll be the first to admit this is not the fault of Cronenberg or Walken (at least not for another few years), but my own challenge as a viewer that must come to grips with the notion that the early 1980's are now "historic" in terms of film. Otherwise there was nothing too out of the ordinary about the acting, although Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson, as my wife notes and I concur, comes off as a proto-Charlie Sheen.

This movie and book set the groundwork many years later for a six season cable TV series. Mainly due to my annoyance-bordering-on-open-hatred toward the Under the Dome TV series, I've decided that I really don't need to watch TV shows based on Stephen King's work that go beyond the miniseries level.