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.