King and the Rest

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Stephen King is an author I admire, although I haven’t read all of his books.  Not even close.  Still, his cultural cachet is high, as it has been pretty much since the seventies when horror literature was first being recognized.  I’ve been fascinated by his outlook on religion, or, in broader terms, the supernatural.  Rebecca Frost approaches things from a different angle, but her Surviving Stephen King: Reactions to the Supernatural in the Works by the Master of Horror is a volume worth pondering.  Quite often, as was the case with Douglas Cowan’s America’s Dark Theologian, I haven’t read all of the books and short stories the author discusses.  Frost gives good summaries, however, which help frame the discussion.  One of the reasons I enjoy King is that he allows the supernatural in, but something I hadn’t really realized until reading this book was that the supernatural is generally a threat.

Now, knowing King as a horror writer, it’s obvious that there has to be a threat, but in what Frost explores, standard Christianity doesn’t always work well against the supernatural.  One of the points I made in my expensively-priced Nightmares with the Bible is that physically fighting a demon crosses ontological lines if demons are spiritual beings.  Frost discusses how quite often “success” in a King story involves destroying the physical aspect of the supernatural threat.  It doesn’t always work permanently, but for the protagonists, at the time, it tends to be sufficient for them to get on with their lives, sans supernatural.  Having studied religion through three degrees, this made me stop and think.  The impetus to start on that career track was the idea that the supernatural tends to be good.  Enter King.

I only started reading King after my doctorate, and I haven’t read as much as true fans, I suppose.  Still, I tend to try to analyze what I read—thus the many posts about books on this blog—and it helps to have the guidance of someone more familiar with his oeuvre than myself.  Reading books like Surviving Stephen King also gives me an idea of which of his books I should pick up, and also which I might safely avoid.  Frost is an able guide, considering the various appropriations, or Christian solutions to the supernatural, in King’s imagination, and whether they work or not.  The ideal reader for Frost has probably read King a bit more widely than me, but I still found this study enlightening.  And it added some novels to my to read list.

Monkey Shines

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While religion isn’t a major part of the story, it appears enough in The Monkey to be noted.  The movie presents probably the most inarticulate priest in cinema, played for laughs.  But then again, there is quite a lot of comedy in among the gore.  It’s difficult to say if the movie would’ve succeeded had it been straight horror.  Based on a Stephen King short story, the plot revolve around a toy ape, actually, a drum-playing chimp that is wound up with a key.  The problem is, when the last drum-stick comes down somebody nearby dies in a bizarre way.  As is the way in such stories, if the “monkey” (I’ll just give in and call it that) is destroyed, which it is from time to time, it keeps coming back.  When purchased by a father for his twin sons, tragedy follows until only one is left standing.  The religion comes at the funerals.

The twin sons, Hal and Bill, the main human focus of the film, hate each other.  This is mainly because Bill, the firstborn, bullies Hal, driving resentment.  They discover the monkey among their absentee father’s effects and when they wind it up they soon end up as orphans.  When it kills their guardian uncle, they put it down a well where it stays quiet for 25 years.  Bill acquires the toy as an adult and harboring resentment, believing Hal killed their mother, he sets the monkey off again in the hopes that it will kill his estranged brother.  A string of bizarre deaths occur, cluing Hal in to the fact that his brother is back at it.  Only one of them survives while the town lies in ruins.  The deaths, although gruesome, are comedic, making them bearable.

The story is dark enough that director Osgood Perkins’ decision to make it comedic appears to have been the only way to make it palatable.  Horror comedy is often difficult to pull off well.  Many such films wind up being simply silly or losing any potential to be frightening.  The Monkey manages to blend fun and fear effectively.  It also continues the long line of horror films that animate toys of various sorts, making all kinds of commentary about childhood.  Of course, this film begins with Bill and Hal’s childhood and has them learning to deal with death at an early age.  At the end even Death on his pale horse has a cameo. Handled differently, it could’ve been quite terrifying.  Especially since the religion in this world is so completely ineffectual.

From the Grave

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“Macabre” is a word of uncertain etymological origin.  One of the most convincing arguments that I’ve read is that it derives from Hebrew qbr, a root associated with graves.  The “m” prefix would be the preposition “from,” making the phrase miqqeber, or “from the grave.”  It has been decades so I don’t remember where I read that, but it made sense to me.  In any case, this is a fairly common word for titles, it would seem.  I recalled Stephen King noting Macabre among the scariest films up to 1980, so I thought I’d try to find it.  A simple IMDb search showed it streaming for free on a couple of platforms, so I clicked on one of them.  At about halfway through, I paused the movie to see if maybe I’d got the wrong one (I had).  But I decided to finish it out in any case.  There will be spoilers below.

What I’d found was the 1980 Lamberto Bava movie.  Bava’s name was familiar to me from his famous father, Mario Bava, an Italian horror movie innovator.  There was a family resemblance.  So, what’s it about?  A woman with two children is having an affair.  Her somewhat unstable daughter decides to drown her brother to get her mother to come home.  On the way, her paramour, who is driving, runs into a guardrail and is decapitated.  After being released from the mental hospital, the woman moves into the apartment where the affair had been taking place.  The house is owned by a blind man who knew about the affair.  It sounds like, however, the affair is still continuing although said man is dead.  

When the daughter, who is trying to get her parents back together, confesses that she drowned her brother, the woman drowns her—echoes of Medea here—but the blind man kills the woman when he tries to save the daughter.  What makes this even more macabre, is that both the blind man and the daughter had learned that the woman was keeping the head of her lover in the freezer—echoes of Alice Cooper as well—to stimulate her as she continues the affair without her former lover.  It’s not a horror classic.  Titles can’t be copyrighted, so some repetition is bound to occur.  The Macabre I should’ve watched was the one from either 1958 or 1969.  Apparently this is a popular film title, as there was another released in 2009.  I can rule out the last one, but to find out what I should be looking out for, I’ll need to dig out my copy of, well, Danse Macabre.

Grown-up Jane

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Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror.  Some of the others remain remarkably effective today.  I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?;  I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid.  When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try.  I was pretty impressed.  It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good.  One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.

In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her.  Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades.  Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister.  Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister.  There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on.  There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.

One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help.  I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this.  How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out.  And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist.  Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times.  While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels.  The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments.  Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror.  Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues.  I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.

Scary Things

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I recently set myself the challenge to come up with the scariest movies I’ve seen, up to 1979.  The date is the publication date (I think) of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, which gave me the idea.  Book publication dates can be difficult to decipher; I have the Berkley Trade paperback edition, which is copyrighted 1981 and published in ’82.  So, let’s just say 1980.  Now, I would never challenge Mr. King, who is older, and wiser (not to mention much better known) than me.  And I suspect, if I understand writers at all, his views may have changed since then.  Several of the films he discusses are thrillers.  And, of course, each person’s viewing history is unique as their thumbprint.  So let’s give it a try.  First, I need to say there are different kinds of scary.  We all have our triggers, and I’m going for things that frightened me.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Since we’re using 1980 as the cutoff, The Shining has to be on the list (of course King wrote the novel).  Like most of these movies, I saw it at home and the theatrical experience would’ve made an even bigger impact.  The Exorcist also has to be on this list as well.  For older fare, Eyes Without a Face certainly qualifies.  The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is among those in this period but it isn’t terribly scary.  I watched a number of King’s movies—many of which I’d never seen—and found some frightening ones among them.  Night of the Hunter, which makes me add the original Cape Fear, should be included.  So is The Bad Seed.  Something all of these have in common, apart from perhaps The Exorcist, is that they derive their terror from psychology.  There may be some supernatural involved, but the mind is the truly scary part.

Growing up—and even in the present—I’m not really looking to be scared.  I have no trouble getting to that state all by myself, thank you.  The monster movies of childhood thrilled with the unusual, and the realm beyond the everyday.  The haunted house movie held its own frisson for a similar reason.  Of course, children are often not developed enough to understand the nuances of psychological horror.  The more I ponder it, the more it seems that “horror” is the wrong name for what I’m after.   We gain bragging rights by watching scary movies.  And I don’t count jump startles as truly frightening.  I’m more of an existential dread kind of guy.  But I do love monsters.  Even this little exercise made me realize how difficult ranking such movies can be.  Perhaps I should bow to the King.

Learning to Write

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If you’re not famous as a writer, nobody asks you for advice on improving their game.  Part of that is simply having a writer’s outlook.  We all have our own ideas about how it’s done.  I admire the work of Stephen King.  He’s a gifted storyteller and his books often deal with the kinds of things I think about.  I had his book On Writing on my reading list for years.  What finally got me to read it was finding it in a local independent bookstore and wanting to support said venue.  I found it both helpful and a little scary to read.  This is part memoir and part instruction manual by someone who isn’t full of ego, despite his success.  Egoism isn’t uncommon among writers, but King realizes that many people have talent, but not all know how to bring it to any kind of success, no matter how modest.

I really enjoyed reading the memoir parts.  Indeed, I wish I could’ve read them when I was, say, in college.  My own trajectory as a writer might’ve turned out differently.  His instructive sections are also helpful, but the part about finding an agent is hopelessly out of date.  The internet has made doing so both easier and more difficult.  Too many people now flood agents’ offices with pitches that you practically need an agent to get you an agent.  I know this from experience.  Nevertheless, King’s advice generally feels quite solid.  And it’s encouraging to hear of the commonalities we share in our upbringing.  Writers often begin in less-than-ideal situations.  If we can struggle out of them, some can find success in writing while others manage to do it on the side (this isn’t my day job).  But write we do.

As with most of King’s books that I’ve read, this one went fairly quickly.  Not every book that I read makes me feel eager for reading time, but King always does.  In part, at least with On Writing, it’s because I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing this right.  During the course of reading his book, two more rejection letters came for my fiction projects.  Any writer knows that you have to deal with lots and lots of these.  King started earlier, but, like me, he kept his rejection slips.  Eventually I ditched mine because they’re too discouraging.  And I still submit to what has become, since this book was written, a very, very crowded fiction market place.  Still, this is an encouraging book, offering advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.  It’s a shame I waited so long to read it.

Escape Room

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I didn’t go out looking for horror films in 1979.  I knew about Alien, of course.  Everyone did.  Even in a small town.  I didn’t see the movie until many years later, though.  I was still in high school and money was scarce (college was all either scholarship, loan, or work-study money).  If Tourist Trap ever came to town I didn’t know about it.  In fact, I didn’t know about it at all until reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  Enough time has passed that the movie is now streaming for free and, indeed, it is David Schmoeller’s first film.  Critics didn’t love it, but King thought it had some appropriate eeriness, so why not?  It isn’t horrible—I’ve definitely seen worse.  And movies with animated mannequins hit that uncanny valley at just the right angle, even if poorly written.

The story’s a bit convoluted.  Five young people are on vacation and get drawn into, well, a tourist trap.  There’s a fair amount of psychokinesis that goes on, and the tourist trap is Slausen’s Lost Oasis, which is filled with animated wax-work figures/mannequins.  These are what make the film creepy.  As the plot unfurls, the kids get killed off, one-by-one, as horror viewers come to expect.  There is a bit of a “reveal” toward the end, so I won’t spoil it.  It is fair to say that insane antagonists were fairly common by 1979 and that the blurring of real people and manufactured ones is a bit unnerving.  There are some questions of motivation, and many times the characters don’t take the obvious steps to help themselves.  Still, the movie isn’t too bad.

I was drawn to it, having seen Schmoeller’s real groaner, Netherworld.  And King’s recommendation.  There is something about movies that are lacking in undefined ways that keeps you watching.  I was curious how Tourist Trap was going to end up.  There were several points at which I thought I’d figured it out, only to be told, “but wait, there’s more!”  The more wasn’t always really worth waiting for, but the ending has a bit of a payoff.  There is some slasher aesthetic here, but it’s unconventional enough that you may at least be kept guessing.  The thing that the movie gets right is that human figures that aren’t human are scary.  Many films play on this, of course.  Even if you’ve seen others, it still tend to ramp up the shudder factor a bit.  It only took four decades for me to stumble into this tourist trap, and it was a reasonable brief vacation from reality.

After Daytime

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When you’re looking for freebies to watch, it helps to get some advice of what to see.  Particularly if it’s older (and more likely to be available).  I hadn’t heard of Night Watch until I saw it in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre list of really scary movies.  Granted, this was nearly a half century ago and many horror classics had yet to come.  Still, I was surprised at just how “ho-hum” Night Watch was.  Yes, it has a twist ending that makes some of the foregoing less credible, but that little hook was kind of neat.  Otherwise, the pacing is slow and the characters largely unsympathetic.  And scary it is not.  Granted, had I seen it as a young man in a theater, that might’ve made a difference.  I know that Fatal Attraction really bothered me in those circumstances.

The story of a rich couple with a traumatized wife and an unfaithful husband, it has trouble garnering the sympathy of some viewers.  Elizabeth Taylor’s acting is pretty good, and the setting (lots of British thunderstorms), and some good, creepy music do help the mood.  And if you’ve seen Rear Window and Gaslight a bit of this will look familiar.  Taylor’s character thinks she sees a murdered person in the adjacent house and as her hysteria increases nobody will believer her anymore.  Of course, her husband is having an affair with her best friend (who is living with them), so what could possibly go wrong?  The movie’s generally not considered horror, although a number of King’s favs aren’t.

That got me to thinking about what the scariest movies would’ve been to me back then.  Keep in mind that most of my childhood fare was Saturday afternoon monster movies.  If we move it ahead a few more years, say to the early-mid eighties, I was in college and saw more that was properly scary.  Of course, I didn’t see the really scary stuff until I lost my job at Nashotah House.  So by the mid-eighties my scare list would have included Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, and a Dracula movie that I didn’t catch the title of and for which have been trying to locate the specific scene that really set me off.  Oh, and The Cross and the Switchblade.  I was a child with many obvious phobias, and my mother didn’t allow really scary viewing.  A couple episodes of The Twilight Zone really bothered my young psyche.  Perhaps I need to put together a post on movies I’ve seen since then that fall into the Danse Macabre time frame.  There’d definitely be things scarier than Night Watch in there, I assure you.

Dancing with King

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There are books you wait too late to read, but which you read at just the right time for you.  That’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.  This book is endlessly cited in more academic treatments of horror and I knew I should read it.  And one thing I immediately appreciated is that even early in the eighties King expressed my long-term concern: many genres fall into horror.  He, perhaps rightly, considers horror a subspecies of fantasy.  Or course, fantasy has come to mean something quite different in the intervening half-century.  Still, the reader is treated to thrillers, sci-fi, and weird fiction.  There’s also a dose of the gothic and speculative as well.  King sets his four classes of monsters early: the vampire, the werewolf, the thing without a name (Frankenstein’s creature), and ghosts.  These are all very broadly conceived.

It will become clear in coming weeks, for anyone who’s interested, that the movies I “review” here have been influenced by King’s list.  And in the longer term, the books as well.  And I tend to agree with King’s antipathy toward television, although I disagree with his assessment of The Twilight Zone.  Danse Macabre is a book of its time, of course.  I would be curious as to the master’s reaction to such more recent classics as The X-Files.  I loved that he treated Ray Bradbury as a sometime horror author and it becomes clear that each of us finds different things scary.  The thing was, I found myself anticipating my too scarce reading time each day for the month it took me to read the book.  I often start books that I soon find myself approaching with a kind of duty to finish.  Love him or not, King is a talented writer and will keep you coming back, just like birds to a feeder.

I learned that King, too, appreciates bad movies.  He grew up about a decade and a half before I did, but the small-town culture I experienced as a child was not so different, although Sputnik was already up and the Cold War already on.  I guess what I find so engaging here is that this is a guy who speaks my language.  My tastes differ, of course, but there’s something comforting about whiling away the pre-dawn hours with a guy who can say “The Thing” and you know immediately what that vague phrase means.  And it was strangely reassuring to be reminded that the world of the seventies, which I experienced as a teenager, was just as scary as the world is right now.  And if King ever looked me in the eyes, I think he’d recognize something about me, although a sometimes critical fan.

A Kind of Shine

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Sometimes you just can’t not comment.  A few weeks after Donald Sutherland—known by some of us for his horror roles—passed away, Shelley Duvall has died.  It feels like the passing of an era for horror fans.  I never saw Sutherland in MASH, although I’m sure he made a good Hawkeye.  I did see him in Don’t Look Now, however, and An American Haunting.  Shelley Duvall grasped her claim to fame in The Shining, of course.  I can remember the apprehension that gripped me, after years of everyone telling me how scary it was, when I first saw it.  The Shining has its detractors, of course, but it remains one of my favorites.  That’s in no small measure due to Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy.

Duvall did other things, of course.  Since I tend to fixate on the things I like, I never followed her further career, but I did see her now and again.  She was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.  For those looking forward to The Myth of Sleepy Hollow (I know I am), she’ll appear as the creator of Tall Tales & Legends.  She also created Nightmare Classics, which I have to admit to never having seen.  Although she was involved in other genres, she seemed to have a real interest in horror.  She retired from acting early in the millennium, but came out for one final film, last year.  It was the horror movie The Forest Hills.  Horror gets its hooks into you, I know.  But it keeps coming back to The Shining.  

In part it’s the claustrophobia of three people, only three, in an isolated hotel.  Of course it’s haunted as well, but the isolation premise alone is frightening.  Especially when one of the three (or maybe two) is becoming unhinged.  We live in an era of remakes and it’s possible someone will be foolhardy enough to try to remake Kubrick’s classic.  Even if it were a more faithful adaptation (Stephen King’s book is scary in its own right) it’s difficult to imagine that it could be better.  Part of it probably has to do with how Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall pushed her to the edge.  Fame has its cost.  And I suppose (since I wouldn’t know) that fame in a horror role comes with its own burdens.  Duvall went on to create things of her own.  More’s the pity that they’re not easily found either for streaming or on disc.  And things seem just a little bit quieter now, don’t they?

Best King

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I suspect most people have read one or two at least.  Most reading folk, that is.  I mean Stephen King novels.  He’s sure written plenty.  By my count I’ve read nine: The Shining, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Revival, and Cujo.  I probably have one or two more in me.  The dilemma is that I like King’s writing—I’m not one of those nay-sayers who call it clap-trap.  There’s real literary merit to much of it (sometimes just too much of it), and he integrates religion into horror really well.  The thing is, not all of his books are made equal.  I suspect that’s true of any writer.  I’ve consulted some lists to see which are the best and I’ve watched some movies before reading the books, but I’m starting a ranking of my own here—it will probably be revisited from time to time, as events warrant.

What’s his best?  Well, such lists are supposed to start with the worst and work their way forward.  I’ll cave to convention this time.  So, The Tommyknockers and Cujo are tied for least favorite.  Each has a reason: The Tommyknockers is too long and lacks sympathetic characters and Cujo is just too nihilistic.  The premise is good but the bleakness got to me.  The Stand comes next primarily because of the length.  I like the way that one ended up, though.  Revival, my most recent read, comes here, about in the middle.  It was enjoyable to read, even with its length.  I think King has a little trouble writing convincing kids, but the story was good.  Next I would put ‘Salem’s Lot.  Who doesn’t like a good vampire story?

Not that kind of book.

My top three are, perhaps predictably, generally among the top ranked.  My order is perhaps a bit different than most, however.  I really, really enjoyed The Shining.  The movie, I believe, is better.  That may be heresy, I know.  Carrie has all the freshness of a novelist breaking through, and it’s effective.  Better than the movie.  That leaves Pet Sematary as my current favorite.  The story there caught me up and it’s the only one of my top three that I read before seeing the movie (both of them).  The book is way, way better than the movies.  Compared with Revival, which also deals with what happens after death, Pet Sematary offers a commentary on grief that doesn’t involve everyone dying by suicide.  It’s on a much more human level.  As I read more, I’m sure I’ll form other opinions, but for the time being, these three of the King’s early novels, are, in my standing, the most deserving of the crown.

A Different Zone

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I haven’t read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone yet, but it’s on my list.  That’s why I was a little reluctant to watch the movie.  It was free on Amazon Prime, however, and I reasoned to myself that I’d seen The Shining and Carrie before reading the books.  Indeed, my earliest introduction to Stephen King was through movies.  (Well, I did read one of his short stories in high school, but the novel side of things came later.)  When the opening credits revealed it was directed by David Cronenberg I wondered what I was in for.  I didn’t know the story, but I hadn’t heard of this as a Cronenberg body horror spectacle either.  It was quite cold outside and I was nodding off, so why not.

The thing is, it’s not always listed as horror.  That’s a faulty genre designation, as is sci-fi.  There’s one futuristic scene in the movie and it lasts for just over a minute.  Does that make it sci-fi?  Also, I  realized, it deals with clairvoyance and for similar reasons the X-Files are also listed as science fiction.  Paranormal, it seems, is permanently ruled out of the realm of possibility by assigning it an improbable genre.  Well, back to the zone.  I figure the title will be better explained by King, but there is a brief scene explaining what a dead zone is.  The story follows Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who becomes clairvoyant, although it manifests itself only after a car accident and a coma.  The main purpose of this, at least through the movie lens, is to prevent a Trump-like populist from being elected president.  That is the horror part, I guess.  And it’s becoming clear to me that writers were warning about these things since the seventies.

Unlike many of my weekend movies, I’d actually heard of The Dead Zone before.  There are some horror tropes present.  It begins with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and has a few other horror references tossed in.  Still, it’s a very human story.  The movie probes the difficulties of a life with special abilities.  Johnny never gets over the woman he was going to marry before his coma, and he feels for those whose futures he sees.  The movie is fairly slowly paced and it drops a few threads, again, likely found in the novel.  In the book or movie debate I generally go for book first, but that often leads to disappointment on the silver screen.  Maybe this was the right order to go this time around.  Once I read the novel I guess I’ll know.  Or at least have an opinion.

Clergy Problems

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I believe Revival is the most recently written Stephen King novel I’ve read.  It was pretty good—it certainly scores high on the religion and horror scale, although it takes quite a while to get to the horror part.  Part of the problem for me is that I liked Charles Daniel Jacobs.  I tended to relate more to him than to Jamie Morton (the narrator/protagonist).  Perhaps this was because, like Jacobs, I studied to be a Methodist minister.  And like him, came to have a rather different view of what is really going on in the world.  He’s clearly King’s villain, however.  Or “fifth business” as he’s termed in the novel.  The secret lightning he seeks turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin.  I was curious to know more about it.  The novel, as is typical, has several subplots but the main one is how Jamie and Charlie face what’s after death in a tragic climax.

Charlie starts out as a Methodist preacher.  When his wife and son are tragically killed, he becomes a huckster who actually has tapped into an electrical power that can heal people.  It often, however, leaves bad aftereffects.  Jamie, who knew him as a kid, is cured by him from a heroin addiction.  Their paths continue to cross over the next fifty years or so—this is a longitudinal story—as Jamie comes more and more to distrust his childhood hero.  Charlie can use electricity to perform wonders and it make him rich.  He wants more, however.  He wants to see beyond death to assure himself that his wife and son are in a better place.  It seems to me that that motivation isn’t a bad one.  The only way he seems a villain is that he doesn’t really care for other people.

The story is well told but it doesn’t have the same “classic” feel as some of King’s earlier novels.  He well understands, however, that horror and religion belong together.  I haven’t read all of his novels—not by a long shot—but clergy aren’t rare and when they’re present they’re implicated in the horrors, or in this case, responsible for them.  These are important insights, as others have also noticed.  Revival is one of those books that requires some reflection.  It certainly feels like something written by a man facing the limitations of the aging process.  And not necessarily at peace with it.  Ministers sometimes do go bad—they’re only human—but they can also lead to real change.  I, for one, am interested to hear what King has to say about it.

Who’s Knocking?

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I’m by no means alone in enjoying Stephen King novels.  I’ve read a fair number over the years.  I was put on alert for The Tommyknockers by a scholar who pointed out some of the religious elements in it—again, not rare in King’s oeuvre—but I’d never heard of it before that.  I’m not really a good fan boy, I guess.  In any case, I saw a copy with the shiny copper of King’s name worn off at a library book sale for a buck.  It sat on my shelf for many months because, well, it’s long.  I finally pulled it down in October only to discover that it wasn’t my favorite King story.  For one thing, it’s simply too long.  For another, the characters aren’t the easiest to cotton onto.  If you’ve not read this one and you plan to, a spoiler of two might slip out but I’ll do my best not to ruin the ending.

I think horror when I think King, although I know it’s unfair to typecast authors like that.  Tommyknockers is more King’s hand at science fiction.  Well, at least it has a space theme, which is generally a cue for sci-fi in my book.  Bobbi Anderson discovers a buried flying saucer on her Maine property.  With the help of an alcoholic friend (Jim Gardener) she begins to excavate it.  The saucer, which has been buried for millions of years, is reactivated by their interaction with it and soon the entire town of Haven, except those with a lot of metal in their bodies—like Jim, are under its power.  They invent advanced gadgets (and weapons) using power from the ship and standard batteries.  They begin physically transforming into something less than human.  Jim, mostly immune, tries to help Bobbi out but he, along with a fairly extensive cast of disposable characters, are powerless to stop things.

Like most King novels, it’s well written.  Like some of his other material, it’s over-written.  Having had my own written work chopped down  (and, let’s face it, I’m now an editor), I see places where cuts could be made.  As with any long book, however, I’m left feeling a bit lonely now that characters I’ve read about nightly for many weeks are gone.  Even though I really had a difficult time evoking much empathy for them, hey, they’re people too.  Or so it seems.  Such is the magic of fiction.  Besides, there are bits of the old King horror still present in the book.  I know it won’t ever be my favorite King novel, but it won’t stop me from reading another, when I have the time.  Hopefully the next one will be a few pages shorter.

Creeping Again

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The morality of Creepshow 2 is pretty straightforward.  Of course, this is early Stephen King.  Sometimes it’s good to keep things simple.  Horror anthologies sometimes work and sometimes they don’t.  This one falls somewhere in the middle.  Of course, George Romario didn’t direct, although he wrote the screenplay.  And King didn’t write the screenplay, as in the first installment, but he shows up for a bit part.  Campy and funny, as the first film established, there are a few scary moments, but you get the sense that the bad guys deserve what they get.  There are only three regular segments, apart from the cartoon framing, each with a “do something bad, get punished” theme.  “Old Chief Wood’nhead” seems to start out insensitively to First Nations people, but it features an avenging statue “cigar store Indian” whole doles out justice.  It’s the most disturbing of the three segments since the robbers show no human compassion at all.  Of course, the chief gets them.

“The Raft” features less obviously bad protagonists.  Four teens drive out to an isolated lake with a swimming platform (the eponymous raft) in the center.  They all get high on their way there, and it’s clear the guys want to get their girls to the raft to have sex with them.  A mysterious floating blob surrounds the raft and eats them one by one.  You start to think Randy might survive for being good but when left alone with Laverne (his best friend’s girl) he begins to seduce her while she’s asleep.  None of them survive.  The last segment, “The Hitch-hiker,” follows a woman who’s having an affair.  Late getting home, she hits a, well, hitch-hiker and ends up as his victim.

The Creepshow franchise is, of course, comedy horror.  This film does end with a moralizing message that comic books don’t lead to juvenile delinquency, but rather other factors do.  This feels like an important message in days of increasing efforts to ban books.  Easy solutions by unthinking adults never solve the “problems” they hope to address.  Often what it comes down to is an aesthetic difference rather than true morality.  Morals don’t fit across the board, especially if you don’t think through your own motivations.  Of course, it’s nice to have a movie where such deep thinking isn’t really required.  Kids being eaten alive for being kids may be a bit harsh, but the others in this pleasant little diversion really just get what’s coming to them, and right soon.