Ramblings of a Honk Mahfah

A Review of "Children of the Corn" (2009)

2012-02-12T07:27:00.003-06:00

Here's a review I wrote of the Children of the Corn remake for Loaded Couch Potatoes back in 2009.

It's -- um... - harsh.

Let me establish some credentials right up front:

I’m sure you can guess by the simple fact that I’m writing a Stephen King-related column that I’m, well, a Stephen King fan. I have been since roughly 1987, and I’m primarily a fan of his written work.

That said, I also take a big-time interest in the movies, to the extent that I own every single one of them on DVD … except for the last couple of seasons of The Dead Zone, and those only because I keep forgetting about them.

Heck, I even own the movies that are only tangentially part of King’s canon, such as The Mangler Reborn and Sometimes They Come Back For More and Creepshow III (still haven’t been able to force myself to actually watch that one). Those movies are so far removed from King’s source material that it makes The Lawnmower Man look like the model of fidelity.

From all that, you can probably surmise that yes, in fact, I do own the entire Children of the Corn series. Every last gobsmackin’ one of ‘em. They’re all terrible, from the original right up to Revelation, but they’re all sitting right there on my shelf nevertheless, and I even watch them once every five years or so.

I do not say this lightly: the remake of Children of the Corn may even worse than the rest of the series.

It’s definitely worse than the original, and I can think of a couple of the sequels I may have enjoyed more, and frankly, there’s not a single one of the sequels I can immediately disqualify from contention as being better.

This thing is fucking awful.

This is no surprise, of course, but I’d hoped that somehow, some way, just maybe it could at least be passable. Nope. Not even vaguely.

The remake is directed by a fellow named Donald P. Borchers, who produced the original Children of the Corn as well as other such luminous titles as Meatballs 4 and Leprechaun 2.

As a director, Borchers’ only other work consists of the Paul LeMat film Grave Secrets and Perfect Fit, which co-starred David Greico, who I am going to assume is Richard Greico’s shiftless brother.

Borchers “co-wrote” the screenplay with Stephen King himself; apparently, this collaboration consisted of Borchers revising King’s never-used screenplay for his own short story. Hopefully, this was a heavy revision, as most, if not all, of the dialogue is awful.

The original story, of course, is not necessarily a classic, but it’s got style and tone going for it. This movie has none of those things. What it has is a lame attempt at social relevancy, coming via a poorly-considered Vietnam allegory which clearly wants to be an Iraq allegory. However, since Borchers also wanted to be able to claim on DVD bonus features that this film was more faithful to the story than the original film, he insists on setting the film circa 1975, complete with ’00s-style interracial marriage and ’00s-style sundress.

Speaking of that sundress, it is occupied by Kandyse McClure, a greatly attractive woman who did some good work on the television series Battlestar Galactica. She also played Sue in the underrated television remake of Carrie, so she’s hardly a stranger to appearing in King-related films made by people just because they owned remake rights.

McClure is stupendously awful in this movie, and as much as I want to lay sole blame for that at the feet of Borchers, I just can’t do it. Even if he and his editor purposefully picked only McClure’s worst takes to use, it’d be on her to explain how she could be this bad in a movie.

To be fair, her character is written to be as unpleasantly shrill a woman who has ever existed on-screen. And to be even more fair, this comes directly from King’s original story.

The key to making this sort of unpleasant marriage seem realistic onscreen is to … well, to play it realistically. McClure fails miserably at this goal. Her co-star, David Anders, fails, too, but not quite as miserably; this may be due only to not having to be as shrill as McClure is called upon to be.

Instead, he gets saddled with what surely must be one of THE worst lines of dialogue ever written: “Put that in your God and smoke it,” he says at one point. It’s been too long since I’ve read the King story to remember if this comes from it, and I have no way of knowing if — should that not be the case — King might still have penned it as part of his original screenplay. I really, really hope not. Can we please get some sort of verification that this was a Borchers line?

Even worse, if you can believe that, is the portrayal of Isaac, the juvenile prophet and leader of the cult of children. He is played here by Preston Bailey, whom you might recognize as Cody on Dexter. (Then again, you might not. I didn’t; IMDB helped me out there.) Bailey is beyond awful. Watching him in this movie is like what I imagine watching a production of the screenplay at your son’s elementary school to be like. He’s that bad. I don’t blame Bailey for this. No child ought to ever be held accountable for his performance in a movie; that is something the director is in charge of sculpting, and Borchers clearly has no idea how to do so.

And somehow, Bailey isn’t the worst of the bunch! There are other kids who sound as if they could get their lines out only by repeating what Borchers — or, more likely, some hapless and unpaid PA — was whispering to them from slightly off-camera.

The only cast member whose performance almost works is Daniel Newman, who plays Malachi. He’s about a decade too old for the role, and he’s not good, but he’s passable, and in this movie, that qualifies as a legitimate achievement; so I assume, using the transitive property, that he must be a talent to look out for.

There is not one single scare in this movie, nor does one single creepy thing happen during the entire film. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that there is not one single moment that works, even within the microcosm of the singular moment in which it is taking place.

In a world in which The Mangler Reborn exists, I cannot honestly say that it is THE worst King-related film ever made … but it’s close.

Movies really don’t get much worse than this one.

(Review originally appeared here.)

The Dark Tower: Sorcerer

2012-02-05T08:14:00.000-06:00

Here's a review I wrote for Loaded Couch Potatoes of the one-shot The Dark Tower: Sorcerer on April 20, 2009.

The sharp-eyed observer will notice that the Dark Tower line has a slightly different creative team this issue, with Robin Furth graduating from plotting/consulting duties to plotting/script duties and Richard Isanove moving from co-artist to solo artist. Scripter Peter David will be returning for the next arc in the series, The Fall of Gilead, but co-artist Jae Lee has apparently left the series.

There are changes behind the scenes, but the sharp-eyed observer might not notice: it’s a fairly seamless transition. The only place I actually noticed a difference is in the design of a trio of characters (Cuthbert, Alain, and Aileen), and their appearance is so brief that I can’t be sure how I feel about the differences between Isanove’s rendering of them as opposed to Lee’s. All in all, Isanove’s art is rock solid; no surprise, there.

Furth’s script, if anything, is superior to Peter David’s scripting work; this is a good sign for the upcoming Del Rey adaptation of The Talisman, which she is scripting.

This particular issue serves as a bit of a bridge between Treachery and the The Fall of Gilead, and focuses on Marten, showing a bit of his backstory, as well as the details of his involvement behind the scenes during the course of the stories told in the previous issues of the series. It is a satisfying, chilling issue that stands as one of the best so far.

In a major addition to Dark Tower lore, we learn that Marten has a personal relationship with Maerlyn’s Grapefruit, which apparently has a personality and is in some ways literally the child of Maerlyn. Marten is also Maerlyn’s child, so this makes him and the seeing spheres siblings of a kind. Well, the Grapefruit’s personality/essence (it’s called a “jinni”) exists — or, at least, is experienced by Marten — as a fertile-looking, pink-skinned, Medusa-haired spectre; the jinni is Marten’s sister, lover, confidant, and co-conspirator.

In the process of working her wiles on Steven Deschain, the jinni learns of Marten’s relationship with Gabrielle. Intensely jealous, she seduces Roland in his sleep, and casts upon him the spell which will cause him to mistake his mother for Rhea and kill her. This strikes me as a very satisfying addition to Roland’s story; it absolves him somewhat of a bit of his matricidal guilt, but not in any way he could ever be conscious of.

In the behind-the-scenes segment which serves as this issue’s appendix, Furth talks a bit about how she collaborates with Stephen King on the comics, mentioning that some of the details (such as those focusing on Marten’s childhood) come directly from King. Others, such as the notion of the jinni, come from Furth, but are approved (enthusiastically, in this case) by King.

In any case, it has long since become very clear that Robin Furth is not only a major creative force in the overall Dark Tower mythos, but is developing into a substantial fantasy author in her own right. At this point, I have every intention of following her career; I suspect doing so will reward me.

Furth probably also gets credit for the sequence in which Marten kills Arra, the very pregnant wife of one of the Gunslingers. The manner in which he kills her is brutal and disturbing; even more disturbing, her blood gets all over an apple, which Marten picks up and takes a bite out of and then places in the dead woman’s mouth. This prompts Stephen King-calibre chills.

Speaking of that Gunslinger with the doomed wife, his name is Charles Champignon. Champignon also appeared in the previous arc, Treachery, but I didn’t notice something then that I noticed this time: his name is awfully similar to another King-related name, Charles Campion. Campion was the fellow from the military base who initially spread the superflu in The Stand. It seems unlikely that Furth would have been unaware of this connection, and in The Sorcerer we learn that James Farson’s infiltration of Gilead came about due to Champignon’s attempts to save his wife’s life. In a sense, he can be said to have been responsible for the initial infection of Gilead that will ultimately lead to its downfall. This is a nice parallel to The Stand; after all, Campion, too, was just trying to save his family.

A connection like that is totally unnecessary for the enjoyment of this issue, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and it’s a great example of how fun the Kingverse can be to play around in.

Also released recently was The Dark Tower: Guide to Gilead, another encyclopedia-like issue consisting of information about the larger Dark Tower world. This one focuses on the various towns and villages of Gilead, and also on certain key characters and groups of people. As with the rest of these type issues, it makes for somewhat dry reading, but is fun for the devoted fan. It was written by Anthony Flamini, who also worked on Gunslinger’s Guidebook and End-World Almanac.

It might also prove to be a valuable reference tool. I suspect that certain elements in the Guide to Gilead are going to feature into The Fall of Gilead.

I am greatly enjoying Marvel’s Dark Tower series, and I hope they end up committing to a long-term series which adapts (and expands) the entire series. There don’t currently appear to be plans for that type of adaptation. Either way, the Dark Tower universe is far richer now than it was before they became involved in it. I look forward to seeing how it all wraps up.

No, Seriously: Who IS Watching the Watchmen?

2012-02-03T05:11:00.002-06:00

I sometimes get asked who my second-favorite writer is. (This is a complete lie: I have never once been asked that question. But let's roll with it; it'll make this post easier for us both to get through.) #1 is obviously Stephen King, right? Right.

But who gets the silver medal in the Honklympics?

I sometimes answer Larry McMurtry, whose novel Lonesome Dove is probably my single favorite book, and who also wrote a number of other fine novels (among them: Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and Horseman, Pass By). Lately, I've been answering Joe Hill, whose work has not only impressed me, it's flat-out floored me.

But I think the real answer is Alan Moore. I forget about him sometimes, which seems like an odd thing to say about someone I'm holding up as a strong potential candidate for second-favorite-writer status. It's true, though; I go stretches of time in which I think about Moore almost not at all. The dude IS a magician ... maybe he occasionally casts a cloaking spell on himself or something, I dunno.

Recently, though, I started reading some Moore again (for the first time since the lead-up to the Watchmen movie from a few years ago), and I'm remembering something: this dude is the truth.

This was prompted by my reading a bunch of Scott Snyder comics -- I became aware of Snyder thanks to American Vampire, which Stephen King helped kick off (see how it all ends up coming back to Uncle Steve eventually?) -- including his excellent current run on Swamp Thing. This made me remember that about ten years ago, I'd purchased the first three of the six volumes of The Saga of the Swamp Thing (in which Alan Moore revolutionized the character) ... but I'd never, somehow, managed to get around to reading them. So, being in a Swamp Thing state of mind, I dusted off the Alan Moore Swamp Thing books and got to readin'.

And here's the thing: they're good. They're really, really good. In fact, they're GREAT.

As I was reading them, I remembered all the other Alan Moore books that I love: V for Vendetta and From Hell and Top 10 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Promethea and Tomorrow Stories, etc.

And, most especially, Watchmen.

Watchmen is not only THE best comic book I've ever read, it's one of the best pieces of fiction of any kind that I've ever read. Yeah, yeah, I know: some people think it's overrated. They are welcome to that opinion, just as I am welcome to my opinion that they don't know shit from the fabled Shinola; in other words, these people don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Watchmen is monumentally great. I've read it probably half a dozen times, and it bums me out every time it's over.

For this reason, I have to plead to a bit of hypocrisy when I start complaining about the fact that DC this week announced its plans to issue a series of Watchmen prequel comics this summer: I love Watchmen and wish there was more, and now there's more ... but it's more without Moore, and that's a problem.

It's old news in the comics world for characters to be bounced from writer to writer to writer, and from artist to artist to artist; that's the rule, generally speaking (at least within the realm of superhero comics). I would imagine Superman and Batman have been written by more people than have read some comics. Watchmen, however, has always managed to stand apart: it was -- is -- such a towering, singular work of art that it's previously been unthinkable that anyone would try and continue or augment Moore's story. Heck, even artist and co-creator Dave Gibbons has no involvement in these prequels.

So, by all rights, I ought to be up in arms, shouting to the heavens that these prequels -- which have the on-the-nose title Before Watchmen (cue eyeroll) -- are an abomination.

And they are. Let's have no misunderstanding about that.

But they're an intriguing abomination, because DC has at least had the sense to enlist some serious talent to bring these things to life. J. Michael Straczynski, Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, and several others are handling the scripting; amongst the artists is a name that will be familiar to some Stephen King fans: Jae Lee (the inaugural artist on the Dark Tower comics). With talent like that working on the books, there is simply no way I can resist buying these comics. I hate myself for it a little bit, because I'd like to be true to Alan Moore's wishes that the project not happen. (And if you want to read a bit about the history of why Alan Moore is against the idea, here's a link for you.)

However, as Stephen King would say, it is the tale ... not he who tells it. And while I'm a massive Alan Moore fan, I'm also a massive Watchmen fan ... and who knows, it might end up being good. Probably not, but stranger things have happened.


Jae Lee's cover for the Ozymandias issue of Before Watchmen

This got me to thinking about something.

Once -- and let me be clear: I hope this doesn't happen for another thirty years, but it WILL happen eventually -- Stephen King reaches the clearing at the end of the path, there is almost certainly going to be interest in continuing his legacy in some way. Some smart-aleck is going to want to write more Dark Tower novels, or a sequel to The Stand, or another Jack Sawyer adventure. Under certain circumstances, I'd be okay with that: if it was Joe Hill or Owen King, for example, or Peter Straub, or even Scott Snyder. Someone who had an actual connection to King. I'd still be dubious, but I'd at least be interested to see what they did with the material. And even if the writer is unconnected to King, but still a genuine talent, I'd try my best to give it a fair shot.

But what if it's just some Joe Blow type, some mook with good intentions but an insufficient talent level? Would I be okay with it then? Probably not; with Before Watchmen, it's the significant talent level involved that's keeping me from setting up some sort of mental Occupy DC camp to protest the whole thing.

The thing is, I don't know exactly why any of this should bother me. If the worst-case scenario happens, and Stephen King were to die five years from now and somehow Stephenie Meyer were to get ahold of the rights to The Dark Tower and then rewrite the whole series, it would undoubtedly suck ... but so what? It would infuriate me, but should it? After all, nobody would be forcing me to read it, and it's not like my copies of the real books would disappear.

I had to think about all of this for a while before I finally figured it out: it makes me mad because I know that WHATEVER it ended up being, I'd still read it! It's not that I wouldn't want to: I would want to not want to, but I'd still, despite my own potential distaste for it, read it. I've got DVD copies of Creepshow III and The Mangler Reborn to prove it, sadly.

Because of these contradictory impulses, this summer I will be forking over hard-earned money for Before Watchmen. I'll grumble about it a bit, and if it is anything less than awesome, I'll grumble about it some more ... but DC will get my money either way. If it's good, they'll get my money a second time, because I'll want the inevitable collected hardback. And if -- miracle of miracles -- it should somehow end up being great, there's no telling how many times they'll get my money, as increasingly swankier editions are released over the years.

But even if it's utter garbage, DC will get my money once. I mean, Phantom Menace-level awful, or Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror-level awful, DC is getting some bucks from me for Before Watchmen; quality is irrelevant in this equation.

Why, you might ask?

The answer is that when it comes to the stories I truly, madly, deeply love, I'm an addict. They are stronger than I am, and at the end of the argument, if what it takes for me to get that richly-desired hit is for me to perform the consumer-integrity equivalent of debasing myself in an alley for a few bucks to buy enough to get me through ... well, that's what I'll do. I'll want to NOT do it; but I'll go ahead and do it anyways.

Stephen King was right: it really IS the story, not he who tells it.

But sometimes, I wish it weren't so ... because today it's Before Watchmen: tomorrow it may well be The Stand 2: The Wrath of Flagg, as written by whoever's ben writing Tom Clancy's novels lately.

*****

I leave you with a sample page from Watchmen, and if you've never read that book, do yourself a favor and make it a top priority.

Why Listening and Reading Are Not the Same Thing, By Honk Mahfah

2012-01-25T16:45:00.001-06:00

There's a good interview at Talk Stephen King between David Squyres and Matt Jacobs (of the Stephen King Fan Cast). Check it out.

David and Matt are both audiobook fanatics. That's cool. I love audiobooks, too. However, they (charmingly) persist in thinking that listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading a book, and I (dickishly) persist in trying to educate them to the contrary.

Amongst the other topics in their interview, they took a moment to gang up on me on the subject, and you know me: I ain't gonna let that slide.

Class in now in session!

Reading is the act of reading: passing one's eyes across printed words (or, in the case of Braille, one's fingers along raised surfaces) in the act of consuming information. Listening is the act of being spoken (or, in this case, read) to by someone else. They are not the same thing, plain and simple. At some point in the future, I have no doubt, we will be able to download texts into our brains, and thereby possess full retention of it. This will be a superior process of consuming a text, but it will still not be reading; it'll be its own thing, and there will be a need to call it something else so as to make clear the distinctions between the two.

As a comparison, if you go out for dinner at a restaurant, you wouldn't say you "cooked" dinner, would you?

No; you would say that you had dinner, but that it was cooked for you. Whether you've cooked dinner or someone else has cooked it for you, you've had dinner ... but there is definitely a difference -- factually, though perhaps not in terms of quality -- between cooking it yourself and having it cooked for you.

With books, it's the same thing. You're consuming the book either way, but there is a difference -- factually -- between reading it for yourself and having it read to you. I'm attaching no value judgments here; I'm simply stating a fact.

Someone reading the book to you is going to read it in certain ways -- with inflections, pauses, vocal tones, character voices, etc. -- that would be different than the way you would read it to yourself. The meanings of the words are being shaped by that reader, translated through their thoughts and emotions, and formed in a way different than you would do if you were reading it to yourself.

Furthermore, in some cases prose is designed to do things that cannot be replicated aurally. Take King's novel Misery as an example. King uses different font styles to convey information about the manner in which Paul Sheldon is composing his new novel. These tricks cannot be replicated vocally; it is literally impossible to do so, and hence, something has quantifiably been lost in the translation. (I wrote about this topic in one of the first posts on my blog, which can be found here, for anyone who is interested.)

That's an extreme example, but here's a less-extreme one: when you are listening to an audiobook, how do you know when a paragraph has ended? You don't. The reader may pause to try and indicate it, but he also pauses when there is an ellipsis ... so how can you tell the difference?

You can't; not always, at least. You can't tell the difference between a colon and a semicolon, either. You can't tell the difference between these three things, which are conveying the same information, but with slight -- yet definite -- variations in meaning and emphasis:

(1) He said -- laughingly -- that it was all a game.

(2) He said (laughingly) that it was all a game.

(3) He said, laughingly, that it was all a game.

A truly great reader can do it. Frank Muller, for example. But even good ones can't do it every time, and the potential is there for the reader to interpret things differently than you would have done for yourself.

Prose matters. When it's great prose, every comma, every ironically capitalized letter, every paragraph break ... everything the author does has the potential to convey something crucial, which can be lost in the translation to audio format.

By sloppiness or momentary inattention, we all miss such things when we read for ourselves, also, at least occasionally. But by allowing a reader to interpret the language for you, you are forfeiting your ability to interpret this type of thing for yourself. You have gone -- in some regard -- from active participant to passive participant. Saying those are the same thing is, again, simply inaccurate.

Similarly, if you read an English translation of a French-language novel, you are not actually reading the French novel; you're reading a translated version which has been adapted by someone else. Want to read the real version? You'd better learn to read French, or learn to not mind not knowing what the words you're reading mean, because otherwise, it's not happening. The two things are not the same. Similarly, a book and an audiobook are not the same thing.

Fellas, words DO mean something, and when you're listening, it means you're listening ... not reading.

If that were not the case, I could say I was going to drive my truck to play and then eat some lunch once I got back to my hotel, and mean I was driving my car to work and would have dinner once I got back to my apartment.

Not the same thing. Related concepts, yes; but also very, very different. I say this lovingly, of course. I'm a fan of both of you, and love the work you do.

Class dismissed!

The Thing I Don't Want to Look At: A Review of "Under the Weather"

2012-01-22T00:58:00.001-06:00

Guess what I've got for you today?

So proceed with caution if you have not read "Under the Weather," or if you have never seen The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, The Wizard of Oz, Unbreakable, Planet of the Apes, or Psycho.

Cause I'm gonna ruin 'em all. And frankly, if you haven't seen those movies, you've got WAY better things to be doing than reading this blog. So get to it!

Everyone else, allons-y!

I can't recall ever hearing the word "spoiler" used in this context pre-Internet. Probably it was and I simply wasn't aware of it. In modern parlance, though, it's got rather a double meaning, doesn't it? Used literally, it refers to one's enjoyment of a story being spoiled through the unwitting or inopportune revelation of key details of that story (often meaning the details of a crucial plot-twist). As a secondary -- and, one suspects, unintended -- meaning, it also refers to the unavoidable fact that many people have become spoiled (in the sense of a child who has been given too much) by the idea that they should be able to read anything, anywhere, at any time, and never run the risk of finding out anything about any story from anyone. A lot of people will tell you that no matter who you are, where you are, or what you're talking about, you should NEVER discuss spoilers, lest you ruin somebody else's future good time.

On the one hand, I get that. Let's say we're discussing a novel that's just been released; 11/22/63, for example. Not everyone reads books in hardcover; many people wait until the paperback comes out. So, until the paperback version of that novel has been out for a reasonable period of time -- let's call it six months -- then I figure it would be poor netiquette to talk about how it ends without saying beforehand that I'm going to be doing so.

After that six months, I feel considerably freer, and a point will come when something has been around long enough that I consider it to simply be a part of our shared culture, and therefore fair game no matter the context.

For example, let's say that I want to talk about M. Night Shyamalan's masterpiece, The Sixth Sense, and tell you that this image

is from the end of the movie, during the scene in which Malcolm (Bruce Willis) finds out that he is dead, and has been for nearly the entire movie. (They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.) As far as I'm concerned, it's within my rights to do so and to not have to hear shit about it; the movie is nearly thirteen years old, and I figure anyone who wants to see it has had ample opportunity. If you didn't take that opportunity, well, pal, that's on you. Oh, and by the way, in Unbreakable (another Shyamalan masterpiece, and yes I meant it literally both times), Mr. Glass was the bad guy the whole time. Spoilers, lol!

While we're spoiling things, here's some more plot twists spilt onto the floor for all to see and know:

In Psycho, "Mother" is actually Norman Bates, wearing a wig and brandishing a knife. A boy's best friend is his mother.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and the unnamed character played by Edward Norton are actually the same character: when Norton "goes to sleep," he becomes Durden, and has no knowledge of it when he "wakes up." I am Jack's split personality.

In Planet of the Apes, it turns out that the titular planet was Earth all along: a far-future post-apocalyptic Earth. You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

In The Empire Strikes Back -- please note that I did not refer to it as Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back -- we find out that Darth Vader was once Anakin Skywalker, and is therefore Luke Skywalker's father. No! That's not true! That's impossible!

In The Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) IS Keyser Soze. And like that ... he's gone.

And, in my all-time favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz, it turns out that Oz was merely a dream: Dorothy has been asleep in Kansas the whole time. There really is no place like home.

Now, WHAT has all this got to do with Stephen King's "Under the Weather"? Directly, nothing. Indirectly, also not much. But there is (arguably) a plot twist, so I thought some conversation about the spoiling of such plot twists might be in order.

Ellen, Brad's wife in "Under the Weather," is -- in Willis-esque fashion -- dead the entire story.

The question that needs answering here is this: should this be counted as an actual plot twist?

Most of the above examples -- The Wizard of Oz is excluded, to some degree -- are plot-twists in the traditional sense of the phrase, by which I mean that there is a specific point in the film in which the filmmakers intended the entire audience to collectively hitch in a surprised breath, and then let it back out again in a gleefully surprised "whaaaaaaaaa...........!!!!!!!!!!" noise.

I'm not sure "Under the Weather" falls into that category. The reason I say that is that while I can point, in the case of each of the above films, to specific moments in which the plot twist is delivered, there is no real equivalent in "Under the Weather." Instead, there are several moments in which strong hints are dropped, and I imagine that at each one of these points in the story, a number of readers figure out what's going on: the rest pass through, blissfully ignorant for a while longer, and maybe they figure it out at the next point, or the one after. Some, I'm sure, get all the way to the end, where it is spelled out point-blank; but I'd imagine most catch on earlier.

The first clue comes on the fourth page, when Carlo the doorman is talking with Brad about the smell which is supposedly coming from dead rats in a neighboring apartment. "You're the only one on" [floors] "four, five, or six who hasn't complained," Carlo says. It's reasonable to assume that some people read this, make the connection that only this one apartment hasn't complained about the smell of rotting flesh, and then remember that the wife is supposedly sleeping, then make that two and two equal four. A lot of readers, however, will roll right past it: King has done a good job of making it very obvious that Brad is an early riser; therefore, it doesn't seem odd -- to many people, if not most -- that Ellen would, in fact, still be asleep, and therefore they never make the connection during the conversation with Carlo.

Several pages later, Brad remembers a bad moment during a vacation he and his wife took years previously. Flying to Nassau, Brad looks over at Ellen at one point: "...I turned to her and for a moment thought she was dead. It was the way she was sleeping, with her head cocked over on her shoulder and her mouth open and her hair kind of sticking to the window. She was young, we both were, but the idea of sudden death had a hideous possibility in Ellen's case." He goes on to relate the story of how Ellen was diagnosed with a heart condition which would have been an obstacle to bearing children.

On the very first page of the story, Brad wakes up, and is frightened by a noise he hears coming from under the bed. He nearly screams, and thinks, "It's the thing I don't want to look at. It's the thing in the window seat." I've got a poor memory, but many people don't: anybody who remembers that line from the first page would now -- knowing what "the thing in the window seat" is -- undoubtedly put two and two together. And even for everyone else, the sudden focus on the idea of Ellen's mortality serves as a strong hint.

The next clue comes only a few paragraphs later, when -- still in the flashback to the trip to Nassau -- Brad, seemingly joking, tells Ellen that if if she was dead, he'd take her on the trip anyways. "Because I wouldn't accept it. No way would I," he says.

"You'd have to after a few days," Ellen replies. "I'd get all smelly." At this point, the cat is pretty much out of the bag; this is certainly the point at which I figured it out. But, if you happen to not remember the issue of the dead "rats," then I suppose you might still not catch on. So, mere lines later, within the same conversation, we get these lines:

"I'd keep you alive."
"Really? How? Necromancy?"
"By refusing to give up. And by using an adman's most valuable asset."
"Which is what, Mr. Fasprin?"
"Imagination."

If this doesn't clue you in, you may be incapable of receiving clues.

So, what do we think: should "Under the Weather" be counted as a traditional plot-twist story, or is it something different?

*****

Regardless of whether you count what's going on in the story as a plot twist or not, I'd have to say it's a fine story. It's grim as hell, but if you're reading a King story, I can't imagine that grimness bothers you overmuch. In my previous short story review, I talked about "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," which is also a grim story; that one, however, at least had two opposing viewpoints, one of which offered some rays of light to shine into the darkness.

In "Under the Weather," we're stuck inside the mind of Brad Franklin, a creative ad man whose newest project involves successfully talking himself into believing that his wife, who has passed away and lies rotting in the bed they have shared, is still alive and well. The story is full of King's customary sensory-engagement details: the smell of Ellen's decomposition hangs over the story like a malefic green cloud, and the occasional scenes involving Lady the cocker spaniel making a guilty meal out of the Beggin' Strips that were once Ellen's fingers are like thunder within that cloud. King's writing is mostly restrained, and the ideas come slinking through all the more powerfully as a result. There's really not much escape to be had here; we are in the mind of a very disturbed man, and there's just not much getting around it.

Brad Franklin isn't the first ad man to appear in a King story. There's also Vic Trenton in Cujo, who had all those cereal problems. Vic, too, ended up having to deal with a death in the family, but in that novel, the advertising business is a catalyst moreso than it is a metaphor. Here, it's definitely a metaphor, one for a topic near and dear to Stephen King's heart: creative imagination.

The notion of creative imagination was present in "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" also: that story's elderly poets still possessed that lively spark, and the implication was that that same spark was part of what was keeping Wouk himself in the game pitching, even at so advanced an age. I also found there to be an element suggesting that the suicidal character, Brenda, possessed a quantity of the same creative imagination, but had no particular ability to channel it ... other than to imagine very dismal futures for herself, her children, and everyone else around her. The argument might be made that Brenda uses life to imagine death. Here, Brad uses death to imagine life, and he is apparently able to do so quite successfully.

One question I had after finishing the story the first time was this: does Brad actually think his wife is still alive, or is he persistently lying to himself -- and, as a result, to us -- in an attempt to convince himself of the unconvinceable? In rereading the story, I think the answer to the question is that it's a little of both, but I found several clear instances in which Brad does indeed seem to believe his own lies.

Take this passage as an example. Brad has been leaving messages for Ellen on Post-It notes, which he has been scattering around the coffeemaker for her to find:

I jot on a pad, and for a moment I think of all those notes scattered around the coffeemaker back in good old 5-B -- why are they still there?

There's is no reason for a man who is deluding himself but is also conscious of the delusion to wonder about something like that. No, instead, it seems to be the case that Brad's imagination is so powerful -- or, if you'd prefer, his psychosis so deep -- that he is able to genuinely believe Ellen is still alive for long stretches of time. The saner side of his mind sends him the occasional klaxon of alarm such as this one, but for the most part, he's convinced himself.

This, obviously, is not far removed from old Normie Bates, whom I mentioned earlier in the post. He seemed to be doing much the same thing with Mother; Robert Bloch's novel started it, and Alfred Hitchcock's movie made it legend. And the unnamed character in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club -- later given form by Edward Norton in David Fincher's masterful movie adaptation -- did something very similar by dreaming up Tyler Durden to swoop in and make life a bit more interesting. Brad Franklin the ad man doesn't seem to have the murderous and/or anti-social tendencies of those two models of insanity; but, then again, who knows how far he might be willing to go to protect this illusion?

*****

"Under the Weather" was published in the trade paperback edition of Full Dark, No Stars, and if I can put on my anorak for a moment, I'd like to have a one-sided debate on the topic of whether it is officially a part of that collection.

I can hear you now (which is probably a dangerous thing to say so soon after talking about a man imagining things): "But Honk, the story is in the book. Of course it's a part of Full Dark, No Stars!"

If you think about it much -- something you probably shouldn't do, by the way -- then you'll realize that the notion of a story collection is really rather a fragile notion. What IS a story collection? Well, the obvious answer is to say that a story collection is a collection of stories, grouped together in a single volume. That's true facts there, folks.

Here's something else that's true: a story collection is whatever the author -- or editor -- says it is. With that in mind, the concept becomes more fluid, less easy to pin down and define.

Let's take as an example I Sing the Body Electric!, a Ray Bradbury story collection first published in 1969. In its initial form, it included the following stories:

"The Kilimanjaro Device"
"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place"
"Tomorrow's Child"
"The Women"
"The Inspired Chicken Motel"
"Downwind from Gettysburg"
"Yes, We'll Gather at the River"
"The Cold Wind and the Warm"
"Night Call, Collect"
"The Haunting of the New"
"I Sing the Body Electric!"
"The Tombling Day"
"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine"
"Heavy-Set"
"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt"
"Henry the Ninth"
"The Lost City of Mars"
"Christus Apollo"

However, I have the 1998 edition, which adds an additional eleven stories, all of which are inserted between "The Lost City of Mars" and "Christus Apollo." If you want to get really technical -- and I suppose that's what we're doing here -- then it must be noted that the proper title of the 1998 edition is I Sing the Body Electric! And Other Stories.

Here's my question: if I were to sit down and start writing about I Sing the Body Electric!, which edition should I be writing about? The original edition? Well, maybe, but if Bradbury decided later that the collection ought to include an additional eleven stories, who am I to argue with him?

So, clearly it's the 1998 edition, right? Well, maybe, but the original edition was the one that counted for almost thirty years. That's a long time; why should it matter if Ray Bradbury, once he got to be an old coot, decided to change the contents (or, even worse, if it wasn't him making the decision, but his publisher, who wanted to stimulate sales by piling some new crap into an old sock)?

Is the solution to treat I Sing the Body Electric! and I Sing the Body Electric! And Other Stories as two separate, distinct collections? I tend to think this is the only way to proceed without madness taking hold, and the fact that the books have different titles makes that doable. Do a little research on Bradbury collections, though; a great many of them have variable contents from one edition to the nexet, and in many cases, there are no title variations to assist the would-be critic.

Making decisions of this nature may seem tedious; for many, they undoubtedly ARE tedious. But they are, on occasion, necessary (at least for the critic, or the blogger, or the fastidious fan). As an example, let's return to the question that started me down this road: is "Under the Weather" to be considered a part of the collection known as Full Dark, No Stars?

My answer is no.

My evidence for this is that it isn't listed in the Table of Contents, even in the trade paperback edition. That tells me that King -- or his publishers, or both -- is thinking of "Under the Weather" in the same way as he would think of an excerpt from a yet-to-be-published novel when it appears in the back of one of his books: it's value-added content, nothing more. If future editions of FDNS continue to include the story, I might be forced to revisit my opinion, of course; but until then, I say the Table of Contents is what counts, and "Under the Weather" ain't in it.

That said, it fit Full Dark, No Stars relatively well from a thematic standpoint. That collection's stories might be said to have a common theme: men who do really bad things to women. ("Fair Extension" doesn't fit that thesis perfectly, but I'd argue that it still fits.) That's what is -- arguably -- going on in "Under the Weather," too: Brad is motivated out of love rather than hate, but it's still a fairly bad result for Ellen ... or at least for what's left of her.

So, from that standpoint, "Under the Weather" belongs. (So would the story "Morality" have done, by the way.) But I still say that it shouldn't be considered to officially be a part of Full Dark, No Stars.

What say you?

*****

A few more notes before I go:

Would you describe "Under the Weather" as a horror story? I ask because so far, I can't make up my mind one way or the other. Regardless, the opening paragraph is a great horror paragraph.
On the fourth page, there is what I assume to be a mistake: Carlo the doorman, talking to Brad, asks him how his wife is doing. "How is Mrs. Nathan?" he asks. The few other times it is mentioned in the story, Brad and Ellen's last name is given as Franklin. Editorial boo-boo, I assume.
That said, I wish it was Nathan instead of Franklin, and I'll tell you why: the name "Nathan" makes me think of Nathan Grantham, the poor fellow in Creepshow who only wanted his cake ... and who had it, too. What with him being a murderous corpse and all, I kinda liked the association my mind created between him and poor, rotting Ellen.
Po-10s = awesome name for boner medication. Something tells me Stephen King is a top-notch ad man in some other reality.
"Billy Ederle's leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy. It's a remarkably lousy soda, but it's all we vend. The company's a client." This, obviously, refers to Nozz-A-La soda, which appears in the Dark Tower novels, and in Kingdom Hospital. It also, apparently, made an appearance in an episode of Lost!
All the ad agency stuff makes me think of Mad Men. It's not fair, and I know it, but I just can't help it. Not making it any easier for me not to: this story features one character named Pete Wendell (Mad Men has Pete Campbell), another named George Slattery (Mad Men co-stars John Slattery as Roger Sterling), and another whose "admirable breasts rise and fall in a theatrical sigh" (tell me that doesn't make you think of Christina Hendricks). Oh, you don't know who Christina Hendricks is? Well, she plays Joan on Mad Men, and she's kinda like a human Po-10s. Here ya go, and careful pitching them tents, fellas:

If those aren't admirable breasts, then I don't know what are. Hendricks is also an astonishingly good actress, whom I first noticed playing the charmingly villainous Saffron on Firefly. On Mad Men, she exudes grace, power, charm, wit, and fragility, sometimes all within the space of a few seconds; she knocks it out of the park just about every scene she's in (of which there are typically not enough).

Wait. What were we talking about, again?

Nope, I can't remember, either.

Oh, well, let's just call it a night, while we've all got visions of Christina Hendricks dancing in our heads. I'll be back soon with part three in this series, a look at King's "Mile 81." Until then, just remember: in advertising, making a silk purse out of a sow's ear is the main job seven times out of every ten.

Soon the Days Will Turn Cold: A Review of "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"

2012-01-02T00:06:00.003-06:00

"Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" is not a happy story.

If you've read it then you already know that. (If you haven't read it, by the way, then you are advised to do so before you continue reading this review of it, because I will be discussing it in full detail. As of the time I wrote this review, the story was still available online here.) However, I thought it was worth mentioning that things might get a little grim in this review.

To counterbalance that somewhat, allow me to offer this cheerful image:

If you're asking yourself what's so cheerful about that image, I don't know that I can help you. Honestly, what isn't cheerful about the idea of a lightsaber-wielding Batman moments away from slaying a Great White?

By the way, I pilfered that image from the Horror Etc. podcast. Give 'em a listen sometime, won't you?

Moving along...

A summary of "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive": An impoverished single mother, Brenda, wins $2700 and decides to take a road trip with her best friend (who is also an impoverished single mother). She's keenly aware of how shitty her life is, and of the near-certainty that that status is never going to change, and that it will be passed down to her children, and to their children, and so forth. Seeing no happy endings in sight, she -- with implicit approval from her friend -- decides to end it all by ramming their rented van into a tree at high speed, snuffing out the lives of everyone inside it. Intertwined with this story are visits with two elderly poets who observe the "accident" when it interrupts a picnic they are having.

This isn't a terribly lengthy story -- it ran seven pages in The Atlantic -- but there is plenty to talk about. Let's start by discussing the controversial element of the familicidal character of Brenda. King took some heat from readers of The Atlantic, who found his depictions of Brenda and her BFF Jasmine to be stereotypical. One letter-writer had this to say:

“The poor” are silenced by the stereotypes projectedonto them from the dominant culture, and King doesn’t offer anything in thecharacters to counter these assumptions. Be sentimental about it if you like,but if he depends on clichés rather than seeking to depict peopleauthentically, he’s perpetuating, rather than dismantling, these notions of thepoor. King has proved that he understands the poor only as an observer.

Another, this:

The reality is that real people exist behind thefiction, and it’s the (good) writer’s job to recognize this and seek to reflectthis complexity in their writing. I’m not saying that writers cannot write fromdifferent perspectives, but perhaps King should stick to exploring thecomplexities of his own existence, before venturing to expose the complexitiesof other people’s existences—which he seems unable to comprehend.

King was given an opportunity to rebut, and had this to say:

These are people I’ve known and worked with all mylife. One wonders if those crying “stereotype” have had the same opportunity.The idea that I am living in some sort of ivory tower and have no contact withthe real world is a stereotype in itself. Those who want to meet my ladies needonly to come to Bangor. Their counterparts live here, work here (or look forwork here), go to AA meetings here, and live the life. I live it with them. Whywould I not? I grew up with them.

(Those quotations were drawn from this site, by the way.)

Most of the criticisms of King here seem to proceed from an assumption: that it was his goal to have Brenda and Jasmine serve as archetypes of some sort, and for them to stand in as a statement about what King thinks of poor people (specifically: poor, fat, single women with multiple children).

I think it's the wrong one to make, but I can see how and why a reader would make that assumption. On the one hand, I don't think King is saying "This is what poor people are like." However, I do think he's saying "This is what hopelessness can drive a person to do," and I think he's banking on achieving two simultaneous results that are at odds with one another (if not flat-out contradictory): he wants us to understand Brenda and sympathize with her, and he also wants us to be contemptuous toward her and judgmental of her actions. It's up to each individual to decide whether he pulled it off. I think he did; not perfectly, but I think he managed it well enough for me to call the story a success.

The story begins from Brenda's point of view, and right off the bat, we are told several things about Brenda: that her initial impulse to go buy a bottle of Orange Driver to celebrate her winnings; that she instead opts to pay off a maxed-out credit card; and that her grand idea is to take a trip to show off her grandchildren to her parents in the hopes of getting some money out of them. Shortly after this, we find out that her friend -- Jasmine -- was "broken in" by her own father at the age of fifteen, and that her knowing mother did nothing about it. These two women have several children each, with names like "Delight" and "Truth" and "Freedom"; one of them works at a skating rink, the other doesn't know who fathered one of her children. These women and their children live "pretty much on noodles and Pepsi and hat cheap ice cream they sell at Walmart." As King says, these "are the fat women nobody wants to see when they're on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there's nobody better in sight." Money is hard to come by, and the future stretches out before them like an endless desert.

Even having won $2700 and successfully talked her friend into taking a road trip with her brings no real happiness:

Brenda should be happy, she knows she should. The kids are quiet, the road stretches ahead of her like an airport runway, she's behind the wheel of a brand-new van, and the traffic is light, especially once they leave Portland behind. The digital speedometer reads 70, and this baby hasn't even broken a sweat. Nonetheless, that greyness has begun to creep over her again. The van isn't hers, after all. She'll have to give it back. A foolish expense, really, because what's at the far end of this trip, up in Mars Hill? Food brought in from the Round-Up Restaurant, where she used to work when she was in high school and still had a figure. Hamburgers and fries covered with plastic wrap. The kids splashing in the pol before and maybe after. At least one of them will get hurt and bawl. Maybe more. And Glory will complain that the water is too cold, even if it isn't. Glory always complains. She will complain her whole life. Brenda hates that whining and likes to tell Glory it's her father coming out ... but the truth is, the kid gets it from both sides. Poor kid. All of them, really. All poor kids, headed into poor lives.

And, later:

Freddy will go for a soldier and fight in foreign lands, the way Jasmine's brother Tommy did. Jasmine's boys, Eddie and Truth, will do the same. They'll own muscle cars when and if they come home, and if gas is still available twenty years from now. And the girls? They'll go with boys. They'll give up their virginity while game shows play on TV. They'll have babies and fry meat in skillets and put on weight, same as she and Jasmine did. They'll smoke a little dope and eat a lot of ice cream -- the cheap stuff from Walmart. Maybe not Rosellen, though. Something is wrong with Rosellen. She'll need to go to the special-ed classes. She'll still have drool on her sharp little chin when she's in the eighth grade, same as now. The seven kids will beget seventeen, and the seventeen will beget seventy, and the seventy will beget two hundred. She can see a ragged fool's parade marching into the future, some wearing jeans that show the ass of their underwear, some wearing heavy metal T-shirts, some wearing gravy-spotted waitress uniforms, some wearing stretch pants from Kmart that have little MADE IN PARAGUAY tags sewn into the seams of the roomy seats. She can see the mountain of Fisher-Price toys they will own and that will later be sold at yard sales (which is where most were bought in the first place). They will buy the products they see on TV and go in debt to the credit-card companies, as she did ... and will again, because the Pick-4 was a fluke and she knows it. Worse than a fluke, really: a tease. Life is basically a rusty hubcap lying in a ditch at the side of the road, and life goes on. She will never again feel like she's sitting in the cockpit of a jet fighter. This is as good as it gets. Her ship will not come in. There are no boats for nobody, and no camera is filming her life. This is reality, not a reality show.

There is nothing fantastical here, nothing that stretches the imagination. If anything, it's a stretch of the imagination to read those descriptions and not sympathize with the hopelessness.

It's one thing to feel hopeless, of course, and another thing entirely to purposefully smash a van into a tree at a hundred miles per hour in an attempt to kill yourself, your best friend, and your accumulated children. That, surely, is a decision that only a fractionally tiny percentage of people would ever come to, and with that in mind, it's difficult to take it seriously when someone suggests that these are stereotypical characters.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to accuse King of perhaps not quite sticking the landing in terms of drawing Brenda in such a way as to make it believable that she would leap from hopelessness to running the van into a tree, I'm more sympathetic. He might have been able to do it if he had a novel's length to work with, but here, he doesn't quite make it work.

But that's okay. In a way, the whole point of the story is the idea that such an act is fundamentally not understandable, because the real focus of the story isn't on the pathetic women so much as it is on the two poets.

These characters -- Phil Henreid and Pauline Enslin -- are in the grey years of their lives, and King puts some fine touches in as he describes their younger selves:

Phil smiles. The wind blows the gone-to-seed dandelion puff of his hair. His scalp shines gauzily through. He's not the young man who once came roistering out of Brooklyn, broad-shouldered as a longshoreman (and just as foulmouthed), but Pauline can still see the shadow of that man, who was so full of anger, despair, and hilarity.

"We're a couple of old crocks," she says, and bursts into laughter. Once she had sex with a king and a movie star at pretty much the same time on a balcony while "Maggie May" played on the gramophone, Rod Stewart singing in French.

These are no longer those people; once longshoremen and sexpots, they are now old people whose age is "late, but not quite yet last call." It is easy to feel a sense of imminent fading from them: they are mostly healthy and energetic now (apart from some arthritis), but are also at the age when that can change drastically seemingly overnight, at which point even the memory of those broad shoulders and that sexuality strong enough to tempt movie stars and kings will fade forever.

Interestingly, there is very little such attitude present in either character. Instead, they both seem focused -- as many old people are, one assumes -- on just living in the here and now, for as long as they able, as happily as they are able. It is here that the story's title comes into play, as Phil reads an article called "Nonagenarian Wouk to Publish New Book."

I know very little about Herman Wouk. He is one of any number of writers whose name I have been familiar with for my entire mature reading life. Mentally, I put him in the "historical fiction" category alongside James Clavell and James Michener, probably due to seeing their books all in the same sections in various used bookstores and thrift shops as a child; I don't know if that is an accurate reflection of Wouk's work or not, and in some ways, I don't know that it matters.

If anything, my vaguely-knowledgeable indifference works for this story's narrative. In my consciousness, Wouk is already a ghost of sorts, and always has been from the first moment I became aware of him ... and yet, despite the fact that his work has had virtually no impact on me (and on any number of people similar to me), it is nevertheless certain that it had an impact of some sort on many others, and even if it didn't, he's still pursuing that work. Herman Wouk does not notice that I'm not noticing him. Herman Wouk is still alive, and he is too busy pursuing that life to worry about people like me. In fact, he doesn't show too many signs of being worried about his ever-more-likely death: "The ideas don't stop just because one is old," he says in the article Phil reads. "The body weakens, but the words never do."

In some ways, this attitude seems to mirror the attitudes with which Phil and Pauline are going about their own lives, and because the link the three of them share is that they are writers, it is easy -- and almost certainly accurate -- to project that attitude onto King himself. King turned 64 in 2011; he has reached what most people consider to be retirement age, and so is (arguably) officially an "old person." And yet, he continues to produce fiction at a remarkable rate: a very well-reviewed 800+-page novel, plus five short stories and several non-fiction pieces, were published in 2011, and at least two more novels are already finished and awaiting publication. The man is still writing novels, short stories, poems, screenplays, comic-book scripts, essays, and who knows what else. The words truly seem to not be stopping, and so far, the body doesn't appear to be weakening too much, either.

It's hard for me not to read this story and project a bit, imagining that when King is writing about Wouk, he's writing about what he hopes can be his own future: a man still producing notable prose at an age more than thirty years advanced from his own current age! Being -- obviously -- a massive enthusiast for King's work, I can say with certainty that I would love to see another three solid decades of healthy and happy life and work from King.

It is always folly to read too much autobiography into an author's work, of course, and I don't want to go too far down that road. With that in mind, I'd like to wrap up such notions by mentioning that I find it interesting that King made his two poets, Phil and Pauline, a good decade older than he is himself. Personally, I find that also to be a sign of optimism. Kind of a second layer of it, almost as if King is saying to himself (and to us): hey, I'm not as old as these two old coots, and they aren't even close to being as old as old Herman Wouk ... and HE'S STILL WRITING, so that's pretty goddamn good news for me, ain't it?

Indeed it is.

From here, of course, we have to return to Brenda and Jasmine and the horrible day-to-day lives, which will soon be reaching their end. I find Phil and Pauline to be the most important characters in the story, because they seem to most accurately reflect King's own viewpoints, but those viewpoints would have considerably less weight if Brenda's sad tale was not there to serve as a counterbalance to it. The poets are characters who are, by definition, not too far from death's door; sure, they might continue on for a while longer, and might even make the march toward the big 100, as Wouk is doing ... but then again, they might just as easily pass away in the middle of their next night. Both scenarios are equally unlikely; the actuality lies somewhere in between the two options, but both are viable.

And yet, they are able to remain optimistic.

Compare that with Brenda. She is -- despite her situation -- young and healthy, and in the actuarial sense of things, she has years and years and years of life left. And yet, she has almost no optimism for those years whatsoever. She is debt-ridden, saddled with children she doesn't seem to like much if at all, unable to find a job, unable to find a good partner, and unlikely to see any improvements on any of those fronts. She has nowhere to go, and nobody to go there with except for her friend Jasmine, who is (if anything) even worse-off than Brenda is herself. In the figurative sense of the word, we would not be wrong to say that Brenda has nothing to live for, and as the story develops she decides that that sentiment is true not only figuratively, but also literally. Her decision to end all of the pathetic lives in that van is a deplorable one ... but it's also an empathetic one.

Interestingly, King takes several opportunities to illustrate the idea that Brenda has some of the same artistic leanings that Pauline the poet has. Brenda is imaginative -- after all, it takes both self-awareness and imagination, plus the ability to use the one to extrapolate in regards to the other, to come to the sorts of bleak decisions Brenda comes to here -- and there are occasional flashes of an ability to successfully translate those talents into imagery. Take this passage, which follows Brenda's thoughts about the likelihood of Jasmine getting some of the money her parents received from the government as compensation for her brother's death in the military:

And she knows things like government money are mostly a mirage. This is something they both know. Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.

Or this one, in which she begins to envision the bleak futures her and Jasmine's children -- and the children they themselves will spawn -- seem likely to inherit:

Brenda sees a horn of plenty spilling rotten fruit. Yes, she thinks, that's just about right. Thanksgiving for fools.

This is a surprisingly effective, and sad, image. I suppose one could cry foul on the subject of someone like Brenda being able to conjure an image of that sort, but I don't think it's done haphazardly on King's part. Quite the contrary, in fact.

There are several points in the story in which Brenda thinks of her life -- her condition -- in terms of being "gray." It is an emotion she is feeling, and yet her mind leans toward trying to interpret that emotion in visual terms. Brenda does not have the ability to consciously develop that sort of artistic leaning, but it is certainly present, and the above quotations indicate that her mind is more than capable of producing imagery as a byproduct. It is very possible indeed to imagine that if Brenda were in different circumstances, and had the leisure to do so, she might learn to become an artist of some sort.

There are some echoes of her in Pauline's work, in fact. Take these lines from the poem of Pauline's that Phil reads aloud:

The cloudsboil apart and a phantom disc
seems torace behind them.
It burststhrough!
For fiveseconds it could be summer
and Iseventeen with flowers
in the lapof my dress.

As we know, Pauline is -- to a slight, but nevertheless conscious, degree -- sadly nostalgic for her lost youth, her lost vibrancy, her faded (if not entirely vanished) sexuality. It seems, at least here, to be motivating her work. Brenda has similar thoughts, and while they are not expressed as fluidly, and are perhaps not as grand as Pauline's recollections of movie stars and kings, it comes to roughly the same thing:

Brenda thinks, How did we end up with all these kids? Wasn't I letting Mike Higgins cop a feel of me out behind the metal shop just yesterday?

Crude, perhaps, but the essential sentiment remains the same: Wasn't I just [fill in the blank] yesterday? How did I get from there to here so quickly?

I don't find this to be a political story, and I don't want to turn the discussion of it into a political discussion; that would be the wrong way to go. However, it's difficult for me not to see an indictment of our culture in this story. If Brenda is a character who seems to have the undeveloped gift for artistry that the older, more advantaged Pauline also possessed and was able to the develop and utilize, it seems to become necessary to ask the question: why was Pauline able to live the life she lived, whereas Brenda is able only to live a demeaning and joyless life, one which she would rather bring to an end than continue?

There is no easy answer for that question, of course, and I don't think King means to imply one. Sometimes, it is sufficient to simply pose a question, and I think that is what this story does effectively.

Herman Wouk

*****

A few remaining thoughts I feel the need to toss off before bringing this one to a close:

This reads a bit like a story King wrote to answer for himself the question, "What kind of person gives children names like 'Delight', 'Truth', and 'Freedom'?"
The poets' last names -- Henreid and Enslin -- make me think of Lloyd Henreid from The Stand and Mike Enslin from "1408." I don't think anything should be read into that, either from a plot standpoint or a thematic one, but with King's work you never know.
Here is yet another story which takes place at a rest area, like "Rest Stop" before it and "Mile 81" after it. And isn't there a stop-off at one in "The Road Virus Heads North"?
Pauline thinks about the meal she and Phil will be served at their poetry festival as "beige food," meaning bland and unremarkable. This is a more conscious version of the way in which Brenda thinks about her hopelessness in terms of being "gray."
Phil and Pauline also put me in mind of Bobbi Anderson and Jim Gardner from The Tommyknockers. Not much significance to that, apart from King's frequent use of writers as characters, but the two of them did cross my mind.
Did Rod Stewart actually record a French-language version of "Maggie May"? If so, I may need to locate it, because I love that song.
There is a brilliant, haunting moment of connection between Brenda and the poets when Brenda notices their parked Cadillac shortly before making the decision to crash the van: "Here is the rest area, coming up fast. Brenda sees only one car in the parking lot. It looks like a fancy one, a Lincoln or maybe a Cadillac. I could have rented one of those, she thinks. I had enough money but too many kids. Couldn't fit them all in. Story of her life, really." Here, Brenda is seeing more than merely a Cadillac: she is seeing, in dim and indistinct terms, the life she COULD have led. Again, she is thinking instinctively in poetic and metaphoric terms.
The wreck itself is horrific. King shows restraint in describing it, which is appropriate for a non-genre story appearing in The Atlantic. However, he is still able to get some serious mileage out of it, and in his descriptions of Phil's actions, he does so. An onlooker asks Pauline what has happened, and King replies: "Down below them a skinny old poet is happening." (A beautiful sentence, that.) "He's now naked to the waist. He has taken off his shirt to cover one of the other bodies. His ribs are a stack outlined against white skin. He kneels and spreads the shirt. He raises his arms into the sky, then lowers them and wraps them around his head."
This story has it origins in a bet King had with his son, the writer Owen King. King the elder revealed those origins in a fine interview which appeared on the Atlantic's website: "Every year my son Owen and I have a bet on the NCAA March Madness Tournament, and last year the stakes were that the loser would have to write a story [with a title] the winner gave to him. And I lost." I enjoyed Owen King's story collection, We're All In This Together, and I'd be interested to see the two Kings collaborate on a story together. A similar collaboration between King and his other son, Joe Hill, yielded spectacular results in the Richard Matheson homage "Throttle." (By the way, that interview wit King is well worth reading, and can be found here.)

I'll be back soon -- or as soon as I'm capable, at least -- with the second part of this series: a review of King's story "Under the Weather." Until then, just remember: the morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age, but that don't worry me none ... in my eyes, you're everything.

Stephen King Short Stories of 2011

2011-12-31T02:50:00.000-06:00

With the Master's newest novel still burning up the bestseller charts, an impending new volume in the Dark Tower series, and persistent rumors of multiple big-budget Hollywood adaptations which may or may not ever actually be produced, the end of 2011 marks a pretty fine time to be a Stephen King fan.

For this Stephen King fan, it was an interesting year. The highlight of it was unquestionably the release of 11/22/63, but there were also fun times to be had in the ongoing Marvel comic books (The Dark Tower and The Stand), and the Turner Classic Movies documentary The Horrors of Stephen King made for a delightful Halloween treat. The lowpoint...? The release of YET ANOTHER Children of the Corn movie; this one is not only completely unrelated to the short story upon which it is "based," it's also got almost nothing to do with either children or corn!

For me, though, I suppose I ought to hold a bit of fondness in my heart for 2011 simply because it's the year I started blogging. The one-year anniversary of Ramblings of a Honk Mahfah is coming up in about a month. It's been fun. It's also been frustrating, because I keep running into cases of my ambitions outstripping my reach. Hopefully, 2012 is going to be a bit of an improvement in terms of time-management considerations.

Before 2011 scoots out the door, though, I wanted to call some attention to the the short stories King published during the year. His longer fiction is always going to overshadow his shorter work, and perhaps that's as it should be. However, the short fiction is almost always worth shining light upon, and King's short-form output was quite good this year.

I'd like to talk about the stories in some depth, and in order to do that, I have to venture into spoilery territory. However, since most of these stories were available only in somewhat specialized formats, I assume that a great many King fans probably will not read them until they make an appearance in his next story collection. Therefore, it would be poor form on my part to simply dive right in and ruin the plot details of these stories. I won't do that. Instead, I'll first offer up some general thoughts on each story, and save the more in-depth analyses for separate posts on each story, all of which I hope to produce within the next couple of weeks.

First out of the gate (in the May issue of The Atlantic) was "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," a story of a low-income mother who wins the lottery one day and decides what to do with the money. The results may surprise you!

I thought this was a pretty fine story, personally. It's one of King's occasional stories which has absolutely nothing to do with horror, the supernatural, the fantastic, or the otherworldly. That's not to say that the macabre never creeps in, because it certainly does. On the whole, though, this is King working with character, tone, and perspective to create a portrait of what receiving a ray of light can mean to someone who is poor.

I'd compare the story a bit to King's similarly-themed "Premium Harmony," which appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. In fact, "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" reads -- not in its specifics, but in terms of its tone -- a bit like a stronger attempt at crafting a story that lives a bit outside the bounds of what most people think of as "a Stephen King story."

Next up: "Under the Weather," which was published as a bonus story in the trade paperback edition of Full Dark, No Stars.

This is a fine story about which I can say virtually nothing without spoiling it. I'll say this: a man goes to work ... and the results may surprise you!

This was probably my second-favorite of the five short stories King published in 2011. It is easily obtainable, so go get yoself a copy.

Published exclusively as a download for Amazon.com Kindle, "Mile 81" is the longest of King's 2011 short stories. It's also the least satisfying, at least as far as I'm concerned.

And yet, I feel certain that it probably hews the closest to what most King fans would consider to be prime King story material. It's about a car ... a hungry car, and some people who maybe stray a little to close to it. The results? They may, in fact, NOT surprise you.

If that summons up images of Christine and/or From a Buick 8, well, it's not entirely without cause. However, this feels to me like a story that ought to have gone through a few more rounds of revision before being released: it simply doesn't have the polish that I expect from King.

Maybe I can do a better job of explicating that once I get into my spoilery discussions. For now, maybe it's enough to say that if you've got a Kindle -- or a computer which has an internet connection (you can get Kindle for your PC, which is how I was able to read "Mile 81") -- the story is so affordably priced that you're well-advised to simply download a copy of it and read it for yourself.

Speaking of Kindle for the PC, that's also how I was able to purchase a copy of the Stephen Jones-edited anthology A Book of Horrors, which included the King story "The Little Green God of Agony."

This particular story is a little gem of horror, one which could fit comfortably alongside classic King stories of the sort you might find in Night Shift or Skeleton Crew. It's the story of a bedridden wealthy man and his rehab nurse, and let's leave it at that, except to say, of course, that the results ... entirely possible you'll be surprised by them.

Finally, there's "The Dune."

No, this has nothing to do with Fremen, Bene Gesserit, or the Kwisatz Haderach ... although if I found out that King was writing a novel set in Frank Herbert's Duneiverse, I'd be kinda giddy with anticipation.

Instead, this is -- like "The Little Green God of Agony" -- another gem of a horror story. Like that one, it would feel the slightest bit out of place in one of King's first two story collections, and believe me when I say that I mean that as a compliment.

I can't say much about "The Dune." It's my favorite of the five 2011 short stories; I can say that. I can also say that it reminds me a wee bit of "The Cat From Hell": both stories are about younger men visiting old wealthy men, and coming into contact with the secrets they have been keeping. The secret this particular old man has been keeping may -- yep -- surprise you, possibly even moreso than did the one in "The Cat From Hell."

"The Dune" is the better of the two stories, though, methinks.

Also worth mentioning:

"On Cooking," a short nonfiction piece King wrote for the cooking book Man with a Pan. It's a delightful little essay in which King talks about what he whoops up when he's left to his own devices cooking-wise. It fairly boils over with King's wit and charm, and -- amazingly enough -- actually makes me wish Stephen King would write an entire book about cooking. It's one of the better nonfiction pieces he's written in the past few years. I have not read the rest of the book, but it's well worth picking up for King fans based just on his contribution (which is four pages in length, plus a one-page recipe).

And, finally, King also wrote an introduction for a new Centenary edition of Lord of the Flies this year. His introduction runs seven pages, and is -- like many of his introductions -- a fine balance between literary criticism and autobiography. At some point in time, somebody really needs to release a collection of his nonfiction of this type.

I'll be back soon -- possibly as soon as tomorrow -- with an in-depth look at "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive." Until then, just remember: if you're going to be an abusive father, it pays to make sure your child isn't into voodoo.

Scott Snyder podcasts

2011-12-19T13:42:00.000-06:00

I've been really getting into the work of Scott Snyder recently, and wanted to pass along a few links to some podcasts he appeared on earlier this year.

this guy writes Batman and wears Elvis t-shirts: what's not to like?

Snyder, as some of you undoubtedly know already, was co-creator (along with artist Rafael Albuquerque) of American Vampire, the comic book which Stephen King did some guest-writing for. That's a great book, of course, and continued to be great even after King's five-issue arc was finished.

from American Vampire #1

That isn't all that Snyder is known for, though. He's also been doing some major work for DC, including a run on Detective Comics called "The Black Mirror." It's out in hardback currently, and while I haven't read it yet, I've heard great things about it. I can believe in them, too, because Snyder is currently scripting Batman as part of DC's "New 52" relaunch series, as well as the revamped version of Swamp Thing. (King fans might recall that the character of Swamp Thing was originated graphically way back in 1972 by Berni Wrightson, who later collaborated with King on Creepshow, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Stand, and Wolves of the Calla). I've been reading both of those and can report personally that they are terrific. As a writer of prose, Snyder published a short story collection, Voodoo Heart, several years ago; it caught the attention of Stephen King, who provided an enthusiastic blurb for the cover.

In other words, Snyder is a major talent whose work -- thanks partially to super-talented artists like Greg Capullo and Yanick Paquette -- seems only to be improving.

from Batman #1

This weekend, I stumbled across a trio of comics-focused podcasts which Snyder appeared on as an interviewee. I downloaded them and listened to them, and they are a lot of fun; Snyder is enthusiastic, personable, nerdy, AND well-spoken, which is a pretty great combination. The podcasts are focused mainly on the relaunched versions of Batman and Swamp Thing, but there is also some American Vampire talk, amongst other topics.

If you have any interest in these topics, the podcasts are all well worth listening to.

Comic Book Revolution Podcast #74: http://comicbookrevolution.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=994:comic-book-revolution-podcast-74-scott-snyder-interview&catid=73:podcasts&Itemid=106

IGN Assemble!: http://comics.ign.com/articles/117/1177077p1.html

Talksplode #44: http://ifanboy.com/podcasts/talksplode-44-with-scott-snyder-of-batman-swamp-thing-american-vampire-and-severed/

Download 'em today, won't you?

from Swamp Thing #2

A Review of A&E's "Bag of Bones"

2011-12-16T22:51:00.000-06:00

Q: How's it going, Honk?

A: Pretty good, Mahfah. 'Sup?

Q: Ah, you know; the usual.

A: Cool.

Q: You know why I'm interviewing you today?

A: I suspect you want to pick my brain about the A&E movie version of Bag of Bones? Am I close?

Q: Dead on, my friend. Dead on. Did you watch the movie?

A: I did. Why do you keep calling it a movie? It's a miniseries, not a movie.

Q: Nope. It's a movie. Sorry, but in order for me to think of it as a miniseries, it's got to be longer than two nights. Hell, add both parts together and it's not even as long as The Return of the King.

A: Almost as good, though ... right?

Q: .....

A: Hurm...

Q: Anyways ... yeah, just because it aired in two parts doesn't make it a miniseries. That's a movie. And call it what you want: movie, miniseries, or whatever, it was crap.

A: Did that surprise you?

Q: Nope.

A: I didn't think so.

Q: Did you like it, Honk?

A: I did not. I liked it slightly more than I expected to like it ... but overall, it was awful. But before we get too far into playing pinata with this piece of crap, can we talk about what I liked for a while?

Q: Sure. Example...?

A: Here's a visual hint:

Q: Ah...! Pierce Brosnan!

A: Indeed. As you know, I'm a life-long James Bond fan. I've been a Bond fan for even longer than I've been a Stephen King fan, so it's kinda cool to see those two fandoms cross over a bit.

Q: A lot of people cried foul when Brosnan was cast, though, didn't they?

A: They did. I was even one of them.

Q: Why?

A: Well, because Mike Noonan in the novel is substantially younger than Brosnan: nearly twenty years younger, in fact. Also, I seemed to remember Mike showing a great deal of weakness during the course of the novel, and it feels to me like if you want to cast someone to show a lot of weakness, you DON'T cast James Bond.

Q: True.

A: Problem with that is, I had failed to remember a few things.

Q: Such as...?

A: For starters, I wasn't remembering the novel particularly well. Mike is emotionally damaged, and he is definitely fragile in some ways, but he's not a weak character; far from it. In fact, there are numerous times during the narrative when Mike has to make split-second decisions. He runs on instinct a lot, and he has a lot of moments of being highly decisive, and those are qualities that an actor who once played -- very successfully, I might add -- James Bond is going to possess inherently. So, from that viewpoint, Brosnan was actually great casting for Mike. I'd forgotten something else, also.

Q: What's that, Honk?

A: Well, I'd forgotten that in real life, Pierce Brosnan is a man who knows what it's like to lose his wife. His first wife, Cassandra Harris, died after they'd been married for over a decade. Now, normally, I hate bringing up biographical details like that, because they typically don't have much relevance. In this situation, though, if I'd remembered that Brosnan had that sort of real-life similarity to Mike Noonan, I'd have been a lot more supportive of the casting decision. As was, I was for it, but only because I like Brosnan as an actor; I thought he was miscast quite badly. I was wrong about that; he was actually cast quite well.

Q: After seeing the movie, did you think he was good in the role?

A: Yes. I thought he was very good indeed. There are several scenes in which that's not true, but it is due to poor directing and/or poor editing and/or poor screenwriting; I don't think Brosnan should be blamed for any of those scenes. We'll talk more about those later, though. For now, we're still in the "saying nice things" phase of the interview.

Q: Fair enough.

A: One of the things I really liked about Brosnan's performance was that he was really good playing the grief. I saw some reviews which were unkind to his ability to cry, but I thought he was fine during those scenes. He excelled, I thought, during the scenes in which he in playing Mike's quiet desperation. He feels -- whether due to personal experience or due to simply being a good actor, I don't know -- like someone who has really and truly just been emptied out.

Q: Yeah, that scene of him sitting there playing Jo's -- I assume it is Jo's, at least -- ukulele was one of the better moments of the movie.

A: Agreed. And there is a nice call-back to it during the montage scene in which Mike is sorta getting his writerly mojo back. You see him playing it again, but looking a little bit more confident, a little bit less glum, and you know it means Mike is beginning to recover. It's going to be a slow, painful process ... but at least it's begun.

Q: Right. Honk, don't you think that's the sort of thing film is well-suited to do? Convey emotion in that way, I mean?

A: Absolutely, and I think it's essential to truly capturing Stephen King's voice on film. In prose, he's a master at building a bond between the reader and the characters he's created. It's his strongest talent. I think that's what people mean when they talk about how readable he is; when people say that even when they don't like his books, they find them to be compulsively readable, I think that's what lies at the heart of that sentiment. We read what he's writing and we think, "That could be me," or "That's me," or "I'm glad that's not me." And I think that most of us probably don't know what it's like to have a spouse get run over by a bus, but I also think that ALL of us have had cause to feel emotionally devastated in some way. Maybe we lost a pet, or just got stood up on a date; something has hit us hard.

Q: Right...!

A: Think back on the best Stephen King movies, and I think you find a lot of scenes where we find ourselves bonded to one of the characters. Unfortunately, I think creating that bond is one of the things that director Mick Garris is the worst at achieving. Let me amend that statement a bit: he can achieve it, but he's not very good at sustaining it.

Q: Are we going into negative land now?

A: No, but we will. Those scenes with Mike and the ukulele, though, were good, and there were other similar scenes during Part 1 of the movie. On the whole, because of that, I think I'm ready to proclaim that Bag of Bones marks a step forward for Mick Garris. I still don't think he's made a good movie, but this is his best movie, simply because -- for once -- he shows at least some grasp of subtlety.

Q: So what else did you like?

A: I thought Annabeth Gish was really good playing Jo. More importantly, I thought she and Brosnan had a nice chemistry during their small amount of screen time together.

Q: Gish is hot.

A: Mahfah, we don't traffic in that type of crudity around here.

Q: Yes we do. She's hot and she makes my dingus tingle.

A: .....

Q: Well, she does. More like Bag of Boners.

A: .....

Q: .....

A: She is awfully good-looking; it's true. Always has been, and probably always will be. She's also a really good actress; I always believe in her when she's on the screen. I loved her on Brotherhood, and I wish she'd gotten more time on The X-Files, too.

Q: Yup. How'd you like Melissa George as Mattie?

A: I liked her in some ways and disliked her in others. Let's put it this way: I think she did a fine job of delivering the kind of performance Mick Garris asked from her. I've got problems with what Garris did to the character -- major ones -- but I don't think Melissa George is at fault for that. So on her own, she was fine. You know who else was fine?

Q: Who?

A: Anika Noni Rose. She was a great Sara Tidwell. Even during the scene in which she curses her attackers -- which bordered on being campy -- she was really good. I think she's got a hell of a future. She's a great singer, too.

Q: Also: hot as hell.

A: I can't argue with that. Between her, Annabeth Gish, and Melissa George, the movie did have some beautiful women. Also: some relatively beautiful production design and cinematography. I really liked all of the paintings which are hanging in the lakehouse. I assume we're supposed to take them to all be paintings that Jo has done. That's a change from the novel, but it's a good one: Annabeth Gish feels like a painter somehow, and it feels right for the relationship between Mike and Jo. Also, it lends a bit of a feel of there constantly being some sort of feminine energy surrounding Mike, looking down on him, sometimes helping, sometimes hurting. Visually, Mick Garris can be capable of producing lovely images, and I think the production design of the lakehouse helped him with that big-time in this movie.

Q: Why do you keep calling it "the lake house"? It's got a name: "Sara Laughs."

A: No it doesn't.

Q: I read the novel, Honk; trust me.

A: Trust ME, Mahfah. The house does not have a name in the movie.

Q: It ... oh, you're right...! They never mentioned it! Did they mention that Sara Tidwell used to live there?

A: I don't believe so, no.

Q: Well, that's an odd thing to change! Say, Honk, can we start bashing this movie now?

A: Oh, yes; we certainly can. Where would you like to start?

Q: Well, let's start where we already are: how did you feel about the changes made to the story?

A: I didn't care for them.

Q: Sigh. Are you one of those "no changes to the book!" people? Will you, for example, be upset if Roland does not have blue eyes in the eventual Dark Tower movies? Do you focus on the novel to that degree? Did you mind Tom Bombadil not making it into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings?

A: Slow yer roll there, Mahfah; lemme keep up!

Q: Sorry.

A: Let's go in reverse. I did not miss Tom Bombadil in the Lord of the Rings movies; he is an intriguing character in the novel, but if he had made it into the movie -- even if P.J. had toned down all the singing and whatnot -- then I think he would have created some unrealistic expectations in the audience. Or, more likely, just confused them. So, no, I don't focus on the novel too heavily. For example, I couldn't possibly care less what color Roland's eyes are. I'm fine with them being blue in the novel; I'd also have been fine with them being brown or green. His eye color is completely irrelevant, and if you are the type of person to focus on that as something a movie HAS to get right, then I honestly don't know why you would ever -- EVER -- watch a movie based on a novel you'd read. You're doomed to disappointment if you do. That's not me. So, to be clear: feel free to make changes to the source material. However, you need to do so from a place of understanding what is and isn't dispensable. Also, you need to understand that if you DO make a change, you have to change it fully. A story element in a novel is like cancer: if you're taking it out, you'd damn well better take it all, or it's bound to cause you problems. And some cancers simply can't be removed without killing the patient. It's a fact of life, and a fact of adapting prose into film.

Q: You're proud of that last paragraph, aren't you?

A: Little bit.

Q: Fair enough.

A: We could spend all night talking about the changes Mick Garris and screenwriter Matt Venne -- which is pronounced "Vain," apparently (and ironically) -- made to the story. But instead of getting bogged down in listing them, let's take a few examples and see how the changes function.

Q: Sounds good. Name the one you thought was the worst.

A: I barely even recognize the movie's version of Mattie as being the same character as the one in the novel. Same goes for Kyra. A lot of people will focus on the change to the characters' ages. In theory, I don't mind that. Aging them up for the movie actually makes sense: unless you're Steven Spielberg, I have very little confidence in your ability as a director to find an actress to play a version of Kyra who is three years old. She frequently seems older even in the novel, but King gets it right more often than he gets it wrong, I think; not by much, but by enough.

Q: Agreed.

A: As for Mattie, if you're casting Pierce Brosnan -- who is rapidly approaching sixty -- then you simply cannot get away with having Mattie be in her early twenties. An age difference of twenty years is one thing; an age difference of nearly forty years is an altogether different thing. (By the way, in a different version of the world as we know it, I'd have cast Jon Hamm to play Mike, and Amanda Seyfried to play Mattie.)

Q: I like them both.

A: Me too. However, in theory, there's nothing wrong with Pierce Brosnan and Melissa George. The problem lies in the fact that one of the novel's major components is the custody battle between Mattie and Max Devore, and a big -- massive, even -- part of the reason why that custody battle is plausible is that Mattie's age IS a major issue. She's a good -- maybe even a great -- mother, but to the outside world looking in, she's trailer trash: Max is able to successfully plant the seed of doubt in people's minds that Mattie is irresponsible, dangerous, and unfit to raise a small child. All of that is gone from the movie. Every last bit of it. Nobody would look at Melissa George's Mattie -- a beautiful, vivacious, well-put-together, and obviously thoroughly stable woman -- and even consider taking Kyra away from her. Furthermore, because Kyra is older, and would be able to speak up for herself and for her mother, it becomes even more implausible that custody proceedings could ever have gotten as far as they did.

Q: Well, that's true, but ... the scene in which Kyra is walking down the road is still there. Isn't that enough?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Why?

A: Because Kyra is now older. She's old enough to know not to walk in the middle of the road. She's old enough to know not to leave the house without her mother's permission. In the novel, the scene works because it's plausible a three-year-old could get a little huffy and then go off on her own. Here, it's ludicrous; even moreso because there's no hint that Kyra has gotten a little huffy. No, she's just a smiling, cute-as-a-button kid walking down the middle of the street. It doesn't fit her character at all; she's obviously smart enough to know not to do any of those things. So, why is she behaving that way? Simple: because Matt Venne and Mick Garris were too daft to realize that when they aged Kyra up, they had to apply that age change to her behavior throughout the movie. Here, in one of the story's most important scenes, they failed utterly at that goal.

Q: What else...

A: Oh, I'm not done talking about Kyra and Mattie.

Q: Oops. My bad.

A: Quite alright, Mahfah. The worst part of the changes to those characters is the change they made to have Lance Devore be complicit in the curse: he tries to murder Kyra by drowning her in a sink, and Mattie then shoots him, killing him.

Q: Actually, doesn't that make more sense? The curse, naturally, should have fallen to Lance, even in the novel. Right?

A: That's true. In the novel, though, he clearly dies accidentally before that ever happens. I don't think King ever comes right out and states it as such, but it seems logical. And that is what causes Max to suddenly want custody; it's Sara's curse working on him. I mean, he's a bad, terrible person, so there's that, too ... but, mostly, it's the curse.

Q: So what's wrong with the idea of having Lance try to kill Kyra?

A: Again, in theory...? Nothing. But that is a major change, and unfortunately, Garris and Venne -- again -- failed to get all of the cancer out. At no point in the movie does Kyra act like a child whose father tried to drown her, only to be shot dead by her mother. If that had happened, it seems like Myra ought to seem a bit more unbalanced. Same goes for Mattie: she doesn't seem like someone who's been forced to murder her own husband in order to save her daughter's life. Does she?

Q: No, she really doesn't.

A: That, to me, is purely idiotic from both a writing and a directing standpoint. And there was no reason, ultimately, to make that change. What's the difference between Lance falling off a roof and Lance getting shot to death? I ask that literally: what, in THIS movie, does that change create to benefit the film?

Q: I'm not coming up with anything. Because either way, the result is the same: Max Devore inherits the curse, and begins seeking custody.

A: Exactly. This is an example of the movie making a change to the story that fundamentally makes the story more -- not less, which is what story changes to a novel's story tend to be all about achieving -- difficult and complicated to convey. It is a boneheaded maneuver on every level. And frankly, once it got to that point, I lost almost all interest in the movie. I'd been mildly enjoying it up to that point, but from there, it was all downhill.

Q: What else didn't work for you?

A: Can we talk about the scene in which Rogette throws rocks at Mike?

Q: Absolutely.

A: Terrible scene. It begs credulity even in the novel. There, it works for two reasons: one, Mike himself has a hard time believing that it happens; and two, because despite the implausibility of it all, it becomes so dangerous a moment for Mike that he comes very close to dying. You get the sense that the only reason he doesn't die is because Rogette wants him to stay alive so as to fulfill Max's purpose for him. In the movie, she sucker-punches him off the cliff; that works because it IS a sucker-punch, and even from a frail old woman, that could work. And if the scene had ended there, with Max and Rogette laughing down at Mike, having sufficiently demonstrated their power over him, then I'd've felt like it came off relatively well. But, no: Garris and Venne just HAD to keep the rock-chucking. AND THEN THEY HAD HER NEVER ACTUALLY HIT HIM!

Q: That is weird.

A: I know, right?!? Now, I'll admit that if I'd never read the novel, I might not care about that. But it's another example of changes that simply don't make sense. The whole point of this scene is ... well, there are several points to it. One is to allow Mike and Max to have a face-to-face scene; well, that's already happened in the movie (though Max isn't able to be too nasty in that particular scene), so the scene on the cliff is already headed down a path of obsolescence. The main point, though, I think, is to bring Mike back down to Earth a bit: to demonstrate to him that he is NOT in control of the situation around him. In a way, it's a foreshadowing of what ends up happening to Mattie: it shows that these people are playing for keeps. By removing the danger of the scene, what you're left with is a really terrible performance by the actress playing Rogette (Deborah Grover), who simply looks silly. She's cartoonish; she's campy. The scene stops the movie dead in its tracks for all the wrong reasons, when it could have done it for all the right reasons.

Q: That's harsh. Not overly harsh, though; just ... harsh.

A: Okay, so let me return to being somewhat more positive. Here are a couple of examples of changes to the story I didn't mind at all: one, having there be no mention of Rogette being Max's daughter; and two, having it be Mike's brother, rather than Jo's, who is seen with Jo at Dark Score Lake. For the movie, they essentially combined those two brother characters, and that's fine by me, because it was thoroughly accomplished. That's a common trick in adapting a novel to film: when possible, combine characters, because it saves on hiring actors, and gives the ones you've already got more to do. Even Stephen King himself has done it: in his screenplay for The Stand, he combined Rita and Nadine into the same character. And there, it worked. It works here, too.

Q: So you really don't mind changes to the story in all instances, huh?

A: No, of course not. They simply have to make sense within the context of the movie. Many of the changes here make no sense. Oooh...!

Q: What?!?

A: I thought of something else that makes no sense...!

Q: Do tell...

A: At the end, when the day has been saved, Mike and Kyra go out in a canoe on the lake.

Q: Yeah...? And...?

A: That's just dumb. Twice now, poor little Kyra has nearly been drowned. At this point in the story, it's been only a few hours since Mike himself briefly thought about drowning her. And you're telling me he suddenly thinks it's a good idea to take her out onto I'm Goan Kill Yo Ass Lake IN A RICKETY FUCKING CANOE?!? Really?!? You're going to tell me Kyra wouldn't freak out at the very idea? You're going to tell me, further, that the police would allow it?

Q: Those are fair points.

A: You're damn right they are. And by the way, I'm not dense: I get the point. Garris is showing us that the lake is now a safe place again. In a way, it makes thematic sense as an ending. However, in order to achieve that, all character logic has to be thrown out the window. And given how heavily King stories -- Bag of Bones in particular -- function as character pieces, this seems like the exact WRONG move to make. It's another example of why Mick Garris is simply not qualified to adapt Stephen King.

Q: Hell, that's okay; there's no shame in it. Stephen King isn't even very good at adapting Stephen King, is he?

A: No, not really; his screenplays for The Stand and The Shining and Desperation are efficient at getting the stories onto the screen, but they eliminate so much of the poetry, so much of the stuff that makes the stories actually work. I've never done it, but I assume it's hard work to adapt a novel like one of those, or this one.

Q: I feel bad for bagging on Mick Garris all the time.

A: I do too! Every interview I've ever read or seen with him, he seems like a cool dude. If he ever got the opportunity to direct a genuinely good screenplay, maybe he could do something good with it. I think Bag of Bones shows some improvements from him. He's done poor work with Stephen King projects, but visually, he IS capable of creating striking images.

Q: I feel like I have to ask you this: are you being overly dramatic about all of this? After all, it's just a stupid movie. It's not like it hurts the novel; it's still there, on the shelf, for you to read if you want to read it.

A: That's true. And if there had never been any good Stephen King adaptations, I'd agree with you. But there have been. There have actually been a lot of them that are at least decent: Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Christine, Stand By Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, Apt Pupil, The Green Mile, Hearts In Atlantis, Secret Window, The Mist ... now, I know some of those aren't universally loved, but they've all got plenty of credible supporters. And I probably left off a few I could have included. My point is, it IS possible to adapt the man's work to the screen. Maybe not all of those titles are home runs, but a few of them are, and NONE of them -- even Brian DePalma's Carrie, which I personally dislike -- are bad movies.

Q: So, why can't we get that every time? Is that what you're asking?

A: More or less. Really, though, my point is this: that ought to be the minimum we should expect, and the minimum we should accept. As such, Mick Garris's Bag of Bones simply does not make the grade. I know some King fans enjoyed it. But honestly, I'm not sure why.

Q: You enjoy Children of the Corn.

A: Only in the "so bad it's good" sense. Well ... mostly only in that sense.

Q: You enjoy Maximum Overdrive!

A: I do! It's a terrible movie, but it's a cocaine-fueled bunch of nonsense that was probably only ever intended to be stupid fun. And it comes close to actually managing to be that! I think there's a lot smaller gap between intention and achievement on display in Maximum Overdrive than there is in Bag of Bones. Bag of Bones wants to be a heartfelt romantic ghost story; it wants to seriously explore loss and recovery. And yet, it has scenes in which James Bond (A) fights a tree limb and (B) spends several seconds getting his ass beat by an elderly woman in a bathroom. It falls badly short of its goals; Maximum Overdrive at least HAD very few goals.

Q: God...! I'd forgotten that bathroom scene at the end when Rogette starts actually beating Mike's ass. That was terrible! And the scene with the tree limb...! Did that make you think about Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, wrestling with the rubber octopus?

A: Boy, DID it! I thought, this man played James Bond for nearly a decade: you simply CANNOT be doing this to him! And yet, they were; they really were.

Q: What else should we talk about, Honk?

A: You're the interviewer, Mahfah.

Q: Right-o. Did you catch the Lisey's Story reference?

A: I did. That one made me chuckle. I was less amused by the Misery reference toward the beginning; it was a bit on-the-nose for me. But it was okay; it probably made a lot of people watching happy, and that's okay, I guess.

Q: Were you shocked when Jo got hit by the bus?

A: Not at all.

Q: Really?

A: Really. I mean, yeah, I knew because of having read the novel that something was going to happen. Even so, if I had no idea what happened in the story, I'd've known something was up. Jo walks into the frame all the way over on the right side of it, looking determinedly ONLY to her left...? That's cinematic language for "something's about to happen, folks!" Sorry, I've just seen too many movies to be fooled by something like that. It wasn't a bad scene, though; just a little transparent. And Brosnan was terrific when he runs out and finds her. Here, again, that's a change I don't mind: it gives the movie the immediacy that film can provide. And the makeup on Annabeth Gish was oogy.

Q: It really was. Speaking of oogy, how about the rape scene?

A: Terrible.

Q: Yes.

A: No.

Q: No?

A: Not for the reason you mean, I mean. I mean "terrible" as in poorly-executed. The actor playing old Max was bad, but the actor playing young Max was even worse: he was throwing an unwanted hump into poor Sara Tidwell, but he was doing so so lazily and with -- pardon me, but there's simply no other way of saying this -- such inconsistent thrusts that all I could think was, "Does this poor bastard have ANY idea what he's doing?" And that's not what you ought to be thinking during a rape scene. You ought to be thinking NOTHING during a rape scene except "Jesus, this is horrible and I hope it ends soon." You want to see a well-done rape scene? Go watch Frenzy. It'll give you nightmares. Which it should; rape is an atrocity, and if you're going to film one you'd better damn well make it hurt right down to the marrow. Here, I could only think about how poorly the actor was thrusting, and how vacant the looks were on the faces of the extras playing Devore's accomplices.

Q: Yeah, you're right: it was pretty bad. That guy looks like he's thinking about Farmville.

A: He does. And the others are no better; the scene keeps cutting away to those looks, and it's like they're watching someone write haiku or something.

Q: Say, we've barely mentioned two other prominent cast members: William Schallert as Max, and Caitlin Carmichael as Kyra. Your thoughts?

A: Well, I thought Schallert was decent; not good, particularly, but not bad. Carmichael, on the other hand, was quite good. She was at her best during the climactic scene in the bathroom: she looked genuinely frightened. Hopefully, that is the result of good acting and not the result of child-labor-law violations of some sort.

Q: Final thoughts?

A: I thought of what I'm going to say on Facebook when I post a link to this review: "I have come to here to do two things: chew bubblegum and eviscerate Bag of Bones ... and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Q: That's a They Live reference, right.

A: You have to ask?

Q: I do not. Nice talking to you.

A: And to you, sir. We should do it again sometime.

Q: Ehhh...

A: Be that way then...!

Joe Hill's "Horns" Getting Closer to the Big Screen

2011-12-09T04:04:00.001-06:00

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting -- which makes sense, what with the name and all -- that Mandalay Pictures has hired Alexandre Aja to direct the feature-film adaptation of Joe Hill's novel Horns.

I'm going to take a good-news/bad-news/decent-news stance on this.

Alexandre Aja filming Mirrors

First of all, let's get the bad news out of the way.

I should admit right up front that I'm not a big fan of Aja's. His film Haute Tension (that's French for High Tension) was a good-looking, sporadically nerve-wracking movie that didn't make much sense to me. Frankly, I did not get what the fuss was all about. The next film he made was the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which I found to be too gory to allow me to get much enjoyment out of it. Aja also directed Mirrors and Piranha 3D, neither of which I saw.

So that's the bad news: Horns is apparently going to be brought to cinemas by someone whose work I'm not fond of.

Here's the decent news:

For all its flaws, High Tension WAS a good-looking movie, and one that a lot of people liked a lot more than I liked it. Plus, I didn't see it under the best of circumstances: I was at some friends' apartment, watching it on a television from 1983 while their child made many, many loud distractions. I wasn't exactly able to focus on the movie. As for The Hills Have Eyes, it rubbed me the wrong way, but it, too, looked great ... and really, isn't it potentially a plus for a horror movie to disturb you? I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that in the case of both of these movies, it may be the case that I was off my game as a viewer; that DOES sometimes happen.

As for his other movies, I actually heard from numerous people I trust that Piranha 3D was a hell of a lot of fun, so I'd like to check that out sometime. Mirrors...? I'd like to see that one, too. Not only does it star Kiefer "Ace Merrill" Sutherland, it also stars Paula Patton?

What's that? You don't know who Paula Patton is? Well, allow me to introduce the two of you:

Paula Patton in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Yessir, THAT is Paula Patton. She's one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful women in the world. Add that to Ace Merill, and yes, I kinda want to see Mirrors despite being rather uninspired by Alexandre Aja's work. (By the way, I'm dying to see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which is directed by Brad Bird.)

That, then, is the decent news about: Aja has made visually striking movies, if nothing else, and it's entirely possible that combined with solid source material, he might be able to produce something genuinely good.

The good news: Joe Hill is getting closer and closer to gaining a firm foothold in Hollywood. As you know if you read the novel (my review of which can be found here), Horns is definitely solid source material. It's an odd novel in some respects, but it's got some very cinematic qualities, and the sweep of the story arc ought to serve as prime fodder for a satisfying movie.

The article in the Hollywood Reporter makes no mention of any cast for the film. The last I heard about the movie, Shia LaBeouf had been signed to play Iggy Parrish, the novel's protagonist (or antagonist, depending on how you look at it). It's possible that LaBeouf is no longer involved, which would be okay by me: he's a great actor, but somehow I have a hard time picturing him as Ig.

My choice, if I had one: Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad.

No matter what, I'm happy to see the project is gaining steam again. Here's hoping it turns out well!

Honk Mahfah Says "Vote NO to Politics!" + The "11/22/63" That Never Was

2011-12-01T21:59:00.001-06:00

I'm not particularly interested in politics. I pay only a marginal amount of attention, and most of the news stories I encounter come either from someone sharing them on Facebook or from one of the podcasts I listen to on a daily basis (Cort and Fatboy and The Rick Emerson Show, both of which are terrific). Because of this, I have occasional opinions about things. Those opinions tend to lean -- sometimes quite strongly -- to the left, but not exclusively.

I'll give you an example.

The recent spate of accusations about the philanderings and harassments allegedly perpetrated by Herman Cain -- a gentleman who, frankly, never had a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected President anyways -- have gotten a lot of conservatives up in arms about how the (sigh) liberal media has invaded his privacy. This, in turn, has prompted a lot of smugly self-satisfied liberals to play the Clinton Card: i.e., to crow about how hypocritical the right is being, given the shellacking poor Slick Willie took over Monica Lewinsky's jizz-stained dress a few administrations ago. These liberals are failing to realize that by taking pleasure in seeing Cain's campaign brought down by these allegations, they themselves are guilty of being thoroughly hypocritical. Furthermore, what the right seems to be forgetting currently is the same thing the left forgot back then: that character and integrity DO count, and that Americans ought to be able to hold their political leaders up to high standards of conduct. Sorry, guys; comes with the job, and you all know it in advance.

Speaking personally, I don't care that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife. However, I care a lot that he apparently did it in the Oval Office itself; and I REALLY care that he lied about it. As for Cain, I also don't care that he is an adulterer, but I care quite a bit about the idea that he's also a serial harasser of employees, and his failure to sufficiently explain his behavior makes him thoroughly unsuited for the job. Sorry, dude, but if you can't prevent yourself from harassing employees, you are unfit to be Most Powerful Man In The World, and if you are upset about the media finding out about it, you should have thought about that beforehand.

I could list further examples, but that ought to be an indicator of where I come from ideologically: I'm on the left, but not in such a way as to (I hope) keep me from being fair.

You might at this point be asking yourself why a Stephen King fan-blogger is talking about politics at all. It's a fair question. As I stated above, I am not particularly interested in politics. By that, I mean that I don't follow it the way some people do. It's not that I don't care, it's just that I have very little ability to act upon my political beliefs without completely overhauling my entire life. Sure, theoretically I could devote my free-time to being some sort of local political activist, but the energy doing so would require would mean that I would have to effectively stop blogging, stop reading, stop watching movies and television shows, etc., except to the extent they aided my political goals. To do it any other way would be to do it half-assed and ill-informed, and that's no way to do it. Even then, it's unlikely that I could ever have any sort of major impact; instead, what would likely be the result is the political equivalent of masturbation, an act that really didn't do anyone other than myself much good.

That ain't for me. If you take a dim view of that outlook on politics, that's entirely within your right.

With that in mind, I think of my blog as being a place where politics will only rarely come into play, simply because it's not a major part of my personality. And yet, it's impossible to escape entirely. Some, after all, would say that everything is political, whether we wish it to be or not. That might or might not be true; I don't know. But I do know that Stephen King's newest novel, 11/22/63, has major political content, and that makes it difficult to not talk politics at least a little bit when talking about the novel.

So let's talk politics a wee, wee bit. Please note that there are a few mild spoilers for those who have not read 11/22/63 yet.

Unsurprisingly, King has been criticized in some corners for his novel. I don't read most of the places where such criticism would be heaviest, but I've seen a few comments sections populated by the type of people who seemingly can't go two sentences without using the words "Obamacare," "libtards," or "DemocRATS," and a few others populated by people who almost certainly wrote their diatribes while wearing hats made out tin-foil. You folks have at it; don't bring it around here, but have right at it, and what's it matter if someone like me thinks living with you must be like living with cancer?

One of King's recent television interviews -- this was on Hardball with Chris Matthews -- stirred the pot up a bit. In the interview, Matthews mentioned King's notion that the political climate in which Kennedy was assassinated was not totally unlike the current political climate in which Barack Obama exists. King talked for a bit about the parallels he sees between the two, including the right-wing anger toward both Presidents, and at some point Matthews -- quite reasonably, I thought -- pointed out that, as a Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald was from the left-wing, not the right. King was flustered by this a bit, and didn't do a particularly good job of defending himself.

In noting the undeniable similarities between Kennedy and Barack Obama, King's argument isn't that Kennedy's assassination was a result of right-wing extremism akin to the type America is currently seeing; that was a reasonable deduction for a political commentator like Matthews to make, but it's an incorrect one. King would have been able to deflect it easily, I suspect, but he was clearly surprised by the very question, and he seemed to do the old mental equivalent of a long-nailed dog skittering in place while trying to run across a tile floor. No, the way I see it, the idea is simply that when right-wing extremism becomes prevalent, it also brings about left-wing extremism as a result (and vice-versa). King is leery of extremism of any sort, and I suspect he would say that he feels it is dangerous because it tends to draw mentally unbalanced people to it. There is, after all, a reason why the phrase is "the lunatic fringe." It's a politically neutral phrase, and while not everyone to the far end of either side is a lunatic, I think it's reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the lunatics end up to one extreme or the other.

Part of Oswald's psychopathy, then, might be said to be the result of right-wing extemism in that it was a countering response to it: right-wing antics of the time pushed Oswald further to the left, and once he was there, his lunacy took hold and never let go. That Kennedy ended up being assassinated by a left-wing nutbag rather than a right-wing one isn't an indication that there was no right-wing extremism in the early '60s; it's just a bitter bit of irony.

Just today, King wrote an op-ed piece which appeared in the New York Times and which addresses some of these issues. King wrote the piece as a response to "The Enduring Cult of Kennedy," another op-ed piece from the Times (this one by columnist Ross Douthat). Douhat takes issue -- not without merit -- with the enduring myth of Kennedy. I'm sympathetic with him to some degree: I'm no expert on Kennedy, but it doesn't really seem that he was all THAT good a President. He seems to feel as if King is firmly on the side of the Camelot camp, and I have to wonder, based on that, whether Douhat actually read the novel or not. After saving Kennedy, Jake returns to 2011 to find that American history has, to put it mildly, not progressed for the better. Camelot never happened, to say the least; if anything, King is critical of Kennedy's political abilities, even suggesting that it might well be for the best that he died. This is a part of the larger theme of the novel (i.e., the notion that it's a virtue to appreciate the here and now), and maybe that's why the left hasn't pounced on King the way I half-expected. After all, he is not overly kind to one of their ultimate idols. I don't know, maybe I'm just not seeing those comments. Either way, I think it would be patently false to accuse King of buying into the Camelot myth in the novel.

What he has bought into is the myth of the Camelot myth. That's what Douhat seems to have missed out on. It's not Kennedy himself who matters at this point: it's the myth of Kennedy. Men die; myths live forever, as a part of the ongoing cultural process of trying to shape and inform what it means to Be American. As such, ultimately THAT is what is important about Kennedy. Would we draw inspiration from him if he had lived? Hard to say. Kennedy, in some ways, is like Chris Farley: we love him primarily for the idea of what he might eventually have done, and only a little for what he actually did. There is some hypocrisy in those attitudes, but it's also an unavoidable by-product of life: we mythologize things. All of us have certain memories of our own lives that we hold onto and then turn into stories that we can tell over and over again: something we did while hunting Easter eggs, or something that happened on a first date, or some horrible thing a co-worker said, or something amusing a pet did, et cetera, et cetera. We all do this; every single one of us.

We do it on a cultural level, too. It is important to remember history accurately, but it's also unavoidable that as a culture, we are going to misremember it semi-intentionally. Douhat cannot be unaware of that fact; odds are that, as a conservative, he's engaged in it multiple times on the subject of one Ronald Reagan. (By the by, I freely plead guilty to the charge of being a liberal, but I also freely admit to loving Ronald Reagan; always did, and probably always will.) So on the one hand, he seems in his article to be willfully ignoring a cultural fact of life in order to make a largely irrelevant point, and on the other hand, he's missed one of the key facets of King's novel.

Unsurprisingly, King's response is a vastly more interesting. He makes a compelling argument that Oswald was motivated less by politics than he was by the (metaphorical) worms in his brain; the article is mandatory reading for anyone who's read 11/22/63, and I'd suggest that you give Douhat's article a read first just so that you know what King is responding to.

That's about all I've got to say about politics, I guess. If you find fault with something I've said, feel free to point it out, but I'll warn you in advance: keep it civil, and keep it level-headed. In return, I promise to keep politics -- and religion, too -- out of my blog as much as humanly possible. After all, I'm no expert on politics, and while I think me way of seeing things makes sense, I'd be reluctant to ever try and push it on anyone else. You want that, it's easily found elsewhere; here, you can find opinions on deep subjects like whether the new Muppet movie is good (it isn't; it's GREAT) or whether Martin Scorsese's Hugo is the best 3D done to date (it is, and nothing else I've seen is even close).

THAT's the kind of stuff I feel qualified to talk about.

*****

Moving on, I'd now like to talk just a wee bit about a different ending for 11/22/63, one which many King fans may be unfamiliar with. To do so, I'll (obviously) be getting into heavy spoilers about the novel ... not in terms of what happens in the novel, but in terms of the ending King ended up NOT giving it.

So if you haven't read it yet, this'd be a good place for you to duck out. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Back in early 2007, when Marvel Comics was getting ready to launch its series of Dark Tower comics, they dedicated an issue of their Marvel Spotlight comic to King's series of novels. It's a cool issue, too: it's got a lengthy interview with Robin Furth, plot summaries of all seven novels, good interviews with Jae Lee, Richard Isanove, and Peter David, artwork ... and a highly interesting couple of pages written by King himself.

In that piece -- which is titled "An open letter from Stephen King" -- the author has this to say:

Other novels I might consider (for future comic adaptations)? Firestarter would be a natural, but I don't know what the rights situation is. Original projects? You bet. I'd like to do a kickbutt, zombies-overrun-the-world story told from the viewpoint of several girls who start out as Valley Drones and become tough take-no-prisoners survivors. I'd like to tell a time-travel story where this guy finds a diner that connects to 1958 ... you always go back to the same day. So one day he goes back and just stays. Leaves his 2007 life behind. His goal? To get up to November 22, 1963, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. He does, and he's convinced he's just FIXED THE WORLD. But when he goes back to '07, the world's a nuclear slag-heap. Not good to fool with Father Time. So then he has to go back again and stop himself ... only he's taken on a fatal dose of radiation, so it's a race against time.

Now, for those of you who've finished 11/22/63, you obviously know that King didn't stick with this ending. But he certainly used elements of it: the notion of Jake succeeding in saving Kennedy remained, as did the notion of finding out that saving Kennedy was not exactly the cultural boon the myth of Camelot would suggest it would be.

I had never read this Marvel Spotlight issue as of the beginning of this summer. In fact, I'd never heard of it, and when I did hear about it, I immediately got online and purchased a used copy. When I got it, I read it cover-to-cover, and winced when I got to that bit about the time-travel story; by that point, 11/22/63 had been announced, so I assumed I'd read a whopper of a spoiler. I didn't worry about it too much, though, because I thought the idea of that ending kicked complete ass. In fact, once I started reading the novel and it became apparent that the ending would have to be different, I was a little bummed out. Only a little; I loved the novel, and loved the ending (which was apparently Joe Hill's idea, according to King's Afterword to the novel). But DVD culture has also taught me to be able to enjoy the idea of alternative ideas that never quite came to fruition, and I enjoy this different ending in the same way.

Why, you ask, couldn't King have used that idea? Well, my guess is that sometime after 2007, he came up with the idea of the past resetting each time someone went through the portal, and went with the story in that direction. That, obviously, makes it impossible for a dying Jake to go back in time again and have to stop himself, and without that bit of drama, the notion of the world being a fallout zone becomes problematic. I suppose it could have made a decent Rod Serling-esque ending on its own, without the notion of Jake resetting the past at all; you could also have added some drama involving a rapidly dying Jake struggling to get back to the portal so that he could reset things, possibly dying the instant he goes through and leaving a mysterious corpse in 1958. That could have been cool.

Either way, King went in a different direction, and I think it's a very satisfying one. Still ... I DO love that original idea.

By the by, I also love the idea of the Valley Girls in the zombie apocalypse. I wonder if he's worked on that one at all. I kinda hope it'll be next in line after Dr. Sleep!

For those who are interested, by the way, you can probably still find copies of that Marvel Spotlight issue online. It was also reprinted as part of the recent Dark Tower Omnibus edition Marvel released. That one'll set you back $95 at a minimum, but if you're a fan, it's well worth having.

Them's my thinks for now. I would wager that the next thing I write will be a review of A&E's Bag of Bones, which I hope to enjoy. After that...? Man, I've still got to write some reviews of King's 2011 short-story output; he had a great year of short fiction ("Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," "Under the Weather," "Mile 81," "The Little Green God of Agony" and "The Dune," four of which I loved), and it deserves some serious consideration. I'll do my best to make that a priority between now and the end of the year.

Until then, just remember: dancing is life.

A Brief Review: Dark Score Stories

2011-11-19T20:47:00.001-06:00

Say, are you a Bag of Bones fan? Are you looking forward to the Mick Garris-directed movie coming up on A&E this December 11-12?

If you answered yes to those questions, then you need to check out a website: Dark Score Stories, which contains a lot of photo-essay material, as well as some audio clips of characters from the movie.

If you're familiar with my site, then you're also probably aware that I've been somewhat opposed to this movie. I'm not a Mick Garris fan at all: I feel like the movies he's made from Stephen King books and stories have been, on the whole, fairly poor. The Garris/King association began with the wretched Sleepwalkers, and has gone on to include The Stand, The Shining, Quicksilver Highway (the "Chattery Teeth" segment was based on the King short story of the same name), Riding the Bullet, and Desperation, all of which have been problematic. I'm aware that Garris has a lot of fans in the King community; I'm not one of them.

Period.

So, naturally, I've been dreading Bag of Bones. This was not helped by the apparent miscasting of the lead role (Mike Noonan doesn't exactly scream "James Bond," and while I know that Pierce Brosnan is more than a former 007, it's hard not to see the suave spymaster anytime he's on screen), or by the apparent major changes to the plotline involving Mattie Devore.

I'll say this, though: Dark Score Stories has turned my opinion slightly back toward the positive.

The photo essays are fictionalized, by which I mean that they are a part of the narrative within which the movie itself takes place (not photo essays about the making of the movie). Here, the essays are written (and the photos taken) by an unnamed character who was sent to Dark Score Lake by his/her publisher, Zenith House. The essays are nothing special; they're just a prop to hang the photos on, and many of the photos -- there are roughly eighty in all -- are beautiful. They were taken by Joachim Ladefoged, who appears to be rather talented. I know very little about photography, but I know when I see a purty picture, and there are a lot of purty pictures here.

As several other sites, including Lilja's Library, have pointed out, there is a lot of fun to be had here in scrolling through the photos and checking out the many amusing homages to other Stephen King stories. Bag of Bones (the novel) has a great many tie-ins, including ties to Insomnia, Gerald's Game, The Dark Half, and It, so it's completely appropriate for the movie to follow suit. It's hard to say how many of these will end up in the movie, of course, but examining the photos, I found references to the following:

"Secret Window, Secret Garden"
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"
"Big Driver"
"The Sun Dog"
"Quitters, Inc."
Carrie
It
The Dark Tower
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
"Umney's Last Case"
"1408"
"The Library Policeman"
The Plant
"Mile 81"
Rose Red
The Dark Half
The Shining
Misery
The Tommyknockers
Lisey's Story
Desperation
Duma Key
The Regulators
The Dead Zone
The Stand
Insomnia
The Colorado Kid
Cujo
Hearts In Atlantis
'Salem's Lot
Thinner
Needful Things
and a host of real-world King-related things like The Rock Bottom Remainders, Dollar Babies, and Lilja's Library itself!

There are probably tons more that I didn't recognize. Lots of fun. Here's one of my favorite shout-outs on the site:

There is a TON of love for the Stephen King universe evident in the set design of these photos, and a lot of artistry on display in the photos themselves. If the movie overall manages to have this passion and artistry, then we might be in for something special.

For now, I'm going to remain dubious. Garris isn't a particularly gifted director, and screenwriter Matt Venne's highest-profile work to date is the (highly unsuccessful) sequel to White Noise. The credits simply don't inspire confidence.

But Dark Score Stories, the website, does, after after spending an hour or so poking around on it, I feel a lot more excitement mounting for the movie than I would have thought possible. Regardless, the site itself is a beaut.

Go check it out, won't you?

The Passage of the World's Last Gunslinger: "11/22/63" Reviewed, Part 2

2011-11-15T01:00:00.000-06:00

In the second part of my review of 11/22/63 (you can find the first part here if you missed it), I'd like to focus on the ways in which the novel crosses over with other stories in the King universe.

Obviously, 11/22/63 spends a fair amount of time playing in the same stomping-grounds as did another famous epic novel: Derry, Maine, in 1958, which was the setting for about half of It. That novel, which has major themes involving the intractable nature of time's passage, is my favorite by King; revisiting it might well have proven to be disastrous, and in the hands of a lesser writer probably would be. King, of course, often cross-pollinates his works (e.g., having Jack Sawyer from The Talisman pop up in The Tommyknockers), and I cannot off the top of my head think of instance in which he's done so to the detriment of his work.

Here, what happens to the story of It as a result of the events of 11/22/63 is that it concretizes the notion of time as an active force in our lives; this was a major element of It in the sense that the characters of that novel are keenly aware that their childhoods have ended, and that while they might hold on to some aspects of their past, they can never truly regain them. They are engaged in their own peculiar sort of time travel; it is figurative rather than literal, but they are both successful AND unsuccessful in their attempts, just as Jake is. Furthermore, the structure of It -- which bounces back and forth between past and present -- makes time an even more active element of the novel; for our purposes as readers, the past and present are both active, and toward the end of the novel the two begin to merge. It would have been troublesome for 11/22/63 to work against those themes, but it doesn't; it deepens them.

As such, the appearance of both Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier -- whom we meet maybe a month after the 1958 portion of events from It -- is an absolute delight. They sound just right: it seems as if they walked straight out of that novel and into this one. No mean feat on King's part, that; he's revisiting a 25-year-old novel, and doing so with complete success.

What he doesn't revisit is Pennwyise, at least not directly. At one point, Jake does visit the Kitchener Ironworks, and he passes by the same fallen industrial chimney in which Mike Hanlon hid from a monstrous bird in It. Here, Jake senses a malevolent presence of some sort, almost as if it is beckoning to him: it seems to whisper to him that "Time doesn't matter in here; in here, time just floats away." (Chapter 8) The use of the word "float," of course, is no coincidence: here, Jake is directly sensing the presence and influence of the alien entity known as Pennywise, who has been thoroughly wounded by the children, but by no means killed.

Later in the novel, when visiting Dealey Plaza for the first time, Jake gets a similar sense of wrongness from the Texas School Book Depository building, which also seems to speak to him, and also seems to exude wrongness. In fact, all of Dallas exudes that sense of wrongness, as did all of Derry.

In this idea, we begin to transition a bit to the concerns of King's interconnected stories: the idea that certain places simply exude evil. The Marsten House in 'Salem's Lot was such a place, as is the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the Micmac burial ground in in Pet Sematary, the crash site in The Tommyknockers. etc. In 'Salem's Lot, the Marsten House is an evil place which calls to evil people, and that's how Barlow and Straker end up occupying it; here, the Depository is an evil place which has called to an evil person, Lee Harvey Oswald, and therefore positioned him to enact a watershed moment in history. King's argument, though, is that from the universe's point of view, that watershed moment was a necessary one: that without Kennedy falling beneath a sniper's bullet, the fabric of reality could not sustain itself.

Why is this the case? It's a fair question, and it's one which may well be asked by any number of readers who come to the novel relatively free of knowledge about King's larger universe. The answer they will likely come to is that the process of changing the past itself is what causes the damage to the fabric of reality. However, I don't think this is actually the case. It makes for an excellent diversionary answer, and it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a deeper answer until I was writing this essay. But I think there is a deeper answer.

It's all about the Rose ... by which I mean the Tower.

There are no overt connection between 11/22/63 and The Dark Tower; I might as well admit that. However, there are points of possible overlap: the Yellow Card Man and the Green Card Men are somewhat similar to Low Men, and while they are definitely NOT the same thing, they do seem to serve similar functions and have similar capabilities. Additionally, it's hard to think of Jake placing bets which he knows the outcome of without also thinking of Ted Brautigan from Hearts In Atlantis and The Dark Tower. Add to that the fact that It has thematic ramifications within that larger King universe, including an appearance by one of the Guardians of the Beam, and you come up with a viewpoint from which 11/22/63 might not have any direct connections, but plenty of indirect ones. Therefore, it has to be considered part of the same overall storytelling universe.

This concerns us in two ways. First of all, let's turn our attention to The Drawing of the Three. Here's an excerpt from the chapter "Detta and Odetta":

“—lastgunslinger,” Andrew said.
       He had been talking for quiteawhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over hermind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in theshower. But this did more than catch herattention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
        “I beg pardon?”
       “Oh, it was just some column in thepaper,” Andrew said. “I dunno who wroteit. I didn’t notice. One of those political fellas. Prob’ly you’d know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he waselected—”
     She smiled, touched in spite ofherself. Andrew said his ceaselesschatter was something he couldn’t stop, wasn’t responsible for, that it wasjust the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing – cluckings andchirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-bakedpolitical opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number ofweird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flyingsaucers, which he called you-foes) –but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.
         “But I didn’t cry when that son of abitch – pardon my French, Miz Holmes – when that son of a bitch Oswald shothim, and I hadn’t cried since, and it’s been – what, two months?”
         Threemonths and two days, she thought.
         “Something like that, I guess.”
        Andrew nodded. “Then I read this column – in The Daily News, it mighta been –yesterday, about how Johnson’s probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won’tbe the same. The guy said America hadseen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger.”
       “I don’t think John Kennedy was thatat all,” Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew wasaccustomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give astartled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), itwas because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase – America has seen the passage of the world’slast gunslinger – that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue –John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type –but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.
         “Well, the guy said there would beno shortage of shooters in the world,” Andrew went on, regarding her nervouslyin the rear-view mirror. “He mentionedJack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti—”
          “Duvalier,” she said. “Poppa Doc.”
          “Yeah, him, and Diem—”
          “The Diem brothers are dead.”
         “Well, he said Jack Kennedy wasdifferent, that’s all. He said he woulddrawn, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there wasnothing else to do. He said Kennedy wassavvy enough to know that sometimes talking don’t do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it’s foaming at themouth you have to shoot it.”
          His eyes continued to regard herapprehensively.
          “Besides, it was just some column Iread.”
         The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenuenow, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac emblem on the end of the hoodcutting the frigid February air.
        “Yes,” Odetta said mildly, andAndrew’s eyes relaxed a trifle. “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand.”
         Youare a liar, a voice spoke up in her mind. This was a voice she heard quite often. She had even named it. It was thevoice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree completely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, butfor God’s sake don’t lie to yourself, woman.
            Yet part of her protested,horrified. In a world which had become anuclear powderkeg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake –perhaps one of suicidal proportions – to believe there was a difference betweengood shooters and bad shooters. Therewere too many shaky hands holding lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, ithad passed.

This is an interesting passage not because it impacts upon the plot of 11/22/63 in any way, but simply because it illustrates the point that even around the time of The Drawing of the Three, King seemed to come down on the side of thinking that Kennedy's death was ka. I remembered that little scene between Odetta and Andrew a couple of days after finishing 11/22/63, and looked it up to see if my memory had gotten it right; it had.

And at that point, something else occurred to me: if you proceed from the assumption that Jake's exploits are taking place in the same universe as the one Odetta, Eddie, and Jake come from, then all of a sudden it becomes vitally important to the story of The Dark Tower that Jake not succeed in changing the course of events. There is nothing specific in 11/22/63 to point to idea that the altered version of 2011 has changed the lives of Eddie Dean or Jake Chambers, but the notion of another character named Jake serves as a bit of a harmonic ... one that Jake Epping is unaware of, but a harmonic nevertheless. Also, it is not at all a stretch of the imagination to think that either Eddie or Jake or both might indeed HAVE been fundamentally altered. Eddie's brother Henry was a Vietnam vet, after all; that might have changed in the altered timeline, thereby altering Eddie's life, and possibly even preventing Roland from being able to Draw him.

Even worse, the changes to the time-line might have had an affect of some sort -- direct or indirect -- on the Rose which exists in an abandoned lot in New York. If the Rose falls, then the Tower falls, and if the Tower falls, then all of reality is plunged into Todash darkness.

I don't think it's much of a stretch at all to speculate that the watery ripping noises Jake hears in the sky in 2011 Mark 2 might be the sound of Beams collapsing, and the process of the Tower beginning to fall. Might this be explainable by means of saying that due to Jake Epping's actions, Roland and his ka-tet has been unable even to form, much less to prevent the Crimson King from succeeding in his quest to destroy the Tower?

I don't think it's a stretch at all. I also don't think it's a stretch at all to suggest that the Green Card Man -- Zack Land, originally from Seattle -- might be a representative of some version of the Tet Corporation, which within the Dark Tower tales was established to combat the Sombra Corporation, which was an agency of the Crimson King.

Until King comes and says something one way or another, it's probably foolish to think of this as an accurate interpretation, but it seems to track. In any case, that's the way I read it: because of his actions, Jake Epping has enacted a series of events which will culminate in the fall of the Dark Tower and the victory of the Crimson King, and because of this, the Tower itself has structured reality in such a fashion as to -- along with assistance from the friendly Tet Corporation -- prevent Jake from being able to allow his actions to stand.

It's also worth mentioning that the mystic -- and highly Dark Tower-relevant -- number 19 is all over this novel. Harry even tells Jake about a nuclear meltdown which took place on June 19, 1999!

*****

One final note. 11/22/63 also features several appearances my a model of car which ought to be familiar to King fans: the 1958 Plymouth Fury.

Inevitably, this is going to result in speculation as to whether one of the cars we see is Christine herself. I don't find any evidence at all to indicate that this is the case. I skimmed Christine a bit, and didn't see any evidence that would connect that Fury to any of the events or locales of 11/22/63.

However ... it IS possible that we are meant to think that the Plymouth Fury outside the Worumbo plant in Lisbon Falls is the property of the Yellow Card Man, and possibly even the vessel he uses -- they use -- to travel to our universe from wherever it is they come from. The Low Men, as we know, use vehicles which appear to our eyes as cars, but in fact are something else entirely. The Yellow/Green Card Men, who appear to be benevolent opposites of the Low Men in Yellow Coats, might well use a similar mode of transportation, and it is perhaps not beyond the realm of possibility to consider that Christine might have been one of these which somehow got away from them and ended up in the possession of Roland LeBay. Perhaps that alienness is what could have permitted Christine to become haunted in the first place...?

Personally, I don't think so. I think this is just a case of there being multiple Plymouth Furies in the world.

But you never know...

At the Bottom It's Always a Woman: "11/22/63" Reviewed, Part 1

2011-11-14T16:44:00.001-06:00

The brokeroffered a dark smile. "On Greenville Avenue you can never tell what'sgonna happen. Man blew his own head off just a block and a half fromhere a few years ago."
"Really?"
"Yessir,outside a bar called the Desert Rose. Over a woman, accourse. Don’tthat figure?”
“Iguess,” I said. “Although sometimes it’spolitics.”
“Nah,nah, at the bottom it’s always a woman, son.”

-- 11/22/63, Chapter 21

Here's the first thing you need to know about this review: unless you have already read 11/22/63, you shouldn't read any further than this sentence. The reason for that is simple: I want to write a bit about some of the things that I think make the novel work so well, and I can't do that without being free to talk about the story in its entirety.

You don't want to be spoiled to that degree. Even if you think you do, you don't: this novel deserves to be read with as little foreknowledge of its contents as is possible. I knew too much about it going in (although some of what I thought I knew ended up being false info), and while that didn't hamper my enjoyment of the novel in the slightest, I still wish I had had a completely unburdened first read.

So, if you're planning on reading the novel -- and if you aren't, why on Earth are you reading this review? -- do yourself a favor: go read it, and then come back here.

In order to provide a bit of a transition before I get into the review, I offer this:

And here is the point at which I reveal something major about the novel 11/22/63: it isn't really about the Kennedy assassination ... at least not in as large a sense as the marketing of the novel indicates. Lest this seem like an odd thing for me to say, allow me to pose a question: how much of It is really about a shape-shifting monster? How much of The Shining is really about ghosts? How much of Christine is really about a haunted car?

If you answered those questions with some variant of "not all that much," then you're on the right path. It, of course, is actually about the undeniable fact of childhood's ultimate end, even within our own memories; The Shining is about the gravitational pull of madness, and Christine is about the dissolution of a teenage friendship. (Those are broad-stroke summations, of course; all three novels are about much more than that, but those make for good starting points.)

This, of course, is nothing new in the works of Stephen King. Most of his novels have a hook of some kind -- I hesitate to call them MacGuffins, though they aren't entirely dissimilar -- upon which King hangs his larger thematic concerns; that's one of the elements of his work to which so many critics and reviewers are, apparently, blinded.

11/22/63 is, however, receiving largely positive reviews; some of them have downright rapturous, and a few of them have even noticed that King is working with some large concerns which don't really have an awful lot to do with Lee Harvey Oswald. Some of these positive reviewers seem surprised by what they've found: "Mr. King's books have a far stronger real-world component than they used to," writes Janet Maslin in the New York Times, "even when he deals in premises rooted in science fiction."

I am happy that Maslin enjoyed the novel, and that she recognizes its strengths, but I have to wonder in what sense Carrie (which is all about the desperation of being a picked-upon unpopular teenager) or Pet Sematary (which deals with the grief following a child's death) or Cujo (which is a tale of the ramifications of an unsatisfying marriage), to take three examples, have notably weaker real-world components than 11/22/63.

From my perspective, obviously, they don't. To be frank, Maslin doesn't know what she's talking about in that sentence, but she needn't feel too bad about it: she's hardly alone. King's "real-world" relevance has often been overlooked, but it's absolutely essential to an understanding of why he has built and maintained as large an audience as he has. What keeps them -- us, I should say -- coming back again and again is the bond of identification he creates with his readers. The means by which he goes about accomplishing that identification: his characters.

Again, this is nothing new. I remember reading some critical analysis of King's work twenty or so years ago -- it may have been in Douglas E. Winter's The Art of Darkness -- which pointed that element of King's work out to me, and I was floored. I was an incredibly unsophisticated high-school-age reader back then, and it came as a genuine revelation to me to find out that it was the people, rather than the monsters, which were the true engine in the car that is King's career.

I could play the old point-at-the-critics-and-holler-"J'accuse!" game for pages and pages, and I'd have a lot of fun doing it ... but there'd be little point in it. I did think it was worthwhile, though, to point out that even now, when the good reviews are rolling in regularly, King is still being mistaken by the critical community. It's a function of the marketing, and King himself perpetuates the sham to some degree, perhaps under the assumption that once his audience is reading the novel they'll see it for what it really is. It's an assumption that has paid off brilliantly for nearly forty years, so I can't say that I blame him.

So, you might be asking, if 11/22/63 isn't really about the Kennedy assassination, then what, pray tell, IS it about?

The simplest way to put it is to say that it's a love story. There's more to it than that, of course, but -- again -- it makes for a good starting point. "Love," here, is defined not merely in the romantic sense, but in the larger sense of the word: a fundamental caring for the circumstances of others, and the desire to better those circumstances. Virtually every action Jake Epping (King's protagonist in 11/22/63) takes is motivated by that fundamental caring; it is truly the novel's primary concern.

Within that framework, Oswald's assassination of Kennedy is merely a component, one which has echoes of Jake's own actions: Oswald is a harried mama's boy who goes about his madness partially to escape his mother and partially out of an attempt to protect the leftist garden spot of Cuba from the forces that seem to be aimed at destroying it. Oswald's relationship with his mother is a failed love; it spills over into his relationship with his wife, Marina, whom he'd like to love, but can't seem to stop smacking around long enough to actually do so. Policitcally, Oswald is an extreme leftist, but as King depicts him, he is motivated by a hatred of racism, and by a love for the Communist paradise that Cuba seems to be. No rationale is provided as to why Oswald decides to kill Kennedy, but it is hinted that is is due to Kennedy's threatening stance toward Cuba. Oswald, clearly, is mad, but behind his madness is love for the people of Cuba. Is this fundamentally different from Jake's love for the bettered version of America he hopes to bring about by stopping Oswald? I don't think it is. I think Jake is a vastly more sympathetic character, and a saner one; but I don't know that his motivations are automatically more pure than Oswald's might theoretically have been. I say that with no political bias implied, but merely as a human observation.

Back to Jake:he makes for an interesting protagonist in that he is something of a blank slate, not dissimilar to Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone in that regard, or Pet Sematary's Louis Creed, to name another. Jake's character traits aren't terribly pronounced, so that he can serve as a point of identification for the reader. In other words, Jake is that reliable standby, the Everyman, within whom the reader can set up shop with his own concerns and desires. And who among us is not motivated, in some way, by love?

The quotation which I borrowed for the beginning of this essay points toward that idea. When the clerk at the pawn shop tells Jake that "at the bottom it's always a woman," what he really means is that all actions are motivated by love in some way: we act from the desire to attain it, or to keep it, or perhaps in frustration at being denied it.

Jake tells us right up front that he is a relatively unemotional man: "I have never been what you'd call a crying man," he says in the novel's opening sentence. The untitled prologue of the novel continues from that point, detailing a partial history of ways in which Jake has proven to be the type of man who doesn't cry ... but also ways in which he has proven to be exactly the type of man who does cry. As a child, he cried when he found out his pet dog died (possibly as a result of his own carelessness); as an adult, he cried when he found out his mother died. He never cried in front of his wife, however, which is a big part of the reason why she became his ex-wife.

This prologue is a mini-masterpiece in terms of how effectively it establishes a bond between the reader and Jake. It is utterly unrelated to Oswald and Kennedy, except in the sense that Jake admits to us that everything that followed -- i.e., his trips into the past -- resulted directly from an instance in which he was a crying man: his reading of an essay by an adult-education student, and the degree to which he is affected by the tale of a family torn apart by a madman with a hammer.

In the relationship Jake forges with Harry Dunning, the janitor whose tale inspires such pathos in him, we see a foretaste of the type of emotional undercurrents which will come to define Jake: a desire to protect innocence when it is threatened by outside forces. The argument can probably be made that the only reason he befriends Al Templeton -- the owner of the diner which houses the time bubble -- is that he feels some sympathy for Al: he enjoys Al's cooking, and wants to defend it from the semi-serious charges that the low prices must indicate the use of substandard ingredients in the food. From there, he listens to Al's seemingly-crazy story, and grants his seemingly-crazy requests, out of a respect and sympathy for Al's seemingly-crazy situation. None of this is present in the narrative, per se: it seems to instead be an instinctual part of Jake's character. He may not be a crying man, but he is certainly a caring man.

What ultimately motivates Jake to take the insane step of agreeing to spend five years in the past isn't so much the idea of saving Kennedy, but of saving Harry the janitor from a life of being mocked by students as "Hoptoad Harry" due to a pronounced limp and slight mental feebleness. Harry has also mentioned a sister, who was funny enough that he and his family thought she would be the next Lucille Ball; Jake is moved by the thought that this sister was never allowed to blossom into the natural cut-up she seemed destined to be, and is determined to stop her father from splitting her skull open. Similarly, once it becomes apparent that changing the past is possible, Jake completely buys the notion that saving Kennedy can also save untold other lives, including Robert Kennedy, possibly Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of soldiers who would go on to die in Vietnam, etc.

Really, though, it's all about Harry and his family; even once he's saved part of Harry's family only to discover that it caused a non-4F Harry to go to Vietnam and die, Jake saves the Dunning family a second time, rationalizing that saving them more completely might change Harry's fate for the better. And, he rationalizes, if he is able to save Kennedy, it will probably keep Harry from ever having to go to Vietnam in the first place.

How is this (you might be asking), at the bottom, about a woman? The key to Jake's character, for me, is that he is haunted by the failure of his first marriage: to an alcoholic whose addictions he was unable to salve. I take a great deal of what transpires in 11/22/63 as an instance of Jake running away from that failed relationship (in something similar to the way Lee Harvey Oswald ran all the way to Russia to try and escape his domineering mother). The former Christy Epping is never present as a character in the novel, and Jake spends only a tiny amount of time talking about her, but the prologue is very much about how her accusations toward Jake -- the charge that he is emotionally blocked, for instance -- have affected him. I look at his reactions to Harry's essay as being partially due to Christy's judgment of him: in other words, Jake cries over Harry's words partially because Christy has suggested he is incapable of crying. He weeps, then, not merely for Harry and for his lost family, but also for his lost relationship with Christy.

Later in the novel, once Jake has formed a serious relationship with Sadie Dunhill in the past, Christy seems to be almost entirely forgotten. Then there comes a scene in which Jake is trying to snap Sadie back to consciousness after she has overdosed on pills and alcohol; his tongue slips at one point, and he calls Sadie by his ex-wife's name, illustrating the fact that while Christy might be out of his life -- and gone from his conscious thoughts to such an extent that she is scarcely mentioned during the course of an 850-page first-person narrative -- she is still very much present beneath the surface of things.

The bulk of the novel's love story, of course, is given over to the relationship between Jake (as "George Amberson") and Sadie, and it is this relationship which is probably going to be the one people take away from 11/22/63 the most forcefully. King has worked directly with the love story before, in both Wizard and Glass and Bag of Bones, as well as Hearts In Atlantis; it isn't anything new. It may be even stronger here than in those novels, however. The relationship between "George" and Sadie -- and, later, the one between Jake and Sadie (no, they're not quite the same) -- feels rather idealized in some ways, but that is its appeal, and I think it's also a purposeful move on King's part.

Well over a hundred pages of the novel is focused almost entirely on the blossoming relationship between George and Sadie, and while I have no doubt that this is the rocky shore on which some readers' ships will become grounded, to me it is the heart of the novel. We all come to novels like this for different reasons, of course, and those who have come to 11/22/63 purely to read an adventure tale about a time-traveling reverse-assassin may read this section -- with its focus on first meetings, football-heroes turned thespians, small-town gossip, and the minutiae of staging first Of Mice and Men and then a lowbrow vaudeville show -- and wonder what King was thinking. It's not an entirely unjustified reaction.

For me, though, these are the novel's best sections, and the sections which I feel meant perhaps the most to King; his writing here -- as well as in the prologue and in the novel's final few scenes -- seems more passionate, more lively, and I find it hard to imagine that that is happenstance.

Instead, I think it's part of the plot. It's going to take me a bit of digression in order to get back to that point, but I will get back to it.

One of the novel's major elements is the notion that while the past can be changed, it really doesn't want to be changed, and will resist anyone who tries to change it. Frankly, I don't feel quite smart enough to be able to write fully about that element of the story. It all makes sense to me, but in ways I struggle to put into words. I've watched enough time-travel movies -- from The Terminator to Back to the Future to Doctor Who -- to feel comfortable exploring the notion of the past being somewhat obdurate. I've never, however, seen the idea of changing the past portrayed quite as King portrays it here: it feels utterly implacable, and the fate vs. free-will dynamic -- while never discussed as such in the novel -- comes into play heavily.

We learn toward the end of the novel that in saving Kennedy, Jake has committed an act that, if permitted to proceed unchecked, will eventually literally tear the Earth to pieces. Numerous things happen as a result which cause the Mark 2 version of 2011 to be a far worse place than the one Jake came from, but in addition to that, there are apparently consequences which will cause all of reality -- all universes, everywhere -- to fall into disaster. (I've got a lot more to say about that, too, but it's going to have to wait a bit: a digression within a digression seems like a bad idea.) With that horrible knowledge in mind, Jake returns to 2011, but it's not this that motivates him to return again to 1958 (thereby resetting the damage he has done): instead, it is the desire to bring Sadie back to life, even if he can only restore her to the life she knew before meeting him. From there, he returns yet again to 2011, to the unsullied, unchanged future which he was already living when the novel began.

One thing Jake learns when he returns to 2011 for the final time is that Sadie is still alive, and that even without the presence of "George Amberson" in her past, she was still attacked by her husband. It seems that she was always fated to be disfigured by Johnny Clayton, and it also seems that she was always fated to survive his attack on her. I spent a great deal of the novel reading events from the perspective that when something would happen that seemed to be a roadblock to Jake's attempts to change the course of future events, it was because the past -- or whatever force controls it -- was actively trying to course-correct. And in some cases, this is obviously true: for example, the severe beating Jake takes at the hands of Akiva Roth and his men could not have happened if Jake had not been present in the past, so that incident represents a case of the time-stream changing itself to attempt to remove Jake as a threat.

This is, however, not the case with Jake's relationship with Sadie, though I initially took it to be. As Jake learns in 2011, Sadie never married a second time, and never had children; it is almost as if she was a trap designed to ensnare Jake, and to then form a bond of love with him so strongly that he would ultimately act in her best interests, to keep her alive even if it means erasing his relationship with her from ever having existed. That these best interests would also require Jake to undo the damage he has done to the time-stream (and, therefore, to the fabric of reality) is undoubtedly not a coincidence.

It's more complex than that, though, and I say that as a means of ending my digression: we're back now to the idea that the scenes in which Jake is simply living as George Amberson are the true heart of the novel.

It feels to me as if Sadie really IS a trap set up by the past, but one which is designed to keep Jake from ever even trying to save Kennedy at all. The universe seems to have put a genuine soul mate in Jake's path, and she is one whom we know -- from Jake's final return to 2011 -- was never destined to have a significant relationship with another man afterward. Many obstacles are put in Jake's path during the course of his attempts to save Kennedy, but none are more potent than Sadie, because Jake is tempted (by virtue of loving her and wanting to keep on loving her) to simply give up the entire idea, and live out the remainder of his life with her, teaching school and living a small-town existence. Again, the universe seems to be constructed so as to allow for this: Sadie has no greater destiny, and (given that the universe isn't pulling itself apart trying to keep him in 2011) Jake doesn't seem to, either. Furthermore, the time-stream arranges itself so that when Jake returns to the 2011 in which Kennedy lived, he is greeted by the one other thing which might be able to cause him to rethink his actions: he finds that he hasn't actually made life better at all for Harry Dunning, who is still a cripple living in Lisbon Falls.

This all gets complex to deal with if you're not a physicist, but the way it makes sense to me is that the universe had arranged itself so as to permit for the possibility of Jake living in the past with Sadie. It was not, perhaps, the first and best option -- that would be the lack of any tampering at all with the past -- but as an emergency Plan B, the universe could live with it. I say all of that as a means of offering proof that the scenes between George and Sadie are purposefully idyllic; they do represent a bit of a structural and stylistic detour in the novel, but in a way that actually advances the plot. Betcha didn't know you could advance the plot by stopping it in its tracks, but this novel is my proof that it can certainly be done. Like I said, those sections were my favorite in the novel, because they seemed to offer Jake the fulfillment of the love he seemed to be motivated by.

The tragedy of the novel is that Jake didn't take the universe up on its offer. He is too obstinate to simply abandon his plans, and when Sadie is attacked by Clayton he gets another opportunity; again, he is too obstinate. She recovers a bit, both physically and emotionally, and actually joins Jake in his quest to save Kennedy. They are successful, but at a price: it costs Sadie her life, and Jake finds that he feels no triumph at having changed the future. If she can't be a part of the future, then it's worthless to him.

The novel culminates with some of King's most poetic writing ever. Jake, taking on his familiar guise as George Amberson one final time, travels back to Jodie, Texas, where he attends a Citizen of the Century celebration in honor of Sadie. She is an elderly woman, now, but he introduces himself, and there is still a spark of some sort between them. They dance, and it almost seems as if Sadie recognizes him; for the merest of moments, as they dance, time falls away. It is a haunting ending, brutally sad and yet somehow redemptive.

King has occasionally struggled to find a way to properly end his novels; this is not one of those times.

I'd be a bit remiss in my duties if I didn't spend at least some time talking about the actual JFK/Oswald elements of the novel. The novel has proven to be somewhat controversial in terms of the degree to which King committed to the notion that Oswald was, indeed, a lone gunman; in his version of the story, there was no conspiracy.

I can understand how and why this upsets some people. For all I know, there WAS a massive conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy; I'm no expert on the subject, so I can't speak from any place of knowledge. However, King has said in interviews that he researched the subject extensively, and came down on the side of thinking that Oswald had acted alone. In terms of the novel itself, that's good enough for me.

And in King's story, it's a woman at the bottom of Oswald's behavior, just as surely as it is with Jake's behavior. Here, it's his mother, Marguerite, who is depicted as a shrew of a woman. Historical evidence has pointed to her being an incredibly possessive and overbearing mother figure for Lee, and it appears to be the case that many of his adult actions were -- either directly or indirectly -- designed to allow him to escape her influence. He was never able to fully do so, however. Marguerite is not a major character in the novel in terms of page-count, but her influence is keenly felt; Jake even thinks to himself after observing her at one point that he has more sympathy for Lee Harvey than he had for Frank Dunning (the murderous father of Harry the janitor).

Another important figure in the novel is Marina Oswald, Lee's wife. She is depicted as an extremely sympathetic figure. I know nothing of her in terms of her actual life, but as she is depicted by King, she is a sad, beaten woman, but a vibrant and lovely one despite all of her hardships. One suspects that King might have fallen ever so slightly in love with her while writing about her, and indeed, Jake himself notes the similarities between her and Sadie, his own object of affection.

As a final note, I'd like to mention the climactic scenes in which Jake and Sadie race through the streets of Dallas, desperately trying to avoid the malicious clutches of the past and get to Oswald in time to prevent him from firing the fatal shot. These scenes are among the most tense and thrilling King has ever written.

Coming up as soon as I can finish putting the polishing touches on it, I'll have a second piece about 11/22/63, this one devoted to the various cross-overs between it and other King stories. (Here's a link to that piece.)

For now, I'll leave you with a few additional images, stolen from various websites:


Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald

one wonders how history might have been different if Oswald had been able to content himself with this existence...

a photo from Life magazine, taken 11/23/63: (L-R) Marguerite holding infant Rachel; family friend Ruth Paine; June Oswald; Marina Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald's mugshot

A Brief Review: "11/22/63"

2011-11-12T04:33:00.001-06:00

11/22/63 is awesome. It is, in my opinion, the best novel Stephen King has written since Wizard and Glass way back in '97. If you're bothering to read a fan blog like this one, I'd say there is almost no chance that you won't enjoy the novel.

A word of caution: if you have managed to keep yourself in the dark about the novel's plot developments, then please try and find a way to keep that lack of knowledge intact. Avoid reading reviews; avoid reading interviews with King, or watching his recent television appearances. Most of these that I've read/seen haven't been too spoilery on their own, but added up, they gave me way more knowledge about the novel going in than I would have preferred. It did not by any means ruin my experience of reading the book, but I do wish I'd known a bit less.

So, if you can keep yourself from being spoiled, I'd urge you to do so.

Speaking of which, you definitely want to stay away from the next review of the book I'll be writing, which will spoil the entire plot in the interest of getting at the heart of this extraordinary new novel. Nosir, that review, when it materializes a few days from now, will be strictly for people who've already read this whopper of a tale.

Until then, just remember: Wetmore a good name for you...!

Cecil B. De Morgan Freeman

2011-11-09T14:18:00.002-06:00

Hey! Hey! You over there!

Put down that copy of 11/22/63 for just a moment.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, actor Morgan Freeman will be receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at the upcoming Golden Globe Awards.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that The Shawshank Redemption and its profound post-release success was a major part of Freeman's career. That is why I am able to bring you this report.

Freeman, obviously, is much greater than a single role, though, and from The Electric Company to Dolphin Tale, he's been charming and engaging audiences for decades now. He's a genuine superstar, in the classic sense of the word. Do you know anyone who watches movies who doesn't know who he is? Most of us recognize his voice immediately, and some of us can even tell when an ad agency has hired a vocal sound-alike (sometimes Freeman's own brother!) to try to replicate those dulcet tones.

I'd say this is a well-deserved award, and I hope the great roles continue to role in for Freeman for quite some time to come.

Worst to Best: Stephen King Books

2011-11-08T00:30:00.000-06:00

To celebrate today's release of 11/22/63, I have embarked upon a fool's task: ranking King's books, from worst to best.

I'll probably piss even myself off doing this one...

So, what's at the bottom of the pile-up? Let's see:

(71) Stephen King Goes to the Movies: I didn’t include this on my list of Collectionsin my post yesterday about Canon, but I’ll include it here. Nothing wrong with the stories, but thereought to have been a bit more variety: nearly two-thirds of the book istaken up by the novel-length “Low Men In Yellow Coats.” Agreat story, that, but some of that space could have been used on “Graveyard Shift,”or "Trucks," or as a means of finally collecting “Weeds” and “The Crate” (which were adapted forsegments of Creepshow). The problem lies in the concept, which reallyjust doesn’t work: most of the genuinely memorable King movies have been made from book-length works, and are therefore unwieldy in a collection. The sole savinggrace: short, but invariably interesting, commentaries by King in front of eachof the five included tales. Otherwise,this feels like a bit of a cash-grab, theoretically of interest for fans of King movies who have never read any of his stories ... but even they would have been better-served by some alterations to the contents.
(70) Secret Windows: This shaggy-dog collection of nonfiction, released as a Book-of-the-Month Club exclusive to cash in on the hullabaloo surrounding On Writing, has a slightly less-severe version of the same problem Stephen King Goes to the Movies has. Namely, there’s a big chunk of a book we've already got (Danse Macabre here) inserted into this book, and between that and several other pieces most ardent King fans would already have, about half of the book's contents are recycled. Here, the saving grace is that the other half-or-so is material that would otherwise be substantially harder to find. And it's all well worth reading. Someday, King needs to sit down and edit together a proper collection of his nonfiction writing, which is frequently as dazzling as the best of his fiction. Until then, Secret Windows is the closest thing we've got, and it was a missed opportunity that focused too strictly on the theme of King writing about writing, when it could have focused simply on King writing nonfiction. Again, I'll add a caveat: that in theory, this book was aimed at people who were new to reading King by virtue of having read On Writing. Even so, I don't think the concept was well-served.
(69) Faithful: I may as well admit that I'm not a baseball fan. It's too slow for my tastes; a game goes by and all I can think is that I could have just watched an Alfred Hitchcock movie, sometimes two. But that's okay; I don't have to be interested in a subject to be interested in someone writing about that subject. A good writer will make you interested, at least while you're reading him wax philosophical about his own obsessions. And King's sections of this book are predictably engaging, entertaining, and illuminating. So why so low on the list? Well, the answer is that King wrote only about half of the book; the other half is by Stuart O'Nan, whose contributions I did not enjoy. In fact, I only read about maybe the first half of them; after a while, I began simply skipping ahead to the next King-written section. So, on the whole, I can't rank it any higher; just can't do it.
(68) Rose Madder: I don’t much care for the supernatural elementshere; they very nearly ruin what is otherwise a darkly compelling story of survivingdomestic abuse. My least favorite Kingnovel, this would have been better-served as a straight drama. Or perhaps shouldhave been a great deal shorter; at thislength, it falls apart.
(67) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: I’m just not a fan of this one. I don’t have much interest in the characters,and the quasi-supernatural elements don’t work at all. The only reason this isn't ranked beneath Rose Madder is that it's a good deal shorter; in many ways, though, it's the lesser of the two works. The pop-up version is kinda nifty.
(66) Lisey's Story: It’s kinda split into three distinct styles, allof them intermingled throughout the novel. I love one of those (Scott's backstory), am so-so on another (Lisey's relationship with her sister and their attempts to stave off a psycho), and am actively disdainful of the third (the Lisey/Scott love story -- specifically, the overuse of their "private language," which is like a prose hemorrhoid). The good parts arevery good indeed, but it’s not enough for me to say anything other than that Idon’t like this novel very much. The caveat here is that if you aren't put off by the elements which put me off, then you will almost certainly like this novel WAY more than I do.
(65) The Talisman: One of my least favorite in the canon, and I’m hard-pressed tosay exactly why. Part of me thinks it’sbecause the novel is told in too realistic a fashion to make it believable thata child could do all the things Jack does in this novel. Or perhaps it's that, despite being an epic, parts of it feel incredibly rushed. Beats me. All I know is that parts of the novel work well; I just don't think they add up to anything meaningful.
(64) Blockade Billy: It's merely a short story given its own front and back covers, and not agreat one at that: readable, but that'sabout the best I can say for it. Itprobably ought to have just been held for inclusion in the next story collection. The mass-market edition adds in a second story ("Morality"), which is considerably better, but not enough so as to change my mind about where to place this one.
(63) Nightmares in the Sky: A coffee-tablebook of gargoyle photographs, which has a decent-sized – and good, ifunspectacular – King essay as its text. But those photos are good, and the text is good, too, so this is worthhaving for any King fan. It's also of interest to Joe Hill fans, seeing as how King spends a decent chunk of the essay talking about his son. This is by no means essential stuff, but it's worthwhile.
(62) Cycle of the Werewolf: Some of the vignettes are well-done, but this feelslike exactly what it was: a toss-off, and a very minor work. The artwork by Berni Wrightson, though, is spectacular; somuch so that it tempts me to bump this one up the charts a bit. (Hey, no need; Silver Bullet serves in that capacity.) Still, aminor work.
(61) Creepshow: The comic-book adaptation of the movie is aslight affair, but intermittently chuckalicious. In all honesty, it's not much more than a companion piece to the movie. Here's a thought: howsabout a Blu-ray box-set which includes a new version of the book, one which includes King's screenplay, the prose stories which inspired some of the segments, and other nifty goodies as well as the comic. That version might fare better on this list.
(60) The Eyes of the Dragon: King's only true high-fantasy novel (which is ostensiblyfor children but is perhaps a bit too mature in some regards to occupy that space comfortably) comes off as an interesting experiment, but not much more. His style is simply too modern to work inthis mode, and the story itself is a too flat to sustain the novel'slength. It would have worked better as anovella, but the overly modern tones in the narration would have harmed it at any length. The crossover elements with other King works are mildly interesting, but if I'm being honest, I can't reconcile this Flagg with the Flagg in The Stand, much less the one in The Dark Tower.
(59) Silver Bullet: The screenplay is not exactly high art, but it’sa more finely focused affair than the novella, which is included here forcomparison. This edition is out of print, but ought to be relatively easy to find, so if you're looking for a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf, this is definitely the version to get. Does it feel like a cheat for me to have included both Cycle of the Werewolf AND Silver Bullet on this list? So be it.
(58) Dreamcatcher: The first third or so of the novel is terrific,but the rest is a grind to get through: just like with the movie, it falls apart a bit after the infamous shit-weasel scene. Still, up to that point, it's awfully good, and there are occasional good moments in the latter sections. Not a bad novel, just not a terribly successful one.
(57) Black House: Some great passages, but overall, the plot justdoesn’t work for me. It is, at least,better than The Talisman … but not,for my tastes, to a terribly meaningful degree. The links to The Dark Tower are tantalizing, but they created -- for me, at least -- the expectation that Jack Sawyer was going to have a major role to play in the final novels in that series; that, obviously, did not come to pass, and in my opinion, it weakens Black House.
(56) The Regulators: In some ways, I consider Desperation and The Regulators to be two volumes of the same novel, and I considered treating them as such. If I had, I might have placed it a bit further up the list than the two component parts will be ranked. After all, to my knowledge, nobody has ever published two novels on the same day which serve as parallel-universe reflections each of the other; thematically, it's a compelling concept. For now, though, I'm going to leave them as separate entities, since that was how they were published and how they have remained ever since. And this one, I think, is the weaker of the two, despite being tighter and better-paced; the characters don't pop quite as well, and the themes are stronger in Desperation. But this is a pretty decent Twilight Zone-ish novel in its own right.
(55) Blaze: I'll be honest: I don't remember a whole lot about this novel. I know I enjoyed it to a mild extent as a curio, but that's about it. I'm glad King brought it out of his trunk, but I can also see why he left it in there for so long. I'd love to someday be able to read the original version to see for a comparison how much King changed to get it ready for its published form.
(54) The Colorado Kid: A minor work, and a bit of a marketing scam (in no way does this actually count as a crime novel), but those are not the same things at all), butnevertheless well-written and intriguing, if not exactly satisfying. At any rate, it's better than the lame television "adaptation," Haven, which is almost entirely unrelated, and is -- except for the fine performances by its three charismatic lead actors (Emily Rose, Lucas Bryant, and Eric Balfour) -- sloppy, forgettable filmmaking at every turn. Oh, well; it, too, is a bit of a marketing scam, so in that sense, if no other, it carries over certain aspects of The Colorado Kid.
(53) Rage: I get what King – pardon me, Bachman – wastrying to do here, but the ultimate resolution, in which the classrallies around the killer, seems forced and unrealistic. Still, there is some good writing, and itmakes for interesting comparisons with the other “Bachman Books” and with Kingnovels such as Carrie. For all intents and purposes, this was written by a teenager; and as far as that goes, it's pretty good. What, you ask, is my stance on whether or not King ought to relent and allow the book to see publication again? Well ... let's leave it at saying that I understand why King would want to leave it off shelves.
(52) Just After Sunset: Out of the stories represented here, there are only four which I love, and there are at least five to which I am rather indifferent. The great ones -- "Willa," "N.,""Graduation Afternoon," and the icky "A Very Tight Place" -- are really fucking great, though. This is King's weakest story collection, but it's still well worth your time.
(51) Feast of Fear: Conversations With Stephen King: This one is another possible cheat, in some ways, and I know it. In case you're unfamiliar with it, it's the second of two interview collections -- the first was Bare Bones, which I ranked a bit higher up the chart (at #43) -- edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, who compiled edited-down versions of interviews with King from various magazines and newspapers, as well as occasional transcripts of speaking engagements. To the best of my knowledge, King himself had zero involvement in the publication of either book, which makes them both highly suspect when someone like me tries to list them AS King books. Here's the upside: they're both kinda terrific. There is simply no doubt that King's voice comes shining through in these various interviews, and I'd love to see additional volumes appear at some point. To be honest, I was tempted to slot both even further up on the list, but the unauthorized-by-King aspect troubled me enough that I couldn't feel good about doing so.
(50) The Plant: Zenith Rising: In some ways, this one is just as problematic as the interview collections. On the one hand, it was unquestionably written and published by Stephen King; on the other hand, it was never finished, and is no longer available for purchase, so for many King fans, it may as well not even exist. But it exists for me: I printed the fucker out and had a custom-made hardback bound. What's there is unquestionably good (if a bit less than great), but the fact that it's unfinished makes it difficult to esteem too greatly. One hopes for an eventual conclusion, but part of me would be content for King to focus on new and better tales.
(49) American Vampire, Vol. 1: Not by any means a classic, this is anintriguing kick-off point for a solid vampire-comic series. If I have a major problem with it, it’d be the waythe comic was initially promoted: as an attempt to redeem vampires, to makethem scary again in a post-Twilight world. That’s fine; however, American Vampire takes just as many liberties with traditional vampire lore as do the Twilightnovels. Possibly even more. And that’s fine by me, butit feels ever so slightly hypocritical for the book to have promoted that way. And yes, I'm aware a marketing gimmick ought not to be held against the actual content, but I'd be a liar if I said it hadn't colored my opinions. Either way, the first volume of the series is the only one on which Kingworked, and it’s good, introducing readers to a nasty redneck vampire namedSkinner Sweet, as well as a newly-turned lady vamp named Pearl. King writes the Sweet sections, whileeverything else was scripted by series creator Scott Snyder. The art by Rafael Albuquerque is distinctiveand memorable. The rest of the serieshas actually been superior to this first volume in most regards, and anyone whoreads Volume One is encouraged to continue with the series despite the lack ofKing’s presence. It was never really hisstory to begin with, anyways.
(48) Everything's Eventual: There are fourteen stories here, and of them, I can only claim to be truly engaged by maybe six. That's not to say the others are bad; no, there isn't a bad story in the bunch. But only "The Man in the Black Suit," "The Little Sisters of Eluria," the title story, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away," "1408," and "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French" really pop for me. Still, though, it's pretty good.
(47) Thinner: The Mafioso elements are problematic for me; they feel a bit like something out of a Creepshow segment. Maybe that's appropriate, especially given the heavily moralistic leanings of the novel, but it's also too serious to support a somewhat goofy element like that one. That aside, though, this is a pretty good novel, with a memorably pitch-black ending.
(46) Nightmares & Dreamscapes: This whopper of a story collection is generally pretty strong, with a few standouts -- "Crouch End," "Umney's Last Case," "Dolan's Cadillac," and "The End of the Whole Mess," for example -- but perhaps no real classics. Oddly, my favorite piece here may be "Head Down," the nonfiction essay about Little League baseball which has no business in this collection ... but for which I am nevertheless thankful.
(45) The Running Man: The first King novel I ever read, oddly; I thought it was a novelization of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie! (I wrote about that at some length here, by the way.) Of the early Bachman books, this, to me, is the one that feels the least like Stephen King; even Roadwork, which is in no way a horror story or a fantasy of any kind, feels like King. This one feels more like the work of some budding socio-sci-fi author who died in a car crash after writing only a novel or two, before making a real name for himself. Don't get me wrong, though: it's a good novel, and one which has somehow managed to remain just on the edges of plausibility. As far as socio-sci-fi goes, that's a good achievement for a forty-year-old novel.
(44) Four Past Midnight: "The Langoliers" is a fine dip into the Twilight Zone (or, possibly, the Outer Limits, which might be King's preference), and while the end doesn't quite come together, it's still a fun ride. "Secret Window, Secret Garden" is probably the best of the four, and while it ought to feel like a ripoff of The Dark Half, it's anything but. "The Library Policeman" is a silly concept with a harrowing execution. "The Sun Dog" is the weakest of the bunch, but even it is fairly good.
(43) Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King: Awkwardly titled, true; unauthorized, true; relentlessly compelling...? Also true, very much so. Of the two Underwood/Miller volumes, this one -- which features, amongst other things, the classic Playboy interview -- is the stronger of the two, and is essential reading for hardcore Kingphiles.
(42) Desperation: I'd argue that the book is probably a tad too long, but so what? I prefer overlong to undercooked. The characters are what make this work; that, and a compelling theme about faith (also strongly in evidence in The Green Mile, published the same year). If anyone ever asks you which you should read first, this or its sister novel, The Regulators (both of which were published on the same day), answer them thusly: Desperation. Why? Because it's the one King put his name on, rather than his pseudonym; it's just that simple.
(41) Christine: The concept -- a haunted car -- is just inescapably silly, but King's writing is strong enough that the novel somehow manages to work regardless. And, perhaps because the goofier elements are more foregrounded, the novel manages to not feel unbalanced in the way that Thinner (what with its somewhat ridiculous Mafia hitman) does. The story is unquestionably a tragedy, and I wish it worked a little better in that way; the way Carrie does, for example. But it's a good novel, no doubt about it in my mind.
(40) The Dark Half: The plot is moderately hard to swallow, and issomewhat lacking in clarity, but King’s prose is solid. Don’t believe the hype about how this is aparable for the way King’s own “Richard Bachman” pseudonym story played out inreal life; this is actually a story about a writer wrestling with hisown demons, not demons foisted upon him by the outside world. As such, it makes an interesting companionpiece to both Misery and The Tommyknockers.
(39) Insomnia: It's a long, somewhat unfocused novel, not dissimilar to Desperation in that regard, but it's got two elements which make it a bit better: a seriously serious amount of genuine emotion; and a highly compelling connection to the Dark Tower series. Unlike in Black House, it is clear here that the main characters' involvement in that story is restricted to this particular novel; that's another advantage. Truth be told, I'm not sure how anybody can enjoy Book VII without having read Insomnia. On its own merits, though, it's a satisfying and engaging work of fantasy which maybe drags in a few places, but is nevertheless well worth reading.
(38) Needful Things: Lots of terrific characters here, and while it’scomedic in a dark way, it’s also frequently horrifying. As with Underthe Dome, the chills are mostly human-induced, too, rather than monster-induced. That might make for aninteresting critical essay one of these days. Are there other King tales that also feature that element? I bet there are. Looking back on it, I'm not entirely sure I understand why King felt the need to "destroy" Castle Rock. It wasn't hurting anybody, Steve! Except maybe for itself...
(37) Cell: I’m a sucker for end-of-the-world stories, andthis one is pretty good. You may welldespise the way the story ends, but I found it to be both logical andexhilarating.
(36) Firestarter: Very good; there are no major weaknesses, although Charlie's dialogue is a bit problematic: she rarely sounds like what it seems like an eight-year-old ought to sound like. King had the same problem in The Shining, but there, Danny's telepathy made for a terrific explanation; there's no such saving grace here. In any case, the narrative works well enough that it isn't a major problem. The novel gets compared to Carrie,but I find it has much more in common with TheDead Zone. It's not as good as thatnovel, but it's an entertaining sci-fi thriller with political undertones.
(35) The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla: This meandering, plot-lite, lengthy novel stillmanages to engross by creating an interesting setting and by reintroducingFather Callahan to the Kingverse. Someextremely good passages are rendered less powerful overall due to the inertnessof the plot; King means this novel to be a bit of a calm before the storm, butit doesn’t quite manage to work overall. Still, any Dark Tower fan ought to appreciate the time spent with thesecharacters. It's the worst in the series, by my calculation ... but that don't make it bad.
(34) Roadwork: A novel I disliked on first-reading (atapproximately age fifteen), the more mature version of me found it to be quitecompelling when I returned to it years later. It’s maybe a little forced, but it’s also powerful, and seems like botha good reflection of its time and a still-relevant metaphor for despair. One of King's very few novels with nofantastic elements whatsoever, this character study is a grim tale of despairthat I find to be immensely underrated. Needs to be rediscovered. Whereyou at, Frank Darabont…?
(33) The Tommyknockers: A bit of a shaggy dog in some respects, thisnovel loses a bit of focus and introduces a few too many characters during abloated middle section. However, some ofthose characters are interesting and compelling, which is also definitely trueof the story’s two main characters. I’dalso point out that the novel comes to a more satisfying conclusion than issometimes the case with long King books. All in all, I’d say this one is underrated; it’s really quite good.
(32) The Bachman Books: It’s a cheat to place this collection on thislist, but hey ho, here we go… Truth is,taken as a whole, it’s a fascinating look at a sort-of alternate-universe versionof early Stephen King; all of the tales feature characters who find themselvesin very tight spots, and the four novels rub up against each other thematicallyin interesting enough ways that TheBachman Books really does have a sort of separate life from its individualcomponents.
(31) The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah: The big development here – King writing himselfinto the story – is surreal and postmodern and divisive. It makes for interesting fictionalautobiography, and though it disconcerted me at first, I came to accept it, andthen to love it. That’s only part of thenovel, of course, but it’s a major part; the rest is tense and exciting, andsets up the series finale pretty well.
(30) Full Dark, No Stars: One of these four tales – “1922” – is anout-and-out masterpiece, and while the others don’t measure up to that level,they’re each also pretty good. Taken asa whole, this is a collection that is entirely about the evil men do to women,and it’s satisfying that the final tale of the four features a woman who iscapable of fighting back before becominga victim. The paperback version includesa bonus short story, “Under the Weather,” which continues the theme, but altersit: here, a man does something terrible out of love for his wife. All in all, it’s a fine collection, and onethat fits in nicely with King’s mid-‘90s feminist trio of Gerald’s Game, DoloresClaiborne, and Rose Madder.
(29) 'Salem's Lot: Not as highly prized by myself as by most Kingfans. I nevertheless find this to be a very fine novel for the most part. Numerous good characters and great scenes,marred somewhat by at least one act of such dunderheaded stupidity – Susangoing to confront Barlow in the Marsten house – that it threatens to wreck allbelievability. Other than that, itsstatus as a classic is fairly well-deserved.
(28) Bag of Bones: Along with The Green Mile, this is one of the novels which truly got critics to begin reappraising King and his merits as a writer. It's a corker of a tale, with everything one could possibly want from an old-school Gothic ghost story/romance/tragedy. By the way, am I looking forward to the Mick Garris-directed movie coming up in December? I am not.
(27) Gerald's Game: A semi-Hitchcockian cousin to Misery, this one maybe isn’t quite thatgood, but it’s a better novel than 99.9% of other writers would have made fromthe same concept. Pointsoff for the crossover with DoloresClaiborne, which -- unless the two meet at some point in a future novel or story -- is forced and rather pointless. Also, the appearance of a certain character toward the end mayalso color your opinion. Me, I found itto be terrifying. This, in my opinion, is a pretty excellent piece of work.
(26) Under the Dome: A little sloppy in terms of execution, butoverall, a damn fine novel. Never getsboring in nearly 1100 pages, and certain scenes have stuck with me eversince. There is some political andreligious material that is maybe a bit too one-sidedly left-leaning, but Ipersonally can live with that; those who can’t probably take substantialpoints off for it, and they’d not be wrong to do so. The novel has its demerits– a poorly-named central character not being the least of them – but is mostlyvery successful nonetheless.
(25) Storm of the Century: I think the movie is a bit of a masterpiece, so maybe that's coloring my opinion a bit here, but this screenplay makes for a damn fine read in its own right. Linoge is a terrifying villain. Do you suppose he and Randall Flagg are Facebook friends? Yeah, I think so, too.
(24) Pet Sematary: Yep, we're starting to get down to the nitty-gritty good shit here, now. This is definitely one of King’s most horrifying tales; it's liable to make anyone feel a little sick in their soul. However, the book also feels very calculated, in a way that isn't fully comfortable alongside most of King's other works;you can practically hear the chess pieces being shoved about the board at somepoints. Despite that slight flaw, this is ahighly memorable novel, and prime nightmare fuel.
(23) From a Buick 8: A fine tale of memory, with an intriguingstructure, this novel finds King working at just the right length for the storyat hand, and with just the right cast of characters. Good stuff, and surprisingly -- methinks -- underrated within the King community.
(22) Danse Macabre: As captivating as most of his fiction, thisbook-length essay is an enduring work of criticism peppered with intriguingbits of autobiography. Intenselyreadable, and as compelling as a great novel ... assuming you have any yen toward reading critical/autobiographical work. If you don't, you'll probably want to drop this down about twenty or thirty places on the list. Not me, though.
(21) Misery: Claustrophobic and nightmarish, this meditationon the power – good and evil – of artistic inclination features on of King’sbest villains, one of his most sympathetic heroes, and one of his tightestscenarios. So why doesn’t it ratehigher? A bit too over-the-top in someaspects, it veers into grand guignol at a few moments when it ought to havestayed a bit more grounded. But this is quibbling; it’sa great novel.
(20) The Long Walk: Great writing here from Richard Bachman, and itcomes to a satisfyingly unsatisfying ending. It doesn't make a lot of sense, in terms of specific reality, but thisis a deeply felt, riveting work that is certainly one of King's angriestnovels. It's amazing to me that something this good was written by a college freshman.
(19) Hearts In Atlantis: Is it a novel? A collection? Does itmatter? Not at all. The structure is interesting for that reason,and the mix of the supernatural with the completely mundane is perhaps evenmore interesting, but either way, this is strong stuff. And, supposedly, incomplete: according to King, one tale -- "The House on Value Street" -- remains to be written. Well, that's tantalizing as hell...
(18) Dolores Claiborne: A chapterless first-person narrative written indialect ought to be a chore to read; that this one isn’t says a great dealabout King’s essential strength as a storyteller. The crossover with Gerald’s Game either weakens it or strengthens it, depending onyour point of view; it definitely does one or the other, though, and for me it weakens it ever so slightly. Dolores is unquestionably one of King's bestcharacters.
(17) Night Shift: Of the nineteen (19!) stories in this collection, I'd argue that a minimum of fourteen of them are classics, as is King's Foreword. 'Nuff said.
(16) The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower: King’s magnum opus comes to an emotionallytaxing conclusion, with several tear-inducing passages and a coda that isawe-inspiring in how it “ends” the story. Balancing that somewhat toward the negative is an anticlimactic confrontation with theCrimson King, who is perhaps not all he has been made out to be. Did I want some sort of more apocalypticbattle with that villain and his armies? Well, sure I did. Doesn't matter;this is a moving epic with a goosebump-inducing resolution, and for thisTower-junkie’s money, it’s a grand finale.
(15) The Stand: The longer version of the novel adds enoughrichness of detail that it almost makes up for what is still, to mythinking, a too-weak finale. Would many King fans disagree with me on the subject of that finale? I'm sure they would. Would mostKing fans be horrified to see this novel ranked so lowly on this list? I expect so, but hey, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Another problem I have is that it feels like too little time is spent with the survivors in Vegas; we get a far greater understanding of what makes the good guys tick. I feel weird even suggesting that this novel could have benefited from another couple hundred pages, but, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying: I wish I knew the Las Vegans better. By the way, placing this novel at a mere #15 is not so much a poor reflection on its qualities as it is a sign of how greatly I prize the novels I've placed ahead of it. In any case, this epic mishmash of horror, fantasy, politics, and religion has a largecast of very memorable characters, and is certainly a classic ... but a slightly imperfectone, in my opinion.
(14) The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three: Almost entirely focused on character, but togood effect. Each reader’s reactions toDetta – a purposefully gross and offensive collection of stereotypes – willperhaps determine their interest in the remainder of the series. Me, I get a little annoyed with her, but Ialso think that King mostly wants me to react in precisely that way. Also deepening – and fundamentally altering –Roland himself, this novel is a well-told tale in which not a great dealactually happens ... but you may not notice until the third or fourth time youread it, and even then you're unlikely to care.
(13) Cujo: Oppressive, depressing, and very memorable. The best sections may be the ones in which Kingwrites from the dog’s point of view; he does so quite well, and also inventsseveral great characters of the two-legged variety. Within King's canon, only PetSematary (and possibly "1922") is grimmer. But grim can be compelling, and it's certainly compelling here.
(12) Skeleton Crew: The ratio of great stories to merely good stories here is about the same as in Night Shift, but what gives this collection a leg up is "The Mist," a short novel which on its own merits is easily good enough to crack the top ten on this list. Top five...? Probably not; but maybe. In addition to that, you get "The Jaunt," which is utterly horrifying; "Survivor Type," which is similarly horrifying; and a dozen or so other super-fine stories such as "Nona," "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," and "The Reach." I'm also a big fan of the poem "For Owen," and while that doesn't have too big of a bearing on this book's placement on the list, it certainly doesn't hurt any.
(11) Duma Key: Reminiscent of Pet Sematary in terms of its uncompromising bleakness, and, for mymoney, even better. Edgar is a greatKing character, and there were a couple of times when I felt genuinely nervousfor what was about to happen. This haunting,horrifying character piece is long but not overlong, with an entirelysuccessful setting, and a great ghost-story premise; a great novel, and a greatrefutation of any claims that latter-career King has lost his touch.
(10) The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands: Part of me thinks this is the best novel in theseries: the story advances more here than in any of the other books; there areseveral stupendous action setpieces; the requisite excellent characterizationsare plentiful; and King’s command of writing an epic-fantasy-style landscape isdead on the money. Add to that acliffhanger that had fans tearing their hair out from ’91-’97, and you’vegot a book that may well be too low on this list. I'm torn!
(09) The Shining: Some of King’s best scenes of terror, yes, butalso extremely engrossing in its backstory for Jack’s plight. Another superb character study, this one alsofinds King working in the tragic mode to great result, which is a commonrefrain throughout his career: when the happy ending is nowhere in sight, Kingis often at his finest.
(08) Carrie: Not short on missteps in the prose department,there are also moments of sheer inspiration, and the overall effect is tremendous. Carrie remains one of King’s mostsympathetic characters, despite the fact that she burned up a whole bunch of people. This is conveyed extremely well in the novel, but it's all interior drama, and the movie adaptations have been utterly incapable of replicating it; for that reason, they are failures. Yes, even the DePalma film. But why are we talking about that? Back to the book! King's firstpublished novel is also -- still -- one of his best, a dark fairy tale that crackles withtragic pathos but also keeps the reader at just enough of a remove that it canall be exciting.
(07) The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass: Largely consisting of a lengthy extended flashback to a point in Roland's tragic youth, this one is acorker of a love story with several good action scenes, excellent new characters, and a wide-eyed youthfulness that is surprising when carried off by a wide-eyed youth; for a middle-aged fellow to have accomplished it is a miracle. Possibly the best-lovednovel in the series, this is a Western-romance-tragedy-fantasy fusion thatprobably ought to have been an utter failure. It isn't.
(06) The Green Mile: Works great either as a serial or as a novel. Grim in the extreme and with a gut-punch ofan ending, it tells a crackerjack of a story, and manages to be both chillingand uplifting. I wish my top five could have six books in it. (And, in a way, it does ... see #4.)
(05) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: Not only will this exceptional book give you some of the best writing advice you will ever encounter, it's also a tremendous pseudo-autobiography. I think it illustrates that, ultimately, the writer and his craft are one and the same, and that seems a valuable lesson. This is a GREAT book.
(04) The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger: You will perhaps note which title I have gone with. Alternatively, I could have used The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. That's the proper title of the revised version (which King released in 2003 to bring the first novel of the series a bit more in line with its successive volumes), and that's fine by me: I love the revised version, too, especially the added scenes involving the trap-word "nineteen." But for me, the original holds a special place. I know that some King fans, and even some Tower fans, dislike the novel for its slowness, its coldness, its distance, its mystery. Well, to each his own, and my own is that I love the novel for all of those reasons. Not in spite of; for. Rarely has a work of fantasy immediately invested me in a fictional universe quite so fully. In fact, I don't know that it's ever happened; the only other competition is The Lord of the Rings, and I prefer this novel to that one. For me, this was the high-point of the series. Don't misunderstand me, either, because I love the rest of the series, each one of the novels; and yet, to me, they all pale just a wee bit in comparison to this stark, lean work of haunted beauty.
(03) The Dead Zone: One of King’s best characters in one of his bestsituations, with some of his best writing. Feels, with its emphasis on politics and society, very much like aBachman novel, and if it were, it'd be the best of them, hands down. Even as a King novel, it's one of the best, abit of a masterpiece; and, again, a tragedy.
(02) It: This lengthy, captivating novel effectivelysummons a remarkable feeling of time’s passage. The structure is exceptional, as is the sheer amount of imagination onhand: this novel has more finely-sketched characters between its covers thanmany writers will create in an entire career. Characters show up for only a couple of paragraphs and feel more fully-realized than some novels' main characters. The big sex scene near the end is a sticking point for many people, andprobably ought to be, but even if you despise it – and I don’t, although I do comeclose to despising the “humor” of one R. Tozier – it can’t blunt the sharpnessof this epic. A truly fine piece ofwork. Oh, and did I mention that it's scary as hell?
(01) Different Seasons: All four of these novellas, ifthey had been individually published, would possibly be in my top ten. Taken as a whole, though...? They're even better. This book is a masterworkabout the power of storytelling, and if only one King book survives the bombs,or the tidal waves, or the plague, or the aliens, or whatever it is that finally gets us, my vote is that this ought to be the one.

And today, we've got a brand-new epic joining the ranks:

I can't help but wonder: in a week or so, once I've finished reading it, where will it rank on this list? Listmaking of this sort is always a bit of a useless endeavor, although fun, but I'm absolutely certain of one thing if nothing else: there's no need to worry too much about the book cracking the top five, or the top ten, or even the top thirty. To be honest, if King never writes another book that makes it to my personal list of his top thirty, it's no cause for concern. Hell, by my calculation, 11/22/63 could come in as low as #45 and I'd still feel like I had just read a damn fine novel.

Mileage may vary, of course, and I'd imagine there are literally ZERO Stephen King fans who would read my list and say to themselves, "Nope, no problems there." Everyone would find something to quarrel with, and to me, that's a terrific thing. With only a few very slight exceptions (Secret Windows, say, or Nightmares in the Sky), I suspect every King book has MANY devoted King fans who place it at the top of their own personal lists ... and, by the same token, others who place it at the bottom. We're a remarkably varied group, and King's output has been, on the whole, remarkably consistent. There have been no major dips in quality; minor ones, sure, but major...? No way.

With that in mind, the odds are extremely good that today, all King fans have been given an extraordinary gift.

Again.

And for that, we thank you, sir.

Tom Holland's Twisted Tales

2011-11-07T17:35:00.002-06:00

Here's a brief item which might be of interest:

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/07/4036762/fearnet-gets-on-board-for-tom.html

That, in case you haven't already found out, is a link to a an article about the just-announced FEARnet series Tom Holland's Twisted Tales, which will begin airing next year and consists of ten short films written and directed by Tom Holland.

What (you might be asking) does this have to do with Stephen King. Well, not much.

However, some of you might remember Holland as the fellow who directed the movie versions of both Thinner and The Langoliers, so Holland is tangentially related to the Kingverse.

Of course, I'd be an utter liar if I said that I liked either one of those movies. I don't; I actually kinda hate them both. But I've got no problem in hoping that Holland is able to produce something good in his Twisted Tales series; there's always room for a good horror anthology series on television.

Tom Holland and Stephen King on the set of Thinner

Holland also earns brownie points amongst horror fans for having directed Fright Night and Child's Play.

Chris Sarandon and Tom Holland on the set of Fright Night

Chucky and Tom Holland

Canon

2011-11-07T05:51:00.002-06:00

With only one more day to go until 11/22/63 gets dropped upon us all like what reviews indicate is going to be a highly entertaining ton of bricks, I thought it might be worthwhile to pause for a bit, and just stand back and contemplate the forest rather than this single new tree.

After all, a lot of people -- including me -- are going to be intently honing in on that particular tree over the next several weeks, and months, and maybe even years. It seems as if the anticipation for 11/22/63 is even more fevered than is typically the case with new King books; I don't know if it's the supposedly-atypical subject matter (science fiction, which is not actually all that atypical for King) or the still-hot topic (the assassination of JFK, a moment as historically iconic as any in American history), but King's name is getting discussed a LOT these days.

Possibly it's also a byproduct of the numerous high-profile film projects Hollywood is currently struggling to put in front of audiences. I don't know for sure what its source is, but there's definitely something in the cultural air that is making Stephen King a bigger presence than he has been in some time ... probably since the near-fatal car accident back in 1999.

And there might be a connection of some sort there. After all, King ain't gettin' any younger. I hate to be morbid, but he is creeping closer and closer to the age where he will officially be considered to be elderly. He's 64 now, which can theoretically be said to be at the extreme upper limits of middle-age; rationally speaking, though, it's an unavoidable truism to say that Stephen King is an old man. Maybe not elderly, but certainly old.

With that knowledge comes the realization that his career is unquestionably in the process of winding down. How quickly it's winding down is unknowable: it's entirely possible that King could continue producing a book per year for another thirty years. And let me speak with utter clarity when I say that I hope King DOES live for another thirty years, healthy and wealthy and wise, clear-headed and happy and with the energy and imagination it must take to write at his pace of production. And here's my guess: that's exactly what's going to happen. His imagination is going to keep him healthy and active for quite some time to come.

Still, the thoughts begin to creep in: how many more novels like Under the Dome and 11/22/63 can we possibly have left to look forward to? (As a personal concern of mine, this type of fretting isn't reserved exclusively for King, by the way: as a massive Steven Spielberg fan, I'm stoked to see his one-two punch of The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse later this year in cinemas, but I begin to wonder how many more Spielberg movies I can expect to see; or, as another couple of examples, how many new Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen albums I can expect to hear.)

My point is that when the culture begins to sense those heavenly shades of night, and to wonder when they are going to start falling, it begins to become reflective, and I do believe that some of this is what's motivating the uptick in King's cultural profile of late. King has reached the point at which it's culturally acceptable to start winding things down; and yet, he's not only not doing that, but he's winding things UP a notch, by producing a work of speculative sci-fi that is pushing some interesting sociological buttons. His new works are keeping him relevant in a way that most massively successful artists simply don't achieve in their sixties.

That's got me, as a King fan, contemplating the vast sweep of his career, marveling at its scope, and the remarkable consistency with which it has progressed. In doing so, I've found myself also contemplating issues of canon. To get to those thoughts, though, you've first got to get past this creepy fellow:

Let's talk canon. "Canon" is a word that has taken on slightly distorted meanings, thanks to navel-gazers and anoraks of all manner of geeky persuasion, who argue about the canonicity of, say, Doctor Who spinoff novels and "radio" dramas, or about whether Ultimate Spider-Man counts as real Spider-Man. I've been known to engage in such conversations/arguments from time to time, because they can be a fun way or exploring an area of one's geekier interests. (By the way, in case you're wondering: yes, I do know that "canon" has many definitions that in no way involve nerd conversation; all you need do is consult your handy dictionary if you want to see what all "canon" can refer to beyond the meaning to which I am referring.)

Properly speaking, when it comes to literature or the arts, "canon" refers to a body of individual works which have been verified, or commonly accepted, as the works of a specific author. In other words, Stephen King's canon consists of all works -- written and otherwise -- which are known to be the direct product of his own craft, either solo or in collaboration with someone else.

There are some works -- novels, short stories, essays, poems, etc. -- which are indisputably part of King's canon. However, from there the matter becomes rapidly more complex and open to interpretation.

Clearly, some movies and television programs would absolutely fall into the realm of being a part of King's canon: projects which he directly scripted, such as Golden Years and Creepshow and Rose Red. But hold on. Do we count all of Golden Years and Kingdom Hospital, or merely the episodes which King himself scripted? Should the episodes written by someone else be excluded, or should they be included by virtue of King's creative presence as a producer? It becomes necessary to define the role of the producer for those projects in order to make a decision. And if the answer you come up with is "yes, include those episodes," do you then also include the movies Riding the Bullet and The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, which King did not directly write but did produce?

If you include those producer credits into the canon, then surely you would also have to include the Marvel Comics series based on The Dark Tower and The Stand; after all, King is credited as both Creative Director and Executive Director on those titles. So: include them, or not? How about the spinoff novels The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and The Journals of Eleanor Druse, neither of which were written by King, but both of which were, in a sense, produced by him and then written by other writers?

As you can see, this ceases to be clear-cut almost immediately. It seems in some ways to be a pointless endeavor, but I'd argue that there is value to be found in answering these questions. Certainly the answers are going to be vital to anyone attempting to seriously study King's career in the coming decades and (possibly) centuries. Future scholars are going to need some assistance in terms of helping them to understand how to frame certain aspects of King's career, and guiding them in defining -- both for themselves and for the culture overall -- the contents of King's canon. They'll also need some assistance in terms of being able to figure out how King's contemporary audience received his works, and how the reputations of those works developed over time.

This is the point at which I suppose I ought to go ahead and divulge my secret: I want to be a part of that process. At my current skill level as a blogger, or a critic, or an essayist, or whatever designation you want to assign to me (and, yes, if you come up with "hack amateur," I can see how you got there), I'm nowhere close. A pro like Rocky Wood, as one example, puts me to shame. And that's fine by me, partially because I'm a fan of writers/researchers like Wood, and also because it's my intent to get a lot better at what I do. It isn't going to happen overnight, but it IS going to happen, and once that process is complete ... well, maybe I'll still be a hack amateur. But, then again, maybe I won't.

With that in mind, I'm going to now begin the process of trying to publicly present my own definition of King's canon. This is a tentative thing, and should by no means be taken to be my final words on the subject. Far from it. No, instead, it's just a means of allowing me to kill some time in a vaguely productive fashion.

LEVEL ONE -- PRIMARY WORKS

"Primary works" are defined -- by me, for the purposes of my own arguments -- as all published prose fiction of any length, as well as any book-length nonfiction and any poetry, nonfiction, or screenplays which were included by King in one of his own collections. Additionally, some non-prose (such as film or stage) projects have been included, as have any screenplays published in book form under King's name as an author.

I've broken this into six sections: Main Bibliography (which is a list of King's notable works of substantial length); Short Fiction (all novellas and short stories); Major Short Nonfiction (encompassing lengthy or notable essays, introductions, etc.); Poetry; Collections (book-length collections of stories, novellas, nonfiction, etc.); and Major Non-Print Works (which is a list of substantial authorial contributions by King to non-print media such as film, television, comic books, and stage productions). For the record, yes, I AM aware that comic books and graphic novels are print media. But they do not, in my mind, belong in the Main Bibliography unless King was the primary author of the comic, and the only times he has worked in that capacity are instances of adapting his own previously-existing stories or screenplays.

You will note that in the Main Bibliography section, I have made some rather massive alterations to the commonly-accepted chronology in terms of the order of King's novels. It is common practice to refer to Carrie as his first novel, and certainly it was his first published novel. However, there is ample direct -- i.e., stated by King himself -- evidence to show that Carrie was the fifth novel King actually wrote. For scholarly purposes, it is imperative to view his bibliography in this fashion, and while I have mostly followed publication chronology in compiling the Main Bibliography, I will make alterations when and if there is persuasive evidence placing a work at a substantially different chronological point.

(Side note: regardless of its supposedly negligible literary worth, I deeply hope that King someday sees fit to permit publication of Sword in the Darkness, which will otherwise remain a tantalizing mystery. However, since the novel IS known to exist, I feel its inclusion here is appropriate.)

You will also note that I have elected to include King's lengthier novellas on this list. The reason for this is simply that they could very easily be considered to be short novels rather than novellas; after all, Rage is quite short, and it was published as a novel, and the same is true of Cycle of the Werewolf. If Rage counts as a novel, then so -- in my mind, at least -- must several other major King works which are currently classified as novellas. Additionally, a few works which even I consider to be novellas rather than novels have been included, simply because their extremely high quality (I'm referring to Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Breathing Method, and The Mist, by th way) make them more comfortable on a list of long works than on a list of short works. It's a somewhat arbitrary decision, I'll grant you.

This, then, is an instance in which I am invoking -- to the paltry extent I am able -- scholarly license; the reader is encouraged to ignore these designations as he or she sees fit. You may also feel free to email me (honkmahfah@yahoo.com) with any criticisms, corrections, or additions; I'll be happy to make it a workshop.

Main Bibliography

Rage (written 1967; novel, revised 1971; unpublished until 1977)
The Long Walk (written 1969; novel, unpublished until 1979)
Sword in the Darkness (written 1970; novel, unpublished; Chapter 71 published in 2006)
The Running Man (written 1971; novel, unpublished until 1982)
Carrie (1974, novel)
Blaze (novel, written immediately after Carrie; heavily revised for publication in 2007)
'Salem's Lot (1975, novel)
The Body (novel, written immediately after 'Salem's Lot; unpublished until its collection as a novella in Different Seasons)
Roadwork (written 1974; novel, unpublished until 1981)
The Shining (1977, novel)
Apt Pupil (novel, written immediately after The Shining; unpublished until its collection as a novella in Different Season)
The Stand (1978, novel; revised edition published 1990)
The Dead Zone (1979, novel)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (novella, written immediately after The Dead Zone; collected in Different Seasons)
The Mist (1980, novella; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Firestarter (1980, novel)
The Breathing Method (novella, written immediately after Firestarter; collected in Different Seasons)
Danse Macabre (1981, nonfiction)
Cujo (1981, novel)
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982, novel; revised version published 2003)
Christine (1983, novel)
Cycle of the Werewolf (1983, novel)
Pet Sematary (1983, novel)
The Talisman (1984, novel co-authored with Peter Straub)
Thinner (1984, novel)
The Eyes of the Dragon (1984, novel; revised edition published 1987)
Silver Bullet (1985, screenplay)
It (1986, novel)
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987, novel)
Misery (1987, novel)
The Tomyknockers (1987, novel)
The Dark Half (1989, novel)
The Langoliers (1990, novel; collected as a novella in Four Past Midnight)
Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990, novel; collected as a novella in Four Past Midnight)
The Library Policeman (1990, novel; collected as a novella in Four Past Midnight)
The Sun Dog (1990, novel; collected as a novella in Four Past Midnight)
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991, novel)
Needful Things (1991, novel)
Gerald's Game (1992, novel)
Dolores Claiborne (1993, novel)
Insomnia (1994, novel)
Rose Madder (1995, novel)
The Green Mile (1996, novel)
Desperation (1996, novel)
The Regulators (1996, novel)
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997, novel)
Bag of Bones (1998, novel)
Storm of the Century (1999, screenplay)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999, novel)
Hearts In Atlantis (1999, novel)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000, nonfiction)
The Plant: Zenith Rising (2000, novel)
Dreamcatcher (2001, novel)
Black House (2001, co-authored with Peter Straub)
From a Buick 8 (2002, novel)
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003, novel)
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004, novel)
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004, novel)
Faithful (2004, nonfiction written with Stuart O'Nan)
The Colorado Kid (2005, novel)
Cell (2006, novel)
Lisey's Story (2006, novel)
Duma Key (2008, novel)
Under the Dome (2009, novel)
1922 (2010, novel; collected as a novella in Full Dark, No Stars)
Big Driver (2010, novel; collected as a novella in Full Dark, No Stars)
11/22/63 (2011, novel)
The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012, novel)

Major Short Works

The Glass Floor (1967, short story; uncollected)
Cain Rose Up (1968, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Here There Be Tygers (1968, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Strawberry Spring (1968, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Night Surf (1969, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Reaper's Image (1969, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Stud City (1969, short story; revised for incorporation into "The Body")
Slade (1970, short story; uncollected)
Graveyard Shift (1970, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Blue Air Compressor (1971, short story; uncollected)
I Am the Doorway (1971, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Suffer the Little Children (1972, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Fifth Quarter (1972, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Battleground (1972, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Mangler (1972, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Old Dude's Ticker (written 1971 or 1972; short story, unpublished until 2000; uncollected)
deleted scenes from 'Salem's Lot (written circa 1973; unpublished until 2004)
The Boogeyman (1973, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Trucks (1973, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Gray Matter (1973, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Sometimes They Come Back (1974, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Lawnmower Man (1975, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan (1975, short story; revised for incorporation into The Body)
It Grows On You (1975, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Weeds (1976, short story; uncollected)
The Ledge (1976, short story; collected in Night Shift)
I Know What You Need (1976, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Children of the Corn (1977, short story; collected in Night Shift)
One for the Road (1977, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Cat from Hell (1977, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
The Man Who Loved Flowers (1977, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Jerusalem's Lot (1978, short story; collected in Night Shift)
Quitters, Inc. (1978, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Last Rung on the Ladder (1978, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Woman in the Room (1978, short story; collected in Night Shift)
The Night of the Tiger (1978, short story; uncollected)
The King Family and the Wicked Witch (1978, short story; uncollected)
Nona (1978, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Gunslinger (1978, short story; collected in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
Man with a Belly (1978, short story; uncollected)
The Crate (1979, short story; uncollected)
The Way Station (1980, short story; collected in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (1980, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Crouch End (1980, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Monkey (1980, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Wedding Gig (1980, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Oracle and the Mountains (1981, short story; collected in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
The Jaunt (1981, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Slow Mutants (1981, short story; collected in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands (1981, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Reach (1981, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Gunslinger and the Man in Black (1981, short story; collected in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
two excerpts from The Cannibals (from the unfinished novel; excerpts unpublished until 2009)
Survivor Type (1982, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Before the Play (1982, deleted scenes from The Shining; uncollected)
The Raft (1982, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Word Processor of the Gods (1983, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Uncle Otto's Truck (1983, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Gramma (1984, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Mrs. Todd's Shortcut (1984, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet (1984, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson (1984, short story; revised for incorporation into The Tommyknockers)
Beachworld (1984, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Dolan's Cadillac (1985, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1) (1985, short story; collected in Skeleton Crew)
The End of the Whole Mess (1985, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The General (1985, screenplay, exceprt from Cat's Eye; unpublished until 1997; uncollected)
Popsy (1987, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Doctor's Case (1987, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Sorry, Right Number (1987, screenplay; unpublished until collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Dedication (1988, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Sneakers (1988, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Reploids (1988, short story; uncollected)
The Night Flier (1988, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Home Delivery (1989, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Rainy Season (1989, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
My Pretty Pony (1989, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Moving Finger (1990, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (1992, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Chattery Teeth (1992, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Beggar and the Diamond (1993, parable; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The House on Maple Street (1993, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Ten O'Clock People (1993, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Umney's Last Case (1993, short story; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
The Man in the Black Suit (1994, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Blind Willie (1994, short story; revised for incorporation into Hearts In Atlantis)
Luckey Quarter (1995, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Lunch at the Gotham Cafe (1995, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Everything's Eventual (1997, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
L.T.'s Theory of Pets (1997, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Autopsy Room Four (1998, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French (1998, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
The Little Sisters of Eluria (1998, novella; collected in Everything's Eventual)
The New Lieutenant's Rap (1999, short story; revised for incorporation into Hearts In Atlantis)
In the Deathroom (1999, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
The Road Virus Heads North (1999, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Riding the Bullet (2000, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
All That You Love Will Be Carried Away (2001, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
The Death of Jack Hamilton (2001, short story; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Harvey's Dream (2003, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Rest Stop (2003, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Stationary Bike (2003, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
The Things They Left Behind (2005, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Memory (2006, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Willa (2006, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Graduation Afternoon (2007, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
The Gingerbread Girl (2007, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Ayana (2007, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Mute (2007, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
A Very Tight Place (2008, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates (2008, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
N. (2008, short story; collected in Just After Sunset)
Ur (2009, short story; uncollected)
Throttle (2009, short story, co-authored with Joe Hill; uncollected)
Morality (2009, short story; collected in Blockade Billy)
Premium Harmony (2009, short story; uncollected)
Blockade Billy (2010, short story; collected in Blockade Billy)
Fair Extension (2010, short story; collected in Full Dark, No Stars)
A Good Marriage (2010, novella; collected in Full Dark, No Stars)
Herman Wouk Is Still Alive (2011, short story; uncollected)
Under the Weather (2011, short story; collected in the trade-paperback edition of Full Dark, No Stars)
Mile 81 (2011, short story; uncollected)
The Little Green God of Agony (2011, short story; uncollected)
The Dune (2011, short story; uncollected)

Major Short Nonfiction

The Horror Market Writer and the Ten Bears: A True Story (1973, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Foreword [to Night Shift] (1978, essay; collected in Night Shift)
Introduction [to Dracula/Frankenstein/Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] (1978, essay; revised for incorporation into Danse Macabre)
On Becoming a Brand Name (1980, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Introduction [to Joseph Payne Brennan's The Shapes of Midnight] (1980, essay; uncollected)
Imagery and the Third Eye (1980, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural] (1981, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to John Farris's When Michael Calls] (1981, essay; uncollected)
Foreword [to Charles Grant's Tales from the Nightside] (1981, essay; uncollected)
Between Rock and a Soft Place (1982, essay; uncollected)
Visit with an Endangered Species (1982, essay; uncollected)
Afterword [to The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger] (1982, essay; published in the original editions of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)
Afterword [to Different Seasons] (1982, essay; collected in Different Seasons)
On The Shining and Other Perpetrations (1982, essay; uncollected)
Introduction to Harlan Ellison's Stalking the Nightmare (1982, essay; uncollected)
The Importance of Being Forry (1982, essay; uncollected)
An Evening at the Billerica Library (1983, speech transcript; collected in Secret Windows)
Introduction to The Blackboard Jungle (1984, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to Skeleton Crew] (1985, essay; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Notes [on Skeleton Crew] (1985, essay; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Why I Was Bachman (1985, essay; collected in The Bachman Books)
Foreword [to Silver Bullet] (1985, essay; published in Silver Bullet)
Banned Books and Other Concerns: The Virginia Beach Lecture (1986, speech transcript; collected in Secret Windows)
"Ever Et Raw Meat?" and Other Weird Questions (1987, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Turning the Thumbscrews on the Reader (1987, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Nightmares in the Sky (1988, essay; uncollected)
A New Introduction to John Fowles's The Collector (1989, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
A Preface in Two Parts (1990, essay; published in The Stand: For the First Time Complete & Uncut)
Head Down (1990, essay; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
What Stephen King Does For Love (1990, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Straight Up Midnight (1990, essay; collected in Four Past Midnight)
Perfect Games, Shared Memories (1991, essay; uncollected)
untitled essay [from Writers Dreaming] (1993, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to Nightmares & Dreamscapes] (1993, essay; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Notes [on Nightmares & Dreamscapes] (1993, essay; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Diamonds Are Forever (1994, essay; uncollected)
The Neighborhood of the Beast (1994, essay; uncollected)
Foreword: A Letter (1996, essay; published in The Green Mile Part 1: The Two Dead Girls)
Afterword [to The Green Mile] (1996, essay; published in The Green Mile: Coffey on the Mile)
Introduction to Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (1996, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
Afterword [to The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass] (1997, essay; published in The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass)
I Want to Be Typhoid Stevie (1997, essay; uncollected)
Leaf Peepers (1998, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to Storm of the Century] (1999, essay; published in Storm of the Century)
An Evening With Stephen King (1999, speech transcript; collected in Secret Windows)
The Bogeyboys (1999, speech transcript; uncollected)
Fenway and the Great White Whale (1999, essay; uncollected)
Great Hookers I Have Known (1999, essay; collected in Secret Windows)
commencement address (Vassar College) (2001, speech transcript; uncollected)
Practing the (Almost) Lost Art (2002, essay; collected in Everything's Eventual)
Afterword [to From a Buick 8] (2002, essay; published in From a Buick 8)
On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things) (2003, essay; published in The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger)
Foreword [to The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger] (2003, essay; published in The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger)
Building Bridges (2003, speech transcript; uncollected)
Author's Note [to The Dark Tower VII: TheDark Tower] (2004, essay; published in The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower)
commencement address (University of Maine) (2005, speech transcript; uncollected)
Afterword [to The Colorado Kid] (2005, essay; published in The Colorado Kid)
Introduction to 'Salem's Lot (2005, essay; published in the Illustrated Edition of 'Salem's Lot)
An Open Letter From Stephen King [from Marvel Spotlight: The Dark Tower] (2007, essay; uncollected)
Full Disclosure (2007, essay; published in Blaze)
Introduction [to The Best American Short Stories 2007) (2007, essay; uncollected)
Introduction [to Just After Sunset] (2008, essay; collected in Just After Sunset)
Sunset Notes (2008, essay; collected in Just After Sunset)
What's Scary (2010, essay; uncollected)
Afterword [to Full Dark, No Stars] (2010, essay; collected in Full Dark, No Stars)
Afterword [to 11/22/63] (2011, essay; published in 11/22/63)

Poetry

Harrison State Park '68 (1968, poem; uncollected)
The Dark Man (1969, poem; uncollected)
Donovan's Brain (1970, poem; uncollected)
Silence (1970, poem; uncollected)
untitled ("In the key-chords of dawn...") (1971, poem; uncollected)
Brooklyn August (1971, poem; collected in Nightmares & Dreamscapes)
Woman With Child (1971, poem; uncollected)
untitled ("She has gone to sleep while...") (1971, poem; uncollected)
The Hardcase Speaks (1971, poem; uncollected)
For Owen (1985, poem; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Paranoid: A Chant (1985, poem; collected in Skeleton Crew)
Dino (1994, poem; uncollected)
Mostly Old Men (2009, poem; uncollected)
The Bone Church (2009, poem; uncollected
Tommy (2010, poem; uncollected)

Collections

Night Shift (1978, story collection)
Different Seasons (1982, novella collection)
Skeleton Crew (1985, story collection)
The Bachman Books (1985, omnibus)
Four Past Midnight (1990, novella collection)
Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993, story collection)
Secret Windows (2000, nonfiction collection)
Everything's Eventual (2002, story collection)
Just After Sunset (2008, story collection)
Blockade Billy (2010, two-story collection)
Full Dark, No Stars (2010, novella/story collection)

NOTE: Several volumes were considered for inclusion on this list, but were ultimately rejected for one reason or another: Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King (this excellent collection of interviews with King from various sources is essential reading, but is not included because King had no participation in editing the collection); Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King and Fangoria Masters of the Dark: Stephen King and Clive Barker are similar interview collections, and were omitted for the same reasons; Six Stories (a limited-edition story collection featuring only stories which later appeared elsewhere; I consider this to be little more than a first-draft edition of Everything's Eventual); and Stephen King Goes to the Movies (a King-approved collection of stories which had been adapted into movies; this collection featured no stories which had not previously been collected, and the new essays by King are not substantial enough to warrant inclusion).

Major Non-Print Works

Creepshow (1982, feature film; screenplay by King)
Cat's Eye (1985, feature film; screenplay by King)
Silver Bullet (1985, feature film; screenplay by King)
Maximum Overdrive (1986, feature film; written and directed by King)
Sorry, Right Number (1987, episode of Tales from the Darkside; teleplay by King)
Pet Sematary (1989, feature film; screenplay by King)
Golden Years (1991, television series; five episodes written by King, overall story written by King for all seven episodes)
Sleepwalkers (1992, feature film; screenplay by King)
The Stand (1994, television miniseries; teleplay by King)
The Shining (1997, television miniseries; teleplay by King)
Chinga (1998, episode of The X-Files; teleplay by King, rewritten by Chris Carter)
Storm of the Century (1999, television miniseries; teleplay by King)
Rose Red (2002, television miniseries; teleplay by King)
Kingdom Hospital (2004, television series; nine episodes written or co-written by King, all episodes produced by King)
Desperation (2006, telefilm; teleplay by King)
American Vampire, Vol. 1 (2010, graphic novel; co-written with series creator Scott Snyder, with art by Rafael Albuquerque)
The Horrors of Stephen King (2011, episode of A Night at the Movies; documentary starring King as the sole commentator)
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012, stage musical; book by King, music by John Mellencamp

Issues of interpretation notwithstanding, it is a relatively simple task to compile a list of King's primary works. Where defining the canon begins to become really difficult is in listing the secondary works. There are hundreds of these, ranging from major interviews conducted with King to magazine articles written by King to ... well, you name it, really.

I'm in no way prepared to even begin listing Secondary Works by King, so instead I will compile a list of the varying types of works which I would identify as being of secondary importance within King's canon, yet nevertheless part of that canon.

LEVEL TWO -- SECONDARY WORKS

newspaper columns (e.g. King's Garbage Truck)
newspaper articles
magazine articles
book essays considered -- by me -- to be of secondary importance
book/movie reviews
story fragments (such as "Skybar")
opinion pieces
short-shorts (such as "For the Birds" and "An Evening at God's")
liner notes
magazine columns (e.g. The Pop of King)
notes and letters
print interviews with King conducted by others
major articles about King containing direct quotations from King
minor comic books scripted by King
notable filmed interviews with King
juvenilia (stories, published and otherwise, written by King as a juvenile)
known minor unpublished works

The lone remaining element of canon revolves around works by other people which pertain to King and his work. In most of these cases, King would have had little or no direct involvement with the project, so technically speaking, these cannot and should not be considered to be proper elements of King's canon. However, they may be of major interest as offshoots of that canon in various ways, and therefore form a parallel canon of their own, separate but related to the actual King canon.

Here again, I'm not quite prepared to put that parallel canon forth, but I can give you a list of the type of works I will eventually incorporate into my version of that canon.

LEVEL THREE -- THE OFFSHOOT CANON

major film and television adaptations of King's work by others
comic-book and other graphical adaptations of King's work by others
spinoff properties of King's work (both authorized -- such as The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer -- and unauthorized but legally sanctioned, such as the many sequels to Children of the Corn)
audio-drama adaptations of King's work (such as The Mist In 3D Sound and the BBC Radio version of Pet Sematary)
stage adaptations of King's work (such as Carrie the Musical)
musical compositions based on or directly inspired by King's works
computer games/software based on King's works
major books about King or his works
notable King appearances as an actor or performer in other people's work (e.g. his role on an episode of Sons of Anarchy and his role as narrator on the Shooter Jennings album Black Ribbons)
notable parodies of King's work (such as "The Shinning" on The Simpsons)
novels and stories written by authors with whom King collaborated (so far, this is almost entirely limited to Peter Straub -- my rationale for including his works is that understanding his work is crucial to giving a proper critical analysis to The Talisman and Black House)
novels and stories written by members of King's nuclear family (wife Tabitha King and sons Joe Hill and Owen King). Here, my rationale is somewhat fuzzier, but I think it is reasonable to assume that living for decades with Tabitha King had a major influence on King's work, and therefore understanding her work might provide valuable insights. The same is less true of Hill and Owen King, but there is a distinct possibility that after Stephen and Tabitha are both deceased, their two sons will have major roles to play in editing unpublished works for publication, and so an understanding of their work might also be helpful. I would also consider including the unpublished stories said to have been written by King's father, should any of them ever surface; it would be interesting to read them to see if they bore even the vaguest similarity to his son's works.
novels/stories/movies/music/etc. by others which featured in King's writing in some major way -- as an example, the books and movies which King wrote about extensively in Danse Macabre (The Haunting of Hill House, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, etc.) or in other major works. It would also be reasonable to include works which King referred to as being primary influences on specific works of his (e.g. Dracula as a major influence on 'Salem's Lot; Earth Abides and The Lord of the Rings as major influences on The Stand; "The Tell-Tale Heart," of which King's story "The Old Dude's Ticker" is a pastiche).

And no, of course The Scorpion King does not feature into that offshoot canon. I just felt like posting photos of other Kings, as an oblique way of underlining the theme of figuring out -- in the process of defining canon -- what does and doesn't count as "Stephen King." Also, really, I need only the barest of excuses to post photos of Elvis "The King of Rock" Presley.

Goofiness aside, the bottom line behind what I've been saying here is that it is a massive undertaking to compile any sort of list that wants to be all-inclusive of the various aspects of a career as prolific and varied as King's. It is a project that other people are probably doing with considerably more skill than I can muster, but I'll press on anyways, slowly and with my own (possibly faulty) viewpoints on things. Whether the process of doing so will ever end up benefiting anyone else remains to be seen; but I'll enjoy it along the way, and for now that's plenty good enough for me.

That's enough navel-gazing for tonight. It's a matter of mere hours before 11/22/63 hits shelves, and I plan to be sitting down to read it as soon as I can possibly get a copy. Once I've finished, I'll write up a spoiler-free review and post it here. Until then, just remember: if you've got the ability to flip over into the Territories, you are cautioned to avoid airplanes at all costs, lest you flip in mid-flight and ... well, best to not dwell on it.