Night Shift (1978)

Stephen King’s fourth book is also his first collection of short stories. As of this writing, he’ll go on to release three more. That’s not to be confused with his collections of novellas, of which there are four as well. Many of these quick-hit tales precede his first novel, and were published in magazines long before anyone had heard of King.

So in some ways, these are the purest stories he’s written – they were conceived without an audience or a bank statement in mind. And in others, they’re the closest he’s come to work for hire. If a magazine wanted a horror story that month, by God, he would write one. But it would be a mistake to think of these as paycheck stories, since King has remained a champion of the short story form, long after the financial need to write them has passed.

A lot can be learned about King the writer by examining his uses of these different story forms. Simply put, he’s a different writer when he’s aiming for ten pages instead of a thousand. These are not condensed novels, they’re works intended for this form, and while some are more successful than others, King’s commitment to the three-thousand-word marvel is worth praising. So here, story by story, is what to expect from Night Shift.

Jerusalem’s Lot

Night Shift begins with what appears to be a dry run for Salem’s Lot – this is the story of a man who moves into his ancestral home, and discovers undead creatures inhabiting it with him. Charles Boone and his manservant, Calvin McCann, spend most of this brief tale digging into Boone’s family history, and unearthing an ancient curse tied to a book called Mysteries of the Worm.

Jerusalem’s Lot takes place in 1850, and is told entirely through letters and journal entries. It’s not a new form of spinning a horror tale, but in this case it is an effective one. King’s traditional style of writing – even now, in his earliest days, fairly firmly established – is so distinctive that when he adopts an entirely different voice, it’s noteworthy. He does so here, slipping into Charles Boone’s more formal way of writing, and he never lets it slip.

There are two unsettling moments in Jerusalem’s Lot, and neither of them have to do with the big setpiece, in which a giant worm pulses up from the floor of an old church. (As with most creatures of its stripe, it would probably have improved things if the giant worm had remained off-screen.) The first precedes Charles and Calvin’s encounter with the undead things in their basement – Charles finds himself unable to write more than one line: “I can’t write of this yet… I I I…”

And the second is the final section of the story, in which King justifies his decision to write it as a one-sided correspondence. I can imagine him typing the final line with a little grin. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he thought of the last line first. Jerusalem’s Lot is an effectively creepy, if sometimes sterile and distant story, but one that showcases a style much different from the one King’s readers were (already) used to.

Graveyard Shift

If any entry here illustrates the difference between King’s novels and his short stories, it’s this one. The characters in the novels to this point are finely drawn, and the action revolves around their nobilities and flaws. The characters in Graveyard Shift are barely given names – we have Hall the young punk, Wisconsky the fat grumbler, and Warwick the unreasonable boss, and that’s as far as the personalities are fleshed out.

No, this story – all of 17 pages long in paperback – is merely meant to unsettle. It’s the tale of a group of men hired to work third shift cleaning out a basement. And there, they meet rats. Large ones, with sharp teeth. The sequence in which Hall forces Warwick to march to his death, surrounded by rodents, is remarkably creepy. King is asking us to shiver at a concept, rather than relate to doomed characters, and while it was the sad inevitability of The Shining that packed a punch, here it is the sight of a limbless rat the size of a calf.

And again, the final lines are shiver-inducing. “Stevenson came back with the lights; a few moments later, they started down.”

Night Surf

This story is even shorter – nine pages in paperback – but it effectively builds a world. Admittedly, it’s the world of The Stand, King’s next novel. Night Surf was the germ of the idea, and it explores the world after the disease known as A6 or Captain Trips has wiped out most of the population. It’s a bleak portrait, and not just because of the devastation – the opening line is, “After the guy was dead and his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach.”

Characters in Night Surf barely have names, but King sketches them nicely. The unhealthy relationship between Bernie and Susie, one senses, was the same before the world ended, and will be the same until one of them dies. Granted, there is a character named Needles, whose entire purpose is to get A6 and (possibly) spread it to the others, but it’s a nine-page story. Expecting more characterization than this seems unfair.

King takes on the voice of Bernard here, writing first-person, and the short, dispassionate language works. He all but breaks that spell, however, with a hand-holding paragraph near the end: “So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons, or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu.” This is the sign of a young writer unsure of his skill. It is information already imparted more subtly, and it rips you out of what is a gripping little story.

I Am the Doorway

Sometimes, a short story simply doesn’t have enough space to explore its concept with any depth. In fact, as is the case here, sometimes that concept isn’t even delved into enough to determine whether it’s worth exploring.

The basic idea of I Am the Doorway is that some alien force infected our hero while he was in space, and is using his body as a portal to escape. Some of it is unsettling, such as the moments when King describes what it’s like to look out through alien eyes on one’s hands. And the ending is chilling – our hero sets those hands on fire, to stop whatever-it-is from coming through completely, only to find a new set of eyes on his chest. But with such a strange framework, and so few pages to develop it, this story never truly takes off.

The Mangler

The short story format allows writers to end their tales at any point they choose, leaving any amount of dangling plot threads they desire. Short stories are meant as snapshots, and when the basic idea is as potentially ridiculous as King’s is in The Mangler – a haunted laundry press machine that kills people – the format can get you out before it becomes ludicrous.

Unfortunately, King ends this surprisingly tense tale about one page too late, with the haunted laundry machine breaking its bonds and roaming the streets of the town, killing at will. The image is just laughable, and all but ruins what could have been a dark murder mystery. This is a well King will return to – lots of everyday objects are possessed or haunted throughout his catalog – but he rarely leaves us with a mental picture as decidedly campy as this.

The Boogeyman

And this is another good example of King working against himself. The Boogeyman takes place entirely in the office of a therapist, one Dr. Harper. He is interviewing a man named Billings, who begins by saying he has killed all three of his children. During the course of the story, we find out that he actually blames an unseen boogeyman, who lives in closets and preys on childhood fears.

But the story is written so well that we don’t know whether to believe him. Billings is a terrible human being, controlling and mean and a harsh, unlovable parent. The writing suggests Billings is capable of killing his children, and justifying it to himself, and may be partially inventing the whole boogeyman tale, and partially trying to convince himself to believe his own lie, for his sanity’s sake.

It truly is that well-crafted, even in 12 short pages. So when the story ends with Dr. Harper removing his human mask and revealing himself as the monstrous boogeyman, it’s dispiriting. King has settled for the cheap horror ending, rather than the more complex ambiguous one, and it scuttles this story almost completely.

Gray Matter

Here is another story that merely aims to unsettle, and this one does its job well. It’s the tale of a young boy seeking out help for his father, who has somehow been transformed into a shambling, amorphous creature. The story maintains a sense of dread all the way through, and never drops the ball.

In fact, the most terrifying moment isn’t the description of the creature. It’s a recitation of the multiplication tables. The monster is dividing, and one of the characters is savvy enough to realize the implications. It’s a nice escalation of an already creepy story, and sends this one over the goal line.

Battleground

This one is practically perfect. It’s economical – the story tells you only as much as you need to know about its main character, a trained assassin returning home after a hit on the founder of a toy company. Waiting for him when he arrives is a foot locker of toy soldiers, who come to life and try to kill him. That’s the entire story, but nothing else is needed. The action itself is inventive and frightening enough that it carries the day.

King does a terrific job here of ratcheting up the tension. The idea of a living room under siege by tiny soldiers starts off as laughable, but as the battle progresses, it becomes more horrifying. And King concludes things with a twist, and a final image that is by turns funny and jaw-dropping. Everything about this one works.

Trucks

If you’re counting, this is the third story in Night Shift in which inanimate objects come to life to terrorize people. Pitched somewhere between The Mangler and Battleground on the ludicrous scale, Trucks imagines a world where automobiles have come to life, and are seeking revenge for… something.

For 15 pages, the trucks hold a group of barely-sketched characters hostage in a roadside diner, finally scaring them enough to agree to refuel them. There are some imaginative moments – the trucks honk their horns in Morse code to communicate, for instance – and it ends with another of King’s now-trademark wider-perspective final images. But what’s here comes off as sillier than perhaps its author intended.

Sometimes They Come Back

This is yet another gripping story let down somewhat by its twist ending. The premise is more deeply emotional than most in this volume. Schoolteacher Jim Norman witnessed his brother’s murder 20 years ago, at the hands of classmates. He sees the faces of the killers in his mind constantly. So it’s shocking to both him and the reader when those faces show up in his classroom – Norman’s new students are his brother’s murderers, and they haven’t aged a day.

King never misses an opportunity here to ratchet up the tension. We feel Norman’s confusion and disbelief, and his pain. So it’s a shame when his course of action – raising a demon to deal with the specters of his brother’s killers – is so simultaneously unbelievable and clichéd.

King sells us on the premise, but never quite lands the idea of a demon-raising teacher, and when the end arrives, it’s clear the twist was concocted to give the title another meaning. In this case, it wasn’t worth the trouble – the dread that accompanies the ending is nowhere near as effective as the sense of creeping doom that the story spins until that twist arrives.

Strawberry Spring

And the pattern continues. Strawberry Spring is the story of a killing spree on a New England college campus. King again excels at first-person, and the tale deftly uses the narrator’s near-detachment to somehow create an atmosphere of creeping dread. It works wonderfully, until the final paragraphs, when the Murder of Roger Ackroyd-esque twist arrives. It does nothing to improve the narrative, and in fact is easy to guess from the way the story is written – so easy, in fact, that one hopes the tale does not go down that path. Alas, one’s hopes are in vain.

The Ledge

A simple, yet thoroughly effective piece of work. Like the ledge that our hero walks across, this story is a closed system, a knot so tightly tied that it can only lead where it goes. Trapped in a net of his own making, Stan Norris is offered a choice – 40 years in prison, or a walk around a building on a five-foot ledge. It sounds ridiculous, but it makes perfect sense, and it’s gripping.

King subjects us to every inch of Norris’ walk, and although there is never any doubt that Norris survives – he is the narrator of the story, after all – King convinces us that a sickening drop is a possibility all the way along. And when Norris does survive, and turns the tables, it’s a thrilling moment. This is one of the few Night Shift stories without a single supernatural or horrific element, and it soars.

The Lawnmower Man

And suddenly, we’re back to earth. The Lawnmower Man is a lark, a brief and silly romp that takes its title literally: it’s about a man who hires a lawn care service, and ends up with a strange, rotund fellow who eats grass. He also sacrifices people who ask too many questions to the god Pan, all the while dripping green grass juice from his mouth.

This is the kind of story in which King makes a special effort to tell us that the lawnmower man’s pubic hair is green. It’s a fever dream, like something that popped into its author’s head at 4 a.m. and burst onto the page amid peals of laughter. As such, its impact is light, but it’s fun. And the 10 minutes it takes to read it are worth it for the policeman’s joke near the end: “Well, like the man said when he saw the black-haired Swede, it surely is a Norse of a different color.”

Quitters Inc.

Now this one’s unsettling. It’s a razor-sharp story about a company with a unique service: a guaranteed method to help people quit smoking. The plot is laid out in a long chunk of expositionary dialogue that turns more and more chilling as it goes – clients are given 10 chances to quit, with penalties at each turn, including electrical shocks for family members and the breaking of children’s arms. The tenth relapse means death.

You don’t even have to know about King’s smoking habit to realize this was written by someone with a dark sense of humor about his own addiction. The most interesting aspect of the story is that Quitters Inc. works – clients come out healthier and better, no longer chained to their habits. The final image is terrifying, but also speaks to a belief that nothing less than this could shake people from their addictions.

I Know What You Need

An early prototype of a later King archetype: a story of a woman finding the strength to leave a horrible man. This one’s spiced up with a bit of voodoo magic, which makes it simultaneously creepier and less believable. But as a short tale, it works. King’s descriptions of Edward Hammer truly bring him across – not detestably ugly, but just unattractive and unkempt enough to remain a social outcast, if not for his talent.

And for a while, that talent appears natural and chilling, Eddie anticipating all of Liz’s needs, and perhaps – just perhaps – killing the boyfriend who stood in his way. By the end, Liz realizes how Eddie has transformed himself into just what she needs, and she’s faced with what may be an awful truth about herself. But she pushes through anyway, in one of the few truly uplifting endings in this book.

Children of the Corn

This one gets off to such a good start that its literally monstrous ending is a shame. A dark and devastating look at unchecked religion, this story finds our squabbling protagonists trapped in a tiny town surrounded by cornfields, and run by children, in service to He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Slowly it becomes clear that the kids have killed their parents, and all the adults in town, and will kill our heroes soon enough.

Many of the stories in Night Shift are tense, but Children of the Corn is a page-turner of the highest order. Which is why it’s so disappointing when it turns out there really is something living in the cornfield, and accepting sacrifices. That takes the bite out of the religious satire, and turns this into just another monster tale. But for about 20 pages, this story simply drips with dread.

The Last Rung on the Ladder

For my money, the finest tale in this collection. Stories of boogeymen and vampires are fine, for what they are, but The Last Rung on the Ladder is truly affecting, if slightly overwritten. It gets at the history between this estranged brother and sister, focusing on a childhood event that serves as a metaphor for the places their lives went afterward.

And the final pages are close to magnificent. King doesn’t quite trust his own imagery and metaphor, and I wish he did, because they’re worthy of writers who command much more respect. When we are finally allowed to read Katrina’s letter to her brother, it is heartbreaking. The monsters under the bed are King’s bread and butter, but in his best moments, these are the stories he writes, and the directions he sends his career.

The Man Who Loved Flowers

Another short one, without much to recommend it. There’s a nice plant and payoff with the early, throwaway mention of a news report on a serial murderer, and in most cases, we’d breeze right by that piece of information, and be cold-cocked with it later. But there’s something to be said for context – this is a collection of Stephen King stories, so we’re looking for the twist, and when it arrives, it’s not as shocking as its author believes. This was likely more effective in its originally published form, however.

One For the Road

If not for the brief tale of grief that concludes this collection, One For the Road would have been a fine bookend. It’s another tale of Jerusalem’s Lot, this one letting us in on what happened after the conclusion of 'Salem’s Lot. And all is not well – vampires are still living in the burned-out town, and when a traveler finds himself broken down in the heart of the Lot, his would-be rescuers run into predictable trouble.

But it’s nice to revisit a familiar setting, and the moment when the timeline clicks into place, and the reader realizes this story takes place after King’s second novel, is a nice one. It’s a trick King will return to again and again, and a notion that will become central to his magnum opus, The Dark Tower.

The Woman in the Room

As much as I would have liked to see Night Shift neatly bookended by Jerusalem’s Lot, this story is a fine one to end on. It’s painfully human – it’s about a son who decides to end his sick mother’s suffering – but it’s told in such effective language, and with such a striking narrative device, that it stays with you.

That device, which sees our protagonist fading in and out of scenes with sentences that begin in one place and conclude in another, is jarring the first time it happens, but fully captures that lost, unmoored sensation of watching a loved one struggle with death. The decision he comes to is inevitable and merciful, and yet still powerful and difficult to deal with. This is further proof that when King decides to leave the supernatural behind entirely, he’s a superb chronicler of the human experience.

Next: The Stand.

The Shining (1977)

Now, by Christ.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that at one time, Stephen King was an untested commodity. Back in 1977, he was still building his reputation, not just as a horror writer, but as an author in general.

The Shining is one of the books that made his name. It wraps up King’s opening trilogy of novels under his own name, again putting his spin on a horror trope: it was vampires last time out, and a haunted hotel this time. Three years later, Stanley Kubrick would put his own stamp on The Shining, casting Jack Nicholson and getting an iconic performance out of him. It was so iconic – you can all see Nicholson shouting, “Here’s Johnny!” as he bursts through the hotel room door, right? – that people seem to have forgotten the book.

I say this because it’s very, very different. The Shining, the movie, is about a haunted hotel. The Shining, the book, takes place in a haunted hotel, but it’s not about a haunted hotel. It’s much more interesting than that. And though it seems like a smaller, more intimate work than Salem’s Lot, it’s actually considerably more ambitious.

Does it all work? Not entirely. But it’s obvious, reading this, why it helped to make King a literary superstar, not just among fans of creepy-crawly flesh-tinglers, but among critics and lovers of pure story.

In contrast to the sprawling narrative of Salem’s Lot, The Shining has only three main characters, and for the majority of the book, they’re alone. Jack Torrance is King’s most complex creation yet, a recovering alcoholic writer near the end of his rope. Jack is, without a doubt, a good man – a loving husband to Wendy, a doting father to five-year-old Danny. But he is also weighed down by incidents of violence in his past, and unresolved feelings toward his abusive father. He’s a flip side of Ben Mears, the (ahem) dark half of the writer archetype King will use again and again.

Jack and Wendy have discussed divorce, particularly after Jack breaks Danny’s arm in a fit of rage, and loses his teaching job after striking a student. Jack knows he has one last chance to make something of himself, and keep his family together, and he takes it – a winter caretaking job at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Where the three of them will be stuck, snowed in, for months.

You can probably guess how well that turns out.

But what King does remarkably well here is to take a boilerplate plot – people stranded in a hotel full of ghosts, with no way out – and ratchet up the tension, not through incident, but through character. Young Danny may appear to be the focal point – he has the titular skill, sort of a cross between telepathy and precognition – but this is Jack Torrance’s story. Specifically, it is the story of how Jack Torrance, a man perched on the edge, falls apart.

The Shining is about alcoholism – King was suffering from it when writing this book, and some of its passages just leap off the page, pulsing with raw, ripped-from-life feeling. He details the dissolution of Torrance’s sanity and marriage in a way that could only come from imagining his own downward spiral.

The Shining is about all the things that keep us from being our best selves, all the insecurities and addictions and faults. And while there are, no question, malevolent spirits at work at the Overlook, Jack Torrance’s real, complex life gives them the tools they need to send him reeling. And King makes you feel every step down the road to Jack’s personal hell.

But there’s a wide, yawning chasm between what works and what doesn’t in The Shining. And what doesn’t has to do with plot mechanics. While King was concentrating on making his characters live and breathe, he didn’t lavish that attention on the story itself, which is painfully predictable.

From the first time we are told the Overlook’s boiler pressure creeps up, we know it will eventually explode. From the moment the kindly cook (and fellow Shiner) Hallorann tells Danny to shout for him if he needs help, we know he will, and we know Hallorann will come to save the day. From Danny’s first premonition about the roque mallet, we know Jack will lose it and wield that mallet against his son.

And was anyone anywhere actually fooled by Redrum?

The upside of all this is, we’re free to ignore the clockwork plot and concentrate on what the book does well, which is detail the disintegration of Jack and the Torrance family. On that score, The Shining is a disturbing, frightening success. No supernatural evil can compete with the scene in which Jack’s father smashes his mother’s head in with a cane, for no reason.

And there isn’t a more sickening moment in the novel than the one in which Wendy blames Jack for the bruises on Danny’s neck, bruises we know were caused by the ghost in Room 217. It is here that things fall apart, though they don’t come crashing down until much later.

King would get better at the big-picture plotting. (Pretty much right away – The Stand is a bit of a masterpiece.) But The Shining shows that even from his early days, he knew what was truly scary: the dark recesses of the human heart, and our frustrating inability to change what we are. That’s what makes The Shining a powerful little book. Its scariest moments are its most real.

Next: Night Shift

Time is slipping away...

Well, I certainly won't get through this project in a year at this rate.

I'd like to say I'm sorry for the delay in updating this blog, but that seems woefully inadequate. Over the past... good lord, nine months... I have left one job, taken another, found out that it's several metric tons more work than I expected, and picked up and moved to a new town. It's been an eventful year, and that's taken its toll on my reading and reviewing. Hell, I read The Shining twice - I finished it late last year, but never got around to critiquing it, and found I had to read it again, to make sure I had all the details right.

I won't make any promises. But I do feel like I'm back on track. My review of The Shining is about to be posted. I've started reading Night Shift, taking notes on each story. Best of all, I'm having fun doing it. My hope is this was the last delay, and this train now barrels along until it reaches its last station. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

And now, onward.

Rage (1977)

Or, the book Stephen King doesn’t want you to read.

I certainly hadn’t, before tracking down a copy online. Rage has been out of print for years – it was last published as part of the Bachman Books collection in 1985. This is at King’s request, and after finally reading it, I can see why he chose that path. Rage is an ugly book about an ugly subject, written with a complete lack of social conscience and maturity. It is also riveting stuff.

Rage was the first novel (novella, really) written by King’s “dark half,” Richard Bachman. You may wonder why a writer of horror fiction needs a dark pseudonym. If so, you should read some of the Bachman books. We’ll be covering them all here, but these are the novels in which King lets loose, channeling the impulses he puts in check in works under his own name. It’s not an uncommon practice, and in fact Rage makes sly mention of one of the most famous practitioners, Donald Westlake, who wrote books about unrepentant bad guy Parker under the name Richard Stark.

In King’s case, Bachman is his outlet for gleefully irresponsible nightmares, stories in which the evil that’s always poking at the corners of his world is given free rein. I usually find myself engrossed in King’s stories, turning pages to find out what happens next. Bachman’s stories leave me with a sick pain in my gut, and a palpable fear of getting to the end, because I know it’s not going to turn out well.

Rage was the first, and King seemingly perfected that sickening style right away. It’s the story of Charlie Decker, a junior at Placerville High School in Maine, who decides one day to shoot two of his teachers dead and take a class hostage. He doesn’t quite know why he does this, but over the course of a few hours, he examines his own motivations and those of his classmates.

Within a few pages, it was clear to me that King is right to keep this out of print. The scenes of Charlie shooting his teachers are stomach-churning, the sequences in which Charlie talks with hostage negotiators are terrifying, and the ending, in which the students all gang up on one of their own and batter him into a coma, doesn’t justify the repulsive setup. It’s a completely irresponsible piece of work, wielding images of great power in service of nothing.

And yet… the writing here is alive, more alive than I can remember ever seeing from King. Descriptions breathe, Charlie’s inner monologue is astonishing, and King stays away from all of his clichéd writing tricks. There’s a little Holden Caulfield to the proceedings, but when King digs into events from Charlie’s home and school life, it’s stunning stuff. And when the situation starts to crumble around Charlie’s ears, it’s intense in a way a book like ’Salem’s Lot just isn’t.

The stakes are higher here, you see. This is truly dangerous material, and that high-wire act pumps life into King’s writing.

I wonder if he felt that while writing it. Rage is a book that pulses with real blood, one that comes from a place King could only visit under another name. Richard Bachman is that sick voice that lives in all of us, and whenever King slips into his clothes from now on, it will be to explore what it feels like to have this uncontrollable monster beneath one’s skin, to have depths one is terrified of sinking to. (He will most literally take on that theme in 1989’s The Dark Half.)

As for Rage, I’m not sure I ever want to read it again. I can only imagine how King feels, reading it now. It’s a sick little book, one that never earns its harrowing premise, but it’s captivating, and the writing leaps off the page in ways I’ve never seen from him. It’s an interesting paradox. Rage is the work of a young writer feeling his way around his conscience, hiding behind another name and letting his demons loose. It is a book without boundaries, and that freedom is both damning and liberating. It’s painful and powerful, so much so that its author has taken it back, scared of the force it commands. That alone makes it worth tracking down.

Next: The Shining

'Salem's Lot (1975)

Wow. At this rate, there’s no way I’m going to get this done in a year…

So after years of short stories and one slightly longer one, Stephen King finally delivers his first real god-amighty novel. ‘Salem’s Lot is more than 600 pages long (in paperback), and for the first time, King’s prose is allowed to breathe. The results are pretty impressive, even if he’s still feeling his way around the tricks of his trade.

So many of King’s career-long obsessions first rear their heads here. In Ben Mears, he has created his first archetypal King hero. For one thing, Mears is a writer, a novelist in search of inspiration. I expect from this point forward I’ll be able to keep count of how many King heroes fit that description. I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head. If nothing else, King’s career has been about the exploration of author to the fiction he creates, and to the readers of that fiction. Think Misery, think The Dark Half, think the Dark Tower series.

Also, we get King’s first use of a small Maine town as not only setting, but major character. For hundreds of pages, ‘Salem’s Lot is about the town itself, and King introduces more than a dozen of its inhabitants, each adding to the world he’s spinning. It’s well-written stuff, and in later chapters, it enables him to tell his story from many different points of view. The Lot lives and breathes – it has a history, one that becomes important in the final pages, and it has a soul. In some ways, the book is about how the souls of these small towns are snuffed out by time and neglect. King just gives those forces physical form.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book opens with a man and a boy, whom we later learn are Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. They are on the run from something, but a news story about Jerusalem’s Lot (the town’s full and proper name) convinces them to go back. I criticized King for using news clippings and flash-forwards in Carrie, since I felt it ruined the suspense. But it works here. We’re immediately intrigued.

The book proper details Ben Mears’ arrival in the Lot months before, and we get to know the town through him. We meet Sheriff Parkins Gillespie, and teacher Matt Burke, and landlord Eva Miller, and drunken tenant Weasel Craig (who shares a history with Eva), and town busybody Mabel Wertz. Early on, there’s a remarkable chapter in which King details one day in the life of the town, jumping from character to character, giving us the big picture by showing us smaller ones. He obviously cares about these characters, and we end up feeling the same way.

Ben strikes up a romance with young Susan Norton, and the scenes with her family are nicely done. Susan’s mother is another King cliché, overbearing and unreasonable, but King creates a nice character in her father Bill. Ben, as it turns out, grew up in ‘Salem’s Lot, and has returned to write a book about the Marsten House, a supposedly haunted mansion on the hill. When Ben was younger, he found the body of Hubert Marsten – a suicide, hanging from the rafters. Sharing this story brings Ben and Susan closer.

What’s surprising about this book is how naturally it shifts from an American small town tale to a story about vampires. And make no mistake, this is a story about vampires. Richard Straker is King’s Count Dracula, setting up shop in a haunted house and slowly taking over the town. The shift comes about halfway through – for a while, King teases you, and you’re not sure whether he’s really going to bring out the vamps, but he does.

And at that point, the book kind of sinks a little for me. There are some fantastic scenes in the latter half, including the death and resurrection of Susan Norton, and Ben’s breakdown after he stakes her. But these characters we’ve come to know and respect are having conversations about vampires, and accepting the idea that their town has been overrun by creatures out of Bram Stoker. It strains credulity somewhat, but because the second half of ‘Salem’s Lot is such a ride, it’s forgivable.

In the final analysis, ‘Salem’s Lot is about the death of a small town. Ben and Mark, a plucky kid who instantly believes in the bloodsuckers, return to the Lot and set it on fire, recalling a similar blaze that nearly wiped the town out in 1951. It’s a striking ending, but a fitting one – you can all but see the wide-angle shot of Ben and Mark as the camera fades to black and the credits roll.

King will go on to examine many more small Maine towns (most notably Castle Rock, which he will return to again and again). He’ll also give us many more tortured, heroic writers. But Ben Mears and Jerusalem’s Lot are fine first stabs, and they anchor a decent second book. It sets the tone and template for a lot of what’s to come.

Next: Rage.

Carrie (1974)

So this is how it begins. With a teenage girl menstruating in a high school locker room shower while her classmates throw tampons at her.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first book, the only one he’s ever written as just a jobbing author, instead of a New York Times bestseller. It’s a slim volume – 252 pages in the Pocket Books paperback edition I have. That would barely count as a novella to King these days, but in his first stab at a long-form work, King gets in, makes his point and gets out, with a minimum of fuss. That focus lends Carrie an almost searing intensity, which works in its favor. Honestly, you wouldn’t want to spend much more time than this watching this story unfold.

Carrie is an uncompromising, ugly, difficult book. It’s the story of Carrie White, an unpopular girl poisoned by her ultra-religious, domineering mother, and ridiculed endlessly by her peers. We first meet her in that high school locker room – she gets her first period at 16, and has no idea what’s happening. Her mother Margaret, a strict Christian, has never told her about menstruation, believing it to be a mark of the devil. The other kids react as horrible kids would, taunting her and tossing sanitary napkins. (“Plug it up! Plug it up!”)

But, as King artlessly tells us on the second page, Carrie White is telekinetic, meaning she can move objects with her mind. And here King seems equally interested in telling us two different stories. The first (and infinitely more interesting) one is about Carrie herself – about that one person in every high school who exists to be the butt of jokes. Her mother is dangerously religious, fanatical to a degree I would have trouble accepting if I hadn’t read news reports of people just like her, and growing up with her mom left Carrie scarred and unable to fully blossom.

This story is also about sexual awakening, and that element of the novel is also fascinating. We have several depictions of women waking up to their own sexual power, and in Billy Nolan, the sexually dominant older boyfriend of popular girl Chris Hargensen, King creates his first real villain. Nolan uses sex as a power play, as a weapon. And when he and Chris drop two buckets of pig’s blood on Carrie White at the school dance, King describes the thrill as almost sexual. His examinations of this theme are well done.

But it’s the other story, the one that wants to be a dry elucidation of telekinesis as a phenomenon, that drags the book down. The narrative is constantly interrupted by excerpts from reports on “the Carrie White affair,” and bits from character Susan Snell’s autobiography. These sections actually foreshadow the main plot, over and over, and too far in advance. I would have preferred it if King had allowed the story to unfold naturally. In the end, I’m not really interested in the potential worldwide impact of telekinesis. I’m really only interested in its effect on one girl, and her small town.

I’m not sure if King took any pleasure in telling this story. He spends about 100 pages building up Carrie’s confidence – Sue Snell, feeling bad about the locker room incident, convinces her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the dance. This simple act of kindness builds her self-esteem to such a level that one gets the feeling she would have been fine, would have grown up free of her mother’s influence. But then, the pig’s blood, and the carnage, as Carrie, betrayed and damaged beyond repair, uses her power (flex) to destroy her town, killing more than 400.

The bloodbath is so much worse because King brings us inside Carrie’s head. We feel her pain, her anger, her betrayal, and that is to King’s credit. But I wish there had been some shaft of light in this story. It’s clearly – clearly – not the work of a writer who wants to sell millions of copies of his work. This is a dark and disturbing little book, and King writes it as if he were possessed by the story. Like he had to tell it, and in order to tell it, he had to go to these pitch-black places.

As for the writing itself, it’s not bad. King introduces that trick he does to parenthetically

(oh god oh god what was that)

bring us into his characters’ minds, and it must have seemed fresh in 1974. But Carrie is not a very intricate book, and despite some chilling run-on sentences during scenes with Carrie’s mom, the writing is fairly straightforward. King will get better, but for my money, he will rarely get more disturbing, or more direct. Latter-day King, the one who sells millions each time out, might have tried to expand this story, and while that may have led to more interesting character moments, the razor-sharp power of this tale may have been diluted in the process. Carrie is a little book that hurts a lot.

Next: Salem’s Lot

Welcome to my nightmare

Stephen King released his first novel, Carrie, in 1974, the year I was born. When I was 12, I read my first King book, Skeleton Crew. It's a short story collection, so it was easier for me to sink my teeth into than some of his longer works. And it scared the shit out of me.

I had other favorite authors before King. Douglas Adams, for example, remains pretty high on my list, even though I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I was about 10. But from age 12 to probably age 19, I was obsessed with Stephen King. I'd read anything he put out. He was my first gotta-read-everything writer, and no matter how silly his books got, or how much I felt he was doing it for the money sometimes, his work remains important to me.

I lost track of King some time ago. I think I read From a Buick 8, his shorter 2002 story about a haunted car (Really? Another haunted car?), and gave up. I know I've missed later works like Duma Key and the well-reviewed Under the Dome, and I've never read the last four Dark Tower books. But something about his writing still calls out to me. I know, I know - he can be fairly pedestrian at times, and his strictly scary novels have gotten rote. But I think King has always been about so much more than just spooks and chills. Odd as it may be to say about a guy who has written nearly 60 novels and story collections, I think King's a real writer, and he deserves critical analysis.

That's what The King Review will endeavor to provide. This is kind of an impulse thing for me, but I've decided to re-read all of King's books, and then take on the ones I haven't yet devoured. I was in college last time I read books like Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary (although I know The Stand by heart), and I really want to revisit them. So here's my excuse to do so.

As I finish each book, I'll analyze it here. This means this will be a very sporadic blog, so no need to check back too frequently, but I think I can do it all in a year. I'm doing it chronologically, from Carrie to the new story collection Full Dark, No Stars (and whatever else King writes between now and then) and I'll include what I remember of my initial impressions from my teen years, too. (As a side note, I'll be saving the Dark Tower stuff for the end. I know those seven books are scattered throughout King's timeline, but I want to read them all at once, and from what I remember of them, they seem like a good way to cap off this experiment.)

Yes, I have a million other books to read, but I think this will be fun. Hope you agree. Now, if you'll excuse me, for the first time since high school, I'm going to read Carrie. I'll let you know what I think when I'm done.