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A L S O+.T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Stephen King - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
T A B L E+T A L K
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THE KING OF DEATH | PAGE 1, 2
Carrie (1974) "Carrie" is a crucial hors d'oeuvre to King's body of work. It was his first successful novel, and it stands apart from the others in several ways, especially its relative brevity, its intensely negative depiction of religious faith -- which otherwise does not play a major role in King's universe -- and its highly compelling portrayal of a female central character. (King has said that his wife, writer Tabitha King, played a significant role in Carrie's creation.) Yet this tale of a gawky high-school pariah -- she uses her telekinetic abilities to destroy not only her teenage tormentors but an entire New England town -- is also one of the clearest statements of King's conception that those who are abused can often transmute their victimization into an awful and unpredictable power. Along with William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" and Thomas Tryon's "The Other," "Carrie" greatly expanded the market -- and the sense of narrative possibilities -- for horror literature in the 1970s. Ironically, of the three books, "Carrie," although by turns pathetic, gruesome and tragic, is perhaps the least suspenseful. King reveals what Carrie has done almost immediately, then builds toward a description of the climactic events with an air of almost Athenian gravity and inevitability. Hence, while the book remains compulsively readable and features ample mayhem and destruction, one remembers it not as a gore-drenched nightmare but as a heartbreakingly tender portrait of a girl who really just wanted to go to the prom, get kissed by a cute boy and be home by midnight. The Shining (1977) Although it has been somewhat overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick's undeniably powerful (if incoherent) film version, "The Shining" remains, for me, King's most haunting and memorable achievement. In the Overlook Hotel, the sprawling, empty Colorado resort where young Danny Torrance and his parents must spend the winter entirely alone, King has created one of the Gothic tradition's truly unforgettable settings. Danny, who has a psychic sensibility one observer dubs "the shining," rapidly becomes aware that the Overlook is a veritable hive of malevolent energy, and that many of its previous occupants have ended their stays unpleasantly. The Torrance family's weak spot is, of course, Danny's father Jack, a recovering alcoholic and struggling writer who hopes to use his stint as the Overlook's caretaker to finish a novel. Jack's losing battle against the Overlook's destructive forces, whatever they are -- demons? Vengeful Native American spirits? Plain old mental illness? -- is a chilling depiction of the descent into bestial male madness, and taught King readers a cruel lesson we would never forget: You can't ever really trust Dad. "The Shining" sustains an almost unbearable level of narrative tension as Danny and his mother come to grips with the fact that Jack has made new friends (even though there's no one else in the hotel), and that his novel has taken a disturbing turn. Like all King's best works, this is a supernatural novel and a deeply realistic one, a masterful evocation of a diabolical genius loci and a grim meditation on the weakness and vulnerability of the human imagination. Pet Sematary (1983) I don't know what visions or nightmares inspired this book, and I don't want to know. Consider yourself warned -- "Pet Sematary," I think, is King's darkest hour, and even inveterate horror consumers will lose a night or two of sleep with it. Once you recover from this mind-bending yarn about a sinister Indian burial ground with the power to return animals -- and ultimately humans -- from the dead, you may notice that once again King has crafted an insidious fable about how a dark secret, a family-destroying evil, can be passed along across the generations. Another of King's tricks -- and I'm not sure this one is conscious -- is to make his central characters so irritatingly square that you almost feel they deserve whatever horrors they stumble into. (Then, when they suffer the torments of Job, you have a reason to feel guilty as well as horrified.) But as dippy as Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, are, nobody deserves what happens to them. Lured by a "friendly" older neighbor in their rural Maine town into burying his daughter's truck-squashed cat on sacred Micmac ground behind the pet cemetery, Louis finds himself seduced by the intoxicating power of the place. It's bad enough that the cat who returns the next day is a bit different from its original incarnation; the Creeds' 2-year-old son then wanders in front of a passing truck, and Louis finds his grief intolerable. If you can stand it (and many readers can't), "Pet Sematary" brings one of the hoariest of metaphysical morality lessons -- that those who try to cheat or deny death will suffer horrible consequences -- into a contemporary context, to shattering effect. It (1986) A sweeping, multi-character drama of childhood trauma and adult transcendence, "It" contains all of King's major themes and concerns -- along with one of his most horrific portrayals of evil -- in one hefty volume. The eponymous It is a demon, or alien entity, or perhaps psychological manifestation (King's spooks can almost always be understood allegorically) that inhabits the sewer system of Derry, Maine, reappearing every 27 years to claim a succession of child victims. In 1958, a collection of preadolescent Derry outcasts, banding together as the Losers' Club, courageously ventured into the sewers to defeat It, vowing that they would return if the monster ever resurfaced. Now, in 1985, the former Losers are scattered around the globe -- most of them having repressed the memory of their childhood horror and forgotten their promise -- and the one who remains in Derry must call the others to tell them that a new series of grisly child-killings has begun. Even more than most of King's novels, "It" reflects the tenor of its time. Child abuse, and the controversial idea that it could be forgotten or repressed for years, were fresh and painful subjects in the mid-1980s. The monster in "It" appears to children as a seductive, sadistic clown, clearly echoing real-world serial killer John Wayne Gacy. But despite its serious undertones, "It," with its large cast and impressively messy flashback/flash-forward structure, is primarily a great adventure novel and a testament to the fact that adults who retain some connection to their childhood idealism are the only ones who really grow up. The Green Mile (1996) Perhaps sensing that some of the fun had drained out of his work during his dutiful, pro-feminist experimentation of the early '90s, King published this death-row thriller in monthly paperback installments from March to August 1996. The result is an artless, old-fashioned storytelling style that's deeply gratifying, yielding a gripping prison yarn whose grisly and supernatural elements never overwhelm its basic humanity. "The Green Mile" is narrated by a retired prison guard named Paul Edgecombe, now confined to a nursing home, who has decided that before he dies he must recount the extraordinary events he witnessed along the green-tiled corridor of a Southern death row in 1932. That was the year an incompetent and sadistic guard named Percy, a homicidal maniac named Billy the Kid, a preternaturally intelligent mouse and a gentle giant (convicted of a terrible killing) who seems to have healing powers came together just yards from the electric chair.
There's no question that King hopes to shock readers (pun intended) into opposing capital punishment, and his almost biblical conviction that the trials of the abused will ultimately make them stronger than their abusers is once again very much in evidence. But King himself would tell you that good pulp is almost always moralistic, and "The Green Mile" unashamedly tries to create a '90s adult version of the Weird Tales comic books King grew up on, thrill rides whose every cliffhanging installment left readers agonizingly longing for the next. Check out the first volume from the library tonight, and, an hour or so later, you'll be checking your watch to see if you might just make it back to the branch before it closes.
Andrew O'Hehir lives in New York. He is a regular contributor to Salon. |
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