Finders Keepers cover

Well, I guess we’ll just add it to the list!  http://stephenking.com/promo/finders-keepers/cover-reveal/

I believe that he’s got a short-story collection due out this year as well!

 

Chris–The Shining

This, I believe, is really the definitive Stephen King story.  More so than anything else that he’s written, this book really captures what he can do as a writer.  And I will admit that this one holds a special place for me–BECAUSE WE’VE STAYED AT THE OVERLOOK HOTEL.

In it’s first incarnation, this story was actually about a haunted amusement park, but it really wasn’t coming together.  Until King went to Estes Park, Colorado, and stayed at the Stanley Hotel in room 217.  He then wrote The Shining; a story about a haunted hotel with a room that you really didn’t want to go into.

Fun fact: when filming “Dumb and Dumber” at the Stanley, Jim Carrey was checked into room 217.  In the middle of the night, he checked out and has still not talked about what happened…

So, Rachel and I being the King fans that we are spent our 20th anniversary there at the Stanley–and it was fantastic.  So cool that we’re going back.

Rachel is trying to convince me to stay in room 217, but I don’t know…

 

And another thing…

What is up with all the padlocks?  Throughout the book, we see that the vampires have managed to padlock themselves into their hidey-holes–from the outside.  In fact, Barlow gets Weasel and Eva to not only padlock the root cellar, but then move that seriously large sideboard in front of the door as well.  And then they somehow managed to get inside the root cellar?

There are several instances of the vampires in the book turning into smoke or mist, and just sort of disappearing, so I guess that maybe that’s what happened…  But then when Barlow does in Mark’s parents, he comes crashing right in through the window.  Which maybe was for dramatic effect.

It just seems to me that if you are going to lock up your door and then mist yourself inside, why not put the padlock on the INSIDE of the door?

 

Chris–Number 2: ‘salem’s Lot

There is a lot of stuff going down in rural Maine.  Take your basic small town full of interesting characters, then have a vampire move in and everyone gets eaten.  The end!

It’s been a while since I’ve read this one, and that’s pretty much how I used to think of it.  Just a straight-forward vampire story.  King goes with the classic Dracula interpretation of vampires, and honestly, it borderlines on cheesy.  “But I thought you loved this book?!”  Oh, I do–and notice, I said “borderlines”.  It never crosses over, just rides the rails.  And that really gives ‘salem’s Lot a very fun feel.  Like when Ben and Jimmy are sitting in the funeral home, watching the recently “deceased” Mrs. Glick, and Jimmy asks if Ben brought a crucifix.  Of course he hasn’t!  But never fear–Jimmy just medical tapes a couple of tongue depressors together and WHAM!  Instant anti-vampire charm!

And here is where King works his magic.  Jimmy tells Ben that it has to be blessed.  And even though neither of them are really even all that religious, let alone Catholic, they start in with the Lord’s Prayer.  And they BELIEVE.  And THAT is what the vampires can’t stand.

The showdown between Father Callahan and Barlow is absolutely EPIC.  I mean, Callahan strides in full of the wrath of God, and he is going to be a seriously fearless vampire slayer.  Barlow realizes this–and I think sees a bit more of Callahan than Callahan does himself.  When Barlow challenges Callahan to toss away the cross and face him mano y mano, Barlow knows what Callahan’s choice will be, and the vampire knows how this is going to end.  In a way, he has a faith of his own–a faith in himself, that he is miles ahead of these pitiful humans.  “Come false priest.  Learn of a true religion.  Take my communion.”  THAT IS SO GOOD.

So often with King’s works, I find that they really are a ton of fun, in spite of what’s happening to his characters.  But every now and again, there comes a time when the fun really stops, and I have to take a few minutes to get back into it.  In ‘salem’s Lot, it’s when Susan gets staked. And OF COURSE SUSAN GETS STAKED—this is, after all, a modern version of Bram Stoker. But still, that moment is horrifying.

King does some really format choices in this as well. He starts the story near the end, and then goes back and plays catch-up. So we sort of know how it ends, but not really. We know enough to figure out that something terrible went down, and now we have to know what it is. He’s got some excellent foreshadowing all throughout the book. I thought that in Carrie he really gave away too much at times, but not here. And here we get our first taste of King’s excellent ability to swear—“Jesus jumped-up Christ on a sidecar!”

So is it just a vampire tale? King makes it a point to quote Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House right in the beginning of the book—so now we have to take a closer look at the Marsten House. Sitting up there, on its hill, looking down in contempt at the town that surrounds it. We see later in the book that Hubie Marsten and Barlow were pen pals, writing each other back and forth. We suspect that Marsten is behind the disappearance of several children, and we know that he murdered his wife before hanging himself. We don’t know what the hell (literally) else he did up there, but we can feel certain that his actions paved the wave for Barlow and Straker to come to town. Without the Marsten House, there would have been no vampires, and maybe the Lot will still be alive. And this is the point that King is making.

Evil doesn’t just happen by itself. Evil needs man to help it along.

 

Rachel-Carrie wrap-up

Carrie—so, for those who have not read it I will give a quick synopsis. Carrie is born to a mother who has experienced trauma, death, and uses religious extremist views to live by and use as a weapon of abuse towards her daughter Carrie. Carrie born with special talents furthers the mother’s belief that this was a sinful birth. Carrie is sheltered from the modern world and knows mostly what her mother tells her. She is viciously and systematically bullied over the years until it reaches a point where Carrie’s mind and spirit can’t take it anymore but also her talents intensify to be dangerous to all around her.
Quit reading now if you don’t want spoilers.

Carrie was written in the 70s but the heart of it is still relevant today. The main themes are religious abuse and extremism, HS bullying, trauma of puberty, and unfortunately what we all know to well as school or public massacres.
Unlike real life where empathy in our culture seems to be pick a side, black or white, right or wrong; this book, like Frankenstein, is written in a sympathetic fashion to create sympathy for the monster/murderer. Like Frankenstein’s monster, both him and Carrie are born and made out of their control and hated upon birth by the very people who created them. They are forced to be out into the world without a support system and left to their own devices to find a place of welcome, love, and understanding. The world reacts in a cruel and vicious way and this being all they know, they respond accordingly.
In the real world when a bombing, school shooting, mall shooting, etc occurs, we as a society seem to think anyone who empathizes with the person doing the massacres are somehow condoning or not having sympathy for those who were hurt. While reading Carrie I felt such sadness that we have to make a choice where our empathy lies. It is fiction itself that repeatedly tells us that our humanity depends on having empathy for all. Carrie’s massacre of her town topples past 400 lives and souls that didn’t deserve it no matter what they did. Yet you are able to read and hold on to an immense amount of sympathy and sadness for Carrie and the people she killed. I read this book first as a teen, then a few times in my 20s and a few times in my 30s. This go around I even was able to read and feel tremendous empathy for Margret White who I thought was far more horrifying than most of Stephen Kings characters in later books.
High School is HELL. Anyway who says otherwise must have been a star of something; academia, popularity, sports, etc, or ended up like Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused and just never left HS and the parties. For me, Oprah money would not get me to go back.
Now you take HS hell and religious abuse and shelter at home and then start your period at school and think you’re dying. Uggg. First off, I knew it was coming, what is was and was also a late bloomer. Yet when it came, I FREAKED OUT!!! I felt shame, gross, fear, pain, and the fear and pain continue for me today. Your scared when you sleep beside you partner… will you leak on the sheets? You’re scared for work days, errands appts, and are constantly super vigilant about it as well as it HURTS and is a huge pain in the ass. So, I can’t imagine being in Carries shoes acting any other way in that vicious bitchy attack in the shower stalls. It is traumatizing!
At the onset of her getting her period (which isn’t puberty also the time teens wolf out or whatever supernatural phenomenon happens because either it’s at a peak or starts) her ability to move stuff with her mind intensifies. She even starts practicing at home raising a hair brush and setting it gently down, to moving furniture and her mother. There wasn’t a single thing up until now that made Carrie feel special and her own place to excel finding peace.
Her mother, at first read, second read, I don’t know up until whatever read I am on, I thought was just mentally unwell which is a nice way to say I thought she was bat shit crazy. Religion scares me in people who think in absolutes. That absolute thinking without leaving open conversation, ability to change mind, very concrete ideals that make people and ideals either righteous or sinful…… those people are not your every day Christian, Jew, Muslim, etc. These people turn up the volume and it seems like the more absolute their thinking with the mind narrowing becomes an extreme that is willing to bully, harass, recruit, and it just seems like it often creates such anger hostility and then violence.
So, to say I now have empathy with Margaret White does not in any way dismiss the fact that she was abusive in horrific ways to her daughter and it implies in the book a very bullying and judgmental figure in her town. However, I REALLY read her and focused in. This woman whose childhood is not stable but also not exactly detailed joins a fundamentalist church. She feels God does not want her to fornicate, it is dirty and sinful, but gives in to her husband. She loses the baby. Which anyone who has miscarried or thought they were going to, etc can understand the trauma. To add to it, the thought that it was God punishing you for giving into sex!!!!????? So, Margaret later describes her husband once again wanting sex and they prayed. He left only to come back drunk and try to take her against her will. She fought very little until she decided she liked it and wanted it which pleasured and sickened her. The husband dies in a work accident and Margret has no idea she is pregnant until labor comes and out comes Carrie. Her first instinct is to kill it because it was made of sin. However she kept the baby.
Then she learns the child has “devil” powers and it furthers in this woman’s belief that Carrie was not only not meant to be but an abomination to be taken out. Margaret however keeps raising Carrie. I feel like there has to be an ounce of maternal feeling here that keeps Carrie alive. I think her mom had a tug of war feeling of love and hate, right and wrong, my baby but the devils work and so on. Absolutes. I do feel like (again in NO EFFING WAY CONDONING) Margaret loved Carrie and tried to make her as Godly as possible to undo what SHE felt she did and the wrong SHE felt she caused. Like she could somehow make Carrie become so what God wanted it could undo the devil part and that to me, is her way of love. It is sick. It is unhealthy. Margaret White was not well….. For sure….. but I do have compassion and sympathy.
So after the plug it up horror, Sue seems to become apologetic. Meh. I believe her. I think for sure she felt like an asshole and knew the crapiness of what she did and had done since Carrie was little. This is a character I keep going back and forth with. Who loans out their boyfriend for the prom to someone??? It seems weird. I married my prom date and no way would I, after doing something shitty, would be like; here take my boyfriend for the night. Wouldn’t it have been better for Sue to go to Carries house or call her and say, “Man, I am a gigantic asshat and I am so sorry. What I did was not ok.”? Or maybe if she wanted her to come out of her shell she could have brought her to her home or had a slumber party and make over. She could have told her to come to the prom with her and Tommy as their friend and guest. Seems weird to me. When a girl is THAT unpopular it is usually the friendship of a fellow girl who has better outcomes. I know a lot of unpopular girls who slept with popular boys thinking it was love or acceptance but it just made them more unpopular. It is the girl pack that can change things. It takes one popular girl to say, “hey sit at my table for lunch” to make the difference. I feel for Sue Snell but I think she and Tommy’s judgment led an open door to Chris and her Boyfriend to cause the last Carrie could take in abuse.
On Prom Night I feel for Carrie. She KNEW it was a trick and still tried to find optimistic hope that she could fit it. It wasn’t to be. Much like when you hear a mother lifts a car off her child which otherwise would be physically impossible, I think the same kind of energy and adrenaline ran through Carrie when the blood rained down on her. Carrie already possessed talents beyond understanding and without much thinking began to throw people against walls, close doors, and set a fire through electrocution that killed a lot of kids.
I feel for the kids. Even the bullies deserve sympathy. Why? Well no one is born a jerk. Plus, a lot of us are jerks in HS and grow out of it to feel remorse and become well meaning kind community parents, leaders, workers, protectors and so on. Very few continue on the path of being a dick. Chris is one I think would have………. But for the other they never got the chance to undo being a jerky teenager. It is sad, unfair, and I just can’t imagine the pain of dying that way or losing my child that way.
When Carrie gets home the last trick is played on her by her mother trying to kill her and her in reaction to stopping her slows her mother’s heart until there is death. She went to her mother to tell her she was right the world was awful and I feel was willing to accept everything her mother said to do or pray or say. But it wasn’t to happen. Carrie pulled herself to a gas station where after killing Chris and her boyfriend, begins to die. Her energy got weaker and weaker in moving things but also speaking in her mind to others. Sue found her past the gas station dying and was able to listen to Carries pain and dying and confusion as well as transmit to Carrie that she had NOT been part of that last trick and there was some repulsion for Carrie but also remorse.
There are no winners in Carrie like many great tragedies.

 

Shirley Jackson and The Lot

Stephen King references Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House throughout ‘salem’s Lot. And as I had never read it, I really never understood the connection. However, last year I finally read Hill House, and I must say that if you have never read ‘salem’s Lot–READ HILL HOUSE FIRST!

 

Chris–‘Salem’s Lot

So, up next is ‘Salem’s Lot. This is easily up in my top 10 King books of all time. I’ve read this one several times, but it has been a while so I’m pretty excited.

Originally published in 1975, this is the story of what happens to your town when a Vampire moves in. Honestly, I’m surprised that a legitimate movie adaptation has never been done on this. There are two made-for-TV movies, but both are pretty bad…

 

Chris–Carrie is done

Finished it up late last night. And by “late”, I mean like 9 PM…

Fair warning: This post is full of spoilers.

It’s honestly been at least 25 years since I read this the first time, so most of it was pretty new. Of course, I’ve seen both film versions, so I knew the basics of what was going to happen. King did something interesting with the story by interrupting it with excerpts from fictional medical journals, scientific studies, court testimony, and memoirs recollecting the events of “Prom Night”, which serves up a lot of foreshadowing. Well before everything is burned to the ground, we know that everything is going to burn to the ground. This really doesn’t take away from any of the suspense, though, and King builds up the tension quite nicely before things start to go boom.

In a previous post I mentioned how King likes to connect his works.  All the medical/scientific studies in this book mention that they’ve almost got the telekinesis gene identified and mapped.  Well, in a couple of books we’re going to meet up with an organization know as “The Shop”, and that sounds like something that they may get into…

These interjections really make up almost half of the book.  This is not a long story at any stretch.  There is almost no character buildup; we’re just dropped right into a high school locker room and learn who everyone is as we go.  And that’s not a bad thing.  More detail is not always a good thing.  We can see right away that Carrie has never had a good day at school in her life without having to revisit every single day of her life.

I had a couple of problems with the book as a whole.

1. King has a way of interrupting a character’s thoughts with more of that character’s thoughts. For example, on page 47, Carrie and her mother had a bit of a fight. Carrie says: “Yes, (she was afraid i’d knock the closet door right off its hinges) Momma.” Most times–like this one–this technique serves to give us some additional insight and character building. Occasionally, though, it’s so fragmented and broken that it’s very hard to follow. I had to go back and re-read several of them to try to figure out what was happening.

2. The mind-reading bits at the end. To me, this really didn’t add any value. By this point in the story, it’s pretty apparent that Carrie White is behind all of this, and I believe that all of the characters know it. Sue doesn’t need to “see” what Carrie is doing. She could have logically figured it out.

3. The very end–the letter that some unrelated character wrote to her sister. This really just feels like a cheap gimmick, setting it up for a sequel down the road. Again, this doesn’t really add anything to the story.

Overall, though, this is a really good read, mainly because it’s a timeless story. King published this back in 1974, but it could have been written last year. While the details are a bit dated (10 cent rootbeers, Woolworth’s, and whatever the hell “green stamps” are) the story happens everyday. A girl is bullied endlessly, mercilessly, from her first day of school to her last. Her home life is just as bad, with emotional and physical abuse at the hands of the one person who’s supposed to protect her at all cost. And then one day, she can’t take it anymore and everything ends in tragedy.

Carrie White is not a monster. She’s not even the villain in the story. She’s just a weird girl that never fit in, who took a chance on finally being accepted. She truly deserved better.

 

Chris–King cross-overs

As we’ll see a bit further on, almost all of King’s works take place in the same time and sometimes locations. You’ll hear references to a killer dog (Cujo), we’ll run into some familiar faces (Frank Bannerman), and towns (Castle Rock, anyone?).

Of course, with Carrie being his first book, you don’t expect to find any other works mentioned, but I found this a little interesting. Carrie’s mother is SERIOUSLY religious, yet so far Satan is never mentioned by name–or any other name. He’s referred to as “the Black Man.”  In just a few books we’re going to meet The Man in Black, The Walking Dude himself–Randall Flagg.

 
I wonder if maybe this isn’t the same person…

 

Chris–Day 1, Book 1

So, happy New Year! I got started on this last night sometime after midnight–didn’t make it very far, though. But it’s started!  There’s a terrible glare on there, so sorry about the picture.

Carrie is King’s debut novel, published way back in 1974. The story that I have always heard about this book is that we really have King’s wife, Tabitha, to thank for it. Supposedly, King was very frustrated with it and tossed the entire manuscript out. Tabitha rescued it from the trash and eventually convinced her husband that he really did have a story here. So who knows? Maybe if Tabitha hadn’t fished it out, maybe we wouldn’t have any of these books…

Anyway, if you’ve never heard of the book or seen either version of the film (the Spacek one is better), Carrie is about a teen-age girl with telekinetic abilities.  Add some parental abuse, some peer-bullying, and a general innocence regarding life in general, and you’re set for a serious disaster.