Chris–Different Seasons

Up next, Different Seasons.  Along with short stories, King also wrote a ton of novellas–this is the first collection that he released.  Four stories, each representing a “different season” of life and living.

Three of these stories were made into films, and the two hands-down, undisputed greatest movie adaptations of King’s works are found here.

“The Body” became Stand by Me, and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” became exactly what you think.  “Apt Pupil” also got a movie, starring Sir Ian McKellan, but 1) it’s seriously grim and depressing (so is the story) and 2) it’s not any fun.  Not sure that I’m happy to be re-reading that one…

These are all stories about life.  Like with Cujo, there are no ghosts or spooks here.  Unlike Cujo, though, King thoroughly commits.  Well, except MAYBE for “The Breathing Method”…

See you on the other side!

 

Chris–Cujo wrap-up

I’m just going to come right out and say it–I did not enjoy this book.  Now, I have read this one before, but honestly it was like 30 years ago, so there was a lot that I didn’t remember.  I had problems with so much stuff in here…  so let’s discuss!

One, there is a lot of stuff that just isn’t needed and doesn’t help the story at all.  As near I can figure, the only purpose of introducing the character of Aunt Evvie is so that she can foretell that it’s going to be a hot summer.  And that’s the extent of her importance, because she dies immediately afterwards.  Same goes for George Meara.  He gets one more scene than Aunt Evvie, and we do get to see his reasoning for not delivering the mail at a crucial point–but do we need to?  King could have just as easily said “Joe Camber left a note to hold the mail” and been done with it.  Message passed.

I get that the whole ad business with Vic and Roger is sort of integral to the plot–we need a reason for Vic to leave town and leave Donna and Tad behind–but do we really need to know what they are doing in detail?  And Steve Kemp.  Yes, he’s also sort of an important figure, but I felt that there were too many pages dedicated to what he was doing off on his own.

All of these things do have a place in the story, and they all do sorta kinda come together at the end, but for the most part it felt very piecemeal and broken for me.  This is supposed to be a terrifying experience, and yet it became somewhat boring.  We go from OH MY GOD WE’RE TRAPPED IN THIS CAR AND IT’S A 1000 DEGREES AND THIS DOG IS GOING TO KILL US to “hmmmm… how do we save this ad campaign for cereal?”  The story never finds a rhythm, and the tension and build up are constantly interrupted.

The worst of these interruptions for me was the bit with the girl and the cereal.  This seems like nothing more than a cheap scare.  Again, I see that knowing what happened is kind of important to the story, but do we really need to know this?  Does it really help the story along?  Or is it just filler thrown in to give us an easy shock?

The other big problem that I had with the book is that while there isn’t anything supernatural here, it’s almost like King couldn’t commit to it.  He puts a boogeyman in Tad’s closet.  Literally the Boogeyman.  From the short story in Nightshift.  And it’s not just that Tad THINKS that there’s a monster in the closet.  The door opens by itself.  Things get moved around.  There’s that terrible smell.  But it never serves a purpose.  It would have been better character building if Tad had just thought that there was a monster.  The results would have been the same.  And it wouldn’t have seemed so flip-floppy.

And I’ll admit–that kid’s name sort of gets me.  MY son’s name is Tad…  and while he’s much older than 4, it’s very difficult not to put him in this situation when you keep reading that name.

There are a ton of connections in here.  This is the 2nd Castle Rock book, so we are reintroduced to Sheriff Bannerman (and unintroduced, I suppose), and the John Smith/Frank Dodd incident is mentioned throughout.  Another odd connection–Herbert Tarreytons.  Those are King’s choice of cigarettes for his stories; we will see those again.  And there’s a quote from Huck Finn about “lighting out for the territory.”  THAT is going to become very important when we get to The Talisman.

Cujo is supposed to be a scary, frightening, terror experience, but really it’s just sad.  There is nothing fun here.  And it’s not just that bad things happen to good people–look at Charlie McGee, Johnny Smith, Danny Torrance.  But the weird and creepy elements in those stories offset the horror of what they went through.  In Cujo we just get a little boy who literally gets roasted alive due to a ton of stupid coincidences.

And the saddest part?

“It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tired to be a good dog.  He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him.  He would have died for them, if that had been required.  He had never wanted to kill anybody.  He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies.  Free will was not a factor.”

 

Chris–Cujo

Up next is Cujo.  This is another one of those books that I read once 30 years ago and for whatever reason never went back to it.  So it’s almost like new!

Now so far we’ve had telekinesis, psychics, vampires, pyrokinetics, literal good vs literal evil, and seriously haunted hotels.  If I remember correctly–there are no supernatural elements in Cujo.  It is just a story about a big, loveable, friendly, big, shaggy, big, with seriously big teeth, dog who just happens to come down with rabies.

*Pictured–pretty much the exact opposite of Cujo, that’s Toaster the Wonder Beagle.

 

Chris–Firestarter wrap-up

Normally, in a Stephen King story, the supernatural element is what is frightening, right?  There’s a ghost, or some vampires, or some crazy physic power that causes all sorts of problem.  Whatever it is, that is the aspect of the book that’s supposed to scare you.

This is not the case with Firestarter.

Charlie McGee, while she does have some heavy-duty abilities, isn’t someone to be afraid of.  She’s just a girl.  Like any other girl, except for that one difference.  And maybe this should be frightening–after all, no one knows just how much this power is going to grow.  Maybe she will be able to crack the planet in half.  But she’s no monster, and all we feel is sympathy for her and her dad.

No, the scary side of this book comes from the US Government.  Specially, the outfit known as “The Shop.”  Now we’ve met the Shop before–if you remember, they were behind the Captain Trips virus in The Stand, so we know that they are up to no good.  Well, here we get to see how bad they really are.  And they are terrifying.  There is nothing that they can’t do.  They can arrest you for no reason.  They can make you disappear.  They can threaten your family.  They can rip out your fingernails, break your dead, and leave your corpse shoved in a laundry room.  And they want Charlie, and will stop at nothing to get her.

What makes this so frightening is that it really doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch.  Sure, the firestarting stuff is out there, but the Government’s response to it?  Seems pretty much right on point.

Now that King’s done a sequel (Dr. Sleep, which shows up what happens to Danny Torrance years after The Shining), I would love for him to do another.  The open end of Firestarter does give you some hope that Charlie manages to settle down somewhere safe, but I would like to see where King thinks she ends up.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

I didn’t catch any obvious crosses with other books, other than The Shop, but there is something interesting here.  Andy’s plan to get them out is pretty solid.  They really had a good shot; however, Rainbird got a little lucky and figured things out.  So it’s not a total victory for the good guys.  In later books (like Mr. Mercedes), it’s the BAD GUYS that come up with the pretty good plans, only to have them foiled when the good guys stumble across something.  Maybe King is softening up?

I doubt it.

 

Chris–Firestarter

Next up–Firestarter.  King definitely has a soft spot for kids.  Young Danny Torrance was absolutely heart-breaking in The Shining, Carrie White was just a misfit kid, and here he introduces us to Charlie McGee.  Who can start fires.  With her mind.  Surely that’s not going to be a problem, right?

Back when I’m done…

 

Chris–The Dead Zone… wrap up…

OK, so you’ve seen so far that I usually will post a quick intro for the book that I’m reading next.  Well, I’ve been a little busy lately, and we’ve done a little traveling, and I went ahead and finished the book before I got a chance to post an intro…  so here’s The Dead Zone.

So, on the surface, The Dead Zone is about a man who has an accident, suffers a severe brain injury, goes into a coma for almost 5 years, and wakes up with the ability to see the future…  But there is so much more here.

First and foremost, this book is a tragedy–the loss of things that might have been.  In some cases–like with Eileen’s children–that loss is a good thing.  With most, though, there is a real and moving loss.  What might have been between John and Sarah?  Or Herb and Vera?  This story is filled with loss and missed opportunities, with no real explanation.

Again, the fact that King doesn’t explain is part of what makes the story work so well.  Is it God’s plan that this happen to Johnny?  Or just plain old bad luck?  It’s up to you to decide.  There are no clues that really point in either direction.  Different characters have different beliefs; if you were to ask Vera Smith, it’s pretty clear what she thinks.  But Sam?  He’s much more difficult to pin down.

In the end, Johnny loses everything.  And now we have to wonder–what would have happened to the world had John Smith not been in that accident?  Would Greg Stilson still have been such an unstoppable force?  Was that late-night car crash the only thing that stood between the world and complete devastation?  That’s a scary thought.  John Smith thought so, as well–fortunately.  He willingly gave it all up–and more, really.  He knew that no one would ever understand his reasons, and even if Herb, Sarah, or Sam talked about them, no one would really believe.  So he went down as a villain, a would-be murderer, instead of the hero that he should have been.

Now, there a quite a few connections in this one.  Number one–this is the first of the Castle Rock books.  We’ll see good old Sheriff Bannerman again.  And now King begins to reference himself.  When the bar burns down towards the end, one of the kids cries out “he set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book Carrie.”  I found that pretty funny.  But we’ll find that King immerses himself and his writing in relevant pop culture–so why shouldn’t his books make their way into his stories?

I found some interesting character cross-overs, as well.  I saw quite a lot of similarity between John Smith’s parents and Fran Goldsmith’s.  Definitely not the same people, but there was some resemblance.

King also gives a shout-out to Ray Bradbury.  There’s an early section in here that starts off with “The seller of lightning rods…”  Wait a minute, I thought, as soon as I read that, and went to my bookshelf.  I pulled down Something Wicked This Way Comes, and sure enough, there’s that very same phrase.  And it’s obviously a reference to Bradbury’s book–otherwise King would have said “the lightning rod salesman” or something similar.  In fact, later in The Dead Zone, Chuck mentions that he’s gotten his girlfriend interested in Something Wicked.

The last odd connection–that same girlfriend is seriously into a punk-rock band called The Ramones.  So she’s got good musical taste!  But the Ramones did the title track for the film version of Pet Semetary, and it’s an awesome song.

I had a lot of fun reading this one–I think I’d only read this once before, and it was a very, very long time ago.  And I’ll try to stay on format from here on out.  Again–it’s a good thing that this isn’t my day job!

 

Chris–One More Night Shift Connection

I totally forgot to mention this.  Most of the connections to other King works are pretty obvious–the two ‘Salem’s Lot stories and “Night Surf”, but there is one more very subtle tie.  In “The Last Rung On The Ladder”, Kitty and Larry grew up in Hemingford Home, Nebraska.  Sound familiar?  That’s where Mother Abigail spent 108 years of her life…