The story: “Sorry, Right Number,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. It’s the screenplay for an episode of Tales of the Darkside that aired in 1987. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Katie Wiederman receives an unsettling, incomprehensible phone call from somebody seemingly trying to either plead for help or warn her about something. The phone calls starts a chain of events that ends with Katie’s husband Bill’s death of a heart attack. Years later, Katie realizes that the phone call was from her future self, trying to warn about Bill’s impending death.

My thoughts: This is a sweet, sad little story told in the form of a screenplay. Given the close association of King’s written work with film, it seems appropriate to find a King-written screenplay tucked in here amidst his more traditional short stories.

Although we don’t realize it until the screenplay’s closing pages, the key plot element in “Sorry, Right Number” is time travel—in this case, a message transmitted into the past, intended to warn Katie about Bill’s death. Depending on how you read the story, the specific time travel theory is either the predestination paradox (if you think that the mysterious phone call actually caused the heart attack it was trying to avert) or the self-healing hypothesis (the idea that the course of history cannot be changed, and will resist efforts to change it). These ideas crop up from time to time in shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.

But this isn’t a science fiction story, and it’s actually not very concerned with the details of time travel. It’s mostly a rather touching story about a happy family whose life is thrown into turmoil when they get a phone call from a strangely familiar-sounding voice begging them to take some unspecified action. Believing that a relative must be in trouble, they scramble in a panic to check in on their extended family members, all of whom turn out to be safe and in good health. They dismiss the phone call as a strange fluke, but Bill dies later that night of a heart attack. Years later, the family has moved on; Katie has happily remarried but still mourns inside for her loss. In a bout of grief, she dials her old telephone number, is inexplicably connected to her younger self, and tries to warn her younger self to get Bill to a hospital. But she cannot articulate her message through her sobs, and the call is disconnected… setting the sequence of events in motion.

Compared to King’s usual chatty, verbose writing style, the screenplay format is necessarily stark and short on typical King details. Nonetheless, some of his storytelling strengths shine through. The husband/wife relationship, something he almost always gets right, comes across as warm and believable. A few amusing scenes of Bill and Katie’s children bickering over which TV show to watch were clearly written by somebody who’s frequently wrangled with arguing children.

King also pulls one of his trademark “author insertions” here: Bill is a famous horror author. As he often does, King uses this opportunity to mock both himself and his fans. Bill’s bibliography includes amusingly lurid titles like Spider Doom and Ghost’s Kiss, the latter of which is chewed up by a toddler at one point; and when Bill is trying to get an emergency telephone operator to help with the crisis, she keeps interrupting to ask him for autographs. At one point, Katie expresses concern that their youngest son is watching an ultra-violent movie based on one of his father’s novels—a conversation I am sure that King and his wife Tabitha had more than once as they raised their kids.

What really stood out for me in “Sorry, Right Number” is King’s portayal of grief (possibly because it was also a theme in “The Man in the Black Suit,” which I read a few days ago). Grief in King’s stories is not a life-ending psychological blow that dooms your happiness forever; nor it is something that you can simply push past with a Hollywood-style burst of willpower and then leave behind for good. It’s something that you survive, but that leaves you with permanent scars. Five years after Bill’s death, Katie has “moved on”—she and her family seem to be genuinely happy. But she can be content with her circumstances and still wish, deep inside, that things had worked out differently.

This was a good but melancholy read. I had forgotten most of its details; with its focus on a mysterious phone call, I initially suspected it would turn out to be a horror story of the He’s calling from INSIDE THE HOUSE! variety. I’m glad to be proven wrong.

Next up: “The Monkey,” from Skeleton Crew.

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The story: “Strawberry Spring,” collected in Night Shift. Originally published in 1968. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A man recounts the strange events of a “strawberry spring” (like an Indian summer, but in the spring) years ago, when a serial killer murdered several women on a college campus but was never caught. The narrator’s reminiscing ends with his realization that he was, and still is, the killer.

My thoughts: As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, Stephen King has written novels and stories that draw on nearly every horror-story trope in existence. In a number of cases, he may have single-handedly popularized them. But curiously, one trope he hasn’t focused on heavily (to my knowledge) is the Serial Killer. (Another neglected trope is Zombies—you might be surprised to learn that they’re the centerpiece of his novel Cell, but not much else.)

King’s massive body of work doesn’t contain many serial killers. (Granted, his non-serial killer villains do nevertheless tend to kill lots and lots of people.) There’s Annie Wilkes from Misery, Bob Anderson in “A Good Marriage,” the narrator of “Strawberry Spring,” and no doubt a few others I’m forgetting. (King experts, please share in the comments below.) But given the popularity and glamorization of the Silence of the Lambs-style serial killer in thrillers and film these days, it’s a little unusual that very few of King’s villains fit the profile of the charming, witty, and intelligent psychopath compelled by dark urges to kill in disturbing fetishistic ways. King’s villains are often crazy, murderous, and charismatic, but not in the way we associate with serial killers as pop culture depicts them.

“Strawberry Spring” presents the recollections of a man who may not fully realize until the story’s end that he is, in fact, the killer known as “Springheel Jack.” During a short period of strange foggy weather that gave evenings a surreal and dreamlike quality, Springheel Jack terrorized a college campus by savagely killing several women.

King spends less time describing the murders than he does depicting the panicked, and increasingly irrational, public response to them—and this is what makes “Strawberry Spring” better than your typical serial killer story. King fancies himself a student of human nature and social behavior (in The Stand, characters spend a great deal of time hashing out social theory) and he gets it right here. He traces the college community’s reaction to the murders from its early stages (gossipy fascination with the murders and victims); to the more serious and coordinated attempts to solve the crimes (increased security, arrests, and a general atmosphere of tension); to the crazy phase (conspiracy theories spread like wildfire), to the inevitable end (public boredom, as the killings end and new distractions appear in newspaper headlines). It’s a response-to-tragedy pattern that is unfortunately very familiar to those of us in the United States at the moment.

“Strawberry Spring” closes with a surprise revelation, an element common in horror stories but very hit-and-miss in execution. It works well here because King has carefully pointed us toward the revelation (so it doesn’t seem random) without making it too obvious. There are enough clues spread through the story to make you feel smart for noticing them, like in a good mystery novel. Of course, you know you’re reading a story by Stephen King, so you’re somewhat on the alert for this sort of thing. But there’s also the vaguely confessional nature of the first-person narration; the fact that the narrator begs off of social functions to be alone on the nights of the murders; and the overly romantic way that the narrator describes the fog and other features of the strawberry spring nights.

I ended up enjoying this story much more than I thought I would. (I’m really not a fan of the serial killer genre.) And impressively for one of King’s early, obscure little stories, it features one of his very best closing lines:

I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.

And oh dear God, I think so too.

Next up: “Sorry, Right Number,” from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

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The story: “The Man in the Black Suit,” collected in Everything’s Eventual. First published in 1994. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An old man recounts a strange and frightening encounter he had when he was nine years old, when he met the devil himself in backwoods Maine.

My thoughts: I knew I was going to have trouble with this story by the fourth page, when the protagonist mentions his dead brother. As I’ve lamented before, becoming a father made me a huge wimp when it comes to stories, books, and movies about threatened—or worse yet, dead—children.

This has been a huge problem for my interest in the horror genre. Horror stories are about finding and exploiting readers’ greatest fears, and what is more terrifying than the idea of one’s child put in mortal danger? You can bet they hammer on that theme a lot. And beyond that, many of the best horror tales feature child characters; a child’s resourcefulness and vulnerability make them an ideal protagonist for fairy tales and horror stories alike. I knew I would run into this eventually with King’s short stories; children feature prominently in some of his best work, most notably the coming-of-age epic It, which I haven’t yet had the courage to revisit.

The death of a child—the brother of Gary, the narrator—takes place a year before the events of “The Man in the Black Suit,” but it’s a driving narrative undercurrent throughout the story. One thing King writes well is grief: he avoids maudlin drama and preachy reflection, but picks out the little ways that unresolved emotional pain manifests itself. Nine-year-old Gary and his family clearly haven’t moved on from their loss.

Gary heads out one day to go fishing in the woods. And in a manner consistent with the “I met the devil down by the crossroads” strain of American folklore, the devil appears to him there. This devil isn’t a slick businessman or shady deal-maker; he’s a monster who tries to break Gary’s spirit before killing him. The devil mocks his brother’s death, and gleefully informs Gary that his mother too has just died—a lie, although Gary believes it at the time. Gary pulls himself together long enough to escape. He returns home to find his parents alive and safe, but for the rest of his life Gary carries the weight of his seemingly random encounter.

At first read, this is an odd story; there’s no twist ending or even much narrative closure. It’s more of a “let me tell you about something creepy that happened to me once” campfire tale. King describes “The Man in the Black Suit” as an homage to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and it’s easy to see why. As with Goodman Brown’s dreamlike encounter in the woods, Gary’s exposure to pure, inexplicable evil sows seeds of spiritual doubt that he never quite manages to shake throughout his entire life. In King’s story, the encounter with Old Scratch serves two purposes: on the one hand, it’s a way for Gary to confront, and push past, the pain of his loss. On the other hand, his brush with evil permanently mars his belief in divine good, in the same way that not even the most pious among us is ever truly, completely at ease with the presence of death and pain in a world ostensibly overseen by a loving God.

In an afterword, King expresses disappointment with this story. Compared to Hawthorne’s sublime “Young Goodman Brown,” it does indeed fall short—what short story wouldn’t? But it’s a strange and thoughtful meditation on grief and loss that stands out strongly from King’s more typical genre stories.

I enjoyed this, but the subject matter made it a difficult read. I think I’m ready for a few good old-fashioned pulpy Stephen King horror-fests.

Next up: This weekend is looking extraordinarily busy, so I have a feeling the next entries may be delayed by a day or two. With that in mind, let’s go ahead and pick the next three stories: “Strawberry Spring” from Night Shift, “Sorry, Right Number” from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and “The Monkey” from Skeleton Crew.

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Note: this story is an unusual one for King. After reading it, I asked my lovely and talented wife—who is much more familiar with this genre than I am—to read it and provide her thoughts. The reflections below are all hers. (You rock, Michele!)

The story: “The Doctor’s Case,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1987. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: In this pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are confronted with a challenging “locked room” murder mystery. Surprisingly, it is Watson who cracks the case.

My thoughts: When Andy asked me to read Stephen King’s short story “The Doctor’s Case,” I was sure it would be too violent for me. I haven’t read anything by King since high school, but my vague recollections suggested to me that he wouldn’t be able to resist getting some gory details in some way or another. I was surprised to find that the extent of the gore consisted of the phrase “There was a dagger in his back.” I’m happy to say I rallied quickly from this assault upon my sensibilities.

The story is true to the Sherlock Holmes tradition. It is a locked-room mystery with four, and only four, suspects. (I’m partial to this kind of mystery myself: neat and tidy.) The thoroughly nasty Lord Hull, nearing the end of his life, announces to his wife and three sons that he’s just disinherited them in his new will; then locks himself (alone) into his study and dies from a knife in the back.

Most of the time people who try to write in 19th century style give themselves away with anachronisms. King avoids this, for the most part, particularly in correctly using the wordiness and archaic phraseology tossed around in the original stories. I would say the few times it was apparent from the writing that I was not reading something by Conan Doyle were that the explanation of how it was done went on longer than expected, with somewhat too much emoting by Holmes.

I had expected that the fact that Watson and not Holmes solved the case would be due to something unique about his character. This was not the case, and I suspect the fact that Watson got the win on this one might be due to King feeling sorry for the nice old guy.

One amusing moment came at the beginning of the story, when Watson tells us he is now a nonagenarian and he no longer remembered the case very well. He then begins his narrative by noting that “it was a wet, dreary afternoon” just after half past one, and Holmes was staring out the window, holding but not playing his violin, followed by other extremely precise descriptions of conditions and events which had occurred many decades before. This total recall is, of course, an amusing conceit of mystery stories, as well as many other genres.

At one point Holmes references “The Speckled Band” in the course of this story. The solution here is reminiscent of that story, in that it is ridiculously complicated and would almost certainly not work in real life. Fortunately, I like complicated solutions to mysteries, and as a result I enjoyed this story quite a bit.

Thanks, Michele! Next up: “The Man in the Black Suit,” from Everything’s Eventual.

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The story: “The Road Virus Heads North,” collected in Everything’s Eventual. First published in 1999. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A successful horror author stops at a yard sale on the way home from a conference and buys the world’s creepiest watercolor painting. As he continues his journey home, he notices that each time he looks at the painting, it has changed—showing a murderous car driver following the author’s route north. And getting closer.

My thoughts: Ah, but this is a good one. The best Stephen King stories leave you not exactly scared, but grinning with slightly sick glee at what you’ve just read. And I’m grinning right now.

But first things first. I mentioned in my reflection on “Word Processor of the Gods” that King often uses writers and published authors as protagonists. That’s the case in “The Road Virus Heads North,” where the protagonist (a famous horror novelist named Richard Kinnell) is a very obvious stand-in for Stephen King.

There’s a lot of “meta” going on in “The Road Virus Heads North” (which, it hardly needs to be said, is a wonderful short story title). The story gets its name from the title of a disturbing painting that King claims to actually own. In having a fictional horror author come into possession of it (and meet a grisly end as a result), King is obviously having fun at his own expense. One wonders how many other personal references and in-jokes King snuck into this story.

The story opens on an amusing note. Kinnell is at an author’s convention, rolling his eyes at both his fans (a tiresome autograph-demanding lot who always ask him inane things like “Where do you get your ideas?”) and his snooty critics (“Richard Kinnell writes like Jeffrey Dahmer cooks,” writes one). If it were a different author snarking like this, it would seem peckish; but because it’s Stephen King it instead comes across as just funny. Having been both a raving fan and armchair critic of King’s writing over the years, I feel a kinship with Kinnell’s fans and critics—but mostly, I sympathize with poor Kinnell, who like Stephen King is just doing what he loves. King’s occasional self-insertion into his stories and novels never comes across as obnoxious; King always seems to be in on the joke, even in his most serious novels, and he doesn’t get preachy with it.

“The Road Virus Heads North” (the painting) is the sort of American roadside kitsch that good horror stories turn into nightmare fuel. It depicts a grinning, pointy-toothed creep driving a vintage muscle car through the night, and more specifically, along the highway that Kinnell is traveling on. (The description of the driver reminds me of recurring King villain Randall Flagg—perhaps a Dark Tower expert can tell me if they’re supposed to be the same person.)

In classic “the eyes are following me around the room!” fashion, the painting changes as time goes by (why is that so inherently creepy?). It shows the scary, maybe-not-entirely-human driver following Kinnell’s route, stopping once to brutally murder the woman who sold Kinnell the painting. Kinnell goes through a process of doubting his sanity much like Howard Mitla’s in “The Moving Finger.” He tries to throw away, and later destroy, the painting, but each time it mysteriously re-appears, showing the driver getting ever closer until he arrives at Kinnell’s house. The painting’s final scene reveals the grisly fate in store for our famous, doomed horror author.

I like this story quite a bit. Beyond King’s self-referencing, it’s a good little horror story. Creepy roadside Americana… a murderer cruising down the long, unlit highway in pursuit of his victim… the irony of a horror author meeting a horror-story end… this is King doing what he does best, needy fans and pompous critics be damned.

Next up: “The Doctor’s Case,” from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

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The story: “Trucks,” collected in Night Shift. First published in 1973. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synposis: A motley crew of individuals is besieged inside a roadside diner by a pack of semi tractors and other trucks, which have come to life and are seemingly intent on wiping out their human creators and masters.

My thoughts: This early King short story deals with a theme that is now very familiar to any science fiction fan: the machine revolution. In the years since this story was published, many successful books, stories, and movies have built on the idea that one day, the precious machines on which we rely so much (too much, they suggest) will turn on us.

These days, most such stories imagine that it is computers which will revolt, and that their ubiquity and deeply-layered networking will make them nearly unstoppable. “Trucks,” however, hails from a time before computers (as we think of them today) were the brains behind every complex mechanical or electronic gadget; this story is heir to the tradition of “haunted car” tales (a subgenre King returns to in his 1983 novel Christine).

We never get an explanation for this automotive revolt, and the story doesn’t really need one. All we need to know is that every motor vehicle larger than a car is now possessed of a bloodthirsty cunning, and is working in coordination with other vehicles to kill us. The protagonists are a mostly forgettable collection of average Americans—a salesman, a trucker, a cook, some teenagers, and the anonymous narrator—and they follow the horror-survival script closely as they hunker in a diner, watching malevolent semi trucks circle the property. The salesman snaps and makes an ill-advised break for freedom (and dies badly); the narrator tries to rally the others to make longer-term survival plans. After a few more characters are killed, the true horror of the situation becomes clear: the trucks—implied now to have free reign across all of America, and whose ranks now include not only semis but construction vehicles, tractors, and possibly even aircraft—intend for the humans to be their slaves, refueling and maintaining the vehicles in exchange for their lives.

This is a difficult scenario for King to sell, and the story works best if you just don’t think about it too much. The two obvious problems in the trucks’ plan are the simple facts that humans are a) massively numerous and b) able to take refuge in all sorts of places where the trucks can’t go. King anticipates these points and has the narrator reflect that, given time, there are few places on the planet that determined machines could not level, pave, destroy, or reach. I can accept that for the sake of the story, but the implausibility of the scenario keeps “Trucks” from being as tense or scary as horror stories with more… versatile threats.

Of course, King is using this scenario to make an ecological lament: the protagonist’s realization that no refuge remains on Earth that cannot be wrecked by our machines is a critique of urban sprawl and the encroachment of our fuel-guzzling, air-polluting civilization on what was once an open-ended wilderness. And there’s also the suggestion that we’ve become so reliant on our machines and technology that we’re effectively enslaved to it. (This is a point that resonates well in our world of cellphones and social networks.)

Ultimately, “Trucks” is an entertaining but mostly forgettable story. The protagonists don’t do, say, or think anything memorable, and the concept of technology turning on its creator is now such a common plot device that this story comes across as quaint, rather than terrifying.

Next up: “The Road Virus Heads North,” from Everything’s Eventual.

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The story: “The Raft,” collected in Skeleton Crew. First published in 1982. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synposis: Four college students pay a visit to an isolated, tranquil lake to live up the last days of summer. Alas, they’re trapped out on the lake by a strange creature and are killed off one by one in excessively gruesome ways.

My thoughts: Ewwwwwwww.

I suspect this is what people who haven’t read Stephen King’s work, imagine that all Stephen King’s work is like: weird, lurid, and horrifying.

So far in this little October short story project, we’ve read Stephen King short stories that fit a number of classic horror sub-genres: we’ve seen the Lost Travellers and the Town with a Dark Secret; Lovecraftian Horror; the Faustian Bargain; and the Three Wishes. “The Raft” fits neatly into another familiar theme: Hormone-Addled Teenagers Engage in Forbidden Activities and Die Horribly.

The first few pages of this story are spent getting to know our doomed protagonists: Randy (the nerd), Deke (the jock), Rachel (the sweet girl), and LaVerne (the mean girl). As I’ve noted in discussing other stories, King writes personal interaction well, and he’s got his finger on the pulse of teenage social dynamics. Even as horror envelops the protagonists, they’re evaluating relationships, competing for social status, and thinking about sex. In the brief time we have to get to know these kids, Randy and Rachel come across as the most sympathetic; Deke isn’t a villain, but he’s got a streak of the Stephen King “bully” archetype running through him, and LaVerne comes across as a bit of a boyfriend-stealing jerk.

Actually, it’s the portrayal of the two women in this story that stands out most strongly to me, reading it now. To put it bluntly: there is a weird and uncharacteristic amount of violence directed at the women in “The Raft.” I do understand the rather over-the-top situation they’re in, what with the flesh-eating oil-slick monster that has them trapped in the middle of the lake. But it’s nonetheless not very fun to read about male characters either striking, or thinking about striking, the women, one of whom dies early in the story and the other of whom is quickly reduced to a gibbering, fainting wreck. All of the characters, but especially the women, lack agency; with little prospect of escape, they’re mostly just passive victims. This seems a bit out of character for King, who is actually known for his strong female characters to the point that several of his later books could probably be described as feminist empowerment tales. “The Raft” is not really long enough for me to figure out whether King’s doing something deliberate with genre conventions or is simply being thoughtless here.

And of course, that violence all seems rather moot in the grand scheme of things. Three of the four protagonists are snared by the monster and die awful, luridly-described deaths; one of them is, in my opinion, one of the most gruesome deaths to be found in any King story or novel. (The fourth death, that of the narrator, is strongly implied but not described in the story’s final sentences.)

Apart from the over-the-top violence and the treatment of the female characters, one other element of “The Raft” stands out. If you’ve read much Stephen King, you’re certainly familiar with one of his trademark writing gimmicks—the use of italicized, parenthetical text to communicate what his characters are

(subconsciously thinking)

subconsciously thinking. While King sometimes over-uses this trick, it works reasonably well, and is effective here in supplying an otherwise trashy story with a bit of emotional weight. The curious phrase (do you love) pops up here, as it does in one or two other places in King’s work, as Randy, left alone at the end, contemplates his inevitable fate.

Apart from this, I don’t have much else to say about “The Raft.” It’s gross, it’s lurid… and it works alright. Certainly it works well enough that 20 years after I first read it, I could vividly remember the exact manner of Deke’s death. I wouldn’t recommend this story to somebody exploring King’s stories for the first time, but it does represent a strain of King’s writing that you’ll eventually want to confront.

Next up: “Trucks,” from Night Shift.

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The story: “The Moving Finger,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1990. Wikipedia entry here. No relation, as far as I know, to the Miss Marple novel… although the mind reels at the possibility.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An ordinary, unremarkable man thinks he’s losing his mind when he notices a too-long, moving human finger poking up out of his bathroom sink drain. Things escalate as Howard Mitla wages a one-man war against the horror in his bathroom.

My thoughts: One of the simplest formulas for a horror or suspense story is to start with a thoroughly ordinary character, drop an unexpected threat into their life, and sit back and watch as they either fall apart or rise to the challenge. In “The Moving Finger,” poor protagonist Howard Mitla does a little bit of both.

Howard is a typical King everyman character, nice and a little dull and a lot like you or me. King might have chosen any number of traditional horror threats with which to menace him—ghosts, zombies, vampires, serial killers, etc.—but instead we’re plunged deep into “WTF?!” territory when Howard enters his bathroom to discover that a human finger is inexplicably poking out of the sink drain, feeling its way around. The fact that a) this makes no sense and b) the finger never appears when his wife is around initially convinces Howard that he’s hallucinating.

This is a familiar situation for horror-story protagonists to find themselves in; since I’ve been referencing The Twilight Zone so much in these write-ups, I’ll point you to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which an airplane passenger’s sanity is called into question when he, but nobody else, notices a gremlin running around on the airplane’s wing. King lovingly details Howard’s efforts to deny and rationalize what he’s seen.

“The Moving Finger” takes place in a Queens apartment, no doubt to better capitalize on the old urban legend about monsters in the New York sewers. Add to that one of humanity’s less dignified fears, that something’s going to grab us while we’re in the shower or on the toilet, and you have the recipe for a story that can gross us out while making us laugh at its sheer ridiculousness.

Part of the fun is in King’s attention to the kinds of details that other writers would disregard. Unable to mentally cope with the grander implications of what he’s seeing, Howard focuses instead on a very practical problem with having a monster in your bathroom: where exactly are you going to “go”? Much of the story hilariously follows Howard’s efforts to overcome this logistical challenge, and his inability to find a long-term workable bathroom solution is what finally pushes him to deal with the finger in a more direct way: liquid drain cleaner and, when that fails, a pair of hedge trimmers.

While the first half of the story is at least mildly creepy, things tip into black comedy once Howard decides to employ violence to get rid of the finger, which is by now acting more aggressively (it’s grown several feet long and is probing around the apartment). As his sanity slips away, Howard’s dialogue fills up with very recognizeably Stephen King-style insane, comic banter. Howard finally achieves a gory victory over his impossible nemesis, but at the cost of his mind; and the story’s very funny closing sentences suggest that the war has not been won.

This story was so fun to read, and so packed with entertaining details, that’s it’s a struggle to not just gush praise for it. It’s King at his pulpy best: it’s gross, it’s funny, and it’s a little bit creepy. It’s got some more of the charmingly cantankerous married-couple banter we saw in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” and it showcases King’s love of pop-culture references (Howard is obsessed with Jeopardy). There’s not a lot to take seriously here, although King does supply a by-now familiar, and somewhat out of place, bit on the Problem of Evil. Pardon me if I quote at length:

“What exactly happened in here, Mr. Mitla?” [police officer] O’Bannion asked. “And what have you stored in the toilet?”

“What happened? It was like… like…” Howard trailed off, and then began to smile. It was a relieved smile… but his eyes kept creeping back to the closed lid of the toilet. “It was like Jeopardy,” he said. “In fact, it was like Final Jeopardy. The category is The Inexplicable. The Final Jeopardy question is: ‘Because they can.’ Do you know what the Final Jeopardy question is, Officer?”

Fascinated, but unable to take his eyes from Howard’s, Officer O’Bannion shook his head.

“The Final Jeopardy question,” Howard said in a voice that was cracked and roughened from screaming, “is: ‘Why do terrible things sometimes happen to the nicest people?’ That’s the Final Jeopardy question. It’s all going to take a lot of thought. But I have plenty of time. As long as I stay away from the… the holes.”

Definitely the most fun story so far in my Stephen King short story project.

Next up: “The Raft,” from Skeleton Crew.

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The story: “Word Processor of the Gods,” collected in Skeleton Crew. First published in 1983. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A writer worn down by his verbally abusive wife and son receives a magic word processor as a gift. After learning that what he types into the word processor comes true in real life, he uses it to replace his family with a better one.

My thoughts: “Word Processor of the Gods” is about as close as you get to a genuinely uplifting Stephen King short story. What a change of pace from yesterday’s read! Actually, “Word Processor of the Gods” has a lot in common conceptually with “Fair Extension.” Like “Fair Extension,” “Word Processor” is a modern adaptation of a classic fable. In this case, it’s the story of the wish-granting genie.

So then: Richard Hagstrom receives a mysterious word processor from his nephew (who was shortly thereafter killed in a car accident caused by his drunken father, Richard’s brother). Richard hides in his study from his shrewish wife (whose obesity King uncomfortably counts as a further moral mark against her, something I suspect he wouldn’t write today) and bratty, disrespectful teenage son. After playing with the word processor a bit, he figures out that he can change reality by typing or deleting sentences with the machine. He also learns that, like the wish-granting genie’s lamp of legend, the word processor will only afford him a handful of “wishes” before it stops working, presumably permanently.

Stories about people temporarily granted magical wishes or godlike powers commonly end up as cautionary tales about human shortsightedness and greed. The wish-maker typically lives it up for the first few wishes, only to learn that his wishes come with unintended consequences that damn him, force him to use his last wish to undo them, or (in the most merciful cases) simply teach him a valuable lesson. (Think of “The Monkey’s Paw,” or of every third Twilight Zone episode.)

For this reason, I spent my time reading “Word Processor” waiting for the other shoe to drop. But just as “Fair Extension” confounded my expectations with its conclusion, so “Word Processor” surprised me by allowing poor, sympathetic Richard a happy ending untainted by a scolding moral lesson. He wishes away his mean wife and kid and replaces them with his kind, formerly-dead sister-in-law and nephew, who always seemed a better fit for Richard than for Richard’s brutish brother. And they live happily ever after.

King pays lip-service to the troubling morality of using “wishes” to erase and replace people you don’t like, but the story maintains overall a fairy-tale feel that discourages overthinking it. If King wanted to amp up the moral ambiguity and make this more of a horror story than a revenge-of-the-underdog tale, he might have made Richard’s wife and son more sympathetic—as it is, they’re depicted as purely awful people, like Cinderella’s wicked stepmother or Harry Potter’s cruel uncle. Although we feel a faint moral concern as Richard rides into the sunset with his happy new family at the end, mostly we’re just relieved that the good guy won for once.

On a different note: Stephen King really hates bullies. I’m sure we’ll talk about this more as my reading project continues, because bullies—both the schoolyard variety and grown-up variants like the Abusive Husband and the Tyrannical Boss—show up in a lot of Stephen King stories and novels. Here, the main bully is Richard’s dead brother, who we learn through flashbacks was viciously cruel to Richard throughout their childhood. King knows how to evoke that white-hot, indignant hate for bullies that we all (except perhaps the bullies) harbor; and his depictions of teenage cruelty are terribly effective at making us sympathize with the victim. (If anything, King sometimes overplays his hand, portraying bullying characters as one-dimensionally evil.) Here, he uses this trope in the service of a simple but satisfying story of benign revenge. “Word Processor” isn’t a classic, but its relatively cheery ending makes it a breath of fresh air in between other, more characteristically bleak Stephen King stories.

Final thought: this is also one of many Stephen King stories to feature a writer as the protagonist. But I think I’ve gone on enough about “Word Processor,” so we’ll pick up that theme in a future story.

Next up: “The Moving Finger,” from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

Food for thought: If there’s a particular King story you want me to read, be sure to let me know in the comments. And I’m pondering stretching this project to include one or two King novellas, although the extra time required to read them might disrupt my flow. Share your thoughts below!

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Story: “Fair Extension,” collected in Full Dark, No Stars. Published in 2010. Wikipedia entry here. Technically a novella, but at 30ish pages it looks like a short story to me.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A man diagnosed with terminal cancer makes a deal with the devil: he’ll get better if he designates somebody else who will suffer in his place. He designates his “best friend,” whom he secretly hates, and enjoys a long, healthy life while his friend’s life falls apart.

My thoughts: “Fair Extension” is a harsh read. After reading many thousands of pages of Stephen King stories over the years, I’m on to most of his tricks and am pretty hard to shock or disturb. But stories like “Fair Extension” are evidence that King knows how to cut deep when he wants to.

Interestingly, this unpleasant little piece is devoid of scary scenes, gruesome murders, or other familiar horror elements. It’s set up as a classic Faustian bargain: a desperate man makes a deal with the devil. In this case, the desperate man is Dave Streeter, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. After an encounter with a creepy stranger (whose last name is an anagram for “devil,” a detail that would be painfully cheesy if King didn’t have Streeter bemusedly point it out), Streeter agrees to the devil’s deal: in exchange for his own health, Streeter names an enemy to suffer all the bad karma that would otherwise have come Streeter’s way. Streeter’s medical plight makes him initially sympathetic, but his choice of “enemy” reveals his petty, vindicative nature: he chooses his wealthy, successful, happy, and virtuous “best friend” Tom, of whom Streeter has always been secretly jealous and resentful.

We all know how this story goes, right? We’ve all seen this episode of The Twilight Zone. Streeter thinks he’s getting a good deal until the end of the story, when he is plunged into eternal damnation. Or maybe Streeter finds a loophole in his demonic contract and pulls a fast one on the devil, gaining both healing for himself and a happy ending for Tom. Right? Actually, no. “Fair Extension’s” twist is that there is no twist: Streeter takes the deal, is stupendously pleased with the results, and lives happily ever after. No regrets, no guilt, no repentance. No “What have I done?!?” scene at the end.

Tom suffers horribly, and King rubs every detail in our face: his health collapses, his family falls apart, his finances disintegrate; he is broken in every way that Job was. (Confiding in Streeter at one point, he even compares himself to the suffering Biblical figure—unaware that Streeter is the cause of all his woes.) King describes Tom’s suffering with gleeful detail, and I’ll confess that King’s blackly comic tone made this very uncomfortable to read. Among the victims here are Tom’s grown children; had his children been younger (i.e. closer to the age of my own kids), I don’t know if I could’ve made it through this story. Give King credit for this: he knows that for most of us, the prospect of losing our families, health, or economic security in an apparently meaningless twist of fate terrifies us much more than any horror-movie monster ever could.

Many of King’s stories center around the question of evil and suffering. In his most compelling exploration of this question, The Stand, King appears to conclude that suffering is part of a “good” divine plan, but one so distant and unknowable that it is for all practical purposes cruel and random. In “Fair Extension’s” twisted retelling of the Job story, King suggests that humanity creates its own suffering. Whether this is an evolution in King’s understanding of evil or just King having fun poking readers in the eye, I don’t know. But it’s an effective idea for a story; and if the technical execution of “Fair Extension” doesn’t quite live up to its premise, it’s still a reassuring sign that King still knows how to take the gloves off from time to time.

Random note: “Fair Extension” takes place in Derry, Maine. As somebody who was obsessed with It back in college, I love references to this, the most unlucky of Stephen King settings. King throws in little Derry landmarks and references that I remember, or imagine I remember, from It.

Next up: “Word Processor of the Gods,” from Skeleton Crew.

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