The story: “Mile 81,” collected in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. First published in 2011. (Incomplete) Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A bizarre, mostly-immobile alien creature, crudely camouflaged as a run-down vehicle, appears at an abandoned highway rest stop, where it waits for Good Samaritans to approach and then eats them. After a sequence of hapless people are killed, a trio of kids drives the creature off by burning it with a magnifying glass.

Photo © Bangor Daily News.

So let’s walk through the major Stephen King themes that make appearances in “Mile 81.” First up is boyhood nostalgia. The closest person to a main protagonist in this story is a 10-year-old boy named Pete, who has one foot in the innocence of childhood and the other in the scary, exciting world of Growing Up. The entire first third of the story simply follows Pete as he makes his way to and then explores the abandoned Mile 81 rest stop. It is Pete who will ultimately use his Kid Ingenuity to figure out how to drive off the monster lurking at the rest stop.

Many horror and fantasy stories are coming-of-age tales, and a good number of the genre’s great writers specifically use preteen boyhood as the framework for their horror: several that spring immediately to mind include Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Peter Straub’s Shadowland, and King’s own It. I won’t delve into the (fascinating!) intricacies of this sub-genre now, but a common feature in such stories is that the “magical worldview” of childhood lets kids triumph over supernatural evil, while grown-ups (who set aside their belief in the magical and supernatural upon Coming of Age) are often helpless against it. That’s certainly the case in “Mile 81;” Pete (and two other small children who join him for the story’s conclusion) accept at face value that they’re dealing with an evil man-eating alien monster and act decisively; every single adult who appears in the story falls victim to it because they simply don’t/can’t recognize or believe what they’re dealing with.

The next recognizable Stephen King staple here is the random and unexplained manifestation of evil, in a form that is uncomfortably both terrifying (a shapeshifting horror!) and ridiculous (…that looks like an old car and eats people!). Many of King’s best stories exhibit a worldview in which Bad Stuff happens to Good People for no discernable reason or grand purpose. King also likes exploit the awkwardness we feel when confronted by an Evil Thing that is both legitimately scary and slightly goofy at the same time. Shape-changing alien blobs and killer cars fall squarely into that tortured category.

Lastly, King loves his characters. Read a few King stories and you’ll quickly see how much he enjoys sketching out the backstories of everyone who crosses into his tales—even minor throwaway characters who exist in the story only to be killed off horribly. Several such characters appear here (all of the doomed adults), and King lavishes several pages of non-essential but highly entertaining background for each of them, giving us a feel for the life choices and quirks of personality that make them the kind of people who will pull into an abandoned rest stop to investigate a creepy-looking car. There’s a Bible-thumping lay preacher (King James Version only, of course!) who wants more than anything to emulate the Good Samaritan; there’s the lesbian horse trainer who can’t not stop to help somebody in need; there’s the vacationing family of four that any parent will quickly relate to. (The parents are killed, but the plucky children survive, although they’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of their lives.)

These are all great themes—story elements that King obviously loves and that he rarely fails to put to good use. “Mile 81” falters in just a few areas, notably its odd pacing: Pete is the main character for the first third, then disappears entirely to be replaced by a series of short sketches of doomed grown-ups, after which he abruptly reappears in the final pages to defeat the monster. The depiction of young children in action is mostly good. Pete is a believable ten-year-old, although the slang terminology he uses feels rooted in King’s own childhood rather than the modern era in which this story takes place. There’s a very likeable six-year-old who is a little too worldly-wise for her years (I say this as the father of a precocious daughter), and her little brother who goes through fairly plausible four-year-old mood swings between mourning his eaten-by-a-monster parents and wanting to retrieve his Transformers toys from the car. The tone of the story’s finale, however, is strangely upbeat and light-hearted given that two of the three survivors just watched their parents get devoured by an alien.

But all in all, this works well. It’s a good choice with which to open a short story collection, both for its general quality and because it’s a very recognizably Stephen King story. Recommended.

Next up: Let’s stick with The Bazaar of Bad Dreams for a bit here, and tackle the next story in the collection: “Premium Harmony.”

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The story: “Night Surf,” collected in Night Shift. First published in 1969 (but revised heavily for its inclusion in Night Shift a decade later). Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A small band of teenagers has survived an apocalyptic plague that has wiped out most of the rest of the world’s population. But they’ve succumbed to a hopeless nihilism, and are starting a descent into barbarism. As the story ends, one of them falls ill, and the others realize that they may not be immune to the plague after all.

Not quite like this. But I can’t miss a chance to post the greatest video game cover art ever.

In most grand post-apocalyptic stories, the plucky heroes of the tale eventually encounter a band of barbaric marauders roaming the wastes looking for victims. These marauders are usually more than a little crazy, often bloodthirsty or even cannibalistic, and are led by the most clever or brutal of their number. Or they’ve formed a sick, murderous religious cult that they believe protects them from extinction. They’re a dark mirror of the heroes: heroes cling to their humanity in the face of apocalypse, but these lost souls have surrendered their humanity and live cruel, almost beastlike lives.

“Night Surf” paints us a picture of the sort of people who, having somehow survived the apocalypse, are on the verge of embracing madness and nihilism. Despite their survival, they’ve lost all hope for their future, and lack the moral strength to rebuild… or do much of anything besides wait around for death. As the story begins, they have just crossed a line into barbarism: they’ve murdered a dying plague victim as a sort-of-joking sacrifice to any dark gods out there that might spare them from the plague. They don’t really believe it, but what can it hurt, right?

Bernie, the main protagonist, remembers just enough of his conscience to understand that what they’ve done isn’t funny or appropriate; it’s horrible. But he went along with it anyway. He’s a bitter, unlikable person, cruel to his girlfriend (a fellow survivor) and constantly pulled into memories of the times before the plague, when everything was OK and they weren’t bad people.

Little actually happens, plot-wise, in “Night Surf;” it’s mostly a simple portrait of despair. As the story ends, it’s looking like everyone is going to get what’s coming to them: one of the group of survivors comes down with plague symptoms, and the rest of them begin to process the fact that their perceived immunity might be just one more cruel cosmic joke.

It’s a sad and understated story, which feels strange to say given that it features a killer plague and a band of murderous survivors. King effectively balances the hopelessness of the survivors’ lives with memories of more innocent times, with the result that you feel pity for these lost characters, rather than anger or hate.

“Night Surf” has an obvious connection to King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand, and is presumably set in the same universe as (or in an early version of) that novel. In The Stand, a superplague wipes out most of the world population, and a ragtag band of survivors bands together to rebuild society. The lost souls of “Night Surf,” if they survive the plague, would almost certainly wind up in the camp of The Stand‘s villain, who gathers weak-willed and evil-inclined survivors into his cruel community.

This is a good story that cuts deeper than I expected. And it’s got me eyeing my copy of The Stand, which is surely due for another re-read one of these years….

Next up: By happy coincidence, King has just released a new short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. I don’t think I can resist, so let’s go ahead and look next at the first story in that collection, “Mile 81.” I’ll be tackling this at a slower pace than before… which gives you some time to run out and buy a copy!

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The story: “Battleground,” collected in Night Shift. First published in 1972. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: After murdering his latest target—a toy company executive—a hitman receives a package in the mail… from the victim’s mother. It’s full of little G.I. Joe toy soldiers, who come to life and wage an extended battle against the hitman in his high-rise apartment.

My thoughts: Short, simple, and fun, “Battleground” isn’t the sort of story that invites deep reflection or discussion. There’s just something wonderfully appealing about the thought of a troop of little green plastic soldiers running around performing cute little military maneuvers. But let me point out a few things.

First, by an odd coincidence this is the second story featuring a hitman protagonist that I’ve read this month. I don’t think King does this especially often (King superfans, please correct me); but a hitman does have a few benefits as a protagonist in a horror story. For one, they’re usually armed and dangerous, so you can drop them into tight situations and expect that they’ll put up a good fight. For another, they’re by definition bad people—so while we might cheer them on as they face off against supernatural threats, we don’t mind when they inevitably die in the end. They deserve it.

Secondly, this story, short as it is, accomplishes something that many horror films and stories do not: it skips the usual extended sequence where the protagonist, confronted with evidence of the supernatural, spends a long time questioning his sanity and trying to explain away the situation rationally. When the reader/audience knows for certain that the supernatural element of the story is real, it’s tedious to wait for the protagonist(s) to finally catch up. In “Battlefront,” we get to jump right into the action because Renshaw, the hitman, always puts the practicalities of survival first: it might make no logical sense that he’s being attacked by toy soldiers, but he’ll ask the troubling questions after he’s taken care of the threat.

Unfortunately for Renshaw, he’s not going to survive this engagement. He puts up a good fight, taking down toy helicopters and dodging rocket attacks as he makes a fighting retreat into his apartment’s bathroom. After a humorous nod to World War 2 general Anthony McAuliffe’s famous “NUTS” letter, Renshaw comes up with a desperate plan to sneak around the outside of the high-rise and surprise-attack the toy soldiers with a homemade Molotov cocktail. Unfortunate for Renshaw, he underestimates the firepower at his enemy’s disposal; he is blasted to pieces when the soldiers detonate a toy nuke.

Although “living dolls” and other animated toys have a history of being utterly terrifying when deployed in horror stories and film, the animated soldiers here are not scary; I was cheering them on throughout and hoping they’d manage to take down Renshaw. It’s a funny story, and like “The Reaper’s Image” early this month, makes for a nice bit of filler to read in between more intense King short stories.

Next up: “Night Surf,” in Night Shift.

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The story: The Langoliers, collected in Four Past Midnight. First published in 1990. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A handful of passengers on a red-eye flight across America wake up to find that the rest of the passengers—and the plane’s crew—have vanished into thin air. They manage to land the plane (one of the group is a pilot), only to find that the world is gray and dead—they have gone back in time, but it turns out the past is an empty shadow of the present. And strange creatures called the langoliers, who “tidy up” history by literally devouring the past, are headed their way.

My thoughts: The Langoliers was the story that launched my decades-long Stephen King obsession.

I was in late high school (so 1992 or thereabouts) when my mom came home from the library with a copy of Four Past Midnight. I had never read anything by Stephen King before, and in fact viewed him with faint suspicion and distaste. To this day I’m not sure what led my mom to pick up that book for me from the library, but I’m glad she did.

I read two of the four novellas in Four Past Midnight before the book had to be returned to the library: The Langoliers and The Sun Dog. I don’t recall which one I read first, but I know that while The Sun Dog left little impression on me, The Langoliers absolutely blew my mind. I’d never read anything quite like it in all my years of voracious reading. I went on to read The Stand, followed by It, and by then my addiction was real.

All this to say that I’ve both looked forward to, and dreaded, returning at last to The Langoliers, which I never revisited after my initial reading. Like most of the King stories I read in the early days of my King addiction, it sits atop a very high pedestal; and I’ve often wondered if it really was that good, or if that’s just the nostalgia talking. (Some of the King novels I’ve re-read, such as The Stand, have lived up to their reputation and my own memories. Others, like It, proved disappointing on a re-read.)

So how is The Langoliers? It’s not as mind-bogglingly good as I remember, but it’s not bad, either. The setup is excellent: a motley crew of airline passengers trapped on a plane, all dropped into the deep end of a seemingly impossible mystery. They’re up against two threats: an external threat in the form of the “langoliers,” reality-devouring monsters who “clean up” the past; and an internal threat in the form of one of their own number, who is deeply, homicidally crazy.

When this novella was first published in 1990, I suspect that the piece of pop culture it called most immediately to mind was one of two Twilight Zone episodes: “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” in which a commercial airliner travels into the past, or possibly “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—two classic uses of air travel as a horror-suspense setting. But a modern reading of The Langoliers evokes instead evangelical Rapture fiction, notably the execreble Left Behind series… which also features a handful of passengers discovering that everybody else on the plane has vanished, leaving behind a scattering of clothes, false teeth, purses, and other uncomfortably intimate items. But The Langoliers predates Left Behind, if not the dispensationalist obsession with the Second Coming; and as the passengers discuss the meaning of what’s happened, nobody ever mentions the Rapture as a possibility.

What follows is 200 pages of competent suspense (not horror, really) storytelling. The surviving crew contains the usual assortment of stock characters ranging from the mundane (The Coming of Age Kid, The Writer) to the somewhat ridiculous (the British Secret Agent), and each of the characters gets their chance to shine at some point in the narrative. Most of the action takes places on the ground, once the group manages to land their plane; alone in a completely empty and lifeless airport, they use clues in the environment to deduce (with implausible accuracy) the nature of their predicament, and figure out a way to get the plane airborne again and back through the time-warp that brought them here. It’s at this point that the crazy guy (a well-written example of the Insane Psycho, a staple Stephen King character) strikes, and also that the heroes get their first glimpse of the rapidly-approaching, all-consuming langoliers. A redshirt character dies, a few Noble Sacrifices take place, the bad guy gets what’s coming to him, and the heroes finally escape back into the present time.

The Langoliers is competent, but strangely for its relatively short length, actually comes close to dragging at points. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but I get the feeling when reading King novels from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s that somewhere during this period, King’s editors stopped doing much to reign in King’s verbose tendencies. In The Langoliers, as in It and other novels from this era, King belabors routine sequences, lets slips some cringeworthy dialogue (“Now I find myself involved in a mystery a good deal more extravagant than any I would ever have dared to write,” says the writer character at one point) and gets a bit too maudlin when handling emotional scenes. It’s not unenjoyable, but it’s Stephen King at his “safest.” The only glimmers of good ol’ Stephen King viciousness are found in the excellent sequences told from the viewpoint of the doomed, unsettlingly sympathetic psycho character.

This is good stuff. But it also feels like Stephen King on cruise control; The Langoliers is caught awkwardly between the cutthroat intensity of King’s early novels and the more mature reflection of his later work.

A closing note: The Langoliers is generally referred to as a novella, although at 230 pages I’m not sure why we don’t just consider it a regular-length novel. My guess is that by the late 1980s, King’s legendary writing pace had produced a backlog of novels awaiting release, so his publisher packed the four shortest manuscripts into an anthology and called it Four Past Midnight.

Next up: “Battleground,” in Night Shift.

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The story: “One for the Road,” collected in Night Shift. First published in 1977. Wikipedia entry here. Note that this post contains spoilers not only for “One for the Road,” but for the novel ‘Salem’s Lot.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An aging resident of small-town Maine relates a haunting story from his past involving the dead and cursed town of ‘Salem’s Lot. Years ago, a traveller passing through the area with his family runs off the road in a blizzard near ‘Salem’s Lot (the same town featured King’s early short story “Jerusalem’s Lot”); he seeks help at a tavern a few miles away. The narrator and another local accompany the desperate man to recover his wife and daughter from the stranded car—but when they arrive, both have become vampires. The husband is killed (er, vampirized), and the two locals flee for their lives.

My thoughts: Another vampire story! “One for the Road” is best read as an epilogue to the (excellent) vampire novel ‘Salem’s Lot; without that context, it loses much of its impact. Whether or not you read it in connection with that novel, however, this is a short, simple story that belongs to the “Want to hear about something spooky that happened to me?” around-the-campfire genre. It all builds to the vampire encounter in the final pages—a conclusion that is telegraphed from the story’s opening pages but is nonetheless creepy and tense when it unfolds.

Cantankerous yet good-hearted rural residents of Maine (my wife, who went to college in Maine, tells me these are called “Mainiacs,” but I refuse to believe that) are a regular feature in Stephen King stories, and it’s obvious he has both a personal familiarity with and a fondness for these characters. When a traveler arrives at a small-town tavern looking for help recovering his wife and daughter from their stranded car, the protagonist and his fellow locals seem reluctant to get involved, which initially strikes us as callous. But as the story unfolds, we learn that there’s a good reason for their attitude: ‘Salem’s Lot, the town where the traveler’s car went off the road, is a “bad place.” Nobody actually likes to say words like “vampire” out loud, but everybody knows that you steer clear of the Lot if you know what’s best for you. In the end, the locals risk their lives to help the traveler, but to no avail: unable to convince him that the vampire stories are true, they can only watch as he falls victim to his now-vampire wife and daughter.

If you’ve read ‘Salem’s Lot (and you should—it’s a clever, multilayered novel, and one of King’s best), this story is a nice epilogue, although it doesn’t actually give you much new information. In the novel, the town of ‘Salem’s Lot acquires a new resident: a Stoker-esque European vampire who proceeds over the course of the novel to turn the entire town into vampire slaves. Although the heroes of ‘Salem’s Lot finally manage to destroy the master vampire, they are forced to flee in the face of an entire town of feral, masterless vampires. The novel ends with the only two survivors returning to ‘Salem’s Lot to burn it down. “One for the Road” mentions a massive fire that occurred in the recent past, but clearly indicates that its effect was only temporary, as the ruined town is still haunted by the undead.

King’s vampires are intriguingly traditional, especially when you consider that at the time that ‘Salem’s Lot and “One for the Road” were published, Anne Rice was radically redefining the vampire genre by casting the undead as tragically hip aesthetes. King’s vampire mythology, by contrast, is straight out of Bram Stoker: a cultured, highly intelligent, and demonically evil master vampire (served by a still-living “Renfield”) whose victims become monstrous undead who are weaker and subservient, but also possessed of an animal cunning. I’ve nothing against Anne Rice’s take, but after several decades of sympathetic vampires, it’s nice to face off against a flock of inhuman, bloodthirsty, and horrifyingly clever fiends.

One last observation: this story’s closing shocker is that the traveler’s seven-year-old daughter is a now a vampire too; we’re meant to mourn this repulsive corruption of innocence. This is a powerful theme (even Anne Rice, with her sympathetic take on the genre, wrings a lot of unease out of the idea of a child vampire). Unfortunately, a decade or two of horror and J-horror films involving creepy children has muted some of the shock value here.

Next up: “The Langoliers,” in Four Past Midnight. “The Langoliers” is technically a novella, not a short story, but I’ve been reading it over the last few days.

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