The story: “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” collected in Everything’s Eventual. First published in 1995. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Steve Davis is reeling from his wife’s unexpected demand for a divorce. He agrees to meet her and her lawyer at a fancy restaurant to discuss divorce logistics, but the meeting goes south when an insane maître d’ attacks them with a butcher knife. After a lengthy running battle through the restaurant, Steve and his wife escape, but alas, Steve’s heroics are not enough to save their marriage.

My thoughts: I’ll say it upfront: this story didn’t really work for me. I’ll try to unpack what exactly went amiss.

First things first: I was in a bad mood when I read this story. I had just bungled a parenting situation with my four-year-old son, and it was probably a little unfair to demand that Mr. King cheer me up with a blood-drenched story about a murderous waiter.

But really, I’m not quite sure what King is aiming for with this one. It may simply be that “Lunch at the Gotham Café” tries to address a few too many ideas in the space of 45 pages; in the course of this story, King earnestly muses on the nature of insanity, the cruel fickleness of women, the difficulty of recovering from an addiction (cigarettes), the jerkiness of lawyers, the quirks of married relationships… all wrapped around a 15-page knife fight scene.

The most effective of those things is the knife fight, so let’s talk about that. When it comes to action scenes, King is a believer in extreme detail; he describes every movement, every feint, every swing, every wound, every thought that runs through the protagonist’s mind. This isn’t pointless detail; King knows what he’s doing. The detail serves most obviously to provide a rich mental picture of the scene, but more importantly it stretches out the suspense by making us wait and wait for resolution. The danger is always that the detail will become monotonous, but King is generally aware of the line he shouldn’t cross. This scene isn’t a classic of literary tension, but it works. We wince each time the hero falters, and we cheer each time he gets in a good blow.

The other element of this story that works is the rumination on chemical addiction. Steve is a nicotine addict; he decides abruptly to quit smoking after receiving the divorce notice. King writes convincingly, and even movingly, about the psychological ordeal that going cold-turkey presents. King’s struggles with drug and alcohol addiction are well known and certainly contribute to the authenticity of these passages. This theme feels oddly shoehorned into this story, but what’s there works.

The rest of “Lunch at the Gotham Café” is unsatisfying. King writes often and well about married couples—particularly loving-but-bickering married couples—but he seems to stumble in his depiction of this failed marriage. Diane, the wife, is portrayed as an unrealistically awful person throughout, and when she coldly rudely rebuffs Steve after he saves her life, we’re expected to sneer along with Steve at her petty meanness. (Her lawyer is mean in that lawyer-joke stereotype sort of way—so of course he dies a gruesome death.) I think that King is trying to give us a provocative portrait of two humans who failed at having a relationship—the wife’s faults are obvious, and we can infer from the narrator’s lack of empathy for his wife and his presumed self-serving exaggeration of her unpleasantness that he probably wasn’t Husband of the Year material—but because we have to experience this through his eyes alone, it feels faintly distasteful.

The story closes unnecessarily with Steve musing on the waiter’s insanity and tries to draw a parallel between Steve and the waiter—are crazy people just like us? Who among us might not snap at any minute? Not especially insightful.

I feel a bit bad knocking this story, what with my aforementioned bad mood and all. Mr. King, if the stress of dealing with my son’s potty-training difficulties has caused me to unfairly criticize your work, I apologize. But this story is an unconvincing mishmash of Stephen King themes; he’s done this all better elsewhere. Let’s move on.

Next up: “One for the Road,” in Night Shift.

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The story: “The Cat from Hell,” collected in Just After Sunset. First published in part in 1977. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An aging man hires a hitman to murder his cat, which he believes to be an avenging demonic entity. The cat, he believes, has murdered his family and will soon kill him in revenge for fatal experiments that his pharmaceuticals company conducted on felines years ago. He’s not wrong.

My thoughts: So far, this year’s Stephen King story project has felt a little on the heavy side. We’ve read an intense story of revenge, a strange meditation on suicide, a slow descent into madness, and a gross-out story about a longsuffering parent. “The Cat From Hell” brings a bit of needed levity (albeit gruesome levity) to the mix.

This story falls into the “Nature Strikes Back” subgenre of horror. In this case, nature is striking back against a certain Mr. Drogan, who as the head of a massive pharmaceuticals company oversaw drug development processes that cost the lives of thousands of feline test subjects. Feline revenge has a respectable history in horror: H.P. Lovecraft’s well-regarded story “The Cats of Ulthar” and Poe’s “The Black Cat” both depict bad people getting what they deserve at the hands of cats they’ve mistreated.

The titular cat in this King story is a strangely-colored but otherwise ordinary feline that appeared at Mr. Drogan’s door one day, and was adopted into the family (by Drogan’s elderly sister—Drogan himself hates cats). Before long, all three of Drogan’s housemates are dead: his sister takes a suspicious fall down the stairs, another housemate dies in her sleep, and Drogan’s butler dies in a car accident on the way to have the cat euthanized. The cat returned (unscathed by the car accident, although the dead driver was covered with scratches), and Drogan—convinced that the cat is an avenging beast—has now hired a hitman to get rid of it for good.

There’s not really a lot to the story beyond this basic setup. After hearing this backstory, we follow the bemused and skeptical hitman as he drives the cat out into the country to be done in. Not surprisingly, the cat escapes its container in the car, causes a car crash, and kills the trapped hitman in a horrifically gruesome way. King stretches the “trapped in the crashed car with a murderous cat” scene over many hilariously suspenseful pages, as the mostly immobilized hitman tries to get to his gun while the cat stalks around the car seats and periodically lunges for his face, ears, eyes, crotch, etc. It ends really badly for the hitman.

The story wraps up as the gore-drenched cat races away from the scene of the crime, presumably to pay a final visit to Mr. Drogan.

That’s pretty much it. This is a highly enjoyable, tightly written story that delivers exactly what it promises, no more and no less; which admittedly leaves me without a lot to write about here. I thought about delving into depictions of the cat in horror literature—it’s alternately a creature of both soothing comfort and inhuman terror—but taking this too seriously would spoil the fun.

Next up: “Lunch at the Gotham Café,” in Everything’s Eventual.

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The story: “Dedication”, collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1988.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A hotel maid recounts her interactions with a brilliant, but also deeply unpleasant, author who was a regular guest at her hotel in the 1960s. Despite the author’s racism and general misanthropy, she considers him the spiritual father of her son, who grew up to become a published writer as well. But there’s a really unpleasant central element to this story that will make it hard for you to keep track of the actual plot.

My thoughts: Ewwwww. Gross.

This is gross-out story, plain and simple. If the summary I provided above makes it sound inspiring or even feel-good… well, you’re not wrong. But there’s a gross-out element involving bodily fluids that, I promise, will obliterate your ability to appreciate the story’s otherwise rather noble intentions.

For better or worse, there’s a fair amount going on here besides said gross-out detail, so let’s try and focus on those things.

At its heart, this is a story about the sacrifices a mother makes for the sake of her child. Martha, the protagonist, is a poor black woman married to an abusive thug during the Civil Rights era. Pregnant, confused and desperate, she seeks out the counsel of a bruja—a witch—who provides Martha with cryptic predictions and a presumably magic-infused mushroom. Perhaps without fully realizing what she’s doing, Martha uses the mushroom to improve her unborn son’s future: first by mystically transferring “fathership” of her child from her abusive husband to a brilliant, if unpleasant, author; and second by indirectly killing her abusive husband before he can kill the baby. Martha’s is a stoic and unsentimental, but irrestistably strong, maternal love, and one suspects that King is paying tribute here to his own mother, who raised young Stephen and his siblings as a single mother.

The other element—interesting, but not especially insightful—is the paradox of the beloved celebrity who is actually a horrible person. King claims to have written this story to explore this contradiction after meeting a greatly respected author who turned out, when encountered in person, to be an awful human being.

But really, this story is about the gross-out. In an era when torture porn is an actual thing that people watch, and where the main topic of discussion after every Game of Thrones episode is “Did this week’s rape scene go too far?”, “Dedication” is maybe a little quaint (and thankfully non-violent) in its grossness. But it’s still, well, gross. A side character in “Dedication” who learns of this detail rushes out of the room to vomit.

In a defensive afterward to this story, King acknowledges this story’s ickiness and pre-emptively pushes back against criticism:

The stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes are, for the most part, the sort that critics categorize (and then all too often dismiss, alas) as horror stories, and the horror story is supposed to be a kind of evil-tempered junkyard dog that will bite you if you get too close. This one bites, I think. Am I going to apologize for that? Do you think I should? Isn’t that—the risk of getting bitten—one of the reasons you picked this book up in this first place? And if you get thinking of me as your kindly old Uncle Stevie, a sort of end-of-the-century Rod Sterling, I will try even harder to bite you.

I really, truly respect that. But do you want to know a secret? Here it is: Stephen King’s bark is usually much worse than his bite. For all his reputation as a spinner of blood-curdling, horrifying tales, King’s writing becomes extremely comfortable—would it offend him if I said safe?—after extended exposure. In fact, one of the reasons I’m enjoying these Stephen King story projects so much is the cozy feeling of familiarity I feel when reading King’s prose! For that reason, I respect and sympathize with King’s occasional efforts to lash out and jar the reader. I can honestly count the number of genuinely upsetting King-written scenes I’ve read over the decades on one hand (OK, maybe two hands—and for what it’s worth, “Dedication” is not among them). That’s still a pretty safe ratio, I think; but it’s good to know that there’s a chance, even a small one, when you pick up a Stephen King book, that King’s going to slip a genuine shocker past your guard.

Stephen King doesn’t want to be safe. But for better or worse, he probably is the kindly Uncle Stevie he so fears becoming. I salute his occasional efforts to shove you out of your comfort zone. In some ways, the rarity with which this happens makes it more effective.

But you know what? Give “Dedication” a skip. If you want to be horrified by King, there are better options.

Next up: “The Cat From Hell,” in Just After Sunset.

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The story: “N.”, collected in Just After Sunset. First published in 2008. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A psychiatrist counsels a new patient who exhibits extreme symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The patient, referred to in the doctor’s notes as “N.”, claims that his compulsive, ritual behavior is necessary to prevent the incursion into this world of extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horrors. When N. commits suicide, the psychiatrist investigates… and soon comes to share the late N.’s obsessions.

My thoughts: King once again returns to the themes and mythology of H.P. Lovecraft in this novella-length story. Although King notes in the closing notes of Just After Sunset that “N.” is an homage to Arthur Machen’s influential 1890 horror story The Great God Pan, it’s got “Lovecraft” written all over it.

And you know: it’s hard to make a Lovecraftian tale hit home these days. For one, Lovecraft’s tentacled monsters can seem more goofy than terrifying (my wife sips her morning coffee while wearing adorable plush Cthulhu bathroom slippers). The nihilist vision that lay behind Lovecraft’s stories—the fear that Christianity might be horribly wrong about mankind’s place in the cosmos—lacks the punch it had a century ago. And have I mentioned the racism?

All of this makes it interesting to see King returning to explicitly Lovecraftian territory late in his career. King has riffed on Lovecraft in earlier short stories, notably “Jerusalem’s Lot” and “Crouch End,” both of which paint rather neatly within the lines of the Lovecraftian sub-genre. With “N.”, however, King has found a twist with which to make the mythos his own: OCD. The man called N. stumbled (he says) across a Stonehenge-esque circle of stones while exploring rural Maine. A glimpse of something horrific in the circle convinced him that only through continuous, repetitive, time-consuming ritual acts (centered around numbers and geometry) can the unraveling fabric of reality be strengthened against the efforts of the nightmare entities trying to break through it. Without these activities, combined with regular, harrowing trips to the circle to spiritually reinforce it, the circle will fail and release whatever it’s holding back.

After confessing all this to his psychiatrist, N. commits suicide, overwhelmed by the singular burden of having to keep the world safe. The psychiatrist (who narrates most of the story through his counseling session reports) proceeds to investigate, encounters the same circle and Lovecraftian menace (a being called “Cthun”), descends into the same madness that claimed N., and kills himself as well. The story’s final pages suggest that several other people (the psychiatrist’s sister, and then a family friend) follow the two men into obsession and suicide; we imagine these four doomed souls as very short-lived links in a chain that has stretched through centuries or millenia.

The theatrical Lovecraftian bits of “N.” (the gothic circle of stones, the tentacled Cthun) are familiar and unremarkable. But what King absolutely nails about the Lovecraft mythos here is the insidious, merciless power of knowledge. What dooms these characters is what they know—once the veil of ignorance about the true, precarious state of humanity is torn away, they can never un-learn what they now know. In Lovecraft’s world, truth is a toxic meme, spreading from person to person with fatal results. Like a virus, it spreads to a new host just as the old host begins to break down. And even if it isn’t truth—if these characters are killed by a shared delusion—then we’re still dealing with something considerably more terrifying (in a 21st-century context) than Lovecraft’s slimy fish-gods: a deadly, highly contagious piece of information.

This is a very strong story. It’s light-years beyond straight-up Lovecraft pastiches like “Jerusalem’s Lot.” It makes use of Lovecraft staples like an epistolary narrative and descents into madness, but in the service of a very Stephen King tale. Highly recommended.

Next up: “Dedication,” in Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

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The story: “The Reaper’s Image,” collected in Skeleton Crew. First published in 1969. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An arrogant art collector visits a private museum to inspect, and possibly purchase, a famous antique mirror. The mirror, however, is reputed to be cursed. Think something bad might happen when the scoffing collector gazes into it?

My thoughts: There are a lot of ways you can doom yourself in a horror story. You might decide to descend alone into the lightless basement to check the circuit breaker. You might lean forward to examine the “dead” monster at extremely close range, because it’s dead and there’s no way it poses any danger to you. And here’s another way you can telegraph your impending death: scoff derisively at people who insist that an object is cursed and that you should stop messing with it.

Short, simple, and predictable, “The Reaper’s Image” follows this convention precisely. It features only two characters: a sneering art collector who hopes to buy a famous antique mirror, and the mirror’s old caretaker, who has witnessed its curse in action firsthand. As legend goes, every great now and then, a person looking into the mirror spots something reflected in it that nobody else can see—something that looks like a shadowy figure standing behind them. Once you’ve seen it, you’re destined to vanish without a trace shortly afterwards.

As cursed antiques go, the mirror is mildly interesting. It dates back several centuries, and intriguingly it seems to “claim” people infrequently and randomly. There is mention of a small handful of other sister mirrors—some long destroyed, others in private collections—that might or might not also be cursed. And the curse itself is anti-climactic, but in a good way: instead of the cursed person dying in a freak accident or dropping of a heart attack on the spot, they are seized with a desire to leave the room (to get a drink of water, to grab something they forgot in another room, etc.). And once they step outside the door, they simply never return.

“The Reaper’s Image” is fun, but very lightweight compared to many of the other stories collected in Skeleton Crew. I note that its late-1960s publication date must make it one of King’s earliest published stories, which probably explains why it feels like a practice exercise rather than a fully-developed work. King is always happy to build off of familiar genre tropes, but usually he gives them one or two good twists to make his stories rise above the clichés. Here he doesn’t, and so “The Reaper’s Image” feels like a piece of pleasant filler. That said, it takes a grand total of about ten minutes of your life to read—that’s how much time I spend every night trying to convince my four-year-old son to use the potty before bed, and reading a mediocre Stephen King story is way more enjoyable than that.

Next up: “N.,” in Just After Sunset.

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The story: “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” collected in Everything’s Eventual. First published in 2001. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A travelling salesman checks into a hotel in rural Nebraska intending to kill himself. However, his desire to pursue an unusual hobby/obsession just might be strong enough to keep him alive. The story ends ambiguously, leaving us unsure about his ultimate fate.

My thoughts: This is an odd, somber story. It’s somber because it immerses us in the mental state of a man contemplating suicide. It’s odd because the hobby that might give this man the strength to go on living is a bizarre one: he obsessively records bathroom-wall graffiti from public restrooms all around America. This is certainly not the first time that King has tenuously balanced a serious topic with a borderline bad-taste gimmick in the same tale. But he has a way of making these things work.

The focus on suicide makes me wonder what I would have made of this story had I encountered it during my big Stephen King obsession back in late high school and early college. At the time, I was writing mopey, overly-earnest short stories that involved a lot of death, suicide, and self-sacrifice; while I certainly wouldn’t have suggested that suicide was a good thing, it had a sort of romantic ring to it. (You can blame a too-young reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Or maybe Shōgun.) Today, however, with many years between me and my immature teenage self, it’s just a terribly sad thing to ponder. Not knowing where King was going with the topic, and not entirely trusting him to treat it with delicacy (the bathroom-graffiti sideplot didn’t help), I read this story nervously.

I’m relieved and happy to have been wrong, though. King’s empathy for Alfie, the suicidal salesman, is palpable. Alfie’s suicidal thoughts aren’t prompted by a single failure or point of shame, but rather by the accumulated weight of a life that has lost purpose. But Alfie is a good man and we desperately want him to pull through. I imagine that most authors can be said to “love” their invented characters, but read a few King tales and I think you’ll agree with me when I say that King goes a step further—he’s often actively rooting for his characters. Even the bad ones! (Look at King’s obvious love for the incredibly varied cast of The Stand, for instance.) For this reason, even though this story ends with the possibility that Alfie will go on to kill himself, you’re left with a very strong hunch that it’s going to be OK. Why wouldn’t we feel this way when the story itself seems to want Alfie to live?

So let’s talk about that bizarre hobby of Alfie’s: he records bathroom graffiti. Obscene limericks, lowbrow witticisms, incoherent pronouncements, and cries for help—Alfie records it all in his notebook, and over time starts to feel that he’s put his finger on the pulse of a dark, hidden, fascinating undercurrent of raw humanity. Alfie dissects the grammar of insane rants; he critiques the meter of dirty poems; he mulls over particularly compelling phrases. I expected at first that Alfie’s hobby was giving him a glimpse into what would prove to be some kind of supernatural, occult underworld lurking beneath the surface of American society; but King doesn’t go in that direction. Instead Alfie seems to have found a window into America’s clever, crazy, base, and 100% human collective id.

The very weirdness of this hobby might be what saves Alfie in the end—he delays suicide several times because he doesn’t want the police to find his graffiti journal and conclude that he was just crazy.

In his nonfiction writing, King has often sighed about the kinds of questions his fans direct at him, most especially “Where do you get your ideas?” But many King story ideas can be seen to originate in “everyday stuff you bump into as you go through life”—mundane things like road construction or graffiti. Whereas you and I have trained our minds to disregard the petty, routine details of everyday life, King is always on the lookout for ways to fit a story around them.

And need I mention that this story gives King a perfect excuse to recite a lot of dirty limericks that he’s clearly proud of? Admit it—that’d be pretty fun.

Next up: “The Reaper’s Image,” in Skeleton Crew.

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The story: “Dolan’s Cadillac,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1985. Wikipedia entry here. Read my introduction to this blog series.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Elizabeth Robinson was murdered by car-bomb years ago by a wealthy, untouchable mob boss named Dolan to stop her from testifying against him in court. Unbeknownst to Dolan, her husband—an unremarkable, unassuming, forgettable man—has been plotting and planning ever since, waiting patiently for just the right opportunity to strike back. One summer, Robinson rigs an elaborate trap for Dolan on a Nevada highway… and manages to permanently bury Dolan and his beloved Cadillac beneath the desert sands.

My thoughts: Ah, revenge—the dish best served cold. “Dolan’s Cadillac” is a straightfoward and mostly satisfying story of long-delayed revenge, with almost no hint of the supernatural. In my last King short story writeup two years ago (“The Fifth Quarter”), I asserted that King is at least as good at writing mundane suspense as he is at writing supernatural horror. “Dolan’s Cadillac” is a solid example of that.

Revenge stories involving crime bosses and murdered wives are about as cliché as you can get. To give this hoary old chestnut a new spin, King subverts the trope of the hardcore vigilante avenger by making his protagonist a thoroughly average person, a man with no special revenge-related skills. He not a former special forces soldier, an intelligence agent with a “very particular set of skills,” a grizzled off-duty cop, or a millionaire martial-artist with an armored suit. Instead he’s a grade-school teacher, and through him King asks a fun what-if question: how would you, an average everyday person with a liberal arts degree and a boring office job, go about taking down a wealthy, paranoid, heavily-guarded mob boss?

King has fun with this concept. Robinson, the protagonist, considers but quickly discards Hollywood-esque revenge plans involving guns and cinematic heroics. Instead, he enacts (over the course of several years) an elaborate (maybe over-elaborate) plan of revenge that makes use of mundane skills and tools. When he notices that Dolan periodically travels along a specific stretch of desert highway, Robinson takes a summer job as a road construction worker. When the conditions are just right, he uses his skills to dig a long trench—just the right size to trap a car and prevent its passengers from escaping. Once he manages to detour Dolan’s Cadillac right into it, he buries the car and its passenger beneath tons of earth and asphalt.

In the afterward to Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King describes the process of writing this story as an excrutiating one due to the extensive research he had to do to make the trap plausible. And in fact, King spends the vast bulk of this story detailing the creation of Robinson’s trap. King is probably trying too hard: there is a palpable sense that King really wants you to accept this as something that could realistically be accomplished by one sufficiently dedicated man. It’s an admirable goal, and it succeeds, but at the cost of bloating the story’s page count considerably. King uses all the road-construction detail to stretch the suspense as far as it can go—but he stops just shy of the point where the story shifts from “suspenseful” to “boring.” I’ll admit I was starting to skim as Robinson’s preparations dragged on.

But the payoff proves worth waiting for. For one thing, as Robinson seals Dolan in his buried car, there’s a fun reference to “The Cask of Amontillado” for obvious reasons. And there’s a wonderful and characteristically King exchange between Robinson and the trapped Dolan, who (realizing he’s about to be buried alive) tries to bargain for his life:

“Five million.” It was the last coherent thing he [Dolan] said.

“I think not,” I replied, leaning on the shovel and wiping sweat off my forehead with the heel of one grimy hand. The dirt covered the roof of the car almost from side to side now. It looked like a starburst… or a large brown hand grasping Dolan’s Cadillac. “But if you can make a sound come out of your mouth which is as loud, let us say, as eight sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet, then I will get you out, and you may count on it.”

So he screamed, and I shoveled dirt down on the Cadillac. For some time he did indeed scream very loudly, although I judged he never screamed louder than two sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet. Three, at most.

Oh, Stephen King. It’s so good to be reading your stories again.

One last observation: as I mentioned above, there is almost no trace of the supernatural in this story. His dead wife Elizabeth does, however, speak to Robinson throughout—although I think this is probably best understood as Robinson’s subconscious. If it is the ghost of his wife, it breaks ranks with the stereotype in an interesting way: it’s bloodthirsty, urging Robinson on toward revenge and relentlessly pushing him forward, even when he’s physically exhausted. This is intriguingly different from the usual stereotype, in which the dead wife is depicted as so pure and innocent that you can’t really imagine her truly wanting her husband to cut a bloody swath of vengeance in her name.

Next up: “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” in Everything’s Eventual.

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