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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A typical H.P. Lovecraft horror.

Spoiler-filled synposis: A 19th-century gentleman inherits a family estate near the shunned and abandoned town of Jerusalem’s Lot. After a series of escalating supernatural encounters, he learns that he is the last living member of a bloodline damned long ago by its association with a Lovecraftian horror. He spirals into madness and (it’s implied) kills himself to end the family curse.

My thoughts: “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a rare curiousity in the King library: a straight-up pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft. The writing style mirrors Lovecraft’s reasonably closely, and the story itself is an amalgam of several classic Lovecraft tales, most notably “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Rats in the Walls”. It incorporates almost all of the Lovecraft elements: tainted ancestry, rural New England, blasphemous tomes, inexorable descents into madness, mind-shattering revelations about the nature of reality, and (of course) cosmic horrors with unpronounceable names.

And “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a pretty decent homage—not on par with Lovecraft’s best work (since it’s basically just copying those stories), but better than Lovecraft’s weaker efforts. It has two major weaknesses: 1) it falls short of Lovecraft’s feverishly overblown vocabulary of horror; and 2) it is content to recycle Lovecraftian plots and story elements without adding anything new. Readers who aren’t familiar with Lovecraft (as I was not when I first read it) might find “Jerusalem’s Lot” unsettling and compelling. Readers who know their Lovecraft will find this story enjoyable, but in a quaint sort of way.

It’s interesting to me that outside of this story and perhaps one other (“Crouch End,” which we may get to later), King steers clear of overtly Lovecraftian tales. That is not to say that Lovecraftian elements do not crop up; Lovecraft’s influence on modern horror is immense, and King clearly appreciates that. Many of King’s tales contain villains that could be described as somewhat Lovecraftian. But King has never seemed especially interested in the baroque occult trappings of the Lovecraft mythos.

Why is that? I suspect that King simply likes evil that is personal rather than cosmic. Lovecraft’s evil gods are profoundly inhuman and impersonal; they’re malevolent forces of nature, not enemies you can love to hate. King’s bad guys, by contrast, are often quirky and “human” to the extreme. King prefers his villains cruel, petty, and believable. When Lovecraftian threats are present, as in “The Mist,” King usually provides a more recognizably human villain to serve as the story’s primary obstacle. Even King’s most seemingly Lovecraftian villain, the ancient, near-omnipotent “Pennywise” from It, spends most of its time mocking the insecurities of a band of awkward teenage nerds. What evokes a greater emotional response in you: the idea of a distant, uncaring alien demon (and the nihilistic atheism it implies), or the brutal schoolyard bully who makes your everyday life a living hell? King thinks it’s the latter. He likes villains with personalities, and personalities are not much on display in Lovecraft’s nameless gods, insane cultists, and alien monsters.

Which makes this story all the more fun for being (nearly) unique in the King library. Through either deliberate care or simple inexperience (according to Wikipedia, King wrote “Jerusalem’s Lot” in college), King paints very meticulously within Lovecraft’s lines, with few diversions into recognizeably “Stephen King” territory. Which makes for an enteratining story, but perhaps not what you were hoping for when you picked up Night Shift looking to read, you know, a Stephen King story.

One final note: although King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot shares a setting with “Jerusalem’s Lot,” there’s no explicit connection between the short story and the novel beyond the location. In “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the evil is a degenerate cult and its monstrous deity; in ‘Salem’s Lot the problem is vampires. I like that King doesn’t feel the need to tie these more closely together. Jerusalem’s Lot is a clear example of one of his favorite themes: the “bad place,” a geographic location that attracts darkness and evil for no clear reason. The narrator of “Jerusalem’s Lot” describes this King trope well:

I believe… that there are spiritually noxious places, where the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.

Next up: “Fair Extension,” from Full Dark, No Stars.

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Admit it. This is a little scary.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Two hapless travelers get lost in the woods and come across a creepy 1950s-styled small town, where the ghosts of dead rock ‘n’ roll musicians endlessly relive their glory days… much to the dismay of innocent passersby who are forced to listen to them. Forever.

My thoughts: Stephen King loves his rock ‘n’ roll. Read more than 100 pages of King’s writing and you’re certain to run into a tribute to the music of his youth—as the introductory quote to a novel, in the form of lyrics stuck in a protagonist’s head, or playing in the background of a memorable scene. Classic rock clearly means a lot to King, and in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” where King imagines a magical reunion of rock legends as a nightmare, you know he’s having fun with his own obsessions.

Music is a theme in this story from the start; although protagonist Mary and her husband Clark don’t encounter the Rock ‘n’ Roll Reunion from Hell until midway through the story, King repeatedly calls attention to the music they’re listening to (Lou Reed) as they get more and more lost in the Oregon wilderness.

And they do spend quite a while getting lost. Other writers might breeze through this obligatory set-up sequence, but King takes his time, and it works to the story’s benefit. We spend this time getting to know Clark and Mary through their banter and increasing irritation with each other. There are certain types of character interactions that King depicts very convincingly, and this is one of them: spouses who sincerely love each other but who are long past the honeymoon stage of marriage and have since discovered their partner’s quirks to be both endearing and maddening (sometimes both simultaneously), depending on the context. I’m sure King’s long, successful marriage to his wife Tabitha is a large part of what makes these depictions believable and even charming. After just 10 pages of this, I find myself liking Clark and Mary quite a bit.

But moving along: after wandering lost a while (this story takes place before cellphones and GPS devices were commonplace or even imaginable), the two stumble across a picturesque, nostalgic little all-American town with the cutesy name of “Rock and Roll Heaven,” planted inexplicably in the middle of a huge creepy forest wilderness. King often allows his protagonists a certain meta-awareness of their horror-story plights; Mary immediately recognizes that the too-perfect town is creepy as heck, and even mentions its evocation of Twilight Zone episodes and Ray Bradbury stories.

Digging up the horror lurking behind friendly facades is another classic King trope, and it’s not long at all before Mary and Clark come face to face with the true masters of this too-good-to-be-true Norman Rockwell village: zombie rock musicians. Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, and of course Elvis are not exactly alive, but they are well here. The story ends on a rather delightfully chilling note, as Mary and Clark find themselves trapped—a literal captive audience for a rock concert that, it is suggested, may just go on forever.

The idea of an afterlife reunion of tragically deceased rock stars has the potential to be sweetly melancholic rather than horrifying. King addresses this by adding a characteristically gruesome touch: the dead rock stars aren’t mournful ghosts, but disgusting, decaying zombie corpses obsessed with reliving their glory days. (If King had written this story a few years later, he might have made Gen-Xers squirm by adding Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley to the roster.) It works, and produces some memorable imagery: the mental picture of a jukebox filled with blood and gore has stuck with me over the nearly 20 years since I first read this story, and it’s still as disgusting as ever.

Speaking of characteristic King themes, we get a thumbnail version of King’s Job-like take on the theological Problem of Evil, developed more heavily in other King books but not elaborated upon here:

This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.

All in all, this is a great story, mixing familiar horror tropes (lost in the woods! small town with a dark secret!), better-than-average characters and dialogue, and a comically sick premise. King’s sense of humor runs through it as well, and I suspect he was grinning as he typed this one up. (At one point, deceased rockers Ronnie Van Zant and Duane Allman look to Mary like “the sort of fellows who dropped out of high school the third time through the tenth grade in order to spend more time meditating on the joys of drive-train linkages and date-rape.”) Highly recommended, and a good start to my October Stephen King reading.

Next up: “Jerusalem’s Lot,” from Night Shift.

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Every year when Halloween looms on the horizon, I find myself in the mood for scary stuff. In past Octobers, I’ve made a point of watching horror movies, playing horror-themed boardgames, or reading spooky books.

This year, I find myself in a nostalgic mood, so I’m going to spend some of my October reading and reflecting on short stories by Stephen King. I spent a lot of time in college reading King, and although I loved many of his novels, I have always felt that his short stories represent his most interesting and entertaining work. I would go so far as to say that King’s short stories are some of the most memorable tales I read in all of my youth. I’ll be putting those fond memories to the test as I make my way through some of his stories, chosen semi-randomly and in no particular order (but with a bias toward his 1990s-and-earlier stories).

I’m no Stephen King expert, and I claim no special insight or exhaustive knowledge of his writings. I’m just a guy reading some stories and talking about them.

I’ll try to give you some advance notice of the story I’m reading next just in case you want to read it with me. If there are tattered copies of Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, or other King short story collections gathering dust on your bookshelf, dig ’em out and let’s pay them a visit!

First up (tomorrow) is “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” from the 1993 short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Read it with me!

Update: Here’s a list of what I’ve covered so far:

1. You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
2. Jerusalem’s Lot
3. Fair Extension
4. Word Processor of the Gods
5. The Moving Finger
6. The Raft
7. Trucks
8. The Road Virus Heads North
9. The Doctor’s Case
10. The Man in the Black Suit
11. Strawberry Spring
12. Sorry, Right Number
13. The Monkey
14. The Lawnmower Man
15. That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French
16. Beachworld
17. The End of the Whole Mess
18. Sometimes They Come Back
19. Survivor Type
20. Popsy
21. Rainy Season
22. In the Deathroom
23. Children of the Corn
24. Crouch End
25. Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
26. Graveyard Shift
27. I Am the Doorway
28. The Fifth Quarter

[Image from this nice blog post about King’s short story collection Night Shift.]

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