Stephen King Re-Read Part Four: Rage

I'll admit, I was unsure about whether or not I should include this one in the re-read. For one, King himself has taken this book out of print and I was concerned that some might not be able to get their hands on it. More than this though, the subject matter is something that, for obvious reasons, is going to read a lot differently in 2016 than it did when King first published it in 1977. However, if we're going to do a full Stephen King re-read, then that means a full re-read, which includes Rage.

Rage was the first of seven novels that King wrote and published under the pen name Richard Bachman. One of the five novels that preceded Carrie in creation, if not in publication, King started writing Rage in high school, and describes it as an attempt to deal with his own frustrations and pains in transitioning to adulthood. It's a novel that, along with the short story Cain Rose Up, will be a lot more disturbing now than when it was initially written.

If a high school student wrote something like this today, it would be a huge red flag, and I think that this shift in perception that's occurred since King first wrote Rage is impossible to ignore. School shootings are a fact of life now. A week scarcely goes by without some kid shooting up a classroom in some part of the country, which is something that nobody could have seen coming in the pre-Columbine years when a young Stephen King was first graduating college.

Part of the reason that King himself took the book out of print is because there was supposedly a connection between it and at least one actual school shooting. Whether or not there's any validity to this is a different conversation. What we're here to do is examine the book itself, but in doing so the greater social issues surrounding school shootings are no doubt going to come up.

As far as the story itself goes, it's alright I suppose. Not King's worst story, though certainly not his best either. It's clearly something written by a young author, one who hasn't yet mastered the craft and is still trying to find his literary voice. If nothing else it's certainly a story that makes one consider the nature of rage, and how people deal with long-festering anger, as well as the tragic consequences of allowing such feelings to gestate unheeded.

Charlie Decker's hostage situation is treated as a cathartic experience, with each of the students using it as an outlet to unleash their own negative feelings over their lives. In the end it's the straight man, Ted Jones, that the classroom turns against, representing the rejection of social norms. Though reading it now, the story obviously differs jarringly from the tragic narrative with which we've all become familiar, taken in the context of when King first wrote it, Charlie Decker seems like a dark-side-of-the-moon metaphor for the death of the counterculture movement. Consider the way that Ted Jones is attacked in the end, covered with ink and made to look hideous and deranged, revealing the absurdity of social conformity for its own sake.

All in all I found Rage to be a strange story. It's worth reading for any long time Stephen King fan, but I don't think that King was wrong for taking it out of print. In a way the story was way ahead of its time when it was first written, though now it comes off as glaringly dated.

Stephen King Re-Read Part Three: The Shining

What can I say about The Shining that hasn't already been said? Haunting, terrifying, and impossible to forget, this is one of Stephen King's most deeply personal works, and rivaled only by IT as the most iconic novel of his career. I don't think one can really examine King's Shining without talking about Kubrick's, but we'll get into that towards the end. For now, we're talking about the 100%-Stephen-King-original-accept-no-substitutions version of The Shining, where Wendy is a three dimensional character that does more than just scream, Jack has an actual arc, and it's a roque mallet, not an axe.

While The Shining is of course a ghost story, the real heart of this novel is the internal struggles of the Torrance family. Wendy struggles to keep her family together while shielding Danny from his abusive father, and Danny struggles to reconcile the father that he loves with his visions of impending doom. But it's Jack's struggle that really stands out to me, especially upon re-reading the novel after learning about Stephen King's own history with drugs and alcohol. In this way the Overlook Hotel is symbolic, with the eventual external conflict between Jack and Wendy contained inside the snow-buried hotel, while ghosts flit about and there's a time-bomb waiting to go off in the basement. It almost perfectly mirrors Jack's struggle with addiction, his inner demons that surface in the face of sobriety, and even his explosive nature.

A lot of Stephen King fans tend to skip over his non-fiction books, and since this re-read his about his novels, there won't be a post dedicated solely to any of them. I will, however, take a brief moment here to mentioned the book On Writing. King wrote most of this book shortly after the car accident that almost took his life in 1999. In fact, this was the first book that got him back at his writing desk when he was thinking about retirement (a small portion of it was written before the accident). Half instructional guide for aspiring writers and half memoir of King's own life, it's in On Writing that, perhaps fueled by his recent brush with death, King gives us the most raw and intimate look at his own fight for sobriety, and early frustrations as a fledgling writer.

Seen through this lens, Jack Torrance's struggle with alcohol can be seen as a manifestation of King's own battle with addiction. Ditto Jack's desperate desire to write a good play after he loses his teaching job. People often (unfairly, in my opinion) accuse King of writing himself into his stories. The latter Dark Tower books notwithstanding (we'll get to that later), I don't think King is any more guilty of this than your average writer. I think all of his author protagonists have a bit of King in them, but they're also all unique characters in their own right, and each has something different to say about King as a father, husband, and writer. King himself admitted that Jack Torrance is a very autobiographical character, though he hadn't realized it at the time when he was writing The Shining. When considering this, The Shining takes on a whole new dimension, especially regarding Jack's slow decline over the course of the book.

The Wasps:

One of the most interesting questions that I found myself speculating on when re-reading Jack's character arc, is just how much of what he did was the Overlook, and how much was his own subconscious demons coming to the fore. The particular scene that made me question this was the wasps that wound up stinging Danny.

The implication was always that the hotel reanimated the dead wasps after Jack killed them, but we never actually see him gas the nest. The last we see is him retrieving the canister of poison, and then the scene changes. But I always thought it was curious that the first thing Jack does after his son gets stung is to try and get some money out of it. And then of course we learn later that Jack's own father showed him how to temporarily knock out wasps with smoke. With the cyclical nature of demons that are passed down from parent to child (a theme further explored in Doctor Sleep) I don't think it's terribly unlikely that King might have been hinting that Jack, on some unconscious level, set Danny up to be attacked by the wasps.

Continuing with Jack's father, I think it's also significant that he would set the wasp nests on fire after he put them all to sleep. If the wasps were a manifestation of Jack's inner demons, then his father burning the nest could be a symbolic foreshadowing of the end of the book when the Overlook burns, the hotel here representing Jack himself, wholesome on the outside but with a troubled past, plenty of inner demons, and an explosive nature.

It was also strongly hinted that the incident with the wasps wasn't the first time that Jack unconsciously did something to hurt somebody. Even before his beating of George Hatfield, I think it was implied that Jack was indeed resetting the timer during the school debates, without even necessarily realizing it, his resentment of Hatfield being evident well before their altercation in the school parking lot.

Kubrick's Shining:

Jack's lack of a character arc in the film adaptation is, I think, what a lot of long time book fans have trouble with. In the film Jack is crazy from the very beginning. There's no real indication that he has any kind of love for his son, and Wendy seems terrified to even speak around him. Nicholson certainly gives a good performance, but he's playing a time-bomb waiting to explode, not a loving father and husband that's pushed over the edge by circumstances and an evil hotel. There's no humanity to the character.

And therein lies the greatest difference between Kubrick and King's versions of The Shining. There's no humanity to any of the characters. Some people say that there's no emotion in Kubrick's version at all, but I don't think that this is true per se. Kubrick's Shining is certainly very emotionally evocative, even if the characters themselves don't exhibit the most realistic emotional spectrum. Visually, the movie is brilliant. Like most of Kubrick's films, The Shining is essentially poetry for the eyes, but the heart of what really made The Shining brilliant as a novel is gone. There's no struggle with the Torrance family here, either internal or otherwise. And of course I think that the accusations of movie Wendy being a misogynistic character are very valid, especially given what a fighter she is in the book.

King himself describes the novel and film as hot and cold, respectively. Though I think that King often judges the adaptation a bit harshly (especially since I've never heard him complain as much about other films based on his novels, many of which are just terrible), but in this I think that he's right, and not just given the ultimate fate of the Overlook. Kubrick's movie is very emotionally detached with respect to the characters, and evokes the emotions of the audience through unsettling and often upsetting visual techniques. King's novel on the other hand enthralls the audience by putting us inside the skins of the Torrance family. We feel Jack's struggle with his demons, and we share his frustrations over his play. We share Wendy's fear and apprehension, and Danny's confusion at the loss of the family unit that's always been there for him.

Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and quite possibly the greatest director of the twentieth century. And despite the differences from the novel, he did produce a damn fine movie in The Shining. I've always thought it was strange, therefore, that King so often expressed dislike for this movie, and not something like Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (which, yes, is a real thing). After re-reading I think that part of it is just how personal a novel The Shining was for King, and for many of us constant readers as well. Regardless, I think that the film is the film, and that shouldn't impugn upon our appreciation of the novel.

Continuity and References:

A number of characters and locations introduced in The Shining will come to appear in later King stories (more on those when we get to said stories), and of course in 2013 there was a direct sequel, Doctor Sleep. Most prominent among these, I think, is the Shine itself for which the novel got his name.

One of the most common hallmarks in King's stories, right up there with author protagonists and the state of Maine, is the sort of psychic phenomenon that Dick Hallorann calls the Shine. We often meet characters who just sort of know things that they ought not to, or have abilities that are never explained (such as Carrie White). In King's next big novel, The Stand, for example, Mother Abigail mentions that clairvoyance such as what she experiences was referred to by her own mother as "the shining lamp of God." And of course in Doctor Sleep many types of magic in the Stephen King mythos are attributed to the Shine, but more on that when we get there.

I also thought that the Overlook Hotel was very reminiscent of the Marsten House from 'Salem's Lot. Both of them are frankly terrifying, and seem to have ghosts that attract outside monsters to their locations (Barlow and the True Knot). Even the name "The Overlook" reminded me of the way Ben describes the Masrten House, as a "dark idol" looking over the town of Jerusalem's Lot. I've always liked the idea that the two locations might be twinners, as many suspect of The Tower and The Talisman. Of course, I'm not entirely sure that they take place in different worlds. It's something I'll try to keep track of as we move forward. 

Conclusions:

What we have here is essentially the iconic haunted house story that came out of the twentieth century. This is one of the books that made King a superstar, and no Stephen King collection, or horror collection in general, is complete without The Shining. This is the sort of horror where the supernatural elements enhance the existing story. If you took away all of the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel, you would still have a damn compelling family drama about addiction and ambition, and the fallout that these forces can have on a person's loved ones. That's the kind of story that King excels at.

Stephen King Re-Read Part Two: 'Salem's Lot

'Salem's Lot was King's first real horror novel, and in many ways it sets the tone for the rest of his career. What we have here is the quintessential example of Stephen King horror; a small New England town hidden away in the back roads of rural Maine that harbors a sort of underlying taint. Enter Ben Mears, the world-weary writer who's come to 'The Lot' to clear out the mental cobwebs while he writes his newest novel (a la Jack Torrance, Paul Sheldon, etc).

True to the novel's name, the titular town of Jerusalem's Lot is the real star of this one. The Lot feels like a living, breathing character unto itself, with a secret that acts as a slow-gestating cancer, revealing the town's inner rot long before the vampires show up and start killing people. Everyone in Jerusalem's Lot has a secret. From the teenage mother who beats her baby to a pulp to the husband who batters and rapes his wife, the populace is like the town itself, pretty on the outside, but with a hidden taint that slowly bubbles up to the surface.

I find that upon a re-read, this is what I appreciate most about 'Salem's Lot, the slow burn of the first act where the reader is invited to just revel in the charming malevolence of the town. You see here King's love of New England as well as his skill as a horror novelist in the way he seamlessly weaves the more endearing aspects of rural Maine with the corruption and depravity of The Lot. Beautiful and toxic all at once, the way that pollution makes for a colorful sunset.

Really, it was The Lot that drew Barlow and Straker (which incidentally, sounds kind of like Bram Stoker). The Marsten House, the "dark idol" of Jerusalem's Lot, as Ben calls it, stood before they came into the picture, and it exudes a malevolence over the town that gives readers a chill well before the bloodbath of the second act. A vast improvement over the buildup to the prom night massacre in Carrie, half of the fun in reading 'Salem's Lot is the steady tension that accumulates well before the first vampires begin rising from their graves.

I haven't read 'Salem's Lot in a few years, and honestly I was surprised by how well the book has held up. I think it's a testament to the enduring nature of King's literary ability that this is still such an enjoyable read in 2016, when vampire literature has been driven so thoroughly into the ground that not even a visit from Mr. Barlow will bring it to life anytime soon (and yes, this happened well before Twilight came out. That was just the final nail in the proverbial coffin). 'Salem's Lot is essentially King's retelling of Stroker's Dracula, and this old-world-meets-new style of horror is what I think saves the book from bearing the full weight of the otherwise bloated sub-genre.

Continuity:

Picture by Michael Whelan

Aside from the many precursors to themes and character archetypes that are explored in King's later work, 'Salem's Lot also fits in to his overall canon in a number of significant ways. Unlike Carrie there were no early Flagg sightings in this one, but I did get a kick out of the vampire baby being named Randall Fratus. Then of course there's that Callahan Guy, who I can't help but feel might be important later...

Aside from Father Callahan's future Dark Tower adventures with Roland and the Ka-tet (where we are also given Barlow's backstory), there are two short stories that directly tie in with the events of 'Salem's Lot. Jerusalem's Lot is a prequel, and has a sort of Poe-meets-Lovecraft vibe to it, while also calling back to Stoker's Dracula via portions of the story told in letters written by one of the characters. The other story, One for the Road takes place some years after the conclusion of 'Salem's Lot, and deals with the aftermath of Ben's decision to burn The Lot down, and how the fallout of the vampire situation is experienced by surrounding communities. Both stories are well worth the time of any Stephen King fan and can be found in the excellent collection Night Shift.

Conclusions:

'Salem's Lot was the first King novel I ever read, and to this day it remains one of my favorites. If anything the book has only gotten better with age. Arguably the slowest of King's slow burns, it nevertheless remains enjoyable upon multiple re-reads, without dragging or feeling stagnant at any point. The meandering first act wherein we get to know the town of Jerusalem's Lot is a delight in and of itself, revealing King's earnest love of rural New England, all while gradually and chillingly building tension for the bloodbath of the second half.

'Salem's Lot more than fulfilled the promise that Stephen King first made with Carrie, representing the first (or second) of his many contributions to the horror genre. This is some of King's best work, and in his next book he really starts to shine.

Stephen King Re-Read Part One: Carrie

With an author that produces as much material of a consistently high quality as Stephen King, there are very few ironclad literary absolutes to his career. He might conceivably write another novel as widely loved as The Stand, or as iconic as IT. With the right director at the helm, we might even get a more recognizable adaptation than Kubrick's The Shining. But no matter how many novels an author writes, their first is always going to be their first. And for King, the one that started it all was Carrie.

There's a lot you can tell about an author by studying their first novel, and Carrie has plenty of themes that will crop up throughout many of King's later novels. The small Maine town, the greaser, the paranormal child, etc. But what stands out to me more than anything else in Carrie is the raw humanity that it expresses. From the very beginning King's empathy for the human condition takes center stage, from Sue Snell's desperate need for redemption, to Chris Hargensen's childish pettiness, to the angry vulnerability of Carrie White, we see some of the best and the worst aspects of human nature on display here.

As far as the writing goes . . . well Carrie is a first novel, and it has its share of first novel problems. In particular I found the constant breakaways from the main narrative to tell parts of the story as articles or fictional novel excerpts to be incredibly irritating, and I'm glad it's a tool that King used less in future novels. That being said Carrie was an enjoyable read the first time around, and it's still a fun re-read now. The first two thirds of the story are a slow-burn, and the third act is suitably horrifying in a way that none of the many adaptations have been able to capture or recreate.

What the book understands that none of the movies or stage depictions ever have, is that we're not supposed to root for Carrie White in the end. Pity her, yes, but not cheer. Carrie isn't supposed to be some spatterfest revenge fantasy where the evil bullies get what they deserve. It's a tragedy, where adolescent cruelty based in thoughtlessness shapes a person into a time-bomb, that goes off in the saddest and most horrific way imaginable. I think that Susan Snell sums the events that lead up to the prom night massacre best. "We were kids." Chris Hargensen was cruel as kids are cruel, with no real sense of what their actions mean to the victim.

And of course I should mention that reading Carrie in 2016 with the anti-bulling movement at its height is, I imagine, a very different experience than it was in 1974, a quarter of a century before Columbine happened. This goes even more, I think, to King's credit in his almost prophetic ability to see to the heart of human nature, especially regarding young people.

Continuity:

Even as far back as Carrie you can find places where King is laying the groundwork for later novels. One here that particularly surprised me was what appeared to be a number of allusions to our old friend, Randall Flagg.

Throughout the book there are a number of references to a Satanic being that Carrie refers to as the "Black Man." Sound familiar? It should, because it calls to mind two of Flagg's many monograms, "The Dark Man" and the "Man in Black." The Black Man is also described as having a "many lobed eye." This could be a reference to the Crimson King's sigil, or to the red eye that Flagg gives to his servants in The Stand.

At one point Margaret mentions that her hair went from completely black to completely white in an extremely short amount of time. This reminded me of what happened to Nadine in The Stand. Margaret also seemed extremely traumatized by the sexual encounter that led to Carrie's conception. Could Flagg have sent her visions and eventually conceived a child on her the same way that he did with Nadine? The timeline is certainly very different than it would have been with Nadine, but whose to say that it's the same every time.

I like the idea that Carrie may have been Flagg's tool all along. Part of his MO is toppling kingdoms of various sizes, and King really seems to hit the Arthurian theme with the prom and the thrones for the king and queen of the night. Maybe the prom night massacre was just another in the long line of kingdom's that have fallen before Randall Flagg. Of course, that's all just speculation. It may well have just been that King drew on the poem The Dark Man that he wrote in college, well before Flagg really took shape as a character in his mind.