I'm Now …

by Louis Willis

… a Stephen King fan, which I owe to you. I wasn’t a fan before reading that many of you admire his writing. It’s not that I didn’t like his stories, I just never felt compelled to read them. I liked the movies based on his stories. My favorites are The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. My least favorites are The Tommyknockers and The Dreamcatcher. The movies showed his storytelling skills but didn’t persuade me to read the stories. 

I read The Dreamcatcher when it was first published because of the title and the negative reviews. I wondered how anyone could catch dreams. Also, I knew King was a prolific and popular writer who usually received positive reviews, so, I wondered, why the negative ones? After I read the novel, I agreed with the reviewers, it is a bad novel, and the movie didn’t improve the story. 

I decided to read more of his stories because of your admiration. I bought two of his books at random: The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower and Just After Sunset. The third book, Different Seasons, I bought because it contains the story on which The Shawshank Redemption is based. 

For this post, I read the 13 stories in Just After Sunset. The protagonist in the story titled “N,” describes better than I can what King’s stories are like: “Reality is a mystery, … and the everyday texture of things is the cloth we draw over it to mask its brightness and darkness.” 

“N” is the best and most enjoyable story in Just After Sunset. N, an accountant, sees a psychiatrist for his obsessive compulsive disorder after a weird experience he had while taking pictures of rocks in Ackerman’s Field. When he looks with his naked eye, he sees seven rocks and strange shapes, but when he looks through his camera’s viewfinder, there are eight, and things appear normal. The aftermath of the experience causes him to see even numbers as safe, odd as unsafe, and he must make sure there are an even number of objects on tables, etc.. Although he fears whatever he sees or thinks he sees in the field, he returns again and again. No spoiler, so I won’t tell you how it ends, but the end is scary.

“A Very Tight Place,” involving a conflict between two men over a piece of land, proves that you can still enjoy a story even when you foresee the protagonist will escape a trap his enemy has laid. Such a story satisfies the reader’s anticipation. The incident in “A Very Tight Place “ involving the protagonist’s escape from a portable toilet occurs about a third of the way in the story and kept me on the edge of my seat. I knew he would escape – his being trapped was nowhere near the end of the story. Not only did I want to see how he would escape, I wanted to help him. King’s prose is so good that I felt right there in that sweltering, stinky toilet with him.

“The Gingerbread Girl” is the poorest story in the book where implausibility overwhelms credibility. A young woman who lost her child and is thinking of divorcing her husband goes to her father’s cabin in a deserted resort where she encounters a serial killer. To flee his house, (no spoiler here) after escaping from the kitchen chair he'd taped her to, she runs into the bedroom/office with him pursuing close behind, where she bars the door with a chair. She throws an old school desk through a window, wraps a blanket around herself, and jumps out the broken window. In escaping from the chair, she sprained her wrist and lower back. It seems to me that those injuries would have made it rather difficult for her to escape though that window. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief.

I haven’t decided which book to read next. I am certain of one thing, I shall not read more of the stories on a dark and stormy night.

Off the Literary Reservation

by Janice Law

It is always interesting to see writers operating off their usual turf. Sometimes, the results are disastrous – John Le Carre’s The Naive and Sentimental Lover comes to mind. Other times, skills that flourish in one genre turn out to be dynamite in another. Arguably P.D. James’s best novel is The Children of Men, her futurist tale of a disastrous population crash in near future Britain. The careful characterization and thoughtful prose of her mysteries seem even better when unhitched from the genre requirements of red herrings and planted clues.

Similarly, the Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood hit it big with The Handmaid’s Tale, another futurist foray about an infertile future. (It’s a nice question why this theme resonated with two female novelists in a time of over population). The narrator has a poet’s grasp of the language and the combination of a flamboyant style and a thriller plot made it no surprise that Handmaid later showed up on the screen – and in an opera.

With 11/22/63, Stephen King is the latest writer to move off his particular literary reservation a novel about a time traveler who heads off to Dallas to block the Kennedy assassination. Like Atwood and James, he brings a heady literary arsenal, particularly his gifts for visceral effects, violent action, morbid atmosphere and imaginative plotting.

He doesn’t completely avoid his patented horror effects, either, nor his affection for schools and teenagers, who, in the main, get a charming and sympathetic treatment. Indeed, many of the characters, particularly the minor ones, are sharply observed and appealing.

So is 11/22/63 in the rare category of the totally successful and unexpected? To my mind, not quite, though to be honest, I am a fan of his non-fiction, not his stories. Some of it is excellent, and who can say too much against a writer who comes up with a line like : “A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.” He also has some trenchant observations about life, American politics, and human limitations, and the ending is genuinely touching.

On the down side, the book is enormously long, too long, I think, to be carried by Jake Epping/ George Amberson, the English teacher time traveler, who finds a ‘rabbit hole’ to the past in the back room of his friend Al’s diner. He steps out into September of 1958, the Land of Ago, where he first attempts to reset the life of his school’s handicapped janitor before setting his sights on changing history big time.

George is a fine functional character. He is good at any number of things and abundantly gifted with the savoir faire that enables him to make a living without documents in 1958 and fit into the ‘Sixties without more than a few linguistic slips and some unwise song lyrics. The heroine falls for him; his colleagues like him, and even derring-do is not beyond his brief.

But he does not seem to have much of an interior life. Until the very end, he seems to have few conflicts and, like most of the characters, he belongs to a universe where good and bad are sharply separated. George once confesses to cowardice, momentarily, otherwise he’s a white hat all the way.

Towns, too, are clearly on one of the other side of the moral scale. Derry, Maine, where George first goes to change destiny, is a creepy place, and King can’t resist suggesting a real monster in an old chimney. Dallas, similarly, is haunted by evil, and the famous Book Depository is almost the personification of brooding malice. In contrast, Jodie, the small Texas town where George finds happiness, is almost overflowing with good will and good folks.

11/22/63 is clearly and vigorously written but at over 800 pages, I, at least, began to find the five years before that November day in Dallas very long indeed. Part of the length is caused by the way King has set the parameters of his time travel scheme. It is always September 1958 when one leaves the rabbit hole and precisely two minutes later in modern time when one returns.

Furthermore, every time George re-enters the rabbit hole, the past is reset and any changes he made on his previous visit are erased. You can see the potential for a Groundhog Day scenario, and there is something exhausting about the resets and the repetition of events. I’m probably a minority opinion, but I think 11/22/63 would, indeed, have been masterly at about two thirds of its present length.

Still, there are plenty of things to like as well as some curious touches. The importance of dancing is not so surprising ( Dancing is life) in a man clearly fond of music and devoted to art. But the sense that 11/22/63 conveys of the fragility of reality and the contingency of all our perceptions surprised me in a writer whose great gift is the transcription of violent bodily states.

Indeed, the last writer I would compare to King is Nathaniel Hawthorne, though like King’s narrator, he was often criticized for lacking red-blooded emotions. But early in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne has an interesting passage about the sorts of stories, touched with the uncanny and the supernatural, that both he and King construct.

Of the ruins of Rome, which attracted him as the ruins of our old industrial towns attracts his modern counterpart, he writes of the ‘ponderous remembrances’ of the city where “our individual affairs and interests are half as real here as elsewhere. Viewed through this medium, our narrative– into which are woven some airy and insubstantial threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff of human existence– may not seem widely different from the texture of our lives.”

English teachers as they are, Jake Epping/ George Amberson would heartily agree.

Oops!

(with a lot of help from Kurt Sercu)

3. 11/22/63 (Scribner, $35)

By Stephen King.   A modest English professor is offered the chance to change history — by preventing the JFK assassination.

Washington Post, description of the number 3 book on the bestseller list, December 4, 2011

*    *    *    *

Add to that sense of ho-humness the fact that the secret in question turns out to be rather murky, and many readers will be left wondering exactly what is “the most dangerous thing” referred to in the title. (Beats me.) 

 Quoted from Maureen Corrigan’s review of Laura Lippman’s “The Most Dangerous Thing,” Washington Post, October 9, 2011

     What do these two quotes from the Washington Post have in common other than referring to two recently published bestsellers?  At least one other thing:  they each contain errors unpardonably obvious to anyone who has actually read Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or Laura Lippman’s The Most Dangerous Thing.  In King’s book the protagonist is a high school English teacher, not a college professor.  And no reader who actually finishes Laura Lippman’s latest novel The Most Dangerous Thing (which I liked a lot) could have the smallest doubt as to what the most dangerous thing is.  That question (and the title) is explicitly explained, for anyone who hasn’t already figured it out, in the last sentence of the book.  (You know me, no spoilers – just telling you where you can find it, not what it is!)

    I am pretty unforgiving about errors such as those discussed above.  I mean, all the journalist assembling the list of bestsellers for the Washington Post had to do was write one correct sentence about 11/22/63.  And all Ms. Corrigan had to do was to actually read the book that she was reviewing, start to finish.  One can be more forgiving, however, when it is Mr. King or Ms. Lippman who get something wrong, or seemingly wrong, during the course of their novels.  These, after all, are not factual reviews, they are works fiction, and they come to us with the established leniency of poetic license. 

    One of the funny things about such seeming mistakes, therefore, is that sometimes they are not errors at all.  Laura Lippman, for example, in an afterward, discusses the liberties she has taken with the real-life town of Dickeyville, Maryland in The Most Dangerous Thing.  And Stephen King is famous for dropping snippets of information into his works that could be historical errors but that could also be references to other King works, usually clues hearkening back to his seven (soon to be eight) volume Gunslinger series.   Notwithstanding this, however, Stephen King can be a bit defensive when it comes to defending his own research. 

    In The Colorado Kid (which, as noted in a previous column, is not my favorite work by King) there is a reference to a Starbucks coffee shop in Denver, Colorado in 1980.  When a USA Today review of the book mentioned that there in fact were no Starbuck stores in 1980 Denver, Mr. King bristled, and posted the following retort on his website:  "The review of  The Colorado Kid in [the October 7, 2005] issue of . . . USA Today  mentions that there was no Starbucks in Denver in 1980. Don’t assume that’s a mistake on my part. The constant readers of the Dark Tower series may realize that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue.”

    Hmmm.  Allow me to digress for a paragraph.  For many years my brother and I gave my mother a gag gift as the last gift of Christmas each year.  These were really stupid things – a three foot tall plastic goose that lights up, a kit kat clock, an autographed picture of Dwayne Hickman (“Dobie Gillis” -- remember?).  We always told my mother that each gift was a clue to a secret message that would be revealed over the course of future Christmases.  We continued this silly stunt for twenty five years and every year my mother would fret over what the growing number of “clues” had in common, what they might point to.  Get the picture?  We were just winging it.  No secret message, just stupid disparate gifts.

    Okay – back to the issue at hand.   I have read all of Stephen King’s books, including all of the Gunslinger series, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the presence of a Starbucks in 1980 in Denver has anything to do with Roland’s grand quest in the Gunslinger.   So was that Starbucks a clue, or was it an “oops?”

    With all of this in mind, let’s poke around a little in Stephen King’s latest novel 11/22/63.  As I wrote two weeks ago, I think this is a stand-out novel, to my mind the best thing Stephen King has done in over ten years.  And I don't want to detract from the novel by trolling for errors.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun with it!

    Given the novel’s time travel theme King in 11/22/63 is called upon to describe and re-create life in the era from 1958 to 1963.  Let’s take a look at how he does on just one aspect of that quest, his repeated references to another of my favorite authors (and characters) Ellery Queen. 

    I suspect that Stephen King is an Ellery Queen fan.  After all, Ellery pops up in many King novels, including in the aforementioned The Colorado Kid.  Indeed, in explaining that there will be no solution offered up in that novel to the mystery that is at its core, the heroine is admonished by one of her mentors that she should not expect Ellery “to come waltzin’ out of the closet” with a solution.  The solution to the mystery in The Colorado Kid remains a mystery to me, but so too the connection, if any, between that Denver Starbucks store and the Gunslinger.

    11/22/63 also contains several references to Ellery Queen, most notably to the NBC series “The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen,” which aired from 1958 through 1959.  The timing of certain events in the novel (I’m carefully avoiding spoilers here) are critically dependent on the timing of an episode of the series that, according to the storyline of the novel, was aired on Halloween night, 1958.  At the first mention of the television show in the novel I wondered whether the Ellery Queen series had, in fact, aired on Halloween night in 1958.  This sent me off to Kurt Sercu’s repository of Queen information, Ellery Queen – a Website on Deduction.  (Kurt’s site was the focus, many will recall, of an earlier article.)  And I was immediately rewarded – according to Kurt’s website on Friday, October 31, 1958 The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen, starring George Nader as Ellery presented the following episode:

George Nader as Ellery Queen

Cat of Many Tails

         10/31/58 With John Abbott, Paul Langton

The mayor of New York City calls on Ellery to help solve a series of strangulations for which the police can find no motive but which they believe to be the work of one killer.

The story, based on Queen’s 1949 novel of the same title, is a perfect one for Halloween.

    However, about 100 pages further into 11/22/63 the hero secures a copy of TV Guide to check on the timing of the Halloween broadcast, and there the episode is described as follows:

8 PM, Channel 2:  The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, George Nader, Les Tremayne, “So Rich, So Lovely, So Dead.”  A conniving stockbroker (Whit Bissell) stalks a wealthy heiress (Eva Gabor) as Ellery and his father investigate

     What happened to Cat of Many Tails?  Kurt’s website in fact identifies an episode of the series titled “So Rich, So Lovely, So Dead,” and that episode otherwise meets the description in King’s book.  Except for one fact:  the episode aired one month later, on November 28, 1958.  “What is going on, here?” I thought.  Then I immediately sent an email across the pond to Belgium posing that same question to Kurt.

 

    Kurt dove into his archive of Queen documentation and came up with pretty irrefutable evidence that it was, indeed, “Cat of Many Tails” that aired on Halloween in 1958.  First Kurt pointed out that Francis Nevins lists the episode as the one appearing on Halloween in his definitive article "Ellery Queen on the Small Screen" which appeared in The Armchair Detective volume 12, 1979.  Second, the episode is also identified as having aired on Halloween according to the television archives maintained by the Theatre Arts Library at UCLA.  Third, from Kurt’s own archives he uncovered a 1958 NBC press memorandum that also identifies Cat of Many Tails as the Halloween episode.  And fourth, Kurt supplied me with a TV listing from Halloween week, 1958 also identifying Cat of Many Tails as the episode that aired that night. 

Halloween Week 1958

Halloween Week 1959

Another funny thing – 11/22/63 describes that Halloween issue of TV Guide as one “with Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase on the cover.”  This time I hit the internet, and uncovered the actual TV Guide cover for Halloween week of 1958.  It's reproduced on the left, and, as is obvious, it featured George Burns on the cover.  So what about Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase?

   After all of this Kurt and I sort of had a burr under our saddle so we went back to trolling the internet.  Just as the heroine in The Colorado Kid tried to solve her unsolvable mystery, so too Kurt and I got a little obsessed with what was going on back in the 1950s, at least according to King’s view.   Lo and behold, we eventually found the TV Guide cover above on the right.  Yep, it features Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase, and it was published on the week of Halloween.  But Halloween of 1959, not 1958.

    And that’s as far as we got.  So, just like the heroine in the The Colorado Kid, you should not expect Ellery to come “waltzin out of the closet” tying together all of those clues and making sense out of the 1958 TV schedule as set forth in 11/22/63.  Did Stephen King encounter a (minor) researching “oops” that caused him to miss the date of the Ellery Queen episode he refers to by one month, and the date of the cover of TV Guide by one year?  Or is the Gunslinger and his ka-tet sleeping just a bit easier under a desert moon in an alternative 11/22/63 universe where history has been set right and Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase’s Halloween TV Guide cover exists where it was supposed to, in 1958?

Oops?  or Ka?

November Twenty Second

    Sometimes I have to think long and hard to come up with a theme for Tuesdays.  Not so today.  Today is November 22nd.  That alone should be enough, but this year Stephen King has weighed in to make the task even easier.

    I would hazard a guess that anyone much over 50 – and some quite a bit younger – brood their way through this day each year.   We remember where we were when we heard.  We ruminate over “what if” scenarios.  Today is a day haunted by the memories of grainy black and white photos, horrors on the front pages of newspapers.  It’s a day to puzzle over how things could have gone that terribly wrong.

     Certainly, if you are of an age, it’s a day when you remember where you were back in 1963, what you were doing when Walter Cronkite, in shirt sleeves, announced to a stunned nation what had happened in Dallas.  There are other days like this – 9/11 is one – when a watershed was crossed, when the world tilted a little on its axis and then never again spun quite the same.  Those days, thankfully, are few.  But that is one of the reasons that we brood each year when they roll around.

     On the rock of our obsession with this date Stephen King has built his new novel, 11/22/63.  A very different writer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, once wrote that there is never a great loss without a little gain, and that is true here.  Out of this day, which shall always be dark, we have gained a fine novel from Stephen King, a novel that explores the “what ifs” that have haunted us for the past 48 years.

    Let’s take a deep breath and, at least for a while, step back from today’s date and focus for a while more generally on the amazing Mr. King.  By my count, since breaking into the publishing world in 1974 with Carrie, Stephen King has published 61 books – mostly novels, but also short story collections and nonfiction volumes. 

     The first Stephen King book for me was The Shining.  I bought it back in 1978 after hearing the paperback edition advertised on the radio.  I read about 100 pages the first night, and then found myself completely unable to concentrate at  work the next day because all I could think about was the story.  That night I stayed up until the small hours of the morning and finished the book.  I had to do this in order to get my life back – that is how intense the story was for me. 

    Since that day in 1978 I have read everything that Stephen King has written.  Yep, every one of those 61 books.  But while I am a stalwart Stephen King fan I am also an inveterate critic.  Like many readers, and probably like most teachers, I tend to grade books as I read them.  To my mind King has offered up some solid “A’s”, including The Shining, The Stand (particularly the longer uncut version published in 1990), It and the Gunslinger series.  My entirely subjective grading system also awards some “A-‘s,” including, among others, Firestarter, Pet Sematary, Carrie, and Salem’s Lot.  But recent works by King, aside from the later Gunslinger volumes, I generally relegate to no better than the “B” range, and there are some that for me fall below that line.  Tommyknockers, gets a C-, as does Insomnia and Cell. 

The Colorado Kid (sorry about that, Stephen) is lucky to get a D.   I mean, really – a “fair play” mystery plot where the crime is never solved?  In an afterword to The Colorado Kid, King wrote that people will either love the ending or hate it. "I think for many people, there'll be no middle ground on this one . . . .”  Well, that’s right – there wasn’t one for me!

    Others may compile the grade list differently, but from my perspective (since, after all, it is my list) one of the obvious conclusions is that, with the exception of the later Gunslinger volumes, King’s best books, at least my personal favorites, are generally found among his earlier works.  I am not the only one who has speculated that in recent years King may have been just a bit burned out. Ttake a look, for example, at the parody of King that was on Family Guy a few years back.   Perhaps this is because King used his best ideas, the ones that really grabbed him, early on, and then just ran out of really great ones.  When this happens to many of us who are, or who aspire to be, writers we experience writers’ block.  We produce nothing.  Not so, with King, however.  By all observation the man is the energizer bunny of authors.  He keeps going, and going, and going.  When his publisher ordered him to slow down, telling him that he could not continue to write at the pace of more than one book per year, King famously invented Richard Bachman and used that alter ego to drop another seven books into the book stores.  But while the work ethic is admirable, the process has, as discussed above, produced some lesser gems.

    The purpose of the foregoing digression?  Well, I guess it's two-fold.  First, not every Stephen King book is great.  And second, I hand out "A's" pretty sparingly.  12/22/63, however, gets a solid "A."

     So now lets return to today, November 22, and to King’s latest novel.  I have not finished 11/22/63 as of this writing.  This is because I am savoring it, parceling it out in measured doses, like Christmas candies.  All criticism is subjective, but to my mind 11/22/63 is the kind of King novel that we have not seen in years.  There is nothing "phoned in" here, nor is the story a forced effort by King to write "a Stephen King book."   In fact, there is very little that is supernatural about this story.  11/22/63 reads almost like it wrote itself, its premise is a stampede, and King, like the rest of us, is bouncing along trying to do whatever he can to control those horses.   Such mad rides are the best rides.

    And why is this?  Why does this book work so well?  I suspect that it is because once King came up with the premise of 11/22/63 it was a story that he had to tell.  What a difference it makes when the force driving the narrative is one that has completely grabbed the author's imagination.  When that happens writing will not be forced, it will flow on its own.  King's premise of a protagonist presented with an opportunity to go back in time, to live from 1958 through 1963 and to then attempt to right the horrific wrong of November 22 obviously resonated for the author in a way that other story ideas just did not.  King works hard in  his novels to make the characters live and breathe, but the result can  sometimes come  across as a bit forced.  Not so with those who populate 11/22/63.  They invariably ring true, and I suspect that this is so simply because, the story itself must have become so  real to King as he wrote it that character development flowed naturally.  I suspect Stephen King was as carried away writing this book as his readers will be reading it. 

The back cover of 11/22/63

    In his column last Friday my colleague Dixon Hill wrote an incisive and poignant article on happy endings.  And as Dixon concluded, happy endings generally are not Stephen King’s forte.  I have already noted that I have yet to finish  11/22/63, so I do not know how happy or unhappy the ending ultimately will prove to be.  And, of course, even if I did know the nature of that ending I would not share it here – no spoilers from me!

     But it is not a spoiler to reproduce the back cover of the novel.  And from that back cover one must conclude that, at least as to November 22, 1963, Stephen King, like the rest of us, has spent a good deal of time thinking about the possibility of a happier ending.

     The possibility of putting a better end to November 22,  a day that left us all older though not necessarily wiser, was in any event the apparent spark that inspired a great read from Mr. King. Hearkening back to Laura Ingalls Wilder's advice, we might as well be thankful for that small gain, even though it has sprung from our greater loss.