Book to Movie: The Fifth Quarter (2006)
From the miniseries, Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Alan Sharp
Directed by Rob Bowman
Based on the short story, The Fifth Quarter by Stephen King

Sharp took Stephen King’s shoot ‘em up tale of robbers turning against each other and wrote a donut around it to fill it out for television.

The short story is about a recently released ex-con whose former cell mate is shot by his coconspirators in a robbery. The dying man gives him a quarter of a map that leads to the loot taken in the robbery. Our hero then goes to confront the other three conspirators to get their quarters of the map. He shoots it out with them and gets the map. That is the story.

In Sharp’s teleplay, our hero is Willie Evans, recently released from prison to return to his wife and son who live in a trailer. The former cell mate has been shacking up with Evans’ wife, but vacates prior to Evans’ return. Evans promises his wife he’s going to stay on the straight and narrow.

One night, the former cell mate shows up at the trailer, gutshot by his former compatriots. He tells Evans his tale and gives him the piece of the map. Evans sets out to settle the score and gain the pieces of the map to ensure some financial security for himself and his family.

Here we enter King’s story as it was written. The choreography of the gun battles is about what King put down on paper. Evans, who introduces himself as the Fifth Quarter, kills the other three and puts the map together. However he is wounded in the process.

The police arrive the next morning looking for the cellmate. Evans is trapped. He gives the map to his wife and tells her to figure it out. He leaves with the cops, on his way back to prison.

The wife studies the map and tries to discover which of the coastal islands it might represent. As she does this, she sees a flyer for the amusement park where she works. As it turns out, the loot is hidden in a pirate island ride. She goes inside and finds the lock box with the money buried under the fake treasure of a pirate’s chest.

There were no supernatural elements in this story and the King story was rather pedestrian. I like the backstory, character development, and motivation Sharp supplied King’s character. Had this not been incorporated into the teleplay, we’d have watched 44 minutes of crooks shooting at each other inside various dwellings. That doesn’t make for good television.

Love triangles, crooks trying for that one last big score with the noble intentions of taking care of his family, and bad guys trying to screw him out of it while killing his best buddy – that’s good television.

Kudos to Jeremy Sisto for not turning Evans into a caricature of a tough guy. Evans is one tough hombre, but he’s soft spoken. He loves his wife and kid and is pained by the thought of his wife sleeping with his best friend while he sat in the stir.

This was not one of my favorite stories in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Congratulations to Alan Sharp who pulled off the rare feat of taking a King work, reworking it, and making it better.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One
By Ernest Cline
Copyright 2011

Ernest Cline’s novel tells a tale set in a dystopian future where the Internet is almost the whole of society’s existence and the world embraces 1980s geek culture. Cline incorporates his vast knowledge of all things 80s into the plot, and tells a suspenseful and action filled story of the ultimate in video gaming. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s with Dungeons and Dragons, video game arcades, Atari game consoles, and the music of Rush, the novel is not only an exciting tale, it is a nostalgic adventure.

The year is 2044 and Wade Watts is a high school senior living in an Oklahoma City mobile home park with his abusive aunt and her ne’er do well boyfriend. The Great Recession – perhaps the same Great Recession we endure today – has decimated the economy and the economy and society itself have degraded badly. In this pitiful existence, Wade finds refuge in the OASIS – an alternate universe created on the Internet by the king of video gaming, James Halliday.

The OASIS serves as the underpinning of society. Real people are represented by avatars of their own making. A real economy – separate from that of the real world – exists in the OASIS where there are countless planets, each populated with countless cities, all created by Halliday and his company, Gregarious Simulation Systems. Wade goes to a virtual school on his home planet of Ludus, using his avatar rather than his physical presence.

Wade’s financial means are not just limited to his real world circumstances. He is also poor within the OASIS and has spent his entire life confined to his home planet. Yet, he, like thousands of others, dream of being the one gunter (short for easter egg hunter) to solve the riddle set down by Halliday before his death. The avatar that can find the three keys to the three gates within the OASIS will be the late John Halliday’s heir and inherit more than $200 billion.

Halliday is has been dead for five years and no one has yet stumbled upon the first key to the first gate. Wade, like the thousands of other gunters, has studied every facet of John Halliday’s life. They have immersed themselves in the culture of the 1980s, perfecting their abilities at various video games, learning the entire scripts of movies, and becoming experts at all facets of 1980s culture, hoping to find somewhere the solution to the enigmatic first clue given as to the whereabouts of the first key.

One day, as Wade hides in a derelict van in a junk yard, logged onto the OASIS, it occurs to him the clue may be hidden in the Tomb of Horrors. This Dungeon and Dragons adventure, penned by the game’s creator, Gary Gygax, is notorious for its dangerous traps and the evil being that awaits those who make their way through the tomb. He is convinced that the tomb is located on his home planet of Ludis. Wade is anxious to explore the tomb and test his theory.

Lacking the funds to travel in the OASIS, he volunteers to travel with his school’s sports team. Once the team arrives at its destination, Wade takes off and, based on the description of the tomb in Gygax’s text, begins his search.

The tomb is right where he thought it would be. With his extensive knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons and the Tomb of Horrors, he is able to avoid the traps and meet the demi-lich that awaits players at the end of the adventure. Wade is frightened because, as a low level player, he has neither the weaponry nor the sorcery to fight the demi-lich.

But it is not a fight the demi-lich wants in the OASIS Tomb of Horrors. He challenges Wade to a game of Joust – a 1980s video game. If Wade can take two games out of three from the demi-lich, he gets the copper key to the gate. If he loses two games, he dies and has to go back to being a first level OASIS avatar with no possessions and no wealth.

Wade bests the lich and is presented with a copper key. The real world Wade stops to check the OASIS high score board (remember those from those 1980s video games?) and finds that, after five years, someone has actually taken top score – Parzival. Parzival is Wade’s avatar’s name.

As he’s leaving the tomb, he encounters a woman whose avatar he immediately recognizes. It is Art3mis, the author of one of the most authoritative blogs on the OASIS regarding Halliday and his almanac. Wade is a huge fan of her writing and is smitten with her on sight. He gives her a clue as to how to defeat the demi-lich to gain her own key, then departs to make his way back.

His find makes international news and Parzival is an instant celebrity. His best friend, Aech, with whom he hangs out in a virtual rec room stacked with 1980s movies and video games, is the first to congratulate him. Soon, congratulations flow in from all over the world and everyone wonders who Parzival is in real life. A number of companies that sell hardware and software for OASIS play offer him sponsorship deals which he readily accepts so he can garner the funds – both real dollars for real world use and OASIS cash – to undertake the next step in the adventure: entering the copper gate.

Now with financial means, Wade relocates from Oklahoma City to the tech capital of the world: Columbus, Ohio and settles into a High St. apartment building. He has ascertained that the copper gate, opened by the copper key, is in a OASIS recreation of John Halliday’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio. Before he leaves he notes that others have found the copper key. Their scores appear below his. Art3mis, Aech, and two Japanese avatars have all claimed the copper key. Wade remains atop the leader board for having found it first.

He travels to the planet that contains a recreation of Middletown, Ohio as it was in Halliday’s childhood of the early 1980s. The gate is contained within Halliday’s childhood home. He goes there and opens the gate. He immediately is transported to another world he recognizes instantly from his hours of study of the almanac and all things 80s. He is in the movie, WarGames and is playing the part of the teenage computer hacker portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1983 movie. To successfully complete the gate, he must act out the movie and recite Broderick’s lines. Errors subtract from his score. Extra credit is given for proper voice inflexion. Having memorized the movie, he successfully completes the gate and is given the next clue to as to where to find the jade key.

He returns to find the planet Ludis is now overrun with those in search of the copper key. A corporation called Innovative Online Strategies has its experts on the ground there as well. IOI employs gunters who are experts at individual segments of 80s culture and lore from Halliday’s almanac and pools those resources in hopes of finding the three gates and taking control of Halliday’s fortune and the OASIS. They are derisively called, “Sixers” because their avatars are all denoted by numbers, always beginning with six. The gunters and the gunter clans of the world hate the Sixers because they don’t want to see a corporation gain control of OASIS.

Wade finds his email box filled with thousands of emails, including one from Art3mis. Falling for her as he is, he starts to spend time with her in the OASIS rather than pondering the enigmatic second clue. As a result, his relationship with his buddy, Aech has suffered for he has less time to hang out with him. He also receives an invitation from the head of IOI to meet. Wade agrees and meets Sorrento who leads IOI’s Oology Division. Sorrento wants to put Parzival to work at IOI. Wade declines and mocks Sorrento and the Sixers.

A few days later, Wade reads on the news that the trailer park where he used to live in Oklahoma City was wiped out in an explosion. IOI has tried to kill Wade Watts and end Parzival’s existence within the OASIS.

Parzival and Art3mis are invited to a private party at a club operated by Ogden Morrow, the real life business partner of John Halliday who helped create the OASIS before they had a falling out and parted ways. There, Parzival/Wade tells Art3mis and the real life person behind the avatar that he’s in love with her. Then, the party is attacked by Sixers bent on killing Parzival and Art3mis to send their avatars back to level one. Morrow, with his control of most facets of the OASIS, destroys the Sixers, but Art3mis does not reciprocate Parzival’s affection and slips away.

Hearbroken, Wade decides to resume his quest for the jade key. He travels to planet after planet within the OASIS, following false leads. To relax, he sits down to play a game of Pac Man on a tabletop version of the game, located in an 80s style mall, thinking that perhaps the solution lies within that game. As he sits, he notices a quarter sitting on the table. Those who frequented arcades in those days know that putting a quarter or a token on a machine lays claim to the next game for that player. Wade is unable to pick up the quarter. It is stuck fast to the machine.

He plays the perfect game, eating all of the dots and the bad guys without losing a life. Instead of the jade key, he is only rewarded with the quarter which he can now easily pick up. He pockets it and moves on.

Before long, he sees on the score board that Art3mis and Aech have both found the jade key. Aech, who got his first clue from Parzival on the location of the copper key, evens things with Parcival by telling him the jade key can be found in the computer game, Zork.

Wade gains the jade key. Unfortunately, so have the Sixers. They use their vast corporate resources to deploy troops and equipment to keep other gunters from gaining the key. By studying the lyrics sheet and listening to the 1976 Rush album, 2112, Wade figures out that the jade gate lies within the towering building iconic in the 1982 film, Blade Runner. He travels to the building and opens the jade gate and is teleported to a 1980s bowling alley with the video game, Black Tiger. Parzival enters a 3-D version of the game and bests his opponents, claiming the third and final key.

Tracking Parzival, the Sixers also learn the location of the crystal key and their minions each gain it. They then lay siege to the location of the final gate which is John Halliday’s virtual palace in the OASIS which was thought to be impenetrable. They make it impossible for other gunters to approach the palace while they work on solving the riddle of the final gate.

Wade hatches a plan to get inside. He creates false data to make it appear that he has not paid his bill to IOI for access to the OASIS. This allows IOI to seize all of his computer equipment, arrest him, and indenture him to be a phone operator and troubleshooter.

While locked within IOI’s headquarter, Wade hacks their system. He finds that he, Art3mis, Aech, and one of the Japanese gunters, Shoto, are marked for real death. IOI is working to learn their real world locations. The other gunter, Daito, has already been killed.

Wade also is allowed to gaze upon the face of Art3mis for the first time and learn about her real life. She is a woman (one can never be certain about the real genders of people in the OASIS as they can create avatars in whatever fashion they like). She is a college student leaving in Vancouver, BC. Wade also learns why she was always so reticent to discuss her real appearance. She has a large, wine colored birthmark that covers a large portion of her face. Wade is now in love with the real image of a real person.

Wade programs one of the robots at the Halliday palace to detonate a bomb at a specific time. He then hightails it out of IOI’s headquarters and makes it to a public OASIS station near the Ohio State campus. There, he contacts Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto to let them know of the plot. They decide to meet in Aech’s virtual rec room.

They meet there. As they begin to hatch their plot to gain entry into the palace, Ogden Morrow appears from nowhere. He tells them that he has been using his unfettered access to the OASIS to monitor them and the time has come for him to intervene to stop IOI and the Sixers from gaining control of the OASIS. Morrow knows the physical location of each of the players. He volunteers to fly them to his Oregon home where they can safely undertake the assault on the Sixer siege using the best OASIS equipment.

Wade’s best buddy, Aech, drives from Pittsburgh to Columbus to pick him up. Wade is dismayed to find that his closest friend, represented by a white male avatar, is actually a black female who is also a dedicated lesbian. The latter fact at least explains to Wade how they were so easily able to converse on the subject of the female form. They fly from Port Columbus to Oregon where Morrow has them whisked to his estate.

Wade is anxious to meet Art3mis face to face, but there is no time. They have to gear up and confront the Sixers. The word has gone out over the OASIS for all gunters and gunter clans to unite against the Sixers and to be at the palace. The four gunters assembled at the Morrow estate travel in their virtual spaceships to the planet and get ready. Wade’s pre-planned bomb detonates on schedule, destroying the Sixer shield. Gunter ships and avatars flood in, attacking Sixer troops and weapons.

Sorrento himself is there and the four gunters confront him. Shoto is blown out of the sky and his game is over. They have learned that the crystal gate requires three gunters, each with a key, to open it. So they can afford no more losses. They defeat Sorrento’s avatar and gain the gate. Parzival, Art3mis, and Aech each insert their keys and turn. When they do, the last of the Sixers detonates a bomb which kills every avatar in the vicinity.

On Art3mis’ and Shoto’s screen, the words, game over appear. On Parzival’s screen, he reads, “Congratulations! You have an extra life!” Wade finds that the quarter he won from the Pac Man machine in that remote, abandoned mall on a nameless planet was the key to his survival. He enters the palace where he learns that he must beat Halliday’s high score on the video game, Tempest. He has but one chance to do it. Only one credit shows in the window.

Those who have played it know that Tempest is not a knowledge based game. It is a reflex game. Halliday’s score it quite high and Wade informs his fellow gunters – now reduced to spectators – that he is not well practiced at Tempest. Shoto informs him that there is a glitch in the first generation of the console which allows a player who dies with a certain score showing, to gain an additional 80 credits. Wade puts Shoto’s plan into action and it works. Wade/Parzival now has time to gain the skill necessary to beat the game.

He plays and plays, getting better as he goes. He finally bests Halliday’s score. He then is teleported into what many regard as the ultimate 80s geek movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Wade is a Monty Python expert and easily acts out the script. He leaves that world and finds himself in Halliday’s recreation room with the ultimate collection of movies, video games, video game consoles, and computers, but no clues as to how to collect the prize. He knows he must enter a key word into a computer to advance. He finally figures out the keyword, much as Matthew Broderick’s character in WarGames had to puzzle out the backdoor keyword to the NORAD computer. He enters it into a TRS-80 computer -- the computer the world's greatest programmer first used to learn digital technology.

On a nearby television, an Atari 2600 game console fires up. The game, Adventure is on the screen. In this game, the first easter egg of video gaming was placed when a slighted programmer hid his name and credit in a room in the adventure, unknown to the people at Atari. Wade plays the game, but instead of the long forgotten programmer’s name, Halliday’s easter egg appears. Parzival takes it.

From nowhere, the late John Halliday’s avatar appears in the rec room. He tells Parzival that he (Wade) no controls the OASIS. The avatar, Parzival, is immortal. The palace is his. On Wade’s OASIS screen appears, “Parzival wins!”

Wade exits his gaming console to the cheers and hugs of Aech, Shoto, and Morrow. But it is Art3mis he wants to see most. He finds her outside Morrow’s mansion, in a hedge maze. He greets her in person for the first time and she introduces herself as Samantha Cook. Wade tells her that he plans to divide his immense fortune evenly between the four of them and that he is going to do his part to infuse the global economy with cash to help bring it back. He kisses her and for the first time in his life, enjoys human contact. He finds that his compulsion to log on to OASIS is not so strong anymore.

I was geek in the 1980s. I spent a veritable fortune in quarters playing video games and my hometown’s arcades were my regular haunts. I also dug science fiction movies, listened to Rush – particularly 2112 – at the pain threshold through my old headphones. I dedicated many hours to playing Dungeons and Dragons and ran the game where my players successfully navigated the Tomb of Horrors. The first time I sat down before a computer console, it was a TRS-80. For me, this novel was more than a really great story with exceptionally developed characters. It was nostalgic and had me remembering fondly all of those geeky things I did in my awkward teenage years.

In my review, I have incorporated as many of the cultural references as I could, but Cline, who is a recognized expert in geekology includes many more. Some, such as the anime references, were lost on me. A few of the video games, such as Black Tiger, are foreign to me as well. I think that anybody from my generation is going to recognize most of the cultural references, but will find some foreign to them.

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of Monte Python and loathed the game Zork for which I laid out a lot of money and in which I was richly disappointed.

If you’re over the age of 35, you should read this book. If you’re over the age of 40, it’s a must read because I’m confident it will become iconic, especially with movie rights secured and a motion picture all but assured.

This is Cline’s first book and it will be hard to top. Great authors can engage the reader with a well developed, well placed plot. Cline does that. Great writers can engage his audience with exceptional character development. Cline does that. Authors can also reach their audience by tapping into their real life experiences and evoking emotions shared in a communal experience. Cline does that. Rarely does an author do all three. Cline does that!

The Greatest Generation had the Great Depression and World War II to define them. The Baby Boomers had the hot days of the Cold War and the cultural revolution to galvanize their collective experience. For Generation X, it’s always been difficult to define our communal experience in anecdote such as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or in zeitgeist such as the Hippies and the cultural revolution. In his book, Cline has managed to define what has gone undefined for so long: the communal experience of Generation X. Whether you were a geek or quarterback of your high school football team, if you grew up in the 1980s, you're going to be swept by nostalgia by Cline's prose.

My only criticism of Cline’s book is one that will no doubt be cured with more writing experience. One of the axioms of creative writing is, “Show. Don’t tell.” Early in the book, before his main character is developed, Cline pauses in the action to give us a global history that brought about the current state of affairs. Knowing how we got to the dystopian state of society in 2044 is important. But it could have and should have been revealed through the actions of the main character. Not a long narrative pause.

That’s a small criticism of an astoundingly enjoyable book. I look forward to taking in Cline’s future work!

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

Bag of Bones
By Stephen King
Copyright 1998

Bag of Bones was billed as a “haunted love story.” But Stephen King’s tale of a writer living in his haunted summer home in Castle County, Maine is another example of when the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons.

Michael Noonan is a widowed writer, his wife having dropped dead of a stroke in a shopping center parking lot. He buries his wife, completes the book he is working on, then stops living life for the next four years. He is exceptionally pained because, when he searched the contents of his wife’s purse after she died, he found a pregnancy test. The coroner confirmed she was pregnant.

He doesn’t write. He’s completely blocked and the thought of approaching his laptop to do anything more involved than digital crosswords give him anxiety attacks. He lies to his publisher and his agent about his writing habits and covers by sending them old manuscripts he wrote years before, but never submitted.

After four years of mourning in a lifeless existence in his hometown of Derry, Noonan decides to head for their vacation home in TR90, an unincorporated township along Dark Score Lake in rural Maine. Mike’s cabin, known as Sara Laughs, sits on Dark Score Lake. The cabin is named for a turn of the century blues singer, Sara Tidwell, who lived there with her family.

Shortly after arriving at Sara Laughs, it’s clear to Michael that he is not alone in the house or on the property. He senses a presence in the kitchen and shortly after his arrival, a ghost starts leaving him messages using refrigerator magnet letters. In his living room, a bell draped around a mounted moose head rings when the spirits are worked up. In his cellar, he plays the old tap once for yes, twice for no with the spirit and even down by the lake, in his head he can hear a child’s thoughts as he drowns. Michael is not sure if this spirit is his late wife, Sara Tidwell, members of her family, or all of the above.

He also uncovers a mystery in his own life. It seems that his wife, Jo, had been coming to Sara Laughs the last year of her life without telling Michael. She was seen in the company of another man and was asking a lot of questions about the history of TR90 and Sara Laughs. He admits to himself that when he was writing, he was oblivious as to what was going on around him. But he’s stunned to find he was so oblivious as to miss his wife’s long absences from his life whilst she made the 90 minute journey to TR90 almost daily for a year.

One day, whilst pondering the mysteries of his life, Michael Noonan almost runs down a three year old girl who is walking along the side of the road. He stops and talks to the girl who’s named Kyra Devore. As he’s talking to her, the Kyra’s frantic mother pulls up. She introduces herself as Mattie Devore. She is grateful to Mike for saving her daughter, but asks him to keep it to himself. She points out that several old men are watching them from a nearby gas station with great interest. Michael promises to keep it to himself.

However, he finds out word spreads quickly through TR90 about Michael’s encounter with Mattie and Kyra Devore. Michael learns that Mattie is engaged in a custody battle with Kyra’s paternal grandfather, THE Max Devore whose name is synonymous with computing and whose fortune is matched by few. Max Devore’s grandson died tragically a year before and since then, Max has spared no effort in gaining custody of Kyra.

That evening, Michael gets a call from Max Devore, asking him to confirm details of the encounter. Michael is offended and angry and gives smart aleck answers to Devore’s questions before Devore gets angry and ends the conversation. He later finds a message on his refrigerator that says, “help her.” Michael resolves to help Mattie and Kyra, who are struggling financially, in their fight against financial titan, Max Devore.

That night, Michael has a confused and erotic dream in which he’s with three different women – his wife, Mattie Devore, and Sara Tidwell, in three different places. He awakens confused and shaken, but finds his desire to write has returned. As in the dream, he retrieves his old electric typewriter and takes it up to the attic where he starts on a new novel.

The next day, while walking along the path that fronts the lake leading into town and the country club where Max Devore resides, Michael has his one and only meeting with Max Devore. The ancient Skeletor is a decrepit old man in a motorized wheelchair and relying heavily on oxygen. He’s accompanied by his assistant, a gaunt elderly woman named Rogette. Devore tries to run Michael down with his wheelchair and Michael stumbles backward into the lake. Rogette, gifted with a superb pitching arm, begins to throw rocks at Michael, hitting him several times and driving him deeper into the lake. Just as Michael is sure he’s going to die under the most absurd of circumstances, Jo’s spirit comes to him and provides him with the strength to swim to his own dock where he is out of range of Devore and his aide de camp.

Michael calls Mattie and tells her about his conversation with Devore and tells her he has hired a lawyer for her. At first, her Yankee pride won’t let her accept the offer. But faced with the prospect of losing her daughter, she accepts. She invites Michael over to a picnic at her doublewide mobile home to thank him. After leaving the picnic, Michael is disturbed at how attracted he, a 40 year old man is to this 21 year old single mother.

Michael attends a deposition in the custody case and with a good attorney representing him as well as Mattie, things don’t go well for Max Devore. The next evening, Devore sends Michael a note telling him that he’s giving up the custody battle. Max Devore kills himself that same night. He and Mattie, along with their legal team, plan to have a picnic later in the week celebrating the end of the custody battle, if not the end of Max Devore’s life.

Meanwhile, Michael has been about trying to solve the riddle of the last year of his wife’s life and her repeated trips to TR90 and Sara Laughs. The more questions he asks around town, the cooler the people of TR90, who before were quite fond of Michael and Jo, become. Michael learns that the mysterious “other man” was Jo’s brother who accompanied her on one of her trips to TR90. He says Jo was researching the history of TR90, Sara Laughs, and Sara Tidwell. Why, he did not know.

When Michael starts asking questions about Sara Tidwell and some of the more shocking events in the town’s history like the man who drowned his own son under a hand pump, the people of TR90 become overtly hostile. His caretaker and friend tells him they will never speak to him again. Before they part, the caretaker tells Mike that all of the old families of TR90 are dying out and soon, they will be gone for good. Another of the last of the old families has passed and the entire town will be turning out for his funeral. Michael notes that that old man was one of the ones who spread rumors about town about his encounter with Mattie along the highway.

As the town prepares for the funeral, Michael, Mattie, and their legal team prepare for their picnic. Michael picks up the lawyers at the airport and notes that storm clouds are gathering. They arrive at Mattie’s mobile home and start their picnic. As they are grilling the steaks, somebody opens fire on the group from a car driving by. Mattie is hit in the head and dies in Michael’s arms. The team’s private investigator disables the car which bursts into flames. Everybody is wounded or killed except for Michael and Kyra. Michael takes Kyra and heads for Sara Laughs just as the monster storm hits TR90.

When Michael arrives at Sara Laughs with the grief-stricken Kyra, he runs a bath for her and is overcome with the urge to drown her. Just as he’s about to carry Kyra up for her final bath, Jo’s ghost enters his head and tells him to look at his own novel for the clue necessary to stop the cycle of death in TR90. As she tells him this, Jo disappears with a scream, driven off by a more formidable spirit. The clues are on pages 19 and 92. Michael reads the first word of every line vertically down the left side of each page and it comes to him. He passes out.

As he slumbers, the clues lead him to the out building on the Sara Laugh’s property. There, he finds Jo’s notes on her research. Michael learns that he had relatives that lived in TR90 at the turn of the century. He also reads Jo’s research into the deaths – mostly murders – of the children of some of the oldest families in that part of the state. Each of the children had names that began with “K”. Had Michael and Jo’s child lived, her name would have begun with “K,” like Kito Tidwell’s name.

His dream continues. He is a black woman – none other than Sara Tidwell – walking along the lakeside path the locals refer to as the street. The year is 1902. Sara and her family have been living among the Maine Yankees who tolerate the presence of Negroes in the time when Jim Crow dominated the South. Sara and her family have performed he bawdy and raunchy blues numbers for the locals all summer. Sara is out taking a walk to rest and relax.

She encounters five local young men lead by Max Devore’s ancestor, a lumberjack. They proceed to gang rape Sara Tidwell. Sara’s son, Kito, is fishing nearby and hears the attack upon his mother. When he tries to intervene, one of the men drowns him. The men eventually beat Sara Tidwell to death and bury her. Jo’s spirit guides Michael to Sara’s grave along the path. The ghost of Sara Tidwell is determined to have Kyra Devore, the last of the offspring of the men who killed her. Mike digs frantically and finds a desiccated canvas bag holding a bag of bones. Michael destroys those bones and with it the ghost of Sara Tidwell. Jo’s spirit departs as well with a message of love.

In the epilogue, we learn that Michael has retired from writing, living off the proceeds of his five best sellers. He is trying to adopt Kyra Devore.

This book marked the end of a six book series which could be subtitled, “The Evil that White Men Do.” In the first two of this series, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, the evil that white men do is overt. In Gerald’s Game, Jessie Burlingame is tied to a bed by her husband who can only become sexually aroused by tying up his wife. Dolores Claiborne lays out a long confession to killing her husband who beat her and sexually abused their daughter.

In Insomnia, a man driven by a passion for stopping abortion attacks a battered women’s shelter. In The Green Mile, white men aren’t as overtly evil, but in the subtext of the novel, they carry out the second crucifixion of Christ who comes in the figure of a giant black man. In Rose Madder, a battered woman is pursued across several dimensions and worlds by a husband determined to not let her escape his abuse.

In Bag of Bones, the hero of the novel is a white guy determined to do the right thing with purely altruistic motives. But in the subtext is the century-old evil done by white men upon a black woman. The ghost of Sara Tidwell is not presented as evil or malevolent – just bent on revenge upon the descendents of the men who wronged her. By not presenting Sara Tidwell’s ghost as an evil antagonist, King hints that perhaps the death of these descendents was justice.

Stephen King’s feminist phase was a miserable time for King fans because he did most of his worst writing in this time span from 1992 to 1998. Gerald’s Game, Insomnia, and Rose Madder rank as his least enjoyable books along with Lisey’s Story – another attempt at a haunted love story. The Green Mile was a great story and a great book, but still contained that distracting subtext.

King made it clear with the publication of Needful Things that he was switching gears; putting the haunted town of Castle Rock behind him once and for all so he could resist the temptation to revisit it and move on to different types of fiction. While a writer must mature and his writing must transition with that maturity, King lost a lot of credibility with the publication of Gerald’s Game in 1992 and his career has never been the same. Never well received by critics, King was always well received by his legion of fans. Gerald’s Game was the first King book to be derided by his fans and critics alike. Before Gerald’s Game, every book King wrote was certain to be a best seller. After Gerald’s Game, his books struggled to make the best seller list.

Bag of Bones’ subtext of evil white males isn’t revealed until the end and isn’t as overt as in the previous books, making it an enjoyable read. Michael Noonan is a strong character and King superbly develops the bond between Noonan and his wife even though she died before page one. The many mysteries contained within the book hold the attention of the reader and despite King’s need to write socially relevant fiction at that time, he never lost his knack for compelling narrative.

As a side note, someone needs to tell Stephen King that Jeep did not build the Scout. This is the second book in which King refers to a "Jeep Scout," driven by one of the characters. The Scout was manufactured by International Harvester as a competitor to the four wheel drive Jeep CJ, marketed with farmers in mind.

Standing alone, Bag of Bones is a pretty good book and for the reader who is not one of King’s “Constant Readers,” it was a compelling story. For those of us who’d read everything the man had written and were suffering through his feminist phase, the end left us with mixed emotions, wondering when the feminist phase was going to end. Thankfully, it did with this book.

Bag of Bones was made into a two part television miniseries that aired on A&E network in December 2011. It starred Pierce Brosnan as Michael Noonan.

Book to Movie: Umney’s Last Case (2006)

Book to Movie: Umney’s Last Case (2006)
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Writer: April Smith
Directed by Rob Bowman
From Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

As with most of the stories adapted in the TNT miniseries, Umney’s Last Case was expanded a great deal to give the character and the plot more development to make for a meaningful one hour episode of television. Writer April Smith sets up Umney’s disorienting experiences on the nightmarish day he finds out who he is, then takes the story in a different direction, giving it a major injection of romance and diverting it from the dark ending King’s story contained.

The King story starts with Umney starting his day and finding that the world as he knew it to exist, day after day, was changing. The newspaper boy was going to quit hocking papers and get the surgery he needed to be able to see again. His favorite restaurant closed. His pal, the elevator attendant was retiring. The floor of his building where he kept his office was being repainted and his secretary quit.

The screen treatment first takes us through what is a normal day for private detective Clyde Umney. He gives his favorite blind newspaper hawker a dime for a three cent paper. He breaks bad news to a wife who suspects her husband is cheating. He plays grab ass with his secretary before heading off to his favorite restaurant to shoot it out with some bad guys in 1938 Los Angeles.

After having established what was a normal day for the private detective, Smith then brings King’s story into the mix and the action unfolds just as it did in his story with Umney learning that he’s nothing more than a character dreamed up by a writer of detective noir fiction.

That writer, in King’s story, came to claim Umney’s life because he lost his wife and son in a tragic accident. In Smith’s teleplay, only the son has died, having drowned during a house party. Sam Landry and his wife are now distant. Landry can’t write anymore and wants to check out of his 1990s existence.

In the story, Landry, who is God himself to Umney for having created him and having complete control over his life and actions, takes over Umney’s life while Umney is sent to the 1990s. Umney begins to master Landry’s lap top computer and has a few story ideas of his own the new Clyde Umney probably isn’t going to like.

In Smith’s story, Umney goes to the 1990s to find Landry’s wife there. Umney tells her who he is. At first, she does not believe, but Umney’s lusty behavior, antiquated speech, and tough guy attitude soon convince her and she falls in love with Umney.

But Clyde Umney is not Sam Landry. Clyde Umney plays grab ass with the girls and decides to play grab ass with the pool cleaner. Linda Landry is devastated. Umney tells her he is who he is and he’s not Sam Landry.

Meanwhile, Sam Landry, meek and mild writer, is struggling to make it in 1930s Los Angeles. He can’t speak the language. He may write detective stories, but he can’t think like a detective. Most importantly, he’s not a tough guy.

Finally, Umney figures out the computer and rights (writes) things and everyone is where they belong. Landry and his wife rediscover their marriage and everybody lives happily ever after.

William H. Macy’s brilliant duel performance as Clyde Umney and Sam Landry saved this episode from being a disaster. Macy, playing to very different characters face to face, really brings to life King’s vision of his story. It was entertaining to watch Macy engage himself in conversation and interact with himself as two different people.

The romantic ending was not a good idea. Smith didn’t do a bad job of writing it, but King’s dark ending would have worked better. Watching Landry suffer through the trials and tribulations that Umney could have dreamed up and hacked out with the laptop would have been entertaining.

Of all of the episodes, this was the weakest. Thank God for William H. Macy’s stellar performance.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
Copyright 1917

Edgar Rice Burroughs broke new literary ground with his book, A Princess of Mars. In the writing, which was first serialized in the pulp magazine, All Story Magazine. By writing about traveling to Mars when traveling between two nearby cities in a wooden airplane was not commonplace, the fertile imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs developed a whole new genre which we call today, science fiction. While writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had cranked out a number of stories we call science fiction even today, it was Burroughs who laid down many of the parameters utilized by writers through the 20th century and into the 21st.

John Carter is a Virginia gentleman planter and veteran of the Confederacy. As a man who loves adventure, he set out for the American southwest to prospect for gold. While returning one day from his mine, he runs afoul of some Apache and is forced to flee blindly into the desert. Spotting a cave, he flees inward. This cave is actually a portal that transports him to the planet Mars. Carter’s adventure there is chronicled in a journal left for his nephew who is reading it to us.

Carter arrives in what he later finds out is a hatchery for Martian green people – a race of super large men and women who populate this part of the planet its inhabitants call Barsoom. He finds that he has the ability to leap high into the air and over great distances because of the reduced gravity on Mars and in an early fight with one of the Tharks, establishes himself as a great warrior. The Tharks – a culture made up of warriors and who value prowess in battle -- are so impressed they make him a high ranking official and a prisoner simultaneously.

Carter is assigned a female who is his caretaker and earns the loyalty of one of the giant creatures the green people keep as pets. He bests Thark chieftans in battle and moves up in the ranks of the Thark hierarchy, using his ability to leap as his primary attack and defense.

He is taken with the Tharks when they attack the red race of Mars who dwell in the city of Helium. While attacking one of the red Martian spaceships, the Tharks capture the princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris. Carter falls in love with Dejah upon seeing her since she closely resembles a human. He decides he must rescue her.

While the Tharks camp in one of the many abandoned cities on Mars, Carter, aided by another of the red Martians, is able to effect Dejah’s escape. He is attacked by the Tharks and bests their chief in battle. Tars Tharkas is installed as the new head of the Tharks. Tars Tharkas is different than other green men of Mars in that he experiences love, compassion, and respect in a culture otherwise dominated by violence and prowess in battle. He and Carter become friends.

Carter eventually marries Dejah Thoris and is Prince of Helium. As they are starting their new lives together, the processing station that makes the Martian air breathable fails. Over a period of a week, the people of Mars start to die of asphyxiation.

The resolute John Carter decides to make a last ditch attempt to enter the processing station and restore it. He takes with him an engineer who knows how the station works. Alas, he is too late. He succumbs to asphyxiation while entering the plant. He knows the engineer survived beyond him, but he doesn’t know if the plant was restored or if his love, Dejah Thoris survives.

He awakens in the cave from where he was teleported to Mars. He looks to the red star in the earth sky from time to time, wondering what happened to his beloved Dejah.

This book was a selection of my monthly book club. It garnered universal respect from our members for its originality and creativity given the era in which it was written. Most in the group enjoyed the story – including me. I gave it a “B” for story, noting that the first third of the book read like an anthropological study, and I gave it an “A” as a literary treasure – a wellspring for all of the science fiction literature I would enjoy in the years to come.

We have two English professors in our club. One, who is perhaps the best read person I know in the genre of science fiction, loves the book, having read it as a child and several times since. The other didn’t care for the writing, saying that Burroughs didn’t do enough to flesh out his action sequences. There is some truth to that. To paraphrase a fight sequence in Burroughs book, “I sprang among the many Tharks gathered and in just a few moments, they lie dead at my feet.”

Several in our group of approximately 15 people which includes four college professors, felt compelled to read the rest of the John Carter of Mars books right away. I did not. I am pleased that the book was recommended by my book club and I enjoyed the story. But, it was not so good I feel compelled to immediately take in the rest of the stories.

The book is actually a series of short stories first serialized and published in 1912, then bound and published as a book in 1917. Burroughs stands in good company with the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others who went from writing short stories for the masses to great books for the educated, graduating from the pulp presses of the twentieth century. Pulps were the only avenue available to those who wrote outside of standard literature for more than half a century.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was the favorite author of President Ronald Reagan, according to his biographer, Lou Cannon. Reagan devoured Burroughs as a child and young man and even looked to those stories to inspire himself to develop a narrative for the Strategic Defense Initiative. As we know today, SDI, or “Star Wars” was mostly fiction and Reagan knew it. But the Russians didn’t. Ever the actor, Reagan prepared himself to play a fictional role as the proponent of a real prototype of a spaced based weapons system by reading his favorite science fiction author.

Burroughs is a legend in American literature. It was he who created Tarzan of the Apes and published more than two dozen Tarzan novels to go along with the dozen Mars novels he wrote. He penned westerns, adventure novels, and other science fiction books set on Venus, the moon, and other planets.

For fans of science fiction, Burroughs is an icon. While no one would compare his writing ability to the likes of Asimov or Bradbury who were superior men of prose, one must credit him for the structure and precepts of science fiction. While tracing types of literature to its wellspring is difficult and dicey, a case could be made that Burroughs invented hard science fiction. Given the billions of dollars earned in stories, books, and movies and the countless hours people have invested taking them in, that makes Burroughs one of the more prolific and extraordinary people in American history.

Book to Movie: You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (2006)

Book to Movie: You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (2006)
From the television series: Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Mike Robe
Directed by Mike Robe
Based on the story from Nightmare and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Mike Robe’s screenplay is true to King’s vision of a town dominated by narcissistic rock stars in need of constant admiration and adulation. However, Robe dresses it up just a little for television. Overall, his teleplay is well done.

Just as in the story, Mary and Clark Rivingham are lost in the back woods of Oregon on a remote road. They are driving a vintage 1965 Mustang, perhaps to lend the story a little more of that old time rock and roll feeling.

When they stop to get their bearings, for some inexplicable reason, while Clark is out of the car investigating their surroundings, Mary looks in the vanity mirror and sees herself old and decrepit. No reason or context is provided for this vision and it is no more than a little window dressing to spice up the horror.

They continue down the rutted dirt road until they happen upon the town bearing the name Rock and Roll Heaven, OR. As they sit pondering the town, an old fashioned hippy bus, decked out in psychedelic paint, passes them as hippies cheer and jeer. They start to enter the town with a disco CD in playing. The disc ejects itself and melts on the console. No disco in Rock and Roll Heaven!

From then on, events play out just as they did in the story. Ronnie Van Zant and the Duane Allman are the town toughs, leering at them as they enter the city which is picture perfect. They go to the diner and Clark recognizes the waitress as none other than Janis Joplin. While they eat, Janis starts up the juke box and plays one of her own hits, while she lip synchs for their amusement.

They try to make their escape with Ricky Nelson in hot pursuit. Clark runs Ricky down not once or twice, but three times. But he keeps getting up. Finally, they get on the road and leave Rock and Roll Heaven.

But just a few miles up the road, the hippies have laid a trap. The bus is parked across the road and the Mustang slams into it. Jimi Hendrix steps off the bus and lays down the opening chords of the Star Spangled Banner as Mayor Elvis Presley and Sheriff Otis Redding approach from behind in a cop car. They are taken back to town.

There, they join the audience for what promises to be a really big show featuring the legends of rock and roll – a show that might go on constantly for a year or more. The audience looks on, passive and forlorn, except for Clark. He’s excited to see the show. A fan of that old time rock and roll is Clark Rivingham.

This was the last of the series to air and it went out on a high note. Congratulations to Mike Robe for not screwing up what was probably the most entertaining and creative of the stories from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet by Richard Matheson

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
By Richard Matheson
Copyright 2002

Introduction by Stephen King
Stephen King, unrivaled master of the genre of horror, credits Richard Matheson for reinvigorating it after masters such as Robert Bloch abandoned it in the late 1950s. Without Richard Matheson, there would be no Stephen King.

It is remarkable that it is Matheson that King looks to and names as his inspiration. Not because Matheson is not worthy. He is one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived with extensive work in books, television and movies. It is remarkable because Matheson’s prose is delightfully honed. King’s prose is expansive and massive. No two writers could be more different in their style.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
A man who desperately fears flying, boards a DC 7 and prepares for takeoff. When they reach a cruising altitude, he looks out the window and sees a strange creature capering about on the wing with intent to do harm. He tries to convince the flight crew that there is something out there.

This finely told story was made into one of the most famous episodes of the Twilight Zone. It was a pleasure to read it as Matheson had laid it down in print for the first time all those years ago.

Dress of White Silk
A little girl lives with her grandma in the home where her mother died. When one of her friends comes to visit and pokes a little fun at her and her dead mom, our little heroine puts on a brutal fashion show for her tormentor.

Written in the patois of a six year old girl, Matheson tells a simple and inelegant tale of supernatural revenge with flair. Bravo! It was this story that, according to Ann Rice, inspired her to write horror.

Blood Son
This is the tale of a boy born to be a vampire. At a young age, he is drawn to all things that involve vampires. He disturbs his teacher and fellow classmates with lurid tales of vampirism told in class. He steals a vampire bat and allows it to drink his blood. His entire life is dedicated to achieving status of the undead.

Matheson is really the anti-Poe. Poe used lofty rhetoric and obscure words to weave his tales of terror. Matheson’s use of simple language and sparse prose is just as effective. Nowhere is that more evident than in this tale.

Through Channels
Police interview a teenager who has arrived home to find his parents and their friends dead. The friends had come over to watch television. But on the family television, instead of a test pattern, the word, “feed” is sometimes displayed. When the kid comes home to the carnage, he finds one of the e’s is gone, changing the word to past tense.

Here we see Matheson adopting the style of Isaac Asimov, driving his story almost entirely through dialogue. The tale is told through a series of tapes of the interviews the police conduct with the kid.

Witch War
A group of young, teenage girls use their magical powers to destroy an army of attacking men.

Matheson’s writing here is so sparse, that there is nary a complete sentence in the prose. Most of the narrative is sentence fragments and prepositional phrases. I’ll give him credit for trying an offbeat writing style, but the story didn’t work for me. I got the cold dispassion from the girls, but didn’t feel any sense of loss or injustice when the men, who were not developed in the narrative, died.

Mad House
A teacher becomes so bitter, angry, and depressed, that his rage is transferred from him to the inanimate objects within his home, making the most mundane and everyday tasks untenable and maddening.

All I can say is sometimes, I can relate. . . What a wonderful story.

Disappearing Act
A journal is found in a coffee house, three hours after its owner and writer left it there. It tells a story of a young man, in constant conflict with his wife about his inability to earn enough to support them. After a one night stand with a woman he meets in a bar, he chronicles the slow and random disappearance of all the people and places that make up his life.

Matheson’s tale is a first person narrative taken from a journal. He is able to tell his tale to its conclusion without providing a reader a clue as to why the man’s life is disappearing one person and place at time. The not knowing is always more satisfying than a ham handed explanation.

Legion of Plotters
A mild mannered tie salesman is driven slowly mad by life’s petty annoyances. The bus passenger who sits next to him daily and sniffs constantly, the nightly cries of the baby next door, the parties held by the neighbors upstairs, the cigarette smoke of restaurant patrons all add up to drive him toward madness. He starts to documents life’s little annoyances and grade them. He comes to the conclusion that the world is plotting against him.

I get the impression that little misbehaviors on the part of others really annoys Mr. Matheson. This story is much like Mad House. The focus on irritants by the main characters drive them to madness with sad results.

Long Distance Call
An old woman, bedridden and helpless at night, continues to receive strange phone calls during the wee hours. At first, there is just silence on the line. Then attempts at communication, with the person saying, “hello.” The woman demands that the phone company check out the line. When they do, our little old lady is shocked at where the calls are coming from. Late that night, she receives another call and her mystery caller informs her that he’ll be right over.

This is the stellar stuff of great black and white movies that used to entertain me as a child. This story is a little longer than some of Matheson’s material, but not a word is wasted. We know the voice is supernatural (after all, it’s a Matheson story), but Matheson’s ending was brilliantly conceived and written, letting us know what horror is to come, but not showing us.

I am troubled by this story because I know I’ve seen it on television, but don’t know where. There was a Twilight Zone episode called, “Long Distance Call,” but that was the one where the little boy with constantly fighting parents used the toy phone to call his dead grandmother. Great story, but it was not Matheson’s. I’ve Googled it, but can’t find it. I’d love to know where I saw this.

Slaughter House
The narrator tells how he and his bachelor brother purchase a large, old home that had stood vacant since they were kids. They restore it to its original state and settle into a comfortable existence. Over the fireplace stands a picture of a nameless beautiful woman that fascinates them. Soon, the younger brother becomes slothful, angry, and incommunicative. His brother fears he’s been overtaken by a malevolent spirit that resides in the home.

The story was ok, if not terribly original. What was remarkable about this story and what made it interesting to read was the writing style. The style here was a departure from Matheson’s sparse prose. The plot, the characters, and the style of writing were all reminiscent of the screenplays he cranked out for American International Films in the Poe adaptations and other scripts he authored for Roger Corman in the early 1960s.

Wet Straw
A man living alone in a boarding house has a recurring dream where he smells wet straw. Soon, the dream evolves into a recollection he and his now dead wife had when they were young, waiting out a rainstorm in a hayloft. His recollection of this seemingly romantic memory masks memories of the unfortunate conclusion of their marriage – and her life.

This story was suitable perhaps for grade schoolers. The twist, such as it was, was reminiscent of ghost stories kids tell each other.

Dance of the Dead
The setting is post apocalyptic Missouri and four teenagers are en route to a club in St. Louis to see a remarkable night show act with a horrifying star. Three of them are enthusiastic about getting to the show, using drugs to get into the right state of mind. The fourth has serious reservations about seeing this grisly show.

This was one of the darkest post-apocalyptic stories I’ve ever read. It brought to mind horrid images of the emaciated figures of the German concentration camps (though Matheson does not use that simile in his text). One of his finest efforts.

This story was made into an episode of the television show, Masters of Horror television series that aired on Showtime. The script was penned by Matheson’s son, Richard Christian Matheson, and was directed by horror legend, Tobe Hooper. Young Matheson expanded on ideas introduced by his father and revealed an imagination as dark and inspired as his father’s.

The Children of Noah
A holiday traveler in New England is stopped for speeding in a small Maine town. He is put in jail overnight until he can see the judge in the morning. He is told the next afternoon that the judge is sick, so they’ll have to go to the judge’s house for him to hear the case. The man is taken to the judge’s house, sentence is passed, and the visitor is invited to dinner.

Even the greats write stories that become dated. This story is dated. It may have surprised readers in the 1950s with its twist, but the twist, even though it was not telegraphed, came as no surprise to the modern reader who’s seen it many times before.

The Holiday Man
No one likes to work holidays, but one man has the horrific task of calculating holiday death tolls. What makes him so good at his vocation is that he makes the calculation before the holiday, and sees every one of them unfold before his eyes.

This is an example of Matheson being too sparse with his prose. The story idea is great and there is a gift in being able to tell a great tale with just a few words. This story, however, begged for more character development and more plot.

Old Haunts
A middle aged man returns to the boarding house in which he lived while attending college, hoping to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane. He rents the room and then begins roaming the area, seeing old haunts. He feels as if he’s being watched or followed. Instead of bringing back good memories, the trip instead has him reflecting on a life wasted. As he goes to sleep that night in his old room, a figure appears telling him he can’t come back and he needs to get gone.

This is obviously a supernatural midlife crisis. Each of us has returned to someplace formative in our lives, relived the memories there, and thought about how our lives might have been different had we seized different opportunities. Unfortunately for Matheson’s character, his younger self isn’t happy with the choices his older self made.

The Distributor
A new man moves into Joseph Alston’s neighborhood and promptly introduces himself to Alston as Theodore Gordon. At first, Gordon seems amicable enough. But soon, he starts to “redistribute” the belongings of his neighbors. When they complain, Gordon seizes control of the neighborhood through nefarious and prurient means.

Theodore Gordon must be a Democrat. . .

Crickets
A vacationing couple encounter a man who claims he’s decoded the language of crickets. These noisy nocturnal insects, he tells them, telegraph the names of the dead. He tells them that he’s heard his own name on the crickets’ list and he wants their help.

Crickets as psychopomps is an interesting concept. They are black like death. They haunt the night. I’ll never listen to a cricket again without wondering whose name they are chirping. Brilliant story!

First Anniversary
A man kicks off his first anniversary with his lovely bride by telling her she tastes sour. She is peeved. Then he quits tasting, smelling, and feeling her. It’s finally time for him to face some hard realities and she’s going to make him do it.

I knew it was a space alien – and it wasn’t. Matheson comes at marriage from an unlikely direction and creates an intriguing story.

The Likeness of Julie
A college student in is inexplicably attracted to the plain, childish looking girl who sits behind him in his literature class. He’s more than attracted to her. His emotions devolve into violent fantasies of rape and debasement. He hatches his plan of debauchery and asks her out. But whose idea is it really?

Definitely not one of Mr. Matheson’s most politically correct stories. But the woman gets the last laugh and we find that the poor college student, whom we come to loathe in the narrative, is actually the victim. Matheson stories have more twists than a hemp rope.

Prey
A woman buys a Zuni fetish doll for her boyfriend who likes to hunt. The doll is called He Who Kills and the package comes with a warning that the little gold chain must be kept on the doll to keep the Zuni spirit at bay. But when she is arguing with her mother on the phone, the doll is knocked over and the chain comes off. The woman fights for her life against a six inch tall Zuni hunter.

This is one of Matheson’s best known stories, made famous by the television horror movie, Trilogy of Terror which starred Karen Black in three different roles in three stories based on Matheson’s work. This segment, entitled Amelia, was the only one of the three in the movie given the screen treatment by Matheson himself. The story is average, but the transfer to film is brilliant. King gave it an update, using plastic toy soldiers in his story, Battleground from Night Shift. In the Nightmares and Dreamscapes television miniseries episode based on the King story, the doll appears briefly in a shot – King’s homage to his mentor.

Book to Movie: The End of the Whole Mess (2006)

Book to Movie: The End of the Whole Mess (2006)
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Larry Cohen
Directed by Mikael Salomon
Based on the Stephen King short story from the collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Two veterans of bringing Stephen King to the screen came together and created this hour long television show based on one of the better works from King’s 1993 collection of short stories.

Cohen was the first man to take King from the book to the screen, penning the script for the Brian DePalma film version of Carrie in 1976. He also scripted the television miniseries, It, and The Tommyknockers.

Salomon directed the 2004 television miniseries, ‘Salem’s Lot.

Cohen sticks with King’s story, padding it here and there to make it move. The main deviation from King is the main character is not a writer, but a film maker. So, instead of sitting down to write it all, he sits before a camera and recites it. That’s a good change that saved us from a number of “John Boy Walton” moments where we see the writer writing with the actor doing voiceover.

King's story is cerebral and none of that is lost in Cohen’s script. This may have turned off those expecting to see a King monster movie, but to more discerning audiences who enjoy subtlety and nuance in their horror, Salamon directing was masterful. Particularly subtle, yet chilling, is the television reporter stumbling over her script as dozens of happy, mindless people look on from behind.

The end of the story is rather anti-climatic and may not have made for the best television. But taking the story any place else other than where King took us at the end would have belied story. There could be no dramatic end; just a slow fade.

The Nightmares & Dreamscapes miniseries was well executed with some first rate talent doing the writing and directing in the eight episodes that were drawn from stories published in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and Night Shift. As good as this episode was, it ranks in the middle of the pack. This was a good show and well worth the time spent watching the entire eight episode run.