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

2012-02-08T22:06:00.000-05:00

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

2012-02-05T17:16:00.000-05:00

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)

2012-02-04T15:50:00.000-05:00

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.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

2012-01-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

A Canticle for Leibowitz
By Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Copyright 1960

Walter M. Miller, Jr. a prolific pulp writer of the 1950s, combined three short stories he published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about an order of monks dedicated to a post apocalyptic hero into a short novel published in 1960. The results were the Hugo Award winner for the year 1960, A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Part I: Fiat Homo (Let There be Man)
The setting is the American Southwest, 600 years after a twentieth century nuclear war, or the Flame Deluge as posterity calls it. The monks of this remote desert Catholic monastery are dedicated to preserving and studying the works of Isaac Leibowitz – an engineer who, in the times following the nuclear devastation, worked to preserve the technology and the culture of mankind for future generations. Leibowitz and his group worked against society that, after technology had destroyed their world, rebelled against scientists and intellectuals.

Brother Francis is a brother of St. Leibowitz sent into the desert to fast and reflect. As he is constructing a shelter, he is happened upon by a strange traveler who helps him select the final rock with which to construct his shelter. When Brother Francis moves the rock, he finds that it covers a hole in the ground that accesses an underground room.

In that room, Francis finds several desiccated corpses and machinery far beyond his level of comprehension. He finds electrical schematics and handwritten notes (including a grocery list) that Francis comes to suspect might have been written by Isaac Liebowitz himself.

The traveler continues on his way in the desert and Francis hastens back to the monastery with some of the documents to report his finding. His discovery and assertion that perhaps the materials he brought back contain the actual writings of Liebowitz starts a stir among the order. Some eagerly embrace the new material as the actual work of Isaac Liebowitz. Others dismiss it as more relics of a past age with no connection to their order’s founder.

As the controversy rages, the abbot of the monastery sends Francis back to the desert to complete his meditations. When Francis returns, his ordination is delayed as the abbot fears that the new revelations might interfere with the canonization of Isaac Leibowitz. Francis is assigned to a menial job poring over manuscripts and schematics while advocates from the church visit the monastery to evaluate the work of Isaac Leibowitz. Soon after, Brother Francis becomes Father Francis.

While working, Francis finds a blueprint of an electrical schematic and recreates it in a gilded illumination. When Liebowitz is canonized, the abbot honors Father Francis by sending him to New Rome with the illumination he created and the artifact from which it was copied.

Along the way, Father Francis is set upon by bandits and his illumination is stolen. Francis counts himself lucky it was just the illumination that was stolen and not the relic. However, the pope wants the illumination recovered. He gives Francis gold and tells him to return to where he was robbed and pay ransom for the return of the illumination.

Francis returns to where he was robbed and waits. Once again, he is attacked. This time, he catches an arrow between the eyes and dies. The robbers make off with his gold. When the robbers depart, the wanderer who put Francis onto the artifacts of Liebowitz happens upon Francis’ body. He buries Francis in the desert as the frustrated vultures circle above, denied their repast.

Part Two: Fiat Lux (Let There be Light)
Part Two of Miller’s story is set in the year 3174. Centuries of study have finally started to yield results and a renaissance is underway. Father Kornhoer of the Order of St. Liebowitz has created electric light which he calls Electrical Essence. The single light is powered by four men on treadmills.

From the nation state of Texarkana comes Thon Tadeo -- brother of the mayor Hannegan of Texarkana and renowned scientist. He and his entourage arrive to study the memorabilia and learn more of the work at the monastery. They also have a surreptitious purpose: to study the monastery for its military value in the secret war plans the mayor of Texarkana is developing to control the lands of the American Southwest.

Tadeo asks to take the memorabilia back to Texarkana, claiming that it will take years to study it all and that it could be better done in Texarkana. His men have completed their military analysis and Tadeo wants to preserve the memorabilia from the ravages of war which he knows is coming from his brother. The abbot denies the request, having discovered Tadeo’s true plans. He instructs Tadeo to leave the monastery.

In Texarkana, the papal emissary to Hannegan’s government sends word to New Rome that Hannegan has united the nation states that surround him and plans to wage war on Denver, using the Monastery of St. Leibowitz as a military base. Hannegan finds out about Monsignor Apollo’s treachery and has him executed and declares fealty to the pope of New Rome a crime.

Part Three: Fiat Volantus Tua (Let They Will be Done)
It’s 3781 and mankind has recovered all of the technology of the earlier race of man – including space travel, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It has also discovered cold warfare as two nation states, the Asian Coalition and the Atlantic Confederacy. Both sides are ramping up their preparations for real war, building nuclear weapon platforms in space.

When a test nuclear device is detonated, the priests at the monastery of St. Liebowitz grow worried about the future of mankind. They develop a plan to place the memorabilia aboard a spaceship with a manned crew to send it into space to find a new home on one of the outworld colonies.

The cold war turns hot when the two nation states exchange nuclear weapons. Texarkana is nuked and hundreds of thousands are killed and maimed. The World Court intervenes and is able to engineer a tenuous ten day cease fire to work toward brokering a full truce. The expedition to New Rome with the holy memorabilia of St. Liebowitz hopes to use this cease fire to transport the memorabilia to New Rome where they can board the spacecraft that will transport them to safety.

Meanwhile, to the abbey, comes a mutant woman named Mrs. Grales, who sells tomatoes at a roadside stand near the abbey. She wants to baptize her “baby” which is a second, seemingly lifeless head growing on her shoulders beside her functional head. She calls this head Rachel. Father Zerchi, the current abbot of the monastery promises to take it under consideration to humor her.

The abbot serves as a refugee camp as the wounded masses move west out of Texarkana. Meanwhile, near the monastery, a physician has set up a refugee camp where he engages in euthanasia for the badly suffering. Father Zerchi learns of this and argues with the physician about the evils of euthanasia. At stake are a woman and her baby. Both have horrid radiation burns. The woman’s fillings are radioactive and the baby cries constantly in agony. The physician administers the lethal drugs to the woman and her child, ending their suffering and effectively ending the partnership between the monks and the doctor.

Father Zerchi returns to the monastery discouraged and afraid. The cease fire is not holding. He worries about the fate of the mission to New Rome and for the fate of mankind. As he ponders, a nuclear warhead explodes nearby, destroying the monastery and burying Father Zerchi beneath the rubble.

He awakens to find that he is not alone. With him is Mrs. Grales. He offers to baptize the “child” Rachel. But Rachel, now alive and alert, instead administers the Eucharist to him in something resembling the immaculate conception and Mother Mary. Zerchi then dies, believing he has witnessed a miracle.

The mission to New Rome has made it and have successfully boarded the spacecraft. They launch and head for a new world, taking with them man’s technology, the seeds of its destruction.

As the book ends, nuclear war consumes the world. Mankind is destroyed. The creature of the ocean flee for deeper waters where they are safe.

A Canticle for Liebowitz is one of the most heralded and recognized of all science fiction work and fantasic post-apocalyptic fiction. Scholars have debated extensively its themes of religion versus state, the cyclical nature of history, and of course, the arguments for and against euthanasia.

While the novel is structured around the Catholic church, little Catholic doctrine (other than anti-euthanasia) makes it into the text. What is more prevalent is the church’s embrace of technology as a tenet of its faith and its dedication in preserving the earthly works of man.

What is not examined is why Leibowitz who was a Jew, converted to Catholicism near his death. There is nothing hinting at anti-semitism in the book. Why Miller chose a Jew who converted to Catholicism as the iconic father of the order is not explained.

Of the three stories told, Part One has the tightest plot. Father Francis is well developed as a character and his motives clearly defined. Part Two is less solid. Instead, it reads as an interlude, demonstrating the ongoing conflict between church and state. The plot picks up again in part three as the mission to New Rome desperately tries to get there before the world is nuked and Father Zerchi is left behind to oversee the end of his order at the hands of conflicting governments.

The whole holy conception thing was difficult to understand and did not work well. It was fitting that Father Zerchi, the last of his order dedicated to the preservation of technology, would witness an authentic miracle at the end of his life. However, the writing did not make it entirely clear what Miller was trying to say.

The end is bleak. Mankind has taken its technology and moved on to inhabit another world. But as the novel demonstrates, it’s in that technology and the cyclical nature of history that the seeds of civilization’s third demise are sown. The vignette at the end, with the shark fleeing to deep waters, where it remained hungry for a lack of prey, was chilling.

The book was apparently inspired by Miller’s bombing raids over a sixth century monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II.

This book stands as a staple of science fiction with the works of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. It was one of just two novels Miller published before he committed suicide in 1996. Miller is a recognized giant of the pulp publications of the 1950s where Asimov and Bradbury, along with others such as Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson were plying their trade in the 1950s. While Miller’s approach to science fiction is different than the action oriented works of Asimov and Bradbury, it’s examinations of theology, government, and man’s development of technology faster than the development of his conscience and intellect make it worthy on inclusion among the great works of science fiction.

Book to Movie: Crouch End (2006)

2012-01-25T14:32:00.000-05:00

Book to Movie: Crouch End
From the made for television miniseries Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Kim LeMasters
Directed by Mark Haber
Based on the story Crouch End from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

In the notes section of his book of short stories, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King says he wrote this story for an anthology of Lovecraftian stories written by modern authors. In telling his story, King retains his own voice, but does clearly establish a Lovecraft feel and setting. This episode of TNT’s stellar miniseries felt more Serlingesque than Lovecraftian.

The story opens in a British police station with a woman telling a bobby that her husband has disappeared. We then flash back to a very proper and well to do American couple in a posh British hotel, dining at the finest restaurants and enjoying the finest coffee houses, wearing nice clothes and expensive jewelry. They are invited to have dinner with our hero, Lonnie Freeman’s, law partner who handles their British affairs. He lives in a London neighborhood called Crouch End.

The first cabbie they find won’t take them there. They finally do find a cabbie to take them to Crouch End. The cabbie warns them to beware in Crouch End because unusual things happen there. He goes on to explain about thin places in the universe where other creatures leak through. He says druids used to perform rituals in the area they called Slaughter Towen.

They arrive in Crouch End and immediately encounter the two children who appear in the King story. It is broad daylight, but there are no cars or people. The neighborhood looks cheery enough, but it is deserted (which is the major deviation from Lovecraft). It looks like the strange little town that Serling used to show in so many episodes of his show. It’s picture perfect, but something sinister lurks beneath the surface.

From there, the script deviates wildly from King’s conception of how to tell a Lovecraft story. Lonnie is yanked through a hedgerow and disappears into the yard of an abandoned mansion. When he returns, he is a little off. From there, the couple run maniacally through the town which is more dilapidated now, searching for a main road.

The finally come to a tunnel and Lonnie tries to lure Doris in. When she won’t go through the tunnel, he tries to come out, but some tentacled monster grabs him and takes him to another world.

Suddenly, Doris can hear traffic. She runs until she finds an old couple. When she tells the first part of her story, the old man says, “It’s happened again!” and the old woman tells her, “We want no part of you if you’ve been to the Towen.” They point her in the direction of the police station and flee from her presence.

The story ends with her telling her story to the police.

We don’t get King’s revealing ending with the veteran cop filing the report in a special drawer full of missing person cases from Crouch End.

IMDB.com reviewers only gave this episode a rating of 6.0. I thought it deserved higher. It had some weaknesses like the three street toughs inexplicably morphing into werewolves in a flash scene and the repeated use of those “flashes” of horror that seemed to have no other purpose than to make one jump and do not serve the plot.

But Eion Bailey’s portrayal of Lonnie after he escapes the mansion yard injects a great deal of uncertainty into the viewer’s mind once you know that we are completely deviating from the King narrative. He seems to be the same Lonnie, albeit badly rattled. Yet, he’s a bit off, becoming irrationally pissed about losing his sport coat while being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare. He seems to want to escape, yet there’s something a little off about him.

There's also the transformation of this very stuffy, proper couple at the beginning of the story to the distraught, frantic, and filthy couple at the end. They start the story in beautiful surroundings with beautiful trappings, only to find themselves at the end in a filthy tunnel, surrounded by filth and horrific creatures.

When I say the town was closer to Serling than Lovecraft, that is not a criticism. Lovecraft is an acquired taste. Serling is meat for the masses. I love both and for the TNT audience at 9:00 pm, the Serling look of the town was better suited. The Crouch End of this story was like Lonnie. It had a veneer of normalcy about it, but something was wrong underneath.

The duo who created this episode must have immediately leaped at the chance to work with Stephen King material. The screenwriter, Kim LeMasters, was the executive producer of the television show, Silk Stalkings and his lone genre credit was the abortion of a movie, Wild, Wild West. The director, has a limited Hollywood portfolio with one sci-fi movie to his credit in Alien Cargo.

This series did not have a bad episode. There were many episodes better than this one and Lovecraft fans expecting to see something of their favorite author are going to be disappointed. With its shortcomings, Crouch End still made for decent television and is worth the 44 minutes I invested in watching it.

White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson

2012-01-22T15:43:00.000-05:00

The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenent, Book Three:
White Gold Wielder
By Stephen R. Donaldson
Copyright 1983

White Gold Wielder picks up where The One Tree left off with the Giants of Seasearch, Thomas Covenant, and Linden Avery leaving the sunken island of the One Tree with no direction, no purpose, and no goal.

With them as well are Findail, the Elohim, and Vain, the enigmatic ur-vile who says and does nothing. Vain is altered by the encounter at the One Tree. Earlier, he had placed on a wrist and ankle the metal ornaments of the staff of law. Now, that arm has become wood with bark and all.

The company decides to head back to the Land because Covenant has decided that if he does anything else, it will be to extinguish the Banefire burning at Revelstone.
The giant ship, Drummond heads west, but is blown off course by strong winds out of the south and is driven into a field of ice, many miles north of their course. The giant in charge, the First, decides that they will not free their ship of the ice field in time to reach the land, so she leads a small company of giants and Haruchai to assist Covenant and Linden ashore.

The company crosses the ice field and is soon back in the Land. They meet up with Sunder and Hollian, the stonedowner couple Covenant left behind to spread the gospel of the White Gold and to try to rally the people of the Land against the Sunbane. Sunder reports that they were met in this quest with indifference some places and outright hostility in others.

He also reports that the na-Mhoram have stepped up their kidnappings to feed and strengthen the Sunbane. Most stonedowns and villages are made up now of the very old and the very young, with the healthy and vital taken for their blood.

Joined by Sunder and Hollian, the company heads east toward Revelstone. They arrive to find the place silent. They enter and Covenant, now barely able to control the white gold due to the raver’s venom pulsing in his vains, elects to use another means to bring down the sunbane. He summons the Sandgorgon, Nom, who killed his bloodguard on the island of Bhraithar and then proceeded to single handedly wreck the keep there. It must answer the summons of the person who says its name and kill them. However, wielding the white gold, Covenant is able to control and subdue the sand gorgon and make it do his bidding.

Covenant, Linden, and the giant, Grimmand Honninscrave, enter Revelstone to find the Raver Gibbon who leads the na-Mhoram. The rest of the company is left at the entrance to fight off the attack from behind. The raver, now desperate, has summoned his warriors as well as lowly peasants to strike blows at the giants who guard the rear.

Once inside, the group finds Gibbon in his chamber, wielding his Rukh with which he controls the power of the Sunbane. Gibbon captures Honninscrave by sealing his arms and legs in stone. He prepares to bring his might against Linden and Covenant so he may take the White Gold and supplant Lord Foul as the master of the universe. But before he can, Nom enters and knocks from Gibbon’s hand, his Rukh. This releases Grimmand Honninscrave who attacks Gibbon and kills him.

With the death of Gibbon, the soul of the raver is free. It enters Honninscrave. Honninscrave struggles for mastery of his own body as he duels the raver inside. He begs for Covenant to kill him while he holds the raver at bay. Nom kills Honninscrave as he holds the raver, thus slaying both. Now, no one leads the Clave, the keepers of the Sunbane.

Covenant is distraught and depressed after yet another friend has made the supreme sacrifice on his behalf. Crazed with grief, he steps into the Banefire and unleashes the magic of the white gold upon himself, enduring his own rite of Camora – the rite of immersion in fire used by the giants to cleanse their souls of hurt and suffering. Linden watches with horror as Covenant endures the pain. However, he steps from the Banefire a changed man. He is now at peace with himself and his power for the first time.

They travel to the top of Revelstone where they meet The First and her husband, Pitchwife who are there with Nom. Nom has used his immense strength to channel through the stone and plan to sluice the waters of Glimmermere Lake into the keep and to extinguish the Banefire. Nom lets the water flow and the Banefire is ended.

The end of the Banefire does not mean the end of the Sunbane for it is now deeply woven into the fabric of the Land. Covenant lays the foundation of what he hopes will be a new regime of peaceful people who will once again someday be able to see a healthy Land and make use of its innate power. He instructs his remaining Bloodguard to remain at Revelstone, keep it, and make it ready for a new generation of lords who will oversee the Land’s restoration.

Hollian and Sunder join Covenant, Linden, the two giants, Findail and Vain as they depart Revelstone and head for Lord Foul’s lair in Mount Thunder. Along the way, they are attacked by ur-viles, and the pregnant Hollian is slain. Sunder is bereft of speech with grief. He recovers Hollian’s body and takes it with him, acting if she was still alive.

The company arrives at Andelain where Covenant spoke with his dead and received the gift of Vain. There, the company meets the old forestal, Caer Caveral. Caveral is now old and tired from keeping the Sunbane from sundering Andelain – the only place in the Land that is still pure. He asks that he be killed to save the Land. Sunder obliges him with a knife to the back and Hollian’s life is restored. As High Lord Elena destroyed the Law of Death centuries before in The Illearth War, Caer Caveral has destroyed the Law of Life, restoring life through death.

Sunder and Hollian stay behind in Andelain which is no longer protected by the forestal and is slowly being warped by the Sunbane. Covenant and the rest of the party head for Mount Thunder.

Along the way, Linden becomes uneasy with the new Thomas Covenant who is so at ease with himself and his choices. She fears that he has surrendered and will surrender the white gold to Lord Foul. She resolves that she will take whatever means are necessary to prevent that from happening.

The company arrives at Mount Thunder and enters. They are attacked by Cavewights who want to use Covenant’s ring to resurrect Drool Rockworm, the cavewight who found the staff of law and was tricked into summoning Thomas Covenant to the Land for the first time. The Giants stay to hold off the cavewights while Covenant and Linden venture forward to meet Lord Foul.

Lord Foul is waiting for them. Immediately upon arrival, Linden’s body is seized by a raver and she is left as a powerless spectator as Covenant does what she’d feared. He gives the white gold ring to Lord Foul. Foul grasps the wring and immediately kills Covenant. He then begins unleashing gouts of power at the Arch of Time itself – the device which keeps him chained to the land. With the fall of the Arch, Foul will be unleashed into the cosmos to dominate the universe.

However, something blocks Foul’s attack. It is the spirit of Thomas Covenant, now unbound by both the laws of life and death, to meet Foul head on. Foul eventually uses up all of his power and is forced into submission and retreats from the Land.

Linden is able to break free of the grasp of the Raver and seizes the white gold wedding band. She sees Findail desperately trying to kill Vain and she understands their conflicting, yet synergistic purpose. The fluid earthpower of Findail of the race of the unhomed and the stoic rigidity of the ur-vile Vain, are complementary. Linden uses the white gold to bond the two and they slowly lose their earthly forms and are reshaped into a new staff of law.

With Covenant gone, Linden begins to fade from the Land. Before she leaves, she takes the staff of law and the white gold and combines the power of law and chaos to destroy the Sunbane. Before she leaves, she places the new staff of law into the hands of the giants.

While in an ethereal state between the Land and her own world, the spirit of Thomas Covenant speaks to her. He tells her that he could not use the white gold to attack and kill Foul for the battle would have destroyed the Arch of Time, allowing Foul his victory. He simply needed Foul to wield the power against himself, for as Covenant was told so many times by those repeating prophecy, he is the white gold. He leaves her with the promise of undying love.

Linden awakens in the glade where she witnessed Covenant being stabbed by the maniacal preacher. His body is dead and prostrate upon the stone, a knife protruding from his chest. Her friend and mentor, Dr. Berenford is there with the police. People have been hurt and as doctors, their place is among the wounded. The police are left to tend to the dead.

So ends the third and final volume of Stephen Donaldson’s Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

The second trilogy really pales in comparison to the first. It opens with promise as we see the Land, which Donaldson imbued with so much beauty and spirit in his first trilogy, warped and ruined. The first book was about action, reaction, and learning. Plots and subplots were put into motion and promised an epic battle for the heart and soul of the living Land.

However, Donaldson wallowed in lugubrious reflection, second guessing, and overwrought emotion. Thomas Covenant was an anti-hero. We were supposed to root for him, but not like him. After all, his first act in the Land was to rape a 16 year old girl. He finds redemption in the first trilogy.

But he’s not very likeable in the second trilogy because he’s a whiny, petulant, mouse of a man. Every little setback turns into page after page of morose introspection. Covenant is cleansed of this narcissistic brooding by his immersion in the Banefire. But by then, it is too late for the reader because the remainder of the book is written from Linden’s point of view.

Linden isn’t very likeable either. She’s no anti-hero, although Donaldson makes a half-hearted effort at making her one. We learn that Linden killed her mother by suffocating her as she lie dying in a hospital bed. This would be a tragic and painful ordeal for a real person and would certainly fill them with guilt. But it lacks the despicable nature that creates an anti-hero. The seminal and defining event in Linden's life that makes her so unsure of her emotions is seldom referenced and does not serve as a defining characteristic. It seems tacked on.

Linden is also almost always sulking about something. Much of the second trilogy, especially the second book, is page after page of Linden brooding about something Covenant said or did. Reading the interaction between them was like hanging out with a couple who look for the smallest reasons to fight with each other and ruin your evening. You don’t want to hang out with them anymore and there were times that I wanted to put these books down and quit spending time with Mr. Doom and Mrs. Gloom, aka Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery.

The second book was pointless. Through 500 pages, little new information was revealed. The plot advanced little. The point of the book turned out to be false. It was as if Donaldson was cranking out words and storylines while searching for the resolution of his story – a resolution he did not find before completing the second book.

The third book brings some redemption to the story. We rejoin the main plot. As he head toward Revelstone with the goal of bringing down the Clave and ending the Sunbane, Thomas Covenant once again becomes a man of action. With purpose defined, he becomes a less brooding figure and a more heroic one.

The story’s climax is fitting and almost makes it worth enduring the second book. The climax is brilliant because it is rather anti-climatic, but revealing. At the beginning of the book, Foul tells Covenant that he will willingly hand over the white gold. The reader dismisses this as boastful bloviating. The anti-climax is developed as Covenant does just that. There is no epic battle, just simple surrender and self sacrifice. Foul is not destroyed. We find that Foul and his existence are as essential to the existence of the Land as is the staff of law.

The end of the second trilogy sets up another sequel which Donaldson would undertake almost 30 years later. Three books have been published in the Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. I have read the first two, and they show promise for an exciting conclusion to this epic story.

Reading this trilogy was frequently a struggle, but worth it for no other reason than it sets up the third Chronicles. No matter how badly Donaldson’s plots sometimes falter, he remains a brilliant wordsmith. His expansive vocabulary, his strong character development (when they are not overwrought with self pity), and his descriptive narrative make him one of the most enjoyable writers I’ve ever read.

Book to Movie: Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)

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Book to Movie: Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)
Directed by Jeff Beesley
Screenplay by Richard Dooling, based on the short story, Dolan’s Cadillac by Stephen King

In 2009, director Jeff Beesley took Stephen King’s long short story, Dolan’s Cadillac, expanded it, and made it into a surprisingly solid movie.

The King story is the second half of the movie. The first half is the set up that King glosses over to get us to the action. Robinson’s wife, Elizabeth, is out horseback riding in the desert when she stumbles onto our villain, Dolan, brokering a deal for Mexican women. She watches as Dolan (portrayed by Christian Slater), unhappy with the merchandise, kills the delivery men and some of the women. She starts dialing 911 when they notice her. They shoot and she flees, dropping her cell phone. Dolan’s people find the cell phone and take it with them as they tool back toward Las Vegas in Dolan’s armor plated Cadillac Escalade.

A few days later, Robinson and Elizabeth arrive at home to find a dead Mexican woman in their bed; her lips are sewn shut. Dolan has sent them a warning.

Undeterred, Elizabeth goes to the feds and reports what she saw. The FBI is thrilled to have someone that can testify against Dolan, against whom they’ve been trying for years to build a case. They put her in protective custody at a Las Vegas hotel and begin building their case.

Meanwhile, unhappy with his Mexican merchandise, Dolan starts importing women from Europe. While he is happier with the European “merchandise” he is concerned about profit margins on each load. He tasks his people with finding a way to increase profit margins on each load.

Elizabeth and Robinson go stir crazy in their hotel, waiting for the feds to build their case. One night, Elizabeth decides to slip out. Robinson gives chase, knowing that slipping their protective detail will lead to a bad end. He arrives outside the hotel just in time to see Elizabeth blown up as she opens the door of their car.

With King’s backstory properly revealed on film, the King story starts. Robinson goes through the motions of living, but is empty without his wife. He begins following Dolan. He purchases a 44 magnum and prepares to assassinate Dolan as he leaves his Las Vegas suite. As he waits, another group with assassination as their goal shows up and Dolan watches as Dolan takes refuge in his armored Escalade while his men cut down the assailants with cold efficiency.

In King’s story, at one point, while following Dolan, Robinson ends up right on Dolan’s rear bumper at a detour – the detour that gives him the idea for his revenge. In the story, Dolan doesn’t notice him. In the movie, Robinson stops at a rest area for a bathroom break and Dolan and his men show up. The put a beat down on him and Dolan tells him he is too weak and pitiful to kill. He spits in Robinson’s face as he lies writhing on the bathroom floor. Before departing, Dolan delivers a cryptic lecture on the arc of descent, meant to be a warning to leave him alone.

Robinson returns to his life and his classroom as depressed as ever. He is pondering the arc of descent as he starts pushing a line of erasers from his desk into a trash can. We never see any physical signs of epiphany, but we know from reading the story that Robinson has formulated his plan.

Over Labor Day weekend, with the road crews on holiday, Dolan heads for the desert to set his trap. Dolan sets off for Los Angeles to take delivery of his latest cargo. His agent in L.A. contacts him en route and shows him the solution to increasing the profit margin. He explains that they can get a higher yield with more volume per cargo container. This load contains children to be brokered.

From there, events unfold just as they did in the story. Robinson joins the Nevada road crew and learns to operate the equipment. He digs his pit, removes the detour and waits for Dolan to arrive. Dolan’s driver dutifully drives right into the snare.

While staying true to the essence of the King story, burying Dolan in the movie is much more drawn out, with Robinson throwing shovels of dirt on the Caddy while dialoguing with Dolan, tormenting him; making him scream. At one point, Robinson turns off the cellular blocker he is using to talk to Dolan on a cell phone and allowing him to use his onboard computer to watch as he pours more dirt on Dolan’s tomb.

While Robinson goes about his business, he gets a call from the FBI agent working the case. They've raided Dolan's warehouse, arrested his people, and are executing an arrest warrant for Dolan.

With time running out, Dolan eventually gets busy with the back hoe and fills in the hole, leaving a little gap over the sunroof. He places the symmetrically cut pieces of asphalt back in place. Dolan watches with horror as Dolan slides the final piece over the sunroof.

This was one of the finer King adaptations I’ve ever seen and I’m surprised it didn’t receive more acclaim. It didn’t have any corny special effects, tacked on characters, or major rewrites that often ruin King’s stories on screen.

Adding the backstory as part of the plot was necessary to make a movie and it could have been done poorly with a series of flashbacks. To use flashback as a story telling device for this story would have been instinctive. Instead, screenwriter Jeff Beesley tells it in real time, making it much more enjoyable for an audience that had not read the story and King fans alike.

The deviations from the story such as Robinson’s encounter with Dolan in the rest stop added to the tension and were folded neatly into the story. Too often, when screenwriters pad a King short story, they tack on scenes. There was nothing tacked on in this story.

I pictured Dolan as I read the story as a character from The Sopranos – a large, middle aged man of Italian ancestry. Christian Slater was neat, prim, and attractive and played Dolan with a coldness that was striking. Seldom have I seen Slater pull off a roll so well.

In King’s story, Robinson had a cold detachment from his revenge. To him, it was a laborious task to be carried out at the behest of the ghost of his dead wife. He is methodical in carrying it out. King even opens with the Spanish proverb about revenge being best served cold. In the movie, Robinson delights in tormenting Dolan. This took a little away from the Robinson’s character who was supposed to be a mild mannered grade school teacher.

That is but a minor weakness in what was otherwise a superb adaptation of one of King’s finer short works.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

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Nightmares and Dreamscapes
By Stephen King
Copyright 1993

This third volume of short stories from Stephen King contains almost exclusively new material. Without the restrictions placed on him by various magazine editors, many of the works are long; some are bloated. But the volume also contains some of his finest short work including The End of the Whole Mess and You Know They Got a Hell of a Band.

Introduction: Myth, Belief, Faith, and Ripley’s Believe it Or Not
Stephen King opens his third volume of short stories by telling us that he was a gullible child who believed everything he saw and heard. He absorbed ghost stories and urban myths such as the one about the acid at the core of a golf ball as hard truths. As an adolescent casting his first vote, he sardonically notes, he voted for Richard Nixon because Nixon had a secret plan to get us out of the Vietnam War.

Most of the strange and macabre tales that filled King’s mind, he says, came from the comic book version of Ripley’s Believe it or Not which told of bizarre, but supposedly true happenings from around the world.

It is that ability to openly embrace the weird, the bizarre, and the supernatural that allows him to craft the stories and books that have frightened two generations. It is a necessary component of his psyche that the wisdom of years and the cynicism of middle age have not overcome.

It is also that release of reality that allows us to enjoy his stories. . .

Dolan’s Cadillac
Third grade teacher we know only as Robinson decides he is going to kill the mobster who killed his wife nine years prior. He develops a plan to capture the gangster in the middle of the Nevada desert and see him off.

To do so, he joins a Nevada road crew, working his summer off under the blistering desert sun to learn about roadwork; to gain the knowledge necessary to hatch his plan. Serendipitously, a detour is set on Route 71 – the route the mobster Dolan always takes in his spiffy Cadillac when going on holiday to Los Angeles – for the Fourth of July.

Robinson goes to the detour site and working tirelessly for two days, sets his intricate snare.

This was one of the longer works in the book, but could have easily been more bloated. This character is narrow and single-minded in his purpose. King weaves revenge tales with unabashed creativity and this is a creative end to a wicked little tale. A wonderful story with which to open the book.

Dolan’s Cadillac originally appeared in the Castle Rock Newsletter, February—June 1985.

The End of the Whole Mess
A man recounts in a final journal entry how his genius brother discovers a mineral that promises to end all hostility in the human race – and destroyed mankind with it.

The main character is introduced as a professional writer. He even remarks that he digresses too much as he chronicles how one man destroyed the human race. He knows he’s racing against time to get it all down, but it reads like . . . a Stephen King story with overdeveloped characters. Stephen King remarks in the notes section of the book that the genius brother was inspired by his own brother. The main character writes very much like Stephen King.

The End of the Whole Mess originally appeared in Omni, October 1986. It was made into an episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King that aired on TNT in 2006.

Suffer the Little Children
A grades school teacher, known for being strict and having eyes in the back of her head notices one day (she uses trick glasses) one of her students morphs into a monster when her back is turned. He convinces her that all her students are in fact, just disguised monsters. So, the teacher comes up with a very practical solution to the problem.

I love the dark ambiguity of this story. While it was longer and its primary character more developed, it reminded me very much of Cain Rose Up from Skeleton Crew. We are left with a couple unanswered questions. Was the teacher simply insane, or were her students really monsters?

This story dates back to the days of Night Shift which might explain why to story telling is so tight and disciplined. It was dropped at the recommendation of King’s editor. Suffer the Little Children originally appeared in Cavalier magazine, February 1972.

The Night Flier
Richard Dees, the annoying bastard of a tabloid reporter from The Dead Zone, chases a vampire who prefers to fly – not with the wings of a bat – but with the jet engines of a private Cessna. At the request of his editor, Dees tracks a mysterious creature that travels from small airport to small airport, devouring the blood of those unlucky enough to be there when he lands. After days of flying his small plane south along the east coast, Dees catches up with his quarry.

The first time I read this story, I was reminded of the legendary Kolchak: The Nightstalker. Reading it again dispels that similarity. Kolchak was an optimist. He was always bemused, never terrified as he pursued the supernatural. Dees is a darker personality, bereft of humor. King shows once again that he can add yet another twist to the ancient story of the vampire and make it work.

Night Flier originally appeared in Prime Evil, an anthology edited by Douglas Winter in 1988.

Popsy
A man with a bad gambling problem takes up child snatching as an occupation to pay his gambling debts. One evening, he snatches a lost kid from a mall who is preternaturally strong and with exceptionally sharp teeth. While on the way to deliver the kid to the flesh peddler, he meets the kids father – who bears a striking resemblance to the character from Night Flier.

It just goes to show you that even the children of the undead cannot resist the “must have” toy of any holiday season. One can imagine the difficulty Dracula would have chasing down Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures for his son. This story is much darker than my glib analysis and it is enjoyable to see the vampire play the hero for once without it becoming sappy.

Popsy originally appeared in Masques II, an anthology published in 1987.

It Grows on You
Five retired New England men sit around a stove fire in a general store, recounting the history of a strange, old house in Castle Rock. It’s deadly and eerie nature have kept it abandoned for more than a decade after the death of its builder, a textile manufacturer of some wealth.

The men note that after every evil event that takes place inside the house, a new wing is added to the already expansive mansion. One of the old men notes that someone has started a new wing on the house.

This was a yankee story pure and simple. The language, the mannerisms, and attitudes are all true to form for a provincial yankee town like Castle Rock. King was writing for an audience in this story.

A different version was published in Marshroots Fall 1973 – the University of Maine literary publication. King says he made major revisions from that version for Needful Things. Perhaps, but it is still a yankee story.

Chattery Teeth
A traveling salesman stops at a roadside convenience store in the desert. Besides operating a pet zoo in the desert, they sell gasoline and novelty gag gift items. His mind seizes on a set of metal chattery teeth because they look so unusually large and dangerous. He acquires them and returns to his car, which is now beset by a sand storm. A kid begs a ride and, as they travel the treacherous, sand covered roads in the story, the hitchhiker attacks him. The chattery teeth spring into action.

This is a prime example of the contemporary King – without editorial guidelines, pumping out stories that are way too long to be enjoyed as short stories. This as a great premise and King tells an interesting story. But the literary bloat! Too many words, too much backstory, and too much time building tension.
Chattery Teeth was first published in Cemetery Dance, Fall 1992.

Dedication
A New York hotel cleaning lady receives a copy of her son’s new novel, dedicated to her, saying, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” After work, she sits in the hotel bar and explains to a colleague why that dedication is so true.

Stephen King, meet Alice Walker. Your idea for how to choose a father was done earlier by her in the book, The Temple of My Familiar. King actually defends the story in the Notes section. He then adds that the story shouldn’t need defending; it should stand on its own. It’s just more of that phase King went through in the early 1990s where he needed to prove he could write socially relevant stories. Not badly written, but the story is absolute rubbish.

This story was originally published in a horror anthology entitled Dark Visions published in 1989

The Moving Finger
Howard Mitla is dismayed to walk into the bathroom of his Queens apartment and find a single, human finger extended from his sink drain. Howard is “pee-shy” and can’t urinate with that finger with its single nail, extending from the drain and tapping on the sink. Determined not to spend the rest of his life using public johns, Mitla takes the matter into his own hands and does a little chemical plumbing. He ends up in a battle for his life and his sanity.

Stephen King has said that most of his story ideas start with, “what if.” As he states in his Notes, sometimes it’s fun to read a story without knowing why something happened. King doesn’t take himself or his idea too seriously and the reader comes away feeling as if he’s just read a delightful story from a comic book.

The Moving Finger was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1990.

Sneakers
A recording engineer is at first curious, then apprehensive, and eventually terrified by a pair of old fashioned canvass sneakers in a toilet stall in the bathroom of a recording studio. He is able to learn the legend of the ghost that is supposed to haunt the bathroom. He eventually confronts the ghost.

This was an intriguing and engaging story with a disappointing ending. Too many words and pages expended to have a pointless ending. This story is a real bust.

This story was also published in the horror anthology, Night Visions 5

You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
Rock and Roll will never die! It lives on forever and ever in a remote Oregon town! A couple taking backroads through rural Oregon get lost in the woods and eventually find themselves in the remote town of Rock and Roll Heaven, OR. In Rock and Roll Heaven, Janis Joplin will serve you pie, Elvis will write you a parking ticket, and there is a concert every night!

I loved this story! King doesn’t mind playing with the ghosts of the dead and famous in this creepy story about a town run by dead rock stars. King keeps the tension between the couple simmering and slowly as they struggle to find their way on the narrow gravel roads in the middle of nowhere. Once we get to town, King makes no effort to conceal where he’s going. The reader is trying to guess just who they will see and what they will do.

This story was originally published in Shock Rock, published in 1992.

Home Delivery
The end of the world has come with the zombie apocalypse destroying the world one person at a time. On Gennesault Island, 40 miles off the coast of Maine, the locals prepare to watch over the island’s one cemetery to cut down the dead before they can get going. Meanwhile, a young, timid woman ponders the child in her womb and the world it will come into. Certainly the birth will be a home delivery.

I had forgotten that Stephen King had cranked out one zombie story before writing the superb zombie novel, Cell. This is one of his more graphic stories, written for a splatterpunk anthology called Book of the Dead which used the setting established by George Romero’s zombie pictures as its backdrop. Most horror fans would be surprised to learn that King is not all that graphic in his writing, usually. He ramps it up in this story.

Rainy Season
A couple rents a home in a small remote town to spend a year working on a book. When they get to the town, they are advised that they should leave for the day because this particular day in June, once every seven years, it rains toads in this particular Maine town. Convinced that the locals are pulling a prank on them, they decide to stay and ride out the storm.

Sometimes King takes an overtly absurd, silly concept and makes it horrific. This is one of those tales. It’s not the best story in this volume by far. But perhaps it’s the most creative concept.

This story was originally published in the Spring 1989 edition of Midnight Grafitti.

My Pretty Pony
A dying grandfather delivers a lecture to his young grandson about the nature of time and our perception of it; how it passes slowly when one is young, and gathers speed and momentum as you grow older.

King writes in the notes section that this short story was actually a chapter from a Bachman novel he was working on that fell apart. A gangster is waiting to make a hit. He’s reflecting back on this lecture his grandfather gave him. It’s deep, philosophical, and holds a lot more meaning for me now than it did when I first read it 20 years ago when time was passing somewhat slower.

Sorry, Right Number
In this teleplay, a woman receives a mysterious phone call from a sobbing woman. She is unable to make out what the woman says before the connection is broken. She is sure it someone close to her. She tries desperately to learn the person’s identity. She eventually does, many years later.

The script was originally pitched to Steven Spielberg for his television series, Amazing Stories. Spielberg thought it was too dark for the uplifting show. So King sold it to Tales from the Crypt where it worked much better, in King’s opinion. I’ve never seen the show.

The Ten O’Clock People
Pearson is a smoker who has cut back and trying to quit. One day, as he goes to his 10:00 AM ritual of smoke break, he observes that the president of the bank where he works is actually a deformed mutant. He learns from others who have recently cut back on their smoking that only those who reduce their nicotine intake can see these aliens and that crossing them is a bad idea. Pearson joins an underground resistance movement to kill these creatures.

I was a smoker who quit and I can remember the trippy dreams and strange thoughts that passed through my mind as I endured about a year of withdrawal. The story seems perfectly plausible. It is, however, too long. It consumed more than 50 pages when 20 might have been sufficient.

Crouch End
An American couple goes searching for a friend’s house in suburban London when they find themselves in a Lovecraftian nightmare – complete with homage to Yogsogoth. They struggle to find their way out, but only the wife makes it. She tells her tale to two London police officers.

This was an absolutely fantastic story with King recreating that ominous, washed out, completely bereft of color town like Lovecraft used to do. Reading this reminded me so much of Ramsey Campbell’s work. It may be because the story first appeared in an anthology, edited by Campbell, called New Tales of the Cthulu Mythos.

This story also was made into a screenplay for the Nightmares and Dreamscapes series.

The House on Maple Street
Four siblings, living an unhappy life with an emotionally abusive stepfather discover that, inside the walls of their home, metal is “growing.” The eldest boy figures out that, while they were away on a three month sabbatical with their stepfather, there home was somehow converted into a spaceship. As the hour for the blastoff draws near, they hatch a plan to rid themselves of their wicked stepfather forever.

I believe Ramsey Campbell wrote a story similar to this about an entire city block in London actually being a space ship that takes off. The crux of the stories is the same, but they are different tales. I think Campbell’s is the better of the two.

The Fifth Quarter
After finding his friend gutshot and left for dead, a man hunts down his friends coconspirators in an armored car robbery. Each of these three possesses a piece of a map that, when put together, lead to the location of the buried loot.

King attributes this story to Richard Bachman or maybe George Stark. I hope they write more exciting stuff than this because this was one dull story.

It was originally published in the February 1972 edition of Cavalier. It was also made into a screenplay for the Nightmare and Dreamscapes series.

The Doctor’s Case
In all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, it is always the narrator, the seemingly oblivious and unobservant Dr. Watson who listens patiently as the brilliant Holmes explains the clues Watson has overlooked and how they fit together. Here, it is Watson that picks up on the important clue that solves what seems to be the perfect locked room murder.

King tries hard to imitate Doyle’s prose and actually does a good job while staying in modern diction and syntax. But I’m not a fan of Sherlock Holmes and this story did not excite me.

The story was originally published in the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes published in 1987.

Umney’s Last Case
A 1930s private gumshoe is disturbed when little details that have shaped his life since before he can remember change dramatically. He arrives at his office to find out things are decidedly different there too, upon orders of the owner. When the owner, who just happens to be God in Umney’s world, shows up, Umney’s life is completely redefined.

I suspect that most writers have had the fantasy of injecting themselves into a world that they have created just for themselves. One has to believe that J.R.R. Tolkien must have longed to sojourn in Rivendell and taken in the fine tobacco of The Shire. Here, we see King writing about an author who actually does take over the life of a character in a world of his own creation.

Head Down
In a piece for the New Yorker, Stephen King documents the pursuit of the Maine Little League baseball championship by the Bangor West team. Kings son played on the team.

A real change of pace in the book. It’s an amusing and enjoyable read for those who played little league baseball and know what life lessons come from it. As many King stories, it’s a little long.

Brooklyn August
This is a poem that is an ode to the old Brooklyn Dodgers of 1956, to baseball itself, and to summer.

I don’t know poetry, but I know what I like. While it’s no Greenfields of the Mind, it is still beautiful.

The Beggar and the Diamond
An Hindu parable about being thankful for what you have and what misfortunes have not befallen you when misfortune befalls you.

King wrote this story in a straight forward manner, with simple descriptions and a simple narrative. It is refreshing and engaging.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

2012-01-09T16:20:00.001-05:00

11/22/63
By Stephen King
Copyright 2011

Stephen King explores a new genre of writing as he undertakes time travel and dystopian futures in his latest novel. King, who loathes doing research, did his homework and produced a fantastic novel based on the real events leading up to and during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Jake Eppling is a recently divorced teacher forced to teach English in summer GED classes. He loathes the process of grading student essays which vary in quality, with none ever rising to the level of good. However, one essay stands out in the latest batch. The school’s janitor, who is earning his GED, writes about the night his alcoholic father broke into a rage and killed his entire family – save our janitor – on Halloween Night.

Jake is moved by the simple prose of the profoundly emotional story. He and the janitor, Harry Dunning, later celebrate Harry's graduation at a retro 1950s diner owned by a friend of Jake’s named Al Templeton. Al takes their picture and puts it on his wall of fame – a collection of his customers who are really all average Joes.

A few days later, while at school, Jake receives a call from Al which is alarming and strange since Jake didn’t think the two knew each other quite well enough for Al to interrupt him at work. Al tells Jake he has to see him tonight at the diner – it is an emergency.

Jake meets Al and notices his friend’s physical condition has deteriorated dramatically in just a few short days. He appears to have aged years. Al tells Jake this is because he’s been living the last several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While living in that time, he’s developed lung cancer and it is terminal.

He has summoned Jake because he must share his secret and his goal with someone before he passes on. Al tells Jake that there is a temporal anomaly – or a time portal – in the pantry of his little greasy spoon diner – a diner which will undoubtedly be torn down upon Al’s untimely death. This temporal anomaly has but one terminus – October 1958 Maine. Al says that he dedicated more than four years to being at the right place at the right time to save President Kennedy from assassination. In Al’s mind, the world would be a better place had Kennedy not died that November afternoon.

The temporal anomaly has a fixed return point in time and place as well. The return is always back to Al’s diner and the return time is always just two minutes after you leave. If you go back, all the changes wrought previously are reset. Al invites Jake to try it out. All he has to lose in his own time and place is two minutes of his time.

Jake resolves to return to Derry, Maine in October 1958 to stop his janitor’s father from killing his family. He steps through the portal and finds himself outside of a working textile mill and it does appear to be 1958. He is greeted by a drunken old man who asks Jake for a dollar to take advantage of a two for one special at a liquor store just around the corner. This man, who Al calls the Yellow Card Man because of the strange yellow card stuck in the band on the guy’s hat. Jake gives him fifty cents as Al instructs him to do.

He is struck by the differences in his hometown and the cultural differences as well. Well stocked with 1950s vintage cash, courtesy of Al who used his knowledge of future sporting events to amass a healthy stock of cash, Jake acquires a set of wheels and motors off for Derry to save Harry Dunning’s father from killing his family.

While biding his time and trying to learn more about Dunning, Jake acquaints himself with 1950s culture. He buys the right clothes and tries to learn to adjust his speech and mannerisms for the times – with uneven results. He also encounters two characters well known to fans of Stephen King. Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh, just a few months removed from sending IT into deep hibernation, are in the park trying to learn the fine art of swing dancing with a battery powered record player. Jake stops long enough to provide a little instruction. He also encounters the taciturn and abrupt Norbert Keene, proprietor of Derry’s only apothecary who, one day in the summer of 1958, told Eddie Kaspbrak that the only asthma he had was the asthma his mother placed in his head.

Halloween night finally arrives and Jake prepares to make his move. However, Mr. Dunning the elder has more than one enemy and Jake has tipped his hand to this guy who is determined to stop Jake from killing Dunning so he can do it himself. He and Al eventually head to the Dunning house together and encounter Mr. Dunning in his full rage. Dunning kills one of his sons with a hammer, but Jake and his accomplice are able to save the wife, the daughter, and Harry Dunning – future janitor extraordinaire.

After what seems like a month in another time, Jake returns to 2011 to find Al patiently waiting for him, finishing the cigarette he started when Jake left. Jake tells Al that he is successful in preventing the horror that would shape Harry Dunning’s life. Al asks Jake to consider taking over the quest to save Kennedy and change the world for the better. Jake, born long after Kennedy’s untimely demise, says he will take it under advisement.

Jake returns to the school to find that Harry Dunning is not a janitor there and never was. This does not particularly surprise Jake, so he starts research to find out what happened to Harry Dunning. The Internet reveals no clues. It seems there never was a Harry Dunning. Finally, Jake is able to track down the sister whom he calls. She informs Jake that Harry grew up and went off to fight in Vietnam where he was killed in action.

Jake is distraught that he doomed a man to die in an undeclared war instead of living out full life. He reasons that if he goes back again, saves Harry Dunning again, and then saves Kennedy, that Kennedy will not escalate the conflict in Vietnam and Harry Dunning will be saved by the wise political actions of JFK. (This is specious historically, but serves the story).

Jake goes to Al’s house to tell him that he’s decided to make the trip. However, when he gets there, he finds that Al has ended his life and his suffering with an overdose of painkillers. Jake helps himself to the remainder of Al’s 1950s cash and heads for the past. He takes with him Al’s extensive notes on the Kennedy assassination and the biographical notes on the last years of the misbegotten life of Lee Harvey Oswald to guide him.

First, he goes back to Derry and, in a much neater fashion, saves the Dunning family. Finding Derry, Maine to be an unfriendly, unsettling place he’s eager to vacate, Jake attains an education degree from a correspondence school and heads to Florida where, using his fake credentials, he gets a job as a substitute English teacher.

Jake warms to his job and his colleagues. While in Florida, he places a number of bets on sporting events. Some are small, routine bets. But others are high yield bets which are sure things to Jake with his knowledge of events, but draw attention from his bookie with strong ties to organized crime. Sensing he has overplayed his hand, Jake vacates Florida and heads for Texas. He later learns that the house he was renting was firebombed shortly after he left town.

He settles in the town of Jodie, Texas and takes a job teaching English there. He soon falls for the school librarian, Sadie Dunhill who is in the process of divorcing her husband who lives back in Atlanta. The two quickly fall in love, but Sadie soon grows suspicious of Jake for his strange language and odd statements. Despite his best efforts, Jake can’t help but have lapses and one day, starts singing Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones – a song’s lyrics that were mildly risqué in 1971 when it was released and would be over the top by the standards of 1960.

Sadie pressures Jake to tell her more about who he is and where he came from, suspecting that Jake is holding back. Jake finally admits there is more to his story, but will not tell her. She breaks off their relationship at the end of the school year. Sadie heads off for Las Vegas to establish short term residency to get her Vegas divorce. Jake heads for Fort Worth where Lee Harvey Oswald will soon set up residence.

Jake rents the house across the street from the house that Lee and Marina Oswald will soon take up residency in a Fort Worth slum. Jake also finds a bookie so he can maintain his cash flow. He talks to the current residents who are preparing to vacate the home that the Oswalds will soon occupy. The woman’s name is Ivy Templeton. The name is striking in the story because it happens to be Al’s last name. Through Mrs. Templeton, Jake is able to learn the layout of the house across the street.

Jake settles in to observe and study the Oswalds and to worry about Sadie whom he misses badly. The Oswalds soon take up residence. Jake has bugged their apartment and studies the Oswald family with the underachieving Lee with his delusions of grandeur, his domineering mother who henpecks him constantly, and his lovely, but submissive wife whom he beats and mentally abuses.

One of Al’s major concerns he documents in his notes is whether or not Lee received help in killing Kennedy. Conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination have been an industry unto themselves in the United States since that date in Dallas and Al had one major concern regarding a Russian émigré who was close to Oswald.

The Oswalds receive frequent visits from a Russian named George de Mohrenschildt who is obsessed with a ranting right winger who takes to the radio to speak out against all things communist. General Edwin Walker will soon survive an assassination attempt undertaken by Lee Harvey Oswald. Jake is convinced that if he ascertains whether or not de Mohrenschildt was actually a participant or just an agent provocateur, he will know the truth about Oswald’s role as either a lone assassin or patsy in a conspiracy.

Jake continues to worry about Sadie as well. He is convinced that Sadie’s strange husband is not going to take the divorce well and is concerned. One night he calls Sadie and she doesn’t answer. Convinced that something is wrong, he heads back to Jodie instead of observing the assassination attempt on General Walker. As Jake often notes, the past is obdurate; it does not want to be changed. Time itself is fighting Jake’s efforts to change it.

He arrives in Jodie to find that Sadie has been attacked by her ex-husband. She is badly beaten and slashed across the face by her husband who is killed by one of Sadie’s fellow teachers. Sadie falls into a deep depression over her disfigurement and injuries. Jake briefly abandons his pursuit of Oswald to help Sadie return to mental and physical health.

The Cuban Missile Crisis comes and goes. As Sadie and the rest of the world look on in terror as the two superpowers play chicken over a Caribbean island, Jake reassures Sadie that the Russians will look for a way out to save face and avoid nuclear war. When Sadie demands to know how Jake knows this, he finally confides in her his true nature. She doesn’t believe it at first, but with more and more information flowing from Jake, she soon accepts it.

The Oswalds abandon Fort Worth and head for a brief sojourn in New Orleans before they will return to Dallas one final time. Lee rents the downstairs apartment in the duplex where the Oswalds will reside upstairs. Jake is resolved to track all of Oswald’s final days to ascertain whether or not there was a conspiracy. He visits Dealey Plaza and visits the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

Before he can learn much, he is attacked by a bookie who is angry over having lost so much money to Jake. It turns out that his bookie in Derry, in Fort Worth, in Florida, and in Dallas are all linked to the same organized crime organization. Time is being obdurate again. One of the Dallas police officers investigating Jake’s assault is none other than Officer J.D. Tippit – the officer Oswald will kill in his desperate attempt to escape police pursuit.

Jake is brain damaged and much of his memory, his ability to speak, and his ability to reason is damaged. He has no recall of who he really is and what he is doing. Sadie tries to help him regain his senses. As the final month passes and October 1963 turns to November 1963, the man who would stop history altering events isn’t sure who he is.

Finally, one phrase breaks through Jake’s mental block – “The word of Al.” Jake remembers that he had a notebook put together by a guy named Al that told all about what he was doing and why he was doing it. Jake retrieves the notebook from a safety deposit box and reads it. Most of his memories come flooding back to him over the next several days.

November 22 finally arrives and Jake takes off in a frenzy to reach Dealey Plaza in time to save the president. Sadie is determined to accompany him. Along the way, they have a flat tire, are caught in a traffic jam, and are in a car wreck. History is trying to keep him from his appointment with Oswald.

Sadie and Jake race the final few blocks to the book depository and climb the steps to the sixth floor. As they weave through the stacks of books, they hear the first shot fired and see Oswald sitting at his perch, chambering another round into the bolt action rifle. Jake shoots and misses Oswald. Oswald turns and fires, hitting Sadie in the chest. Jake returns fire and kills Oswald. Kennedy’s motorcade flies out of Dealey Plaza and back to Love Field.

Jake spends Sadie’s last moments with her before she dies and he is arrested. The police question him but his story matches what apparently happened: Jake saved the president’s life. While still at police headquarters, Jake receives a call. President Kennedy calls to thank him for saving his life as well as that of Jackie and others in the motorcade. Jake becomes a national hero.

The FBI accepts that Jake is not part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but they want him to drop out of sight for awhile so they can investigate, not entirely sure how Jake knew that Oswald was going to be at that particular place on that particular day. Before Jake leaves 1963, a massive earthquake kills thousands in California – an event that did not happen in the normal course of history.

Heartbroken over the death of Sadie, Jake returns to Maine and the textile mill where the portal still exists. There, he finds another man standing where the Yellow Card Man used to stand. This man reveals himself to be a guardian over the time portal. There are many portals and many timelines, the guardian tells Jake. The guardian that Jake knew as the Yellow Card Man died of alcoholism. It is an occupational hazard, the guardian tells Jake, with many guardians driven insane by trying to keep timelines straight in their own head.

This particular guardian wears a green card in his hat band. This, he says, is indicative that this string of time is healthy. He encourages Jake to return to his own time. Jake is eager to see the world as it would have been had Kennedy survived. He arrives to find the future he created quite dystopian.

The world has been nuked. Kennedy did not save the world. Instead, he became increasingly unpopular. Hostilities between the superpowers increased with the gunslinger Kennedy in the White House. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1976, made matters worse and eventually nuclear war broke out and the government of the United States fell. Maine seceded from the union and joined Canada, Jake learns. He learns this from none other than Harry Dunning – the man he saved from Vietnam but doomed to live out his years in post nuclear Canada.

Realizing that he’s badly messed up time itself and fundamentally altered the course of the human race, Jake returns to 1958. He can immediately set things to right by sampling returning to 2011. But he can’t forget Sadie. He checks into a hotel room and contemplates returning to Jodie, getting a teaching job, and meeting and falling in love with Sadie all over again to live out his life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finally, he realizes he cannot doom man on earth for his own lost love and steps back through the portal one final time. All is as it should be. He travels to Jodie to find Sadie, now an old woman, has survived the attack by her ex husband without his help. She is an old woman now, having never married. Jake asks her to dance. . .

Give Stephen King kudos for doing his homework on the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald before writing this book. In his closing notes, King tells us that he and a research assistant invested hours in interviewing historians, visiting Dallas, and learning all they could about Oswald. Their primary text in research was William Manchester’s 1967 book, The Death of a President. This factual account of Oswald’s actions prior to killing Kennedy and the events themselves that day in Dallas is a narrative account of history, unfettered by the wild conspiracy theories that developed later. Although it was one of the first books published on the subject, it remains one of the most authoritative. I've read more than a dozen books on the subject of the Kennedy assassination and none are more straightforward in the telling than Manchester's.

As for the story, it is one of King’s better works – certainly the best thing he’s written since Cell. As is King’s wont, each character is provided with extensive backstory, making them deep and rich. The story is not only a narrative of a man trying to change history, but a man observing what was good and bad about another time and a man in love, which is always timeless. King weaves Jake’s dual motivations together seamlessly and we experience Jakes struggle between what he regards as his duty to save Kennedy and his desire to love Sadie.

I feared that this book would become an outlet for all of Stephen King's liberal politics and fantasies to play out. I've never let the difference between King's politics and my own discourage me from enjoying his work. Seldom do his politics creep into his work, even when dealing with political issues such as he did in The Dead Zone. When the do, such as in the horrible book, The Regulators, it is always distracting. I was certain that King's political hero, Gary Hart, was going to be savior of the world in the end.

Alas, King spared us from all that. He instead developed a plausible series of political events that did not disparage any person or political party. Gary Hart didn't even figure into the equation.

King, like many writers his age, has romanticized that time of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a wonderful time. I’ve heard of people referring to November 22, 1963 as the day the “nation lost its innocence.” King does not rhapsodize on how beautiful that period was and how innocent they all were back then. His story points up the overt racism, sexism, and narrow mindedness of American culture as well as the terrifying international events that transpired. He notes that Dallas circa 1963 was a mean place. It was and the political rifts that existed between the competing ideologies were as wide then as they are today as is evidenced by the ascendency of ardent right winger Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964.

But he also notes how we, as a people, were less suspicious of each other. How trusting we were in our fellow man 50 years ago as opposed to now. Some things, as King notes, do get worse with the passage of time. We are a nation of paranoids now when compared to the halcyon days of modern society in 1963.

King has reverted to form in linking 11/22/63 to his earlier works – a practice he’d all but given up. We see Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier from IT. Also in Derry are the aforementioned Norbert Keene as well as the Tracker Brothers who own the trucking depot that became the metaphorical mental refuge of the main character in the novel Dreamcatcher. King seems to revel in his return to Derry and helps the reader revel in it as well. Derry is a dark place, King readers know. Now we have Jake Eppling’s confirmation as he was palpably aware of the Derry’s dark undercurrents. There is also passing references to the Shawshank State Prison that is the setting for Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and is referenced in so many other King Castle Rock stories.

King uses the name Ivy Templeton as the person who rented the Fort Worth home before the Oswalds. Many horror fans will recognize her as the young girl who dies at the end of Frank DeFilitta’s 1976 novel Audrey Rose. I doubt this was an homage to DeFelitta since King ridiculed his work in his 1981 non fiction book, Danse Macabre, saying his work and that of author John Saul were not what he regarded as good horror. Perhaps just a name King grabbed out of his subconscious. He never elaborates on it.

The book comes in at just under 900 pages. While King is often criticized (often rightfully) for overwriting his stories, 11/22/63 is not one of them. In those 900 pages, there is nary an unimportant event or word. The story is epic and King tells it in the grandeur it deserves.

Book to Movie: Needful Things (1993)

2012-01-01T02:04:00.001-05:00

Book to Movie: Needful Things (1993)
Directed by Fraser Clarke Heston
Screenplay by W.D. Richter
Based on the novel, Needful Things, by Stephen King

In the early and mid 1990s, movies and made for television miniseries based on Stephen King’s works were cranked out in Hollywood the way cars are cranked out in Detroit. Like an assembly line, the end product almost always had a sameness about it that resulted in more than a dozen undistinguished works. Some were awful. Some were entertaining. None were great. Needful Things falls into the category of entertaining, but not great.

Screenwriter W.D. Richter used King’s story as a guideline to tell a much different tale. The opening scene has Leland Gaunt tooling down a main country road in a stunningly beautiful, vintage Mercedes sedan, arriving in Castle Rock.

The story introduces us to many of the characters quickly. In the first five minutes, Sheriff Pangborn, not widowed, but having moved to Castle Rock years before after a tour of duty with the Pittsburgh police department, proposes to Polly Chambers. We are also introduced to Nettie, Dan Keeton, and Brian Rusk before five minutes have elapsed.

In the book, much of the action was centered around Alan and Polly and their relationship. She harbors a dark secret about her past involving a child who died in an awful tragedy. He's still grieving and guilt ridden over the death of his family. Their relationship is complex, dynamic, and delicate. The movie pushes commitment to the fore without any of that interaction between the two main characters.

As in the book, Brian Rusk is indeed Gaunt’s first customer. In the book, it is a 1956 Sandy Koufax baseball card that Brian covets. In the movie, it is Mickey Mantle. The change makes sense since Mantle’s name is almost universally known while few of the Generation X age group could even identify the team that Koufax played for. Many of Leland Gaunt’s gifts are changed to make them more identifiable for the movie audience.

As King has him do, Leland Gaunt bargains with each customer and extracts a promise of a favor to be delivered later.

King makes a point of never having Pangborn and Gaunt meet face to face. This is because Gaunt is afraid of Pangborn and his “white magic.” In the movie, Gaunt sits down with Pangborn in his shop and has tea, telling the sheriff he is from Akron (which German actor, Max Von Sydow manages to pronounce correctly. American Ed Harris who plays Alan Pangborn later pronounces it AK-RON). This changes the whole dynamic of the story.

To document all of the differences and deviations from King’s original story would be a distracting undertaking. As in the book, many tricks are played and the first two Castle Rock residents to meet their doom are Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerczyk who die in the Jerczyk home rather than on the streets of Castle Rock.

The conflict between the Catholics and the Baptists over Casino Night is in the movie, but not developed. It is referenced with two or three throwaway lines, but we never see any conflict. This conflict was central to the plot and the conflict around which all other subplots revolved.

Missing is the entry of Ace Merrill, who was to be set against Alan Pangborn. Also eliminated is Polly’s backstory of her child and her belief that Alan has gone looking into that secret. Instead, Pangborn sets it up so Polly finds envelopes full of money aboard the boat that Alan lives on after Gaunt told her that he and Keeton were embezzling from the village. There is also a senseless and needless scene of Gaunt ravishing Polly after she is entranced by him.

The turning point in the movie is the investigation into what happened at the Jerczyk home with Nettie and Wilma. Brian Rusk shows up at the scene and asks to talk to Sheriff Pangborn. When the sheriff comes to talk to him, Brian runs off.

Later, Pangborn finds Brian near the rocky coast. Looking out on the ocean, forlorn. Alan approaches him and finds the Mantle card discarded on the steps leading up to an observation platform. As he approaches Brian, Brian produces a gun – a gun that Leland Gaunt took away from Dan Keeton and gave to Brian. Brian warns Alan to stay out of Needful Things and tells him that Gaunt is not human; he’s a monster. He then shoots himself.

This was a wonderfully written and directed scene and would have worked well had there been any set up for it. But the script provides no hint of the horrible guilt and torment building up inside Brian, nor are we allowed to observe how Brian arrives at his conclusion. This is the primary shortcoming of the movie: the viewer never becomes emotionally vested in the characters or their conflicts because, while King provides tremendous amounts of background and introspection, the script provides no real motivation for any of the characters to hate each other.

After Brian nearly kills himself (we are told he will survive), Alan goes to the Catholic church and talks to the priest, asking him if he believes in the devil. Another good opportunity for developing a central premise for the movie is lost when, instead of talking about the nature of evil and how the devil is the ultimate salesman, the church blows up before they can get down to business. Both Alan and the priest survive. Alan heads for town while the priest heads for the Baptist church to kill the Baptist minister.

Alan arrives to find dozens of people fighting in the streets and widespread looting. Frustrated, he unloads a clip of rounds into the air to get everyone’s attention. Once he has their attention, he makes a sappy speech that ends up sounding like George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, transplanted into a horror movie.

As Alan is speechifying, Gaunt comes out onto the porch of his shop and tells the town he only sold them what they wanted. Caveat Emptor, he tells them. As he and Alan argue, Dan Keeton emerges from Gaunt’s store with dynamite strapped to his chest. After whining and complaining about the persecutors who are persecuting him, he blows up Needful Things with Gaunt still standing on the front porch.

However, Gaunt emerges from the wreckage unscathed. He bids adieu to Castle Rock, telling them that business has been good, but not great, and he must be moving on. He gets into his Mercedes and heads out of town. As he passes by the “Welcome to Castle Rock” sign, his car vanishes, ending the movie.

With all of the noted shortcomings, it wasn’t a tremendously bad film. It had moments of dark comedy and scenes such as the noted interaction between Alan and Brian that were quite good. The cast, many of whom were veterans of other King works dating back to 1979’s ‘Salem’s Lot, lifted the mediocre script with stellar performances. Max Von Sydow was almost as I’d imagined Leland Gaunt long before I saw the movie and his is the best of a bunch of great performances.

Needful Things was probably not a good Stephen King book to make into a movie. The story is simply the closing chapter in an ongoing tale King has been telling about this strange little town since the publication of The Dead Zone in 1979. The reader already knows the town and many of its people. Readers are already emotionally vested in Castle Rock before they pick up the novel.

The movie didn’t emotionally vest the viewer. The script does nothing to make us care about these people. King is careful to make sure that each of the characters – even the less noble like the drunk Hugh Priest or embezzling Dan Keaton – are complex with good and bad in each of them. With just two hours of screen time and many characters to work with, it was simply impossible to develop the characters to that extent. The complexity of the characters is an essential element in making Needful Things a good book. Without that, the story is flat.

Needful Things is better suited for a two or three episode miniseries. In such miniseries as It, The Stand, and Storm of the Century, characters are developed to their maximum potential in the visual medium. It could have been so with Needful Things. Instead of a stellar television miniseries, Needful Things is an incredibly average feature film.

Needful Things by Stephen King

2011-12-24T18:15:00.000-05:00

Needful Things

By Stephen King

Copyright 1991

In the novel, Needful Things, Stephen King brings the saga of the town of Castle Rock, Maine to a head. Castle Rock has always been an uneasy little town. A local celebrity psychic helped catch a serial killing cop. Joe Camber’s big Saint Bernard went bad and killed a kid, celebrity writer Thad Beaumont lost his home and eventually his wife and child in a strange series of events, and local institution, Pop Merrill, went up in a ball of flames with his Emporium Galorium. Castle Rock is an uneasy place with a lot of tension building up.

King opens his final Castle Rock novel by telling us, we’ve been here before. He takes us on a tour of the town and introduces us to the principle players. The big story in Castle Rock at the moment is the building feud between the Catholics and the Baptists over the Catholic church’s intention to hold a casino night fundraiser. For Baptists, the devil and dice are one and the same.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Alan Pangborn is in the final stages of grieving for his lost family. As he battled Thad Beaumont’s unholy twin, his wife was fighting her own battle. She was suffering from nearly crippling headaches. But Alan was too engaged in the Beaumont business to notice. Later, when she crashed the car, killing herself and their only child, Alan was left with painful 20/20 hindsight.

He has found love once again with Polly Chalmers, owner of a local dress making shop. Polly suffers from exceptionally painful and debilitating arthritis in her hands. She also suffers from guilt from a very dark secret she harbors involving the death of a child she bore out of wedlock in the 1970s.

Like all parochial small towns, Castle Rock is rife with petty grudges and sleights. There is corruption and jealousy, all waiting to be exploited.

The plot gets moving much as it did in ‘Salem’s Lot with the announcement that a new store is coming to town. The locals are all sure it is another antique store that will sell second rate merchandise to rook tourists. But, with news and gossip being at a premium in a small town, its arrival generates interest and excitement.

The first to enter Neeful Things is 11 year old Brian Rusk. He meets Leland Gaunt, an elderly and stately gentleman from Akron who is setting up his merchandise, who is the store’s proprietor. Brian is immediately drawn to Gaunt’s collection of sports cards. Brian is looking for one card in particular – a 1956 Topps Sandy Koufax. To Brian, it is the holy grail of cards.

It just so happens that Gaunt has that particular card, autographed by Koufax. Serendipitously, it is signed, “To Brian.”

Brian is excited by his incredible find, then immediately crestfallen by his knowledge that he couldn’t possibly come up with the funds for such a purchase. But Leland Gaunt offers him a special deal. He takes Brian Rusk’s pocket change and a “favor,” to be called it at a later time

Over the next several days, many of Castle Rock’s citizens, from its esteemed (and corrupt) head selectmen to the town mouse who is out on parole after murdering her husband in self defense. Each finds the improbable desire of their dreams. Each dream is for sale at a reasonable price, and a “favor,” to be called in later.

Leland Gaunt has set in motion a series of events that will stoke the Catholics and the Baptists, the petty grievances of Castle Rock residents, and bring the underlying anger of the town to a boil.

Gaunt has arranged for each person to play what would seem to them, mean, but harmless pranks on people they hardly know. At the scene of each prank is left a clue to point the victim in the wrong direction – in the direction of the person with whom they are angry or hold a grudge.

Polly Chalmers is among those who have visited Leland Gaunt’s Neeful Things. To Polly, Mr. Gaunt provides an ancient charm on a chain from the Middle East. It is a talisman to ward of the pain that has left Polly crying in bed for days at a time. She pays $40.00 and promises to play a trick on the town’s former resident bad boy who is on his way back home.

Events get underway when mousy Nettie Cobb, who has just arrived home to find her precious dog stabbed to death, ostensibly by a bitchy neighbor, meets that Wilma Jerczyk, who is sure it is Nettie who has thrown mud on her drying sheets. The two meet in the street armed with knives and cleavers. There, they die at each other’s hand, not knowing that it was the town maintenance man who stabbed Nettie’s dog as his payment to Gaunt, and Brian Rusk who tossed the mud in exchange for the Koufax card.

Nettie worked for Polly at her sewing shop and she is devastated by her death. She and Alan discuss grief and loss and find themselves brought closer than ever by their mutual suffering and the therapy of the other’s comfort. Polly comes close to telling Alan what happened with her son when she lived in San Francisco, but decides not to, out of shame.

Tensions between the Catholics and the Baptists builds as pranks our pulled and threats levied. The Catholics promise swift and harsh retribution should the Baptists interfere with their fundraiser. The Baptists promise to shut down the gambling den by all means necessary.

With all of his wares now in circulation and his markers coming in, Leland Gaunt puts out the help wanted sign because he’s expanded his inventory to meet the new demand – demand for instruments of retribution. The man who excepts Gaunt’s help wanted solicitation is none other than Ace Merrill, who long ago tormented Gordie Lachance and his buddies as they searched for the body of a kid along the railroad tracks. Ace is back in town, on the run from coke dealers whom he owes a lot of money. He’s just completed a four year sentence at Shawshank Prison where Sheriff Alan Pangborn has put him.

Ace’s first mission is to travel to Boston to pick up a load of pistols, automatic weapons, and ammunition. This is Gaunt’s new inventory to be sold out the back door of the shop.

Other tensions are simmering in town as well. The head selectman, Dan Keeton, has helped himself to a sizeable chunk of the town treasury to play the ponies in Lewiston. The state auditors are on his tale and his doom is at hand. But Leland Gaunt has offered him the means of financial salvation and promise of aid in his battle against those who are persecuting him.

Alan puzzles over Nettie Cobb’s death. The solution seems obvious, but the clues don’t quite add up right. He knows there was a “witness” because a neighbor told Alan she saw Brian Rusk leaving the scene on his bike. Alan approaches Brian, who is now so guilt stricken and paranoid that he’s barely coherent. Alan tries to talk to Brian who seems almost desperate to reveal what he knows. But at the last minute, Brian rides off on his bicycle. He goes home and shoots himself in the head with his dad’s shotgun while his little brother looks on.

Sure that Brian Rusk was the key to the mystery of the death of Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerczyk, Alan travels to the hospital in Lewiston to interview Brian’s brother who is in a state of shock. Meanwhile, somebody has played a trick on Polly. She arrives home to find a letter from the California child welfare agency to Alan and cc’d to her telling Alan that his inquiries into the death of Polly Chalmer’s child are improper and illegal. She goes to see Leland Gaunt who encourages her to break it off with the prying sheriff. She calls Alan and tells him off.

While Alan is away, the tension in Castle Rock explodes as people set forth from their homes, seeking vengeance against those who they believed have wronged them with a hurtful or destructive prank. They all stop in to see Leland Gaunt on their way. Gaunt is more than happy to sell them what they think they need. The slaughter starts.

There are shootings and stabbings all over town. The Baptists and Catholics, each attacked in their respective churches with stink bombs, meet on the field of battle in the town park. The state police who try to break it up are caught up in the melee.

After delivering the weapons, Ace Merrill goes treasure hunting, looking for where is uncle Pop Merrill buried his reputably large stash. He uses a map provided by Mr. Gaunt. Eventually, that map leads him to the old Camber farm where Cujo terrorized Donna and Tad Trenton over those two hot summer days in 1983. There, he digs until he finds a can. In that can is a note from Sheriff Pangborn informing Ace that he has beat him to the treasure. Ace is hell bent on revenge against the sheriff.

Ace Merrill, town thug, hooks up with Dan Keeton, leading citizen, to lay waste to Castle Rock once and for all. Keeton opens the town storage building and they grab all the dynamite they can carry and proceed to set time bombs all over town.

Alan is finally able to talk to Brian’s brother who tells him of Brian’s final warning. Brian told his little brother to avoid Needful Things, to avoid Leland Gaunt. What Gaunt sold was poison and he wasn’t human. Alan heads back to Castle Rock, certain that Gaunt is behind what is happening.

Meanwhile, Polly has an epiphany. She watches events unfold in town and knows that Gaunt is behind it. She knows that she has played a role in it and knows that if she keeps the charm around her neck, it will cost her her soul. She removes the charm and embraces her pain. The creature that dwells within the charm escapes and she kills it in the bathtub. She realizes she must find Alan and put things right with him.

Alan arrives in Castle Rock just as the bombs are detonating. Building after building goes up in a ball of flames. He heads straight for Needful Things and finds it abandoned and covered with dust, as if it had been years since anyone had been in. On the counter, he finds a television and VCR with an envelope attached.

In the envelope is a letter from Leland Gaunt who tells him that the tape in the VCR shows the final moments of his wife and son’s life and will close the door on the mystery of what happened in that car when it inexplicably ran off the road, killing Alan’s family.

Polly arrives and tries to convince Alan not to watch. He does and sees Ace Merrill run his wife off the road and into a tree where they are killed. Alan now wants nothing more than to kill Ace. Polly pleads with Alan, telling him it’s all false, like her cure. Alan pauses for a second and carefully goes over what he saw. He finds the inconsistency in what he knows happened and what’s on the tape

He and Polly leave Neeful Things. As they walk out, Ace Merrill grabs Polly and puts a gun to her head. He demands that Alan turn over the money he stole. As they face off, Ace is gunned down by one of Alan’s deputies.

As this is happening, Leland Gaunt tries to slip out of town, carrying with him an ancient valise. Alan confronts him and, using the white magic of an amateur magician, uses sleight of hand to snag the valise. It squirms and shakes with the souls Gaunt has gathered over the centuries of selling people needful things in exchange for those souls. Alan demonstrates to Gaunt that his white magic is more powerful than his and Gaunt flees in his Tucker Talisman. As he flees, the car morphs into an ancient, horse drawn carriage manned by a hunchback dwarf.

As he leaves, those Catholics and Baptists still standing stop their fighting. The anger has dissipated. Fires rage all over town as it slowly burns to the ground. The Castle Rock we once knew exists no more.

The story ends with the announcement of a new shop opening in a small town in rural Iowa. The residents are gossiping about what the new proprietor might be selling.

So ends the story of Castle Rock – the setting of some of King’s best early work. King has stated that he felt like he was visiting that strange little town too frequently. He feared his writing would stagnate if he stuck with it, so he decided to do away with it and do away with it in style.

Needful Things is never mentioned when people discuss King’s great works and I think it gets short shrift. It is an incredibly complex plot with an astounding number of fully developed characters. It’s set in a town well known and loved by fans of King’s work. Its villain is superb. It’s a weighty tome of almost 700 pages, but there’s nary a wasted word.

We see in King's story the nature of a small town where everybody knows everybody else's business and secrets (like that held by Polly Chalmers) are a premium. King reveals the power of coveting what we want and sometimes sacrificing what we need to get it. Finally, we see the power of white magic practiced by a law man over the black magic practiced by an ancient swindler and con man.

As with 'Salem's Lot, Castle Rock is more than a setting in this story. The town itself, the gestalt of its people, their hatreds and prejudices, its dark history, and its moral compass moves and acts as a character.

As King chugged along toward the end of the Dark Tower series, I was certain that Leland Gaunt was going to turn up somewhere. He had all the makings of a tower minion. Alas, he never appeared. The worlds of Castle Rock and the Dark Tower did not meet.

The book was made into a movie in 1993 that starred Ed Harris and Max Von Sydow. It wasn’t a box office smash and tepidly reviewed, but is a fun movie that is a little more “preachy” than the book.

The publication of Needful Things marked a distinct turning point in King’s writing. He quit writing pure horror stories and tried to be more socially relevant and mature. There would be no more monsters. His work went more mainstream. He went through a horrible feminist phase with his next few books and for the first time, he was writing bad books. It wasn’t until 1996 when The Green Mile was published that King would again turn out a worthwhile novel.

Book to Radio: The Martian Chronicles

2011-12-11T16:43:00.005-05:00

Book to Radio: The Martian Chronicles
By Ray Bradbury
Dimension X radio broadcast
Radio play by Ernest Kinoy
Broadcast Date: August 18, 1950

This episode of Dimension X opens with Rocket Summer as a child watches in fascination as the first rocket takes off for Mars.

Ylla begins to have her dreams of men from the third planet coming to visit her. She begins to sing a song that she doesn’t know without knowing how or why. Ylla’s husband becomes increasingly disturbed with her prescience regarding the coming of the earthmen. He takes a weapon and waits for the earthmen. He deals with them. . .

The story then jumps to the fourth Martian expedition where astronaut Spender finds that Martians have all been dead about a week – dead of chicken pox. Spender eloquently quotes poem So, we’ll Go No More A-Roving as he predicts that men will defile Mars as they have defiled Earth with liquor and boorish behavior.

The men of Earth came to Mars for work, for adventure, for a fresh start – and they came in masses. We then revisit There Will Come Soft Rains. It is nearly identical to the earlier broadcast in the opening, but we get to meet the family. In this version, with atomic war inevitable, they decide to jump into their rocket and head for Mars. The house continues its duties in isolation. But instead of the family being dead in the war, they have evacuated to Mars.

The story then jumps to the Off Season as Sam Parker operates the only hot dog stand on Mars. Parker is looking forward to the new settlers filling their pockets when they observe the earth melt in a ball of atomic fire.

The people of Mars rush the Luggage Store and then head home, deserting the red planet. Shortly after they leave, our family who has evacuated their automated home arrive. They travel down the canal and arrive in a deserted Martian town. They proclaim themselves Martians.

In just 24 minutes, writer Ernest Kinoy introduced the masses to Ray Bradbury’s seminal work. It hardly scratches the surface and omits its most famous chapter – the doomed third voyage to Mars. Nonetheless, Kinoy uses his paltry 24 minutes to do a decent job in telling Bradbury’s story of the rise and fall of man’s civilization on Mars.

Book to Movie: Cry for the Strangers (1982)

2011-12-11T16:31:00.003-05:00

Book to Movie: Cry for the Strangers (1982)
Directed by Peter Medak
Teleplay by J.D. Feigelsen based on the book, Cry for the Strangers by John Saul

In 1982, John Saul’s best seller was made into a made for television movie starring Patrick Duffy. To date, it’s the only movie ever based on his work. One could only hope that Hollywood has not ignored John Saul based on this movie, because it’s not his fault it’s as bad as it is.

From beginning to end, this movie is just terrible. It sticks with the basic premise of the Saul story, but there is zero character development (and I mean absolutely NO character development) and we are given no clues as to what is going on. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Admittedly, Saul introduced some premises that he left on the table, such as biorhythms and Indian curses. But this movie just leaves them all on the table. The final scene is Patrick Duffy, who played Brad Russell, explaining the whole thing to his wife – and to the audience.

It’s almost as if J.D. Feigelsen wrote his teleplay, went back to proofread it, and saw he had major plot holes. So, instead of developing some action or sequences to explain why all of these strangers are dying, he just has Patrick Duffy do a little narrative in the end.

Feigelsen also manages to eliminate the central conflict in the story which is the conflict between Sheriff Whalen and the Russells and Palmers. Whalen – played by Brian Keith – is just a bit player who comes off as dispassionate and unconcerned about everything going on around him. He has no malice toward strangers. He doesn’t carry out any malicious acts against strangers. He just tells everybody he doesn’t know what’s going on. This movie really need an antagonist to carry it and it doesn't have one.

This movie had no character development, a broken, linear plot, and no conflict. It made for a boring, bad movie that no one should watch.

The only compliment that can be given to this horrid movie is it is well shot. The village looks cold and foreboding in every shot. But even that gets screwed up by Feigelsen and director Peter Medak. In the book, both the cabin and the house were without utilities. The house, while structurally sound, was as primitive as the cabin. In their version of the story, the cabin is cozy and the house is luxurious.

At every turn, Feigelsen and Medak took Saul’s pretty decent story and screwed it up. John Saul should be angry and embarrassed.

Hollywood should take another look at Saul’s body of work and take two or three of his stories that would make for good teleplays or even motion pictures. Certainly Punish the Sinners would transfer well to visual. The Blackstone Chronicles has mini-series written all over it. In the right hands, these stories could work on film. Feigesen and Medak are not the right set of hands.

Cry for the Strangers by John Saul

2011-12-05T19:13:00.005-05:00

Cry for the Strangers
By John Saul
Copyright 1979

Starting with his first book, Suffer the Children, John Saul almost relies on a template for constructing his stories. He opens with a prologue that describes some evil deed years prior. Then, he moves to present day and that evil is revisited upon his characters. Such is the formula in Cry for the Strangers.

The prologue is set on a stormy Washington beach. An older couple is buried up to their necks in the sand. The surf is pounding away at the shore as a storm builds. Each wave brings the tide closer to the helpless victims. Dark figures dance a ritualistic dance around them. A little boy watches from the seclusion of nearby woods.

The boy awakens the next morning to find his grandparents, with whom he lives, aren’t home. He runs to the beach to find them dead, drowned in the surf. A voice whispers, “Cry. . .Cry for them. . .and for me!”

We then flash forward to current time. Psychiatrist Brad Randall and his wife, Elaine, are looking for a quiet town where they can live for one year while Brad writes his book on biorhythms. They arrive in Clarks Harbor – a seemingly idyllic little town on Washington’s coast. It seems perfect.

While they are having lunch at the local inn, Brad is surprised to see the father of a former patient. Brad treated Glen and Rebecca’s son, Robby, for a mental disorder that made him incredibly hyperactive and destructive. Brad is surprised and pleased to learn that, since they moved to Clarks Harbor, Robby’s troubling malady has disappeared.

The Palmers love what Clarks Harbor has done for Robby, but it has not been good to them. People in Clarks Harbor despise outsiders. Glen is an artist trying to get an art studio up and running in the small fishing village, but has encountered passive resistance from residents who deliberately overcharge for services and deliver goods late. Were it not for Robby’s incredible cure, Glen tells Brad, they would not be in Clarks Harbor.

The only rental property available in the village is adjacent to the cabin being rented by the Palmers. Like the Palmers' cabin, it has no electricity or gas, but is habitable and has direct access to the beach. It is owned by the town sheriff, Harney Whalen who hates outsiders more than most residents of Clarks Harbor.

Whalen is being harassed by the wife of a fisherman who recently drowned, trapped in his own nets. The wife is certain that her husband’s death was not an accident. But Pete and Miriam Shelling are not natives to the town, having lived there but 15 years, so Whalen is not inclined to investigate too thoroughly.

A few days later, after warning Greg Palmer that bad things are in store for him and his family, Miriam Shelling hangs herself from a tree on the beach.

The Palmer children react differently to Clarks Harbor. Robby loves it. He loves the beach and he especially loves the storms when they blow him. They fill him full of energy and excitement and he enjoys venturing forth from the house to take them in.

The storms bring dark, disturbing images of ghosts dancing on the beach to his sister Missy, who hates Clarks Harbor and only accompanies her brother on his forays into the storms to avoid being left alone.

Whalen is troubled by the Palmers moving into a cabin down by the beach and he resolves that he won’t rent the house to the Randalls. Whenever strangers come to Clark’s Harbor, bad things happen to them. Whalen wishes strangers no ill will. He, and almost everybody else in town just want them to stay away.

Whalen meets the Randalls at the house and tells them how difficult life will be for them in the primitive home and in the village that hates strangers. He then rents the house to them, not remembering later that he did so. Harney Whalen has been subject to blackouts lately. He loses hours when he has no idea what he’s been doing or where he’s been. The Randalls return to Seattle for their belongings to relocate for a year.

Meanwhile, life for the Palmers gets a little easier. Robby and Missy endure the taunts and torments of their schoolmates who don’t like strangers any more than their parents. But Glen develops a friendship with Whalen’s only deputy, Chip and Chip helps him complete the remodeling of his art studio.

One evening a giant storm builds to the west and the fishermen of Clarks Harbor know to pull up anchor and head in. A pair of brothers who have ventured south get caught in the storm and head for Clarks Harbor. They make it in just before the storm. They check into the inn before the older brother returns to the harbor to secure the boat for the storm.

While he works to secure the boat, it is set free from its moorings. He tries to start the motor to bring it back into the harbor, but finds it was vandalized in the short time he was gone. He is helpless against the tide that soon smashes his boat against the rocks where it finally explodes, killing him.

Whalen investigates and his first inclination is to blame Glen Palmer for no other reason than he is not a native of the town. He finally concludes it was an accident. The younger brother wants a more thorough investigation, telling the sheriff that his brother was an experienced seaman and would not have been so careless. But Harney Whalen puts forth little effort in investigating the deaths of outsiders.

Whalen is also not happy that his deputy Chip – who is also his nephew – is getting friendly with Glen Palmer. One day, as Chip looks on, Whalen takes the please cruiser and uses it to splash mud onto the artwork Glen has displayed outside. He dares Glen to complain, which he does not.

Meanwhile, the Randalls move into their home down the beach. Shortly after their arrival, Jeff, the dead fisherman’s brother is found in the woods with his neck broken. The body is found on the Palmer’s property and again Whalen is inclined to blame Glen. But with no evidence, he can’t hold him.

Chip becomes concerned about his uncle. He can tell that Whalen is not himself and that there is definitely something unhealthy about his attitude toward strangers. One evening, he sits down with his grandfather who tells him the whole story about Harney Whalen.

Whalen’s grandparents owned a large chunk of the land that is Clarks Harbor, Chip’s uncle tells him. Harney’s grandparents leased the timber and mineral rights for some of the land to a company out of Seattle. When the lease came up for renewal, Whalen’s grandparents would not renew. Later, they were found dead on the beach, buried up to their necks in sand. Most people concluded the owner of the company carried out the murderous deed. But, as Chip’s uncle points out, the Indians that inhabited the area believed that man took from the sea and the sea demanded something in return – souls. Harney Whalen, Chip’s grandfather points out, is part Indian.

That night, a monster storm hits Clarks Harbor and Robby Palmer is driven to go outside and take in the sights and sounds of the storm that so enliven him. Missy tells her mother who ventures out into the storm with Missy in tow to find Robby before whatever got Jeff, got him. As they are searching, Missy feels a presence creeping up on them. She tries to warn her mother. Before she can, Rebecca is seized from behind. Missy flees into the storm and the mysterious entity breaks Rebecca’s neck.

Once again, a body has been found on the Palmer land. This time, it is Rebecca Palmer. Harney brings Glen in for questioning again. His mind is made up. Harney postulates that Glen caught Rebecca and Jeff making love on the beach and killed them. He has no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, to back up the charge, but tries to force Glen to confess.

Brad and Elaine invite Glen and his children to stay with them at their house so they don’t have to be alone. That night, another storm moves in. Robby and Missy are distraught over the death of their mother and Robby suggests that they head back down the beach to their own home where they will be more comfortable.

They venture out into the storm and start through the woods adjacent to the beach. Once again, Missy senses the presence of evil around her. She looks around and sees ghostly figures dancing on the beach. Meanwhile, Harney Whalen is there, waiting, with the spirit of his dead grandmother exhorting him to avenge her death on the strangers. Harney attacks Robby.

Glen and the Randalls notice the kids missing. Elaine heads for town for help. Glen and Brad search the beach and the woods. After Elaine finds him, Chip heads for the beach and finds his uncle attacking Robby. He launches himself at his larger uncle and is able to wrest him away from Robby. After a brief struggle, Harney overpowers Chip. He gets up and walks into the ocean, never to be seen again.

This was a good book. That’s all I can say about it. What I like most about John Saul is consistency. He always writes a good book. He never writes bad ones, nor has he written a truly great one. There is no magnum opus or capstone work in John Saul’s library of 36 published titles. With a few exceptions, all rely on the standard Saul construct for a novel with different characters, settings and circumstances.

I’ve said in earlier reviews that Saul doesn’t flesh out his characters any more than is necessary to tell his story and none of the characters in this story are particularly deep. With the exception of Chip, none are introspective. We are left with the motivations and emotions at hand with no backstory.

A stylistic critique I’d level at this Saul work is how he writes from so many points of view. None of the main characters are a mystery to the reader and despite a few red herrings about Indian legends, it’s painfully obvious who the villain is. But being in Harney Whalen’s head was useless text. We were in his head when he was rational. He knew he was having blackouts and was concerned about it. Saul could have shown us that. If Saul needed to be an omniscient narrator, he should have taken us into Harney’s head when he was maniacal.

Saul does do a good job of creating the setting of the remote, unfriendly fishing village on the coast of Washington; constantly beset by storms and cold weather. Perhaps it’s because Saul grew up in Washington that he is able to set the scene so well.

Saul is fun and easy to read. I can breeze through his books in just a few sittings and the stories, while seldom enthralling, are well told and well written.

Cry for the Strangers was Saul’s third book. Like most authors, he improved over the years and wrote many books superior to Cry for the Strangers. Nonetheless, the book made for light, easy reading and I enjoyed it a great deal.

There was a made for television movie based on this story. To my knowledge, it is the only adaptation of a Saul story for any screen. I have not seen it, but it was apparently not well received by viewers and IMDB.com reviewers.

The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson

2011-11-26T16:17:00.004-05:00

The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book 2
The One Tree
By Stephen R. Donaldson
Copyright 1982

The One Tree picks up at the end of The Wounded Land. Covenant has just delivered the tormented souls of the Giants of Seasearch their long sought peace by sending them to their final rite of Camora – the Giant rite of cleansing pain and grief by fire. In exchange for Covenant helping end the torment of their lost brethren , the Giants of Seasearch agree to take Covenant to find the One Tree from which the Staff of Law was hewn.

Without any real idea of where they are headed, The party sets sale aboard the Starfare Gem – the giant warship made of stone. After a few days out to sea, Linden becomes uneasy. She senses a raver is aboard the ship. The Giants conduct a search of their massive ship, but find no stowaways. Just as they complete their search, the ship is attacked by a swarm of rats containing the spirit of the raver.

Covenant is bitten which reactivates his venom. His power grows and he begins to let loose with blasts of white magic from his ring. Fearing for the safety of his friends and their quest, Covenant mentally seals himself off from the rest of the world, lapsing into a catatonic state.

Linden, ever fearful of intimacy and human contact, is forced to enter Covenant’s mind and possess him so that she can force him to come back. Covenant is restored, but more nervous and paranoid than ever about his growing power.

The Giants lead the ship to an island inhabited by a race known to Giants. The First of the Search informs Linden and Covenant that the inhabitants of this island are temperamental barterers with whom they need to tread lightly. Covenant and his Giant host come ashore along with several Bloodguard. There, they are greeted by the Elohim – a race of people who are not quite corporal, who emerge and disappear from the earth and air. From them, they hope to learn the whereabouts of the One Tree.

The Elohim are delighted to greet Linden Avery, whom they hale as the Sunbane and savior of the land. However, they are exceptionally displeased to find out that Covenant possesses the ring. Linden perceives that the Elohim are not a people but an entity composed almost entirely of earthpower. This the Elohim acknowledge. They also claim that they are forbidden in aiding the quest in any way.

Covenant pleads and then demands that they reveal the location of the One Tree. The knowledge was stored in Covenant’s mind by the Forrestal when Covenant visited with his dead friends in the plains of Andelain. The Elohim meet Covenant’s demand. They reveal to the Giants the location of the One Tree. However, in the process, Covenant is once again rendered semi-comatose. When the ritual is done, he will not communicate or respond. He simply mutters, “Don’t touch me,” to any statement.

The Starfare Gem once again sets sail with the party aboard. Days pass and Covenant’s silence persists. Linden fusses and worries about how she can release whatever spell the Elohim have cast upon him. Meanwhile, the one Giant aboard the ship who shares Linden’s earth sense inexplicably starts attacking a ship’s mast. The giant forces from the stone the leader of the Elohim, Findail, who stowed away aboard their ship. Findail refuses to reveal his purpose aboard their ship and refuses any aid. He, like the ur-vile Vain, takes a place on the foredeck of the ship and remains still.

The next day, the ship is hit by a giant storm. It is severely damaged by the storm, having lost its center mast and taking on water. The crew is forced to put in at an island called Bhraithar. Bhraither is a militaristic society ruled by a leader known as gaddhi, Rant Obsolane who it is said dominated the powerful and evil Sandgorgons – an indigenous creature thought to be indestructible – that had bedeviled the inhabitants of the city for generations.

Once again, Linden is joined by the First of the Search, along with several other Giants and Bloodguard. They also bring Covenant along. They are first greeted Kaseryn – the Gaddhi’s major domo who is solicitous and cordial. Kaseryn assures the Giants that they may use whatever stone is necessary to fashion a new mast and that their supplies will be restored.

They are then taken to meet the Gaddhi who turns out to be a small, petty, seemingly powerless man. IT occurs to Linden that Kaseryn is the power behind the throne.

Kaseryn’s true goal is to possess Covenant’s ring. One night, he kidnaps Covenant from his room and attempts to release the spell holding his mind hostage. Unable to free Covenant and compel him to give up his ring, he decides to turn his attention to Linden.

Kaseryn takes the party hostage with his guards and leads them to the city wall, accompanied by the Gaddhi. Once there, the Gaddhi – petulantly angry with the party over the slaying of one of his guards – tosses a piece of his jewelry over the wall and demands that the Bloodguard Cail retrieve it. A rope is lowered and Cail descends. There he is attacked and slain by a Sandgorgon. The rest of the party is taken prisoner and Kaseryn promises more death if Linden will not free Covenant’s mind so he can give up his ring. Linden enters Covenant’s mind, but she tricks Kaseryn by instructing Covenant to say the Sandgorgon’s name, thus summoning it. She removes the spell placed on Covenant and places it on herself to free him. He says the Sandgorgon’s name, summoning the creature who immediately begins to attack and destroy the city’s walls.

Kaseryn seizes Covenant and takes him to his laboratory to take the ring. Before he can, however, the Bloodguard Brinn kills him and saves Covenant.

The party retreats from the city as the Sandgorgon destroys it. They get to the Starfare Gem to find most of the repairs completed and provisions replaced. They flee Bhraithar headed toward the one tree.

Covenant and Linden fall in love.

They sail for days and eventually reach the island that is home to the One Tree. The party takes a boat ashore, accompanied by Vain who takes it upon himself to enter the boat, and Findail. Once there, Brinn tells them that their people believe that one of their own is the guardian of the One Tree and a Bloodguard must best him in battle for access to the tree to be possible. To master the guardian, Brinn tells them, is to learn the meaning and the purpose of their rigid and joyless existence in servitude.

Brinn ascends the cliff and fights the guardian, besting him. Brinn returns to the party and tells them that he has taken the place of the guardian for all time and directs the party to follow him to the One Tree.

The party arrives in a deep cavern inhabited by a solitary, giant tree. Linden can sense the overwhelming earthpower in seeping through the bows and the trunk. As Covenant begins to search for a bow that is straight and true to serve as the new staff, the Giant Cable Seadreamer, gifted with earthsight and cursed with speechlessness, tries to get Covenant to stop what he is doing. Finally, in frustration, he rushes at the tree, summoning its true guardian.

The Worm of World’s End, Findail tells them, is the guardian of the One Tree. Covenant’s white magic springs to life and is more powerful than ever. He prepares to slay the worm to gain the tree. Findail tells Linden that events have transpired to the designs of Lord Foul. Lord Foul wanted Covenant to gain the One Tree to fight the worm. To best the worm, Covenant, now brimming with uncontrollable white magic, will unleash enough power to destroy the Arch of Time and release Lord Foul from The Land and allow him to do his will across the cosmos.

Meanwhile, a change has come over Vain. He is struck by one of the balls of energy unleashed by the arrival of the worm. His arm, bearing one of the bands of the original Staff of Law, turns into wood.

With Covenant ready to burst with power, Linden is able to talk Covenant down. Recalling the cryptic words the ghost of his old friend, High Lord Mhoram, “that which you seek is not what you need,” he releases the power.

The island begins to shake and collapse around them. The party flees with Brinn’s help. They return to Starefare Gem in time to watch the island collapse. The quest for the One Tree and a new Staff of Law has failed.

Thus, the book ends inconclusively with the party having achieved nothing. This is my primary frustration with this book and the reason it is the only book in the entire series I did not like at all.

The pace of the book is ponderously slow with page after page of lugubrious introspection on Linden’s part. This book does develop her character a great deal. But she is revealed as a pitiful, mousy person full of self loathing. Perhaps Donaldson was trying to make her more pitiful than Covenant. But at least Covenant was defiantly pitiful and self loathing.

The two diversions both feel like they were tacked on to pad the story. Findail does become essential to the story later. But he joins the party early in this book and is set on the foredeck of the ship, out of the reader’s way and out of his mind. That seems like cheating a little. The trip to Bhraithar is a pointless diversion that adds nothing to the central story.

Donaldson spends almost 500 pages in taking the reader on a doomed quest that accomplishes little and reveals nothing. I understand the concept of a trilogy and how each book is but one segment of a story. But each segment must advance the central plot. In The One Tree, Donaldson zigs and zags around, but doesn’t take us anywhere.

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

2011-11-15T18:25:00.006-05:00

Profiles in Courage
By John F. Kennedy
Copyright 1955

Forward by Allan Nevins
Historian Allan Nevins describes for readers how each of the subjects selected by Sen. Kennedy for his book was a hero who risked entire careers, reputations, and lives in defense of a noble cause in the face of tremendous adversity.

Preface
Sen. Kennedy describes how the idea for this book and most of its research and writing took place as he convalesced from back surgery. He then proceeds to thank the people who helped him with his research, writing, and editing. Perhaps it is fitting that he saved Theodore Sorenson, whom he calls his research associate, for last in his list of thank yous because it has become apparent over time that, while Kennedy selected the subjects and had a hand in the writing of the book, the actual prose belong to Sorenson.

Courage and Politics
In this remarkable essay, Kennedy describes the constant conflicts and pressures confronted by members of Congress when they go about their business and how one’s conscience, desire to accomplish goals must be balanced against his loyalty to his constituents, his loyalty to his nation, and his own sense of what needs to be done.

Kennedy’s essay today should be required reading for all students of American government. With the entirely dysfunctional Senate we have now, this essay is illuminating. With the wingnuts of both parties demanding ideological purity – profiles in courage on each and every issue – this essay is particularly topical.

This is because most people do not understand how the Senate works and what a Senator must do to accomplish the greater good. They assume that the send their senator to Washington to always vote his or her conscience and always do what they know to be right while always voting the way his constituents would have him vote.

However, a senator who routinely defies his party will never accomplish anything. He will be marginalized, so party loyalty is of the essence. Fellow senators understand the pressures of loyalty versus constituent interests and matters of conscience and one need not tow the party line constantly to be an accepted member of the club. But to expect a senator to maintain ideological purity at all times, to vote strictly in the interest of his state at all times when the needs of the nation must be weighed, is unreasonable.

I disapprove of today’s ideological electorate every bit as much as I disapprove of Congress.

Members of the Tea Party and the uber liberals of the Democratic party should read Kennedy’s essay and take it to heart.

Part One: Time and Place
Kennedy sets the stage for his first profile in courage by describing a U.S. Senate that is not the great deliberative body it was designed to be. In 1803, the Senate was little more than an advisory body to the president and the disposer of what the House proposed.

Thus the Senate was until forced to act on the possibility of war for the young nation. As British naval vessels seized American ships and American sailors and impressed them into service in the British Navy in the country’s war against the French, it was clear the situation was becoming untenable for the United States and action would soon be necessary.

Here, we see a young U.S. Senator, heir to a tarnished family legacy, struggle between what he knows is in the best interest of his nation and what the constituents in his home state want and need. The debate over American declaration of war upon Great Britain after the incident between the American ship, The Chesapeake and the British ship, The Leopard.

John Quincy Adams
History refers to John Quincy Adams as “Old Man Eloquent.” This nom de plume comes from his later years in the House of Representatives fighting the fight against slavery in the early days of the abolitionist movement. But before he served his long term in the House, and before he spent four unhappy years in the White House, John Quincy Adams served as the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Young Adams was a Federalist like his father before him. Having served as an ambassador during his father’s administration, he was recalled after Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams to gain the presidency. Massachusetts remained a strong Federalist stronghold and shortly after his return to the United States, Adams was appointed to the Senate by the Massachusetts legislature.

It did not take him long to earn the scorn of Federalists in Massachusetts. In 1803, he had supported Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Federalists regarded this as an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. The party, now relegated to a New England sectional party, also saw the westward expansion as a threat to their regional political power. Adams was excoriated in his home state for his support of Jefferson.

After the Chesapeake Incident, Adams was in a quandary which would require him to tap all of the courage he could muster. To retaliate, Jefferson had proposed an embargo on trade with Great Britain. Massachusetts and New England relied heavily on this trade for their economic livelihood. As the war between Great Britain and France wore on, the sentiment in New England was decidedly pro-British.

But Adams realized that such an attack could not pass without retaliation. America was still a young nation and Great Britain was showing contempt for American sovereignty. Although his constituents would have him support and represent their interests in the U.S. Senate, Adams viewed the problem as a national problem. He ultimately cast his vote with the Republicans in favor of the embargo.

The reaction in Massachusetts was every bit as bad as Adams had anticipated. He was excoriated in newspapers, deserted by friends, mocked to his face. What must have made it even more painful for young John Quincy Adams was he committed this act of party defiance in support of Thomas Jefferson – a man he despised for his cunning and duplicity in defeating his father for the presidency.

But Adams expressed no regrets over the vote. He appeared at a Republican meeting to discuss the embargo. To Federalists, this apostasy was beyond the pale. The embargo went into effect and hard times fell on Massachusetts. Adams would not be sent back to the Senate when his term expired.

Time bore out Adams’ wisdom. The British continued and ramped up their antagonism of the United States, eventually leading to war. Today, it is easy to see the wisdom of Adams’ approach to his duties as a legislator. But viewed through Adams’ eyes at the time, it must have seemed to be political suicide. It was not.

Adams would go on to assist in the formation of the Whig Party and would be elected President. His defeat for re-election also seemed to portend his political death. However, he was sent by the electors of his congressional district to the House of Representatives where he served for many years until his death in the House chambers in 1848. He and Andrew Johnson remain the only two presidents to rejoin the legislature upon leaving the presidency.

Part Two: Time and Place
By 1850, the Senate had evolved into the great deliberative body envisioned by the Founding Fathers. This was the Senate’s golden age with the likes of Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, Salmon Chase, Thomas Hart Benton, and Sam Houston graced the stately senate chamber.

The great issue of the day was slavery and maintaining the union in the face of growing antipathy for the South’s Peculiar Institution in the North and growing distrust of the North’s political clout in the House. Repeatedly, states were admitted two at a time to maintain the balance between slave and free states in the Senate. The architect for these compromises was the Kentucky Senator, Henry Clay.

This delicate balancing act was thrown off balance by the acquisition of Texas and other new lands in the Mexican-American War and the Wilmot Proviso which proposed banning slavery in any new state or territory acquired during that war. Secessionists convened at Nashville and began laying out a plan for the southern states to secede from the union.

The Great Compromiser Henry Clay once again took up legislative pen and hammered out a compromise he hoped would restore balance and preserve the union. He crafted the Compromise of 1850 which called for: 1) California was to be admitted as a free state; 2)New Mexico and Utah were to be organized as territories with no declaration as to whether they were free or slave holding territories; 3) Texas was to be compensated for territory which it ceded to New Mexico; 4) slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C.; 5) Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act to assure that slaves fleeing to the north would not be given amnesty from their southern owners. Like most compromises, there was something for everyone to hate in the compromise.

Sectional tensions were at their highest. In this chapter, Kennedy profiles Daniel Webster of Massachusetts who sacrificed his political career to support the compromise and the union by delivering his famous Seventh of March speech, Thomas Hart Benton who, despite the pro-slavery sentiments of his state, fought to preserve the union, and Sam Houston, the Texas patriot who sacrificed the adoration of his fellow Texans in the name of American unity.

Daniel Webster
Kennedy notes that Daniel Webster was the greatest orator in the history of the Senate. With today’s lengthy quorum calls, floor maneuvers, speechless filibusters, and vacant chambers, it is hard to believe that one man could command the attention of 99 fellow senators. Daniel Webster was such a man.

While Webster is a vaunted historical figure today, he was not for many years. His name was held in scorn for betraying the cause of abolition for which he had fought his entire career. As was John Quincy Adams, Webster was a Massachusetts man and the state that led the way toward American independence did not value independence in its senators. It demanded that they represent their interests. As far as Massachusetts was concerned, their interests lied in the abolition of slavery.

Kennedy points out that Webster, while a great orator who moved audiences with his speeches, was a flawed man. While it might be a stretch to say he was on the take or corrupt, he did expect to be paid for favors delivered. Webster accepted cash and gifts from all comers and had no qualms about doing so, nor did he try to hide it.

When the time came for Clay to push for passage of his compromise he hoped would one more time maintain the union in the face of sectional tension, he knew he needed Daniel Webster to deliver. Clay called on Webster one cold evening and the two talked late into the night about how Webster could play his part in sustaining American unity.

On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster prepared to deliver his speech. The Senate gallery was packed with people who had traveled from all parts of the country to hear the man from Massachusetts defend Clay’s compromise. Senators stood in the aisle, offering their seats to the women present.

Vice President Fillmore gaveled the chamber into order and opened the Senate for business. The senator who held the floor immediately yielded to Webster. He rose and began in his measured voice, “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a member of the Senate of the United States. . .I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.”

For the next three hours, Webster spoke. The galleries were silent. Senators listened with rapt attention. The venerable and frail John Calhoun, champion of the southern cause, was assisted to his seat to listen. When Webster yielded the floor, the chamber was still silent, stunned by Webster's brilliant oratory as well as the position he’d taken in favor of compromise.

Like most Massachusetts men, Webster had dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery. Now, he’d foregone a lifetime of advocacy in the cause of American union. As they’d done to Adams when he defied his state in the cause of his country, the people of Massachusetts excoriated him with venomous attacks. He was a political pariah in his home state.

History bore out much of what Webster prophesized in his speech. He noted there could be no peaceful disunion. The dissolution of the states, he predicted, would be convulsive, difficult, and probably bloody. A prescient man was Daniel Webster.

But his support for the compromise disarmed southern critics. It won the day for Clay’s compromise and the union was preserved for another 11 years.

Webster had always aspired to the presidency. Following his speech, he sought the Whig nomination for the presidency. His rival was President Millard Fillmore who had become president upon the death of Zachary Taylor. Fillmore had no declared position on slavery other than compromise. Nor did the Whig party have a declared position. Nonetheless, northern abolitionists in the party deadlocked the convention. The party eventually settled on Mexican-American War hero, Winfield Scott. But, without a declared position on the greatest issue of the day, the Whig Party was doomed to disunion and death. Scott would lose to pro-southern Democrat, Franklin Pierce and the Whigs would never put forward another presidential nominee of consequence.

Webster sought the nomination of his party in 1852, he would not live to cast a vote in that election. He fell from his horse in October of that year and later succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage.

Kennedy notes that Webster sacrificed everything he held dear – the love of his fellow Massachusetts men, his political aspirations, and many friendships, in the cause of preserving the union. Such political courage is almost impossible to imagine today.

Thomas Hart Benton
The U.S. Senate – the Club of 100 – is known, and has always been known – as the most pompous assemblage of people anywhere in these United States. No man was more pompous or arrogant than Thomas Hart Benton.

Benton was a vituperative, sarcastic, vain man given to leveling cutting and biting insults at those with whom he did not agree. He used the word, “sir” two or three times in one sentence, never with respect and almost always with contempt.

But, to the people of Missouri, he was their champion. He was the Senate’s chief spokesman for westward expansion; the floor leader of Manifest Destiny. He would not allow sectional tensions or slavery detract from the pursuit of Manifest Destiny – the expansion of the American country from sea to sea.

Slavery and abolition were impediments to that expansion and he scorned both equally. It was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that created the state he represented in the Senate and allowed Missouri to enter the union as a slave state. When the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 threatened to abrogate the Missouri Compromise, Benton, with all his bluster, arrogance, and passion, made his final stand in the cause of westward expansion.

He cared little about whether Missouri was a slave state or free state. He had no patience for the arguments of abolitionists. Indeed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act offended both sections, for it called for Popular Sovereignty – or letting the people decide whether or not their new states would be slave or free.

What so disgruntled Benton was the line drawn across the United States by the proposed law. It would hinder the creation of new western states by making the entry of each new state a battle over slavery. He took to the floor of the Senate and denounced the proposed law, its supporters, and its consequences in the harshest language ever heard in that august chamber. At one point, he so enraged a fellow senator that he pulled a gun on Benton on the floor. Benton thrust open his vest and defied his fellow senator shoot him. Colleagues defused the situation before blood was shed.

The Kansas Nebraska Act was popular with the Missouri state legislature and the people of Missouri which saw its potential to expand slavery in the west. Benton saw it as a threat to union.

The Missouri legislature, dominated by fellow Democrats, decided not to send Benton back to the Senate in 1854. His unwillingness to court votes, engage lobbyists on behalf of railroads, and his nasty, arrogant disposition made it impossible for him to effectively fight for reelection. His unwillingness to put his state’s popular opinion ahead of his own belief in the importance of union and the pursuit of Manifest Destiny effectively ended the career of one of the nation’s most colorful politicians.

Were Benton a senator today, the media would no doubt carefully analyze his melt down. Politicians today do not behave as Benton did, deriding his colleagues with harsh language, dismissing ideas with which he did not agree with ugly vehemence. Indeed, today’s silent filibuster precludes the need for senators to make such declarations.

When one reads about Benton, it is impossible to not feel admiration for him in standing for the cause of union. However, as one reads the text of his various speeches and statements, laced with biting sarcasm coupled with condescending arrogance, it is also impossible to feel that, in the end, Benton got what he deserved. Arrogance such as his would have no place in today’s political discourse.

Sam Houston
Sam Houston stands as a larger than life figure in American history. The hero of Texas who defeated a much larger Mexican force at San Jacinto during the Mexican-American War, Houston was a genuine American hero of his day, much like Dwight Eisenhower would become 100 years later.

Houston was an eccentric man. He served as governor of Tennessee. But when he learned that his betrothed had only agreed to marry him out of her father’s desire to gain political clout, the heartbroken Houston left Tennessee and headed west to live with the Indians.

After living in Arkansas, he moved to the Mexico, settling in present day Texas and quickly became a high profile proponent of Texas independence. His victory at San Jacinto and his capture of Generalissimo Santa Anna made him the hero of Texas and he was elected the president of the Republic of Texas. As a strong advocate of admission of Texas to the union, he led the way on Texas’ long path to admission to the United States.

When sectional tensions of the 1850s led to Texas leaders contemplating secession, Houston spoke out forcefully against Texas leaving the union and the right of any state to secede. He had dedicated too much of his life and seen too much blood shed on Texas’ behalf to gain her admission to the union to see it scuttled by sectional tensions.

Like Benton, Houston recognized the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a dangerous law that would lead to violent separation. He opposed it vociferously, prophesying, “I see my beloved South go down in an unequal contest.”

Like others who fell on their sword in this tumultuous time, Houston fought for neither the cause of the slaveholders or the abolitionists. He was a union man. With tensions running as high as they were on the eve of secession, there was no room in the middle. Houston, unwilling to participate in the dissolution of the union, was branded a traitor by his state. He left the senate and was twice elected its governor. But when the Texas legislature ultimately voted for secession, he refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and was removed from office.

Houston lived briefly in Galveston before ultimately leaving the state so embittered toward him for opposing its popular will and moved to Tennessee where he died in 1863.

Part Three Time and Place
Kennedy sets the scene of postwar America following the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomatox. Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated. The coarse, ill-mannered, and uneducated Andrew Johnson has assumed the presidency. In Lincoln’s last days, he’d been battling with Congress over the best way to reconcile the union and restore the Confederate states to the United States. That battle fell to the overmatched Johnson.

The Senate, controlled by radical Republicans wanted to punish the south for their disloyalty and make the path to statehood difficult. Johnson wanted to take an easier route – one that would restore the union with less rancor. The state was set for a battle over which branch would control policy.

Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act that required the president to seek the advice and counsel of the Senate in firing any member of the cabinet. Johnson immediately put the act to the test, discharging Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who was loyal to the Republicans. Republicans almost immediately brought impeachment charges against the president. The House voted to impeach the president and a trial was held in the Senate. There, President Johnson would need six Republicans to swing his way to keep his job.

It would be in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that Edmund Ross of Kansas would, “. . .look into his open grave,” as he voted his conscience rather than how his constituents and party would have him vote.

Lucius Lamar would act as a healing agent in the days of Reconstruction. A Mississippi House member and later senator, he would eulogize a northern Republican with words of reconciliation – words that would inflame and anger his southern constituency. He would go on cast his vote in favor of hard currency rather than free silver in the depths of economic depression, further angering the people of Mississippi.

Edmund G. Ross
Edmund Ross came to office following the suicide of Kansas senator James Henry Lane. Lane had separated from his fellow Republicans on several votes regarding Reconstruction and was thoroughly beaten down by state and national Republicans. One of those Kansans that had a hand in Lane’s demise was Edmund Ross, a radical Republican, who had accused (falsely) Lane of financial improprieties.

In the Senate, as the trial of Andrew Johnson proceeded, Republicans caucused to ascertain how many votes they had to remove the president. Five Republicans had broken ranks and were leaning toward acquittal. Edmund Ross refused to tell his colleagues how he would vote, saying he wanted to hear all of the evidence before rendering judgment.

Ross was offered bribes, patronage, and other inducements to vote with his fellow Republicans. But he refused to allow his vote to be counted before the end of the trial.

At the end of the trial, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase sought a vote on guilt. The five Republicans who’d said they would vote against removal held out, the last vote counted was Ross’. All waited silently until Ross uttered, “not guilty.” President Johnson was spared the indignity of removal from office.

Ross’ fellow Republicans were furious with him. His Kansas constituency, so certain that he was a true Republican that would vote in their interests, were also infuriated. Newspapers excoriated him. His fellow senators shunned him. He finished out his senate term and returned to Kansas. There, he worked in the newspaper business as he had prior to entering politics. He was later appointed governor of the New Mexico territory by President Grover Cleveland.

Edmund Ross became a figure of interest in the late 1990s as the U.S. Senate proceeded with the trial of President Bill Clinton. Historians looked back on this man who had cast his vote, not with blind loyalty to his party or his constituents, but with an eye toward the future of the American government that might permanently been damaged by an overly powerful legislature and imbalance in its balance of powers.

Some journalists, mostly conservatives, derided Ross as a false hero lionized with glaring errors in Kennedy’s book. They revealed evidence that Ross had sought rather than been offered bribes and patronage. Liberal journalists held Ross up to contemporary Republicans as an example of courage they should follow.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar
Lucius Lamar might have been the last person any in Congress would have looked to for a plea for sanity in the days of Reconstruction and bitter feelings between the North and South following the Civil War because Lamar had been a leading proponent of secession.

As a congressman from Mississippi from 1856 to 1860, Lamar had fought hard for the southern cause. In 1860, he left the House to draft the articles of secession for Mississippi who would secede the next year. He later served in the Confederate Army as an aide to General Longsreet.

But, on the floor of the House, as Congress memorialized the most radical of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Lamar asked for peace, sanity and harmony between all the states. His address moved his audience, bringing even the hardened Speaker, James Blaine to tears.

His constituents in Mississippi didn’t share Lamar’s feelings of forgiveness. They’d not forgotten Sumner’s efforts to make their lives hell in the days following the Civil War as military and carpetbagging government officials held power in their state. Newspapers railed against him and he was called traitor in some circles.

His reputation recovered and he was sent to the Senate by the state legislature in 1877. The United States was enduring a harsh depression. Exacerbated in the South by a lack of capital and business resources, the depression created widespread misery.

Many saw currency expansion through the coinage of silver as the panacea that would get the economy moving again. Silver was abundant and had climbed in value. The citizens of Mississippi demanded inflation and expansion of the supply of capital and the Mississippi legislature passed a resolution demanding that Lamar vote in favor of bimetallism.

Once again, Lamar followed his intellect and his conscience and voted against the coinage of silver. He regarded a falsely inflated currency as immoral and bad business.

His constituents were furious with him for not alleviating their misery. Rather than hide in Washington, Lamar took the road across the state, delivering speeches defending his vote for sound currency. He managed to salvage his political career and would go on to serve in the cabinet of Grover Cleveland before eventually being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Part Four: Time and Place
The time and place for the fourth part of Kennedy’s examination of courage in the Senate starts at the beginning of the 20th century. Far from that body that was so powerful in postwar America as to throw the whole system of checks and balances out of whack, the senate was now a moribund body with no dynamic leaders and no dynamic statesmen.

Into this void would step Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, a renegade Republican who made a name for himself in the House fighting to curtail the power of Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon and who would fight America’s entry into World War I with every parliamentary tool at his disposal. Also filling the void of statesman in the U.S. Senate was Ohio’s own, “Mr. Republican” Bob Taft whose judgment OF Nuremberg and the trial’s there were statement of conscience that challenged the conventional wisdom and political zeitgeist of his time.

George Norris
Like John Quincy Adams, it was more than one act of courage that places Sen. George Norris in Kennedy’s list of profiles in courage. Norris’ entire career in both the House and the Senate was spent bucking the system and fighting against the popular tide to defend principles in which he believed.

Norris was a loyal Republican in the House for many years. Soon, he, and other Republicans, became disaffected with the iron fist rule of Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon who made sure the House Rules Committee and other important committees were always stacked with loyal lieutenants, effectively controlling what legislation came before the House for votes.

He joined with progressive Republicans and Democrats in changing House rules. In parliamentary maneuvers that stunned the powerful speaker, Norris introduced legislation that assured that seniority rather than the whims of the speaker determined who sat on and chaired committees. Norris lead the charge that dethroned perhaps the most powerful Speaker of the House in U.S. history.

In the Senate, Norris fought the popular tide of war as President Woodrow Wilson led the nation toward declaring war on Germany and entering World War I. He feared that it was financial considerations and programs that benefited the wealthy that were the real reasons for entering the war. He was one of just six senators to oppose American entry into World War I.

However, he was not a mindless Republican renegade. He fought with the Republican faithful to defeat the Treaty of Versailles and American entry into the League of Nations, dealing President Wilson his greatest defeat.

Later, he would go on to support some of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs – particularly the Tennessee Valley Authority which meant nothing to his home state of Nebraska. But he would oppose Roosevelt’s attempt at packing the Supreme Court.

Norris did not pay a heavy price for his courage as did many of Kennedy’s heroes. The people of Nebraska did not always agree with him, but they trusted him. When he could no longer align himself with the Republican Party during the Great Depression, he left. However, he could never align himself with the Democrats. So, the people of Nebraska elected him as an independent over nominees of both parties.

Norris was a native of Bellevue, Ohio, having been born and raised just west of that northern Ohio city in York Township in Sandusky County.

Robert A. Taft
Taft was the son of an American president who aspired to the presidency himself. However, he would speak out against what he regarded a grave injustice and violation of the principles of American jurisprudence and earn the scorn of the entire country.

In remarks delivered at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH, Taft decried the Nuremberg trials where Nazi war criminals were tried, convicted, and executed. Taft claimed that it was un-American to prosecute anyone – even people as vile as the leadership of the Nazi party – without having specific laws in place under which to try them. While they had committed atrocities, Taft said, there was no law on the books that prohibited what they did. Therefore, to charge and try them was a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Ex Post Facto trials.

Americans were outraged. Democrats running in 1948 made political hay out of Sen. Taft’s remarks. Republicans either denounced him or distanced themselves from him. Newspapers in Ohio and across the country heaped scorn on him for coddling Nazis. Taft was given several opportunities to back away from the remarks, but stood by his principles.

Taft’s views did not hurt him so badly that Ohioans would not send him back to the Senate. Republicans elected him Majority Leader in 1953. He worked closely with the Eisenhower Administration in trying to enact Eisenhower’s domestic policies. However, his leadership of the Senate was cut short when he developed bone cancer in his legs. One leg was amputated and he continued, struggling through the pain, to lead the Senate, but he would eventually succumb to cancer. Kennedy remarks on the man’s courage in fighting the pain of his debilitating disease to do his job in his final days.

Kennedy would not only memorialize his political adversary in his profiles in courage. Kennedy chaired the Senate committee which named the five greatest senators in America history to be memorialized in the Senate Reception Room. Among them is Bob Taft.

Additional Men of Courage
Kennedy goes on to describe briefly other men and other acts of political courage. He talks of Sen. Andrew Johnson’s loyalty to the union while representing Tennessee in the Senate. That loyalty led to a noose being placed around his neck in Virginia where he came within seconds of being hanged.

He also discusses George Washington’s valiant defense of the Jay Treaty that prevented the young country from fighting another war against Great Britain and Charles Evans Hughes, as an attorney with political aspirations, fighting to allow socialists to be seated in the New York Assembly even though Hughes was an ardent Republican. He also discusses patriot John Adam’s valiant defense of the British soldiers in the case of the Boston Massacre.

The Meaning of Courage
This essay on courage is actually a defense of representative democracy as opposed to popular democracy. Each person elected to public office has the duty to do what he believes is right, regardless of party sentiment or voter affection. Truly great leaders listen to their constituents, weigh their opinions, and make the best decisions they are able based on their knowledge and principles. As current Ohio senator Sherrod Brown once told me in an interview, “Do the right thing and elections will take care of themselves.”

It is clearly understood that the prose of Kennedy’s book was penned by his aide and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen – a speechwriter without peer in the history of our nation. But that should not discount Kennedy’s contribution and leadership in the project that became this book.

Senators and elected officials rely on others to forge speeches, letters, legislation, and opinions. No elected official has time to do it all himself. While we can enjoy Sorenson’s worthy prose in this well written book, we can be sure that the sentiments are those of John F. Kennedy.

Some historians have attacked parts of the book. Indeed, the punishment borne by those Republicans who opposed the impeachment of Andrew Johnson is overly dramatized in Kennedy's book. Historians have also criticized the inclusion of Lucius Lamar, saying he was an agitator for racial disharmony rather than the spokesman for reunification.

I agree with their assessment of the high drama Kennedy portrays in the Johnson trial. Judgment of Lucius Lamar I'll leave to those more learned in Reconstruction politics than I.

Book to Movie: The Langoliers (1995)

2011-11-13T18:00:00.002-05:00

Book to Movie: The Langoliers (1995)
Written and Directed by Tom Holland
Based on the novella, The Langoliers from the collection Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

Seldom does a made for television movie series so closely resemble the text of the story as does Tom Holland’s teleplay based on Stephen King’s novella, The Langoliers.

Almost every element of the story is there, including almost verbatim dialogue. The only character omitted from the original story is the drunk who sleeps through most of the events. He wasn’t important to the written story and would have been unnecessary baggage in this story.

One important difference is we learn in the opening moments Nick Hopwell’s true nature and true profession as he is given his orders by an agent to kill the girlfriend of an important politician.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The movie is well cast. Bronson Pinchot – almost exclusively a comedic actor – plays the antagonist, Craig Toomey. His pasty makeup and Pinchot’s ability to play a maniacal ass lifts the story and makes it watchable.

David Morse, who has stellar horror credentials for his work in 12 Monkeys, the Green Mile, and Disturbia, plays Brian and like Pinchot, lifts the moribund script with his excellent acting.

Dean Stockwell plays Bob Jenkins, the know it all mystery writer and actually makes him more likeable than the written character by humanizing the smug writer whose leaps in logic always seem to be correct.

The story is as ponderous and slow as the written version. Early on, the audience is intrigued by the mystery of the disappearing people and the haunting atmosphere of the empty airport. But from there, the constant discussion and pondering slows the story to a crawl, just as in King’s story.

When the Langoliers arrive, the producers did the best they could at computer generated effects with 1995 technology. They resemble those little red dots that were used in 7Up commercials in the early 1990s, but are passable.

The effect of the time rip is straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a multi-colored cloud that is entrancing.

The closing moments of all of the surviving passengers walking out of the airport together, arm in arm, leaving the airport is a little too happy and cutesy for the heavy events they have just survived, including the death of a ten year old girl and the loss of the only love of Laurel’s life.

With the two part television miniseries nearly identical to the King story, it suffers from the same weaknesses. There’s the let down at the half way point when the small nature of the problem is revealed. The audience is feeling a search of urgency, but the characters are not. They continue to ponder and discuss their situation.

While worse – much worse – movies have been made based on Stephen King’s work, The Langoliers is incredibly average. Nothing in the movie makes the viewer groan with disgust. But dull, poorly paced movie never delivers a thrill either.

Book to Movie: Secret Window (2004)

2011-11-05T13:33:00.006-04:00

Book to Movie: Secret Window (2004)
Screenplay by David Koepp
Directed by David Koepp
Based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden originally published in Four Past Midnight

David Koepp used many of the elements and scenes from the Stephen King novella, Secret Window, Secret Garden, but completely changed the motivations of the characters to tell a different story.

Just as in the novella, successful author, Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is bedeviled by a man by the name of John Shooter (John Turturo). Like the story, Shooter accuses him of having stolen a story from him. He wants Rainey to admit to having stolen the story.

The Mort Rainey of the movie is essentially the character King created. He’s depressed about his divorce, experiencing writer’s block, and is prone to taking long naps. Instead of a cat, he owns a dog.

Events start playing out just as they did in King’s story. The Rainey house, currently inhabited by Mort’s ex-wife (Maria Bello) burns down and along with it Mort’s proof against the allegation of plagiarism. From there, the story deviates far from King’s.

When Mort’s dog is killed, he calls upon a private investigator he’s used in the past to deal with aggressive fans. It is that private investigator who ends up with Mort’s hatchet buried in his head along with the caretaker.

In the story, Mort’s incident of plagiarism is revealed to him in his dream and we come to find that the guilt of that act of theft has led him to create John Shooter and take on his identity to kill his friends and burn his home. In the movie, he has a dialogue with himself, similar to the book. Instead of plagiarism, we come to find that it was his wife’s betrayal that has driven him mad.

As Mort falls deeper into anxiety over Shooter’s demands to produce the story, Amy becomes concerned about him. She decides to visit him at the cottage to try to help him through his problems.

Just as in the story, Mort has descended into madness and ceased to be Mort Rainey, taking on the personality of John Shooter. As in the story, when Amy arrives, she finds Mort dressed as Shooter and Mort tries to kill her.

When Mort has disabled Amy and has her where he wants her, her boyfriend shows up, having followed her. Mort decapitates him, then goes to finish off Amy.

The story ends with Mort going into town to purchase groceries. It is evident that the people in town despise him. That evening, the sheriff pays Mort a visit. In Mort’s home, he finds ears upon ears of corn cooking and Mort hard at work at his typewriter, eating corn while writing. He tells Mort that he knows that Mort has killed his wife and someday he will prove it. Meanwhile, he instructs Mort to stay away from town, that people don’t want him there anymore. The camera then focuses on a garden of corn stalks and fades.

Rather than fixating on the issue of plagiarism, which is probably of greater interest to readers than to movie viewers, Koepp chooses to veil his movie with bits from the story that Mort has stolen. In that story, the main character is betrayed by his cheating wife. He eventually kills her and buries her in a garden adjacent to her home. The character is convinced that if he plants a crop and eats it, eventually her death will become a mystery to even him.

Koepp tells a different story, but it works well as a movie. Being quite familiar with the book and thinking I knew what to anticipate, I was shocked and impressed with the conclusion which was not a twist to the movie audience, but was certainly a twist to those of us who read King’s original story.

Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

2011-11-01T14:50:00.004-04:00

Four Past Midnight
By Stephen King
Copyright 1990

Introduction

In his introduction to this collection of novellas, Stephen King reflects on his career as he enters middle age. He was 42 years old when he published Four Past Midnight.

He compares his career with that of Milwaukee Brewers Hall of Famer, Robin Yount, who, at that time, was entering the twilight of his great career. Yount broke into the majors the same year King published his first novel.

Robin Yount came up as a shortstop. King started his writing career with an emphasis on children bedeviled by various monsters (with a few exceptions like The Stand). To extend his career, Yount made a position change to outfielder. King, too, changed as he got older and expanded to more adult oriented horror with much of it centered around writers bedeviled by their books and by their fans.

In 1994, Yount was old by major league standards, but still playing top notch baseball. King seemed to feel that he was entering a transition in his career as well. He closes by saying that Yount isn’t quite done yet and neither is he.

One Past Midnight: The Langoliers
Captain Brian Engle is taking a deadhead flight from New York to Boston where his ex-wife has just died in a fire. He falls asleep in the first class section of the plane shortly after takeoff. He is awakened by a shrieking girl.

The girl is Dinah Bellman, a ten year old blind girl who is on her way to Boston with her aunt to have surgery performed that will restore her sight. She awakens to find that her aunt, who serve as her eyes, is not in the seat next to her. She gets out of her seat and starts walking forward, calling out for somebody to help her.

She continues forward and starts feeling in the seats. That’s when she realizes there’s nobody aboard the plane. When she grasps a wig lying in a seat, she thinks she’s grabbed human hair. She starts shrieking loudly and awakens the remaining passengers on the flight.

There are ten of them. Captain Brian Engle; Dinah Bellman; Fifth grade teacher Laurel Stephenson, who is making a trip across the country to meet a man she has corresponded with via personal ads, Nick Hopewell who is in the employ of the British government; Don Gaffney, a retired tool and die maker, businessman Rudy Warwick; Albert Kraussner, a teen violin prodigy on his way to the Berklee School of Music in Boston; Bethany Sims, a 16 year old girl on her way to a drug rehab center; Bob Jenkins, a mystery writer; and Craig Toomey, an investment banker on his way to the Boston Prudential Center to explain to his investors how he lost $43 million of their money.

The remaining passengers introduce themselves to each other and immediately begin to take stock of the situation. Brian and Nick go forward to assess the situation in the cockpit. There, they find the cockpit empty and the plane flying on autopilot.

The passengers search the plane and note that odd objects are left behind. Radios, watches, dentures, surgical pens, and other travel flotsam. As they each tell their story, the deductive mystery writer determines that the one thing they all had in common was that they were asleep when whatever happened, happened.

In the cockpit, Brian tries to raise Denver tower and finds the radio devoid of traffic. He looks out the window at where Denver should be, and it’s not there. He decides that the best thing they can do is to continue east but land at the less congested Bangor Airport as opposed to Logan.

When Toomey hears that he will not be going to Boston, he flips out. That’s when we learn that Nick Hopewell is not a mere attaché to the British Embassy. He takes the badly behaving Mr. Toomey and puts him in a nose lock and promises to send him to unexplored realms of pain if he doesn’t shut up and behave. Mr. Toomey returns to his seat and begins slowly and methodically shredding magazines – a nervous habit that helps him calm down.

Brian delivers the plane and passengers to Bangor, but it is deserted. Immediately, Dinah notices that the air tastes funny and sounds don’t have resonance. They proceed into the passenger terminal to find some food and ponder their problem.

They find the food tasteless, the beer and pop flat. Looking outside, they notice that their plane, colorful and bright, stands in sharp contrast to the surroundings which seem to be dulling in color. The matches in the terminal won’t light. Nothing in this world is any good. Meanwhile, off in the distance, they can hear a strange noise, like milk poured on Rice Krispies. . .and the sound is getting closer.

While the other survivors are pondering what happened to the world, Mr. Toomey sneaks off to find a gun with visions of forcing Brian to take him to Boston so he can make his meeting at the Prudential Center. He gets his gun from airport security, sneaks up on Laurel and puts a gun to her head and demands to be taken to Boston. Albert sneaks up on him, but Toomey sees him. Just as Albert clouts him on the head with his violin case, Toomey shoots Albert.

But the powder in the bullets don’t ignite any better than the matches and the bullet harmlessly bounces off Albert’s chest. Nick ties up Toomey and leaves him lying on the floor while they deliberate some more.

After much pondering and discussion, the mystery writer employs his powers of deductive reasoning and determines that they have traveled to the recent past where everything and everybody has moved on. Brian tells them that there were a strange weather phenomena over the Mojave and perhaps that is where they encountered their “rip” in time. Nick suggests they fly back from whence they came, the way they came.

The problem is that they are almost out of fuel and the fuel in Bangor of this time is certainly no good. Bob Jenkins, again deploying his outstanding deductive reasoning skills surmises that perhaps if objects are taken aboard the plane, which is a temporal anomaly in Bangor, perhaps those objects will work once again. Brian, Nick, Albert, and Bob set off to test this hypothesis.

Dinah is left in the terminal, accompanied by Laurel, Gaffney, and Warwick to keep an eye on Toomey. Toomey tells them that the Langoliers are coming. The Langoliers are little creatures with quick little legs who chase down and eat slow and dull children, or so his father told him. Craig Toomey lives his life as a type A personality, driven by the childhood fears of Langoliers that will eat him should he slow down.

The group wanders away from Toomey to get away from his horror stories. They walk to the windows to watch what’s going on out at the airplane. While they are not looking, Toomey slips loose and gets to a food counter where he grabs a knife. He then surprises Dinah and stabs her in the chest and takes off running.

On the plane, Brian and his friends find that the objects and material brought aboard are restored to their earlier properties. Brian says he can use the plane’s engines to pump fuel from a fuel truck and get the plane ready for takeoff.

Nick returns to the terminal to see to Dinah who has a punctured lung and is certainly dying. He dispatches Albert and Gaffney to find a stretcher so they can move Dinah back to the plane. As Nick is seeing her to her wounds, Dinah implores Nick to not kill Toomey, telling him that they still need Toomey.

Gaffney and Albert find airport emergency services and walk in. Albert immediately spots a stretcher and moves toward it. But Toomey is lurking behind the tour and ambushes Gaffney, stabbing and killing him. Albert, armed with a toaster wrapped in a blanket, swings his makeshift sling, and knocks Toomey unconscious.

The group gets Dinah on the stretcher and heads for the airplane as Brian makes ready the engines and the fuel truck. They begin the long, slow process of pumping the fuel into the plane. Meanwhile, the ominous crunching sound is a lot closer and they can see trees and power towers falling in the distance.

Dinah is delirious, but has a mental connection with Mr. Toomey. She implores him to get up, telling him that the Boston bankers have come all the way to Bangor to hear his important presentation. Toomey struggles to rise and get to his meeting. He sees visions of his father, accusing him of laying down on the job. He runs through the terminal and out onto the tarmac where he sees a boardroom table with men waiting to talk to him.

As they are reaching the final stages of fueling, the group gets their first look at the Langoliers who are literally eating existence. They are little black balls with huge, sharp teeth that zig and zag as they make their way through matter. They make their way past the plane to Mr. Toomey, who stand before an imaginary board of directors, explaining how he lost $43 million in bad foreign currency investments.

When he sees the Langoliers, Toomey begins to run. The Langoliers pursue, giving Brian time to get the plane started and taxiing. The Langoliers catch Toomey, cutting him off at the legs and then turning to finish him off as he pleads with them that he’ll be a good boy from now on.

After being sure that Mr. Toomey has diverted the Langoliers long enough to allow the plane a chance to take off, Dinah dies from her wounds.

Brian launches the plane down the runway as the Langoliers begin to turn their attention to the airport and its environs. He manages to get the plane aloft before all of Bangor falls into non existence.

The group flies across the country, or what’s left of it down below as the Langoliers do their work of eating the setting of times past. They reach the temporal anomaly and Brian prepares to fly them through and hopefully, back to their own time at LAX. Just then, it occurs to the deductive Bob Jenkins that they have forgotten that they must be asleep lest they disappear into nothingness just as the other passengers did. Brian turns the plane around and enters a holding pattern as they discuss what to do next. Meanwhile, their fuel supply dwindles.

Brian tells them he can put them all to sleep by depressurizing the cabin, but that somebody – namely him – has to be awake to land the plane. Nick Hopwell, who feels he has a lot to atone for from his bloody work of fighting for Her Majesty, agrees to take the oxygen mask and stay awake to start cabin repressurization in time to wake up Brian to land the plane.

Laurel, who has fallen in love with Nick is horrified. She boarded a cross country flight to take a blind chance on finding love, but found it aboard the plane. Now, she is going to lose it. Nick says he has a lot to atone for and this is his way to do it. He asks Laurel to visit his father in England and tell him that, in the end, he got redemption.

Brian depressurizes the cabin and everybody goes to sleep except Nick who is using an oxygen mask. As the plane heads toward the time rip, Nick starts to repressurize the cabin. When it passes through the rip, Nick disappears, his watch falling to the floor.

Brian awakens and begins the approach to LAX. He is out of fuel and has to take the plane in hard. He lands the plane and coasts down the runway, eventually crashing into a gate. They come to rest and look out the window. They immediately notice that LAX looks just like Bangor. It is abandoned. The passenger and their captain despair.

They get out of the plane and enter the terminal. They notice some distinct differences between Bangor and LAX. LAX seems more “there.” The colors are more vivid and the sounds resonate. They also hear a humming sound that is growing louder.

Deductive wizard Bob Jenkins tells them that they have actually moved a few minutes into the future and that time is catching up with them quickly. He forces them up against a wall so they’ll be out of the way when the moment arrives.

The passengers watch as the world quickly appears around them. A kid notices that the passengers have appeared out of thin air and tells his dad about it. But nobody else notices. The passengers of the aborted flight leave the airport to resume their lives.

When I first read this story, the mystery really had me intrigued. King gives us scant clues as to what is happening, but it is exciting. There’s also the element of the locked room mystery. Whatever occurred on the plane occurred in a sealed environment.

However, as the nature of their predicament becomes apparent, there is a real let down. I was expecting something much more ominous and exciting than merely traveling back in time a few minutes to find an empty airport.

Also, much too much time is spend with mystery writer, whom King develops as a second rate Sherlock Holmes, always making sure he has an audience while he dispenses his brilliant deductions, some of which he correctly arrives at despite having scant information.

The characters recognize early on that time is of the essence in solving their problem. Yet they continue to provide their rapt attention to Jenkins as he has them conduct experiment after experiment to reveal what has happened. There was way too much deliberation and not nearly enough well paced action in the story.

King cleverly overcomes the obstacle of how to put the passengers to sleep and that lifts the second half of the story, perhaps salvaging what was an otherwise average effort.

This story spanned 240 pages and could have easily been published as a novel. Had it been a stand-alone novel, it would have ranked as below average. While there was much to like about it early on, when the nature of the problem presents itself, it becomes much more dull.

Two Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden
Author Mort Rainey is awakened from a nap by a knock on his door. At his door is a man named John Shooter who accuses him of stealing his story.

Rainey is beside himself with anger because plagiarism is the worst charge that can be leveled at a writer. Shooter says he’s from Mississippi and he picked up a copy of Rainey’s short stories in a bus station and discovered the story that he claims to have written. He leaves a copy of his manuscript and promises their business is not completed.

Rainey tosses the manuscript into the garbage, but his housekeeper pulls it out, thinking that Rainey has thrown it there by accident. When Mort finds the manuscript later, he reads some it and notes the striking resemblance to his story Secret Window, Secret Garden. Now he’s ticked that someone has stolen his story.

He encounters Rainey one day while on a walk. Rainey asks Shooter when allegedly wrote this story. Shooter says he wrote it in 1982. Mort feels a moment of triumph as he tells Shooter that the story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1980 – two years prior to when Shooter says he wrote the story. Shooter is thrown off stride by this and tells Rainey he has three days to produce the magazine and prove that he did not steal the story.

Mort knows he has a copy in the study of his home back in Derry where his recently divorced wife still lives. He calls his ex-wife and tells her he’ll be down tomorrow to get the story. He then takes a long nap. When he awakens, he finds his cat stabbed to death with a screwdriver and pinned to his back door.

He also learns that his former home has been burned to the ground during the night. It is an obvious case of arson and the fire started in his old study where the magazine was allegedly stored.

Growing more desperate, he contacts his publisher about getting a copy of the magazine Fedexed to him. Meanwhile, he contacts the local police about his dead cat and the man threatening him. He asks the sheriff to talk to a local care taker who saw Rainey talking to shooter near the beach.

Mort, meanwhile, must deal with the arson at his former home. He meets his ex-wife and her new lover at the insurance adjustor’s office. While there, he realizes he still has feelings for his ex-wife, even after catching her in bed in a no-tell motel with her current lover. They go over all that they lost that represented their lives together and Mort is devastated, as is his wife, Amy.

The next day, Mort finds that the caretaker and the man he asked to help him have been murdered with tools from Mort’s shed. They lie dead at the exact spot where Rainey met Shooter the day prior.

Mort returns home and Shooter calls and is angry that Mort involved outsiders in their private business. Shooter promises to show up the next day to see the copy of the magazine. Mort, mentally exhausted, falls asleep again.

He awakens and obsesses over the situation. He remembers that he might have stolen a story once, but it was many years before and it certainly wasn’t Secret Window, Secret Garden which he recalls was inspired by a window in his wife’s study that looked out on a small garden hidden from view from the house.

Mort goes to the post office to retrieve the package that contains the magazine. He finds that his story has been excised from the magazine, along with the table of contents that had his name in them. He rushes home to figure out what he’s going to do about the maniacal John Shooter who is supposed to be arriving that afternoon to see the magazine.

He falls asleep and dreams of his college days in creative writing. In his creative writing class, there was a student by the name of Dellacourt who was a brilliant writer of stories – better than Rainey. But the student dropped out of the class and was never seen again. Mort was bitterly jealous of the young man’s writing ability.

Several months later, after receiving several rejection letters for his own work, Mort comes across a manuscript written by Dellacourt. He decides, as a joke, to submit the manuscript as his own work, just to prove that Dellacourt would also be rejected. However, the magazine accepts the manuscript. At first, Mort resolves that he will withdraw the manuscript, but ultimately doesn’t and it is published. He then spends the next year living in mortal fear that he will be out\ed as a plagiarist. No one ever learns of his duplicity.

He awakens and walks to his study. There, he finds his word processor smashed and replaced with an old Royal typewriter which he used to write on. As he looks at the typewriter, he realizes that there never has been a John Shooter, that he is John Shooter. His conscience has come back to haunt him and he has killed all these people and burned his own home.

At this time, Amy arrives to find out why Mort has been acting so weird. She encounters Mort, now dressed and acting like John Shooter. Shooter says he has to kill her. He pursues Amy through the house and she runs out the back door. Just as Mort is about to stab her, he is shot by the insurance investigator who has been following Amy as part of his investigation into the arson.

The story concludes with the insurance investigator explaining how he figured out that Mort had set the fire at his house. Amy theorizes that Mort became two people, with Shooter’s personality finally taking over.

This was the strongest story in the book. That Mort and Shooter are the same person becomes apparent early on and King is making only token efforts at shielding that. Every event transpires while Mort is taking one of his many naps. But that’s not the crux of the story.

The reader is engaged in wondering how it’s all going to play out. Mort and his agent are both confident that the story does exist in the magazine. The reader believes it too and this is a masterful red herring. It’s not until the end that King reveals the reason why Mort Rainey has come unraveled.

Three Past Midnight: The Library Policeman

Rotary member Sam Peebles is asked at the last minute to give a speech before his local club. Sam is not a practiced speechfier and needs help.

He drafts a speech and has his secretary, Naomi, look it over. Naomi tells him it is full of good information, but is dry. She recommends that he spice it up by adding a joke or two as well as some inspirational poetry. She tells him to go to the library and pick up a couple reference books to help him find the right material.

The thought of going to the library fills Sam with dread, although he has no idea why. When Naomi mentions the idea, his mouth fills with the taste of red licorice, which he’s never tried, but hates. A single line, spoken by a man with a lisp also runs through his head” “Come with me, thun, I’m a poleethman.”

Sam goes to the library. He takes a look around and notices how retro the whole library looks. He is taken aback at the posters in the children’s library and the sign at the entrance that reads, “SILENCE!” The standard posters advising kids of the joys of reading and warning them of stranger danger are not nice, sunny pictures to inspire joy. They are fearful posters that Sam is sure would inspire terror rather than motivation. As examines these posters, he comes across the fearful visage of a shadowy, creepy creature dubbed, The Library Policeman. He’s the guy that comes to get the kid who does not turn in his books on time. For reasons unknown to him, his anxiety returns.

As he’s taking in the posters at the children’s library, he is approached by the librarian who introduces herself as Ardelia Lortz. Sam describes his predicament to Ardelia who is able to help Sam find two reference books that will meet his needs. Sam checks out a book of poems and an old book called, The Speaker’s Companion.

As Ardelia is processing his library card and checking him out, she reminds him that these particular books are only one week loans and he must have them back on time. Her tone and domineering posture make it clear that she’s not joking.

Sam delivers his speech and it is a rousing success. He sees business at his insurance and real estate business soar during the week after as the accolades continue to flow. Sam is basking in his glory and his new cash flow when it dawns on him that the books are due.

He rushes home from the office and looks for the books. They are not to be found. His anxiety is cranked high. Thoughts of the dreaded library policeman run through his head and the taste of licorice flood his mouth. He searches his office and can’t find the books. Finally, he reaches a conclusion: Dirty Dave has taken his books.

Dirty Dave is a town drunk that goes around and collects newspapers and other recyclables to sell for money to live on. Sam is now dreadfully sure that he picked up the books when he bundled the newspapers for Dave to take.

That evening, as Sam spends and uncomfortable evening at home, pondering the fate of his two lost tomes, there is a knock at the door. When Sam answers it, he finds a tall, looming figure dressed in a trench coat and wearing a fedora. He forces his way into the room and takes Sam into his firm grasp. He says with a lisp that he’s the Library Poleethman and he’s here for the books. Sam’s mouth fills with that red licorice taste again as he trembles and tells the man that he does not have the books. The Library Policeman tells Sam he’d better come up with him or things will go badly. Later, Ardelia Lortz calls and tells Sam she’s going to give him an extension to return the books. She adds with great menace that, if he does not return the books, he’ll regret it.

The next day at work, Sam raises the name of Ardelia Lortz with Naomi who has a visceral reaction when Sam mentions her name, but doesn’t provide him any clues as to why, dismissing it as something that happened a long time ago. Later, when Naomi’s mother calls, looking for her, Sam asks her about it. The woman is filled with anger at the mention of the name, and she chides him for bringing it up before she hangs up on him.

That evening, Sam heads for the area shelter where Dirty Dave lives to ask him if he has the books. He inadvertently walks into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. There, he sees Dirty Dave along with Naomi and a couple of the town’s leading citizens who, during the day, Sam is sure would not give Dirty Dave the time of day. He is unobserved, so he waits patiently outside for the meeting to break up. He approaches Dave who tells him that he’s already taken the day’s load to the recycling center.

Hoping against hope that his books will still be intact, Sam heads for the recycling center. After an extensive search of the detritus from the day’s haul, Sam finds the water laden dust jacket of one of the books. Anxiety turns to terror for he knows he can not return the books and the Library Policeman will be paying another visit.

That evening, he calls the shelter to ask Dave if he knows anything about Ardelia Lortz. The mere mention of her name sends Dave into an absolute panic and he keeps telling Dave what happened with Lortz wasn’t his fault. Then someone takes the phone away from Dave. It is Naomi, who is known to residents of the shelter and to her fellow A.A. members as Sarah. Naomi tells Dave he is a horrible, hateful man to bring up Ardelia Lortz to Dave and that she will never work for or speak to him again and hangs up the phone. Dave feels all alone now, facing the problem of the psychotic librarian and her henchman.

The next afternoon, Sam goes to the library, planning to tell the librarian that he’s lost the books and offer to pay for them. When he arrives at the library, he finds the interior does not remotely resemble the library he visited earlier. It is modern, with the old skylights covered with a drop ceiling and the scary posters replaced by happy posters. The sign that once demanded, “SILENCE!” has been replaced with a friendly greeting. He finds the library staffed by teen volunteers, none of whom have ever heard of Ardelia Lortz.

Sam decides to research the old newspapers to ascertain what he can about the library’s history. He comes across a section of the newspaper from several years prior that documents the library’s history on its 50th anniversary. He reads the roster of prior librarians and the years they served. He notes a gap in the documented history of the library in the late 1960s. Ardelia Lortz is not among those listed as having served as librarian.

As he’s pondering this, he is taken by surprise as Naomi approaches him from behind. She tells him that she has come to apologize for having been so abrupt with him, realizing that he must not have known about Ardelia Lortz, her horrendous crime, and Dirty Dave’s connection to it. She invites him to come to the shelter that evening because Dave wants to tell his story and do what he can to help Sam.

They go to the shelter and Dave tells his story. Back when he was a young man in the 1960s, attending church, he met the town’s new librarian, Ardelia Lortz at a Sunday worship and was immediately smitten. He was drinking then, but still a respected artist and sign painter who did a good business in the town. He started spending more and more time with Ardelia, in her bed and with her at the library. Ardelia put his talents to work, drawing the scary posters Dave saw. He tells them that he learned that Ardelia Lortz was not human, that she was an evil creature who fed off of the fear of children.

Despite knowing her nature, Dave could not break away from her spell. He began to drink more and more and before long he lost his business. But he still had Ardelia. One evening, as Dave lay in his cups, Ardelia flew into a rage about the town’s police chief who was starting to question Ardelia’s methods of running the library and how she was treating the children. She planned to kill him and then to “hibernate.” To hibernate, she needed to kill a couple children to fuel herself on their fear. She tells Dave that he, too, must kill a child and join her in hibernation.

Ardelia goes on to kill the police chief, causing him to have a heart attack. She then abducts two children and kills them. Dave, still under her spell, stalks a child, but at the last minute has a moment of clarity and cannot go through with it. He’s left behind with the knowledge of Ardelia’s true, supernatural nature and the guilt of two dead children on his conscience.

Dave tells Sam that he’s in deep trouble because Ardelia will need to kill again and hibernate before she is discovered again. Dave tells Sam that there must be something in his past, a “Library Policeman” that Ardelia is exploiting to create terror in him. Sam assures him that there is not. Dave tells Sam to acquire new copies of the books he lost and to present them to Ardelia after the library closes. Dave hopes that that will make things even for Sam and put the matter to rest.

They are able to locate the books they need at a book store more than 100 miles away in Des Moines. Dave says he has a friend who has a private plane that owes him payback for a huge favor done many years prior. Dave tells them to fly to Des Moines and return with the books and he will meet them at the library after it closes.

Naomi and Sam fly to Des Moines with Dave’s friend who tells them that he does indeed owe Dave a favor so large that he’s willing to drop what he’s doing to fly them. They acquire the books at the bookstore. On the flight back, Sam falls asleep and has a terrifying dream that brings back to memory a past trauma.

He’s a young man on his way to the library, eating sticks of red licorice, his favorite candy. He is going to return a book that is four days past due. He approaches the library and on the steps, he sees a man dressed in a dark trench coat, wearing sunglasses and bearing a large scar on his face. He stops ten year old Sam and asks him if his book is overdue. Sam tells him it is. The man then says, “Come with me. I’m a poleethman and you have to pay a fine.” He takes Sam to a secluded area near the library and rapes him. Sam awakens terrified with just hazy memories of the dream, but a clear idea of what must be done at the library.

Naomi and Sam return and head for the library. Along the way, Sam purchases several packages of red licorice and wads them into balls for no reason he can understand, just knowing that that is what he must do to fight Ardelia and her policeman. They arrive at the library to find Dave waiting for them. They wait outside as the last of the library’s patrons and real, current staff leave for the night. They then enter through the delivery door. They find the library as it looked circa 1960.

The Library Policeman is there to ambush them. He grabs Dave and tells them that the librarian has a score to settle with Dave who left her alone all those years ago. Sam says that may be, but Sam has a score to settle with the policeman. The policeman tosses Dave across the room where his head strikes a fire extinguisher and he falls unconscious. He then grabs Naomi. He plants a taunting kiss on her neck. Sam orders the policeman to let Naomi go and to deal with him. He tosses Naomi aside.

Dave tells the policeman that he has the books and past fines are all paid. He then attacks the policeman, striking him with the books he has acquired. The policeman is stricken and begins an abrupt change from something resembling a human into a dwarf like creature with a long proboscis. This is Ardelia’s true nature. She attacks Sam and holds him. She enchants him with her eyes. He is paralyzed. She then extends her proboscis and begins to lick the strange, pinkish tears from Sam’s face.

Sam realizes that she’s feeding on his fear and is able to find his resolve. He takes one of the balls of licorice and plugs the proboscis with it. Ardelia stumbles about, trying to get her nose unplugged, but can’t. She finally explodes with guts and tissue flying all over the room.

Naomi and Sam go to Dave whose obviously sustained a substantial skull fracture. He’s barely conscious, but he tells Dave to remember that Ardelia finds a way to go on through time; that she survives and for Sam to make sure she is gone forever. He then dies.

A couple days later, Sam attends a memorial service for Dave at the shelter. He notices that Naomi has left the room. He goes out back to find her standing, contemplating the railroad tracks. She tells him that she doesn’t feel well and that, for the first time in a long time, she wants a drink. Sam hears a train approaching and knows what Naomi is contemplating.

He also notices a large welt where the policeman kissed her. He recalled Dave’s final warning about Ardelia finding the means to maintain her existence. He find one of the balls of licorice left over from his earlier encounter in his coat. He grabs Naomi who he now knows is no longer Naomi – but Ardelia. He places the ball of licorice against the welt. Ardelia screams and the ball of licorice swells and pulses. Sam removes the licorice from Naomi’s neck and places it on the track where it is promptly run over by the train. Naomi screams and collapses.

She awakens a short time later to find that she’s her old self again. Naomi and Sam are now confident that the creature that was Ardelia Lortz and the Library Policeman is truly dead. They live happily ever after.

This story was weak, but was compensated with exceptionally strong characters.

The story was weak because King leaves a couple important details unresolved. At one point, Dave describes the Library Policeman as Ardelia’s henchman. But the end leads us to believe there was but one being. This inconsistency is never rationalized.

The other glaring plot hole was in the incident that lead to the books being lost. Had Sam not made the error of placing the books out with the recycling, he’d have returned them on time and nothing would have happened. The event that triggered the crisis was caused by human accident. We are lead to believe that Sam was targeted by Ardelia because of his past fearful association with the library. But she took no action to bring Sam back to the library, instead leaving it to chance. I know it’s a small issue, but it did take away from the story.

What is fantastic is the character development of Dirty Dave. The concept of the noble drunk is a cliché to be certain. However, King takes the time in a short novel to give this character incredible depth. The tale that Dave tells about his past association with Ardelia Lortz takes up nearly one third of the book and succeeds in making the gifted artist turned town drunk into a tragic character.

When the pilot tells the tale of a younger Dave, a younger drunk, but still a functioning artist, painting the portraits of the Kansas City Royals on baseballs and getting them autographed for the pilot’s dying son, it adds tremendously to the sympathy the reader feels for this unwashed, unkempt man who once had a great talent and was respected for it. King invests many pages in telling this tale as well.

This story should have been expanded into a novel and the creature that was Ardelia assigned a backstory to make her more terrifying. Knowing King’s proclivity at character development, he could have made Ardelia Lortz and the Library Policeman into something truly terrifying.

Four Past Midnight: The Sun Dog
All Kevin Delevan wants for his 15th birthday is a Polaroid Sun 660 Camera. That is exactly what he gets. But excitement turns to disappointment – and eventually horror – when he finds that it does not take pictures of what it is pointed at.

Kevin takes his first picture which is supposed to be of his family. Instead, what comes out is a picture of a black mongrel dog walking on a sidewalk with a dilapidated picket fence in the background. Kevin considers taking it back to the store to exchange it, but it is damaged at his birthday party, making it impossible to return.

Kevin’s father recommends that he take the camera to Pop Merrill, the owner of Castle Rock’s pawn shop. He is known to be pretty handy with fixing mechanical devices. Kevin decides to pay a visit to Pop.

Pop inspects the camera and the photos Kevin brings in with him. He notices that each photo is just a little different – that the dog is moving and that, in one shot, it is clearly evident the photographer (whoever he or she is) has adjusted to keep the dog in the frame. Pop tells Kevin that he can’t even open the camera because it is plastic and designed to never be opened.

Pop is curious about the camera and sees a potential profit in it. Kevin is haunted by the images of the dirty mongrel because there’s something sinister about it. He says he’s considering smashing the camera. Pop tells Kevin he can do just that right there in the shop, but Pop proposes and experiment before they dispose of the camera.

Kevin purchases a packet of fifty exposures and over the next three days takes pictures at regular intervals. At the end of those three days, he takes the camera back to Pop and they examine the pictures together. It is evident that the dog is moving and is starting to turn. Kevin wants to destroy the camera. Pop tells him to hold off a little longer and to come back to the shop tomorrow.

That day before Kevin’s arrival, Pop Merrill runs some errands. He takes the pictures to a friend of his who transfers photographs to videotape and has the pictures converted. He stops by a department store and buys an identical Polaroid Sun 660 Camera. He plans to frighten Kevin a little more so he’ll want to get rid of the camera and he’s scheming to get his hands on it so he can sell it to collectors of supernatural artifacts.

Kevin and his dad show up at Pop Merrill’s shop the next evening and Pop has laid his plan well. Prior to their arrival, Pop has smashed the Polaroid he just bought and stowed the pieces out of sight in his shop. When Kevin and his dad arrive, Pop takes the camera from them for another “examination” and sets it down precariously close to the edge of the counter. He then invites Kevin and his father upstairs to view the videotape.

The tape frightens Kevin and his father. It is evident that the dog has taken notice of the photographer and his making ready to turn and attack. Pop dismisses himself as Kevin and his dad review the tape again, goes downstairs, and feigns a crashing sound. He hides Kevin’s camera and scatters the pieces of the other Polaroid on the floor. He tells Kevin and his father that they won’t need to smash the camera after all. It has met an unfortunate, accidental end in their shop. The Delevans are relieved.

That night, Kevin starts having recurring nightmares about living in a two dimensional world inhabited by two dimensional people – people who live in photographs. They are trying to tell him something. Eventually Kevin figures out that Pop Merrill has swindled him out of his camera. He also knows that if that dog gets lose, it’s coming for him because, regardless of the possessor, the camera is his, as is the dog.

Meanwhile, Pop Merrill is getting caught up in a mania of his own. He’s convinced that he can get thousands of dollars from some customer interested in supernatural material. But his “mad hatter” customers are not interested. Each has a different reason. One dismisses it as uninteresting and unremarkable. Another thinks it’s too horrifying. Another sees it as useless.

At each stop, Pop Merrill takes a few pictures. The dog has turned and is prepared to launch itself at the photographer. Now Pop, not the most imaginative of people, is concerned about that camera and that dog. He resolves to destroy the camera himself. But he’s too late. He’s under the spell of the camera and the dog.

He stops on his way home to buy pipe tobacco. Instead, he unknowingly buys Polaroid film. Meanwhile, Kevin and his father are making a few purchases of their own. They buy another Polaroid 660 Land Camera and a packet of film.

Back at his shop, Pop resolves to take the camera to his back yard and smash it. Instead, he puts the camera on the counter and takes a cuckoo clock out back to smash. Now that he thinks he’s put the nasty camera business behind him, Pop returns to his shop to tinker on a clock. In reality, he’s snapping picture after picture, bringing the dog closer to the photographer and to our world.

Kevin and his dad arrive at Merrill’s shop to find that he’s exhausted his film. Stacks of pictures lay on the counter. One, however, is starting to take on a third dimension. The picture pulsates and it appears as if something is trying to escape from it. Finally, a dog’s head bursts through and rips into Merrill, killing him. It continues to try to push its way out.

Inspired by his dream, Kevin aims his camera the way a hunter aims his gun – to kill. Kevin is careful to get the entire dog, now more than halfway out of its birth from Polaroid Land to the real world, into the frame of the picture, and snaps the shot with his new camera. The dog disappears, trapped once again inside a Polaroid camera.

In the story’s epilogue, Kevin receives a word processor (back when word processors were stand alone devices) as a gift. He is excited about his new toy and sets it up. He types in the typist practice phrase, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.” What appears on the screen is entirely different. Kevin reads the monitor with horror, for written there is, “The Dog is loose again. And it is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you, Kevin and it’s very hungry. And it’s VERY angry.”

In its introduction, King tells us that this story is meant to serve as a bridge to what he says will be the final Castle Rock story. We met Sheriff Alan Pangborn in The Dark Half and he makes a token appearance in The Sun Dog. We also see Deputy Norris Ridgewick and there are several mentions of the town selectman, Dan “Buster” Keaton and Polly Chalmers, owner of the You Sew and Sew. Each will play an important role in the final Castle Rock story, Needful Things.

We also learn that Pop’s nephew, Ace – the antagonist from The Body – is doing a stint at Shawshank Prison for an armed robbery, put there by Sheriff Pangborn. This sets up one of the conflicts coming in Needful Things. We also learn that Pangborn’s wife died in a car accident and that before she died, she’d learned that she had a brain tumor.

Needful Things is a long book, so having a novella to introduce a few characters and set up the coming conflicts and subplots served King’s needs.

The story is enjoyable, if not particularly compelling. A great deal of effort went into developing Pop Merrill as a character integral to the life of the residents of Castle Rock, just to have him die at the end of the story.

Four Past Midnight was the second of three volumes of novellas published by King. It is not nearly as good as Different Seasons and its stories are not as good as those published in Full Dark, No Stars. While Secret Window, Secret Garden ranks as one of King’s better stories, the book in its entirety ranks far down the list of King’s works.

The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury

2011-10-22T13:58:00.002-04:00

The Toynbee Convector
By Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1988

The Toynbee Convector
A journalist is excited to be interviewing the world’s one and only time traveler on his 130th birthday and on the day in a future passed that he arrived in a distant time to find that man has conquered the demons of pollution, war, international strife, and bad economies. The journalist, confident he is getting the story of a lifetime, finds the story isn’t quite what he thought.

One could see the twist coming, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable morality tale told the way Bradbury tells them best. This was an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Trapdoor
A woman awakens to find a doorway to an attic that she’d never noticed before even though she’d lived in the house for ten years. She’s afraid to go into the attic because it seems to be inhabited by rodents. She calls an exterminator who finds the job to big for him. . .

This was a rather banal story. Not loathsome, but below par for Bradbury.

On the Orient North
A middle aged nurse has a chance meeting with a ghost – a corporeal ghost – as she travels north on the Orient Express. She pities him because he is dying a slow and miserable “death.” He is dying because, in the modern world, embracing the rational has squeezed out faith in what we cannot see. The nurse sets out with the ancient, stately being to find that faith and belief in ghosts that will sustain him.

This was a fantastic tale, worthy of being ranked among Bradbury’s best. The ghost as a sympathetic, lonely creature is nothing new. But Bradbury puts a delightfully refreshing twist on it by adding social commentary about the death of imagination in an increasingly secular world. This story was made into one of the finest episodes in the six year run of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

One Night in Your Life
A newly divorced man heads east from Los Angeles en route to New York to start his life over. As he contemplates the misery of his marriage that was, he finds a young woman wandering along the side of the road outside a small Iowa town. He stops and passes the day – just one day – with the woman of his dreams.

There are a couple themes here common in Bradbury stories. The man is miserable in Los Angeles with his wife who loves the big city. He enjoys driving his convertible along the open vistas of America. His wife hates it. Finding happiness in the openness of middle America is a common thread in Bradbury stories. The other is the pure happiness that is limited in its time by a supernatural force. This is a wistful and romantic story.

West of October
The matriarch of a farm family has the power to send her family member on adventures by transporting their souls into the bodies of others. She transports her two young nephews to explore the minds of inmates of a nearby insane asylum. While they are gone, their bodies are destroyed in a fire. The woman must deposit their souls into the head of their grandfather until new bodies can be located for them. The boys adolescent fantasies torture and embarrass their grandfather who is driven nearly mad.

Imagine being an old man with two adolescents living inside your brain! Bradbury weaves a fanciful tale that is humorous, a bit racy (at least for Bradbury), and original.

The Last Circus
Two boys hear that a circus is coming to town. As one of the boys talks excitedly of the circus at breakfast, the boy’s father laments the development of ever increasingly powerful atom bombs. The boys go to the circus and take in all of the acts. After the circus is over, they watch as the workers take down the tents, pack their gear, and head off for the next destination. As they walk home, one of the boys, perhaps pondering his father’s worry of the growing atomic menace, tells his buddy there will be no more circuses. This was the last.

I think we’re supposed to get from this story that atomic war is coming to wipe out the world, and therefore there will be no more circuses. The link between the father’s lamentations and the boy’s conclusion is tenuous, but it is there.

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
A slightly overweight man and a slightly undersized woman meet at a cocktail party and instantly fall in love. The call each other Stan and Ollie and we never learn their real names. For a year, they rejoice in their love and fondly embrace their repartee of the old movie duo. However, Stan decides she wants a commitment which Ollie is not willing to give, and she leaves, promising to come back to the steps where Laurel and Hardy performed their famous piano moving sequence once each year to see him. Ollie shows up at the appointed time for a couple years, but Stan doesn’t show. He skips a couple years, then goes back. He finds a bottle of champagne with a note from Stan saying she won’t be returning. Years later, they pass each other in a Parisian street by chance, each accompanied by their respective families. As they pass, Ollie says to Stan, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” and keeps walking.

This is a romance story pure and simple and Bradbury writes a few of these which are always passable and sometimes good. He rewrote and retitled it for the Ray Bradbury Theater and injected a sinister supernatural element which made the screen version better.

I Suppose You Are Wondering Why We Are Here?
A man prepares a fine feast at a restaurant for his parents who reside just up the road – in a cemetery. They are coming back for a visit and to tell him something. They tell him that he bores them.

I love Ray Bradbury. I really do. But sometimes, there’s just no point. This is one of those instances.

Lafayette, Farewell
A World War I airman, getting on in years repeatedly walks into his next door neighbor’s home, mistaking it for his own. He often sits and reminisces fondly of his former comrades in arms like Eddie Rickenbacker. But on this night, as he nears the end of his life, he wants to honor his enemies, including Baron von Richtofen, who he says fought honorably and bravely.

This was a story that provided an interesting commentary on the nature of war and who actually does the fighting. Most soldiers in World War I didn’t know Kaiser Wilhelm from Hoyt Wilhelm (yes, I know it was before Hoyt Wilhelm’s time, but you get the idea). They had no political ideology – just a job to do. One can admire the honor and glory of a vanquished foe.

Banshee
A screenwriter reports to his director’s home deep in the moors of Ireland with his latest submission. The director is a boastful, arrogant man who talks constantly of his conquests over women. As the director and screenwriter talk, they can hear a plaintive wail out in the fog. The director says it’s the wail of a Banshee and invites the young screenwriter to investigate. The screenwriter finds the pitiful creature bemoaning being used and jilted by a resident of that home a century prior. She longs for revenge. The screenwriter convinces her that the current occupant is deserving of a little revenge on behalf of all women used by cads.

This was a taut, well paced story with sufficient character development in its scant pages to make the reader want to see a little vengeance dished out by the undead woman. The story served as an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Promises, Promises
A man shows up at his mistress’s door to tell her that his daughter has nearly died of a head injury sustained in a fall at home. Whilst she clung to live in the hospital, he prayed and promised God he’d give up the thing must precious to him in the world in exchange for his daughter’s life – his mistress.

This is purely mainstream fiction and a passable story. It is a commentary on one of the many ways people find their way to faith.

The Love Affair
One of the last Martians left after the chicken pox epidemic admires from afar a young earth woman who inhabits a lonely radio outpost on the surface of Mars. He revels in her beauty, but is certain that, if he makes his presence known or makes contact, he will fall prey to the same disease as did most of his people.

It’s always fun to revisit Mars with Ray Bradbury. This Martian is like Ylla from the first installment in The Martian Chronicles. He is attracted to humans.

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road
A British lord with the greatest wine cellar known to man dies. His will stipulates that he indeed will take it with him and the minister starts to pour the rare vintages over his casket in his grave. But a careful reading of the will by the patrons of a nearby bar reveals that it need not go with him in any precise form. They begin to partake of his stock, promising to leave it with him.

As the saying goes with beer and wine, you don’t own it, you rent it. A humorous innuendo here.

At Midnight, in the Month of June
A serial killer stalks and attacks his last victim. As he wraps up his crime, he thinks back to games of hide and seek he played as a child and how accomplished he was at hiding from the seeker. Now, he decides it’s time for all in free. He leaves clear clues at his last crime scene and toddles off to an all night diner for some milk and graham crackers – his favorite childhood treat.

This was a creepy story that was a delight to read. Serial killers of various kinds have been done to death by horror writers. Leave it to Bradbury to find the fresh take, linking the heinous deed to a childhood game.

Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
A priest awakens in the middle of the night, certain that someone is coming to confess. He dresses and walks to the church. Sure enough, a penitent comes to the confessional and confesses a childhood sin. The priest finds this old man’s sin to be very much like his own from years past.

This was a Christmas story. And like all Christmas stories, it is about redemption and forgiveness. No one is ever going to compare it to A Christmas Carol, but it’s a well told tale nonetheless.

By the Numbers!
A man on a train sees a stranger who immediately reminds him of an incident years before at a hotel when he observed a hotel maintenance man who had a strange and methodical means of disciplining his son. The man learns that, in the end, that rigid discipline didn’t pay off for either the father or the son.

There’s nothing supernatural in this tale, but it is indeed strange. Perhaps a commentary on what can happen if excessive discipline is taught to a child.

A Touch of Petulance
A man on a train meets himself, 25 years older. His older self has come back to tell him that, 25 years from now, he’ll murder his wife. His wife will drive him insane with her petty whining. The younger man, newly married man, is incredulous, claiming he loves his wife dearly. He invites his older self home to see.

Was expecting a twist here that never came. But the last sentence makes the story work. This story was redrafted for an episode of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Long Division
A man arrives at his former home to divide up the marital property as he and his wife finalize their divorce. When he arrives, she finds that she has already decided who gets what books. They argue over and trade books for hours. Finally, after hours of haggling, the man prepares to leave and reminds his wife that, at some point, they will have to discuss who gets the children.

Some people really love their books! Of course, I don’t love them as much as my children, but I do take very good care of my books and don’t lend them out easily. When I finally have to part with a volume, I worry it might go someplace where the owner will fold pages to mark places or worse yet, lay the book face down to mark a place.

Come, and Bring Constance
A man receives an invitation to attend a self help seminar. At the bottom is scrawled, “Come, and bring Constance.” Problem is, his wife’s name isn’t Constance. Sometimes he has trouble remembering his wife’s name, but he knows it isn’t Constance. The wife wants to know who Constance is. When Constance arrives on her doorstep, she finds out.

This story didn’t seem to have a point, a theme, or underlying message. A rare swing and a miss from Bradbury.

Junior
An elderly man awakens to find that he has the first erection he’s had in years. He calls three elderly women with whom he used to cavort in his salad days to come over and admire it.

Bradbury uses G-rated language to tell a PG-13 story just wonderfully! I don’t dig reading comedy, but Bradbury hits the mark here.

The Tombstone
A man and a woman are traveling and stop by a boarding house to spend the night. The room they have reserved has a tombstone in the middle of it. The proprietor explains that the room’s last tenant was a stonecutter who carved tombstones and had left this one behind because he misspelled the name. The woman is upset, convinced the room is haunted, but her husband makes her stay. In the middle of the night, the stonecutter returns to claim his stone. He has located a recently deceased for whom the stone will serve perfectly.

I don’t know if this was a story Bradbury wrote in the 1980s for this book or if it was an older one from the 1950s or 60s. It has a retro feel to it. The woman is hysterical like many women from 1950s literature. The couple is staying at a boarding house (who stayed at boarding houses in the 1980s?). Even the language was somewhat archaic. It was a story best enjoyed by a younger audience. This story was an episode in the final year of the Ray Bradbury Theater.

The Thing at the Top of the Stairs
A traveling man decides to stop by his old home town of Green Town, IL. While there, he visits the house in which he grew up. It now stands vacant. He goes inside to confront the not-quite disbelieved imaginary monster of his childhood.

This was an undertold story. There was a lot to work with here and Bradbury gives us the bare minimum to make it interesting. Stephen King once stated that Bradbury over wrote much of his work. The story and the monster had so much more room for development to make a truly terrifying tale. It's interesting that as I envisioned this story unfolding, I envisioned it in black and white, perhaps linking it in my own mind to The Twilight Zone for which it would have made an excellent episode.

Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy
A bored little boy appeals to an old man to help him make the final days of summer interesting and exciting. The old World War I veteran builds an fake mummy out of materials from around the house. The kid plants the mummy in a field. When it is discovered, excitement ensues.

This was not a terribly interesting tale, but it had a moral. Life’s excitement is not generated by the events around you, but what you make of those events. This story was rewritten and retitled for the Ray Bradbury Theater.

Of the Bradbury collections I've read, this one was the weakest. It had one truly great story and several good ones. Bradbury rarely produces a clunker, but there are a couple here.

One can't help but wonder if Bradbury wrote many of these stories with an eye on the television screen since, at the time this book went into publication, his television show was in full swing on HBO.

The Toynbee Convector is certainly not one of his best works. But it is worth reading -- especially for hardcore Bradbury fans.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

2011-10-16T22:51:00.003-04:00

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
By Cormac McCarthy
Copyright 1985

Cormac McCarthy’s story – such as it is – tells the tale of The Kid and exploits with the notorious Glanton Gang who hunted Apache Indians for fun and profit in Mexico following the U.S. -- Mexican War. The book is a very loose tale and might be called a character study except that the principle characters are absent for long periods during the narrative.

The book opens with The Kid (we never know his name which is typical in a McCarthy novel) being born in Tennessee during the Leonids Meteor Shower. In the next scene, he is older and attends a tent revival. A strange, hairless, albino like man enters the tent and accuses the preacher of having sex with a goat and a young girl. The man’s accusations stir the crowd at the revival into a frenzy and they attack and kill the preacher.

Flash forward a few more years, and The Kid is an older teenager or a young adult making his way toward the Texas territory The kid first joins a group of Army men whose filibuster against Indians roving the Mexican landscape meets with doom. He and a pal then join the Glanton Gang.

The Glantons were just the sort of people the American government were trying to keep out of the Texan territory and Mexico following the war. They killed in impunity. They were hired by locals to take care of local Indian problems and they hunted Indians, killing every Apache man, woman, and child they find. The Glanton Gang actually existed and McCarthy is said to have drawn on a semi-historical account of the Glanton Gang raids.

With the Glanton Gang rides The Judge – or Judge Holden. McCarthy makes us believe that there is something extra-human or supernatural about Judge Holden. When the men are holding off attacking Apache, they run low on gunpowder. Standing at the edge of a volcano, upon the brimstone, the Judge concocts a form of gunpowder using the sulpher and other minerals there. The key ingredient is urine. When they load their rifles with Holden’s gunpowder, they never miss a single shot.

Also traveling with the Glanton Gang is an ex-priest named Tobin (he was actually just a novitiate and never an actual priest) whose company The Kid enjoys. Both are fascinated with the Judge and his peculiar habits of walking around the Mexican sun naked, his white flesh exposed to the sun and his need to catalogue and log everything they see.

As far as a story, it’s pretty thin. The gang goes one place and they kill and scalp Indians. Then they go another place and kill and scalp Indians. They arrive at a town and they get drunk and trash the place before moving on to the next town to get drunk and trash the place. Most of the events of the book could be placed in any order and the story would not have changed.

McCarthy’s story is violent beyond comprehension. Kids are raped and murdered. The blood and violence flow freely through McCarthy’s highly intricate prose that often lead you to rereading entire paragraphs to grasp the action.

Finally, the gang seizes a ferry from some white men. They operate the ferry for awhile at a great profit, but are attacked by Yuma Indians who kill most of the gang and scatter the rest. The Kid wanders the Arizona-Mexican borderlands for awhile until he encounters the Tobin and another buddy. They encounter Judge Holden, but in the Judge’s mind, their interests no longer lie together and he tries to kill them to take their guns and gold. The Judge kills Tobin, but The Kid eventually make it to San Diego where he is arrested.

The Judge arrives a few days later and visits The Kid in jail. Judge Holden tells The Kid that he has told the authorities that The Kid was responsible for leading the atrocities carried out by the Glanton Gang. The Kid eventually reveals to his jailers where they can find the wealth amassed by the gang and they set him free. He then wanders about, eventually making his way to Los Angeles to coincidently be on hand when two of his old traveling buddies are hanged for their crimes in Mexico.

We then flash forward to 1878 – almost 40 years into the future. The Kid is now a man past middle age and McCarthy now call him, “The Man.” He is working as a mercenary in the American southwest.

One evening, he enters a saloon and finds his old friend, Judge Holden. They talk about their days of hunting Indians and Judge Holden declares the Man to be a disappointment and failure for holding pity and mercy in his heart for a heathen race. The Man tells the Judge that he’s nothing. The Man then leaves the bar and goes to the privy where he is surprised to find Judge Holden in the privy, naked, waiting for him. The Judge kills the man. Holden then returns, under the Leonids Meteor Shower, to the bar to join the whores in dance.

An epilogue follows that makes no sense and seems to have no bearing on the story at all.

This was the book of the month for our book club and I was the guy who nominated it. I nominated it because Cormac McCarthy is held in such high regard by so many readers and this was supposed to be his best work. I thought The Road was better.

I have mixed emotions about Blood Meridian. I am glad I read it. It made me reach intellectually to grasp McCarthy’s arcane prose. I finally decided to quit consulting the dictionary for words I didn’t know lest I never finish the book. It is good and proper to challenge one’s intellect in such a way occasionally.

I find McCarthy's disregard for standard punctuation to be pretentious bullshit. He doesn't use quotes and he doesn't use apostrophes for contractions. I read somewhere that he thinks these little marks clutter up a page. I think the key broke off his keyboard.

But I did not enjoy the book. When I read fiction, I want a good story. I don’t enjoy character studies which is why I assiduously avoid Hemmingway. Also, when I read fiction, I don’t want to have to work to hard at it. A story that challenges the intellect is fun. A story that scares you, makes you laugh, or moves you in some way is great. This book’s story was incredibly thin. There’s not a lot of there, there.

Most of the book club agreed with this assessment. The only person entirely captivated by it was the English professor in our group who was kind enough to explain to us the allusions to Faust, The Heart of Darkness, and others. It was his third reading of the book, so he knew it well going into the reading for book club.

I saw The Judge as the Devil and McCarthy put in front of the reader all of the traditional satanic symbols for the reader. The fire and brimstone of the volcano rim, the red desert setting, a goat off in the distance. Judge Holden was Mephistopheles as far as I was concerned.

Perhaps he was supposed to be the embodiment of American attitudes toward the American Indian during the 19th century. That Americans perpetrated the greatest evils ever committed by our government and our culture upon the American Indian is not in doubt. Perhaps that was the allusion McCarthy was going for.

I know this book is held in high regard by American literati. Time ranked it 22nd on its list of 100 great novels of the 20th century. I wouldn’t call it a great novel or even a great book. I won’t read it again, but I’m glad I read it once.

Supermind by A.E. Van Vogt

2011-10-08T17:45:00.004-04:00

Supermind
By A.E. Van Vogt
Copyright 1977

This book is what is called a fix-up of three short stories written by Van Vogt in his career. The stories are redrafted, incorporating new material to link them. In the case of this muddled, confusing book, the short stories should have been left alone because, as hard as Van Vogt works to meld them into a story, the stories are too dissimilar and incongruous to make for a good short novel. The three stories in the fix-up are Asylum, first published in 1943; The Proxy Intelligence first published in 1968; and Research Alpha, first published in 1965.

The “story” centers around beings of advanced I.Q. in the galaxy and how they migrate. Spanning the story is an organization based on earth called Research Alpha which is a repository of the knowledge of the Great Galactics whose role it was to protect lesser developed solar systems from being overwhelmed by greater ones.

In the first segment of the story, two fugitive Dreeghs – energy vampires that suck blood and use energy – land on Earth. They are in dire need of blood and attack two humans right away to restore themselves. They then bury their spaceship under a New York restaurant where they dwell.

The murders shock the people on earth because murder is almost unheard of since Dr. Ungarn – currently residing on an asteroid near the Jupiter moon of Europa – devised serum to rid most of mankind of its murderous impulses. The story is investigated and reported by one of the world’s most recognized reporters – Bill Leigh. Soon after the publication of his article, he is invited by a stranger to his favorite New York restaurant to dine in a private room.

Leigh arrives and soon is joined by a young woman who hastily takes him through a secret door to a subterranean chamber where the Dreeghs are living. The young woman confronts them and warns the Dreegh that Earth is to be left alone. As a lower, fugitive race, the Dreegh will be dealt with most harshly.

Leigh is stunned and isn’t sure how to report this story and make it believable. But before he can, he is kidnapped by the Dreegh who use their mental powers to convince him to travel to the asteroid where Dr. Ungarn lives to destroy him and his daughter. The Dreegh suspect that the Ungarns are agents of the Great Galactics who will prevent them from settling and taking over Earth.

Leigh manages to hitch a ride on the freighter that routinely transports supplies to Dr. Ungard’s laboratory near Jupiter with no idea what his real intentions are, other than to find the girl who he met on Earth that he is sure is Patricia Ungard. They arrive on the asteroid and just as they are meeting with the Ungards, the two Dreegh arrive and capture them. They inform the group that more Dreegh are on the way and that this vanguard against their invasion of this solar system will be destroyed.

As the Dreegh prepare to draw the life force out of their three victims, a powerful mental force awakens in Leigh and he is able to slay the Dreegh before they can harm Patricia or her father. He is then contacted by a higher intelligence that informs him that he has never really been Bill Leigh, reporter. He learns that it is he who is one of the supreme beings of the Great Galactics. Leigh, unable to comprehend all this, jumps into a small space shuttle and flees to earth, ending the first portion of the book.

In a chapter in between, two scientists at Research Alpha discuss the events that have just unfolded and the awakening of one of the Great Galactics, thought to be gone from material existence. They see Leigh’s victory over the two Dreegh as a positive development in their quest to raise the I.Q’s of certain beings to that of the supreme beings.

The second phase of the story opens with the freighter captain, who was captured and bound by the Dreegh on the asteroid, escaping his bonds. He joins Patricia and her father who are awaiting the arrival of Patricia’s betrothed – a man she has never met before. When he arrives, it turns out he is an advance scout for the Dreegh invasion party.

The Dreegh captures the Ungards and Captain Hanardy. The Dreegh drains some life force from Hanardy and puts him into a stupor. Nine more Dreegh arrive and they appropriate Hanardy’s freighter to stage an invasion of the spaceport on Europa where they plan to tap into the blood supply of the humans there.

But like Leigh, the somnolent Hanardy finds a great intelligence inside himself – intelligence planted there by Research Alpha – and he is able to seize control of the minds of the Dreegh. After they take blood from almost 200 residents of Europa, Hanardy acts to drive them away. Using his vast mental power, he propels the Dreeghs thousands of light years away from our solar system.

In the third segment, which bears upon the previous two not at all, a Research Alpha scientist decides to test a serum he has developed to expedite the evolution of man’s mental abilities. He first injects it into a typist who works for the laboratory’s chief administrator, then into her boyfriend. He hopes to watch them evolve together and perhaps create offspring.

The young woman immediately notices she is smarter and more mentally sharp. She suspects that the strange pinch she felt on her shoulder when the doctor was standing behind her has something to do with what is happening to her. Her boyfriend, whose shot didn’t quite take, becomes lethargic and ill.

The scientist keeps his subjects under close observation and decides to inject them with a second, higher level serum. The young woman’s mental powers increase dramatically and draw the attention of the head of Research Alpha and his assistant who try to monitor the woman’s evolution to determine if she will act as an agent of good or an agent of evil.

The boyfriend also receives a second injection, but his condition deteriorates. The scientist decides he must die and tries to kill him by drowning him. But the leaders are able to save him and bring him back to the laboratory.

Meanwhile, the young typist finds her new mental abilities astounding. She is able to send her consciousness out into the universe to observe cosmic events. She can delude people into believing whatever it is she would have them believe. While she is not evil, she is undisciplined and the heads of Research Alpha – they themselves mentally superior beings – decide they must reign her in. They set a trap for her, using the boyfriend as bait, to bring her back to the lab.

She returns to the lab, knowing that the snare is set, but not caring. She has enough humanity in her to be concerned about her boyfriend. The lab director shows her her boyfriend who has physically devolved into a 22 inch tall, dwarvish creature. The lab director explains that the serum effects the genetic code of every person differently because every person has a different genetic code.

She asks her old boss what he has planned for her. He says that there is a man here on Earth that she will marry and mate with to start a race of Great Galactics on Earth. His name is William Leigh.

There ends the story.

I would like to read Asylum as a stand alone story because its elements of intergalactic vampires coming to Earth to take over has great appeal to me. The story was well written except where obviously new material was injected into it to link it and transition it to the second phase of the story.

The Proxy Intelligence might have well been a decent stand alone story. Here, it is a mishmash of the original with a great deal of obviously injected and incongruous new material that makes it disjointed and hard to follow. Van Vogt may have developed the character of Patricia in his original story as a strong willed, self sufficient woman. In Supermind, she is that at times, but at other times hopelessly weak and indecisive for no explicable reason.

Research Alpha – even in this fix up book – is a great stand alone story and reveals what a great teller of short stories A.E. Van Vogt was. The characters are interesting and complex. In most stories of this sort, we see illustrated the old maxim of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the case of the young typist, it does corrupt her to some degree because she enjoys her omniscience. However, she retains her essential humanity and makes conscious decisions not to harm anyone. While it is long for a short story, it is well paced with no wasted words or actions.

Van Vogt is one of the more prolific writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. While many names from that era like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov are recognized by most people today, Van Vogt has faded from the notice of even most science fiction fans.

Van Vogt wrote action oriented stories with thin characters. This was acceptable in the pulps of the 1940s and 1950s. More refined readers of today expect more. Bradbury, Asimov, and even the technically oriented Heinlein developed greater characters and greater settings for their tales. They also incorporated human emotion, human heroism, and human frailties into their tales. Van Vogt comes up short in this area most of the time.

I have several of these thin pulp books on my bookshelf authored by Van Vogt. While horribly dated, some are quite enjoyable. Supermind does not rank among Van Vogt’s enjoyable books. It reads like an author who has quickly and haphazardly pieced together unrelated stories to get a book to market.

Book to Radio: There Will Come Soft Rains

2011-10-03T21:25:00.008-04:00

Book to Radio: There Will Come Soft Rains
By Ray Bradbury from his book, The Martian Chronicles
Adapted to radio by George Lefferts
Dimension X broadcast, June 17, 1950

In June of 1950, radio show Dimension X featured two stories by one of the “new young writers of science fiction, Ray Bradbury.” The first of these was There Will Come Soft Rains. The other was Zero Hour from The Illustrated Man which I will review later

There is no reference in the script to Mars. This empty house is on a post-atomic Earth.

The story opens with the real estate agent pitching the house and all its features in the futuristic year of 1980. The house came equipped with self warming blankets, beds that make themselves, talking book recordings, "mouse things" that take away all the dust. Set the menu on the oven for the week and it will prepare all of your meals.

The automated house goes about its day, preparing breakfast. The writer of the script and the director demonstrate real talent in the presentation with the discordant rhymes the house chants, backed with discordant music as the house announces the time and the tasks to be performed.

Narrator Norman Rose goes on to describe the dark shadows scorched onto the walls of the house – remnants of the bodies scorched into the surface by atomic energy.

The narrator’s voice picks up speed. The house performs its tasks ever faster until evening arrives when the home finally asks which poem the residents would like to hear. Not hearing a response, it selects Sarah Teasdale’s There Will Come Soft Rains. The pace slows as Teasdale's soothing prose unfolds.

However, a tree falls outside and spills solvent onto the stove. The house catches fire. The house begs for help. It begins to maniacally carry out its tasks before the wiring burns. It eventually crashes into dust and rubble.

The story ends as Teasdale poem ends – with no one mourning the passing of mankind.

Norman Rose is a gifted radio voice talent and his narration, growing more frantic with the discordance going on behind him makes this absolutely creepy. It deviates far from Bradbury’s text, but writer, George Lefferts shows his genius in taking this chapter from Bradbury’s book and making it into something disturbing.

Book to Radio: Mars is Heaven

2011-10-02T23:12:00.008-04:00

Book to Radio: Mars is Heaven
by Ray Bradbury from his book, The Martian Chronicles
Adapted for radio by David Friedken
Escape! radio broadcast
Original Broadcast: June 2, 1950

Escape was the first radio show to adapt Ray Bradbury’s tale of the third mission to Mars to radio. To do so, they completely rewrote Bradbury’s story, changing it a great deal, but keeping the essential story intact.

The show was adapted for Escape by David Friedkin and starred Ben Wright.

The Escape broadcast opens with the news of the launch of the first manned mission to Mars (as opposed to the third). People of all faiths and creeds have come together to pray for the success of the mission and the astronauts aboard the rocket.

The characters from the crew are limited to the ship’s captain and the doctor who are the only two allowed to leave the ship. It is they who quickly discover that Mars bears a striking resemblance to their homes on earth. A resident tells them they are in Green Lake, Ohio.

The doctor finds his grandmother living in the house she lived in when he was a kid. She explains that Mars is a “second chance.” They soon hear a parade, complete with a brass band, leading the crew away from the ship. The Captain sees his old girlfriend among the crowd and decides to join her in an emotional reunion.

The Captain is sitting on the porch swing on a quiet summer evening when he starts to develop a hypothesis. He tells her, if the Martians wanted to manipulate the crew, they would use their memories and fondest desires to entrap them. The girlfriend tries to dissuade him. But when the Captain decides he’s got to talk to the doctor about his hypothesis, Phyllis turns on him and kills him.

After the astronauts have all been dispatched, the Martians hold a town meeting to analyze and discuss what has transpired.

This broadcast was the first of this Bradbury story (and perhaps the first of any Bradbury story), but it is also the weakest. The Dimension X and X Minus One broadcasts are far superior, relying on larger casts and sticking closer to the Bradbury story.

The Wounded Land by Stephen R. Donaldson

2011-10-02T17:12:00.006-04:00

The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
The Wounded Land
By Stephen R. Donaldson
Copyright 1980

Ten years have passed since Thomas Covenant defeated Lord Foul at Foul’s Creche and saved The Land. Now, he lives on his farm where he has resumed his writing career.
Linden Avery is a young physician with a tragic backstory. Her father committed suicide when she was just 10. She found him hanging from the attic rafters. Her mother lived out her years a slothful, self pitying creature who longed for death. She and Covenant will be linked in a new effort to save The Land now completely under the sway of Lord Foul.

Linden’s mentor, the chief of staff at the local hospital, beseeches her to visit Thomas Covenant and check on him. He is dealing with a problem which he refuses to divulge, but wants Linden to ascertain how he is doing. Linden reluctantly agrees.
On her way to Haven Farm, Linden notices that there are several people dressed in burlap and rags in town. They are holding signs that tell people they must repent now. As she turns into the drive leading to Covenant’s farm, she sees and old man standing alongside the drive, dressed in ochre robes. Upon Linden seeing him, he collapses to the ground.

Linden starts CPR and is able to resuscitate him. After regaining consciousness, the man whispers to her, “You will not fail, no matter how he may assail you.” He then disappears.

Startled and unnerved, she makes her way to Covenant’s house. As she stands at the door, waiting for Covenant to answer, she can hear the plaintive screams of a woman inside the house. Covenant answers the door and tells her to get lost, that he doesn’t want her help or her company. She tells him about the man in the ochre robe and Covenant is startled enough to let her into the house.

There, she finds Joan, Covenant’s ex-wife, bound to a bed, screaming and raving. Covenant is trying to care for her. Covenant releases one of her arms and she scratches him and then licks the blood from her nails. Joan apologizes, saying, “He’s in my head, Tom.”

Linden is horrified and insists that Joan be taken to a hospital. Covenant will not have it. He will take care of Joan – alone. Covenant tells Linden that Joan has recently had a breakdown. It started as a sudden devotion to religion. She took their son, left her parents’ house, and joined a commune. But she soon left, returning to the farm she once shared with Thomas Covenant and tried to claw him to pieces. Since then, Covenant has been caring for her while keeping her restrained. “He,” is using her Covenant tells Linden, to torture Covenant. Linden quickly comes to believe that Covenant himself is mentally ill.

She leaves Covenant’s house and travels down the drive toward the main road, her thoughts troubled by how the old man suddenly disappeared and by Covenant’s madness. Linden Avery, the cold and aloof physician whose life is dedicated to science and logic, must find the rational explanation to the riddle. She parks her car and heads back toward Covenant’s house on foot.

As she approaches the house, she sees that Covenant has company. An old man dressed in burlap tells Covenant that the master has demanded his soul and asks him to come. To Linden’s astonishment, Covenant goes willingly with the man.

They travel through the woods to a clearing. There, Linden sees men, women, and children, all dressed in burlap, standing around a stone alter. Staked to that alter is Joan Covenant. Thomas Covenant is brought forward and asked if he will take Joan’s place. Covenant does so willingly. He is placed on the alter.

Linden is horrified that Covenant is so willing to lay down his life. Just as the leader of the strange cult is preparing to plunge a knife into Covenant’s chest, she begins to scream. Her scream distracts the followers, but the knife continues its downward course into Covenant’s chest.

Covenant feels the knife pierce his chest. But before he can die, his once again summoned to the Land where he is greeted by Lord Foul’s voice, just as he was when he first ventured to the Land 10 years prior. Foul tells him he is now powerless and eventually, will willingly hand over the white gold wedding ring to him.

Covenant finds himself high atop Kevin’s Watch, just as before. However, Linden has made the trip with him. Her highly rational mind can’t grip what she’s seeing. Covenant tries to explain briefly where they are, but they are caught in a fierce electrical storm and cover is their first order of business.

They descend from Kevin’s Watch and are greeted by an old man who takes them to his lonely, remote stone home. He tells Covenant that, for generations, his father and his fathers before him for thousands of years have awaited the return of the White Gold Wielder. He tells Covenant he must put right what is wrong in the Land.

The old man says he must travel to Mithil Stonedown to tell the people that the White Gold Wielder has returned and sets off, leaving Covenant and Linden to wrap their minds around what has happened. Covenant immediately recognizes that he has no earth sense – no vision of what is right and what is corrupt in the Land as he did in his first journey here. Linden tries to cope with the fact that she does have earth sense. To her rational mind, it is nearly too much to bear to be able to see disease and corruption as she sees in Covenant’s leprosy.

Covenant decides to head off to Mithil Stonedown himself. As they depart, the find the old man slain by a knife in the back. Linden is nearly overcome with the horror of the corruption in the act. They continue to the stonedown. Once they arrive, they are immediately taken prisoner by the stonedowners and locked in a room without explanation.

After a few hours, they are summoned to the center of the village and surrounded by the stonedowners who simply stare silently at them. Covenant starts asking questions and making demands. All the while, they stonedowners look on without reaction.

Finally, a voice from the back demands that their blood be spilled. Another man says that he is the graveler of the stonedown and the ritual of silence is his to begin and end. When, in his stream of consciousness ramblings, Covenant mentions the name, Mhoram, the voice from the rear says that since Covenant has named the na-Mhoram as friends, he must die. He launches an attack. But the attack is quickly put down by the graveler using a glowing rock of power. The man is led away and Covenant and Linden are returned to their prison.

Linden says she saw utter corruptness in the man who tried to attack them. Covenant immediately recognizes by her description that the man was held by a Raver – one of Foul’s three disciples who can inhabit the body of the unsuspecting. He also recognizes the graveler’s stone as an orcrest –a magical stone that uses earth power.

The graveler joins them later that evening and tells them that they are to be sacrificed and their blood used to benefit the stonedown. The graveler, who introduces himself as Sunder, the son of the old man who greeted Covenant, says that the blood will be used to control the Sunbane so that the people can extract water and crops from the land which does not yield such without the spilling of blood.
Covenant explains to the young graveler that his father was right and using the man’s orcrest, is able to display the power of the white gold. Sunder is stunned. Covenant implores Sunder to help guide them to Revelstone so that Covenant may learn what went wrong and put it right.

Revelstone, Sunder tells Covenant that Revelstone is where the Clave, the controllers of the naMhoram make their home and the place from which the Sunbane emminates. Covenant insists upon going there. Convinced by Covenant’s display of power, Sunder agrees. They set off under the cover of darkness.

As they travel north along the dry bed of the Mithil River, Covenant learns how wicked the Sunbane is. Sunder must cut himself and draw blood to use his orcrest to summon water on days of desert sun. On days of the sun of pestilence, one must take cover out of the sun or stand on solid stone lest their flesh be corrupted and they converted into horrible monsters.

As they are traveling, Covenant is beset upon by a strange reptilian like humanoid that bites him and injects him with venom. Linden tries to extract the venom, but is unsuccessful. Sunder explains that the being who attacked Covenant was the man who tried to kill them back at Mithil Stonedown. As punishment, he was left to be corrupted under the sun of pestilence and became this creature.

The venom infects Covenant and he becomes ill. In his delirium, he is unable to control his wild magic. Through the use of treasure berries, Linden is able to nurse him back to health, but while the venom is dormant, it is still present.

As they come to the end of the Mithil River, Covenant shows them Andelain and tells them it is a place of beauty and wonder. Sunder is unwilling to enter Andelain, having heard tales of Andelain driving people mad. Covenant ventures forth to see if the Sunbane has infected Andelain as well as the rest of the land.

Covenant finds that the inherent beauty of the Land is still present in Andelain. He wanders about with the venom still coursing through his veins. He eventually encounters the last forrestal, his old friend Hile Troy. With Troy are all of Covenant’s dead from his previous time in the Land. Elena, Saltheart Foamfollower, Mhoram, and Bannor. Bannor implores Covenant to save his people whose plight is an abomination. They give him a gift, an ur-vile to accompany him. He is the last of his kind. The forrestal tells Covenant that his name is Vile, and his purpose is his own. However, he can be commanded just once to carry out Covenant’s wishes.

Covenant returns from Andelain to find his friends are gone. He tracks them to a nearby stonedown where he learns that they have been seized by the Clave and taken to Revelstone. He sets out to rescue his friends who have a large head start on him.
Soon, he is picked up by a rider of the Clave who bears him to Revelstone. There, the na-Mhoram profess to be the only protection between the Sunbane and total destruction of the Land. They invite Covenant to shed a little of his own blood to learn more about the Sunbane. He volunteers and is trapped. His blood flows freely into the banefire while he watches the history of the land unfold; how a raver took control of the lords and corrupted them and the land to create the Sunbane. He also learns that the blood that feeds the Banefire most potently is that of the Haruchi – the Bloodguard.

As his life force dwindles, the white gold, which he can no longer control or harness, kicks in. It wipes out the members of the Clave in the room and he is released. Delirious from blood loss, he only can think of his friends imprisoned in the dungeon. He heads there where he is able to free Linden and their friends as well as several Haruchai.

They head north from Revelstone to Glimmermere Lake which remains untouched by the Sunbane. There, Covenant recovers the Krill of Loric – a magical weapon effective against Ravers. Covenant then decides he must leave the land and search for the One Tree so that a new Staff of Law can be fashioned to help restore the Land to its former glory. Covenant, Linden, the ever silent and implacable Vile, and several Bloodguard head west toward Coerci – the home of the lost giants who died at the hands of the ravers thousands of years before.

As they near the coast, they encounter Giants who are part of an expedition seeking out a source of ill in the world Covenant convinces them that the only way to rid the world of the Sunbane is to use their ship and take him abroad so that he may find the One Tree. After much arguing and convincing, they agree.

The party heads for Coerci and the giants are horrified at the tale Covenant tells them about the giants willingly laying down their lives in shame at what had become of their three brothers. Covenant uses his white gold to bring forth the dead of Coerci and each completes the rite of Camora – a rite where giants immerse their flesh in fire to relieve guilt and anguish. The grief of the dead of Coerci is released and these new giants proclaim Covenant Giantfriend.

Covenant tells Sunder and Hollian – a stonedowner captured with Linden and the others, to take the Krill and return to the Land to fight the Sunbane. He promises to return with the Staff of Law to put things right. The book ends with Covenant and Linden setting sale with the giants, in search of the One Tree.

Donaldson gives us a whole new Land with this second trilogy. Juxtaposed against the Land as we knew it in the first trilogy, this is a vile place. Blood is shed to commit even small acts of survival. The weak are killed and bled so that their friends and neighbors can survive. Hostages are taken to Revelstone – once an icon of love of earthlore – to be bled to feed the Sunbane.

While Donaldson wrote from a few points of view in the first trilogy, it was clear that Covenant was the focal point of the story. In the second trilogy, we get a sense that Linden Avery is a greater focal point than is Covenant. She has earth sense. It is she that perceives and it is she that can reveal knowledge. Covenant, perhaps because he’s dead back in the real world – has not these abilities anymore.
Donaldson tries to make Linden an emotional cripple the equivalent of Covenant in the first trilogy and doesn’t quite get there. Yes, she is sullen, emotionally detached from other people, and excessively deliberative. But she lacks Covenant’s status as an anti-hero. There’s no reason to dislike Linden as there was with Covenant. Therefore, she is a weaker hero in this trilogy (so far) than was Covenant in the last.

There is a profound change to Thomas Covenant’s character in the second trilogy. He is much more proactive. In the first trilogy, everyone else laid out the plans and decided what was to be done. Covenant was always passive; going where he was told to go and complaining about his plight all the way.

In this book, it is he who is decisive, dictates action, and fights. Donaldson brings forward this transformation admirably. We learn how much Covenant has come to love the Land since he left it ten years before and how he has come to love those with whom he fought for its safety. The transformation of Covenant from a pitiful whiner (albeit effective anti-hero) into a decisive, heroic figure, is the most remarkable trait of the new trilogy.

Instead of transporting us back to the real world at the end of this book, we stay in the Land. This is good. While the first trilogy was superb in its execution, these seams in the story were a distraction. It is apparent that our entire story is going to take place in the Land – or at least in the world in which it exists.
The next book covers the search for the One Tree. It is aptly titled, The One Tree. In it, we will learn about other lands exist outside the Land and we will learn of the source of the Staff of Law – and Vain’s purpose.

Book to Movie: The Dark Half

2011-09-24T17:07:00.009-04:00

Book to movie: The Dark Half
Directed by George Romero
Written by George Romero
Based on the novel by Stephen King

In 1993, like most King novels, The Dark Half got the screen treatment. The writer and director was the legendary George Romero. King and Romero had collaborated before on the 1982 sleeper hit, Creepshow with success. This collaboration was not nearly as successful – or good.

The opening scenes are of Thad Beaumont’s childhood when he experiences tremendous headaches and eventually has to have surgery to remove what the doctor believes is a brain tumor. The surgical scene when the doctor finds out the true cause of Thad’s malady is horrific and terrifies. From there, the movie goes downhill.

Romero rewrites the King story, keeping its essential elements and events in place. In opening of the book, Thad Beaumont’s outing as George Stark is in the past. The photo spread for People is in the past. Romero opens with it and it takes the movie forever to get going. Perhaps had I not read the book and knew about all that Romero was showing me in the first 25 minutes, it would have meant more. But I’d wager that most people who went to see that movie read the book and didn’t need it.

From there, the movie flows much as the book with the series of killings of all those associated with the People magazine article. But it flows too quickly. King takes several pages of text to describe the murders in excruciating detail. Romero breezes through them.

Another dramatic change is in the description of George Stark. King’s stark was a large, blonde, “high toned son of a bitch.” Romero’s Stark is a caricature of Elvis talking like Johnny Cash. It came off as a foolish attempt to make Stark look like a 1950s reject from Rebel Without a Cause.

Other events and characters are tinkered with to make them more exciting on film. Thad’s associate at the college, Rawley Delesseps, is converted from a man into the caricature of the bizarre woman who has encyclopedic knowledge of the occult. Thad’s escape from his protective detail is much more exciting (if not as creative) than that in the book.

The end of the movie is blocked differently, but essentially the same as the King book. The sparrows do their number on Stark and carry off his remains. Thad and Liz live happily ever after and presumably Thad never writes another Stark book. Sheriff Pangborn is left to deal with the events in Needful Things.

Timothy Hutton works as Thad Beaumont and Amy Madigan is cast well as Liz. From there, casting goes downhill. Michael Rooker is horribly miscast as Sheriff Pangborn. I like Rooker and thought his debut movie, Henry, was excellent. But he comes off as a southern sheriff in a Maine community.

Having Hutton play both Thad and Stark is foolish. I know the underlying premise of the movie and book was the connection between twins, but King never implied or inferred that Thad’s twin was an identical one. In fact, King tells us that Stark is purely a conjuration of his own imagination – physical description, biography, and death. They should have cast a large blonde actor for this part just as King had written him..

Romero has made some incredible, legendary movies and he’s made some of the worst garbage to ever see celluloid. The Dark Half doesn’t have any of those moments that make you groan with agony they are so bad. There is no stilted dialogue, no gratuitous violence, no tacked on sex scenes, or bad cinematography. It has none of the things that make a movie painful to watch.

But it lacks some of the essential elements that make a film interesting like well developed characters, a plot that moves, a climax that excites.

It is interesting that this movie came out as it did because, as I noted in my review of the book, it was one of King’s tightest stories. He moved the plot along at a rapid pace compared to his other works. Yet Romero could not translate King’s tightest story into a movie that was interesting.

The Dark Half was not a bad movie, nor was it a good one. It was simply two hours of incredibly average characters in an incredibly average movie. My feelings would perhaps be more visceral had I actually paid to see the film. Had I, I would feel ripped off. Having watched it on DVD, I invested two hours in a boring film.

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

2011-09-17T16:15:00.008-04:00

Danse Macabre
By Stephen King
Copyright 1981

October 4, 1957 and an Invitation to Dance
What was it that turned Stephen King onto horror – real horror! It was that day, October 4, 1957 when mankind altered his view of his place in the cosmos.

According to King, he was at a movie theater, viewing the sci-fi classic Earth vs. The Flying Saucers when the picture was stopped. The theater manager appeared on stage and told the audience that it had just been reported that the Russians had successfully launched Sputnik. Now, the Russians had an object in space – the first manmade object in space. We’d never look at our world the same way again.

He goes on to contrast two sci-fi movies of the era: The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The former had helpful aliens that came to help man and prevent him from destroying itself. The other featured aliens bent on destroying mankind.

He then invites us to join him on a retrospective of horror in all its forms over the last 30 years.

The Tail of the Hook
In this rather disorganized chapter, King attempts to describe what he defines as the essence of horror and tries to differentiate between science fiction and horror.
He sees it as the Appollonian being disturbed by the Dionysian. He discusses “freaks” as in people in freak shows as horror, the common campfire story (such as the murderer on the loose at a lovers lane who has a hook on his hand), and the modern tales of horror.

He discusses E.C. Comics, the pulps of the 1940s and 1950s, the low budget movies of Roger Corman and American International Pictures, and modern horror set against the backdrop of space such as the movie Alien.

He raises an interesting point that fans’ interest in horror as a genre has ebbed and flowed over the years. It tends to flow during difficult economic times.

I understand that King is trying to lay a foundation for his analysis of horror that is to follow, but the chapter is a disorganized, stream of consciousness essay on the subject.

Tales of the Tarot
King says that before we can have any discussion of modern horror, we must go back to its roots. He defines those roots in thee novels of the 19th century: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In those three novels, we find the archtypes for horror: the creature, the undead or vampire, and the wolfman.

He first discusses Frankenstein. He tells the well known tale of Shelley and her friends stranded at a remote mansion by rainstorms. They take turns reading aloud ghost stories before all setting off to write their own tales of horror to bring back to the group.

King informs us that no novel has produced as many movies based upon it as Frankenstein. It is Boris Karloff’s character, the creature, for which the story is best known even though it is named for the creature’s creator, Baron Frankenstein.

King summarizes the novel and discusses how Hollywood, for good and bad, distorted Shelley’s story. In Shelley’s story, the creature is human enough, can reason, think, speak, and has emotions. He wants a mate. When the Baron won’t deliver, his creature seeks revenge.

As we all know, in the movies (with few exceptions), the creature is a grotesque, unthinking monster. Much less intellectually stimulating are the movies, but they make for better theater, King tells us.

King praises Shelley for her story, but pans her storytelling. Shelley is not a very good writer in King’s opinion with her monsters and their counterparts arguing as if before a Harvard debating society.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel of sexuality, King states. The bite of a vampire is the ultimate hickey. Sexuality and horror have always been melded and, as King points out, movie makers have always incorporated the two. Even in the Bela Lugosi incarnation of the movie, Lugosi plays the evil Count as suave and smooth – a real lady’s man.

Vampires and the undead form a large block of modern horror from the various interpretations of Stoker’s novel, their sequels which have little or nothing to do with Stoker’s novel, as well as the zombie which first appeared in film in the 1920s and was brought to the fore so aptly by George Romero’s Night of The Living Dead.

King admires Stoker’s novel although he points out that Stoker did not create the vampire as a creature of literature. That was done by a writer by the name of John Polidori with his short novel, Vampyre which King says is not good at all. It is believed that Polidori simply retold Lord Byron’s The Burial.

Ironically, King – the man who has written four novels longer than 1,000 pages – criticizes Dracula for being overlong.

It is here that King begins his effusive praise of H.P. Lovecraft, showing how Lovecraft drew upon Stoker’s style of writing to conjure creatures of his own mythos.

The character, the Wolfman, finds its basis in Stevenson’s novella. A good man is transformed into an evil being. Of the three novels King says form the bedrock of modern horror, it is Stevenson’s sleak story he likes best.

The transformation, willingly or unwillingly, is a fixture in modern horror. Everything from the movies based on the novel, from The Wolfman, to the Incredible Hulk all find their basis in Stevenson’s story.

King says one could include Henry James’ Turn of the Screw because some see it as the basis of the modern ghost story. He eschews it because James ultimately relies on the rational and psychology to form his story.

An Annoying Autobiographical Pause
King delves into his own past to try to determine what it was that led him to write horror. He first explores the psychology of horror writers. Those who loathe the genre often ask what makes people write that sort of thing. There must be something in their past that warped them psychologically.

King does have a bizarre incident from his past that he relates. When he was four, he left his house to play with a neighbor. A short time later, he returned home and refused to speak the rest of the day. His mother was horrified that the kid with whom he’d gone to play had been hit by a train. King heard later that they picked up pieces of him with a wicker basket. King has no recollection of the event and does not ascribe his desire to write horror to the event. He simply acknowledges to those who seek psychological reasons for the horror writer’s lust for the macabre, that the event is there.

When King was just an toddler, his father left the family, never to be heard from again. One day while exploring the family attic, King came across a stack of horror and science fiction pulp novels from the 1940s. King’s mother explained that they belonged to his father. King’s father, he learns also aspired to be a writer and submitted stories to pulp magazines, only to be met with rejection.

It was reading the stories in those pulps that started King’s lifelong love affair with the fantastic and the horrible.

Radio and the Modern Set of Reality
Like many of us who love Old Time Radio (OTR), King sees it as one of the great story telling media in history. Unlike television or movies, it requires the listener to engage his imagination in visualizing the story – the theater of the mind as E.G. Marshall called it in his opening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was completing its eight year run on radio when King wrote this book and he pans it. He says it is amusing, but a shadow of the earlier versions. His favorite shows were Suspense and Dimension X.

I fully and wholeheartedly disagree with King’s assessment of CBSRMT. That show was a staple of my childhood and many of those stories stayed with me for more than 20 years before I rediscovered it on the Internet.

He recalls his first true moment of terror as the night he sneaked down the steps of his family home and secretly listened to the radio broadcast of Dimension X episode Mars is Heaven – an adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story from The Martian Chronicles. King points out that the broadcast date of that story would have made him four years old – a bit precocious to grasp the story. I wonder if he didn’t hear the later, 1957 broadcast of the same story on the radio show X Minus One. Both shows, which adapted scripts from the best sci-fi writers of the age, were excellent.

He also discusses how movies and eventually television started out by essentially using script writing style of radio, having people describe action to the audience as it was unfolding – something necessary in radio but entirely foolish in the visual media.

The Modern American Horror Movie – Text and Subtext
King examines horror movies made from 1950 – 1980, describes their plots (the text) and the allegory they deliberately or accidentally represent (the subtext)

Some of his analysis was old when he wrote it. Who, for example hasn’t heard of or read the thinly veiled allegory of a “Red under the bed,” in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? But when he sets different movies against the time they were made, King brings forth some interesting observations.

For instance, King sees the movie, The Thing from Another World as pointing out the folly of the policy of appeasement that allowed Hitler to gain valuable time (and more Jews to die) in the run up to World War II?

It was published as a novella in 1938 by author John W. Campbell, so the timing is right. King points out that the military men on the base want to trap the thing and kill it. But there’s this mealy mouthed scientist that is sure that if we just try to reach out to it, we can learn from it. As King points out, that scientist gets his just before the military men – paragons of effectiveness and efficiency in the 1950s, dispose of the creature.

Compare that reliance on the surety of the military in the 1950s seen in such films as The Thing from Another World, Them!, and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers against how the military was portrayed in 1970s works such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the military were the bad guys who were too eager to kill the aliens without first trying to understand them. King accounts for this by pointing out two generations’ experiences with the military: World War II versus Vietnam.

King provides many more examples and I’m not going to rewrite the chapter for him. But one example really jumped out at me because it was the movie was a favorite of mine as a child, but has not withstood the test of time. King states that the movie, The Amityville Horror (and Jay Anson’s book by the same name) are an allegory for the financial insecurity the middle class felt in the 1970s.

Yes, it’s supposed to be based on a true story, but everybody knows it’s not. But the theme that runs through the novel is finance. The house is priced cheap. We learn that right away. George Lutz’s contracting business is struggling. The nephew loses $1,500 cash in the house and George writes a check to cover the balance of a catering bill for the young man’s wedding, convinced that the money is still in the house. George finds the bands that wrapped the money, but the cash is gone and the check bounces. Finally, the family walks away from the home.

Perhaps it’s a better allegory for today’s economy. How many people have homes (meaning mortgages) that are terrorizing them and eating them alive.

King provides commentary on the quality of the movies (or lack thereof) he examines, but makes no recommendations. The chapter is a semi-scholarly examination of the horror movie and how it fit within the context of the times.

The Horror Movie as Junk Food
King turns away from analysis of great cinematic horror and to what he calls the “junk food” of horror. While the term is meant to be pejorative (as it should be because so much of cinematic horror is junk), he likens this exploration of Hollywood and independent B-movies as an mining expedition – finding a small diamond amidst all the coal.

The greatest of these independent B-pictures, made with just pennies for a budget, was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Romero is a film maker with a mixed reputation for making some damned good movies and some truly tasteless, useless pictures such as Last House on the Left.

But even casual horror fans are familiar with Romero’s sensational Living Dead series. King mines deeper to find great scenes in otherwise bad films. He pans the awful Roger Corman film, Little Shop of Horrors, but is taken with the scene where Jack Nicholson delights in the pain of tooth extraction.

Nobody made as many bad horror films as Roger Corman (except maybe Bert I. Gordon), but King finds a few well written and well acted scenes in several of Corman’s abomoninations.

One of King’s favorite bad movies is the 1979 movie, Prophecy. I found this film passable, but not good. King delights in it. He likes the setting of New England and the film’s core premise. But he’s just as quick to pan its many plot and casting shortcomings.

He also delves into the irredeemable picture that is so bad you just have to laugh. Pictures such as Robot Monster and Plan Nine from Outer Space bring joy in how funny they are trying to take themselves seriously.

What is remarkable as King explores the dregs of horror films is that he does not explore deeply the works of Ed Wood and Bert I Gordon. These guys, forerunners of Roger Corman who tried so hard to turn out gritty heroes and horrifying monsters on low budgets, thought they were making serious pictures. They tried to replicate the success of Universal Studios and MGM on low budgets. I always looked on these two directors as tragic because, unlike Roger Corman who just wanted to put something out there that might be marginally entertaining, Wood and Gordon thought they were making great movies. It’s a shortcoming in King’s analysis that he did not draw more from their body of work.

The dregs of horror as we know it today – what is often referred to as “torture porn” – had not yet been invented. I’ve never watched a torture porn film, but between the gratuitous, over the top gore, there might be some good scenes.

The Glass Teet, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers
The term, Glass Teet, was coined by writer Harlan Ellison who richly despised television as a story telling medium and dedicated a volume of work panning it and those who enjoy it. As King points out, Ellison is not saying that television sucks. He’s saying people suck AT television.

Very few television shows based on horror have lasted long. Censorship (also called network standards and practices) inhibited unleashing real terror. A few gems have made it onto the small screen, although they’ve not lasted long.

King considers Thriller, hosted by horror legend Boris Karloff as they greatest of them all. It lasted but two seasons. He also holds the first of two seasons of The Outer Limits in high regard (for which Ellison penned two episodes). But he pans a couple favorites of the genre such as The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Nightstalker.

King admits that by panning The Twilight Zone, he’s spitting on an icon and acknowledges the high regard with which the series is held in the horror genre. But he says it was transparently moralistic, sappy, and didn’t really horrify. He does acknowledge that the show had great episodes and great moments, but credits the writing of men such as Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury (who wrote but one episode – an adaptation of his own story, I Sing the Body Electric), and Charles Beaumont.

He implies that Rod Serling’s best writing was done for other shows and for a few great movies such as the script for Planet of the Apes. He even uses Serling’s own words to back this up where Serling, in his final interview, admits that he thought that only about one third of the Twilight Zone episodes were great, one third average, and one third poor. I think King and Serling are both giving Serling short shrift. There were certainly some poor episodes of the Twilight Zone. But the show was also presented some of the most memorable moments in television history. It would seem my favorite writer and I have divergent tastes in what makes good television.

As for Kolchak, King states that the two movies based on a poor novel were fantastic. The great Richard Matheson scripted both movies and made them into primetime movie of the week hits. The series, King says, replicates the slow decline of the Universal Studios horror genre from horror into comedy. Kolchak, King says, was too much camp, not enough horror. I agree. The show has a faulty premise. Horror demands that the reader or viewer suspend disbelief. But the story must be plausible and for this newspaper writer, week after week , to stumble into the realm of the supernatural only to have his editor kill the fantastic story, is just too much.

Kolchak is not without its charm and I do enjoy watching several of the episodes. Darrin McGavin makes Kolchak a likeable and sympathetic character. Some of the stories are actually intriguing if not horrifying. But as King points out, when it seemed that the horror was falling short, the writers went for camp and the show just fizzled. Nonetheless, I remain a fan and enjoy watching an episode of this 1970s relic from time to time.

Horror Fiction
King dedicates about one third of his book to naming and analyzing what he thinks are the great books written between 1950 and 1980. Some of them I’ve read, some I’ve not.

The first book he lists as great is Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. I must admit, I’ve never read this, but have heard from others that it is an excellent book. I’ve seen the movie and it was enjoyable enough. But, as one can tell from my blog, I spend a great deal of time comparing books and the movies based on them and know too well a so so movie can be made from a great book.

I’ve read only two Straub novels: Shadowland, which was ok, and Koko which I thought was dreadful.

King claims that it was Ghost Story that created the American gothic tale as the old men of the Chowder Society did battle with the ghost that inhabited their town as well as the guilt from a horrible past wrong they committed in their youth.

He also dedicates a great deal of words in a divergent summary and analysis of Straub’s first published book, Julia.

For the great haunted house books of that era, King nominates Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Anne Rivers Siddon’s The House Next Door. To King, these are the archetypes of what he calls, “The Bad Place” of horror. A less modest man (and King is not a particularly modest man) would have included King’s The Shining. But maybe Mr. King was more modest in the late 1970s.

Jackson’s novel about psychic experiments inside the dark and foreboding Hill House still stands at the pinnacle of the sub-genre of haunted house books. Written in the 1950s, Hollywood is still cranking out movies based on it (although none as good as the 1963 version called The Haunting). King himself took a crack at retelling Jackson’s story in an uneven – and sometimes dreadfully bad -- three part miniseries entitled Rose Red.

Siddon’s book, King says, transplants the haunted castle of European literature to American suburbia. I’ve never read Siddons’ book and to my knowledge, there was never a movie made about it. The story is told by observers watching as several successive residents who inhabit the home next door to them go insane.

As King describes it, The House Next Door is the stuff of Hammer Horror set in suburban Atlanta. His advocacy for the book has encouraged me to seek it out and take it in at some later date.

To his list of great horror novels of 1950-1980, he adds Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. He credits it, along with The Exorcist, for bringing horror novels back into vogue in the 1970s. I don’t know if I would rank Rosemary’s Baby in my top 10 novels of all time, but it would rank high. Before I discovered Stephen King, I discovered Ira Levin. As a pre-adolescent, I took in Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and the Boys from Brazil, all of which I found on my mother’s bookshelf. They, along with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings, were my introduction to adult horror literature.

King sees Rosemary’s Baby as a novel that was simply a product of the times. It was penned during that era when Time magazine displayed its controversial cover bearing the headline, “Is God dead?” With God dead or dying, (he wasn’t, but leave it to the media moguls of New York to try to slay him), the birth of Satan’s child in New York to a middle class couple fit right in with the times.

Rosemary’s Baby is also a rare instance where the movie is a straight retelling of the novel. Roman Polanski, who had his run-in with pure evil when his lovely wife was murdered by Charles Manson, and committed great evil when he raped a 13 year old girl, made a masterful movie and Mia Farrow who would go on to encounter evil when she married a pedophile, was exceptional in her portrayal of Rosemary Woodhouse.

King provides some great insight into Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers which is next on his list. According to King, Finney says he had no political ideology, no allegory, no metaphor in mind when he wrote The Body Snatchers. Like most great story tellers, he simply wanted to write a good story.

This is another book I read as a child and have not picked up since. My recollection of it is hazy, but I’ve watched both movies based on it recently. The 1956 Kevin McCarthy version is close to a straight retelling as I recall. King says the story works so well because of its setting in a small town, where everybody knows everybody else. Small towns tend to be insular. Everybody knows everybody’s business, but they don’t share it with outsiders. What better place for aliens to stake their claim in our world?

Next on King’s list is Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. While he includes it on the list of great novels, he’s critical of Bradbury’s writing style, saying parts of it are over written. This comes from a man who practically invented over writing.

I think King misses what Bradbury was going for in his tale of a haunted carnival coming to the now mythical Green Town, Illinois. It is an adult novel told in a child’s voice from a child’s point of view. What do children do once they start to put together sentences? They talk too much. Is there too much narrative in Something Wicked. . .? Perhaps, but Bradbury does make us feel like it is a child telling us the story and there is something special in that.

Where King criticizes Bradbury on one hand, he offers high praise on the other. He says many writers are defined as horror writers, science fiction, writers, adventure writers, fantasy writers. To King, Bradbury is simply Bradbury – all things to all readers. High praise indeed – and true!

At the time of King’s writing, Disney had not yet made its entertaining, but not overly great movie based on the second of Bradbury’s Green Town trilogy.

Next on King’s list of the pantheon of horror fiction is Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. Why he chose this instead of Matheson’s I am Legend is beyond me. I have read both and while I think The Shrinking Man is a good book, I think I am Legend is a GREAT book that has inspired three direct movie retellings and redefined the whole genre of zombie stories.

King does not say it in this book, but has said in other writings that it was Matheson more than anyone else who inspired him to write horror fiction. He calls The Shrinking Man, “. . .another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality.”

As King points out, Matheson, like Bradbury, eschews hard science fiction in favor of telling a good story. If you want to know how things work, King tells us, read Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven. If you want to read a good story, take in Matheson or Bradbury.

Matheson’s shrinking man is affected by radiation, just like the big bugs of the 1950s movies. Matheson has given us our foundation in rationalism to tell a great adventure tale of a small man conquering large obstacles inside his own home – doing battle with his cat and later, in the cellar, with a black widow spider.

In its time, King postulates, it tells of man’s shrinking importance in a society becoming increasingly dominated by machines.

King adds Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother to the list. I’ve reviewed on collection of Ramsey Campbell stories and, looking back on it I was too harsh on Campbell for those stories, more than a year later, still resonate with me. I’ve never read a Campell novel.

Campbell’s novel is about a supernatural cannibal who eats a man’s arm shortly after it is amputated. King says that Campbell provides a new take on the horror archetype Dracula as the three main characters hunt down the creature.

The most obscure entry into King’s list of legendary books is James Herbert’s The Fog which King points out bears no connection to the John Carpenter film of the same name. In Herbert’s novel, a strange fog is released from a canister lost by the government. That fog invades an small English town and causes the people to commit maniacal murder upon each other.

What sets Herbert’s writing apart, King tells us, is how “he seizes our lapels and begins to scream in our faces!” in his story.

King brings his list of 10 important novels to a close by including Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, Strange Wine. It is clear that King is an astute admirer of Ellison’s. Those in the writing trade either hate or love Ellison just as Ellison either hates or loves them. A caustic personality is Harlan Ellison.

King goes on for several pages and more than a thousand words about Ellison and his short stories before telling us that Strange Wine is a great collection of fables packaged as fantasy and science fiction.

King wraps up by informing us that horror literature is a booming industry filled with garbage to be avoided. As garbage, he points out two writers whose works I have enjoyed: John Saul and Frank DeFelitta. While neither Saul nor DeFelitta (who wrote Audrey Rose) never wrote anything with the epic feel of The Stand or the sheer terror of The Shining, they never wrote anything so bad as Gerald’s Game.

The Last Waltz – Horror and Morality, Horror and Magic
King wraps up his tome of terror by informing us that horror is, at its essence, always a morality tale. For horror to work, evil must be contrasted with good. Bad events hurt. Good events bring happiness. Bad people are to be punished. The good are to be rewarded or at least made into heroes if they meet their end.

King’s book is badly dated with age, but still full of wonderful information for lovers of classic horror and science fiction such as myself. It would be a treat to see him update it, but King only writes non-fiction books every other decade.

Endurance: Shakelton’s Incredible Voyage

2011-09-10T16:28:00.005-04:00

Endurance: Shakleton's Incredible Voyage
By Alfred Lansing
Copyright 1958

One of the great benefits of being a member of a book club is reading books you would otherwise never consider reading. I am not a fan of seafaring adventure. I’ve never read a book regarding seafaring other than books about the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald and have no real interest in maritime subjects. I was not thrilled when this was the book of the month for our group, but decided to read it anyway since another member was willing to lend it to me and I didn’t have to shell out for it. I am truly grateful that it was lent to me because I thoroughly enjoyed this incredible tale of perseverance and survival.

Lansing tells the tale of the ill fated Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition led by Ernest Shakleton. Shakleton, a man of large, but subdued ego, had been bested in the attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. He decided he would place himself at the fore of great adventurers to be the first to traverse the continent on foot.

Shakleton selected his crew rather capriciously with some interviews lasting no longer than five minutes. Yet, when it was crunch time and each man had to reach down deep inside to survive and each man had to put aside his own discomfort, Shaklteton’s crew performed with stoicism unrivaled by any account I’ve ever encountered.

Shakleton and his crew set out for Antarctica in a wooden barquentine ship called Endurance. They sailed into the Weddell Sea, hoping to make landfall on the Antarctic continent and start their journey across. Before they could make landfall, the ship became hopelessly locked in an ice floe.

Lansing drew heavily on the journals kept by the crew of the Endurance, so one can believe that what is in Lansing’s book is the authentic feeling of those who survived rather than an author retelling a tale to make it more heroic. The Endurance was locked in this ice for ten months. During this ten months, the crew actually seemed to enjoy themselves. They had scant few books or other sources of entertainment to serve as a diversion. They had only their duties and time to kill, yet they looked upon it (at this point) as a positive experience.

The Endurance, however, could not endure the extremes of the Antarctic. For ten months, she drifted north with the pressure of the floe building on her hull. Finally, she began to groan and creek and was eventually crushed. The crew salvaged what they could from her including stoves, food, and three boats, and set up camp on the floe as their ship was reduced to kindling and eventually sank.

On this ice floe, the crew remained for a year. They survived on the scant rations they scavenged from the Endurance, seal meat, and penguins. When meat was scarce, they dined on their pack dogs. The floe took them slowly northward. All through this, Shakleton kept his crew functioning as a team.

Lansing does not portray each of these men as saints. Shakleton had some troublemakers among his crew. How he managed the troublemakers made the difference. Rather than shunning them or keeping them at a distance, Shakleton would embrace the most problematic of his crew. By keeping them close to him, he could keep them away from men of less resolve who would be distracted by their antics.

As they drifted north over the year, the floe upon which they camped got smaller and began to develop serious cracks. Eventually, Shakleton put his men into three small boats and set out for Elephant Island which was just a couple hundred miles away.

Keep in mind, this was before the time of GPS, radar, or any electronic guidance. They navigated by stars, moon, and sun. Elephant Island, despite its name, was not a large body, yet this crew braved frigid cold and harsh seas to get there. The navigation skills exhibited by his navigator, Frank Worsley astound the mind.

Their arrival on Elephant Island was the first time the crew had stood on terra firma in 500 days, but it was not a happy time for them. Their shelters, constructed of stones chinked with snow and topped with a lifeboat and tarp were cramped and inhospitable. The seal oil they burned for heat and cooking covered them in soot and they had not bathed or shaved for more than a year. Their small beach on Elephant Island afforded them little lee from the vicious blizzards that assailed them. Staying on Elephant Island, awaiting rescue, was not an option.

Finally, Shakleton resolves to cross 650 miles of open sea in a sixteen foot open boat to Georgia Island where there was a whaling colony. He selects his crew and sets off, promising his men he will return with rescue.

The final third of Lansing’s book is incredibly enthralling as he documents the discomforts and pains suffered by the crew sailing the Antarctic seas in an open boat and by those left behind on Elephant Island with nothing but time and penguins to kill.

Aboard the boat, men tried to sleep atop the bags of ballast stones in deerskin sleeping bags that were decomposing. As the bags rotted, the hair that lined them got into their mouths, their food, and their water. Provisioned for only four weeks, they could not afford to throw away any food or water, spoiled or not. They endured storms. They dared harsh winds to break away ice from their mast that would have capsized the boat had it been allowed to remain. Their navigator, Frank Worsley, seldom slept over that month as he made constant adjustments in their course to get them to Georgia Island.

Meanwhile, back at camp on Elephant Island, the men were miserable. The stove heated their makeshift cabin, but often filled it with smoke. Some men snored loudly, making it impossible for others to sleep. The floor often flooded. Food was meal after meal of penguin or seal. Entertainment was nil. A few men kept journals which served as the only diversion. One man suffered a heart attack and managed to survive. One man had all the toes on one foot amputated because of gangrene brought on by frostbite. As the months passed, each privately began to give up hope although none would give voice to the thought. They agreed to give Shakleton until the middle of August to rescue them.

Shakleton and his men make it to Georgia Island, but they’re on the wrong side. Their boat is destroyed and a mountain range and glaciers stand between his crew and the whaling camp. No man had ever traversed that obstacle, but Shakleton knew it was his only option. He and two other men set off, leaving the other two behind to await rescue. They scaled the mountain.

Three times they went up, only to be met with ridges and cliffs that could not be descended. Having endured so much over so much time, Shakleton would not be thwarted. Finally, in an act of desperation, he and his men careen down a glacier, sliding on their asses at high speed. A collision with a rock would have killed them. Just a small ridge of rock sticking up out of the ice would have literally ripped them a new one. Somehow, they made it to the bottom and found the camp.

The men at the camp could scarcely believe Shakleton’s tale. He and his crew were presumed lost. When they heard his tale of riding an ice floe, then crossing to Elephant Island in the three small boats, they were amazed. When they heard how he and his crew of four crossed 650 miles of frigid sea in an open boat, they were in awe.

Boats were dispatched to the other side of the island to pick up the two men left behind. They were allowed to shave, bathe, and acquire new clothing. But Shakleton wasted little time in going back after his men on Elephant Island. But his frustration was not yet ended.

Three times, Shakleton led voyages toward Elephant Island only to be stopped by weather or ice. On the island, one by one, the men lost hope and began living to die. Finally, on August 30, Shakelton made it. He evacuated his men back to Georgia Island. There, Lansing’s tale ends.

The book was exceptionally well received by my book club. There were a couple (one an English professor and poet) who found the writing dry, bereft of metaphor and simile in saying, “it was cold.” They compared it to journalistic writing. However, they agreed the tale was compelling enough to keep them engaged.

Indeed, this was a story that even the worst professional writer would have to work hard at telling badly.

After reading it, it is still hard for me to conceive that it was true. For me, with the ever short attention span and constant need for mental diversion, the time killing aspect was compelling. I simply can’t conceive of spending that much time without a book, without a movie, without something to occupy my thoughts.

Lansing is guilty of saying again and again, “it was cold.” Yet many in our group remarked that they felt cold while reading it, even though it was the August monthly selection. As a person who can bask in 90 plus degree weather and finds 40 degrees to be cold, the phrase, “it was cold,” repeated over and over again was almost entrancing. I was cold when I read this book.

I probably will not willingly revisit the maritime story willingly. As I stated, it’s not what I enjoy because I have little experience with it in real life. But this one time visit to the genre I liken to visiting an amusement park while on vacation. I had a splendid time while I was there, but probably won’t go back.

The Dark Half by Stephen King

2011-09-04T19:00:00.009-04:00

The Dark Half
by Stephen King
Copyright 1989

When we last visited Castle Rock, we visited Castle Rock of the past. It was 1960 and Gordie LaChance and his friends traveled across the Maine countryside to see a dead body.

Our next visit opens around that same time. Thad Beaumont is 11 years old and has one a writing contest with a short story. Young Thad enjoys writing stories and longs to write more. But before he can get his budding literary career going, he is afflicted with killer migraine headaches.

He has the classic symptoms of a brain tumor. He has seizures and an x-ray reveals a mass on Thad’s frontal lobe. An operation will be necessary to remove the mass and determine if it is malignant or benign.

When the doctors open Thad’s skull, they receive the shock of their lives. Instead of a mass of cancer, they see a clouded eye. Once the shock wears off, the doctor explains that what they are seeing is the remainder of Thad Beaumont’s twin which he absorbed in the uterus. The doctors remove the eye as well as a couple teeth and a fingernail that continued to grow long after the fetus that was Thad’s twin was absorbed.

We then flash forward to the year 1988. Thad and his wife are looking at a People magazine article written about themselves – or more specifically about Thad and his other half. The picture with the article features Thad and his wife, Liz, standing before a tombstone that bears the name, George Stark. Below his name is engraved, “Not a Very Nice Guy.”

Stark was Beaumont’s pen name. Under his own name, he wrote one novel that won an American Book Award and two more that did not fare so well. Depressed over the failure of his books, Thad adopted a pen name and began writing violent, gangster novels featuring a hero named Alexis Machine. Those novels did quite well and earned Thad a great deal of money.

But a law student stumbles onto Thad’s secret. He tries to blackmail Thad, but Thad thwarts the greedy blackmailer by outing himself. He no longer wants to write Alexis Machine novels anyway and he resents the intrusion. So, the publisher stages the publicity photo and article to kill George Stark once and for all.

A few days after the photo session in the cemetery, Castle Rock’s grave digger finds a giant hole in the ground where there ought to be no grave. He also notices claw marks in the hole as if someone were pulling themselves up and out and footprints leading away from the grave.

That evening, a man is murdered in Castle Rock and his truck stoeln

The next day, Castle Rock County sheriff Alan Pangborn (having taken over as sheriff after the death of George Bannerman in 1983 when Cujo did a number on him) show up at Thad’s doorstep prepared to arrest him. Pangborn and the state troopers with him tell him there has been a murder in Castle Rock and the murdered man was beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. The man’s vehicle has also been located and Thad’s prints are all over the murder scene.

Thad has an iron clad alibi. He held a party that evening for members of the faculty at the college where he teaches English. He was in their company into the wee hours. Sheriff Pangborn has quite the conundrum. He has irrefutable evidence that Thad literally wallowed in a murder victim’s blood, yet Thad could not have possibly been there.

The next day, in New York, the young law student is sliced and diced with a straight razor. Then Thad’s agent is killed. The killer makes her call Thad and he listens with abject horror as the murder cuts her throat with a straight razor. Thad calls Sheriff Pangborn and tells him what has just occurred. Police protection is provided for everybody else in the city who was associated with the People magazine article. But against a man as strong and as wily as George Stark, police protection is no good.

He goes on a murderous rampage that night until everybody he can find associated with the People magazine photo shoot and article are dead.
Written on the wall, in blood, at each murder scene is the phrase, “The sparrows are flying again.”

The authorities are perplexed since Thad was obviously at home when the murders occurred in New York. Thad and his family are provided police protection. A wiretap is installed on their home phone. They wait for another call.

They don’t have to wait long. A man calls claiming that he once believed he was George Stark and tells Thad that he spent time in a mental hospital. Now that he’s killed these people, he’s got things straight. He knows he’s not Stark. Thad knows it is really Stark and that Stark is trying to fool those who are listening into believing a rational explanation.

Shortly after Stark’s call, Thad retreats to his study and falls into a trance. He awakens to find that he’s written several cryptic words and phrases in pencil, one of which is “The sparrows are flying again.” Thad is sure he knows what has happened and knows he’s responsible.

Sheriff Pangborn stops by the Beaumont residence one evening and Thad and Liz lay out a theory that they can hardly believe themselves. They tell Pangborn that the killer is none other than George Stark who has somehow come to life to seek revenge for having been killed off. Pangborn is incredulous and dismisses the theory. But he can’t dismiss the fact that science and reality are conflicting with each other in the case.

Meanwhile, Stark is cooling his heels in Greenwich Village. He’s purchased some Berol Black Beauty pencils and pads (Thad always wrote Stark’s novels with Berol Black Beauty pencils) but finds he can’t write. He needs Thad to help him with that. He decides it’s time to head for Maine and find his other half so they can start the new Alexis Machine novel. It is Stark’s hope that, as the process gets rolling, the writer will be the one to die and the nom de plume will be the survivor.

Thad tells Pangborn about the surgery he had as a child. Thad doesn’t know all the gory details, but knows enough to perk Pangborn’s interest because the sheriff is grasping at anything now that will help him solve the murder committed in his jurisdiction.

Pangborn tracks down the surgeon who performed Thad’s operation. The surgeon tells the sheriff what they found that day and about a strange event that occurred at the hospital that evening. As young Thad convalesced after his surgery, the hospital was besieged by sparrows. Thousands of sparrows descended upon the hospital, slamming themselves against the glass windows and the wall of the hospital

Thad decides to seek out information on what the sparrows have to do with the entire episode. He consults his friend and fellow professor Ronnie Delesseps (a name that hard core King fans will remember) who teaches a class on American folklore. After some research, Delesseps tells Thad that sparrows are psychopomps. Psychopomps are creatures that guide spirits to and from the material world to the spiritual plane. He warns Thad that they are not to be messed with.

A short time later, as Thad and his police escort are gathering some files in Thad’s office, Delesseps tells Thad he has a call in his office. Thad answers the phone and it is Stark. Stark is calling from his home. He is holding Liz and their twins hostage. Stark tells Thad that he must lose his police protection and head for home if he wants to see his family again.

Thad slips his protective detail with Ronnie Delesseps’ help and heads for his Castle Rock summer home where he is to meet Stark and his family. As he heads there, he notices that there are sparrows everywhere.

Meanwhile, Pangborn gets a call from a Castle Rock local who says someone has just driven a car out of his barn out in the country. He says it is an old Toranado with Mississippi plates and bearing a bumper sticker that reads, “High toned son of a bitch.” This matches the description of the car Thad conjured up in his own imagination when creating George Stark. Pangborn heads for the Beaumont’s summer home as well.

Pangborn drives to the Beaumont summer home and notices that the woods and the road are covered by sparrows. He tries to sneak up on the home, but Stark catches him and takes him back and adds him to his cache of hostages.

As Thad makes his way toward his summer place, he can barely pass because of the sparrows that are in the road and flying around. He eventually makes it and is relieved to find his family unharmed. Stark, however, is looking pretty bad. He is literally decomposing before his eyes. It’s time to write, Stark tells Thad. Thad can feel himself warming to the task.

They go to Thad’s study and Thad writes the opening paragraphs to the new Alexis Machine novel. He presents them to Stark who approves of them with delight. Thad notices that, after the writing, Stark’s appearance has improved. Thad invites Stark to crank out a few paragraphs. Stark takes the pencil and finds that, in the presence of his other half, the words flow and he writes fantastic prose.

Meanwhile the sparrows are swarming outside the residence. Thad knows that Stark does not know about or even notice the sparrows. When Stark is deep in his writer’s trance, Thad produces a bird call and sounds it. The sparrows attack. They crash through the windows and collapse the wall in Thad’s study. They begin to devour Stark. He fights with his straight razor, but to no avail. There are simply too many birds. The sparrows eventually take off, carrying the remains of George Stark off to another plane of existence.

The epilogue opens with a chapter from the new Thad Beaumont novel, The Sudden Dancers. The narrative then cuts away to the aftermath of the bird attack. Pangborn knows the truth and knows the truth will not suffice to explain the murders of so many people. Therefore, he and Thad decide to burn the place to the ground with all of the sparrows and all of the evidence. There, the story ends.

Stephen King, he of the long and sometimes laborious back story, he of the dozens of intricate subplots and minor characters, tells one of his most linear and straight forward stories in The Dark Half. Other than Carrie, which was written by a much less mature King, no other King book is easier to read.

The book was inspired by the death of King’s own pen name, Richard Bachman. The circumstances that killed George Stark are almost exactly like those that killed Bachman. Like the fictional Thad Beaumont, King decided to out himself and Bachman on his own terms rather than let a meddlesome third party do it.

King has made it clear in various essays that he was not pleased about the outing of Bachman and that he had plans for the nom de plume, including publishing Misery under his name. One can’t help but think the inspired writing of the killing of the various parties involved in the outing of George Stark was inspired by this real life anger.

But the book is more than just King telling a tale based on his own bitter experience of being outed. It is about the dual nature of the writer. When a writer is writing, he’s not himself. He’s not necessarily another person, but he is not the person that others see, interact with, or even know. The writer is living entirely within his own head. The writer is God in the world he inhabits inside his head and behaves as such.

The writer finds sympathy with the most evil people and beings. He commits acts in his books that he would not otherwise commit. He unleashes terrible events and harms the innocent. The writer (or the muse if you are so inclined to believe) is much different than the person.

People assume that writers of horror are twisted, mentally ill people. By all accounts, King is your average Joe. He owns a home (actually, several of them). He loves his wife and kids. He hates signing autographs, he loves rock and roll music and the Boston Red Sox and is a politically active Democrat. If one can ignore the fact that he is one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century and is making his mark in the 21st, King is as average as they come.

It is in The Dark Half that King sets the stage for the climactic ending of his series of novels set in Castle Rock. He has introduced and developed Sheriff Pangborn. He’s given us nodding acquaintances with Pangborn’s deputies. We’ve learned the names of a few of Castle Rock’s more important citizens and businesses such as You Sew and Sew and the Mellow Tiger. King will give us one more flyover of his fictional city in the novella, The Sun Dog published in the collection, Four Past Midnight before bringing the action to a head in Needful Things.

A note on Ronnie Delesseps. This was the original name in the story, The Crate, that was included in the movie anthology Creepshow. Delesseps was the college professor beleaguered by the crass, noisome wife. The name was changed to something more pronounceable in the movie.

The Dark Half does not rank among King’s best works, but stands as a good one and a worthwhile read. It’s not a bad first book for someone who’s never read King before. While Stephen King fans embrace King’s lengthy character development and subplots, they can distract the casual reader. No requisite knowledge of the lore of Castle Rock is necessary to enjoy The Dark Half. It is a story that is fast paced, has a plausible premise, and a great climax.