End of Watch By Stephen King

End of Watch
Bill Hodges Trilogy Vol. 3
By Stephen King
Copyright 2016

Brady Hartsfield is locked in Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic. He is a vegetable. He can speak only a few words. Has just a little bit of motor control. Can barely communicate with those around him. As long as he remains in that state, he will not stand trial for attempting to blow up a rock concert.

He has found a friend in an obsolete hand-held video game system known as a Zappit. He stares at the game – particularly a fishing game – for many hours at a time. It keeps him occupied while he isn’t using newly developed telekinesis abilities to move objects around the room.

A doctor has taken a strong interest in Brady’s case. He is giving Brady experimental drugs, hoping to restore Brady’s senses. But Brady turns the tables and uses new found abilities given to him by the doctor to make the doctor part of his army of revenge.

Bill Hodges and his partner, Holly are quite successful in operating their detective agency, Finders Keepers. However, Bill has been sick lately and losing weight. Pain in his side has sent him to a doctor and he fears the diagnosis and prognosis are not going to be good.

They are invited to the scene of a murder suicide involving a mother and daughter. The daughter, completely paralyzed, had been one of Brady Hartsfield’s victims in the attack with the Mercedes Benz. While at the scene, he locates one of the Zappit game systems along with the letter Z drawn on an electrical outlet. They learn that the mother used the Zappit game quite frequently.

Later, while Bill is at the hospital checking up on his old pal, Brady, Jerome’s younger sister is narrowly missed by a delivery truck she tried to step out in front of. Bill is there to talk to her and she tells how she got the Zappit from someone handing them out for free in exchange for completing a survey.

Soon, with Holly’s help, Bill uncovers a scheme that had all of the Zappit game systems shipped to his town after the company went bankrupt. Through Holly’s tracking, they are able to track a mysterious Mr. Z and Dr. Z to one of Brady’s old colleagues from the electronic store. From her, they learn that all the Zappits – many of which were put specifically into the hands of those who attended the concert several years before that Brady intended to blow up – are programed to hypnotize their possessors and drive them to a website to convince them to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, Brady has taken up permanent residence in the head of his doctor – Dr. Z – and has driven off into the country to watch the results of his plan. Using their resources, Bill and Holly are able to track him down to a remote, wooded location. There, they confront Brady and put an end to the insanity.

Bill admits himself to the hospital to get treatment for his cancer. But it is too late and the cancer too far advanced. Bill dies, leaving the business to his friend, Holly.

End of Watch was a fitting end to the Bill Hodges trilogy. The first book was a lot about plain old detective work and not really my cup of tea. The second had many twists and turns and subplots that kept the plot moving and would have worked as a fine stand-alone novel. However, the third is an excellent race against time against a cunning evil.

This book – and all the Bill Hodges books – are shorter than the average King book. Therefore, minor character development – for which King is so famous for – suffers some. However, where there might have been backstory, there was action. The book was seldom ponderous nor were the characters other than Bill that introspective.

The other two other main characters, Holly Gibney and Brady Hartsfield, received substantial development in the first book which may have rendered Mr. Mercedes somewhat less action driven than the other two. They didn’t develop much beyond that, but they didn’t need to. The evil Brady Hartsfield was already evil and cunning enough to set up his diabolical plan. The neurotic Holly never got better – which made her believable – but never backslid into deep neurosis when the pressure was on.

This book involved more technical research than most King books and it is apparent that King’s researchers provided him with adequate material to build a techno-thriller that worked on a technological level. King, who admits he hates research, certainly put forth the effort to learn this material so it might not be picked apart by techno-geeks.

Stephen King rolled a lot of ideas into this short novel. The concept of pure evil. The supernatural element of mind and body control. A high-tech conspiracy. The constant pain of his hero which, since his accident, has been a staple of King’s writing. The end came in an old fashioned chase through a snow storm. Congratulations on weaving so much into such an easily digestible book.

End of Watch does not work as a stand-alone novel, unlike Finders Keepers. To understand it, one must read the two earlier books. End of Watch is a fine climax to a fine trilogy and will stand as one of the better books in the King canon.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
By Stephen King
Copyright 2015

Introduction
In between eerie opening and closing statements, Stephen King explains why he still writes short fiction. He says he has to because writing is what he does. He also enjoys and struggles with the challenge of crafting short fiction. In italics, at the end, he compares himself to a hawker at a midnight bazaar, selling his wares – his stories.

Mile 81
A muddy, unidentifiable station wagon coasts into an abandoned rest area on a Maine Interstate 95. The driver’s door opens and the car awaits its victims. One by one, it kills good Samaritans until one little boy takes matters – and magnifying glass – into his own hands.

One haunted car story should be enough for one author. Two haunted car stories are probably too many for any one author. When he gets to the third one, the trope is as dull as this story. It is not very good despite the creepiness of King’s introduction that explains the inspiration for the story.

Premium Harmony
A middle aged couple bicker on their way to Walmart. He complains about her eating and she about his smoking. She insists on stopping at a different store to buy a simple rubber ball as a gift for her nephew. She goes in alone. When he finds out she dropped dead, he just haves to laugh.

I was thinking about the dog all the way through the story and was wondering if Mr. King had forgotten. Alas, it sort of became the dark punchline for the joke. King tells us in the introduction that this story is dark humor inspired by the writing of Raymond Carver. I didn’t think it was funny or particularly interesting.

Batman and Robin have an Altercation
A man takes his father, afflicted with Alzheimers – to lunch at Applebees and a regular basis and treats him with all the dignity he can muster. One afternoon, the father recalls how he and his son went out on Halloween as Batman and Robin. On their way home from lunch, there is a car accident and an altercation. The man’s father surprises him.

This is Stephen King trying to be literary again. The story is dedicated to John Irving and I suspect King was trying to channel a little Irving in the writing. Not to my taste, but there was nothing objectionable about the story.

The Dune
A retired judge takes a canoe every day to a small island just a short distance off shore of his Florida home. Near that island is a dune where, since he was a child, that judge has been able to gain special insight into upcoming events. As he nears the end of his life, he describes the role of the dune in his life to his probate attorney.

This is reputed to be one of the better stories in the book. I thought it was acceptable, but unremarkable. There was no profound reveal, no epiphany, no shock, no twist. Nor was it particularly atmospheric or emotional.

Bad Little Kid
An attorney meets his client in a local prison. The client’s execution for shooting in cold blood a small boy. The former accountant tells his lawyer how he came to meet this “kid” in his salad days and his encounters with him over the years that led to the shooting.

So far, Bad Little Kid is the best story in the book. King always writes this first person narrative well. In short story form, it was The Man Who Could Not Shake Hands in Night Shift. In novel form, it was Dolores Claiborne. This is King doing what he does best.

A Death
A local man is tried and convicted of killing a little girl and stealing her silver dollar in an Old Western town. He is sentenced to die, all while protesting his innocence. He goes to the gallows and hangs. After his death, the solution to the mystery is revealed.

King refers to his prose in this story as “dry and laconic.” He also says he thinks of Elmore Leonard when he reads this story. He is right that the verbiage in this story is dry and sparse, but it works and it was a good story – even with the less than original solution.

The Bone Church
This is a narrative poem about a tragic voyage through a jungle that claims many lives of the expedition team through various horrific means. After all but two men have died, they arrive at a strange church and watch the parade of their dead go marching by.

I don’t know how to evaluate poetry. I don’t know good poetry from bad poetry. This was dark – as dark as any of King’s horror tales. But, like most narrative poetry, I found it hard to follow the story.

Morality
A thirty-something couple is living in Brooklyn while he works as a substitute teacher and she a nurse for a retired minister who has experienced a stroke. One day, the minister presents her with a proposition that will allow her to make $200,000 and get the bill collectors off their back. The minister wants a dalliance with sin and wants to experience it through her. She complies with ugly consequences.

It’s really a riff on Indecent Proposal. However, it is a really good riff although it could be justifiably called derivative. As he grows older, one sees King dealing with fewer monsters and more actions, reactions, relationships and consequences. This is one of those stories and it’s a pretty good one. I know I was reading at a feverish pace just to find out what the minister wanted of his nurse.

Afterlife
A man dies from cancer and enters the afterlife. There, he meets the owner of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company who is serving a sentence just short of Hell in the afterlife. He finds out what comes after death.

Stephen King ponders his own mortality in this story which may or may not reflect his real life views on the subject. As a short story, it was not bad, but not too terribly thrilling either.

UR
See earlier summary and review

Herman Wouk is Still Alive
A story told from two perspectives about a fatal car crash that kills 9 people, including seven children. One perspective is that of the driver – a middle-aged woman with four children and no husband who has one a pick 3 lottery and rents a van to take her children, her best friend and her children to a neighboring city to visit their families. The other perspective is that of two aging poets who are enjoying a sunny afternoon at a turnpike rest area.

This story is steeped in despair. Despair about being poor. Despair about being single. Despair about being old and many more despairs. I’m sure there is supposed to be a subtext or meaning here, but I just didn’t get it. Nonetheless, King still tells a decent story here and built the tension nicely.

Under the Weather
An advertising executive’s wife is sick – really really sick. He tries to care for her while he goes on with his daily work routine. Meanwhile, his building superintendent is on him about getting into his apartment because of complaints of a horrible smell emanating from within.

King lets the reader reach the obvious conclusion early on without actually telling him. He is masterful in building the tension as the walls close in on the advertising executive even though the reader knows how it must all come out. A great story and a nifty bit of storytelling.

Blockade Billy
See previous summary and review

Mister Yummy
An elderly man recounts for his friend living in a retirement community how he knows he is going to die because he has scene death. Death personified is not the notorious Grim Reaper, but a 22 year old man dressed in tight shorts and a sleeveless blue t-shirt.

Again we see Stephen King pondering the nature of old age, death, and the afterlife in sobering terms. There is a beautiful and haunting allusion in this story where King refers to hanging out in gay clubs in the 1980s as the AIDS epidemic raged as similar to attending the ball in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

Tommy
A poem about the death of a hippie as his friends toast and celebrate his life.

I’m no judge of poetry, but this struck all the right emotional chords. Sorrow, remembrance, nostalgia, they were all there.

The Green God of Pain
An uber-wealthy man hires a faith healer to relieve him of the chronic pain afflicting him since a plane crash many years earlier. His physical therapist protests and learns a hard lesson about faith and pain.

King explores another subject with which he has become acquainted in his autumn years: pain. He explores it in a manner more akin to his youth. Great story.

That Bus is Another World
An Alabama ad executive is desperate trying to make it to a pitch at a Madison Ave. ad agency. Every conceivable delay has been thrown in his way. While sitting impatiently in a cab in traffic, he witnesses a horrific event on an adjacent bus.

I was on the brink of dismissing this story as literary masturbation until the defining event came out of nowhere. This followed by the moral ambiguity of the main character made this one a real chiller.

Obit
A writer for an online news site finds he is gifted/cursed with the ability to kill people by writing snarky obituaries about them. He starts with his editor. He falls for an attractive coworker who puts his power to use to punish the wicked. He finds power is like heroin.

At first, I was completely willing to dismiss this story as a rehash of Word Processor of the Gods. While the story premise is juvenile (I read a story with the exact same premise in a comic book as a child), the first person narrative was so well constructed and so compelling that I ended up enjoying it a great deal. It takes a great author to take a tired, trite premise and make it work.

Drunken Fireworks
A mother-son pair of local rubes engages in an annual fireworks contest with a wealthy Italian family on the other side of the lake. Every year the fireworks get bigger and bigger until one side finally goes too far with disastrous consequences.

This story was originally published as a stand-alone novella and sold online. I’m glad I did not pay for it. It was dull with a predictable climax. It also recycled the narrative device employed in Dolores Claiborne. Perhaps the worst story in the book.

Summer Thunder
It’s post apocalyptic America and two men are surviving in rural Maine. They go about surviving as more and more of the animals die around them. Finally, both confront the reality that the end has come. Each faces it in their own way.

I am a sucker for the post-apocalypse and this story has just the right amount of despair and hopelessness.

Finders Keepers By Stephen King

Finders Keepers
By Stephen King
Copyright 2015

Stephen King introduces us to retired detective “Ret Det” Bill Hodges in Mr. Mercedes. The book ends in a cliff hanger and the reader is left wanting to know the fate of the book’s villain. Now comes book two in the Hodges trilogy, Finders Keepers. This from Stephen King.com:

"Wake up genius." So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years."

I must say that I enjoyed Finders Keepers much, much more than I enjoyed Mr. Mercedes. Gone is Bill Hodges lugubrious self pity which morphs into grief. Almost gone is the caricature of a black character known as Jerome. Finders Keepers develops new characters who are much more interesting and real while keeping Hodges, Jerome, and Holly Gibney moving right along.

There is not much new in the way of development for the old characters except we find out that Holly is now fighting the mental illness that constrained her for so many years. Hodges is quite successful as a private detective and enjoying life. Jerome has moved onto college (thank God) and isn’t in the book much. When he’s in the book, he does very little of the jive talkin’ that irritated the hell out of me in Mr. Mercedes.

I love the villain who is a well read, philosophical born of an intellectual and middle class family who is just a no good loser. No caricature there. He’s well spoken, but morally depraved. While other criminals kill for money, he kills for literature. I love it!

Mr. Mercedes got way too bogged down in Hodges emotions. The story was slow to get going and slowed down too frequently. That is not the case with Finders Keepers. The story is lively paced. Even the character backstories that sometimes slow King’s stories are rich. The trip through Morris Bellamy’s life makes his character and is interesting to read. The verbose King pares down the prose in Finders Keepers to tell a sleek, well-honed story.

But what of Brady Hartsfield – the brain damaged killer who uses and upscale motorcar to mow down the unemployed and downtrodden? King hasn’t forgotten him and neither has Bill Hodges. He’s still very much on Hodges’ mind and Bill visits him in the hospital weekly. While Brady plays the slobbering gork bit quite well, King leads us to believe it is very much an act. Brady Hartsfield is very much aware of what is going on around him and maybe has developed some new abilities after being hit with a sock full of ball bearings.

My chief complaint about this book is that it does not advance the overall story at all other than give us hints about Brady Hartsfield’s condition. Finders Keepers could be read as a stand alone novel and enjoyed by those who’ve never read Mr. Mercedes. That is not necessarily a bad thing. But King left us with the impression at the end of Mr. Mercedes that the story was going to be Bill Hodges and the gang versus the evil force of Brady Hartsfield. That story is not advanced one iota.

That criticism aside, Stephen King reminds us that there is much more to him than monsters and things that terrify us. There is nothing supernatural about the story in Finders Keepers. It’s entirely mainstream. A friend of mine who teaches English told me he found King horror stories to all be based on the same formula. However, when King left the genre and told a mainstream tale like he did in Misery, Different Seasons, and others, he was at his best. I don't agree with that assessment, but King can and does write strong mainstream fiction.

I’m quite certain that I would not count Finders Keepers as one of his best and would not put it in the same league as Misery and Different Seasons which were both absolutely brilliant. It is, however, a very good book that King fans will love and those who do not read King on a regular basis will enjoy.

Revival By Stephen King

Revival
By Stephen King
Copyright 2014

Stephen King’s novel, Pet Sematary was billed as “the novel that frightened Stephen King.” The book lived up to its billing and stands as one of his creepiest tales ever. Revival got similar billing.

Supposedly King thought Revival was the scariest thing he’d ever written. He told an interviewer that the novel was so dark, he was glad to be finished with it. Early reviews said the ending was so dark and compelling, it was disturbing.

While Pet Sematary did not disappoint, Revival doesn’t quite live up to its billing.

The story opens with the arrival of a new minister in the small Maine town in 1962. Jamie Morton, just 10, is one of the first to meet the new minister and is immediately taken with him. Rev. Charlie Jacobs, his wife and small son are quickly welcomed and made part of the community.

Soon after Jacobs’ arrival, Jamie gets a notion that Rev. Jacobs might be a pretty smart dude. Jamie’s older brother, Conrad, suffers a throat injury and is left unable to talk. One afternoon when Jamie and Conrad are visiting Rev. Jacobs, he attached some electrodes to Conrad’s throat. With a small charge of electricity, his voice is restored.

Tragedy destroys the Jacobs family and rocks the small Maine town. On their way home from Castle Rock, Mrs. Jacobs and their young son are killed in a car crash. Jacobs is devastated beyond conciliation. He is absent from church for several weeks. When he makes his return, he stands before the congregation and renounces his faith. While many in town still sympathize for him, he can no longer function as a minister. Much to Jamie’s chagrin, Charlie Jacobs packs up and leaves town.

Life goes on for Jamie. He falls in love with guitars and rock and roll. He joins a local band and plays gigs around the area. He gets his first car and his first girlfriend. After a few years, he and the girl drift apart and he makes a name for himself as a reliable session rhythm guitar player. But the life gets to him and he falls into the trap of heroin. In his mid-30s, he finds himself unemployed and living in a seedy Oklahoma motel room. He decides to go to the local carnival to score some heroin when he comes across his old friend Charlie Jacobs.

Charlie is now working as a huckster photographer, using his extensive knowledge of electricity to take elaborate photos of people. He is delighted to be reacquainted with Jamie, but immediately recognizes Jamie’s problem. He thinks he has the solution.

Charlie takes him to a laboratory and hooks him up with electrodes similar to those attached to his brother all those years before and puts an electrical charge through him. Jamie is cured. When Charlie prepares to take his show on the road again, he secures a job for Jamie at a recording studio where he has a friend he cured of disease many years before.

More years pass and Jamie is successful as a recording engineer and producer. He remains heroin free. Meanwhile, Charlie Jacobs has gone back to religion. He is now a revival tent preacher who heals the sick and infirm. Jamie follows Charlie’s career from afar with great interest.

Jamie has strange impulses that can only be explained by Charlie’s treatment. Research online reveals a high rate of suicide or mental illness for those who receive Charlie’s “cure.” Jamie decides to confront Charlie about his cure and its true nature.

Charlie is now mega-wealthy and retired from the tent revival circuit. He is still pursuing his passion for curing with electricity – but not the kind that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison conceived. Through coercion, he enlists Charlie’s help in harnessing the ultimate energy of the cosmos to perform the ultimate miracle. The results are horrific and haunting.

I stated earlier that Revival did not live up to its billing. That does not mean it was not a good novel. It was, in fact, quite good. Just not as good as the reader is led to believe. In Revival, King weaves in Lovecraftian notions of powers and beings beyond the human perception. He pays homage to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein through his transformation of Charlie Jacobs from rational being to mad scientist. It’s all traditional horror brought into the modern age by the modern master.

First person narratives can be tedious to read. As my friend who is an English professor once remarked, reading them can be like sitting with a drunk at a bar who recounts their sad tale of woe. King has written several first person narratives and he is comfortable and capable with the style.

Jamie’s tale is never boring. He’s not given to self pity and there’s just enough introspection to develop Jamie as a character. No sad tales of woe and no digression. The reading was easy and the tale interesting.

The book’s chief weakness was the ending. Although it was not a major letdown on the scale that Dean Koontz sometimes let’s you down, I was looking for more. I expected something dark like Pet Sematary or epic like IT. Instead, King gives his climax a rather vanilla treatment. It is dark to be sure, but not as dark as I expected given Charlie Jacobs’ emotional devolution.

It is also rather silly at times, reminding me of Dean Koontz trying to terrify the reader through description rather than letting the reader’s imagination serve him. King seldom makes this mistake. But in Revival, that silliness – while not ruining the novel's end – detracted from it.

It was enjoyable seeing King revisit the horror genre after the rather dull Mr. Mercedes. We do not know when he’ll visit again as his next published work will be a sequel to Mr. Mercedes.

For those who say they like old Stephen King work, this book will be a treat. It is straight horror without the political agenda, without the commentary on aging, and without the rehashing of major bodily injury. Revival is a fine horror novel that takes the reader back to King’s glory days.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes
By Stephen King
Copyright 2014

Bill Hodges is a retired police detective haunted by three crimes that went unsolved on his watch. One was a freeway killer who preyed on women at rest stops. Another was the murder of a woman seemingly by her husband, but the police could not get enough evidence to make a case stick. The third was a ghastly crime of mass murder where an unknown suspect stole a powerful Mercedes Benz sedan and drove it into a crowd of people lined up for a job fair, killing several including a baby.

Hodges is lured out of retirement (and away from suicide) by an online message taunting him over the crime from the presumed perpetrator. He resumes his own, private investigation. It leads him to the woman who owned the stolen Mercedes. She has committed suicide, but Brady falls in love with her younger sister. She hires him to find out who and what drove her sister to suicide.

Brady Hartfield is a computer tech for an electronics retailer. He lives with his alcoholic mother in and has with her a semi-incestuous relationship. Having killed his younger brother many years before, Brady is a psychopath.

Brady is an electronics whiz who has built an electronic device that allows him to steal signals from key fobs. Using this, he stole the Mercedes and slaughtered the job seekers. But he aspires to a larger kill; one that will make him a legend. First, however, he is determined to rid himself of Bill Hodges.

While Bill is attending the funeral of his girlfriend’s mother, Brady plants a bomb in his car. Unfortunately for Bill, his girlfriend is driving his car when it explodes. She is killed and Bill is more determined than ever to find the Mercedes Benz killer.

With the help of his teenage gardener and a middle-aged, mentally ill niece of his recently departed love, he tracks Brady to his house where they find his mother, dead in bed – the victim of an accidental poisoning at Brady’s hand. They learn of his plan to bomb the civic center during a boy band concert. They race against time to foil the plot.

Stephen King has conjured some horrific, non-supernatural villains in his more than 40 years of writing. Annie Wilkes is every bit as menacing as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Roland Dinker, the Nazi general in Apt Pupil and his protégé were as ugly as they come. With characters like that to his credit, it is such a shame that Brady Hartfield is so lackluster.

Brady is not particularly sinister. He’s diabolical, but not introspective. The most significant reason for this is that nobody is afraid of Brady. The aforementioned King villains inspired fear in people. They terrorized their respective victims. Bill Hodges never fears Brady and he and his companions are the only people who know who and what Brady is. Without fear, Brady fall flat as a villain.

King is known for stellar character development. He often delves deeply into the backstory of even insignificant characters to enrich the story. In Mr. Mercedes, his protagonists are every bit as limp and lifeless as his villains.

We get enough backstory on Bill Hodges to make him functional as a protagonist, but King doesn’t develop Janey (Bill’s love interest) at all. When she dies, the reader just doesn’t care that much. We aren’t emotionally vested in her. This was supposed to serve as the emotional turning point in the novel. But without character development, it didn’t work.

Bill’s sidekick is an African-American teenager. Kudos for creating a non-traditional duo. But Jerome is perhaps the most irritating character in King’s career cast. I wanted him to die and he was one of the good guys! Jerome frequently lapses into an irritating, African-American retro slave patois that serves no point except to remind the reader over and over again, JEROME IS BLACK!

Mr. Mercedes takes a while to get going. Actually, it takes a very long time. But once it does, the plot races to a rewarding climax inside the civic center. For all that King does to work against himself and his novel, the payoff at the end is satisfying.

The novel is the first of a trilogy built around Bill Hodge and presumably – given the final paragraph of the novel – Brady. We can only hope that King can develop his hero and his villain sufficiently in the next novel to make it more interesting than the first installment.

Lisey’s Story By Stephen king

Lisey’s Story
By Stephen King
Copyright 2006

After treating fans to Cell, a great zombie story, Stephen King produced Lisey’s Story, a real departure from anything he’d written before. Lisey’s Story was a love story told in past tense through the recollections of Lisa “Lisey” Landon, widow of the world famous author, Scott Landon. The result was his worst novel ever.

Scott Landon has been dead for two years and Lisey is finally getting around to going through his papers. Various universities are begging her for unfinished and unpublished material. One professor from the University of Pittsburgh was particularly insistent upon seeing Scott Landon’s private papers.

She starts reminiscing about their courtship and marriage as she goes through the various clippings and articles her husband saved from his many appearances. She first recalls when a deranged fan shot her husband in 1988 and how she saved him by knocking the gun from his hand.

She is forced to deal with a mentally ill sister who falls into a state of catatonia shortly after visiting Lisey and a man hired by the Pittsburgh professor to get Scott’s papers. The man visits Lisey and tortures her, promising to come back if she doesn’t deliver the papers to the University of Pittsburgh.

She remembers Scott’s peculiarities and his family’s history of mental illness that manifests itself in uncontrollable rage and murder. She recalls that Scott was able to transport himself to a place called Bool Ya Moon, another world that contains a pool that provides inspiration and healing for those who suffer and also provides ideas to great authors.

She learns that Scott has anticipated the arrival of the crazed fans and scholars who will dog her incessantly for his papers. To prepare her for this, he has prepared a “bool” – a treasure hunt of sorts that will provide her with the means to confront the man who promises unspeakable torture if she doesn’t turn over the papers.

Using Scott’s clues from beyond the grave, she is able to revive her catatonic sister who helps her confront the stalker and lure him to Bool Ya Moon where she is able to kill him. But Scott has one more Bool left to give Lisey – her very own story. Lisey’s story reveals the complexity of their marriage and their love.

I absolutely loathed this novel and have never been more disappointed in a novel. There are several reasons why.

I don’t necessarily mind a novel told in a series of flashbacks. But most of this novel was flashback and it was sometimes hard to discern what was present time and what was flashback.

The invented language and the interior language of Scott and Lisey’s marriage so pervaded the novel as to be annoying. If I read “Schmucking” one more time, I’d have tossed the novel into the fire. So much of this novel was taken up by these made up words.

It seems as if King was attempting a real literary effort instead of a Stephen King novel and failed horribly. I don’t necessarily mean horror. King has often stepped outside the genre of horror and written wonderful works such as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Lisey’s Story had none of the charm of that story. It was an attempt to write something “serious” and it resulted in a novel that was a struggle to read.

The villain seemed to have been directly lifted from Secret Window, Secret Garden. The mannerisms and speech were nearly identical. There was certainly a degree of laziness on King's part here.

It did have its moments that were entertaining and engaging. The demise of Scott’s brother and his father were enthralling. The final chase scene through Bool Ya Moon, once King got going with the present tense action was also well written. But I could have done without all of the interior language of love and the romance in the novel.

Lisey’s Story was, by far, Stephen King’s worst novel and I shall never read it again.

Book to Movie: The Tommyknockers (1993)

Book to Movie: The Tommyknockers (1993)
Screenplay by Lawrence Cohen
Directed by John Power
Based on the novel, The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

In the early and mid 1990s, ABC produced a number of miniseries based on Stephen King novels. A couple like The Stand and IT were quite good. Some were enjoyable but not great like Sometimes They Come Back, and others were horrible such as The Shining and The Langoliers. While marginally better than the Langoliers, The Tommyknockers falls into the category of dismal.

Part of the problem was the lack of characters in the novel. King only developed Bobbi and Gard to any depth. Ev Hillman got some development, but was not a major character. To expand the story to miniseries length, Cohen had to develop characters. The additional characters were just horrible.

Becka Paulson, just a piece of trailer trash who warranted a chapter, got an upgrade to deputy under Sheriff Ruth Merrill. Also added as major characters were Trooper Butch Dugan, Postmistress Nancy Voss, and the Hillman family.

Cohen stayed true to the essence of the King story, which was no prize to begin with, but completely rewrote events for television. More special effect scenes were added and a romance between Trooper Dugan and Sheriff Merrill was created. To describe all of the deviations and plot changes would be to write a summary of the movie, which isn't necessary to convey how bad it is.

The low point of the series was Voss’ laser lipstick that she used to zap various characters into non-existence. It was over employed. Voss was portrayed by Traci Lords of underage porn infamy and Lords had not yet evolved (has she yet?) from playing the porn star. She was slutty, with atrocious dialogue and atrocious acting. Her appearance alone was enough to degrade the show.

Power employed some talent such as Jimmy Smits who played Gard, Marge Helgenberger who played Bobby. Hollywood veteran E.G. Marshall was brought in to play Ev Hillman. Smits and Helgenberger did what they could with the poorly conceived script. The writing just wasn’t there. The only performances that stood out were Marshall and John Ashton as Trooper Dugan. Alyce Beasely (whom I always thought was an underrated talent in Hollywood) did well with Becca Paulson.

It is surprising that this particular miniseries ended up as badly as it did because Cohen has always produced quality when adapting King. He doesn’t have an extensive list of writing credits, but he did write the two Carrie scripts that matter and he wrote IT. While the Tommyknockers was the weakest source material he’d ever worked with, I didn’t expect Cohen to make it worse. Yet he managed.

To bring it to a close, Cohen rewrote the ending to give it a happier conclusion. Gard, with the Tommyknockers bearing down on him, flies the ship out. What's left of Haven returns to normal and Bobbi and her beloved dog Pettie are left to ponder it all. Not the ending that King envisioned and not the ending that should have been.

Cohen also downplayed the alcoholism a bit. In the novel, Gard's need to drink was front and center and he was unable to overcome it. In the movie, Gard's demons show up, but he almost always is able to defeat them.

While I did not indicate it in my review of the novel, I think The Tommyknockers, along with Misery, are important entries in the King canon. Misery is great and The Tommyknockers below average. For what The Tommyknockers lacks in interesting story, it is a glimpse into the personal turmoil of King's life at that time while he struggled with his own alcoholism and addiction. Eliminating this eliminated the galvanizing element of King's original story.

See it once to say you saw it if you’re a diehard King fan. But for those who are casual fans of sci-fi or are looking for Lovecraftian overtones should avoid it because it just isn’t worth watching.

The Tommyknockers By Stephen King

The Tommyknockers
By Stephen King
Copyright 1988

With the exception of a couple short stories written early in his career, Stephen King had never tackled science fiction writing. His idol, H.P. Lovecraft, had a knack for blending the genres of horror and science fiction into masterpieces such as the Color Out of Space (which served as the inspiration for the Tommyknockers). Unfortunately, Stephen King does not share Lovecraft’s ability to straddle the genres. In what was apparently supposed to be a Lovecraft pastiche, King gets bogged down in melodramatic character development and some really ridiculous plot elements.

The story opens with novelist Bobbi Anderson tripping over a piece of metal jutting from the ground on her farm in Haven, Maine. She starts to dig around it and receives a shock from the metal. She develops an inclination to excavate this piece of metal that becomes all consuming. When she’s not digging, she finds that she’s inspired to build nifty inventions such as a hot water tank that runs on batteries and a device that converts her lawnmower into a hovercraft.

Meanwhile, her friend, a poet by the name Jim Gardener, is ruining his career in New Hampshire. Gardener is at on tour with a group of poets doing readings. Gardener has managed to stay dry through most of the tour, but gets drunk one night at a party held for the poets. He overhears the party’s host discussing nuclear power with one of the party’s guests – a man from the power company. An authority on nuclear power James Gardener is and belligerently enters the argument citing the horrors of Chernobyl and the near death experiences at Three Mile Island Fermi.

Gardner ends up making a mess of the party and himself and upsetting guests. He is asked to leave, but before he does, he attacks Ted the Power Man with an umbrella. He wakes up a few days later on a breakwater on a beach near a hotel, horribly hung over.

He decides to commit suicide there and then. But before he can do so, he gets an inkling that his one true friend in this world, Bobbi Anderson, is in trouble. He puts off suicide to hitchhike to Maine to see Bobbi.

He arrives at Bobbi’s farm to find her exhausted and emaciated, having been working day and night at her excavation. Gard puts her to sleep. Before she drifts off, she shows him her latest invention, a Royal typewriter that allows her to transmit her novels from her brain to be typed on the machine. Gard is blown away by what he sees.

The next day, properly rested and fed, Bobbi leads Gard to the site and shows the smallest hint of a very large oval she has unearthed. She invites him to touch it. When he does, he gets a blast of radio stations running through his brain, but no great inspiration to dig or any ideas for inventions. They surmise it is because a metal plate in Gard’s heat – the result of a teenage skiing accident – blocks the ships emanations from penetrating his brain.

As Bobbi and Gard unearth more of the ship, wonderful ideas start occurring to people all over Haven who invent modern conveniences out of household items and batteries. One of those Haventes is a 10 year old boy named Hilly Brown who has just discovered the art of magic. Hilly develops a device that makes things disappear – not through a trap door, but for real. He decides to put on a show to impress his friends and family.

He’s done a couple shows before, and they were met with polite acceptance. He is determined to make this one his piece de resistance. The subject of his act is his little brother, David, who is scared to do it, sensing something strange in his brother. Hilly sets up the act in front of his parents, his grandfather, and a few friends who wait impatiently for it all to end. When Hilly activates his device and David disappears, they are not impressed. His parents tell him to find David and come to supper.

Except Hilly can’t find David. Every other item he has made disappear has returned. David won’t return. Eventually, David’s disappearance is reported to Haven constable who organizes a search of the area. No trace of David is found. Meanwhile, Hilly has lost his mind and has become catatonic. He is sent to a hospital in Derry and is accompanied by his grandfather. His parents are too wrapped up in what is going on in Haven.

Soon, the project to excavate what is clearly a spaceship consumes the entire village of Haven. Those who try to get in the way, like the town constable and state troopers, are killed. Bobbi is the town’s spiritual leader in the quest to unearth the ship. She and a group of people meet in her garden shed every night with strange equipment running. They are hastening their, “becoming” which is their conversion from human to an alien life form.

Gardener continues to labor away even though the ship has no effect on him. He is there to help his friend Bobbi who he sees being transformed into an alien life form, and to keep whatever power this ship holds out of the hands of the government that he considers evil and corrupt. Bobbi’s friends don’t like Gard, but they keep him around because he’s a hard worker and Bobbi, their leader, insists that he be kept around.

As more and more of the ship is unearthed, the air in Haven becomes toxic to outsiders and people quit coming to Haven. The work carries on.

Back in Derry, Hilly’s grandfather, Ev, is convinced that something strange is going on in Haven. First, he tries to convince a reporter who dismisses him as a foolish old man. Then he approaches the state trooper in charge of the investigation of the disappearance of two state troopers returning from Haven. The two were zapped out of existence by weapons invented by the Havenites. The trooper, “Monster” Dugan agrees to accompany Ev to Haven to investigate. Ev provides Trooper Doogan an air tank so he can breathe in Haven. Ev is immune because of a metal plate put in his head after a war wound.

They find the ship and are confronted by Bobbi and her friends. Dugan shoots Bobbi before he is killed. Ev is taken captive and put in the shed to be used.

Bobbi is less and less human by the day. Gard knows that the point will come when there isn’t enough of Bobbi Anderson who loves him to keep the alien Bobbi from killing him. He wants to see the inside of that ship before he dies. After several months of excavating, they finally find the hatch.

Bobbi and Gard descend into the hatch and find the dead crew of the ship. It appears they were fighting over the controls when they crashed. Gard mocks them and Bobbi is a little disheartened.

Gard realizes that his time is short now with most of the residents of Haven well on their way to becoming. He decides to see what is in Bobbi’s shed. He enters and finds Bobbi’s dog, Ev Hillman, and Bobbi’s sister immersed in tanks of green fluid, apparently powering a supercomputer inside the shed. Ev, still alive, implores Gard to use the computer to bring his grandson back from Altair 4, the place that the Tommyknockers send the unwanted. Gard does not know how to do it and flees from the shed.

A few days later, Bobbi informs Gard that his time has come. She wants it to be peaceful. She lays out a bottle of booze and a bottle of valium, telling him to take lethal doses of both while they talk about the true nature of the Tommyknockers. Suspecting Bobbi is going to kill him, Gard brings a gun with him. While at the kitchen table, swallowing valiums and drinking scotch, Gard shoots Bobbi and kills her.

All of Haven is drawn to the Anderson farm when their minds sense that Bobbi has been killed, leaving Gard little time to accomplish what he needs to do. He goes to the shed and uses the computer to bring David Brown back from Altair 4. The drain on their stamina kills the shed occupants. Havenites chase Gardener into the woods, inadvertently setting it on fire. Gard races though the fire to the ship. Using the controls he instinctively knows how to operate, he flies the ship out of the ground and into space.

Haven burns and firefighters are unable to enter the town to stop it. One by one, the Havenites die. The few survivors are picked up by the notorious Shop – a secret government agency introduced in Firestarter – and transported to Texas where they are studied until they die. The book ends with David Brown snuggling up against his beloved older brother in a Derry hospital room.

The Tommyknockers does not rank as one of the worst of King’s works, but it is a weak effort compared to the material he’d put out previously. Written at the worst point of his drug and alcohol addiction, the book drips with desperation and despair. It’s too much and it reduces Gardener as a character.

One chief failure of the book is to develop Gardener as an anti-hero. Anti-heroes are flawed individuals who ultimately carry out noble deeds. King meets the textbook definition, but Gardener, as he’s written, is unlikeable. His anti-nuke tirades and anti-government paranoia are too over the top. His only redeeming quality is his love for Bobbi. He does carry out his noble deed in the end, but it is not for Bobby or for Haven. It is to keep the ship out of the hands of the “Dallas Police” which is his pejorative term for all authority. Making Gardener more likeable would have helped.

Also, the novel fails to move. There is little action and lots of talking and philosophizing. Much of the action that is in the book is foolish. The soda dispenser that flies around killing people is just too ludicrous to swallow and comes across as hokey.

As for it being Lovecraftian, I can see some connections. The Tommyknockers arrival obviously predates the rise of man since a large part of the ship has become part of the bedrock. The creatures, as they are described, are Lovecraftian. But the story is not. Lovecraft scared people with his stories. This was not a scary story.

This and the length of the novel make for some dull reading. The book opens nicely with the development of Bobbi and Gardener and their relationship. From there, there is no character development of peripheral characters and we are not made to care what happens to the town of Haven.

It seems as if King was trying to capture some of what he accomplished in ‘Salem’s Lot by populating a town full of people we knew and then destroying it by nefarious means. We did not know the people of Haven nearly as well as we knew the people of ‘Salem’s Lot and we cared a lot less when they died.

Book to Movie: Carrie (2013)

Book to Movie: Carrie (2013)
Screenplay by Lawrence Cohen
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Based on the novel, Carrie, by Stephen King

In 2013, a third remake of Stephen King’s first novel and horror classic, Carrie was made. The first was a blockbuster that has become iconic. The second, made for television effort, was an atrocious effort to launch a television series based on the character. The third was a serious attempt to capture the drama and torment of the original King novel and Brian DePalma film. While not nearly as good as the original, it is not without its charm.

Lawrence Cohen was brought in to write the screenplay. He authored the first Carrie script and was the first screenwriter to bring King to the big screen. His first effort was brilliant, but he may have done a better job with this script.

The 2013 Carrie captures more of the King novel. The opening scene shows Carrie’s birth and her mother’s desire to kill her right out of the womb, believing her to be devil’s spawn. While not exactly as King wrote it, it does capture the essence of King’s introduction of Carrie.

Cohen also manages to accomplish with this script what neither he did in his first script nor King did in his book: he defined Tommy Ross.

Both the novel and the original screenplay were ambiguous as to Ross’ motives for taking Carrie to the prom. Was he just doing it because it was what Sue Snell wanted? Or, did he take pity on the poor Carrie and do it because he was kind? In this movie, it is clear that Ross was a genuinely nice guy who wanted to treat Carrie to a wonderful evening.

The lesser roles in the remake were well cast, well scripted, and well acted. I didn’t think anyone could top Nancy Allen portrayal of the evil Chris Hargensen, but she did. She definitely comes across as the ultimate bad girl.

Gabriella Wilde was cast as Sue Snell – the moral center of the movie. The role was originally played by Amy Irving in her first acting gig. Wilde is better. Cohen’s treatment of the character was better in this script and Wilde takes that treatment and makes the most of it.

Having said that, this movie lacks what drove the original Carrie to iconic status: great acting from its principles and great directing from the director.

No one could envy Chloe Grace Moretz for having to take the role that Sissy Spacek defined and make it her own. While her portrayal of Carrie was not bad, it certainly did not rise to the level of Spacek. Moretz wasn’t quite as mousy as Spacek when the role called for her to be demur. Nor was she menacing enough in the movie’s climax. It’s hard to top Spacek’s wide eyed stare at the crowd as pig’s blood drips from her. That image defined the original movie and is not present in the remake at all.

Moretz’s chief fault is she is simply too attractive for the role. Carrie, as envisioned by Stephen King, was a doughy, pimply faced mouse. While Spacek wasn’t exactly what King had envisioned, she was homely enough for the role. Moretz is attractive from beginning to end. Boys would have been interested in her. Girls might have hated her, but only because she would have been a rival for the affection of boys.

Julianne Moore was weak as Carrie’s domineering mother, Margaret White. She underplays the role. Piper Laurie won a best supporting actress Oscar for her over the top, maniacal portrayal of Margaret White. Laurie’s performance drove that original movie.

Peirce is simply not in Brian DePalma’s league. Two make that abundantly clear. The first is the shower scene, with all of the girls yelling, “plug it!” DePalma shot most of it from Carrie’s point of view and the girls, all attractive, looked like raving monsters. DePalma also understood that scene was going to set the stage for the rest of the film and made it lengthy. Peirce didn’t give it nearly enough play.

The second was the penultimate scene in the gymnasium in which all the students were killed. In the original, all the students laughed and kept laughing until Carrie unleashed her furor upon the crowd. In this movie, they stopped when Tommy Ross died. There was a break in the tension that was absolutely unnecessary when Carrie pauses momentarily to mourn the dead Tommy.

What followed were several exhibitions of CGI that paled in comparison to DePalma’s real fire with Carrie presiding on stage – not as the queen of the prom – but as the queen of mayhem. In the original, she killed indiscriminately. In this version, Carrrie picks and chooses her targets. It reduced the impact of the scene.

Cohen brought back, on a small scale, the terror Carrie unleashed on the town on her way home. Her confrontation with Chris Hartegen was well scripted and added a little more climax to that pivotal moment of justice than did the original screenplay.

Snell’s arrival at the White home just after Carrie has killed her mother was another change that worked well because Carrie got to ask that pivotal question that summed up the novell. “Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” Snell had no answer for her.

The ending of the remake fell well short of DePalma’s original. Who didn’t jump when Carrie’s hand reached up out of the grave to grab Sue Snell in her nightmare? I know it ranks as one of the single most frightening moments in my movie viewing experiences. The crumbling monument in Peirce’s version added nothing to the film other than an excuse to end the movie.

Carrie 2013 was a decent movie. Not as bad as many King fans feared, but better than most expected. It is entirely watchable and enjoyable. In some places, it has greater depth than the original. But without the brilliant talent of Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, and Brian DePalma, it is not worthy to be compared to the original which is an important and iconic film.

Cell: A Novel By Stephen King

Cell: A Novel
By Stephen King
Copyright 2006

In 2006, Stephen King returned to the genre that made him famous. After completing the Dark Tower series and penning the soft crime novel, Colorado Kid, King wrote a genuine horror novel.

In a career spanning forty years, it seemed that King had touched on every aspect of horror. But he’d never written a zombie novel. Tipping his cap to Richard Matheson and George Romero, King wrote a zombie novel that added some new elements to the zombie genre.

Clayton Riddell is an author and artist who produces graphic novels. He is in Boston when the world goes crazy. People start savagely attacking one another, buildings explode, and police are no help.

Riddell finds shelter in a store and meets a man who also seems normal. Tom McCourt lives in a nearby town and they decide to head there. As they exit the building in that evening, they notice that the mayhem has stopped.

They are able to figure out that whatever happened to the people who went crazy, it was caused by their cell phones. Neither Clayton or Tom owned cell phones.

As they make their way to Tom’s suburban home, Clayton obsesses over the fate of his son and estranged wife who are at home in Maine. He makes it his goal to get there to find out what happened.

Along the way, they pick up a pre-teen girl, Alice Maxwell who is in a state of semi shock. They finally arrive at Tom’s home and spend the night in comfort. The next day, they see the zombies, converted by their cell phones, are wandering the streets and are starting to band together, moving in the same general direction.

After a couple days at Tom’s house, the group decides to leave and head for Maine to find Clayton’s family. They leave at night and procure weapons from a neighbor’s house. They head north.

They eventually find a private school where two survivors are there to greet them. The school’s acting headmaster and a young student, Jordan. Jordan is a computer geek who has developed a theory as two what caused the calamity and what was occurring now.

The pair show them the school’s stadium during the day. Tom, Alice, and Clayton see a stadium packed with zombies who are sleeping and are not disturbed by their presence. Around them, boom boxes play soft rock music.

Clayton and Tom are determined to wipe out this flock of zombies and steal a couple propane trucks to park in the stadium. The ignite the trucks, blowing up the stadium and destroying the flock of zombies.

That night, their dreams are haunted by a zombie dressed in a red Harvard hoodie, leading a pack of zombies that surround the house. It seems that the Harvard zombie, whom they dub The Raggedy Man and The President of Harvard is giving them free passage to a cell free area in Maine.

Confused as to why they are offered freedom to leave, they decide to get out of New Hampshire and head for the cell-free zone in the TR90 in Maine. Along the way, they find that they are pariahs among the other normal people who have been warned in dreams to stay away from the group.

They encounter another group of people who wiped out a group of zombies in New Hampshire and have found themselves as outcasts. They join forces and head for the TR90.

Along the way, Alice is killed by a reckless driver. Eventually, they arrive at the fairgrounds in a bus they find along the way. They are taken prisoners by the zombies and locked in a casino. The group notices that the zombies, who once marched together so orderly and went to bed at dusk, are starting to act erratically. Jordan theorizes that their programming is breaking down.

directions. But Clayton is determined to find his son. He eventually locates him sitting on a curb. He is a zombie, but not vicious or dangerous. Theorizing that his son must have received a corrupted pulse, Clayton decides to care for his son.

After many days of trying to reach his son, there is no improvement. Clayton decides on a desperate act. He decides to administer another pulse to his son, hoping to restore his son’s psyche with the same device that destroyed it. The book ends with him holding the phone to his son’s ear.

Reading this book was like meeting an old friend who’d been gone from my life for several years. After nearly a decade of writing feminist books, fantasy books, crime books, and science fiction, the King of horror returned to the genre where he reigned supreme and showed that he still ruled.

Zombie books, movies, and television shows are all the rage now. In some, the zombies move fast. In others, they are shambling and mindless. This is the way it has always been. King dared challenge that trope and made the zombies intelligent and purposeful. The undead are always associated with the night. King brings them out into the day. King takes the entire zombie genre and turns it on its head and the result was the best zombie novel I’ve ever read.

Another factor that makes this novel so satisfying is what King chose not to write. In Under the Domei>, King took more than a thousand pages to explain the phenomena that trapped the people of Chesters Mill. The end and the solution were horribly unsatisfying and hurt the novel badly. In Cell, King never tells us the source of the Pulse. He never explains it except through the theory developed by an 11 year old boy. Not knowing the nature or source of the Pulse made the book better by making the plot and movement much more streamline.

Then there is the ambiguity of the ending. It reminded me very much of the ending of Pet Semetary. We don’t know exactly what happens next, but we have an idea it’s not going to be good. At the end of Cell, the reader is left to use his imagination.

The book has one minor weakness and it is usually a strength of Stephen King. He leaves some characters underdeveloped. More backstory on the other group of “untouchables” would have given a little more depth to the story’s climax. There’s enough to make the story work, but there could have been more.

Cell has been made into a movie to be released this year starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson who paired up in the movie 1408. It is to be released in 2015.

Cell ranks as one of King’s better books. Fans have mixed feelings about it. They either love it or hate it. Those who love Stephen King’s horror are the former. I am one of them.

The Colorado Kid By Stephen King

The Colorado Kid
By Stephen King
Copyright 2005

In 2005, to help launch the Hard Case Crime series, Stephen King penned a short, paperback novel about a mysterious death in a Maine resort town. What’s odd is there is nothing hard boiled about this story. The story is about as soft as anything King has ever written.

An intern at a small Maine newspaper is having lunch with her two bosses – elderly gentlemen who own the paper – when talk turns to unsolved mysteries. Having blown off a national reporter looking for unsolved crime stories, they proceed to tell her the story of the Colorado Kid who died under mysterious circumstances in their small town in 1980.

They recount for her the finding of the body and how the obvious cause of death was choking to death on a piece of steak. The man goes unidentified for nearly a year until a young police intern decides to check the tax stamp on a pack of cigarettes in the man’s possession. They find out he was an advertising executive from Colorado.

The old men tell her how they worked to reconstruct his movements to determine how and why he got to Colorado. They were never able to discover the how or the why. The Colorado Kid walked away from his job in Colorado at about 10:00 a.m. to die in Maine that evening. The lesson, they tell the young woman, is not all stories have an ending.

That is true, but novels should. While reading, the men keep hinting that there’s going to be an unsatisfactory ending. But the reader reasonably suspects the woman will pick up where the old men leave off and find some great revelation as to how or why the man died. It never happens.

Stephen King has written a couple novels I liked less, but never has he written so unsatisfying as The Colorado Kid. Upon completing the book, I thought it a useless, unsatisfying reading experience. What’s a mystery with no twist or no resolution? The story amounts to just a bunch of stuff that happened.

In his postscript, King acknowledges that many will not like the book. I don’t know of any fans that do. The postscript sounds like a copout – like King knew he wasn’t doing his best work or putting forth maximum effort.

His second novel for the Hard Case Crime series, Joyland, is what one would expect from a writer of King’s caliber writing in this genre. Read Joyland and skip the Colorado Kid. You’ll be glad you did.

Book to Movie: Misery (1990)

Book to Movie: Misery (1990)
Screenplay by William Goldman
Directed by Rob Reiner
Based on the novel Misery by Stephen King

When reading Stephen King’s 1987 suspense thriller, Misery, one can’t help but think this is a book ready made for screen treatment. Strong characters, a suspenseful plot, and a claustrophobic setting are the ingredients for good suspense thrillers.

Of course, you have to have a good screenwriter, a good director, and the right cast. The movie Misery had all three and the result was a superb movie that equaled the book.

The movie doesn’t deviate from King’s basic narrative of the writer trapped in a home by his insane “number one fan.” But to keep it from being a two person show with Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) and Paul Sheldon (James Caan), the writer and director had to open it up a little bit with new characters and outside action.

Created for the movie was a local sheriff known as Buster (Richard Farnsworth) and his wisecracking wife and deputy, Virginia (Frances Sternhagen). Although they enjoyed relatively little screen time in contrast with Bates and Caan, the chemistry between between Farnsworth and Sternhagen was nearly as strong and served as a little bit of light comic relief between the tense scenes played out in Annie Wilkes’ spare bedroom.

Scenes were added as Sheriff Buster led a search for the missing author that eventually led him to the Bates farm.

Bates was the absolute perfect choice to play Wilkes and the movie launched her career. Her performance of Annie’s “up” moods was a little more understated than King wrote them. That only served to make her maniacal behavior stand in starker contrast. Physically, Bates was everything King envisioned in the character.

Caan played Paul Sheldon as if he’d read the novel several times and was an authority on it. Caan played the role just as King wrote it. Bates and Caan had a wonderful chemistry that created tension masterfully.

Interestingly, little of King’s actual dialogue made the movie script. Some of Annie’s peculiar expressions like “oogie” made the script. But Goldman chose to construct his own dialogue and it worked wonderfully for the actors.

There were a few changes to the story that made it stronger for the big screen. Annie lets her pig, Misery, into Paul’s bedroom for a visit. Paul decides to wean himself from narcotics whilst living with Annie. The most striking difference was Annie’s “hobbling” of Paul. In the novel, it is a tense moment, but not the most tense in the book. In the movie, this was the defining moment. Instead of chopping off one of Paul’s feet as she did in the book, she uses a sledgehammer to break both his legs. It was a fantastic scene that worked so much better than had they stuck with the book.

Ultimately, it’s Sheriff Buster who investigates the Wilkes farm and gets shot and killed for his troubles. This sets up the final scene where Paul burns the Misery novel and touches off the final conflict between himself and Annie.

The final scenes are different than the book, but again, work better on the screen. Paul is having lunch with his agent when she asks him about a non-fiction book recounting his experiences on the Wilkes farm. As they are discussing this, he sees Annie Wilkes wheeling a desert tray in his direction. Terrified, he looks away. He looks up again to see a non-descript waitress standing at the desert tray. The waitress recognizes him and tells him she’s his number one fan.

Misery ranks in the top five adaptations of King’s work on the screen. This is because the book lent itself so well to screen treatment. Secondly, Rob Reiner knows how to get the most out of King material, having directed the brilliant Stand By Me. Thirdly, the movie was cast perfectly.

It’s hard to find a flaw in this adaptation. It had no weak moments, no throwaway scenes, no gratuitous gore or action. Every scene built upon the prior and it had a wonderful climax and a subdued, but creepy ending. Misery is a great movie on every level that can be enjoyed by fans of King’s work and movie fans in general.

Misery By Stephen King

Misery
By Stephen King
Copyright 1987

Misery was all set to become the latest installment from King nom de plume, Richard Bachman when Bachman got outed. So, instead, it just became another bestseller for Stephen King and a strong rebound from the fan-disappointing Eyes of the Dragon.

Paul Sheldon is the writer of bodice-ripper novels starring the heroine, Misery Chastaine. He’s just finished a “serious” novel called Fast Cars that he hopes will earn him some respect with critics. After celebrating its completion with copious amounts of champagne, he decides to drive from his hotel in Colorado to Los Angeles. But he hits a snow storm in Colorado and wrecks his car, injuring himself badly.

He awakens in the first floor bedroom of a remote Colorado farm house. His legs and pelvis are badly mangled and have been crudely set. He’s been rescued by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes, a nurse who is just a little bit insane.

Annie is unhappy that her beloved Misery Chastaine died at the end of the last novel. She makes Paul destroy the manuscript for Fast Cars and orders him to bring Misery Chastaine back to life in a novel just for her.

Paul is in a great deal of pain and relies on Annie to provide medication to relieve that pain. He soon becomes addicted. But Annie is moody. Sometimes, she disappears for days, leaving Paul in agony.

Despite all this, Paul manages to write. Annie is there to read each chapter as it’s finished. The ancient Royal typewriter she’s provided Paul has no “n” so Annie pencils in the “n’s” with great delight.

When Annie is away, Paul manages to sneak out of his room from time to time. One time he steals several pills of his medication to hold him over while Annie goes to her “laughing place” when she is in the depths of depression. Another time he finds a scrapbook that reveals that nurse Annie Wilkes was an angel of death at each hospital where she worked. She once stood trial for murder, but was found not guilty.

Annie learns of Paul’s excursions from his bedroom and decides to limit Paul’s mobility. She cuts off one of his feet with an axe. When the police discover Paul’s car after the spring thaw, she kills the state troopers that come to investigate.

For months Paul has been pounding away on the Royal to complete the Misery Chastaine novel. Despite the insanity of his life, he is still enjoying the work and is proud of the book. Annie informs Paul that their time is short. He needs to wrap up the novel because the police are certain to find her out eventually and she plans a murder-suicide to bring their relationship to a close.

Annie plans an elaborate ceremony for the reading of the final chapter of the book. She purchases caviar and champagne. Paul has his own elaborate ceremony planned as well. As Annie prepares to read the climax of the novel written just for her, Paul sets fire to the manuscript using matches and lighter fluid he has squirreled away.

He then clouts her on the head with the heavy typewriter. For months, the Royal has served a dual purpose. It has served as a writing instrument and also as a weight for Paul to develop upper body strength. With well toned arms, he smashes Annie a good one on top of the head.

The two struggle before Paul eventually makes it out the front door where two state troopers have just arrived. Annie escapes, but is later found dead in her barn, her skull fractured from the blow Paul dealt her.

As the novel winds down, we learn that Paul did not burn the manuscript, but a fake stack of papers with the title page on top. The novel is going to be published and with the publicity of Paul’s ordeal to market it, is certain to be a major blockbuster. But Paul is a changed man. Writing is now difficult and he’s uncertain if he’ll ever write again. To compensate for his withdrawal from pain killer addiction, he becomes an alcoholic.

However, one day, while taking a short walk, Paul encounters a boy with a pet skunk. His dormant muse springs into action and Paul begins to write again, basking in the joy of finding his craft again.

I had originally rated Misery as an average book in King’s canon. However, after this reading (my fourth), I’ve upgraded it to above average. I’d forgotten how menacing a creature Annie Wilkes was. Her lack of conscience, her unpredictable mood swings and her violent temper make her one of King’s more horrific creations. When you juxtapose Annie against the many “monsters” of King’s contrivance, Annie Wilkes ranks with the best of them. When you consider that’s she’s not supernatural, but a human being, she’s even more menacing.

King did not overwrite Annie to make her maniacal. In fact, she is quite believable as a person. If you’ve ever dealt with a person who is bipolar or suffers from clinical depression, you know that there are many real life Annie Wilkes walking the earth. King added just the right amount of sadism to make her a terrifying presence. Any more would have made her a horror movie caricature. Any less would have made the novel dull. Bravo to Stephen King for conjuring one of his best villains out of real life rather than the supernatural.

The novel had two major drawbacks. First were the long stretches of the Misery Chastaine manuscript. These were really pointless and quite distracting. Typeset in the book in an ancient font with the letter “n” penciled in, they were hard to read. It added nothing to the book except to pad the page count of what is one of King’s shorter novels.

The other was the brevity of the final conflict. The struggle between Paul and Annie was entirely too short. Misery is a claustrophobic novel. The reader is trapped in that room with Paul and his tormentor for a long time. The final battle between the two should have been longer and more dramatic as a payoff.

King has described this book as his own battle with being imprisoned. He was imprisoned by drug and alcohol addiction. He was imprisoned by his fans who were disappointed in his departure from horror in Eyes of the Dragon and wanted him to return to horror. While King has written many books with writers as the main character, there is probably more of Stephen King the man in Paul Sheldon than any other of his books.

Misery was a book that just begged for screen treatment and in 1990, the movie was made. The superb movie nearly surpassed the very good book and launched the career of Kathy Bates.

Book to Movie: Dreamcatcher (2003)

Book to Movie: Dreamcatcher (2003)
Based on the Stephen King novel, Dreamcatcher
Screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan

What happens when you take an awful Stephen King novel and make a movie out of it? You get an awful movie based on an awful Stephen King novel. Proof in point is the dreadful Dreamcatcher, based on the King novel of the same name.

Goldman and Kasdan stick very close to the story as it was laid out by King in the novel. The four friends have gathered in the hunting cabin. Two go off into the stormy night for groceries when the aliens invade.

The only redeeming quality of the novel was the strength of two of the main characters, Henry and Jonesy. In the movie, they were insipid and under-developed. While the story languished for being over-told and the villain was a cartoon character, it was hard not to like Henry and Jonesy. In the movie, the viewer just isn’t made to care enough about them.

The novel’s weakest point was Jonesy locking himself in the Tracker Brothers’ depot in his brain and hiding “files” that were his memories. This concept is introduced earlier by the filmmakers, with Jonesy telling his friends about his warehouse of memories and how he has a secret filing drawer where he keeps his secrets. This was good screenwriting, lest the notion make even less sense to movie goers than novel readers. While it was just a warehouse of Jonesy’s own conjuring as opposed to the Tracker Brothers, it still didn’t work.

Col. Kurtz (Curtis in the movie, played by Morgan Freeman) was one dimensional in the novel, coming across as a caricature from a bad political cartoon. Kasdan changed him up a bit. Instead of a caricature, he is not developed at all. We’re given just one instance of his mania – when he shoots the soldier for letting a woman and her four year old daughter leave the quarantine area. Otherwise, Freeman plays Curtis like a straight military man. Not much of a villain.

In the movie, Henry reads Owen Underhill’s mind and appeals to his since of decency. He asks Underhill what his wife and daughters would think of him if he knew of the slaughter that was about to take place upon his commands. This puts in motion the events that lead to Henry escaping and heading to Derry to find Duddits.

Duddits is very much like the Duddits of the novel and Andrew Robb, who played young Duddits played him quite well, as did Donnie Wahlberg. Unfortunately for the two actors, like every other character in the novel, Duddits is underdeveloped. We are never shown the closeness that developed between the four friends and their mentally challenged sidekick. We are treated to a scene where Duddits constructs a Dreamcatcher that links the four -- a scene that wasn't in the book. But this link and how Duddits achieved it, is never explained or even alluded to.

The chase dominates the last third of the book with Kurtz chasing Underhill for revenge and Underhill and Henry chasing Jonesy and Mr. Gray to save the world. The chase should have been the climax to the movie, but was really quite dull. Instead of setting off like a renegade, abandoning his command, Curtis is relieved by a general and surrenders quite docilely – said general having been tipped off to Curtis’ intention to slay the prisoners by Underhill.

Curtis doesn’t figure into the chase until the end when he arrives by helicopter. All of the good writing King did in the novel with Henry tempting Mr. Gray with things like bacon are deleted. When you delete the only good writing from a bad novel to make your movie, you’re making a bad movie worse. Kasdan could have done so much better with this aspect of the novel.

Certainly worse movies have been made based on Stephen King works. But no movie based on a Stephen King work was based on a worse work. Dreamcatcher was an awful novel that made a horrible movie. The changes Kasdan made in the plot were not worse than King’s writing, but they did not improve upon the story.

The movie had a strong cast with Freeman, Wahlberg, Timothy Olyphant and Tom Sizemore. With Kasdan -- who directed The Empire Strikes Back -- at the helm, one might expect them to salvage the meandering Stephen King story and make a better movie. The best that can be said is the movie is no worse than the book. They did no harm.

Hardcore fans of King consider Dreamcatcher a must see movie because it is based on one of his larger works. But as a movie, it is poor viewing. Many bad movies have a scene or two that is memorable and make the viewing not a totally wasted effort. While there is nothing in Dreamcatcher to make the movie fan groan in disgust, there’s nothing memorable about it either. The best scenes are lackluster. The worst parts are forgettable, and the movie itself is not worth the effort to watch.

Dreamcatcher By Stephen King

Dreamcatcher
By Stephen King
Copyright 2001

Dreamcather was Stephen King’s comeback novel. The first he wrote following his nearly fatal 1999 car accident, the pain he felt in the long days of recovery are reflected in its pages. Unfortunately, pain and a near death experience did not inspire King to his best writing because Dreamcatcher is one of his worst novels.

25 years before, four junior high school buddies committed an act of bravery and nobility. They rescued a boy afflicted with Down Syndrome from four older teenage tormenters. That act forged a bond between the four of them and their new friend that time or distance could not break.

Flash forward 25 years, the four buddies are on their annual hunting trip at a remote Maine hunting lodge. Gary "Jonesy" Jones; Pete Moore; Joe "Beaver" Clarendon; and Henry Devlin, have remained close friends all these years despite different intellectual abilities and interests. It’s been many years since they’ve dropped in on their friend, Douglas “Duddits” Cavell, but he will soon be at the fore of their thoughts.

One afternoon, Jonesy and Beaver remain behind at the cabin while Pete and Henry make the 16 mile drive through the woods for supplies. Jonesy is sitting in a tree stand, contemplating for the thousandth time taking his life when he hears noise in the woods. He raises his rifle to take down the buck. However, instead of a deer, a large man wanders out of the woods.

This hunter has been lost for several days in the woods. His behavior is odd and he’s disoriented. Jonesy invites him back to the cabin for food and blankets. While at the cabin, the man is able to reveal little about his odyssey through the Maine woods. He does, however exhibit extreme flatulence that has an overpowering aroma of rotten bananas and ether. When Beaver returns, he invites the guy to go to bed and rest awhile.

Jonesy looks outside the cabin and notices the entire wildlife population of northern Maine is trekking across the woods – bear beside deer, fox beside chipmunk – all in a vector like effort to get away from something. Beaver and Jonesy observe this for awhile, then return inside and find that their visitor has died on the toilet in a massive puddle of blood. Something alive is splashing around in the toilet.

Jonesy tells Beaver to sit on the toilet lid and hold whatever it is inside while he goes to the storage shed to retrieve some duct tape to seal the toilet. But Beaver makes a critical mistake and the creature bursts forth from the toilet. A large, alien weasel with sharp teeth makes short work of Beaver.

Jonesy returns from the shed with the tape and hears Beaver’s struggles. He tries to save his friend, then finally seals the bathroom door to trap the creature. He turns from this struggle to find a gray, alien creature standing in the cabin’s living room. The creatures head explodes and Jonesy passes out.

Meanwhile, Henry and Pete are on their way back from Gosslin’s Market with the food and beer. Snow is falling hard and the dirt trail road is treacherous. They are making their way when the round a bend and fine a woman sitting in the middle of the road. In missing her, Henry flips the Jeep. Beaver’s knee is injured and Henry has a laceration from the steering column.

They run back where the woman remains seated in the road. She is unresponsive to any overtures to communications. They make their way to a remote shed to take shelter, taking the woman with them. Henry plans to walk the remaining ten miles to the cabin to get help. Pete will stay behind with the woman.

Pete, a chronic alcoholic, decides that he needs to return to the Jeep to get beer. He makes the trek and gathers his beer. While resting, he unconsciously writes the name “Duddits” over and over again in the snow.

Pete makes his way back to the shed to find the woman is dead, having been ripped open through her ass. He is then attacked by the same creature as killed Beaver, know as a Byrum. Beaver is able to overpower it and throw it into the fire. He then sees the same migration of Maine wildlife headed out of the area. He tries to make his way to the store, but his bad knee won’t let him. He dies.

Meanwhile, the military has moved into the area and quarantined it. An alien spaceship has crashed and aliens are loose in the area. They bring with them a strange red mossy growth that the military calls “Ripley” (named for Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien) that can apparently infect humans.

Leading this military effort is Col. Howard Kurtz, an insane, gung ho military man bent on wiping out the aliens, despite their broadcasted appeals for mercy. Kurtz leads a helicopter raid on the alien ship and slaughters them without mercy. During the operation, his second in command pipes the aliens’ plea for mercy through the common channel. Kurtz regards this as an act of betrayal and decides he will deal with his subordinate, Owen Underhill, most harshly when they return to their base.

Henry is making his way back to the cabin when he senses that his friends Pete and Beaver are dead. He hears a snowmobile headed toward him. He senses that whatever is aboard that snowmobile is not friendly and decides to hide. He sees it pass and sees that his friend, Jonesy is driving it. But it’s not Jonesy inside that head. It’s an alien presence.

Jonesy has been taken over by an alien conscience he calls Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray has but one mission: to escape the quarantined area. He taps Jonesy’s mind for his memories, not revealing his entire plan. Jonesy’s consciousness retreats into a building in his mind. This building is the Tracker Bros. shipping depot in Derry where Jonesy and his friends save Duddits from his bullies and forged a friendship and something more substantial and binding all those years before.

Looking out of the window, Jonesy can see endless rows of boxes that contain his memories. While Mr. Gray is focused on another task, Jonesy leaves the depot of his mind and gathers all of the boxes labeled “Duddits” and as many as he can that say “Derry,” sensing that Derry is Gray’s target and that Duddit and his special abilities could lead him there. When Mr. Gray returns to Jonesy’s mind, he is forced to return to the depot in his mind and Gray locks him in.

Henry is captured by the military and taken to the internment camp that once was Gosslin’s Store and farm. He is put in a pen with dozens of other civilians, mostly hunters, who have been rounded up. He notices that many have the red moss, known as Byrus, growing on them and finds that it is growing on him too, in the wound he received on the leg in the crash. He finds his sense of telepathy heightened and that normal people have telepathy as well.

Henry knows that the creature inhabiting Jonesy’s body has escaped quarantine and is making its way toward the turnpike to head for Derry. He knows that civilians are never going to leave this area alive. He reaches out to Owen Underhill telepathically for help. Underhill knows the civilians will be killed and knows his own days are numbered. Underhill agrees to help Henry escape and track down Jonesy and perhaps save humanity.

Henry uses his enhanced telepathy to convince the residents of the camp that the military means to kill them. A panic ensues and the masses are able to knock down the fences and escape. Soldiers open fire, killing at random. Henry escapes and finds Underhill who has a snowmobile waiting. Kurtz realizes what has happened and tries to kill Henry and Underhill, but they escape.

What ensues is a race and chase across Maine in a blizzard. Gray, who has a dog pregnant with a Byrum, wants to infect a town water supply to spread his race’s seed on earth. Tapping Jonesy’s memories, his sights are set on Derry.

Henry and Underhill want to catch Jonesy and stop him from infecting humanity. But Henry insists that they stop by an address in Derry to visit his old friend Duddits who he knows can help establish the mental link with Jonesy, if Jonesy is still inside his own mind, and perhaps thwart Gray.

Kurtz is pursuing Underhill to exact revenge. He has a couple troops with him and two men infected with Byrus to serve as telepathic links with Henry to help track them.

Gray acquires a vehicle on the turnpike and with Jonesy tempting and tormenting him inside his head, manages to make his way to Derry and to where the old Derry standpipe used to stand. Gray is furious when the he finds the standpipe gone. Jonesy informs him that Gray tapped an old memory because the Derry standpipe came down in the great storm of 1985 (when the Losers’ Club killed IT). Gray decides to make for Massachusetts to infect the Boston water supply.

Henry and Underhill arrive in Derry about an hour later and go to Duddits house. There, Henry finds his old friend has become a man still very much with a child’s mind. He has deteriorated badly in the years since Henry last saw him. He has leukemia and is dying. Henry asks Duddits mother to take him along on their journey. Duddits insists, knowing that he is dying and has one last adventure to go on. Duddits joins Henry and Underhill.

The chase resumes. Duddits is able to link Henry and Jonesy in his dreamcatcher in his mind. With their combined abilities, they are able to mentally overpower Mr. Gray just as he’s about to drop the Byrum into the reservoir. They trap him in a hospital inside their collective minds and kill him. With his energy spent, Duddits dies peacefully with his favorite saying on his lips: “Scooby Scooby Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now.”

Gray is dead, but the Byrum is still alive. Henry, his hip broken, is powerless to do anything. But Underhill arrives at the last second and kills the Byrum. He goes back outside where he encounters Kurtz. Kurtz wounds him twice before Kurtz’s aide kills him, knowing that Kurtz planned to kill him to eliminate any witnesses. He then performs a mercy kill on Owen Underhill who has saved humanity from alien invasion.

The novel wraps up with Jonesy visiting Henry and his family that next summer and the two of them discussing their relationship with Duddits, each other, and how it came to be that day when they saved Duddits from the bullies. They also engage in a philosophical discussion about not being alone in the universe.

Dreamcatcher is just a horrible novel. It had moments of excitement and some well developed characters. The plot was not ill-conceived. This novel is perhaps the only King novel I would say was just not well written.

The use of the phrases “Same shit, different day,” and “No bounce, no play,” made me want to tear out pages when I read them. It seemed they appeared on every page for the first 100 pages of the novel. Reinforcement lapses into redundancy. I saw no point to it.

While I’m not too awfully squeamish about anything, reliance of prolific flatulence as a plot vehicle is low brow. I could have done without this. Perhaps King was trying to find a way to birth his aliens without looking as if he were ripping off the movie, Alien. Flatulence appeared on almost every page as well.

The Tracker Brothers Depot inside Jonesy’s mind and the boxes containing his memories did not work for me. It felt to me like I was reading some sort of 1970s pop psychology self help book. King used this device a few more times after inventing it in Dreamcatcher and it just never works.

As I noted, the characters are well developed – except for Kurtz. Kurtz was a caricature. While the novel was plenty long at more than 600 pages, a little more development and complexity in Kurtz might have served the story. In Dreamcatcher, he was like a cartoon villain. He wasn't menacing. He was silly and this hurt the novel badly.

Dreamcatcher ranks near the bottom of King’s collection of novels. Better than Lisey’s Story and marginally better than Rose Madder and Gerald’s Game, it’s still not very good and I’ll probably never read it again.

We can cut Stephen King a little slack since this book was written as he endured the painful recovery from his accident. He notes in the afterword that the pain he was feeling made its way into the novel and it does show up in Jonesy who, early in the book, is run down in the street after leaving his office several years before the events in Dreamcatcher took place.

The book was originally going to be called Cancer. Tabitha hated the title, thinking it entirely too negative. She convinced him to change it. King notes that this novel was written by hand with a Waterman cartridge fountain pen – what he calls “The finest writing instrument known to man.” King also tells us that he wrote by hand one night by candlelight during a power outage. Such imagery is stirring. I wish it had inspired a better novel.