Elevation - Stephen King

He may be the preeminent horror author of the 20th century, but Stephen King’s greatest skill as an author isn’t blood, gore, or terror, but his depictions of community. It’s easy to forget that The Stand includes an extended sequence about rebuilding Boulder from the ruins of the superflu-fueled apocalypse, and that these scenes are among the strongest in the book. I was reminded of this while rereading Hearts in Atlantis, in which the first two stories contain long passages of the characters simply existing, passages that in the hands of lesser authors would feel like padding or wheel-spinning. There is a coziness to King’s writing that you might not expect, but is essential to his stories’ power. He writes people you care about, and seeing their lives in such intimate detail is key to making you care about them.

I thought about this a lot while reading Elevation, which is essentially nothing but coziness. There’s some interpersonal conflict and a supernatural phenomenon affecting the main character, but none of it feels primed to draw blood. Even the character’s mysterious condition that renders him constantly lighter without appearing to lose weight feels to him more like a curiosity than an impending doom. If anything, it inspires him to be a better man, and to conjure better angels from the small circle of friends his condition draws around him.

Elevation is a warm cup of tea of a book, a momentary pause to be enjoyed in one reflective sitting. Some of the political elements flirted with the corny, but King has enough skill and experience to flesh out his characters beyond caricature, and to temper didacticism with honest depictions of human behaviour. The ending retains the courage of its convictions, and reminded me of the Baron in the Trees.

Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Christine - Stephen King

I read Christine for the first time in high school and hadn’t picked it up since then. I’ve reread most of King’s books at least once since that time, and I’m not sure why Christine was one of the few I didn’t get around to. It’s a good book, classic King, full of quotidian details and bullies with switchblades and supernatural evil lurking at the fringes, operating at a level never fully explained but sufficiently realized to function within the universe of the story.

The book is constructed in an unusual way, opening and closing in first person with an extended stretch of third-person in the middle. Our narrator for the bookends is Dennis, friend of the bright, bespectacled, and perennially unpopular Arnie Cunningham, who is both the tragic hero and villain of the story. Arnie spots an aging Plymouth Fury up on blocks and is instantly smitten—or perhaps ensnared is a better word. He buys it from a crusty old coot named Roland LeBay, who dies shortly thereafter, and sets to fixing it up. As he works on the car—making impressive if desultory strides in the repair—his personality begins to change, aping the mannerisms of the late LeBay. Dennis is distrustful of the car and feels his relationship with Arnie start to slip.

Meanwhile, Arnie gets a girlfriend, who hates the car as much as Dennis does. The inevitable dirtbag bully crosses him and meets a violent end. A police officer grows suspicious and eventually dies as well. Dennis and Leigh both struggle to believe what is right in front of them, against the frantic struggle of their rational minds: Christine is alive, or possessed of LeBay’s malign spirit, or both (I was never entirely clear), and must be destroyed before it’s jealousy turns on them.

Christine is a good pulpy story elevated by King’s knack for dialogue and character, and his ability to nest outlandish tales in worlds made believable by small details. There is always room to breathe in a King story, and these moments of minutia, which a lesser writer might cut to torque up the action, have always been his greatest strength.

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).

People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.

Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.

The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.

Or at least, it should be.

If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.

I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.

Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Bag of Bones was the new King novel when I started reading him in earnest. I don’t think I got to it until high school, but I recall thinking of it as a milestone of sorts in his work, in which supernatural terrors took a backseat to more psychological fears. In truth, it’s not quite that tidy, as books like Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are clear antecedents, and Dreamcatcher, published just three years later, is classic King. Still, on rereading, I think there is a distinct maturity in Bag of Bones regarding how King went about writing novels, an increased reflection and willingness to let the narrative breathe.

Bag of Bones is billed as a ghost story, and it is, but the spirits take a back seat for much of the novel and, in truth, are the weakest part of the book. The story of Sara Tidwell is well-told and shockingly brutal in its depiction of racial violence, but the latter portion involving the storm felt like a tonal shift and a way to up the tension that had been building much more subtly before that. Really, Bag of Bones is a book about grief, and a grief of a particular sort, where a person loses the partner they meant to spend their life with and finds, with no small amount of despair, that they now have to find a way to spend it alone.

King, about 20 years married at the time of the book’s writing, writes marriage well, cutting past the saccharine hallmark pablum on one side and the hackneyed discord on the other to find a complex, beating core that is truer than most “literary fiction” I’ve read. It is this talent, I think, that separates King from his peers. The man can write a thriller with the best of them, but he populates those taut tales with real, richly evoked people. No one feels like a cog in a Stephen King novel, and you could easily imagine following a side character off the page and into their daily life.

The Dark Half - Stephen King

The Dark Half is the first Stephen King book I read from start to finish. I’d attempted two others previously, It and The Talisman, but was bested by my young age and their prodigious length (I’d chosen, unwisely, two of the chunkier entries into King’s notoriously chunky bibliography).

As a result, I’ve always held a certain affection for The Dark Half, even though I hadn’t reread it until now (nearly twenty-five years later, Jesus) and could clearly recall only two specific things about it beyond the general plot. The first was the improbable and gustatorily unsatisfactory position of a victim’s male member upon discovery of his body (Google it at your peril), and the second was a character (I couldn’t remember who) having a picture of Ronald Reagan on their dartboard. I can see why the first one stuck with me, as it was likely the most gruesome thing I’d ever read to date at that point, but why I hung onto the Reagan thing I have no idea. Especially since the book’s climax contains one of the more striking images in King’s canon: a living corpse borne aloft by a cloak of sparrows and carted screaming to hell. Seems like the sort of thing that would grab my attention, but I didn’t remember it at all.

The lead character is named Thad Beaumont, and he’s the archetype of a King protagonist if ever there was one. He’s a successful writer (check) from Maine (check) with a family (check) who stuck with him through bouts of alcoholism and anger issues (check) and who also teaches English at a local college (check). King writes well enough that this tendency never bothered me much, but I can’t deny that it’s there, especially in much of his 80s-90s work.

The twist (and perhaps the first early nod to the metatextuality that would consume much of the later Dark Tower books) is that Thad achieved most of his commercial success not as himself, but as his pen name, George Stark. A snooping fan outs That as Stark, and in order to get ahead of the story Thad admits everything and stages a “funeral” for the late George Stark. Only George decides he doesn’t like being dead, and opts instead to come to life, rising from his staged grave to wreak havoc on those who outed him, and to persuade Thad through less-than-subtle means to collaborate with him on a final book.

Pulpy stuff, but King does pulp to a high art, in large part through his characters, who I’d argue are richer than truer than many inhabitants of so-called literary fiction. The best one here is Alan Pangborn, a small town sheriff with big city instincts who proves the first bit of the mettle that will be more fully on display in his star turn a few years later, Needful Things.

I love King, and even his more forgotten works are always a pleasure to reread. This may not be his best, but it’s a solid turn.

Needful Things - Stephen King

I’ve been half-finishing a lot of books lately, which is why there’s such a large gap between entries. My choices weren’t bad books, but were a little too demanding for my frame of mind. I needed something I could sink into easily, and for that Stephen King is always a good choice.

I last read Needful Things in high school, so my memory of it was spotty. A few brief scenes remained clear to me—the fatal duel between Nettie and Wilma, the thing in Polly’s azka, and the encounter between Sherriff Pangborn and Leland Gaunt—but beyond that I could really only recall the general plot: a new store called Needful Things opens in Castle Rock, selling objects that entrance the townsfolk. I’d forgotten about the pranks, which Gaunt extracts from buyers as an additional payment in an effort to play the townspeople off of each other and stoke ill feeling.

It’s a classic King story, with a compelling villain, strong flawed heroes, and an undergirding magic that is never fully explained but feels earned by the premise of the story. It also includes a fair bit of what I think is King’s strongest trait: his ability to conjure a deep sense of community between his characters. His books never drag, even when they spend whole chapters on seemingly prosaic matters unrelated to the main story. His characters feel real, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time with them, even the unpleasant ones. There is something entrancingly human about them.

Picking up Needful Things got me in a mind to reread some of the other Castle Rock stories, as that particular intertextual universe of his hasn’t drawn me back as often as some others (the Dark Tower, for one). There’s something homey a Stephen King book (an odd thing, maybe, considering he’s known as a horror writer). It’s comforting to know I can always come back to them.

Fairy Tale - Stephen King

I was pleased as always to come across a new Stephen King novel last month. It’s comforting to know that he’s out there, and I’ll have something enjoyable form him to read every year or so. It’ll be a sad day when he’s gone.

Fairy Tale treads a similar path in broad strokes to another of his more recent works, 11/22/63. In both books, a young narrator befriends an old recluse and through their friendship discovers a portal to another world. Except in 11/22/63, it’s a question of when, and in Fairy Tale it’s a question of where. In this case, the world of Empis, a kingdom once majestic but defiled by a usurping king. Drawn to the world by the promise of a cure for his ailing dog, Charlie Reade finds himself slowly transformed into a storybook prince, albeit one with a dark side, and becomes embroiled in the struggle to right past wrongs and restore balance to the kingdom. The book follows and plays with fairy tale convention, demonstrating the allusive richness that King has become known for, especially in his later years.

The writing is pure King, effortlessly readable, with rich turns of phrase now again dropped in without tarnishing the sense of genuine dialogue needed in a first person account. As always, King’s characters are his strongest point, and the long set up as Charlie meets and befriends the cantankerous old Mr. Bowditch, scenes that would be mere water treading for a lesser author, are in some ways the best parts of the book.

If it Bleeds - Stephen King

For a writer famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for penning novels with four digit page numbers, Stephen King has always been remarkably good at novellas. If It Bleeds collects four of them, all previously unpublished. They’re a diverse lot, but consistent in quality, and in a broader theme of morality and hard decisions.

Mr Harrigan’s Phone is classic King, and of the four feels the most like one of his old short stories—tales where an ordinary person brushes up against dark forces he can’t quite understand, and backs away form them unbroken but changed. king metes out tough justice, which I’ve always appreciated, and you can’t help rooting for Harrigan even if, as the narrator does, you feel a little ill at ease with the consequences of his powers.

The Life of Chuck is, arguably, the most experimental story King has ever written, and a good rebuff to critics who brush off his writing as lackign literary merit. I’ve always pushed back at this assumption, as King, while no stranger to the potboiler plot, writes real people, not cardboard cutouts, and rich themes invaraibly thrum beneath the pulpy action on the surface of the page. Here those themes are given more spotlight, but still anchored enough to character to avoid feeling showy, as if it were some vanity project to prove his literary chops. The plot is hard to describe—its actually more like three different, each humming their own note to make a sad, autumnal chord—but gets to the notion that there is in each of us a world, perhaps a universe.

If It Bleeds steals the show, as was obviously intended—the collection’s not called Life of Chuck, after all—thanks to the welcome presense of Holly Gibney. With Castle Rock, Giliead, and the dark townships of Derry largely pushed aside, King has very ably built a new world through hir David Hodge novels, which have spilled beyond the initial trilogy into other works, notably The Outsider. This story plays as a kind of sequel to that one, with another shapechanger on the loose, which Holly must track down and destroy. The action is slow to build, giving the story lots of breathing room where King can show his strengths in building relationships between characters. It has always bee nthese, more than fantastic creatures or outrageous landscapes, that have formed the firmest foundation of King’s worlds.

Rat finishes the collection. It’s another troubled writer story, and while this is not my favourite King mode, I must admit this story held me with its excellent use of mood. Doom builds like a fever before breaking in a turn of events that it both jarring and graceful, offering a glimpse into King’s assessment of the creative process, and the old notion of writers as mediums for a distant and ghostly place, where spirits give gifts that always have strings attached. And at least this time we’re granted a semi-supernatural reason why every King character farts out bestsellers.

A solid collection, and evidence of King in top form.

Billy Summers - Stephen King

I find it hard to believe that this is my first post about a Stephen King book, which would suggest I’ve gone nearly two years without reading anything by him. I know I’ve missed most of his newest stuff, but I usually reread something of his on a fairly regular basis. In any case, it was a welcome return to my first favourite author, and the writer who more than anyone else inspired me to write my own stories.

Billy Summers, the novel’s eponymous lead, is an Iraq war veteran and assassin hired for one final job. It’s a common premise, borderline cliche, and King makes no effort to hide it. But of course things aren’t that simple, and the beats the story follows are both unexpected and familiar. Unexpected because they diverge from the common tropes that would have made Billy Summers a more conventional and lesser book, and familiar because they very much play to two of King’s favourite themes: the bonds of community, and the power of the written word.

The first theme plays out as Summers ensconces himself in the neighbourhood where he establishes himself prior to that big final job, and again later, after the job is over, through a chance encounter with a young woman named Alice Maxwell. Alice is really the crux of the story, as she pulls the novel from its familiar rails and into far less trodden—and far more interesting—terrain. It’s a joy to read King as he establishes these relationships, as he is probably the best writer I know and making you feel like this is a reall community, and to care not just about the characters themselves, but about the relationships between them.

The second theme emerges as Billy’s cover story, which is that he is a writer cloistering himself away to finish the book. The details are fairly maddening to anyone trying to make it in the business these days, and suggest that King, though obviously intimately familiar with publishing, has perhaps a rosier than true picture of what being an emerging writer these days is like—Billy’s persona, an unknown and unpublished author, lands an agent after writing a couple of chapters of a novel, and the agent is then able not only to hook a major publisher for a potential seven-figure deal, but when he isn’t finishing the manuscript fast enough, gets a $50,000 advance without delivering anything (excuse me while I scream into a pillow). I get that this is a story concocted by characters who are not writers themselves, but it’s supposed to be plausible.

In any case, the heart of the theme comes when Billy starts writing, which provides catharsis for him while simultaneously informing us of his backstory. it’s a neat device, and King handles it well, switching effortlessly between voices. there is even a bit at the end that plays with the theme of writing as wish fulfillment, and King wisely concedes the limits of writing in shaping the world, even as he espouses its power (I was happy that Billy didn’t somehow become a best seller, whcih would have been cloying and ridiculous).

King’s prose is solid. He is not the world’s foremost stylist, but he has the self-assurance of an old pro and handles his words deftly, providing bits of linguistic filigree where the enhance without making everything too ornamental. As a writer, he’s story and character first (not sure which I’d grant primacy over which; perhaps it varies between books), prose second. And his dialogue rings true as ever. Reading him felt like visiting with an old friend. I suspect I’ll be picking up a lot more of his stuff, new and old, in the near future.