"This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody."
-"You Know They Got a Helluva Band"
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In autumn of 1994 I gave Nightmares & Dreamscapes short shrift. As a collection it is a mixed bag, the weakest of the author's publishing career. He seems to have included everything but the kitchen sink. I'll concentrate on the unread tales, or ones I do not recall reading in 1994.
"Dolan's Cadillac," "Night Flyer," and "Popsy" are three of my least favorite Stephen King stories, seconded only by "Sneakers," "Umney's Last Case," and "The Moving Finger."
("The Fifth Quarter," conversely, is Richard Starkean sublimity.)
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The End of the Whole Mess (1986)
The "whole mess" referred to in the title is the everyday grinding carnage of our late capitalist social life. Narrator Howard Fornoy gives us a sketch of his genius younger brother Bobby, who figured out how to stop people from contributing to the mess.
Like "The Jaunt," a personal favorite of mine, "The End of the Whole Mess" gives us a widescreen epic in condensed form. Writing against time and rapid mental decline, Howard tells up how Bobby distilled a drug called Calmative, which he and his brother arranged to spread over the world. To calm the mess-makers.
King in this story does what he does best: gives us the poetic grandeur of belatedness, of sublime regret and mourning once unintended consequences have revealed all their disabolic magnificence.
...."The world," Bobby said, and then stopped. His throat worked. I saw he was struggling with tears. "The world needs heroic measures, man. I don't know about long-term effects, and there's no time to study them, because there's no long-term prospect. Maybe we can cure the whole mess. Or maybe-"
He shrugged, tried to smile, and looked at me with shining eyes from which two single tears slowly tracked.
"Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient with terminal cancer. Either way, it'll stop what's happening now. It'll end the world's pain." He spread out his hands, palms up, so I could see the stings on them. "Help me, Bow-Wow. Please help me."
So I helped him.
And we fucked up....
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It Grows on You (1982)
Some acutely delineated old-timers chew over the matter of the Newall house in Castle Rock, ME. (It may be one of those beacons, like the Marsten House.) It seems, like the Winchester mystery house, to never be completely finished. Its owner, Joe Newall, is a local mill magnate.
....By 1920 Joe Newall was a rich man. His three Gates Falls mills were going like a house afire, stuffed with the profits of a world war and comfortable with the orders of the newly arisen or (arising) middle class. He began to build a new wing on his house. Most folks in the village pronounced it unnecessary—after all, there were just the two of them up there—and almost all opined it added nothing but ugly to a house most of them already considered ugly beyond almost all measure. This new wing towered one story above the main house and looked blindly down the ridge, which had in those days been covered with straggling pines.
The news that just the two of them were soon to become just the three of them trickled in from Gates Falls, the source most likely being Doris Gingercroft, who was Dr. Robertson's nurse in those days. So the added wing was in the nature of a celebration, it seemed. After six years of wedded bliss and four years of living in the Bend, during which she had been seen only at a distance as she crossed her dooryard, or occasionally picking flowers—crocuses, wild roses, Queen Anne's lace, ladyslipper, paintbrush—in the field beyond the buildings, after all that time, Cora Leonard Newall had Kindled.
She never shopped at Brownie's. Cora did her marketing at the Kitty Korner Store over in Gates Center every Thursday afternoon.
In January of 1921, Cora gave birth to a monster with no arms and, it was said, a tiny clutch of perfect fingers sticking out of one eyesocket. It died less than six hours after mindless contractions had pushed its red and senseless face into the light. Joe Newall added a cupola to the wing seventeen months later, in the late spring of 1922 (in western Maine there is no early spring; only late spring and winter before it). He continued to buy out of town and would have nothing to do with Bill 'Brownie' McKissick's store. He also never crossed the threshold of the Bend Methodist Church. The deformed infant which had slid from his wife's womb was buried in the Newall plot in Gates rather than in Homeland. The inscription on the tiny headstone read:
SARAH TAMSON TABITHA FRANCINE NEWALL
JANUARY 14, 1921
GOD GRANT SHE LIE STILL.
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Chattery Teeth (1992)
A father just wants to get home alive to wife and son. A droll wind-up deus ex machina lends a... hand.
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Dedication (1988)
"Dedication" is an unusual story and very satisfying. King has a real curiosity about women and the everyday predicaments they confront. Like Dreiser, it is demanding. It is also very strong, and something to be proud of having the guts and arrogance to write.
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Home Delivery (1989)
Book of the Dead, edited by Skipp and Spector in 1989 was (to be kind) an aesthetic abortion. None of the tales took place in the Romeroverse, as the editors claimed. (This was before the homogenizing effects of The Walking Dead.) The splatterpunks thought this anthology was a (sorry) no-brainer.
"Home Delivery" has the feel of something saved in a bottom desk drawer for a rainy day. A down-east rural story, which King typically excels at, here seems oddly flat and rote.
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Rainy Season (1989)
The kind of story people who never read King think he writes all the time. Like "Children of the Corn" and "You Know They Got a Helluva Band," it is a husband-and-wife-take-wrong-turn tale. It is also a Cursed Town and a Smalltown Secret story, which King does very well here.
....Elise lurched to her feet and ran in a large circle, miraculously avoiding a tumble over the boxes, which had been stacked and stored down here. She struck one of the cellar's support posts, rebounded, then turned and banged the back pf her head twice, briskly, against it. There was a thick gushing sound, a squirt of black fluid, and then the toad fell out of her hair, tumbling down the back of her tee-shirt, leaving dribbles of ichor.
She screamed, and the lunacy in that sound chilled John's blood. He half-ran, half-stumbled down the cellar stairs and enfolded her in his arms. She fought him at first and then surrendered. Her screams gradually dissolved into steady weeping....
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You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (1992)
....it was as if the intensity of her horror had turned her into a human magnifying glass, and she understood that if they got out of here, no memories of this Peculiar Little Town would remain; the memories would be just ashes blowing in the wind. That was the way these things worked, of course. A person could not retain such hellish images, such hellish experiences, and remain rational, so the mind turned into a blast-furnace, crisping each one as soon as it was created.
That must be why most people can still afford the luxury of disbelieving in ghosts and haunted houses, she thought. Because when the mind is turned toward the terrifying and the irrational, like someone who is turned and made to look upon the face of Medusa, it forgets. It has to forget....
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My Pretty Pony (1988)
Dreiser ("Dusk of a summer evening") territory. Acute and well-observed coming-of-age wisdom transferred from grandfather to grandson, along with a pocket watch. (Mercifully, no literal ponies).
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Crouch End (1980)
King gives himself a tough row to hoe: his central characters are UK cops dealing with an American tourist's crisis. Recalls but does not equal the grandeur of a London tale like Arthur Machen's "N."
....It's like a nightmare you want to forget .as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.'
....'Well, this fellow Lovecraft was always writing about Dimensions,' Vetter said, producing his box of railway matches. 'Dimensions close to ours. Full of these immortal monsters that would drive a man mad at one look. Frightful rubbish, of course. Except, whenever one of these people straggles in, I wonder if all of it was rubbish. I think to myself then – when it's quiet and late at night, like now – that our whole world, everything we think of as nice and normal and sane, might be like a big leather ball filled with air. Only in some places, the leather's scuffed almost down to nothing. Places where the barriers are thinner. Do you get me?'
....And when she looked at them, it was a child's look — simple, exhausted, appealing . . . and at bay, somehow. It was as if whatever had happened had somehow shocked her young....
....He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side — she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.
....The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them: 'Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?'
....And in Crouch End, which is really a quiet suburb of London, strange things still happen from time to time, and people have been known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever.
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The House on Maple Street (1993)
A well-observed fantasy about a house that corrects the crisis facing the poorly blended family living within its walls.
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The Doctor's Case (1987)
Sherlock Holmes pastiches are a minefield, and no writer who wants to try one escapes unscathed. King gives us a modest puzzle that really is a puzzle and not a Moffatt-Gattis mindscrew. The style is clear and direct, and not crushed by trying to sound Victorian. King's Sherlock is clearly tuned to Jeremy Brett's TV performance, and there is not a little of the actor's panache here. And thankfully, King resists the temptation to give Holmes and Watson a ghost to bust.
"....He was caught by shadows on a day when there were none because he was afraid he would be caught by none on a day when his father's barometer said they would almost certainly be everywhere else in the room."
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Jay
25 March 2020
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