Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (1985)
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"These are things made for thinking on slowly"
I bought my copy of Skeleton Crew as a paperback in 1986. I read "The Mist" that night, sitting on the edge of my girlfriend's bed in her apartment in Marion, Ohio. When Marsden Hartley said his first encounter with the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder was like reading a page out of the Bible, I know exactly what he meant, and I immediately think about that night in June 1986.
Aside from "The Mist," my favorites are King's down-east masterpieces "The Reach," "Uncle Otto's Truck" and the sublimely Machenean "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut."
Still, there are numerous pieces in Skeleton Crew I had still not read until this week. By far the best of those I read for the first time this week is "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullett." It takes its time and is completely confident in tone and strength of execution.
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Cain Rose Up (1968)
An obsessive meditation on tower snipers and wannabe Oswalds a la Charles Whitman. Hard-boiled and pitiless.
...."Let me tell you something," Garrish told Bogie. "God got mad at Cain because Cain had an idea God was a vegetarian. His brother knew better. God made the world in His image, and if you don't eat the world, the world eats you. So Cain says to his brother, 'Why didn't you tell me?' And his brother says, 'Why didn't you listen?' And Cain says, 'Okay, I'm listening now.' So he waxes his brother and says, 'Hey God! You want meat? Here it is! You want roast or ribs or Abelburgers or what?' And God told him to put on his boogie shoes. So ... what do you
think?"
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Mrs. Todd's Shortcut (1984)
...."Came the summer she disappeared. I didn't see much of her ... that was the summer we had the fire, you'll remember, and then the big storm that knocked down all the trees. A busy time for caretakers. Oh, I thought about her from time to time, and about that day, and about that kiss, and it started to seem like a dream to me. Like one time, when I was about sixteen and couldn't think about nothing but girls. I was out plowing George Bascomb's west field, the one that looks acrost the lake at the mountains, dreamin about what teenage boys dream of. And I pulled up this rock with the harrow blades, and it split open, and it bled. At least, it looked to me like it bled. Red stuff come runnin out of the cleft in the rock and soaked into the soil. And I never told no one but my mother, and I never told her what it meant to me, or what happened to me, although she washed my drawers and maybe she knew. Anyway, she suggested I ought to pray on it. Which I did, but I never got no enlightenment, and after a while something started to suggest to my mind that it had been a dream. It's that way, sometimes. There is holes in the middle, Dave. Do you know that?"
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The Wedding Gig (1980)
....But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. I doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?
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The Reaper's Image (1969)
....Mr. Carlin produced a key ring from his jacket pocket, selected a key, and mounted the stepladder. He paused on the third rung, his bald head gleaming faintly in the shadows. "I don't like that mirror," he said. "I never did. I'm afraid to look into it. I'm afraid I might look into it one day and see ... what the rest of them saw."
"They saw nothing but themselves," Spangler said.
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The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands (1981)
A well-executed club tale, modest within it's tale-within-a-tale requirements. It details consequences of an indigene's curse upon an executor of the White Man's Burden. Not quite up to "Pollock and the Porroh Man."
".... 'Poor old Henry!' he exclaimed. 'I knew it was coming to this, but I never suspected it would arrive so quickly.'
" 'What?' I asked.
" 'His breakdown,' Greer said. 'It stems from his year in Bombay, and I suppose no one but Henry will ever know the whole story. But I'll tell you what I can.'
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Morning Deliveries (1985)
....The chocolate milk was stacked in two coolers at the very back, handy to the rear doors, because it was a very big seller in June. The milkman glanced at the coolers, then reached over them and took one of the
empty chocolate milk cartons he kept in the far comer. The carton was of course brown, and a happy youngster cavorted above printed matter which informed the consumer that this was CRAMER'S DAIRY DRINK WHOLESOME AND DELICIOUS SERVE HOT OR COLD KIDS LOVE IT!
He set the empty carton on top of a case of milk. Then he brushed aside ice-chips until he could see the mayonnaise jar. He grabbed it and looked inside. The tarantula moved, but sluggishly. The cold had doped it. Spike unscrewed the lid of the jar and tipped it over the opened carton. The tarantula made a feeble effort to scramble back up the slick glass side of the jar, and succeeded not at all. It fell into the empty chocolate milk carton with a fat plop. The milkman carefully reclosed the carton, put it in his carrier, and dashed up the McCarthys' walk. Spiders were his favorite, and spiders were his best, even if he did say so himself. A day when he could deliver a spider was a happy day for Spike.
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Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (1980)
King packs more funkiness, fartiness, drunkenness, and weirdness into this story than most others. The missing hood ornament; the Iron City beer cans with Steelers players names that mirror the names of our protagonists; the insect shrouded in spider webs; the laundry worker who says he has a hole in his back from the dripping water of a leaky roof.
"Rocky, I think I'm gettin carsick," Leo said. "Couldn't we just pull over and drink?"
"I gotta get a sticker on my wheels," Rocky said. "This is important. A man's no good without his wheels."
"Nobody in his right mind is gonna inspect this—I told you that. It ain't got no turn signals."
"They blink if I step on the brake at the same time, and anybody who don't step on his brakes when he's makin a turn is lookin to do a rollover."
"Window on this side's cracked."
"I'll roll it down."
"What if the inspectionist asks you to roll it up so he can check it?"
"I'll burn that bridge when I come to it," Rocky said coolly....
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The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet (1984)
A masterpiece of a story about blackout drunks, electrical poisoning, assorted imps of the perverse, and the shared madness of an author and magazine editor.
"....Well, tell us about the letter."
"That's one I don't have by heart, it's just as well for you that I don't. Even abnormality grows tiresome after a while. The mailman was CIA. The paperboy was FBI; Reg had seen a silenced revolver in his sack of papers. The people next door were spies of some sort; they had surveillance equipment in their van. He no longer dared to go down to the corner store for supplies because the proprietor was an android. He had suspected it before, he said, but now he was sure. He had seen the wires crisscrossing under the man's scalp, where he was beginning to go bald. And the radium count in his house was way up; at night he could see a dull, greenish glow in the rooms.
"His letter finished this way: 'I hope you'll write back and apprise me of your own situation (and that of your Fornit) as regards enemies, Henry. I believe that reaching you has been an occurrence that transcends coincidence. I would call it a life-ring from (God? Providence? Fate? supply your own term) at the last possible instant.
'It is not possible for a man to stand alone for long against a thousand enemies. And to discover, at last, that one is not alone... is it too much to say that the commonality of our experience stands between myself and total destruction? Perhaps not. I must know: are the enemies after your Fornit as they are after Rackne? If so, how are you coping? If not, do you have any idea why not? I repeat, I must know.'
"The letter was signed with the Fornit Some Fornus doodle beneath, and then a P.S. Just one sentence. But lethal. The P.S. said: 'Sometimes I wonder about my wife.'
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The Reach (1981)
Another piece of down-east sublimity, already canonized by Hartwell in The Dark Descent (1987) and Silverberg and Greenberg in The Horror Hall of Fame (1991).
...."Everything I ever wanted or needed was here, " she would tell them. "We had the radio and now we have the television, and that's all I want of the world beyond the Reach. I had my garden year in and year out. And lobster? Why, we always used to have a pot of lobster stew on the back of the stove and we used to take it off and put it behind the door in the pantry when the minister came calling so he wouldn't see we were eating 'poor man's soup.'
"I have seen good weather and bad, and if there were times when I wondered what it might be like to actually be in the Sears store instead of ordering from the catalogue, or to go into one of those Shaw's markets I see on TV instead of buying at the store here or sending Alden across for something special like a Christmas capon or an Easter ham... or if I ever wanted, just once, to stand on Congress Street in Portland and watch all the people in their cars and on the sidewalks, more people in a single look than there are on the whole island these days ... if I ever wanted those things, then I wanted this more. I am not strange. I am not peculiar, or even very eccentric for a woman of my years. My mother sometimes used to say, 'All the difference in the world is between work and want,' and I believe that to my very soul. I believe it is better to plow deep than wide.
"This is my place, and I love it."
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....She was beautiful, and I was took with love for her, anyone would have been, any man, anyway, and maybe any woman too, but I was scairt of her too, because she looked like she could kill you if her eye left the road and fell on you and she decided to love you back.
--"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"
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Jay
20 March 2020
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