If You Could Change History, Would You??

Just finished reading 11/22/63, Stephen King's contribution to the ever-developing legend of the JFK assassination.  For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, it focuses on Jake Epping, who travels back in time from 2011 to the late 1950's, with the intention of preventing Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story of the Kennedy assassination, I can't help you--although I will suggest that King's novel provides a better primer than Oliver Stone's conspiracy-happy "JFK."

I highly recommend the book: It's one of King's trademark tomes--nearly 850 pages long--that you can just get lost in for hours on end.  What makes the book special, though, is it's unpredictability.  That is, even if you assume that King will ultimately provide a relatively happy ending (for all that he deals in horror, his novels are seldom tragic), in this particular novel, you cannot be sure what a happy ending is.  Do we want Jake to prevent Kennedy's assassination?  Will that make the world better or worse?

Far be it from me to answer that question: Read the book yourself to find out.

Shine On, You Crazy Author

Of the 438 or so books Stephen King has written, The Shining provides the greatest amount of sheer terror.  I read that book when I was a relatively young teenager--probably too young--and was so traumatized by the fearsome goings on at the Overlook Hotel that I had to take deep breaths and steel myself every time I wanted to go outside: The front door to our apartment, you see, was at the end of a hallway.  The hallway was short--maybe six feet--but always dark.  I knew that, if they were so inclined, unseen ghosts could move fast enough to grab me before I could open the door, flood the hallway with light, and cast the malevolent spirits back to Hell.  Luckily, they never got me, but the fear has never completely disappeared.

Doctor Sleep, which picks up the story of Danny (now Dan) Torrance, the tormented child at the center of The Shining, is not as scary as its predecessor--it almost couldn't be--but it provides its own satisfactions nonetheless.

In this novel, the grown-up Dan Torrance is a recovering alcoholic working at a hospice, where he uses his psychic talents (the "shining" of the original novel) to ease the elderly residents' journeys into the hereafter: His kindly deathbed ministrations earn him the nickname "Doctor Sleep."  Eventually, Dan makes the acquaintance of Abra Stone, a 12-year-old girl with immense psychic abilities of her own, abilities that have brought her to the attention of a group of spiritual vampires known as the True Knot.  The True Knot want Abra for her "steam"--basically her essence--which, because she has such a powerful "shine," would provide sustenance for days.

Stephen King knows how to tell a story, and Doctor Sleep provides plenty of suspense and excitement.  The best parts of the novel, however, revolve not around the supernatural horrors of the True Knot, but focus instead on Dan Torrance's battles with the all-too-mundane demons of addiction and alcoholism.  Stephen King himself has made no secret of his own struggles with addiction, and in the scenes depicting Dan's self-centered depredations, his desperate reaching-out for help, his temptations throughout his life of sobriety, and his interactions with sponsors and other recovering alcoholics--in these scenes we can imagine the reality through which King himself has struggled.  And we can only be thankful that he made it through and lived to share the experience with the rest of us,

Dedication

How prolific is Stephen King? Consider the book dedication. Most authors dedicate their books to their spouses. Perhaps, if one writes a second or third book, a dedication may be made to one's parents or children, or maybe another close friend or relative.  As the books continue to appear, one may thank one's agent, editor, perhaps a favorite teacher or an admired authorial role model.  Stephen King has published so many books that his latest, Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, is dedicated to the late rocker Warren Zevon, with whom King would jam occasionally as a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders (a rock band composed of famous authors like Dave Barry and Amy Tan).

Personally, I think this is great. I figure another two or three novels (which he will probably finish by Christmas) and Stephen King will be dedicating a book to me!

Well Begun and All Done: "Duma Key"

The book: Duma Key by Stephen King

Opening line: "Start with a blank surface."

Closing line: "All the rest is only life."

At some literary conference of the future, tweed-jumpsuited academics will present papers on the recuperation fiction of Stephen King. Since 1999, when King suffered a near-fatal accident, injured protagonists have turned up frequently in his work. From the dreary (Dreamcatcher, 2001) to the quite good (Lisey's Story, 2006--not an injured-protagonist story, but King's imagining of his wife, Tabitha's, experiences if he had not survived), to a significant portion of the multi-part epic, The Dark Tower, into which King wrote himself as a character. Duma Key is another entry in the growing canon.

Duma Key tells the story of Edgar Freemantle, a successful contractor who is nearly crushed to death in a construction accident. He suffers brain damage, loses an arm, and, of course, experiences massive leg pain. On the advice of his doctor, he leaves the wintry climes of Minnesota for a yearlong retreat to Duma Key, off the west coast of Florida. While there, he rediscovers a passion for art and soon finds out he is far more talented than he had ever imagined himself to be.

This being a fairly typical Stephen King story, it turns out that his supernatural-seeming talent is, well, supernatural. His paintings foretell the future! And his talent is a result of a sort of possession by a powerful evil force. . . . Blah blah blah.

As a great fan of Stephen King, we have long since resigned ourselves to taking the mediocre or the bad with the good. Duma Key is an example of the mediocre. Nothing unexpected happens, the good guys win in the end, with the requisite amount of heartbreak and horror along the way.

More interesting is to ponder the symbolism: A successful man suffers a crippling injury, only to discover his creativity blossoming. His creativity, though, is a mixed blessing: recuperative at first, energizing, only to become destructive to the artist and to those around him. What is Stephen trying to say? After his accident, he did consider packing it all in. Maybe conjuring horror and gore lost its appeal after suffering his own near miss.

Maybe, like Edgar, King cannot resist the beckoning of the blank surface (page); at the same time, though, he realizes that art is not all--the rest, after all, is (only) life.

Enjoying the Sunset

Short-story collections are inevitably hit and miss affairs.  They can't all be gems.  Stephen King's collection, Just After Sunset is no exception.

Make no mistake about it: Despite the judgments of numerous detractors (whose numbers, though, seem to have declined over the years), King can write.

(Shameless self-promotion digression: YNSHC actually wrote the entry on King for Continuum Publishing's Encyclopedia of American Literature (1999).  Look it up!  End of digression.)

He may not produce what many people consider to be capital-L Literature.  Then again, who knows?  Dickens, in his day, was a paid-by-the-word hack.  The only reason most of Shakespeare's works were even published was because a bunch of his buddies decided to bind his plays as a sort of tribute after the man's death.  Perhaps 100 years from now there will be an endowed chair of Stephen King studies at the University of Maine.  If there isn't already.

But Literature or not, the man knows how to tell a story.  He wastes no time establishing character, as the first paragraph of "A Very Tight Place," the last story in the collection makes clear:

"Curtis Johnson rode his bike five miles every morning.  He had stopped for a while after Betsy died, but found that without his morning exercise he was sadder than ever.  So he took it up again.  The only difference was that he stopped wearing his helmet.  He rode two and a half miles down Gulf Boulevard, then turned around and rode back.  He always kept to the bike lanes.  He might not care if he lived or died, but he respected the rule of law."

That last sentence, in fact--that violation of the writing-class edict to "show not tell"--is about the only thing that separates King from the realm of Literature.  But one suspects that it's not there because King lacks faith that his readers couldn't draw their own conclusions from his description; rather, King wants his stories to go down easy, like a cold beer on a hot day (about the level of sophistication of a typical King simile)--they are entertainments, and part of entertaining is making your guests as comfortable as possible while they spend time in your narrative world.

The irony, of course, is that Stephen King makes his readers comfortable while describing some highly uncomfortable predicaments.  In the story referenced above, the protagonist finds himself trapped in a none-too-clean port-a-potty.  In another story of a desperately trapped character, "The Gingerbread Girl" (the longest story in the book), a woman is bound to a kitchen chair by a serial killer, and the question that drives most of the plot is whether she'll free herself before her tormentor returns from his latest deadly mission.

The thrillers are the best stories in the collection.  In addition to "The Gingerbread Girl" and "A Very Tight Place," these include "Rest Stop," about a mild-mannered writer who has to channel his more-violent alter ego (his "inner Richard Bachman" as King describes it in the afterward) to rescue a victim of domestic violence; "N.," a sort of homage to H.P. Lovecraft; and "Mute," in which a man enters a confessional to expiate what may or may not be a mortal sin.

King's more-sentimental stories are less satisfying.  The semi-supernatural tales "Willa," "Ayana," and "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" all suffer from the fact that there doesn't seem to be much of anything at stake.  They are "nice" stories, and Stephen King just doesn't do "nice" all that well.

This is not a condemnation--far from it.  Anyone who can grab a reader's attention and keep him compulsively turning pages to see what happens next is far ahead of most writers, including most of those writers considered "Literary."  His short stories are like so much popcorn--not especially bad for you, eminently enjoyable.  And even if you get a little tired of popcorn, you know you're going to enjoy it again the next time you're in the mood.