The Stand Ep. 3 "Blank Pages" - Thoughts and Impressions

 

Happy New Year, King fans! This blogger celebrated the way a mid-40's man should; in bed, sound asleep.

Well, the good news is, I'm not doing this in the dead of night this time, so I'm not too tired to type, and you don't have to look at me if you want my thoughts.

So, The Stand is three episodes deep and overall, I still like it a lot. Yes, there are issues. I detailed most of them when talking last post about my issues with how the anachronic order is working (it seems hit and miss, last episode mostly miss) and that I was angered by the lack of Lincoln Tunnel scene, Lloyd's new persona as this young, new-to-crime, scared kid, who for some reason was still cocky in the prison. Anyway, I complained a lot but this episode I think did a good bit to draw the series' hand out of the fire.

Let's begin with the good; most of the main characters have indeed shown up by this point. We now have met Stu, Frannie and Harold (first episode), Larry, Nadine, Joe, Nick, Ray (Ralph) and Lloyd (second episode), and now in this one, we've met Glen (who I couldn't think to name while spouting off the top of my head) and Tom Cullen. Some of these people are directly based off their novel personas and some have been modified a bit to fit a 2019 setting (that being when this was all filmed). I think they work for the most part. Of course, we met our Big Good and Big Bad in the first episode, and this episode does a good deal to flesh both of them out. We finally get long scenes of Mother Abigail speaking to the other characters, and I think I do like Whoopi Goldberg's take on her. Obviously Whoopi isn't as old as the character is meant to be, but she pulls off pretending the age well. I had selected Cicely Tyson for the part, but I think Whoopi is more than fine here. She's also got the same magnetism she's always had, and we knew she was capable of solid, dramatic performances. 

Alexander Skarsgaard gets a single scene here, one that I'm pretty sure is original, where he tries to convince Nick (Henry Zaga) to come to Vegas and be his right-hand man. The scene implies that Flagg sees a darkness in Nick that he can exploit, and it makes his rejection of Flagg, and later acceptance of Mother Abigail, that much more powerful. Nick is shown here to not exactly trust either one, at first, but follows the one who doesn't demand worship. Skarsgaard is fine in the scene, and I think he's a solid choice, but so far I can't tell if he's better than Jamey Sheridan.

One thing I was kinda hoping for was to make it more clear that Nick was able to use a tablet or smart phone to communicate with those who don't sign, and only resorts to pad and paper once keeping a tablet charged becomes impossible. But I guess I don't have that big an issue with it. I did like the subtle addition that Frannie knows sign language, and uses it instinctively when she's talking in a group that includes Nick. 

Greg Kinnear makes his debut as Glen Bateman here, and I was more impressed with him than I thought I would be. Glen in the book is bald and crusty, like a college professor would be in 1978, when the book was first published. Today, college professors are liberal hipsters, most of whom are somewhere around my age, or at least look my age, which makes Kinnear a good choice as he's pushing 60 but looks closer to 45. When he shows up, clad in jeans and what he likely thinks are cool clothes, I thought "Yeah, I could see this guy teaching Advanced Sociology". His scenes with Stu are great, and I'm still enjoying James Marsden as Stu more than I thought I would.

This episode does a bit to flesh out Nadine and Joe, showing their meeting with Larry and showing that Joe has come a long way, behavior-wise, as it includes his lunging at Larry with a knife. Nadine is revealed to be Flagg's chosen almost right off the bat (we open the episode with young Nadine and her schoolmates playing with a Ouja board, and if you've read the book, you know the scene), but...I don't know, maybe it's just me but I always felt Book Nadine to be less willing and wondering if she should be following Flagg. Of course, most of that is internal monologue, but I still got the sense that for a bit, she actually considered staying in Boulder and siding against Flagg until realizing that she had no real choice. Here, she seems to hate Boulder and everyone in it, and is just faking it until she can get to Vegas.

We also meet Tom Cullen, as I said, and so far he seems to only be there as part of Nick's backstory; we don't see him in present-day Boulder. And Nick's scenes have been entirely condensed; no more deputy sheriff job (the sheriff isn't even present), no Doc Soames, little in the way of Ray Booth, and Tom just shows up at the hospital, for seemingly no reason.

Brad William Henke plays Tom, and looks-wise he's just about spot-on, but give me some time before I pass judgement on his performance. He's not bad in this episode, but he seems a tad...aggressive, I guess, is how I'd put it. Tom in the books is innocent and childlike. This Tom is more like the guy at the bus stop who strikes up a conversation with you out of nowhere and follows right along as you try to move away from him. To be fair, that's apparently the Tom we're going for, here. Tom's first act after realizing Nick's awake is to launch into a rehearsed speech: "My name is Tom Cullen, I'm 42 years old and I am developmentally disabled. Please do not be alarmed at my behavior as I have trouble reading social cues..." and so on. This I liked, not only because Nick now understands immediately what kind of man he's dealing with, but also because this is a realistic portrayal of how a real developmentally disabled person would introduce themselves in the modern age. I also like that Tom's disability now seems more to be that he's somewhere on the spectrum. Tom in the book is frequently referred to as being "retarded", even by heroic characters, which is not a term we use today, and at times it seems like he's supposed to have Down's Syndrome, but he's capable of stuff that a Down's patient would not be. This Tom being on the spectrum makes more sense. They do keep his "M-O-O-N, that spells *insert word or phrase*" and I was happy to see that, as it's a defining characteristic for him, but they have him realize within moments of meeting Nick that he can't hear or speak.

I also enjoyed seeing more interaction with the previously-established characters. We get a scene of Stu meeting Harold and Frannie, with Harold nearly chasing him off because "for all we know, he could be Jeffrey Dahmer!"

Uh...Harold? 

Glass houses, my friend, glass houses.

We also are shown that Harold left markers along the trail, and not just in Ogunquit. This probably should have been included the last episode, or at least not had Larry thank him for his help until after this one, but it does come to mind that this series probably will benefit from being binge-watched once all the episodes have aired. Which makes the decision not to drop them all at once even stranger, but that's how CBSAA has decided to do things. Old habits die hard, I guess. I think we might all feel differently about the anachronic order, et al, once we can sit down and watch this thing in one nine-hour meal as opposed to the 1-hour bites we're getting right now.

That being said, the anachronic order is really bugging people, and I see why to some extent, though most of the complaints are about it being used at all, while I think the main issue is execution, not just griping because I want everything done in the same order as the book. It seems very inconsistent, and in particular this episode annoyed me by just once giving us a time frame textual opening ("Two Weeks Earlier..."). Either do that throughout or don't do it at all, and give us some sort of cue when we're changing timeframes. Damages used different camera filters to let us know if we were in the framing device or the story itself. Some shows play with the aspect ratio. Some use musical stings or sound effects to let us know a flashback is beginning. The Stand does nothing, and that's what bugs me. If you're gonna do it, do it in a way that doesn't demand the viewer read the book to understand it. Hell, I've read the book repeatedly and I still don't understand everything! But I do wonder if binging it will help. We'll see.

One last thing I'm going to talk about is a change from the book involving an escapee from Vegas who shows up in Boulder. Heck Drogan, played here by TJ Kayama, drives to Vegas despite having recently been crucified, to warn the townsfolk about Flagg and his powers. He manages to meet with Mother Abigail, but doesn't get far before Flagg pulls a Saruman and speaks through him, giving the "your blood is in my fist, Mother" speech before Heck expires. It's a mostly well-done scene, and I liked the addition of crows hurling themselves against the window of their room in bloody, feathered splats. I liked that this speech was moved from Abigail's dream to the waking world so that all those gathered can witness it.

So it might sound like I'm complaining a lot, but I still think there's enough to like that I'm on board for the rest, and I think there's a chance that when it's all complete the total package will be something special. I also still prefer this to the Mick Garris version, which, despite being chronological and having a script from King himself still felt immediately dated and stale, despite some good aspects (Jamey Sheridan and Ruby Dee both did well). At some point I will talk more about this, probably in a post about why Mick Garris's King-based films are terrible. I've seen all his offerings now, and I hope to Gan he never does another.

Quick reading update: I'm nearly finished Rose Madder, which, unlike Insomnia is new territory for me. A post on Insomnia will come when I feel like I have my thoughts in order for it. After Rose Madder I think I want to delve into some other horror writers, but I'm going to talk about them, too, as I've said that this new blog won't just be about King's own works.

The Stand, Episode Two: “Pocket Savior” Thoughts and Impressions

Too tired to type, but not to talk. Enjoy me talking about the second episode.

The Stand, Episode One: "The End" Thoughts and Impressions

Well, a day after saying I haven't seen it yet, I have now seen the opening episode of The Stand, the second adaptation of what it probably King's greatest novel to date. This isn't going to be a review, really, just me processing my thoughts.

And in short, what did I think? Strong start. A very strong start.

I know there are King purists who have issues with how this was handled. They don't like the new anachronic structure, that begins in Boulder, and through various time hopping, begins to fill us in on how everyone got there. I've even seen some really insistent Redditors (and people elsewhere) start in with the whole "Josh Boone just doesn't understand the story", a complaint that always makes me role my eyes and think "Sure, buddy, and if you were ever given the opportunity to do your own version, I'm confident someone would say the same of you."

I used to wonder why I seemed to trust critics more than audiences when it comes to freshly released material. And it's this; no matter how little I agree with a professional critic, they at least take the time to explain their stance on the topic at hand. Well, most do, and when they don't, when a review is little more than a critic belittling those who don't share their opinion, then said reviewer has failed at their job. But for the most part, a reviewer will back up what they say with a thought-out, reasoned argument and, usually, critical consensus will be how history views something. There are exceptions, but in many of those cases, audiences were just as dismissive as critics were. Pick almost any film that has become a cult classic on home video, and you'll likely find that both critics hated it at the time and it bombed at the box office, too.

Viewers, on the other hand, tend to just react. They shout "WHY DID THEY CHANGE THAT!!!??" or "That was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life!" They hold on to these reactions for years, often refusing to re-watch the source of their ire because they don't want their opinion to change. And yes, I think this was the case for a lot of viewers of Andy Muschetti's It films, to say nothing of the reaction to Disney's Star Wars films. I mean, I see the weaknesses there, as well, but come on, guys, "worse than the prequels"?

And that is, for the most part, how the over-the-top screaming reactions to "The End" can be summed up. Anachronic order when the book was chronological! Bad! Flagg held open the door for Campion! Bad! Harold is skinny! Bad! We didn't get to see much of Arnette! Bad!

I'm not saying I think every part of this was successful, but ultimately, it feels like a lot of the complaints are basically people who wanted a word-for-word translation, and I've already spoken at length about how those just don't happen, and it wouldn't work if it did. Or alternately, watch any Mick Garris film based on a King work, especially if King himself did the screenplay. Can you honestly say those films are even good, let alone better?

I guess I should also bring up the discussion of just how should The Stand even be filmed, with a lot of people of the mind that it really deserves to be its own multi-season TV series. One person has even laid it out; it needs four seasons, each season covering a fourth of the novel.

There are various reasons I can't agree here. A lot of it comes from how much of the novel is internal monologue, with various characters remembering events from their pasts that are, in many ways, irrelevant to the story at hand. In a novel they work to flesh the characters out. In an adaptation, they should be the first thing to go. And offhand I can think of passage upon passage that is little more than characters reminiscing about stuff from the past, sometimes decades ago. These can go on for pages and pages, and while that's fine in a novel, it's just not needed. To be honest, I'm not sure why this story can't be covered in 9 hours. I might have preferred ten, but I spotted a lot of filler even in the book (most of Stu and Tom's journey back to Boulder was a big one).

The second big reason I'm okay without this covering multiple seasons is that there's no guarantee of renewal, and would you have wanted an adaptation that got us no further than Part One?

So, I'm fine with the anachronic approach. King even used it himself in other books so I don't see why it can't be used here. King might even use it if he were try and re-write it today. I do think some confused time-jumps with POV flashbacks, however. A time-jump means we, the viewer, are being shown events of a different time. A POV flashback means it's just the memory of one character. One review I read seemed to think that all the time-jumps were meant to be Harold's flashbacks, meaning that flashing back to events and people he wasn't privy to doesn't work, but they weren't Harold's flashbacks, so it does work.

One YouTuber pointed out that at times this seems rushed, and it does, mostly in how quickly the plague spreads. I think this could end up being fleshed out in later episodes, so I won't immediately call this a flaw, but yeah, I could have stood with a more gradual plague spread. Here it seems like everyone just dies overnight. One scene they're coughing, the next they look like Bib Fortuna in the last episode of The Mandalorian.

And speaking of, this time they really do a great job with the "tubeneck" effect. The miniseries kinda ignored this. But not here. Oh, no. At one point, Frannie moves her dad's body and the neck-tube wobbles, and it looks like there's something fleshy and solid under the swelling. I could immediately understand what touching that swelling would feel like. Well done. At one point we get to see a tube slashed with a scalpel, complete with a squirt of blood and pus. Disgusting and awesome.

Some have been angered by showing us that the Dark Man appears to be the author of these events, or at least set them directly in motion, thanks to showing us how Charles Campion was able to escape the testing base. In the book, he just manages to get out inches ahead of the lockdown. In this episode, he initiates the lockdown himself, but then notices the door to his chamber is stuck open. He stares at the door, stares at a picture of his family, and you see him warring with himself over what to do. Finally he bolts from the room to get his wife and kid and go on the run. The moment he leaves, the camera pans down and we see a cowboy boot holding the door open, that lets it close the moment Campion escapes.

Personally, I like this. Flagg, in the book, seems to possess little memory of who he is, and it implies his powers are new to him, but when you consider that he's the same man as the Man in Black from The Dark Tower, it becomes obvious that this is just Flagg taking on a new persona, not the idea that literally he was human until the events of the story began. We'll see how Flagg is handled in future episodes; I thought I heard something about how this will make clear that Flagg was just a normal human before (and I understand that even in King's canon he began as a human, but I also understand that it's been a long time since those early days).

It really does seem, when I examine those complaints, that the chief issues people have with it (aside from it feeling rushed) really do stack up as "they changed it, and that is bad". I've said before that changes are not automatically bad should they be done in an effort to clarify or enhance the story in a visual medium. Fidelity to a novel's spirit, overall story and characters remains a must (a big part of why I hated The Grey Castle) but changes in the aid of making the story fit the medium better? I'm all for that. Again, when King writes his own screenplays and hires utter hacks like Mick Garris to direct them, the result is often crap, or at the very best just sorta okay, and in every case they try for a literal translation, or as close to one as they can get. Meanwhile some pretty damn good Kingian adaptations take great liberties with the translation. Even stuff that doesn't get a lot of credit, like The Night Flier.

So let's talk about a couple of changes that weren't so good. First off, I wasn't a big fan of making General Starkey into a hero. Starkey is a relatively minor character in the book, but his impact is rather large. See, Starkey isn't a bad man, but he is the man in charge of the project that developed the virus in the first place, and is the man tasked with keeping it all under wraps, whatever that may mean. Several times in the book he orders the death of innocent civilians just for speculating publicly on the nature of Captain Trips, and he even orders Stu executed at one point.

In this series, he's played by JK Simmons, who is excellent as always even if I really did want to see him in a larger role, like Glen Bateman. Simmons can play bad guys, or conflicted good guys, but here he's solidly heroic, letting Stu go because he's not about to "just follow orders" when the people who were giving them, and the reason they were ever issued, are gone. In fact, this series invents a person who's the exact opposite, a low-ranking soldier named Cobb (played by Daniel Sunjata) just so Starkey can look even better in comparison. I liked the moral ambiguity better. In the book he is driven to his lowest point, whereas here he goes out like a hero.

But I mean, that's not even really a huge issue for me. I can live with it, even if I'm unsure about it. There's another scene where Frannie (Odessa Young) OD's and is found in the nick of time by Harold, and some have complained that Frannie would not get that low. I don't know, though, it's kinda clear they're going in a different direction with this Frannie; she seems more melancholy from her first moment on screen, and she's clearly less tolerant of Harold than in the book. The book lets us know that she's far from Harold's biggest fan, but outwardly is kind to him. Here she's spiteful to him practically from the first, though I will also say that Harold himself has many creepy moments that likely fueled this.

And this brings me to the highest of high points; the casting. They're all wonderful, but special praise must be given to Owen Teague as Harold Lauder. We remember Teague as Patrick Hockstetter in Muschetti's It, and while he was good there, too, he wasn't given much to work with. But here, he's incredible, and I see a bright future for his acting career, assuming COVID ever goes away. While Book Harold was fat and had bad skin (until he stopped eating chocolate and his physical job in Boulder melted his weight off him) but here, despite being skinny and clear-faced, his Harold just screams perverted creep. The first thing we see him do is stare at the object of his unrequited affections (Frannie) through a knothole in her fence. Later he takes one of his dead sister's photos of the two of them at the beach and folds it over so that only Frannie is visible, and jerks off to the photo. We see him practicing his speech to convince Frannie to leave town with him, and then, combine that with his behavior when we flash back to Boulder and...man, I love what they've done with the character. 

As for the other characters, we haven't met many of them yet. Aside from Harold, Fran and Gen. Starkey, we briefly see Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail, who looks credible enough and I liked her voice-over intro so I think she's going to be just fine, and we meet Stu, already locked up and under observation, played here by James Marsden, who I wasn't sure about when I first heard this, but he acquits himself well. He's a good-looking actor, but thanks to his age being allowed to show (he's 48 in real life, and he definitely has more lines on his face and grey in his hair than I'm used to seeing on him), he comes off more like an everyman than I was afraid he would. This might be his best performance, too. His scenes are very strong. I liked the building friendship between him and Dr. Ellis (a sort of mix of Denninger and Dietz, played by the always likeable Hamish Linklater), that felt real even as short as it was. Some of Dietz as also split into Cobb, the humorless soldier ready to take care of the "problem" Stu represents even after the reasons for it don't exist anymore.

We don't see much of Flagg this episode but what we do see is pretty chilling stuff. I'm not sure what I think of his hair, though. He's played by Alexander Skarsgaard, leading me to wonder what it is about the Skarsgaard brothers that they keep showing up as ageless, mysterious, powerful beings in works by or based on Stephen King? We gonna get Gustaf as The Man in the Black Suit next? Actually, he would...never mind.

But the question I think is being asked by a lot of Constant Readers is, does it hold up to the 1995 original mini-series? You may have already surmised that I think this blows it away, at least so far. The mini-series was, in my view, merely okay, which for a Mick Garris piece is practically glowing praise. I'm crediting the fact that it wasn't bloody awful with the fact that the source material is so good. But again, as is the case with Garris, it felt more like some sort of dramatic reading of sections of the book. It suffered from some godawful casting (I liked Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe, Ruby Dee and some others, but Molly Ringwald, Corin Nemec, the usually reliable Matt Frewer, Adam Storke, even Ray Walston all were either awful or seemed unsure of what they were doing there), not to mention some truly awful visual effects, and the fact that it aired on network TV removed nearly all its teeth. Speaking of casting, whose idea was it to have Kareem Abdul Jabar play the monster shouter? In what universe was that a good plan?

I don't have much yet to compare Skarsgaard to Jamey Sheridan or Goldberg to Ruby Dee, but I can tell you right now Owen Teague destroys Corin Nemec, and I think I believe Odessa Young more so than Molly Ringwald as Fran. I think I would believe a ball of pocket lint in any role more than I would Ringwald, though. How does Marsden stack up against Gary Sinise as Stu? Well, hard to say yet, because while I like Sinise, he always seemed too old for the part, which is odd because he was younger back then than Marsden is now, but Sinise has this lived-in face while Marsden has been playing young guys for the past 20 years and only now is starting to look even close to his age. I guess I also felt like Sinise was too...man, I don't know what to say. Most of his roles have a degree of menace to them, even his good guy roles, and while Stu needs to look tough, he does not need to look menacing. I'm not saying Sinise played Stu as menacing. I'm saying that he came off a little bit that way almost by accident. And again, even though there's more years between Marsden and Young than there were between Sinise and Ringwald, it still felt like Stu could be her dad, while Marsden looks fine as her pseudo-husband.

Future posts on this series will likely contain more comparisons between this and the mini-series. It's sorta unavoidable. At the moment I feel like this is leaps and bounds better, but I also am not a fan of the mini-series while I know plenty are. Again, I think that the approach of the Garris series was to try and just transcribe the book as best he could in six hours, but he's incapable of including the heart and soul of what made the book so special, while I think Boone has already done a much better job there. A large part of that is tone. Garris's tone is never right. In the case of The Stand, everything felt too clean, too sparkly, even thought the entire story is about a disease starting the Apocalypse. Everybody was attractive, nobody was filthy enough from their cross-country trips, scenes were always sunny and well-lit (unless it was night, of course). Here, the mood is dour and dark, and everyone seems tense and on edge. Harold is not just a whiny kid but a potential school shooter who embodies the sociopath. Frannie is not a model, nor is she smiley and happy all the time. Stu manages just the right amount of hardness without seeming the asshole. Like I said, we haven't seen much of the other characters yet, but so far, those that we've gotten more than one quick scene from, I think we're three for three here.

A reading update

Lots going on right now; I had my own brush with COVID when my 19-year-old son let us know he'd tested positive. As I had recently driven him to work, this necessitated the rest of my family getting tested; thankfully we're all negative, but the rules where I live are that if you've been in contact with a COVID-positive person at all, isolate for 14 days in case you become symptomatic, even with a negative test. If you do become symptomatic, those 14 days start over again. So far, we're fine.

You'd think that would enhance my reading time, but really it doesn't to any great degree. I've been working from home this entire year, so I will still be putting in regular shifts (12 hour days) and I still have two small children running around my house, creating joy and utter chaos wherever they go.

But I still am reading, and still plan to keep this blog as regularly updated as I can.

I also have kept watching, and at this point have watched pretty much everything except some stuff I haven't read the book/story versions of, and would rather go in having read them. I have also watched literally King-written film/miniseries in existence, with the exception of that one X-Files episode he wrote (that I understand got substantially re-written anyway).

When it comes to watching TV series based off King, the question is how much do I really want to watch? Unlike my friend over at thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com, I don't include "fauxquels" such as Pet Sematary II, A Return to Salem's Lot or the myriad Children of the Corn sequels to be must-watches for this project, but then I did watch The Running Man and The Lawnmower Man, both of which are just barely related to their alleged source material, and I also am watching, and enjoying, Castle Rock. But I kinda quit early with The Dead Zone, the Canadian-produced TV adaptation that stars everyone's favorite 80's John Hughes nerd Anthony Michael Hall. I watched until it was obvious we'd left King's material in the dust and that from here on out we were gonna get passing references at best, and honestly, I wasn't enjoying the show, so I stopped. Maybe if I had enjoyed it, I would have kept watching. I don't know. Or maybe if it didn't run six full seasons. It was easy to get all of Kingdom Hospital watched, and even Castle Rock's seasons are cable series-length.

Write-ups for them are forthcoming, of course, as will posts on what I've finished reading.

Which brings me to my latest reading update. When I stopped the blog last, I was working on Four Past Midnight, which I dropped early, but went back to later on, finishing all four novels in that collection. I burned through The Waste Lands, Needful Things, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne and the remaining stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes before kinda getting burned out on pure-King-nothing-but-King again, and returned to my first love, which is fantasy.

I think part of what stopped me was knowing what novel was next. I have read Insomnia before and I remember thinking it was not a bad story at all, but one I didn't truly enjoy, and one I didn't relish the idea of returning to. I also knew, if I planned to keep on making this a blog about an interconnected Stephen King Shared universe, that this was one I couldn't leave out, for reasons that will become clear when I talk more about it. At any rate, I have just completed it, and I will be doing a full post on it right away here.

This morning I also read, for the first time, "The Man in the Black Suit", which isn't my first story fully read from Everything's Eventual but it is the first one I've read that didn't seem to be tied to The Dark Tower. So I have already read "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe", "Everything's Eventual" and "The Little Sisters of Eluria", the latter two being obvious and the first being because I heard there was a connection between the insane waiter from that story and the Crimson King. And there is. Kinda.

"The Man in the Black Suit" feels like breaking new ground, and I like that in this collection King tells you some background information on the stories, something I believe he does for all collections going forward. He didn't do this in his previous collections, except for Four Past Midnight, which I thought at the time had mostly to do with the fact that these are four full novels packaged together. I'm thinking that posts on the short stories will still be shorter write-ups collected together, as I've done in the past.

For Insomnia, I'll do a post for it separately, as I said, but I think it won't be a review proper and more just thoughts and impressions I have about it, which is likely how it will be overall here. If something is in need of being filmed, or remade, I may talk about that in brief, but if I cast it at all it will be through the page mycast.io, and will consist of "who I pictured while reading" rather than a full explanation of my cast.

There will also be more posts coming on my Kingian viewing, and would you believe I haven't had a chance to watch the first episode of The Stand? I have it queued up and ready, and I'll definitely expound my thoughts on that one.

Meanwhile, as my picture shows, I also got some new reading material, which at some point will be included on this blog (though don't ask me when). This is reading material that goes beyond "did King or Hill write it". and is more tangentially related to my Kingian studies. For starters, I broke down and bought two Owen King Books, We're All in This Together and Double Feature. I know I said I wouldn't bother including his works, but I was intrigued by both, so I will be reading them, and I'll let you know what that was like. I still don't think I'll be seeking out Tabitha's works. They just sound really dull.

I already talked about having Rocky Wood's Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, and to add to that I now have Feast of Fear, which sounds like a fascinating dive into King's thoughts and ideas, and finally I have an unexpected addition to my reading list.

I did not know that there was a "novel" of Storm of the Century, and really, there isn't, but King did have the full screenplay published, in paperback, and it looks from the outside just like one of his novels, and has been counted among his novels by Constant Readers for years. I saw the miniseries, and wondered if I should try and pick up the book. I struggled with this, because I've always considered scripts and screenplays to be different from novels, and felt like in those cases seeing the filmed product was likely enough, but then, thanks to having a copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, I had read the screenplay for Sorry, Right Number, King's original story for Tales From the Dark Side, which was published years after the episode aired, and I'd also seen the episode, so why would I not want to also have this published screenplay? Well, in part because an episode script included in a collection vs. a full book struck me as two different things. Second, because the copies I found on Amazon were pretty pricey, and I couldn't really justify it. But then, while having a look in the horror section of my local used bookstore (all this happened before my son's COVID diagnosis) I found it. And I wasn't gonna let that moment pass, I can tell you!

Whether I'll read it when I get to it, I haven't decided. I saw the series and I know I'll be talking about it. I think a full read and then post on both the screenplay and the series is warranted.

Continuing to Binge

I did say I'd keep talking about my Stephen King film adaptation binging, and so I shall.

It still makes me feel a little weird to admit that I've seen so few of his adaptations overall. Some of them I'd seen years ago, and some of those I considered myself to have "seen" I had never sat down to watch in their entirety and had instead "seen" them mostly thanks to catching large chunks of them on TV. Take The Stand, which I did see in its totality, but only due to renting the DVD and watching as much as I could here and there. But now my memories are refreshed, and in many cases created, so I'm ready to talk (briefly) about them. 

I left off with Firestarter last, so in chronological order, let's move on to:

Word Processor of the Gods (1984)

What does one do when one cannot find an online version of a TV series that contains two episodes he wants to watch? One buys the entire TV series on DVD, naturally. That's what sane people who don't make a ton of money do. Well, anyway, it's what I did. I read this one a while back, and I've talked about it, and how what mostly affected me was the way the story spent a while warning our lead character not to tamper with reality the way he now could, and the ending has him literally un-personing his son (and possibly wife) and re-writing reality to bring his dead nephew and sister-in-law back to life...as his wife and son. The way the story leaves us on this note feels ominous, but lets us imagine the consequences of what he's just done. The TV episode, which stars the always-watchable Bruce Davison, seems to think this is a happy ending. If you watch the ending scene, it's well-lit with sweet-sounding music playing over it, and it feels like we're being asked to think that everything worked out for our protagonist, whose actions have been purely selfish (even if his actual wife and son are pieces of work). I also did not care much for the actor who played Jonathan (the nephew-turned-son). He was stilted and felt like he was trying to make sure he got all his lines right. But otherwise this adaptation is pretty straight-up faithful. I was kinda surprised at how it played out just like the story.

Cat's Eye (1985)

Drew Barrymore was such a cute kid. She instantly has us hoping nothing bad happens to her, and thankfully, unlike King's books, which has child death out the wazoo, Drew survives this one. (Oh, Spoilers, I guess, for an almost 40-year-old film). This is an anthology film, of sorts, the framing device being the adventures of a stray cat who, after being briefly chased by both Cujo and Christine (and the film makes sure you know that's who it was), has a vision of a little girl saying "it's coming for me" and "you have to stop it", before getting caught by a man working for a company called "Quitters, Inc." And thus we get our first adaptation, the film vignette playing out almost just like the short story, with James Woods as our trying-to-quit protagonist, giving his usually strong performance, but the part of this story that sticks out to me is the scene where he buys his little girl a doll and takes it to her at school, mainly as a way of making sure she's okay. As my regular readers know, I have a daughter myself, who as of this writing is close to the age of Woods's daughter (played by Barrymore), and dangit if Barrymore's glasses and wig don't make her look a little like my daughter, as well! The scene is very sweet, and Barrymore's acting makes her actually feel like we're watching a father and daughter, and not an actor and child actor pretending to be father and daughter. Again, for those who get worried about kids being hurt, don't, because nothing happens to his daughter. His wife, on the other hand...well, you get it. The cat escapes the facility and is picked up by a high-rolling gangster who makes a bet that the cat can cross a busy street and not be run over. After he wins, he takes the cat home and reveals that he's the villain of "The Ledge", which is a pretty harrowing tale that had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. We then move into the original story of the movie, which introduces a supernatural angle that wasn't present before, cat visions aside (one could consider the cat's visions to be a product of its own imagination). In this case, the cat is taken in by a sweet little girl (Barrymore again), named General, and becomes her pet over the objections of her mother. General realizes the girl is being attacked by a gremlin creature bent on stealing her breath, but her mother blames the cat. I didn't hate this film at all, and the first two stories are very engaging. The last one is okay, thanks to Barrymore's intensely lovable nature, but it isn't scary in the least, and in fact is another chapter in King stories usually becoming strangely high on the comedy factor. As his books aren't funny at all, and his attempts at humor are usually forced, I don't understand why his movies tend to pile on the cheese and focus on comedy. His movies from the 80's, at any rate.

Silver Bullet (1985)

When Stephen King writes his own screenplay, the results are often hit-or-miss. I'm gonna call this one a hit. Which is weird, because all the ingrediants for absolute suckage were there. It stars Gary Busey. It It was based on a novella that didn't have a ton of screen potential. It has a King-penned screenplay, which, again, is not only not a guarantee of a winner but has an extremely high chance of being awful (I really don't know why King the novelist vs. King the screenwriter are practically two different people, but they are), its director mostly worked in TV and this is his only big-screen credit, and it's a werewolf movie made in the 80's. But somehow all that comes together to make a charming little movie that's even a little scary in some places, features some not-bad werewolf effects (even for today, seeing as how modern werewolf movies tend to rely on CGI) and it's even a little scary in places. It does not go for the cheese factor in the slightest, Busey is remarkably restrained and believable as the well-meaning drunk uncle, and Everett McGill gives a pretty good performances as the town minister. Considering how forgettable the source material is, and what went in to making it, the movie is better than it has any right to be. Is it truly good? Well, let's put it this way; it doesn't suck and it held my attention.

Gramma (1986)

This short tale was adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone, and Barrett Oliver, best known to my generation as Bastion from The Neverending Story, stars as young George, who's left in charge of his ailing grandmother when his bullying older brother ends up having to be driven to the hospital. His only job is to bring her a cup of tea if she wakes up, but the longer he's left in the eerily quiet house with Gramma, the more he begins to remember stories about her, and the rumors about dark entities she associated with. The story is very creepy, and very well told, but I wondered how it could be translated to film, since most of the action is just Georgie, hanging around the house and sneaking down to check on Gramma every so often, with all the bulk of the story being remembered overheard conversations (and his own internal monologue) until the very end. So how is it handled? Not great, overall. At least until the ending, which is very much worth sticking around for, but up until that moment, nearly all the dialogue is in voiceover, which rarely works when overused to this extent. And Oliver is just not up to the task of all that line delivery. For that matter, the relevant information is communicated to us in a much more rushed, confusing voiceover that, if I hadn't read the story, would leave me going "huh?" But...that ending. Oh, man, that ending. I did not expect that, and it worked so well. Very frightening, and it makes the entire thing worth a watch.

Maximum Overdrive (1986)

I'm facepalming right now. I'll be honest, I don't know at all what to make of this movie. See, this is the one that infamously had Stephen King himself not only writing the screenplay but also directing the entire movie. He's not the first, or last, author to do this. Clive Barker directed three movies based on his stories. Frank Miller has done the same since. And so here we have King directing a film based on his short story "Trucks", about some folks trapped in a truck stop when vehicles of the world suddenly gain sentience and go on a rampage. The story itself is tight, serious, and mostly about the implications of "what's going to happen to the world now that the machines we rely upon to live have risen up against us?" That's...not this movie. It's instead a broad, silly semi-comedy with a lot of cringe. Some have speculated that this is what King intended; that it was a loving homage to the B-movies of yesteryear. The problem is, nothing about this seems to be an homage to anything; it may be over-the-top silly but nothing about it harkens back to the age of the drive-in movie for me. Secondly, the ad campaign for this movie featured King himself saying things like "You want to do something right, you have to do it yourself" and "I just wanted to see someone do Stephen King right" and "I will scare the hell out of you!" If that was his intent, it failed miserably because he doesn't even give us a genuine adaptation of his work, and he hardly ever uses that broad, comic tone when writing. It's been suggested, even by King himself, that the biggest problem was that he was about 85% cocaine back when he made this, and honestly, that's as good an explanation as any. The ad campaign though, I seriously wonder how anyone thought it was a good idea, because Maximum Overdrive is not a scary film. It doesn't even seem like it's trying to be one. It really does feel like a sorta whacked-out scifi comedy, with more of an emphasis on humor, but it's not even really humor, either, unless you think a woman (twice) screaming "WE MADE YOU!!!" is funny, or a toy truck with the face of the Green Goblin covering the front of its cab, or a jack-in-the-box going off at the wrong moment, or Yeardly Smith (yes, Lisa Simpson) as a whiny newlywed, or a kid flipping one of the trucks off just after being forced to fill its tank. And this brings up another point; why does it seem like so many King-related adaptations seem so broad and comedy-focused? I mean, it was intentional in the Creepshow films but it's also there in Cat's Eye, The Running Man, Tales From the Dark Side: The Movie, Silver Bullet to an extent and here all over the place.

The Running Man (1987)

As I said when I discussed casting a film based on the novel, this film isn't based on the novel at all, aside from the central conceit of an innocent man on the run for his life, filmed for the benefit of viewing audiences at home, plus a few character names. But in no other way, shape or form does this film resemble the Richard Bachman novel about a man from the near future trying to earn money for his poor family by competing in a reality competition where he's turned into an enemy of the state. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars here in what's basically a pretty standard Ah-nuld film wherein he's a cop who refuses to fire into an unarmed crowd of protestors, so he's sent to prison, while the public is told he did fire, and against orders at that. He escapes, and is instead recaptured by the host and producer of The Running Man, Dan Killian (played by Richard Dawson), who wants him as a competitor, going up against themed "stalkers", essentially Batman-style villains, who chase him through a "kill zone". It's essentially a long excuse to pit Arnie against other strong men of the era like Jesse Ventura and Jim Brown. It moves the setting from 2026 to 2008, and I gotta say its version of 2008 looks a lot like...1987, with bubble-screen TV's, cassette tapes and fashions right out of the late 80's. It always makes me chuckle when films try to predict the future and get it so, so wrong. Heck, even King's novel (which did better) didn't predict the rise of cell phones and has our hero use a payphone (well before going on the run).

Sorry, Right Number (1987)

The second of his two Tales From the Dark Side episodes, this one was actually written directly for the show, and King's script is included as part of his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which I had already finished, so I got to read the script before seeing the screen version this time. And...well, being a script he wrote directly for the show, it reproduces what he wrote almost exactly. But to be honest, I've always felt this was one of his weaker efforts, because once again, he's not really trying to scare you here, and the supernatural event of this story...well, I've said before that leaving some things unexplained in horror is more satisfying than if you explain it, and I'm not even saying that it needed an explanation here, but it needed more...I dunno, awe, or something, some sort of "holy shit, did that really happen" moment that doesn't come. Discussing what I'm talking about would give away the ending, but I will say the main plot concerns a mother receiving a call from an unidentified woman who's weeping and in clear distress, but she can't tell who it is. She rules out her daughter and sister after managing to contact them, but in a twist, her husband later has a seemingly-unrelated heart attack in the middle of the night and dies. He could have lived if he'd gotten to the hospital in time. So, flash forward several years where, at her daughter's wedding, she runs to make a phone call and realizes, too late, that she is the one who called herself all those years ago. It's a sad story, but honestly not top-drawer King. Seeing it acted out didn't elevate it any.

Pet Sematary (1989)

This one has kinda gone down in history as one of the best pure horror adaptations in King's career. Sure, The Shining probably beats it, but here we have King adapting his own work and, while what I said about King adapting himself definitely still stands, here it works out very well, and is at least as good a film as it was a book. Dale Midkiff stars as Louis Creed, and makes me wonder, what happened to him? He's not a bad actor at all, and he's fairly attractive, so why the sudden career nosedive? Surprisingly good is Fred Gwynne, that's right, Herman Munster himself, as Jud Crandall. If there's one thing I would have changed it would have been keeping the Wendigo, which, if the way the deadfall is shot is any indication, could have been bloody terrifying. I mentioned in my casting post for it how hard this book is for me to read, considering I have small kids and the idea of one of them dying almost makes me BSOD, and I wasn't sure if it would be easier or harder watching it acted out. And the answer is...it is so, soooo much worse. I was a blubbering mess by the end. I haven't had much of a chance to talk about this yet, but since my last break from blogging, my wife and I had another child; a little boy. And if you've seen this film, you know why it probably hits even closer to home now than it did then. And Miko Hughes, who plays Gage, and was only three years old, gives the best performance of any three-year-old I've ever seen. What probably sent me over the edge and made the next several scenes harder to see through the blur, was when the demonic infant is finally taken down. He immediately responds with a very toddler-like reaction; crying (so realistically I wonder if they didn't do something to make him), then toddling away saying "no fair!" And now I'm moving on or I may break down again.

Tales From the Dark Side: The Movie (1990)

This movie has frequently been called "The REAL Creepshow 3", and see what I said about the actual movie with that title in my Creepshow post. This is another film where the scares are mostly balanced with laughs, and nowhere it that better demonstrated than in the framing device, where a young woman is going home to make dinner, and we find out that she is in fact a witch, right out of "Hansel and Gretal" and that her "dinner" is a young boy. He has been given a book of scary stories to keep him quite while she was out, and as an escape ploy, he offers to read her some of them as a distraction, and thus we have our setup. There's only one King story in the bunch, The Cat from Hell, which was collected many years later in Just After Sunset. It's never been one of my favorite stories, but I do like how it's presented here, with a big creepy house and two actors who are always fun to watch; David Johanssen as the ruthless contract killer and William Hickey as his creepy client who wants a cat dead. I've never been able to make heads or tales of Johanssen; he's the lead singer of the New York Dolls, a punk band I know little about, but his alternate musical persona is the guy behind the obnoxiously catchy 'Hot! Hot! Hot!", and when he acts it's always in offbeat roles like this. And he's so...weird looking. Overall, I don't know if I recommend this movie. It's not bad, but again, it seems more to be intentionally cheesy than scary, but removed from the trappings of being an ode to old horror comics.

It (1990)

I've made my feelings about this well-intentioned misfire known before. I own a copy, so why not watch it again and re-evaluate it, from the perspective of a mid-40's man who's read the book numerous times and seen the more recent film versions. Did time heal this wound? Not only didn't it, I think I found it worse than before. I still can't get past the bad casting, the hammy over-acting from Tim Curry, the chopping up and dumbing down of a really complex story, the by-wrote storytelling (he gets a call, he has a flashback, repeat) the laughably awful visual effects, even for 90's TV, etc. The results of the more recent film versions from Andy Muschetti have yet to reach a consensus; I thought both movies were pretty good, and for the most part, people seem to agree with me about Part I, but most just despise Part II, and I have yet to hear a coherent reason why. Between this turkey and both Muschietti films, I can tell you right now this one's the loser. One of the chief complaints I hear about It: Chapter Two is its ending, but its ending was a thousand times stronger than this. Nothing about this ending works at all, from the metaphysical battle just becoming three adult men staring at lights until one of them starts spouting, for no reason "I believe in Santa Claus! I believe in the Easter Bunny!", to the absolutely hysterical stop-motion spider. That's all I'll say now as I ranted and raved about it at length in my main post for the casting.

The Moving Finger (1990)

Of all the stories I never would have thought needed to be adapted, I'd put this near the top. Only "Here There Be Tygers" strikes me as less adaptable. Okay, I'm joking, but seriously. This is a pretty simple story that was even kinda just funny when all it was was words on a page. Watching Tom Noonan mug his way through a mostly silent performance was just grin city. Dumb as a brick, but it kinda didn't mean to be anything else. And hey, I bought the finger effect!

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

I'd heard this one was kinda "meh" but I didn't hate it. Honestly it worked as an adaptation and as a movie. Some have had some really harsh things to say about it. I don't know; I thought it was pretty moody, intense when it needed to be, and had an appropriate sense of growing dread. That train tunnel had me going "oh no" the moment it was introduced, and I even thought Robert Russler gave a good performance, and I've always just thought of him as blandly brutish. Tim Matheson and Brooke Adams are our leads, here, and I'll level with you, I've always found both of them to be astoundingly forgettable. Like "oh, he/she was in that? Didn't notice." Never once has either been the draw or reason to see a movie, even The Dead Zone, and I know I'm gonna get some pushback from at least one person I know is a Brooke Adams fan. I'm not saying I have a problem with either actor; just that both of them are pretty bland and standard. But I did sympathize with them here, Matheson in particular, who made me realize he's actually not a bad actor.

Holy shit, this is two posts on this topic now, and I've still got a ton to go. I think this is an appropriate place to pause, and the next time I return to this topic we'll be getting into an era where filmmakers at least mostly started taking the source material seriously. Though the results were still hit and miss.

Back When He was Still Stephen Prince

It's been a neat experience to see where ol' Uncle Steve was at when he was a boy. It's also pretty rare for a major, best-selling author of any sort to have so much early material out there, circulating in the public, some of it even with his knowledge and approval. After all, two of the stories I'm going to explore today were included in King's own Secret Windows as an example of the writing he used to do for his brother's "magazine", Dave's Rag, the circulation of which must have been about half their immediate neighborhood.

The others are from a "collection" that King and his friend Chris Chesley "self-published", by which I mean they typed out numerous copies and circulated them among their friends for a small fee. My understanding is that many of those childhood friends and acquaintances held on to their copies (or found them many years later, likely in their parents' attics; a much more likely scenario) and now that King was a household name, allowed their copies to be shown around, as a sort of "I knew him when" kinda thing.

Said collection, titled oh-so-imaginatively People, Places and Things, contained nineteen short stories and those Dark Tower aficionados out there are likely sitting forward in great interest at this point because...well...nineteen stories! Maybe don't get too excited yet, though, as King himself only wrote nine of them, and co-wrote the final one with Chesley. Also, that number only counts if you include the forward, which King wrote, which takes it down to a far less interesting eighteen stories, eight written by King alone. Also three of the stories he wrote have been lost to time.

When I say "short stories", I mean it. All of these are very, very short. The two from Secret Windows, titled "Jumper" and "Rush Call" are only a few pages, while the stories from PP&T seem even shorter.

"Jumper" and "Rush Call" seem an interesting choice when it comes to stories King was ready to make available to the public himself. Both stories are very simple and not at all what King would become known for in later years, despite PP&T being around the corner and being much closer to the King we know today. It's actually a bit interesting to consider; King's output at this point was far more geared toward fantasy and science fiction, with his first known story (see previous entry) being a fairy tale and the titles of other stories he wrote around this time (but are lost) seeming to point toward a more sci-fi flavor, and it really wasn't until he started working with Chesley that his work became darker and more horror-infused. Might Chesley have influenced him in that regard? I mean, we know that King was always fascinated by horror, enjoying EC Comics and horror films, but he didn't start writing it until he worked with Chesley. Just some food for thought.

"Jumper" is a tale about a psychologist who has a patient that frequently climbs to tall places and threatens to jump. In this story, the psychologist (alternately named Jeff Davis and Dr. Castle, King using both names likely due to forgetting he had already named the character) is called in to talk his patient off a ledge, and does it by confronting him, saying that he really doesn't want to jump, and this...works. Yeah, King was biting off a bit more than he could chew, trying to write about pathological issues at that young an age. The story doesn't really end, either, it just stops, with Dr. Davis/Castle informing us that this was one of the "most harrowing cases I've handled; The Case of the Jumper Who Could Not Jump". Yep, sounds harrowing alright. He was going to jump. And then he didn't. Wheeee.

This story was...not good. It wasn't very well-written, it didn't really have a conclusion that was satisfying or made sense. I tend to judge these early stories by the bar of "If I were his teacher and he'd handed this in, what would I grade it?" And I think the answer is a C or even perhaps C- due to these issues. I wouldn't deduct points for his lack of understanding about psychological issues, but I would suggest that he try to write about something more in his wheelhouse.

"Rush Call" is the story of Dr. Thorpe, an emergency room doc who is, in young King's words, "a grouch", but we don't really get much in the way of grouchy behavior from him. He's in a bad mood, but in the one patient interaction we see before the main bulk of the story begins, he is able to keep his outward demeanor professional, even as a patient regales him with worries from her personal life (this one part does show King's future a bit, as having characters complain about issues in their home life is a recurring theme). Then he's called to the scene of a very serious accident where the victim is a young boy. The experience...sigh...teaches Dr. Thorpe the True Meaning of Christmas. I'm not even exaggerating; those exact words are used.

I mean...he was just a kid...

Unlike "Jumper", there's no obvious wrongness to this story, it's just a sort of a Touched-By-An-Angel sorta story, and decidedly not what one expects from a Stephen King piece. But, it was 1960, King was a child and we can cut him a little leeway here. Just a snidge. He writes well in this one, for a boy his age. But he had a lot to learn about storytelling.

I will give him this; his introduction to his "column" for Dave's Rag does show his seriousness about writing. Clearly it is something he had already to decided to pursue with diligence.

This is also on display with Nouns...sorry, People, Places and Things in which King's newest motif is to give us a short, scary story that ends on a dramatic cliffhanger that's supposed to make your jaw drop. Sometimes it works, at least on some level. Several times it does not. Let's examine each story in the order shown in the Table of Contents:

I'll be ignoring Chesley's contributions, primarily because I don't have them, but also because I don't really care about them. I might have cared, had Chesley grown up to become a writer even on the scale of, say, Bryan Smith, but he isn't, so I don't.

Also, it should be noticed that "The Dimension Warp", "I'm Falling" and "Curiosity Kills the Cat" have been lost. Also noting page numbers above should give you an idea of how short these things are.

We start with "The Hotel at the End of the Road", which has a nice, ominous title, and a nice combination of the potentially supernatural and the more likely natural, yet still horrifying. Two criminals, the brilliantly named Kelso Black and his partner, Tommy Riviera, are on the run from the cops when they decide to cut onto a non-paved side road. Here's where the potential supernatural element creeps in, because when they do this, the police behave as if they had completely disappeared. Have they crossed over to a new plain of existence that only they could see? Once they turn off, they come to an isolated hotel and believe the cops can't find them here (they're right, but still wrong because they have no way of knowing that the cops can no longer see them at all). The hotel is run by a single old man who shows them to their rooms and then in the middle of the night, reappears to inject them with a paralyzing agent. He plans to make them part of his museum of "living specimens". A museum of people? For whom? What kind of being would find a human zoo amusing? Pretty dark thought for a kid that young. "Tommy Riviera could not even express his horror." No, I guess he couldn't!

After that comes "I've Got to Get Away!", in which our narrator, who introduces himself as Denny Phillips, wakes up in some sort of slave galley with no idea how he got there. He tries to escape, and is brought down by two guards who wonder why these robots keep going haywire and their reactions seem...almost human. I've got some more questions. Like why does this robot have the name "Denny Phillips"? Apparently it's actually marked on his casing. Why does he gain self-awareness so frequently, believing he's human? Is this a Cyberman sort of situation, where in fact he was human, but placed inside a metal body with his memories suppressed/removed, but every now and then able to access that part of his brain that tells him who he was and that he's alive? King later re-wrote this and titled it "The Killer", but I don't really have a way of getting ahold of that. I do have Rocky Wood's Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished and perhaps I'll learn more about it from there.

Next up is "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", another tale with a moral to it, in this case about a horrible little boy named, yes, really, Oglethorp Crater, who enjoys torturing small animals, but is able to behave like a perfect little angel whenever his parents are around. One day, he goes missing, just after hearing a voice from the bottom of the well tell him to come down "and we'll have some fun". He's found eventually, and...take a guess at what condition he's in. This one was kinda "meh" because how many campfire-type stories are very similar to this? Again, though, the fascination with the dark parts of human nature show up here, and King will continue to explore this in the future. But honestly? Name a kid Oglethorp and you reap what you sow.

In "The Stranger", Kelso Black returns, either having escaped the evil hotel owner or perhaps this is another level of the tower. In this case, he's escaping the scene of his latest crime, and apparently makes a pact with Death (or the Devil?) himself should he get out of it. Then Death comes to collect his due pretty much immediately! For a preteen, young King does a pretty good job making it clear who has come for Kelso, but without spelling it right out for us. I mean, if some other 12 year old had written that I'd have been suitably impressed, so I'm equally impressed here. He'd get even better at it, naturally, but there's some real promise here. Not that it's a very original or creative a story, just told better than I'd expect an average 12 year old to be capable of.

"The Cursed Expedition" could serve as a forerunner to "I Am the Doorway" and "Beachworld", with a pair of astronauts landing on Venus and discovering it's basically paradise, except that the planet itself is a genius loci...and it's hungry. Simple tale, well-told and certainly beyond the sort of thinking I'd expect from a child. In fact a lot of these stories seem like there's some actual depths to plumb, and some pretty nightmare-inducing implications if you think too hard about them. King would revist the idea of an expedition to Venus in "Doorway", but as he was then a grown man and knew better, he didn't have the ship touch down. His sci-fi story "Beachworld" really explores the concept of a living planet to an even greater degree. It's neat to know he was already thinking in those terms as a young man.

The next story, "The Other Side of the Fog" is not as great, unfortunately, with a man leaving his house and being immediately enveloped by a fog, and each time he comes to a spot where the fog lifts a little, he finds himself in a different time. By the end of the story, we're asked if we ever find ourselves in the fog, and we see him, to help him out. Could this story have been a forerunner to "The Mist"? Maybe. In fact, almost certainly, but writ large, with a greater sense of fear from what might come out of the fog. But here, the concept is only barely explored, with our hero seeing a futuristic city (from the distant year of 2007, heh heh), then prehistoric times, and then it's just over. 

Finally there is "Never Look Behind You", which he co-wrote with Chesley and is easily the worst of the stories because no matter how many different times I've read it, I can't make sense of what happens. It concerns a man named George Jacobs who apparently cheats people out of their money but no one has ever been able to "hook him on a charge". From this, I gather that he's a money lender who charges exorbitant interest or perhaps a crooked landlord. Or gangster? I don't know and I doubt King or Chesley knew either. At any rate, one day he's in his office, counting up his money, and counts by hand, apparently, to the amazing sum of $55,973.62! I mean, with that kind of dough...actually in 2020 that works out to $489,243.71 so that's a pretty tidy sum. But anyway, a woman with a scar on her cheek walks in and kills him, in an apparently supernatural way. Who is she? What was her motivation? What was her method of killing? We'll never know. Then, two young men who were never mentioned before, and who were apparently in the room, suddenly speak up, one wondering who or what could have killed Jacobs, while the other just says he's glad Jacobs is gone. "That young man was lucky," says the text. "He didn't look behind him." As best as I can tell, it's implying that if he had been looking behind him when Jacobs was killed, he would have died, too. But it doesn't say more than that, and what about the other young man? Did he look behind him? Where are they, even? The story says Jacobs was alone in his office. And I'm spending way too much time thinking about the worst story in this collection.

In summation, King was definitely showing promise as a writer early on, despite not being ready for the big time yet. But what 12 year old is? What astonishes me is how many of these themes and ideas King would return to. I guess some ideas just don't leave your mind, and King came back later to perfect them into what we have now. One aspect of King's modern writing is how he can leave certain things a mystery and it's almost more satisfying than if he'd explained everything. He hadn't really come into his own on that score yet, but he sure tried to. About the only places it works are in "The Cursed Expedition", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well" and "Hotel at the End of the World", but even there I think the ideas could stand some fleshing out. It doesn't work at all in "Never Look Behind You" where at least some explanation of the woman with the scar is needed, and it also doesn't work in "The Other Side of the Fog" and not really in "The Stranger".

Final observation; once King quit dicking around with his high-toned dramas and fairy tales, he became a much better writer. The promise he shows in PP&T had not shown up in Dave's Rag, which is odd because these stories all were written the same year.

Updated Bookshelf; Is it Not Beautiful?

So I may have been reading other stuff for a while and avoiding ol' Uncle Steve, but that doesn't mean I've let my collection slide.

I'm almost as proud of this bookshelf as I am my kids. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but I've never been prouder of any bookshelf I've owned.

As you can see, it's pretty fully up to date, even adding Joe Hill's comics, and Rocky Wood's Stephen King: Unpublished, Uncollected, which I'm considering part of this collection, even if King didn't write it himself.

I've added all the non-fiction after years of insisting King's non-fiction didn't interest me. Some of it has had to be in digital form only, such as Guns and A Little Silver Book of Sharp, Shiny Slivers, and I don't have a copy of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, which in part I feel like I should get, but in part balk at the amount I would have to spend for it, when it's really more a John Mellencamp CD than it is a King "book".

If one looks closely on the drum at the right, you'll see the copy of Esquire magazine with "On Slide Inn Road" within it. I feel like I'll probably get to the end of this before King publishes another collection, so I can remain as up to date as I have tried to be thus far.

If one thing does kinda make me shake my head it's that this shelf makes it seem like I haven't gotten far at all in my reading. The last book I finished was Dolores Claiborne, which, if you can see it, is just before the mammoth copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. That's...not even two shelves worth. Out of five. Of course, I've actually read most of the third shelf in the past, and will be re-reading it now, but the world of Shelves 4 & 5 are going to be almost entirely new to me. I say almost because I read the first four volumes of Locke & Key, and the story The Cat From Hell, which was contained in Just After Sunset.

Still excited to be on this journey!