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.
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