The Mist by Stephen King (1980)

This was probably my first time reading the full novella of The Mist as opposed to whatever hack job was published in Skeleton Crew. I say "hack job" in that it was certainly edited for space so it was "hacked" up and not "hack job" as in it was done carelessly. Maybe it was but I'm not the one to judge because I didn't make a careful comparison of the two. All I know is that I liked it a lot when I first read it and I liked it a lot now in its original form. It's possible, based on how much I liked it divided by word count, that it's mathematically my favorite Stephen King story. Sure, I've probably gotten more joy out of "Library Policeman" but I've only ever expressed that around my closest friends who don't judge me when I find immense pleasure in the idea that King wrote a story where a little kid fears being raped because his library books are overdue. "Thteady! Thteady!" But you, not being one of my closest friends, didn't read that here! Plus the last time I had a really good laugh about that "Thteady! Thteady!" line was when I was still hanging out with my friend Soy Rakelson, Catholic Conservative Frat Boy who once worried about whether he should use a condom if he had the opportunity to have sex in college because he didn't want to make the Pope sad without once being worried that the pre-marital sex might make the Pope sad. I know! I know! Conservatives only care about hypocrisy when they can try to prove one of their nemeses is being hypocritical, and usually they can only marginally do that through semantics and false representations of actual facts.

Look, this review isn't about Soy Rakelson! It's also really not about Stephen King's novella The Mist either because I've pretty much finished with that. Loved it! Good job! Although just like It, the story is almost ruined by the unneeded sex scene. In It, the tween gang bang in the sewers, as terrible as it fucking is, was meant to express how the children had to grow up to escape the clutches of Pennywise. But why did David Drayton, in The Mist, have to commit adultery with the hottest woman in the supermarket? Oh, because it was an embracing of life at one of the darkest, most depressing, horrifically terrifying moments of their lives? It was to show how hard they were clinging to survival? Expressing their passion and their need to live no matter the cost? Maybe you should have expressed that point a little better than just having the two hottest people in the supermarket fuck so that Frank Darabont wouldn't have made a film that just flushed the entire idea of mankind's ability to keep up hope and survive against the most insurmountable odds! I guess the ending of Darabont's film adaptation of The Mist was also seeded by the moment when King has Drayton compare the amount of bullets in the gun with the number of people in his escaping truck as well. King's story doesn't end with everybody escaping into an unmisted world but it does end by hitting you in the face with a lead pipe with the word "HOPE" written on it. Maybe Darabont's first language isn't English so he sort of missed that hope bit.

I understand why people like Darabont's film's ending. Hell, even Stephen King expresses his love for it in his 2010 "Forenote" to Danse Macabre. But I've got to tell you, as the biggest cynic in any room but one that appreciates and values when people can be absolutely, bloody awfully, embarrassingly earnest, Darabont's The Mist has the most nihilistic and cynical ending of any film I've ever seen. And that's not a fucking compliment. It's the kind of ending a 7th Grader would have tacked onto a story he was writing just for the shocking twist. And I'm not talking about David killing everybody with the final bullets in the gun and then walking out into the mist to die by giant spider. That would have been a better ending! They tried but they failed and the world has gone to shit and that's that. But Darabont was all, "Hee hee! Haw haw haw! What if I get the main guy to blast his son in the face with a bullet from his gun only to immediately walk out of his car and be surrounded by the military saving the world? OH MY GOD! Ha ha ha! How funny would that be? I mean tragic! I meant it to be tragic! OH NO! So tragic! HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!" Fuck Darabont! Darabont's little trick at the end makes Mrs. Carmody more heroic than David Drayton! Oh, sure, maybe she sacrificed a few people back in the old Megalo Mart. But she was fucking right that it was death to leave and they should stay in the supermarket because guess what? Except for the few unfortunate souls her group sacrificed (which, I mean, maybe they're what convinced God to let the military save the day after all? Who am I to say being that Mrs. Carmody was absolutely fucking right in the end?!), those who stayed in the supermarket were eventually rescued.

Hey Franky? Read my blog name out loud. That's for you, buckaroo!

The other thing I wanted to discuss was the Interactive Fiction game based on The Mist by Mindscape. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for actually feeling like I was in the story, and extending the story in various ways that King only hinted at. It was, as a story, fun. But as a text adventure game? Holy shit did it suck. I remember way back in the mid-80s playing this thing and realizing at some point that I can't get any further because there were monsters everywhere. Sure, you could kill the slug thing with salt. Easy! But the other things couldn't be killed. So I thought, "There's a gun in the story? Maybe if I ask everybody for a gun, I'll have a gun to shoot everything!" And guess what? Yeah, one of the characters has a gun. You also need to ask the characters for a key to the hardware store and a key to the truck. The main puzzles in the game are asking people for things that you can't find (one of them being a gun which is never, ever mentioned, as far as I know. You just have to assume somebody has a gun! You're in Maine, for Christ's sake!). After that, the final puzzles are mostly shooting everything. By the time I worked my way to my son Billy (yeah, in the text adventure, Billy isn't with you. He's staying with a family friend), I still had one bullet left in my gun and, like Frank Darabont, I was all, "Fuck this shit!", and shot Billy in the head. It was the only humane thing to do!

Anyway, great story minus the sex scene especially when David thinks how massive his erection is. Gross. Stupid first person perspective!

Night Shift by Stephen King (1978)

It's been a few months since I read this. I have trouble writing reviews for story or essay collections which is also why I haven't done a review of Palm Sunday by Vonnegut yet. Although this doesn't explain why I failed to do a review of Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut. Why am I providing arguments against my own excuses?! Either forget the Cat's Cradle revelation or believe this subsequent lie: Cat's Cradle was also a short story collection! I bet hardly anybody has read it so they won't know that's a lie! Ha ha! Idiots!

I'm going to try to remember each story and shart out an opinion on each one. King probably worked terribly hard on every story in this collection and I'm going to just vomit up terrible opinions on each story and label them as "critical reviews". This is why I like being a reviewer over an actual author!

Jerusalem's Lot: Oh! This is why that one book was called 'Salem's Lot! It was short for Jerusalem's Lot! Good thing King wrote this story so that people would understand the title of that book years later! It's like how nobody has yet realized The Beatles spell their name not like the insect but like "beats" in a song. That one's particularly hard to figure out because The Beatles never wrote a song called, "Check Out How Our Band's Name is Spelled, You Twats!" I only noticed because I'm the absolute genius who came up with the blog name, "Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea!"

Oh, I forgot about my review! This is already way longer than I expected it to be. Too bad the thought faucet in my brain has been stripped and I can't stop it from constantly dripping. Okay, Me, concentrate now! Review time!

While Stephen King's stories show a lot of obvious influence from H.P. Lovecraft, "Jerusalem's Lot" is the most Lovecraftian of them all. It's epistolary and H.P. loved a good bit of correspondence story telling. It also culminates in what's basically the appearance of a Great Old One in a blasphemous church in an abandoned town. One of the most interesting bits is how King calls the Great Old One "It" (capitalized!) so I'm assuming this is also the first appearance of Pennywise.

Prognosis: Pretty Good!

Graveyard Shift: This story could have been a sidequest in Fallout. While it's ostensibly about a bunch of mutant rats living beneath an old textile mill, I think it's really a fantasy about murdering your boss. We've all had that boss that we'd have loved to spray with a firehose until they stumbled into the waiting maw of a massive deformed rat. Mine was named Barb! No, I'm kidding! Barb wasn't that bad. She just wasn't what you'd call "good at her job". She once cried during a performance review with me because I wouldn't be her friend! Look, Barb! It's fucking work! Work is not playtime! Now get in that giant rat's mouth already!

Prognosis: Satisfying.

Night Surf: This story takes place in a less optimistic version of The Stand. A bunch of cool kids (they must be cool because they hang out at the beach, smoke, drink, and have sex. So cool!) hang out at the beach to smoke, drink, and have sex. Also they talk about how they've all survived a plague they call "Captain Trips". That's the same flu as in The Stand! But in this one, after burning a guy for their cool bonfire, one of them shows signs of having Captain Trips and the protagonist realizes that, although they survived the initial plague, they're probably all going to die anyway. And they didn't even need some nightmare dark man to do it! Losers. Cool losers, of course!

Prognosis: Am I using "prognosis" right?! I'm not a doctor! Which is what these kids needed! Ha ha! Better than The Stand because it was about 1500 pages shorter.

I Am The Doorway: King doesn't often do on-the-surface cosmic horror but if this is an example of him doing that, I wish he'd do more! I qualified "cosmic horror" with "on-the-surface" because if you think about an awful lot of his stories, many owing a debt to Lovecraft, you can probably squint them into being cosmic horror stories. It almost certainly is. Tommyknockers. Possibly all the Dark Tower books? King's written too many books to contemplate (and many I haven't read) so I'm going to end the list there.

This story is about a guy who becomes all eyeballs. It's pretty gross. I think he kills himself in the end because his eyeballs are catching? I don't remember it that well. But it was creepy and gross!

Prognosis: Different but sort of forgettable.

The Mangler: One of the immutable facts of the universe about Stephen King is that he often has better ideas than the stories that come out of those ideas. But the great thing about Stephen King is that the opposite of that is also true! Sometimes his ideas sound like shit on a loaf made of shit and, guess what? They end up tasting great! Mmm, mmm! I love King's shit sometimes! "The Mangler" is one of those ideas I really like that ends in such a laughably terrible moment that I checked to see if King graduated from Clown College. The initial premise is that a laundry machine called "The Mangler" by the people who use it (because it's so dangerous!) becomes possessed by a demon because all the right ingredients from a Satanic Ritual somehow wound up getting passed through it. And then maybe somebody said some Latin or something. Anyway, fantastic idea! Love it! King quickly realizes the problem with this set-up though: once people realize the machine is evil and killing people, people can just not go near it anymore. Perhaps unplugging it also doesn't work because it's possessed. But it's still just a big block of metal in the basement of some shop. Just put up a sign: "Caution! Demon Laundry Folding Machine in Basement! Stay Out!" How scary is that? It's not scary at all! is probably what Tabitha said after reading it.

So King, realizing he had a huge dud of an ending coming up and thinking, "I could set the whole place on fire but I've already done that in like every book I've written so far and a few I'm going to write." So what does he do? He has the machine become mobile, climb out of the basement, and begin stalking the people who tried to perform an exorcism on it! Ha ha! Can you picture this big fucking block of metal lumbering down the street somehow catching and eating people unawares?! The protagonist realizes it's coming for him at the end of the story and instead of walking outside and yelling, "What the fuck are you going to do? Catch a sprinting human being?!", he trembles in fear and waits to die. Or does he actually die? It's been awhile. I don't remember exactly. Although now I really need to see the film based on it and the film's two sequels!

Prognosis: King's Clown College Thesis Paper.

The Boogeyman: This is the first story I can't remember from the title alone so I'll need to read the Wikipedia entry to remember it.

Before even finishing the first sentence of the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, my memory was jogged. Yeah, I would not have remembered this story at all if not for revisiting it in this review. This is another story, if I remember correctly, with a fucking absolutely fucking ridiculous fucking fucking ending.

The story is about a man whose children keep getting killed by The Boogeyman that lives in the closet. He's describing his terrifying life's path littered with dead babies to his therapist. At the end of the story, we discover that the therapist is actually The Boogeyman! Um, what? No, no. That's the biggest "what?" I've ever meant. I think I usually don't really mean it when I respond "what?" to some dumb plot contrivance or stupid twist. But this time, I'm being serious. "What?" This paranormal creature that's been eating this man's children decided to become a psychiatrist? So it can relive the pleasure of the terror it created, I guess? But also it can look and act enough like a man to just wear a mask and fool actual people? Did it study to become a psychiatrist? Did it learn how psychiatrist's act by watching victims watch The Bob Newhart Show from its hiding place in the closet? How is this a fucking twist?! M. Night Shyamalan laughs at this twist and most of his twists are pretty fucking stupid. Like how the twist in Signs was that the "signs" in the title weren't the crop circles but all the clues littering his life that leads him to defeat the aliens! Is that a twist? Can you make the twist a play on the title?!

But to get serious about this less-than-serious story, is this King's commentary on therapy? That therapists just drag terrible things out of the closet of our memory to make our lives worse? Maybe that's his point? I would have liked this story if he'd just left out The Boogeyman, called it "The Rapist", and then had the therapist rape the guy after he spilled his guts about how he, I don't know, fears being raped? Did I make the story better or much, much, much, much worse? At least it's got a better title twist than Signs!

Oh! This story also has a feature film based on it! I have to fucking get my hater mitts on that!

Prognosis: Fucking ridiculous. Unless King was commenting on therapy. And then maybe it's just ignorant?

Gray Matter: Oh yeah! This latest reading of Night Shift was obviously a re-read but having read the book over 35, maybe 40, years ago, I certainly only vaguely (if at all) remembered most of these stories (other than Lawnmower Man! Who can forget that one!). So it was weird that as I read "Gray Matter", I kept thinking, "This is really fucking familiar. Did I just recently see this somewhere?" At some point while reading it and getting stronger and stronger feelings of déjà vu, I realized that I had just recently watched it on Shudder's Creepshow series. You probably didn't need to know any of that but what are you? Too busy to hear a boring anecdote from some idiot on the Internet you'll never meet and never truly know but still want to have sex with for some reason? I mean, right? You do want that?

I suspect this is a metaphorical tale and not just a story about a guy who drinks some bad beer and turns into The Blob. Being that "gray matter" is another term for the brain, and this story ends with the "gray matter" splitting and the implication that each new ooze will split into more oozes and so on and so forth until they consume the world, I'm going to assume that this story is about how gossip, shit ideas, and propaganda spread to destroying the humanity of everybody caught up in the nonsense in the process. Maybe it's not that sophisticated an idea and it's just about alcoholism and how that destroys a person and the people around them. Maybe it's one of those metaphorical tales that can be used to explain whatever the reader wants it to explain. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Prognosis: Gross.

Battleground: A toymaker's mother sends some dangerous army men toys to the hit-man who killed her son in this story that reads like Stephen King was writing a Twilight Zone episode instead of a Stephen King short story. Richard Matheson's son, Richard Matheson, must have recognized this fact as well and, following in his father's footsteps, adapted it for television. If The Twilight Zone had been on the air at the time, he probably would have written it for that. Instead, it was made for Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King which, I suppose, was the perfect place for it. Richard Mathesonson also wrote an episode of Three's Company. Was there an episode where Jack makes a deal with the devil or Janet dates a serial killer or Larry discovers The Ropers' storage shed full of corpses? I only ask because Richard Mathesonson is known for horror and not sexy mishaps comedy.

Prognosis: Fun which isn't horror so bad in this context, I guess?

Trucks: The only good thing to come out of this story having been written is the greatest AC/DC song of all-time, "Who Made Who". You can argue with me all you want with that opinion, if you're so inclined, but realize that two people arguing over the greatest song from a band whose songs all sound the same might be a slight waste of all of our time. Stephen King tried to blame the failure of Maximum Overdrive, the film based on this story, on cocaine but I think the real blame should be put on King trying to make a full-length movie out of a story with nearly no narrative meat on the bone. Although maybe cocaine was to blame because Stephen King got so fucked up on it one night that he couldn't remember the difference between apes and big rigs while watching Planet of the Apes. Or maybe it was that jerk at that party from earlier shooting the shit with King who said, "Imagine if those apes on that planet had actually been Peterbilts!"

I hope whoever designed this movie poster was haunted by the zombies of three long dead Greasers.

Prognosis: Depressing.

Sometimes They Come Back: A teacher is haunted by the zombies of some greasers who killed his brother twenty years ago but then they all died in a car accident soon after. We never find out why the greasers return from the dead to kill the kid brother of the guy they killed earlier. Or did we and I don't remember? It seems like an important detail. Why would they want to kill him so many years later? Was the afterlife so boring that they felt they needed to bully the kid brother of a kid they bullied to death so long ago? Maybe he kicked one of them in the balls while escaping? That seems like a good enough reason to come back from Hell to torment some guy. I would never forget being kicked in the balls! I'd haunt that ball-kicking fucker to the end of time, even if I had deserved it because I was killing his brother! It's just not fair giving a guy a shot down there. These greasers kill his wife but the teacher performs a Satanic ritual to hire a demon to re-kill the greasers. But what's to stop them from coming back yet again? Maybe that's the story in the sequel to the movie, Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again! That movie title really should have an exclamation point on it.

Prognosis: Not good. A teacher protagonist with psychic or mystic shenanigans and not one single town or haunted hotel or government facility gets burned to the ground? Was King off his game when he wrote this?!

Strawberry Spring: I've sat on this title for a few days with the outrageous belief that if I thought about it long enough, I'd remember what it was about from the title alone. But before I check the synopsis on Wikipedia, here's my guess: a serial killer kills some girls on a college campus? No wait! That was the middle part of The Dead Zone! Fine. I'll look it up.

Well pry the nails out of Christ's crucifix! I was right! Good brain! You're a good little girl, brain! So smart! I guess it wasn't interesting enough to remember but since King basically used it again for The Dead Zone, my brain filed it away correctly. The big twist is that the murderer, Springheel Jack, is the narrator who doesn't remember being Springheel Jack. I guess it's Fight Club with less fighting and more murder. Probably about the same amount of misogyny.

Apparently it was adapted to a podcast series with Sydney Sweeney playing one of the roles. Why would she do a podcast? You can't see boobies in a podcast! Ken Marino was also a voice if you know who that is. I think he was a comedian who played quarterback for the Miami Dolphins.

Prognosis: Amateurish.

The Ledge: This story is about a guy who's forced to walk around a tiny ledge on the top floor of a really tall building. He succeeds and then gets his vengeance on the man who forced him to walk the ledge. I don't remember anything terrible happening to the protagonist or his family so I'm not completely convinced Stephen King wrote this. No wait! The wife of the antagonist who the protagonist was fucking is killed. Sorry for doubting you, Steve!

This story was included in the film Cat's Eye which means I need to make a note of yet another film I need to watch (or re-watch? Was Cat's Eye the one with the Drew Barrymore story with the cat "stealing" her breath but actually protecting her from a gremlin thing? Or was that something totally different?! (Just checked! That's the one!)).

Prognosis: Not horror but I guess King had to practice doing non-horror stories so he could eventually write things like "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and The Green Mile.

The Lawnmower Man: Imagine having read this short story and then hearing that a film called The Lawnmower Man. And then imagine not hearing anything about the content of the film because you thought you knew what it was about and couldn't wait to see a naked man slithering around on the ground eating grass while his wang flops all over the place. Now imagine the absolutely spectacular tantrum I threw when I realized I'd been had! I think it made the local papers.

Anyway, this story is fucking crazy. That should be the prognosis. Just a second.

Prognosis: Fucking crazy.

Quitters, Inc.: A well done story that might be a commentary on Alcoholics Anonymous but also maybe isn't at all. The Wikipedia page for this story is so fucking long because somebody decided that what it needed was some other writer's literary thesis on King and this work in particular. It's a lot of words to say King had a mistrust of psychiatry which I pointed out a few entries ago writing about The Boogeyman. And I didn't even do any research to know for sure that King had that mistrust! I just read the story and thought, "Boy, King doesn't like psychoanalysis, does he?!" What I'm trying to say is where is my Doctorate of Literature?!

Prognosis: Another story that easily could have been an episode of The Twilight Zone.

I Know What You Need: Another story I don't recognize by the title alone. Although the title reminds me of The Twilight Zone episode, "What You Need". See? It's basically the same title! Anyway, time to look up the synopsis!

Oh, this was the story about the manipulative stalker who tricks a woman into dating him until she stumbles upon his closet shrine to her and his copy of the Necronomicon. I think I blocked this story out because it hit too close to home regarding me and my plans for Aubrey Plaza and/or Jemaine Clement, whichever I could dupe first. I'm not convinced I could have duped either of them, even with magical voodoo powers like the guy in this story. They seem way to smart and clever and sexy and handsome and pretty and sexy and caustic and whimsical and sexy and sexy and sexy and sexy. Also I don't have a copy of the Necronomicon which I think is the most important tool in the plan. Another important tool? Actually trying to meet the person you're obsessed with. Copying a .jpg of their face and cutting and pasting it onto an image of Wonder Woman's body isn't the best method to meet the person you're stalking. It also helps if you went to elementary school with the person and knew all of their moves and had the ability to murder their boyfriend via magic and also to kill your parents (via magic as well) so that you'd get the life insurance money so you wouldn't have to get a job and could spend 100% of your time researching their lives.

If you were ever interested in successfully stalking somebody and tricking them into loving you, this story gives you some helpful advice by showing that the biggest flaw in the stalker's plan was not killing his obsession's roommate. That roommate just bad-mouthed him constantly and made his lover doubt his sincerity! So, you know, take that helpful advice for what it's worth. Thanks, Stephen King!

Prognosis: I was only kidding about being a stalker. I wrote one Wonder Woman review where I played up my crush on Aubrey Plaza to make it seem like I was obsessed and now I have an FBI file. Thanks a lot, people who don't understand facetious whimsy! Stupid FBI can suck eggs!

Children of the Corn: My friend from high school, Randy, an actual stalker of Arnold Schwarzenegger, looked like Malachai but only if you first threw a little Steven Tyler DNA up Randy's butthole. I've never seen Randy in a field of corn so I don't think he worships He Who Walks Behind the Rows but it's possible! I just used "but it's possible" there in the same way people who deny most science use the term "but it's possible". Meaning that they believe anything they can think with their brains could possibly be true and you can't prove it's not true because you can't prove a negative so they just go on believing the stupidest shit in the world and their YouTube algorithm just gets dumber and dumber. All of that is to say this: you know this story. Why do I have to describe any of it? There are scary children. There's scarier corn. People die scared. The end.

I lived in Nebraska for nearly two years and not once did I meet He Who Walks Behind the Rows. That's probably obvious because I was over 18 at the time and I'm still alive now. But I also never met any children who worshipped him. Not that I talked to many children. The only kid I knew while living in Nebraska was Jordan, my friend's kid. Jordan was about five or six and he once told me he had a dream where he was a girl when he was in his mother's tummy. I loved it and told his dad about Jordan's dream and his dad's reaction was, "Ummm, uh, ummmm." He was from Nebraska. That was probably a pretty liberal reaction at the time!

Prognosis: Good enough to make a movie and 665 sequels!

The Last Rung on the Ladder: This was the best story in the entire collection. I fucking loved it and I think I probably cried quite a bit. Just beautiful and sad and really highlights King's strengths. Well over half of King's books, I'd wager, aren't really that horrific. They're popular because he writes pretty compelling characters. Sure, he writes a lot of crap and stereotypical and boring characters too. But when he gets a character right, the book just shines. I think that's why I loved It so much because he manages to make just about every kid in the book compelling, and most of their adult versions. Also the sewer clown's pretty funny too.

Prognosis: Am I wrong to think this is the best story in the book? I don't know! It's not like I have a Doctorate in Literature like I probably should have if I hadn't been too smart to realize more schooling was a waste of my time!

The Man Who Loved Flowers: Did I sleepwalk through most of the last quarter of this book because I've really forgotten what a lot of these short stories were about? Back to Wikipedia!

After reading the Wikipedia synopsis, I realize my brain was doing God's work all along by forgetting certain stories in this collection. I feel like that moment in Total Recall where I go to get a memory implanted only to find I've had some memories changed and erased and now I need to find out why I had my memories changed or erased only to discover that I was better off having had them changed or erased. That's the problem with forgetting, on purpose or by the simple process of knowledge retention through barely adequate electric flesh circuits. Having forgotten something, and then discovering that you've forgotten a thing, you're naturally curious to discover what that thing was. But shouldn't we trust our brain more? Shouldn't we know better than to dig up the past? Haven't we all read or seen Pet Sematary?! Give up on the past! It's a pre-dug grave! It's a trap! Nostalgia is suicide!

Prognosis: I don't know because I trust my brain and if I can't remember it, it's not worth remembering!

One for the Road: This is the other 'Salem's Lot story, right? Some guy gets into a car accident in the snow near The Lot and he finds some old men to help him because his family were left in the car and the old men are all, "Your family is gone. Sometimes dead is better. Oh, but, um, not in this case, I guess! Wrong story!" But since the old men know there are vampires in The Lot, they decide to try to help save this guy's family. But it's too late. They're already vampires! So they fight them and some people die but I think at least one of the old men survive?

Prognosis: Do not trust children, especially if they're in snow or corn.

The Woman in the Room: Some guy's mother is slowly dying and he decides to help her along. That summation is mine and it's about as long and detailed as the Wikipedia description of the short story. Apparently Frank Darabont adapted this story as one of King's "Dollar Baby" movies (look it up yourself!) when he was a college student. I'm guessing that in his version, the guy realizes his mom is dying and he hates to see her suffer so he helps her along by killing her with pills only to discover that the doctor was about to tell him that she was getting better. That would be about what I suspect from Darabont after having seen his version of King's The Mist, possibly the most nihilistic movie I've ever seen and I hate it so fucking much. But more about that in my next review since I've just finished re-reading The Mist!

Prognosis: I guess shocking in 1978? Maybe it'd be shocking for some people in 2025 too. Especially doctors who treat patients who are likely going to die as if they're already dead but they're not allowed to actually end the patient's life through action and usually just go with inaction by not really taking care of them or letting them basically starve to death. Are things different in 2025 than they were in 2003 when I had to watch the hospital staff do that to my grandfather?!

That's all the stories! I love short story collections! Give me more! Although I was hoping for much shorter stories than King sticks in this collection. I like stories that are five to ten pages long because reading is difficult.

Firestarter by Stephen King (1980)

I have no idea how to approach this book, the least interesting of all of King's early books (that I've re-read so far! I'm looking at you, Christine). I've already discussed how King seems to think terror is somebody having a psychic power that ends in everything being burned to the ground. It's possible King didn't realize he was doing this until somebody said to him at a wild cocaine party, "Have you noticed that all of your books are about a writer or teacher dealing with psychic powers (either their own or another character's) which ultimately ends in everything being burned to the ground?" And Stephen King exclaimed, "That's a great idea for a book!" And then he wrote Firestarter. After it was published, King wound up at the same party as the guy who gave him the great idea for the book. The guy snorted a line, turned to King, and said, "Dude, you need a new idea! You're like a rabid dog gnawing on a bone!" And King was all, "That's a great idea for a book!" And finally, King wrote a different book. Not a different scary book. Just a book about a family who couldn't manage to beat a dog to death with a baseball bat and then go get their rabies shots. Pathetic!

Since I don't have any idea how to get a handle on this book, I'll just write the most boring thing anybody has ever said about this book (I assume because even I'm bored saying it which means the most boring people in the world have probably already said it): "Is this a prequel to Carrie?!" Ha ha! Get it?! It's basically the same book except with a new added creepy Native American assassin paedo character! Okay, fine, I'll give King the benefit of the doubt and believe Rainbird wasn't a pedophile. He just had a massive boner for killing a little girl. That's different somehow, right?

The final chapter of the book had me thinking that King wrote the entire book just for that final revelation of what publication would publish a story about government drug experiments, kidnappings, and assassinations. He was probably having a discussion at that party with that super coked up guy and was all, "The country has changed so much! If Watergate happened right now, who would even dare to publish the article and out the government?!" And the guy wiped his nose in that way they do in the movies after doing coke but I have no idea if people really do it, squeezed his nostrils for a moment, and said, "Um. TV Guide?" And King was all, "No! I'll tell you what paper would have the rock and roll balls to do it! But you'll have to read 425 other pages before I give the big reveal!" And the guy was all, "What were we talking about? Has anybody broken open the adult piñata yet?! I hear it's full of acid tabs." And King was all, "Rolling Stone! Get it?! Rock and roll balls! It would be Rolling Stone!"

After reading the book, I got my Monkey's Paw out of the closet and was all, "Monkey's Paw? Can you make it so that Stephen King writes children better? I hate how Charlie constantly giggles at everything, especially swear words! Are kids really like that? Shouldn't they be a bit more adult about stuff like that?" And the third finger on my Monkey's Paw curled up and I thought, "Ah! That's better! Now King will write children way better!" And then in 1987, he came out with It and I read most of that book thinking, "Fucking A, Monkey's Paw! For once, you came through without fucking up the wish!" And then the children had a gang bang in the sewer and I was all, "Goddamn it, Monkey's Paw!" Later that night, feeling sorry I yelled at my Monkey's Paw, I made a wish on it that I could get my dick sucked. I'm, um, not going to tell the end of that story. Stupid fucking Monkey's Paw.

The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (1979)

I'm not entirely sure what this book is about. I mean, yeah, obviously it's about a bunch of young men / old boys walking in a deadly game show for a mysterious, alluded-to Prize. But what was it REALLY about, you know? Like, life or something? Coming out of the closet? Trying to survive being so horny you nut in your pants just because you saw a guy dry hump a woman on the hood of a car?

I couldn't help feeling that this was Stephen King's version of John Barth's "Night-Sea Journey" and the boys represented slightly less philosophical spermatozoa on their journey to the Prize of fertilizing the egg. But the final, surviving sperm sees the end of the journey, similar to the spermatozoa in Barth's book, as not the magic and miraculous gift of life but as the continuation of pain, agony, and death.

Being a King/Bachman book, I might not have paid as close attention to it as I should have, mostly reading it at a surface level, enjoying the plots and themes and grisly deaths. But I read it at the same time that I was reading Infinite Jest so I couldn't help thinking about each boy's secret life, their obsessions, their reasons for living/joining the Long Walk. It felt like the main kid Ray's reason for joining the race is never fully articulated and either the reader is supposed to ferret it out from the clues he drops to the other contestants or it's left a bit ambiguous so the reader can project their own reason onto Ray.

If I were to guess, based on the many, many, many clues dropped like a spilled tool box full of really heavy tools and hardly any light, Nerf tools, I'd say Ray was gay (Oh! His name was probably a clue! Ray Garrity = Gay Rarity?) and entered the Walk to escape the shame he felt, and his fear of coming out to his mother and girlfriend. I still have large bumps and drying blood all over my head from a few of the heavier clues King dropped.

I can't wait for the movie! I hope in the movie, McVries actually does jerk off Ray while they're walking down the road!

The Stand (Complete and Uncut (Hee hee!) Edition) by Stephen King (1978/1990)

I just finished re-reading The Stand after more than 30 years of having not read it again. If I were Stephen King, I would have called the book The Long Walk but I guess he couldn't because his alter ego was busy on a story with that same exact title at the time. Maybe A Long Walk with a Dog?

The first time I read The Stand, I remember thinking, "What the fuck? The good guys didn't do shit but take a long hike with their dog. Randal Flagg and all his cronies fucked up a bunch and then Trash Can Man took them all out himself." The heroes of The Stand were the most passive yet horny heroes of any book where good faces off against evil. But this time, I realized that their strength was simply in their resistance (and possibly their horniness). Was The Stand a novel about the success of passive and non-violent resistance movements? Because the only actions the heroes take against Flagg are being killed by him and his goons in ways that make Flagg mad and make his people less confident in him. I suppose if I were gullible, naïve, or earnest-minded, maybe I wouldn't sneer at the thought that God was the real hero of the book. Maybe The Turtle from It was the real hero of The Stand? Was The Turtle still alive at this time? Or had it already choked on its own sick?

Anyway, my favorite part was when the nerd got to have butt sex with the hot older kindergarten teacher. Although later he tried to shoot her in the face and I just want to make it known that I didn't think that was cool at all.

The Shining by Stephen King (1977)

First and foremost in Stephen King's mind must be this thought: "Psychic powers are terrifying!" Carrie is about a psychic girl who burns down her hometown because nobody likes her. The Shining is about a psychic boy on vacation. The Dead Zone is about a psychic man who enacts an elaborate form of suicide because the woman he loved married some other guy while he was napping. Firestarter is about a psychic girl who hates to set things on fire but still sets a lot of things on fire. Christine is about a psychic car, I think. The Stand is about a psychic cool guy and a psychic old lady who divide up the last people in America for a game of war. 'Salem's Lot might be the only early Stephen King book that isn't about a psychic because it's about a gay vampire couple who just absolutely obliterate real estate values when they move into town. Also vampires are kind of psychic so, you know.

Another thing Stephen King believes must be a key aspect of horror is that the main character should be a writer and/or teacher. Mostly that's because he was a writer and/or a teacher and he probably didn't want to research other jobs. Researching other jobs is almost as boring as actually doing them so I get it. Most of the main characters in my fictions are people in comas.

If it were 1977 and I was at the grocery store standing in front of the books (oh? You didn't know grocery stores sold books at one time? They probably did!), I would never in a million years purchased this book. What was Dave Christiansen thinking?! The original cover is a fucking disaster! Why is there a fucking cow on it?! And is that supposed to be a lion? Maybe it's a Chow Chow but who fucking knows? If I were Dave Christiansen, I would blame the gardener in the book who sculpted the hedges to look like various animals. "I know how to draw a lion or dog! But that gardener sucks at hedge sculptures!"

And what's up with Danny Torrance?! Is he terrifying because he has white eyes or is he terrifying because he's an ugly little snot with a terribly fucked up haircut? Why is Wendy hidden behind the house?! And why don't any of the characters look like they did in the movie?! That's the part that's really fucking with me!

Am I in the minority of people who believe the movie was fifty-bajillion times better than the book? The hedgerow ending is way better than the boiler blowing up even if the heater blowing up is just a metaphor for Jack Torrance's temper. In the book, he's an angry drunk and the way he dies relates to being drunk and angry and too much pressure on him. In the movie, he's drunk and angry but also lost which makes him more sympathetic. Also Danny looks like a way better bad-ass in the movie pulling the backtracking in the snow stunt over Danny in the book who, I don't know, just kind of makes Jack forget about the boiler?

The only part of the book that's better than the movie is that Scatman Crothers gets to live. But then he wasn't Scatman Crothers in the book so why would I care if he lives? Man, I fucking loved Scatman Crothers as a kid. He's one of the main reason I loved Scavenger Hunt so much! Along with every single other aspect of the movie, of course (including Schwarzenegger).

I might be forgetting some of the things I really loved about the book because I read it months ago and forgot to do my review immediately after so now I'm mostly thinking about the movie and Doctor Sleep. I remember appreciating that Jack was going nuts based solely on Jack being kind of an abusive asshole and the hotel not having to do much to influence him. At first I thought, "This is much better than in the movie where the ghosts get him liquored up and he can then blame the drink! This is all on Jack since there is no alcohol in the bar!" But then there's another scene in the lounge and Jack gets drunk from ghost liquor and then I was all, "Well, fuck, that sucks. Whatever."

The topiary animals aren't just terrible on the cover. I fucking hated that aspect of the haunted hotel. Just really fucking stupid. I'm surprised there was never a director's cut of Kubrick's film that was released after computer generated special effects could have enabled the topiary animals and the scene was reinserted. If only Kubrick had filmed the scenes with people in terrible animal hedgerow costumes that could have been replaced by the computer animation later. Like George Lucas did with Jabba in his re-release of Star Wars! Man, that would fucking blown! But in a really hilarious terrible way that I could have appreciated.

The movie can still terrify me when I think about it sometimes in the dead of night. Just like the images of the vampires in the made-for-television 'Salem's Lot movie. But when I think about this book? Nothing. Nada. Zip-o-rooni tunes. Not scary in the slightest. It's about a father that gets drunk in isolation with his family, treats them bad, and then explodes. Good riddance! I suppose in that context, I love the book! Can't get enough of a terrible father getting his comeuppance tale!

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King (1975)

Carrie ends with the entire town being burned to the ground. 'Salem's Lot ends with the entire town about to be burned to the ground. Did Stephen King's creative writing teacher tell him that this was the best way to end a story? King even has a scene where Ben, the main character who is a writer, burns his manuscript based on Jerusalem's Lot instead of finishing the book. Has anybody checked to see if King's college alma mater isn't just ash and smoldering ruins?

At least The Shining is his next book and we all know that one won't end with the entire setting being burned to the ground because we've all seen the movie and it ends in a snowy hedge maze instead!

This book is the print version of a snuff film. That's not a complaint, by the way! Not that I have ever seen a snuff film nor do I think I would enjoy it. I'm just writing a review! King spends the first half of the book making sure the reader gets to know every single resident of Salem's Lot so that he can spend the second half of the book killing them in ways that make you go, "Who is this again? Oh! It's the jerk bus driver, I guess." Maybe people who remember names better than I do didn't have as much trouble remembering that Ruthie Crockett was the high school girl with the nipples and Sandy McDougall was the baby puncher and Charles Rhodes was the kid hating bus driver. Anyway, they all die. That's sort of a spoiler but not really because I'm pretty sure the first chapter lays out plainly that pretty much everybody died but one guy and one boy.

For a vampire book, there weren't enough homoerotic scenes for my tastes. Hmm, maybe I should do a review of The Tale of the Body Thief. That's one of the best books about how people commit acts to ensure that they never lose the person they love but those acts actually cause them to lose the person they love. Lestat probably should have been more like Barlow. Although we never really get to experience Barlow's feelings towards Straker. I bet there were some longing romantic looks over torn out children's throats in that household.

Stephen King spends an inordinate amount of time with his characters trying to convince themselves and others that this vampire invasion is a reality. It's a modern conundrum King has to navigate in that he realizes his characters would know all about the myths and fictions of vampires and it would be insane for them to not question the evidence piling up all around them. It's almost like modern writers having to figure out how to deal with cell phones in modern horror and suspense films. To make it realistic, you have to deal with the questions which will be foremost in the reader's minds. "How would an actual person react to evidence that somebody might be a vampire?" I think I'd probably be like the sheriff. I'd realize something was wrong and slowly realize what was wrong was that vampires were all over my town and then I'd crack and run screaming. You want to be a hero? Then you can end up impaled on knives at the bottom of some boarding house cellar! Bravo! You were brave!

All in all, this was a solid Stephen King book. It also may have had the first appearance of Pennywise in Callahan's childhood memory of Mr. Flip staring at him from out of the closet.

P.S. Hey, Internet. Look up dramatic irony and the concept of jokes before you correct me about the ending of The Shining!