Seven Reasons We Read Stephen King, #5 : He's A Scaredy Rat

Stephen King is scared of a lot of stuff.  Bats.  Rats.  Spiders.  Death.  Bambi.  The corpse in the bathtub opening its eyes -- revealing nothing but bulging whites -- in the 1955 film Diabolique.


King said in his introduction to Night Shift:

"At night, when I go to bed, I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I'm not a child anymore but... I don't like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. Yes, I might scream to wake the dead."

I think most people have a lot of fears.  The cool thing about Stephen King is that he writes about them!  Well, I haven't read a Stephen King book about Bambi yet, but most of his fears find a spot in his novels.  King has the courage to explore his fears!  We read him because he's willing to go there!

Aren't you scared to go down the cellar?  So is little George, because we know monsters are down there.

King once said he had to rely on Tabby to chase bats that get loose from the attic.  Seriously. . . who lives in a house with bats? 

Pet Sematary was an exploration of death; and in particular, the agony of the death of a child.  Stephenkingshop.com says,

According to King, Pet Sematary, a story about a man who brings his son back to life after he is killed by a speeding truck, was written after the same thing nearly happened to his own son. Likewise, King felt tremendous financial stress during the years prior to publishing Carrie, and The Shining was written as much about how financial and other stresses can tear apart a marriage as it was about a haunted hotel.

King's fears intensify -- refine -- his ability to scare all of us.  His fear of spiders crawls into Needful Things, IT, The Mist and The Dark Tower.

So what's your fear?  King has probably got something to make you squirm! 

• Are you scared of the dark?  King will tell you to hold his hand, then lead you down a long journey through the Lincoln Tunnel -- lights out! 
• Sacred of dogs?  Oh, there's a book for you! 
• Clowns?  Aliens?  Ghosts?  The devil?  Yep, King will give you the devil himself! 
• Anyone scared of a Gypsy curse or demon possessed law enforcement? 
• Scared of the hospital?  The doctor? 
• Anyone scared of Zombies?  How about cell phones?  And that's another thing, isn't it!?  King sometimes takes a fear, and combines it with other fears.  I didn't like my cellphone to begin with, now it might turn me into a zombie! 
• You scared of vampires?  King gives us a town full of vamps!  Or, in Night Flier, a vampire with a plane. 
• Does the haunted house around the corner scare you?  Check out Salem's Lot!
• Do airplanes creep you out?  The Langoliers is a lot of fun.

King is known to take other people's childhood fears and write about them.  It's not that he was scared of the Library Police. . . his poor son was! 

And let's talk rats for a moment. I don't even like little mice -- but rats are truly horrifying! I think the first exploration with rats came with Graveyard Shift. Trips down into the sub-sub-basement, only to discover ever growing rats. The journey is still scary! King gave us more rats in his recent novella 1922. 

I like this quote from 1922, "The rat twisted and flopped. its tail first lashed my calf, then wrapped around it like a grass snake.  Blood gushed from its mouth.  Its black eyes bulged like marbles."  That's nice, Mr. King. 

According to stephenkingwiki, The Rat is one of the twelve Guardians of the Beams that hold up the Dark Tower.

My dislike of rats didn't come from Stephen King, it came from George Orwell.  In his novel, 1984 -- which is scary in an "Under The Dome" sort of way -- the main character is scared of rats.  So, to punish him, Big Brother puts a face mask on him connected to a pipe full of rats.  The rats then attack his face!  Oh, and this book is required reading in some schools.


Let's be real honest, gang: One reason we read Stephen King is because we like being scared!  It's like a drug, though -- each time takes a higher dose. 

Last Rung Of The Ladder To Be Filmed

Andrew Neff at Bangor Daily News has posted an article titled, "NESCom students to film Stephen King short story."

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Students at Bangor's New England School Of Communications will be filming King's shrot story "The Last Rung On The Ladder." The story has been previously filmed, and this production is going to be pretty low key. However, they are hoping that King's name on the project will be a head turner."

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The story revolves around a man who learns his sister has killed herself. He remembers a summer when they were children and the ladder broke as she climbed to the loft. She jumps, at his insistance, and falls into a pile of hay. But she insists that she had forgotten abotu the hay and was simply trusting him. The story uses the theme of falling. The woman saved as a girl from falling off a ladder, later falls from a building. Her brother realizes years later that just as she needed him to save her as a child, she was once again in need of him.

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http://www.bangordailynews.com/story/Living/NESCom-students-to-film-Stephen-King-short-story,163294?ref=topstoriesOld

Shrot Stories

I enjoy short stories the way I enjoy the Twilight Zone -- I look forward to the end and the final twist. But a novel allows you to enjoy each turn, the stories within the stories. It's like LOST verses the Twilight Zone.

One reason The Stand is such an engaging novel is that it is long and takes the time to build characters. King's novels are usually a series of short stories pressed together into a larger plot. Ray Bradbury literally wrote the Martian Chronicles as a series of shrot stories.

I do wish the Tommyknockers were a novella instead of a novel.

Here is a quick list of my favorite King short stories:
1. The Mist.
2. Riding The Bullet
3. Autopsy Room Four
4. Dolan's Cadillac.
5. Suffer the Children
6. The Ledge
7. Survivor Type
8. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon.
9. The man in the black suit
10. Willa

Okay, so the Mist is techincally a novella, but it's in a book of short stories!

Children of the Corn -- Again

I numbly watched Children of the Corn this Summer -- once my children were in bed. It was pretty bad. The short story was acceptable, a good read; but honestly, not much more!

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Donald Borhers said, "I think we stepped up to the line, measured the distance to the dartboard and struck the bullseye." Now I should hope so, because Borchers is not only the producer of the remake, he's also the director and the co-writer!

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Children of the Corn was originally published in Penthouse, 1977. It was published in Night Shift in 1978. But that was just the beginning. The movies would spawn a slew of sequels in the 90's and on into the next century. 1993 promised us "The Final Sacrifice" -- but this is the series that won't die! Please, please, please KILL IT! The Children of the Corn series is like Pet Semetery, each resurrection results in something worse.

• Children of the Corn, 1984


• Children of the Corn 2, The Final Sarifice, 1993


• Children of the Corn 3, Urban Harvest, 1995


• Children of the Corn 4, The Gathering, 1996


• Children of the Corn 5, Fields of Terror, 1998


• Children of the Corn 666, Isaac's Return, 1999


• Children of the Corn Revelation, 2001


• Children of the Corn 2009.
  

This reminds me a little of Star Trek. When out of new ideas of sequals, just start over! (Please, please, no one suggest this to Lucas) I'll watch with interet and low expectations.

"Children of the Corn" premieres Saturday, Sept. 26, at 8 p.m. on Syfy. A DVD with the unrated director's cut will be released Oct. 6.

http://www.qctimes.com/entertainment/movies/article_b45d87c2-a307-11de-8a6c-001cc4c03286.html

King Speaks On The Cannibals

Stephen King & Robert Louis Stevenson

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In Danse Macabre, Stephen King notes that Robert Lous Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at a break neck pace -- completing the novel in just three days. However, the book so upset his wife that he burned it in his fireplace! Then, regretting his repentance he wrote it again, from scratch in another three days. (See Dance Macabre, p.60)

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If that first draft of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde existed -- would we want to read it? You bet! We would probably find that the rewrite came out much stronger, but just the same, it would be interesting.

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The Art Of Darkness

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It seemed that the Cannibals was lost in Stephen King's fireplace. Only mentioned briefly by Douglas E. Winter in The Art o Darkness -- but for the most part, it was gone. Until King found it (or went looking for it) in his office. He has released the first 60 pages. A rather humble act for an accomplished author! To show his work, warts and all, is pretty bold.

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Douglas Winter's book was so good that almost every other references just checked back to Winter. The Art of Darkness was a true gift to fans at the time and still. It has proved a lasting source of information. Something King himself admits having referenced recently! Anyway, Stephen King has recently given some more history on the connection between Under the Dome and The Cannibals.

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King Says. . .

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King says that he lost the first draft, but the other was written in Pittsburg. Interesting to me that this was during the filming of Creepshow, since you would think he would stop writing to make a movie. But then, if King stopped for each movie -- he would never write again!

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"I spent two months in a depressing suburban apartment complex," King says, "that became (with the usual fictional tweaks) the setting for the story. It was called The Cannibals, and this time I got a lot further—almost five hundred pages—before hitting a wall. I assumed the manuscript was lost. Long story short, it turned up—battered, and with some pages missing, but mostly complete—in the summer of 2009."

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John MacDonald Had An Interesting Take
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At the beginning of Night Shift, John D. MacDonald said that what makes King a great writer is that King has written a "stupendous number of other stories and books and fragments and poems and essays and other unclassified things, most of them too wrtched to ever publish." (Night Shift, introduction).

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King offers the work simply for amusement, suggesting it be an "appetier" to Under The Dome. For those who enjoy seeing a writers work before rewrites and editors, this should be a treat. MacDonald would remind us that it is this earlier work that made King's soon to be published work strong.

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A Typewriter?!

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"I’m amused by the antique quality of the typescript," King admits. "this may have been the last thing I did on my old IBM Selectric before moving on to a computer system." Seems like I remember him saying years ago that he didn't like computers because he felt like his words were under glass. Of course, the computer would go bye bye when he wrote Dreamcatcher by hand.

Graveyard Shift

Usually when making a Stephen King movie a top concern is how to incorperate all the elements that made the novel so good. Thus the reason for concern about the upcoming IT movie -- and the reason so many King books are turned into mini series (Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Desperatin).

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King's novella's often suffer from the opposite problem: How will movie makers stretch a short novel into a whole movie? Often this is done with great skill -- All of the Different Seasons stories come to mind. HOwever, sometimes the magic just doesn't happen.

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That brings up Graveyard Shift. I watched this again last night with some enthusiasm. That was not long lived. The tagline was: "Stephen King took you to the edge with The Shining and Pet Sematary. This time......he pushes you over." Well, no! The movie is not at all scary. The characters are not interesting, and unfortuantely the special effects weren't very special.

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It's tough in a movie when you really don't care who dies and who makes it to the end. At least in the Incredible Hulk, when the drifter gets hired you can expect a cool green monster.

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The opening scene is rather delightful. After a worker kills a rat, the other rats stare knowingly at him -- watching as mama rat approaches.

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If Stephen King hadn't written this story, I doubt anyone would have chosen to film this story. The stories power is the imagination -- rats in dark places really is a scary idea that King masterfully drives home.

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The Duck Speaks actually gave this book a very good review. http://badmovieplanet.com/duckspeaks/reviews/2002/graveyard-shift In fact, they liked it enough that it made me want to go back and see if I was watching the same movie! Zack Handlen writes: "After rereading the short story and rewatching the movie in rapid succession, I can safely say that as an adaptation, this one plays straight pool. The source material is a dark, morbid piece with very little in the way of humanity or light, and the movie, touches of dark comedy aside, is much the same. All of the original plot is there, not only the names- and even more importantly, an attempt is made to capture that wonderful “tone” that everyone always talks about King’s work having. It’s a fairly successful attempt, surprisingly; it only misses in the scares department, and even then, it’s not too painful. "