Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All

by King, Stephen

  His mind was already back on the guitar. It hung exactly where the old con man had left it, like an open invitation. His fingers itched to feel that wood and steel again, the way his palms had itched to cup a girl’s breast when he was fourteen.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered, trying to force himself to turn away and follow the old man outside.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He knew this as surely as he’d known he couldn’t stay in college or marry that pregnant girl back in Bar Harbor, as surely as he’d known that if he got a draft notice, he’d rabbit to Canada the first day, and not for any high-toned moral reason, either—not for anything but fear.

  Fresh fear rose up his gullet, locking his throat shut. A small voice inside told him he was in mortal peril. But that voice was powerless against the siren call of the guitar hanging in front of him. He could almost hear music chiming from the sound hole, all the music yet to be played on those bronze and silver strings stretched to perfect tension on the one-of-a-kind body.

  “That old bastard was full of shit,” Branch muttered. “Plain and simple. He was nothing but a carny huckster Percy paid to scare the crap out of me.”

  Filled with relief, Branch took three deliberate steps forward and reached for the guitar. The moment his hands closed around the neck, he remembered Lucky telling him what it felt like: the forearm of a virgin raised on buttermilk and beefsteak. Branch couldn’t help but smile.

  The firebomb he’d left in the hallway seemed to detonate in silence, for the flash arrived first, its white rays bouncing off the face of the guitar and blinding Branch until the shock wave and the sound arrived, slamming him against the wall. Even before Branch pushed himself erect, fire filled the heart of Percy Falkner’s mansion. Branch was stunned, unsure of what had happened. Had the old man set off the Molotov cocktail on his way out? No—he wouldn’t.

  Holding up his hand to shield his face, Branch squinted toward the hall, where flames were already blackening the ceiling. Through the thick smoke, he saw a dark silhouette coming up the hall, black as ash but in the shape of a man. The stovepipe hat scarcely rose above the flames.

  “Why?” Branch shouted. “Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” said the old man, his yellow eyes almost indistinguishable from the fire. He hadn’t raised his voice, yet Branch heard it as clearly as if Lucky had spoken into the shell of his ear. “You did, when you reached out to take that guitar.”

  “You tricked me!”

  “I didn’t do any such thing. You made your choice, Branch. And you’ve got to live with it, just like Robert did. I told you—every man chooses his own hell. Robert chose silence. You chose fire.”

  Branch staggered backward, away from the oven heat. He wanted to ask the old man something else, but when he looked up again, the silhouette was gone.

  He’d never make it down the hall, not even if he wrapped himself in a wet blanket. The corridor had become an inferno. For a few desolate seconds, he sagged against the outer wall and began to sob. Then, in a flash of insight, his original plan came back to him. He’d never meant to leave by the door! The display room had two windows. Branch had watched Percy’s hound chase a goat around the yard when he’d visited last year. Grabbing the guitar from the wall, Branch ran to the window and flung back the heavy curtains.

  Six iron bars had been set into the window casing, running from bottom to top. Branch’s mouth fell open in shock. Those bars hadn’t been there last year! He would have remembered. Forcing down panic, he ran to the other window and pulled back the curtains. Six more bars greeted him, set so close together that a child couldn’t squeeze between them.

  “No, Jesus,” he gasped, looking back toward the hall.

  The fire had already stolen through the display room door. Hungry tongues of flame licked up the walls, seeking fuel and oxygen. Seeking flesh, Branch thought with horror. Suddenly the fire seemed alive, an extension of the old man who’d left him here to die.

  Branch leaned the guitar against the wall and started kicking at one of the bars. He kicked kung-fu style, the way he and his buddies had kicked out streetlights in Bangor when they were kids.

  The bar didn’t budge.

  As he tried the next one, a human form suddenly appeared at the window, lighted by the flames behind Branch. The old man’s face floated inches beyond the glass. He was smiling.

  “Let me out!” Branch screamed. “Help me! I’ll do anything you say!”

  Lucky shrugged, and his calm voice projected clearly through the glass. “I can’t break them bars, no more than I could break a slave chain when I wore one.”

  Branch snatched his pistol from his ankle holster and pointed it at the old man. “I’ll kill you!” he shouted. “Let me out!”

  Lucky only smiled. When the smile became a grin, Branch fired two shots into his chest, then two more. The bullets shattered the window, but they disappeared into the black frock coat without even a ruffle. The old man shook his head as though in disappointment. “All you done now is draw the fire to you.”

  Branch glanced over his shoulders at the burgeoning flames, then threw down the gun in despair. “Why did you do this to me?”

  “You didn’t have nothing to do with it. I knew you was coming, that’s all. I told you, I had to put a piece of myself into that guitar to convince Robert to do our deal. Seventy-five years I been missing that piece of my soul. Like living without a hand, son.”

  “So…you came back just to play that damned guitar?”

  Lucky shook his head. “I came back to get what I lost that night at the crossroads. I couldn’t get it back till somebody destroyed that guitar, and nobody ever did. Who could, with it sounding the way it does?”

  “You knew where it was! Why didn’t you destroy it?”

  The old man looked past Branch at a runner of flame that was coming toward the window. “World don’t work that way. Everybody’s subject to laws, son. Even me. Everybody’s got to render unto Caesar. But when you decided to do this, I knew my night had come. I knew I’d be whole again. But I ain’t so different from you. I wanted to play that axe one last time. To feel that sweet neck, and work them strings the way Robert did in his prime. I just stayed too long, that’s all. I was enjoying myself, and you surprised me. That’s all right, though.” He chuckled. “You won’t be around long enough to tell nobody.”

  Part of the ceiling collapsed behind Branch, and flaming debris filled the air. He whirled to see a wall of flame only a couple of yards away. Unbearable heat blistered his skin, and suffocating black smoke billowed toward him.

  “Breathe deep!” cried the old man. “Let the smoke take you! Easier that way. Trust me.”

  But his words went unheeded. As Branch looked into the yellow eyes, something else the old devil had said came back to him: “There ain’t no music in hell.”

  “FUCK YOU, OLD MAN!” Branch screamed.

  With sudden inspiration, he seized the guitar, sat on the window casing, thrust his finger in the glass bottleneck and began playing “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” Though the fire roared like a ravenous beast, Branch’s crystalline notes pierced it like arrows, and within a moment he saw the “CLABBER GIRL” sign materialize before him, nailed to the weathered wall. Barefoot children and bare-legged women danced around him in the dust.

  Branch grinned fiercely and played as he never had in his life. Not even Robert Johnson had played with such fervor or poured more of himself into and through this guitar. A whole bright world appeared around Branch, coalescing with perfect clarity, as though a summer storm had knocked all the dust from the air and everything shimmered in its own perfect light.

  “Play, boy!” shouted the old man from behind the glass. “Play! Remember, there ain’t no music in hell! Not what you’d call music.”

  Branch thrashed the strings with his fingernails and slid the bottleneck from the saddle to the nut. A fusillade of notes drove the fire back. Behind him the old man laughed and clapped
, shouting encouragement. Branch cycled “Judgment Day” into “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.” Before him the new world grew ever brighter. The coffee-colored girls danced like dervishes, and the old men clapped and chanted a language Branch had never known. Branch felt himself rising off the floor. After fifty-seven years, he’d finally done what Hendrix and all the other greats had done. He’d summoned a full-blown world with his fingers, with his heart…with his soul.

  The world he had conjured was perfect, save for the heat. High above this rich pageant, the Mississippi sun burned down like the glowing mouth of a forge heating an anvil. Sweat poured off the dancing girls, and it sizzled off Branch’s spine like water thrown on a griddle. He was so hot that the tang of cooking pork on the air sickened him. Branch flexed his jaw and focused on the music, working the guitar like a swordsmith working metal. “Last Fair Deal” became “Stones in My Passway,” one of Robert Johnson’s favorites. But as he played, something popped inside the guitar, like bone cracking.

  One of the rib braces had given way.

  Branch gripped the neck harder and played for all he was worth, but four bars later, the neck snapped and the guitar buckled in his hands. His breath caught in his throat and tears welled in his eyes. The “CLABBER GIRL” sign wavered, then began to fade. One of the colored girls gave him a sad smile, then turned away.

  Branch set the wrecked instrument reverently on the floor and turned back toward the window. He was half hoping the old man would be gone, but he wasn’t so lucky. The jaundiced eyes looked deeply into his, more deeply than any eyes ever had, and then they softened with something like empathy.

  “At least you tried,” Lucky said, tipping his silk hat once more in farewell. “You nearly did it.”

  Branch had no words left. As he looked into the ancient face, a runner of flame licked up his pants leg, and searing agony speared into his brain. The smell of pork became the smell of man, man burning, and madness filled him. Branch grabbed the iron bars and began to scream. The old man’s yellow eyes grew brighter, and his smile broadened, the square teeth reflecting fire. The devil seemed to swell in size as the orphaned fragment of his spirit rushed back into him. Branch’s hands broiled as they shook the red-hot bars, and he screamed until his throat produced only a soundless shriek of pain and betrayal.

  “Now that’s music,” said the old man, rolling his shoulders as though in preparation for some task or journey.

  After a few delicious moments, he turned and walked away from the mansion, striding through the sea of cotton, whistling a walking blues, making for the still-warm asphalt line of Highway 61.

  Pop Quiz: The Real Stephen King

  Which story was written by the real Stephen King?

  Select a choice:

  Black Mambo

  In The Woods

  The Rock And Roll Dead Zone

  Robert Johnson’s Flat-Top

  Results: The Real Stephen King

  See what percentage of the Remainders and all other readers picked each answer

  Black Mambo Readers: 29%

  Remainders: 20%

  In The Woods Readers: 14%

  Remainders: 20%

  The Rock And Roll Dead Zone Readers: 36%

  Remainders: 40%

  Robert Johnson’s Flat-Top Readers: 21%

  Remainders: 20%

  INBOX > Subject: Grading the Kings

  From: The Book Genome Project

  To: The Remainders

  Here are the results of Grading the Kings, including both our methodology and results.

  -The Book Genome Project

  ***

  How to Grade Stephen King

  Written by Aaron Stanton, CEO Booklamp.org. Special thanks to Dr. Matthew Jockers, Dan Bowen, Matt Monroe, Sidian Jones, and the rest of the Book Genome team.

  How do you grade four highly skilled bestselling authors when they try to write like Stephen King? Well, if someone asked for a book that was “like Stephen King,” they wouldn't typically be looking for King's latest non-fiction work on, say, taxes, but rather a book that was written in the way that Stephen King writes and about something that Stephen King would typically write about. As such, we analyzed our would-be Kings for both thematic and stylistic consistency.

  Thematic Analysis: We looked at the themes of known Stephen King books, everything from Carrie, Cujo, and Thinner to Tommyknockers, Rose Madder, and On Writing. In our case, “theme” is very granular; we literally measured the thematic building blocks the author used on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. Did the author focus on characters, spending a lot of time on things like facial expressions or emotions? Or did they spend more time on physical setting and atmosphere? The idea is that each author has a unique thematic rhythm that you can compare using the tools of the Book Genome Project. Stylistic Fingerprinting: Most writers have stylistic “tells,” qualities in their writing that are natural and difficult to conceal. The most telling features of individual style are also the most frequent. For example, compared to the other three authors, Stephen King was more likely to use words like, “it, was, had, one, were, on, all, there, like, at, no,” and, “up.” King also tends to use contractions ending in “’t” more often than the other authors, but he is less likely to use, “to, this, we, is, for,” and “about.” The stylistic approach generally needs at least 1,000 words to be reliable. With less text, there's less opportunity for the author to “drop their guard” long enough for their natural style to slip through.

  Our Homework

  We knew that our four Kings were Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Greg Iles, and Stephen King himself. We started by getting a sense of how closely each writer naturally wrote like Stephen King, comparing a number of their books to known King titles. We also included one additional author, a mysterious fellow by the name of Richard Bachman, to see how closely he naturally wrote like Stephen King, as well.

  What We Found

  It turned out that Stephen King has a fairly wide range; he doesn't always write in a single style. Despite that, King does have a detectable and consistent signal in his writing. On average, his books appeared closer to other books he'd written than 99.86% of the books around them (because of the way the system works, it's impossible to get 100%). The closest non-King author was Richard Bachman, whose books were closer to King's writing than 99.66% of books by other authors. It's as if he and King were the same person (if you're not familiar with Richard Bachman, I'd recommend a quick Google search).

  Of the other authors, Greg Iles naturally tended to use themes most similar to King, scoring a respectable 70.91% compared to King's 99.86%, while Dave Barry had the farthest gap to close at 42.33%. You can see that here:

  Next we wanted to find a similar identifying signal using stylistic fingerprints. Of the four authors, Iles had the least consistent stylistic tells in his writing, while King and Pearson clustered together most closely. After some training and tests using blind samples of their known writings, we were able to correctly guess the right author about 78% of the time using the stylistic method alone.

  So there was a signal. More importantly, in every sample where King was the true author, the stylistic tool correctly guessed King. Between the two methods, we were ready for the hunt to begin.

  Analysis

  We received four short stories with the authorship removed. The stories varied in length, from a few hundred words to more than 10,000 words. The minimum length typically needed for this sort of analysis is around 1,000 words, but we decided to see what we could do with the materials provided.

  As you know by now, the four stories were:

  Black Mambo by “Stephen King”

  In the Woods by “Stephen King”

  The Rock And Roll Dead Zone by “Stephen King”

  Robert Johnson's Flat-Top by “Stephen King”

  The First Pass (Thematic Analysis)

  First, we looked at the four stories for their thematic similarity to Stephen King:

  King's known books tended to
range from 90% - 99.99% in training, so having three stories fall within that range meant that our authors did a good job of putting on Stephen King's clothes for a short time. All of the authors changed their natural themes fairly dramatically, so much so that Stephen King was the nearest similar thematic match in three of the four stories. The one exception was Robert Johnson's Flat-Top, which came slightly closer to Greg Iles (67.20%) than it did to Stephen King (65.18%).

  So in terms of grading the four Kings on writing a “typically thematic” Stephen King story, the author of The Rock And Roll Dead Zone came closest, followed by Black Mambo, In the Woods, and then Robert Johnson's Flat-Top.

  The Second Pass (Stylistic Fingerprinting)

  Next up was writing style. Writing style is a better-tested academic approach to author attribution. It calculates the probability that each story was written by an author based on their known writing samples. In the case of our four would-be Kings, this approach provided 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place author guesses for each story. Each guess is in isolation, meaning the first guess was the one the computer thought was most likely to be the author, regardless of what it guessed on the other stories.

  The most glaring distinction between the thematic and stylistic approach was that The Rock And Roll Dead Zone, which was judged thematically as the most similar to King’s body of work, contains very few of his typical writing tells. In fact, the stylistic tool thought there was only about a 7% chance that it was actually written by Stephen King.

  The only point where both thematic and stylistic methods agreed was on Robert Johnson's Flat-Top; both seemed to think it was likely to have been written by Greg Iles. So with that agreement, we made our first guess.