by George Beahm
As for the collection as a whole, Michael Collings points out:
If there is a single flaw in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, it would be the lack of distinctive strength in the opening and closing selections. “Dolan’s Cadillac” is a worthwhile story, but not on the same level, among King’s works, as Skeleton Crew’s “The Mist.” And putting “Head Down,” a prose piece on baseball, in the final position only underscores the lack of a powerhouse conclusion such as that provided by “The Woman in the Room” in Night Shift and to an even greater extent by “The Reach” in Skeleton Crew.
On the whole, Nightmares & Dreamscapes offers King’s readers a great deal to sample and enjoy; in the last analysis, however, it does not meet, let alone exceed, the remarkable strength of Skeleton Crew.
70
DOLORES CLAIBORNE
1993
Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.
—DOLORES CLAIBORNE, FROM THE FILM DOLORES CLAIBORNE
King fans can be divided into two camps: those who want only horror fiction, and those who want everything he’s written.
Those in the former camp may be disappointed with Dolores Claiborne, but those in the latter camp are delighted. This one’s a cooker.
Following on the heels of Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne is a poignant story about a woman with a justifiable ‘tude honed to a sharp edge by a hardscrabble life. For any reader who wants to see the texture of Maine life from an insider’s perspective, this book delivers the goods.
The title character is one of King’s most fully realized and carefully drawn portraits. Dolores Claiborne is one of the most memorable in his cast of Maine characters. She’s a straight-talking, no-nonsense, lifelong resident of Little Tall Island, and when she’s talking, you’ll sit up and pay attention.
Longtime King fans will appreciate the map of Maine reproduced in the book, which depicts the locations of all his fictional towns.
The book was also adapted as a major motion picture, released in 1995. Kathy Bates, who brilliantly acted her memorable role as Dolores Claiborne, was nominated for but did not win the following awards: the Chicago Film Critics Association Award, the Chlotrudis Award, and the Saturn Award. To which I say: There ain’t no justice in the universe.
This is a near-flawless novel, one that can stand on its own merits, though some have noted that it has a superfluous supernatural element that ties it to Gerald’s Game. Besides that minor caveat, the novel is a classic Maine story by King, as Michael Collings explains:
This remarkable story of an old woman’s life, loves, omissions, and sins showcases King’s undeniable storytelling powers—not the least because the entire novel consists of a single, unbroken monologue. There are no chapter divisions, no bits of dialogue from other characters to break Dolores’s spell. The entire story is told from a single point of view, through the mouth of Dolores Claiborne, with only momentary pauses as she listens to her questioners (although readers are never allowed to do so) and responds. The result is a work that depends for its overriding success upon an undeviating sense of character … and upon a character interesting enough to repay the readers’ investment of time.
[As he does in] Rage, Roadwork, and Misery, King very nearly steps completely out of his “horrormeister” persona to present a compelling portrait of a believable character. His story is bolstered by underlying wells of anger and frustration, not consumed by it. And his point comes through clearly and directly in the character and speech of Dolores Claiborne, without any obscuring layers of overt agenda or political correctness.
71
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON INSOMNIA
1994
A T-shirt design for King’s Insomnia tour in 1994.
Insomnia is probably not to every reader’s taste. A long novel that threatens an odd kind of stasis in its opening chapters, it has as its hero an old man of seventy, recently widowed, and increasingly suffering from an unnerving kind of insomnia. It is not that he can’t get to sleep but that he awakens a minute or so earlier every day until eventually he is living on two or three hours of sleep, constantly fatigued, almost hoping for death. This is a relatively long process, and King allows the novel to move slowly over the course of months, detailing the consequences of the affliction on Ralph Roberts’s life and on his relationship with old friends and neighbors—some of whom simultaneously begin acting strangely, even threateningly.
Ralph Roberts discovers that he is not the only one who sees mysteriously energizing auras and little bald men carrying odd implements, or even the only one who can look on someone’s aura and abruptly know everything there is to know about that person, including whether he or she (or it, in the case of Rosalie the dog) is about to die. With that discovery comes the concomitant discovery that he is not insane, that his insomnia has a larger purpose beyond anything he can truly comprehend, and that he and his newfound love, Lois Chasse, have been involved in actions on the cosmic scale approached in It and The Talisman. Confronting one of the little “docs” (who willingly go by the names Ralph suggests for them—Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, after the Greek Fates that spin, measure, and cut the thread of life), Roberts demands an explanation for their intrusion into human affairs.
He gets one.
This moment of true apocalypse is as startling as the equivalent revelation of the vampire in ’Salem’s Lot. After almost three hundred pages of text—interesting and engaging in its own way but not as focused as one usually finds in King—Insomnia asserts itself in one short paragraph as a linchpin in King’s quest-vision, linking itself with The Stand, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, and the Dark Tower novels as explorations of that mystic nexus of all existence whose own existence is threatened by a single action about to take place in Derry, Maine.
Insomnia is slow-paced at the beginning, but the pace has the stolidity, solemnity, and inevitability of something approaching epic, appropriate to the incremental power of revelation and truth. As King makes connection after connection in the second half of this novel to other works and other worlds, the story takes its place as one of King’s most ambitious works, attempting with It, The Talisman, and the Dark Tower series to penetrate the underpinnings of reality itself. And with an adroitness that demonstrates the intensity of his vision, King links the novel’s earlier (mundane and therefore transitory) social and political concerns with the heightened sense of a cosmic game between the unseen forces of Light and Dark—between the Purpose and the Random. Susan Day’s appearance at the Civic Center, as well as the disruption it causes in thousands of lives, also becomes the focus for this episode in the struggle for the Dark Tower and the scene of a key victory for the Purpose in the war that may have no end.
In his final sacrifice, and in its final moments—and Ralph Roberts’s—Insomnia attains a dignity, grace, and even grandeur that place Death firmly in the pantheon of immutable cosmic forces, along with Life, the Random, and the Purpose.
72
ROSE MADDER
1995
In Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris opined, “When did Stephen King’s books stop being so scary?” Citing The Shining, Pet Sematary, and Carrie as novels in which “the horror … springs from the ease with which evil can take hold of (or masquerade as) decent people,” he felt that Rose Madder offered “no seductive ambiguity” (what does that mean?), with an ending that he believed was “a cheat.” He gives the following reason:
She steps through an oil painting of a toga-clad woman warrior into another world, where she has some sort of empowering experience involving a feminist goddess, a maze, a magical stream, and something called the Temple of the Bull. Temple of the Bull, indeed. In the context of a novel that means to explore the psychology of a beaten woman, the random imposition of a supernatural gimmick—especially a wan, fairy-tale-ish conceit that’s about as convincing as a CD-ROM game—constitutes a rather stunning cop-out.
Or, alternatively, and more significantly, it suggests an ongoing explorati
on of what it means to be female in our time: Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne necessarily precede Rose Madder, which I admit is not what King’s horror readers are looking for: the danse macabre.
To them, Stephen King—as Clive Barker put it—is “the architect of the most popular ghost-train rides in the world.” As Barker elaborates in an essay in Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, “Surviving the Ride,” King’s fiction rockets down the roller-coaster tracks by virtue of “his charm and accessibility of his prose, the persuasiveness of his characters, the ruthless drive of his narratives.”
No wonder, then, that when King’s horror-hungry fans find themselves staring at a novel like Rose Madder in the bookstore, their appetite for such fare is curbed.
The publishers surely recognized this, since they pulled out all the stops, distributing an unprecedented number of advance copies to prime the pump: a reported fifteen thousand copies, bound in rose-colored paper covers, went out to reviewers.
Overtly addressing the theme of domestic violence, which is also at the heart of Dolores Claiborne, the discussion is extended into Rose Madder, which King said is not one of his more successful books, as he told The Paris Review (fall 2006):
As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books. I think Rose Madder fits in that category, because it never really took off. I felt like I had to force that one.
In her review, Laura Wise (examiner.com) noted that Rose Madder is what might be termed an “issues novel” given its focus on domestic violence, pointing out that the novel “isn’t vampires-and-aliens horror” but “a look at the human monster”: Rose’s abusive husband, Norman.
W. David Atwood, writing for Book-of-the-Month-Club’s monthly newsletter in 1995, summarized the plot:
King went from high-school English teacher to one of history’s best-selling authors for one simple reason: He dared to confront the 20th century’s unspoken fears. The dog in Cujo, the teenage loser in Carrie, the obsessive fan in Misery, the fatal disease in The Stand, the sexual experimentation of Gerald’s Game, the crazed dad in The Shining, the sleeplessness of Insomnia—all aspects of modern life that scare us, of which we rarely speak openly.
Now, in Rose Madder, King takes on one of our oldest taboos, one that is very much in today’s headlines and, at long last, open for discussion: domestic violence.
Rosie Daniels tries hard to be a good wife, but she keeps messing up in little ways—spilling iced tea or getting caught with a racy novel. And when she does, he’s always there, every night, to punish her. People around town respect Police Detective Norman Daniels, the handsome, well-built high school sweetheart Rosie married 14 years ago. But they don’t know what goes on each night in his own house: the carefully placed punches, the biting that leaves scars, the pencil-stabbing, or the shameful thing he did with his tennis racket.
Agreeing with Stephen King that Rose Madder does matter, but falls short of its goal, People magazine concluded, “Though this is an engrossing story of a battered woman, its supernatural elements are neither super nor natural. And that’s what’s the matter with Rose Madder.”
73
CLIVE BARKER:
DEMON FABULIST
Every body is a book of blood; whenever we’re opened, we’re red.
—CLIVE BARKER, EPIGRAM IN BOOKS OF BLOOD (SCREAM PRESS, 1985)
As Douglas E. Winter tells the tale, he’s in England, visiting Ramsey and Jenny Campbell. Doug tells them that he’s currently writing Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. He notes that:
Ramsey disappeared into the shadows of his writing eyrie, only to emerge with a towering stack of manuscripts: the short stories of an unpublished playwright named Clive Barker. “You’re about to read the most important new horror writer of this decade,” Ramsey told me. After reading only fifty pages, I was convinced that he was right.
In 1984 that towering stack of short stories saw publication by Sphere Books in the United Kingdom. Books of Blood did indeed herald the arrival of a new, major talent, one so bright that, as Stephen King, the reigning King of Horror, told Time magazine, “You read him with a book in one hand and an airsick bag in the other. That man is not fooling around. He’s got a sense of humor, and he’s not a dullard. He’s better than I am now. He’s a lot more energetic.”
It appeared that the horror heir apparent had arrived—a British invasion, as it were, consisting of a one-man army. The young Brit, who grew up on Penny Lane, and whose resemblance to former Beatle Paul McCartney was unmistakable, was heralded and anointed by King, who had been given a copy of Books of Blood and proclaimed, “I have seen the future of horror fiction, and his name is Clive Barker.” (King paraphrased Jon Landau, who said “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”)
Emblazoned on the back cover of the U.S. editions of Books of Blood (1984 and 1985), King’s endorsement went a long way toward helping introduce and sell Barker to an American audience out for buckets of blood.
The horror fans rejoiced at the appearance of a new dark prince of horror, but it soon became clear that Barker never intended to write only horror fiction. A man of towering creative ambition and a talented visual artist, Clive Barker wrote books that shifted from horror and began to become increasingly complex texts, notably Weaveworld.
As Barker said in The Dark Fantastic, “To be continually engaged, to be continually excited about getting up in the morning, I need to feel like I’m pushing onto new ground.… My best hope for another thirty years of creation is to continue to surprise myself.”
And so it is with Stephen King.
In order for him to be excited about getting up in the morning, it means finding the right story and its storytelling mode, and it’s not always going to be a tale of supernatural horror. To King, and to any creative person looking to grow, the challenge is in not repeating oneself; the challenge is in finding new worlds to explore, which explains in part the towering edifice known as the Dark Tower with its intersecting worlds.
King’s desire is that his readers join him for the ride. Sometimes it’s a ride into the dark night, on the hell-bound train, with a skeletal figure as the conductor; sometimes it’s immersion in a fantasy world where anything can, and does, happen; and sometimes it’s looking in the mirror and seeing a reflection that doesn’t look quite right.
Stephen King’s canvases are large, and though not all readers will enjoy every picture in his gallery, because many of them only wish to visit his night gallery, he must follow his muse and write the books his way.
As King explained in an interview in WB (Nov/Dec 1989):
The only thing that matters is the story, not the person who writes it. A writer is not a can of peas. Presumably if you buy Birds Eye frozen peas, you’re going to get the same block of frozen peas every time you pick one up. But every time you pick up a novel by Stephen King or Tom Clancy or Frederick Forsyth, you are not going to get the same thing. You shouldn’t get the same thing. The books shouldn’t be standardized to the point where you can say, “If I pick this guy up, I know exactly what I’m going to get.” If that were the case, why would anybody bother to pick up a particular book? They’d all be the same.
Clive Barker on Stephen King
King is not old-fashioned. He is contemporary because he describes a real world. I’d say that old-fashioned horror lacks immediacy. King is a very immediate writer. I aim to be an immediate writer. We want our depictions to appear in the reader’s mind with the clarity of a movie—that’s part of our modernity. I want my images to be flashing—you know, wham! wham! wham!—whereas Poe and Lovecraft create a distance between the reader and the image. The experience is safer. You’re detached.
—Murray Cox, Omni magazine, October 1986
Cover to Clive Barker: Imaginer (Vol. 1, 1993–2012).
74
DESPERATION AND THE REGULATORS
1996
I had been toying with this idea called The Regulators because I had a sticker on my printer that said that. Then one day I pulled up in my driveway after going to the market and the Voice said, “Do The Regulators and do it as a Bachman book and use the characters from Desperation but let them be who they’re going to be in this story.” Of course, the first thing I say when the Voice speaks up is “Bachman is dead,” but the guy just laughs.
—STEPHEN KING, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, 1997
King’s dual books of the 1996 bookselling season were launched with considerable fanfare and support. New American Library’s Dutton shipped 1.75 million copies in hardback of The Regulators, by Richard Bachman, and Viking shipped 1.25 million copies of Desperation. Both bore cover art by Mark Ryden; in fact, if both books are placed side by side, with The Regulators on the left and Desperation on the right, a continuous picture is formed, visually tying them together.
Originally, when King approached New American Library about issuing the books simultaneously, the publisher recoiled in horror. “They didn’t want to do it,” King recalled. Then the publisher wanted to make sure everybody knew The Regulators was also a Stephen King book, so they wanted to publish Bachman’s The Regulators with cover credit to King to make the connection clear, but he vetoed that, too, because, as he told Bookwire, “you might as well then just say ‘written by Stephen King.’”
