by George Beahm
That was back in the fifties and sixties, and then the world moved on; the cheap paperbacks with the lurid covers became a part of book publishing history, until Charles Ardai and Max Phillips revived their provocative “in your face” cover art and hard-hitting prose for their line of books.
Their Web site: “Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills—the sheer entertainment—of the golden age of paperback crime novels…. Determined detectives and dangerous women … fortune hunters and vengeance seekers … ingenious criminals and men on the run.”
So Joyland doesn’t quite fit in that mold, which is why I agree with Bill Sheehan, who wrote in The Washington Post, that, like The Colorado Kid, Joyland “depends on King’s typically unerring sense of character for its deepest effects.… King has created a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale that encompasses restless ghosts, serial murder, psychic phenomena and sexual initiation.”
And though there’s joy in Joyland, there’s none for wheelchair-bound Mike, who gets to fly the kite on the beach, but not in the way he imagined.
107
DOCTOR SLEEP
2013
[A] return to balls-to-the-wall, keeping-the-lights-on horror.
—STEPHEN KING ON DOCTOR SLEEP, FROM HIS OFFICIAL WEB SITE
In Fear Itself, a collection of essays about Stephen King, Peter Straub wrote “Meeting Stevie,” which concerns King’s third novel, The Shining (1977). “It was obviously a masterpiece, probably the best supernatural novel in a hundred years. He … was now quite clearly one of the best writers of any kind in the United States.” Thirty-six years later, King wrote a sequel—his only one to date—to The Shining.
King told The Guardian that it was about
a cat in a hospice that knows when people are going to die. He would go into that patient’s room and curl up next to them. And I thought, that’s a good advertisement for death, for the emissary of death. I thought, “I can make Dan the human equivalent of that cat, and call him Doctor Sleep.” There was the book.
Titled Doctor Sleep, Danny Torrance is middle-aged, and, like his father, he bounces around from job to job; he winds up working at a hospice in Frazier, a small town in New Hampshire. Also like his father, Danny’s a recovering alcoholic. It’s time, he realizes, to get his life back on track. Haunted by the past and by the Overlook Hotel and its ghosts, who still bedevil his thoughts, Danny once again relies on his old friend and mentor, Dick Hallorann, to help him cope.
Similarly, Danny’s role at the hospice, aided by his psychic abilities, is to put people at ease and help them cross over when they realize the end is near; his unusual talent is then put to good use.
FOREVER YOUNG
Abra Stone, a young girl whose “shining” talent is greater than Danny’s, makes contact telepathically with him. After psychically experiencing the murder of a young boy by a group called the True Knot (psychic vampires who feed on their victims’ life energy, called “steam,” when they die), they are now aware of and hunger for her because their diminishing stock of “steam,” stored in canisters, is nearly depleted; without it, they will eventually die.
Rose the Hat, the leader of the True Knot, realizes that Abra’s “steam” will replenish their diminished stock for many years to come, because she’s a psychic gusher: Her “steam,” procured through her torture, means they will have plenty for years to come.
The True Knot heads east in a caravan of RVs to capture and kill Abra Stone.
Understandably, King was concerned about his Constant Readers’ perception of the new book: Comparisons with The Shining were inevitable, as he told the BBC:
You are faced with that comparison and that has got to make you nervous because there is a lot of water under the bridge. I’m a different man.… What a lot of people are saying is, “Well okay, I will probably read this book but it cannot be as good as The Shining.” But I am obviously an optimist and I want them to say when they get done with it, that it was as good. But what I really want them to say is that it is better than The Shining.
In truth, the issue isn’t whether one book is better than the other, because they are very different books. The Shining is a recognized classic, the work of King’s most cited by college professors for its significance and teachability; it has stood the test of time for nearly four decades. Doctor Sleep is a newcomer, and, though it has generally been reviewed well, a distinction between the two must be made, as a reviewer for The Telegraph pointed out:
It’s … quite a different order from The Shining: there isn’t the same claustrophobic, elemental terror that has caused so many people over the years to develop a phobia of hotel lifts. The members of the True Knot are a memorably loathsome bunch, but having brought them vividly to life, King cannot make them as frightening as the more nebulous beings that terrorized Jack Torrance.
The Shining was a yell of despair from the darkest of places. Doctor Sleep is a warm, entertaining novel by a man who is no longer the prisoner of his demons, but knows where to look when he needs to call on them.
A seasoned writer who has spent a lifetime in New England, King’s roots run deep. “King,” wrote Margaret Atwood, in a review of the book for The New York Times, “is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their belief in witches, to Hawthorne, to Poe, to Melville, to Henry James of ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ and then to later exemplars like Ray Bradbury.”
King draws on that taproot for Doctor Sleep, just as he did for The Shining and countless other tales; though fans aren’t likely to favor the former over the latter, the fact remains that Doctor Sleep is a worthy addition to King’s literary canon: It’s the perfect book on a cold night when the wind-driven rain patters against the window and the moon is bright and full. In other words, it’s a well-told tale, but not in the same league as The Shining, an acknowledged masterpiece.
CLOSURE
For King, and for Danny Torrance as well, Doctor Sleep finally brings much needed, and long postponed, closure. King has now said everything he wanted to say about Danny, who, by novel’s end, celebrates fifteen years of sobriety: Just as Danny turned to Dick Hallorann for succor and received it, he in turn provides assistance to Abra Stone, to make sure she doesn’t follow his self-destructive path.
In the last chapter, Danny has a heart-to-heart talk with her: She’s not like her contemporaries—she has the Power—and she has to learn how to handle her frustrations, her anger, and not give in to it: “I’ll try,” she says. “I’ll try real hard.”
Danny hopes that will be enough. So, too, do we.
Abra is fifteen, and she has miles to go before she sleeps—a lifetime ahead that, with sound choices, may be one of fulfilled dreams and not nightmares.
As for the elderly people at the hospice where Danny works, the years of their lives are largely spent, and, unlike her, they don’t have miles to go before they sleep: They face the long sleep soon. But Danny, as Doctor Sleep, is there to ease their passage into the next world, in whatever form it takes—if indeed there is such a thing as an afterlife.
Oscar the Cat
His name is Oscar, and he’s a handsome little fella with tortoiseshell markings and white fur. Adopted as a kitten, Oscar has no time to spend with healthy people; he prefers the company of the nearly departed, the elderly people who will soon pass on. At the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, Oscar makes the rounds.
In fifty documented cases, Oscar, according to a story in The Guardian newspaper:
spends … days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live. If kept outside the room of a dying patient, Oscar will scratch on the door trying to get in.… Dr. Dosa and other staff are so confident in Oscar’s accuracy that they will alert family members when the cat jumps on to a bed and stretches out beside its occupant.
To date there has been n
o scientific inquiry to investigate the phenomenon, though there is a lot of speculation. In any event, Oscar’s presence presages the imminent end of a person’s life and provides a measure of comfort to the dying by simply being there, especially when the elderly person’s family is far away: he serves as their feline friend.
Oscar is one of life’s real-world mysteries.
Dr. David Dosa has written a book about the facility’s prescient cat, Making the Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat. Dosa’s Q&A in the book explains Oscar’s backstory. He explains that he was originally a skeptic but soon became a convert:
I became convinced of Oscar’s abilities, though, when there were two patients on the floor dying simultaneously. All of the staff thought that one of the patients was closer to death, but Oscar remained attached to the other patient. At one point, a nurse’s aide became concerned that Oscar’s streak of predicting death would end, and brought the angry cat to the bedside of the more seriously ill patient. Oscar looked at everyone like they were crazy and sprinted out of the room, returning to his vigil at the bedside of the first patient. Oscar’s charge died a few hours later, but the other patient rallied for a couple more days. Four hours before the second patient died, Oscar came to his bedside.
108
MR. MERCEDES
2014
At a public talk on December 7, 2012, at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Stephen King spoke about the genesis of Mr. Mercedes.
He explained that, when driving back from Florida to Maine, he stopped in South Carolina and checked into an inexpensive motel. There was, he said, nothing to do but watch TV, and so he turned on the tube and watched with fascination a news story about a woman who drove her car over job seekers who had lined up at a McDonald’s restaurant where applications were being handed out.
After attacking a woman in line, whom she “pasted” with “a couple of good ones,” she “got back into her car, threw it into reverse, and backed over two more people on the way out … and I thought to myself: I want to write about this.”
King can’t recollect where the incident took place, but it may have been in Cleveland, Ohio, at a “national hiring event” hosted by McDonald’s, during a nationwide push to hire fifty thousand new workers.
A witness named Joseph Shores explained, “I was filling out my application when I saw two girls fighting. I don’t know their names, but they were fighting over drama, hood stuff,” as reported by Philip Caulfield in the New York Daily News (April 20, 2011). Caulfield added that “[t]he fight briefly breaks up, and the person on the ground can be seen getting in the car while a shouting mob gathers outside the driver’s open door. Suddenly, the car lurches forward with the door still open, and then—as the crowd screams in horror—speeds into reverse, sending four people flying.”
Mr. Mercedes begins with a similar scene of carnage: A stolen Mercedes sedan is driven into a crowd of job seekers, and in the confusion the killer gets away. He’s named Mr. Mercedes by the media, for obvious reasons, and remains at large. The only significant piece of evidence is a clown’s mask, cleaned with bleach. In other words, there’s no trace of the killer … until he reappears, taunting his old nemesis, a retired police detective named Bill Hodges.
Like others who feel useless in retirement after a very active life in the working world, Bill is profoundly depressed, and clinically so: He’s contemplated suicide. But when Mr. Mercedes taunts him online, Bill finds a renewed purpose in life: to close the book on the killer, once and for all, by finding and capturing him.
Of course, since Bill’s retired, it’s not his responsibility, but he figures that since it’s an old case he had previously worked on, he’s got a dog in the fight.
The killer turns out to be—as they often are—a disaffected, angry young man who blames society for all his problems. Also, as these killers often turn out to be, he’s aspirational: It’s not enough to kill innocent victims waiting in line at the First Annual City Job Fair; he wants to up the ante by killing hundreds of people, and plans to do so at a concert. But Bill, who put his service revolver away, is back on the case, albeit unofficially, and this hard-boiled detective novel gets under way: Bill teams up with Janey (the sister of Olivia Trelawney, whose Mercedes was stolen) and a computer-savvy seventeen-year-old boy who helps him with odd jobs around the house.
A stand-alone novel, Mr. Mercedes is the first part of a trilogy. A mystery/suspense novel, it won “Best Novel” in 2015 from the Mystery Writers of America, prompting George R.R. Martin to observe, on his Web site,
I was very pleased to see Stephen King take home the “Best Novel” award for Mr. Mercedes. You want to talk about writings who have been shamefully overlooked by the Hugos? (And by the Nebulas and the World Fantasy Award too). Start with King.… The world thinks of him as a master of horror, and he is … but horror is also sometimes known as “dark fantasy,” and King has written plenty of SF [science fiction] and even some high fantasy (Eyes of the Dragon, anyone? The Dark Tower) too. He’s won the National Book Award, but he’s never taken home a rocket [Hugo award] or a rock [Nebula award]. So it goes, I guess. But at least now he has the head of Edgar Allan Poe [MWA award]. Bravo!
Coming on the heels of Doctor Sleep, a horror/supernatural novel, this one will likely throw some of his newer readers for a loop. But longtime readers know that King will never abandon the horror field, though he embraces other genres because that’s just how he rocks and rolls.
As Michael M. Smith of The Guardian points out, “Notwithstanding his reputation as the Master of the Dark Side, King is always far more interested in how we get by in life, how we manage to care for one another and walk together toward the light, despite the darkness lurking within us all.”
Mr. Mercedes is, on the face of it, a “stock” book, as Stephanie Merritt wrote in a review of the book for The Guardian: “the maverick detective who must operate outside the confines of the law; the killer with a personal vendetta and an unhealthy relationship with his mother; the band of misfits who cooperate to stop him before he can carry out his murderous plan.”
In less capable hands, Mr. Mercedes would be mere pulp fiction, but as Merritt observed, there’s always more at work in King’s fiction, which gives his books staying power:
Stephen King may be the acknowledged grand master of horror fiction, but he has always known that the everyday demons hiding behind the screen doors of small-town streets can chime with our deepest terrors just as effectively as the evil creature in the sewer. Mental illness, addiction, poverty, childhood trauma, alienation—these are the real monsters that crouch beneath the surfaces of our lives, and they stalk the pages of most of his fiction in one form or another, even in stories that appear to be concerned with more obviously supernatural forces of evil.
109
WORLD FANTASY AND WORLD HORROR CONVENTIONS
I’m still a fan at heart and one of the things which is real rough is not being able to go to a convention and go into the hucksters’ room and look around, maybe pick up some copies of Weird Tales or other pulps without having people come up for autographs, or talk about something they’ve written, or you’ve written. They’re hitting on you all the time and you try to be polite and you try to talk to them but often you are just thinking to yourself, “Why can’t I be like these other people and just be allowed to browse?” You’ve become the browsee instead of the browser, kind of like a walking, talking book.
—STEPHEN KING, INTERVIEWED BY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT ELAINE LANDA, 1986
Every year professionals in the horror field meet at the World Fantasy Convention (worldfantasy.org). In 2014, the convention was held in Washington, D.C. From its Web site: It’s “an annual gathering (almost a reunion) of professionals, collectors, and others interested in the field of Light and Dark Fantasy art and literature.”
Attendance in 2014 was strictly capped at 850. The convention’s roster of attendees boasted many of the big-name writers in the field, but
not its biggest draw, Stephen King, whose success precludes his attendance: His presence is too great a distraction.
Conventions for fans began informally in the thirties. In 1936, seven science fiction fans met at one of their houses in Philadelphia and formally dubbed it the first “science fiction convention.”
Since then, conventions catering to fantasy, science fiction, and fantasy fans are held year-round, drawing massive crowds: Comic-Con International, in San Diego, which started out as a comic book convention, is now a major media convention, drawing more than 130,000, with tickets selling out in a matter of minutes online. (The New York Comic Con, which uses a bigger convention center, draws 151,000.)
But for horror fans, the venues are smaller and more intimate by design.
Stephen King was a guest of honor at the fifth World Fantasy Convention in 1979. The guest artist was Michael Whelan, who illustrated the Firestarter and Dark Tower novels. That convention was held in Providence, Rhode Island, from whence hailed H. P. Lovecraft, who once famously declared, “I am Providence!”
WORLD HORROR CONVENTION (WORLDHORRORCONVENTION.COM)
The other convention choice for horror fans is the World Horror Convention, which was started in 1991 as an alternative to the World Fantasy Convention. Unlike the WFC, WHC focuses entirely on the dark side: “The World Horror Convention is an annual gathering of professionals in the horror industry: publishers, authors, artists, musicians, filmmakers, dealers, and of course, horror fans. WHC serves as both an industry insider’s networking event and a chance for fans of the genre to get together, meet some of the creative talents in the field, and generally spend a weekend celebrating All Things Scary.”
