|
Home
Books
Richard Bachman
Movies
Television
Quotes
Biography
Posters
Links
About This Site
|
|
A collection of novellas and short
stories.
The Short
Stories
The Ballad of the
Flexible Bullet
Beachworld
Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game
(Milkman #2)
Cain Rose Up
For Owen
Gramma
Here There be
Tygers
The Jaunt
The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands
The Mist
The Monkey
Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)
Mrs. Todd's
Shortcut
Nona
Paranoid: A Chant
The Raft
The Reach
The
Reaper's Image
Survivor Type
Uncle Otto's Truck
The Wedding
Gig
Word Processor of the Gods
Commentary
''Skeleton Crew,'' a fat collection of short fiction and
two forgettable poems, as indiscriminate in its assemblage as its author
can be with words, shows off Mr. King's virtues and failings. He makes
mistakes, sentences such as this one: ''There was a bit of pain, but not
much; losing her maidenhead had been worse.'' He pokes fun at himself, by
confessing to ''literary elephantiasis'' and saying, in his introduction,
that he writes ''like fat ladies diet.'' But unfortunate images and bloat
aside, Mr. King is a real talent: his scary tales are fun to read and, I
would argue, accurate gauges of our deepest nightmares.
The book's
opener, ''The Mist,'' a story so long that less prolific souls might call
it a novel, proves you can't fool Mother Nature. When the Army pursues an
ominous top-secret project, all hell literally breaks loose. Mr. King
escalates our worst anxieties into a hyperbolic fairy tale. In his world,
the evil creatures that attack the classic sleepy village, the deaths of
loved ones and the tests that the narrator-prince undergoes do not
dissolve into a last, happy-ever-after sunset. The story is, however,
written in typically cinematic King style; the first sentence starts a
reader's internal movie projector humming.
In the 11 years since he
published ''Carrie,'' Stephen King's reliance on the symbols of popular
culture - not just movies, but rock-and-roll, advertising jingles, hot
cars - has become legendary and spoofable, perhaps because he understands
these symbols better than some more upscale writers who likewise sprinkle
their stories with brand names. His uncensored and uncensoring
subconscious allows him to absorb the world around him and in him, and to
spit it out almost undigested, as if he were walking around in a constant
hypnagogic state.
What saves Mr. King's stories from genre
purgatory is his moral vision. He is in love with his readers, as someone
in his income tax bracket might well be, and he wants to share his world
view with them. He believes that primal, mythological beings and rites
have extraordinary power; that we should stand in awe of nature; that good
does not always beget good; that death is not necessarily dreadful; that
violence is an expression of powerlessness; that creativity demands
listening to inner voices; that madness attracts all of us; that true love
never dies. Sometimes, as in ''Cain Rose Up,'' in which an anal-retentive
type turns into a mass murderer, or in ''Nona,'' a failed attempt at
Bergmanesque ghostliness, his visions run amok. Sometimes, as in ''The
Monkey,'' a story about an evil toy, or in ''Uncle Otto's Truck,'' about a
machine that avenges murder, the vision is predictable. But as a character
in ''The Mist'' says, conveniently explaining the popularity of books
about the supernatural: ''When the machines fail . . . when the
technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people
have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can
seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the
ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million
fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.'' The felicitous phrase is not
always Mr. King's strong suit, but our very own Brother Grimm almost
always speaks the truth. -- Susan Bolotin, New York Times |
