Under the Dome

I read my first Stephen King book almost 20 years ago when I was going to tech school for the Air Force.  I had avoided him up until then because I was afraid that if I liked him I would have to read about 25 more books that he already had published at that time (I tend to do that for authors I like).  But I took the plunge largely because of my sister in law who is an avid fan and just couldn't understand why I hadn't read him yet.

That was 20 years ago and now, Under the Dome is my 41st Stephen King novel.  Guess you can say that I liked that first one back then.  Some of them have been masterpieces (The Stand, The Green Mile, etc) while others have been downright stinkeroos (The Tommyknockers). I am happy to report that Under the Dome is far closer to the top end than the bottom and in fact I would go so far as to say it is in the top 5 Stephen King novels so far.  He reportedly began writing this novel more than 30 years ago but gave it up due to its complexity and shear scope.  In 2007 he took it up again and charged ahead to completion, resulting in another very successful novel.

The idea is fairly simple: a transparent and completely indestructable dome has appeared over a small town in Maine, allowing nothing to get through either way.  The people inside are trapped while those outside are helpless to provide assistance.  About a week goes by over the course of the novel.  Part of the resulting story deals with the mystery of just what this dome is and how did it get to be there but the far larger aspects of the story deal with how people react when faced with this situation.  I read an interview once where Mr King was asked about his favorite authors and influences and which novel would he have most liked to have written.  He replied, Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  This book, I think, is Stephen King's version of Lord of the Flies.

 Stephen King is at his best with his interacting characters, whether they be smart, religious, rich, poor, or fools.  He has long recognized that the most real horror is the kind of horror that real people inflict upon one another when they are desperate.  There are no monsters or demons in this book except those of the very real human being variety.  As the novel unfolds, the situation gets more and more desperate and the members of the town have to choose sides.  One of the best bad guys Stephen King has ever produced, "Big Jim" Renny, makes his debut here.  He is ultimately just a bully, but he is a smart, far thinking, master manipulator as well.  I just love an intelligent, well written bad guy.

This is a long book though and I will admit to times when I was wishing it was a tad shorter.  Mr King includes a huge cast of characters which can become burdensome if left in less capable hands.  But to his credit, once I had completed the book  I was able to look back at the long list of characters provided at the beginning and know every single one of them.  Even though the point of view character keeps switching all over the place, (including to a family dog!), Mr King has a way of reminding us just who the person is, very subtely, but enough to keep the reader on track.  I also enjoyed they very handy map of the town which really helped keep track of what was going on as the week under the dome unfolded. Marvelous job!

This morning, I completed the second short story in Jeffrey Archer's collection, Cat O'Nine Tales, "Maestro".  This was a straight forward story about an Italian restauranteur who had to serve time in jail for failing to pay all of his taxes.  Once again this was another story based in truth and told to Mr Archer while he, himself, was incarcerated.  The nice twist in this one was the revelation that the protagonist was able to find a new, sneaky way of hiding his income which is still in practice today.  Mr Archer is a story teller first and foremost.  His prose is heavy on the "telling" not the "showing" or the dialogue, thus his short stories tend to be like sitting around a campfire and listening to a story...very enjoyable.

Next up: John Jakes' Savannah: Or a Gift for Mr Lincoln.

Skeleton Crew

Over the weekend I jumped the gun and decided to read the last short story of Stephen King's collection, Skeleton Crew. Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually read one short story between each of my other books but this time I made an exception.

Since I've already blurbed about each of the stories as I read them, and tucked those blurbs in at the end of the other blog entries, I won't go into much detail about the stories themselves. I will mention that the last story in the collection, The Reach, was absolutely fantastic and an excellent choice to round out the collection. It is about an old woman who has lived on a small island off the coast of Maine. She has never crossed over the reach to set foot on the mainland because she never saw a need to do so. She is plagued by what she is sure is stomach cancer though that hasn't been diagnosed and so she knows her time has come. The story becomes almost poetic as she takes a walk and meets aspiritions of several of her relatives and friends, including her husband, that have already passed on. Life is good after death, she learns, so what could have been a very horrifying story becomes a comforting tale. The prose is beautifully written as she accepts what is happening to her and she crosses a different "reach" and dies. I understand Stephen King himself once said during a Today show interview that The Reach would be the story he would like most to be remembered for because it is "The Maine he grew up in and the people he knows." Truly a different sort of story that has elements of horror but nonetheless leaves the reader with a warm feeling at the end.

The overall collection is simply superb. This is the 40th Stephen King book I've read and I still want more. In this collection we get to see King at his eerie best with such stories as The Monkey, Word Processor of the Gods, Gramma, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. Hard core horror shines through in Survivor Type, Cain Rose Up, and of course we get the masterpiece novella, The Mist included in this overall collection as well. These stories demonstrate King's vast talent for story telling, not just delivering bloody, evil horror but also showing us real characters. I love the way that King can get into the characters so well that I recognize people from my own life who are exactly like that.

Almost all of these stories first appeared elsewhere, having been published in one magazine or another and many of them at a time in King's early career when he really needed a paycheck. Perhaps desperation produces truly quality output because there are lots of gems in this collection. Some of King's later works, after his rise to literary stardom, are not nearly so cutting edge and frequently are in need of more editing. But even in those cases, I enjoy reading it because it just hits home so well.

I think my next short story collection will be another section in Harlan Ellison's Essential Ellison. I've read a few sections already but I like to spread it out so I should be able to get in this next one during this year.

The Colorado Kid

I started The Colorado Kid by Stephen King yesterday and finished it at lunch today. I guess it goes without saying that it is a quick read. My copy is a 180 page paperback with a pretty large font so it was almost like reading a novella. Unlike most of his published work, this novel is a mystery...at least that's what the "Hard Case Crime" cover leads you to believe. I picked up my copy at the library's store a few months ago for two main reasons: 1) It's a Stephen King novel that I had yet to read and 2) I live in Colorado so how could I not pick it up for only a $1.00...

The story itself is a pretty straight forward one. It involves a young female reporter intern at a small weekly newspaper in Maine and two old geezers who run the newspaper. They tell her the story of the "Colorado Kid", a dead body that had been found several years previously, sitting propped up against a trash barrel on the beach. They test her reasoning ability as they drop clues about his death and she does very well at figuring out the correct answers. This is really more of a "coming of age" story for the young reporter than a traditional mystery tale. Stephen King's style is very much in evidence as he once again displays an uncanny ability to capture the local dialect as the two old guys tell the story. As Mr King himself says in the afterword, it is likely that many readers will not appreciate this story because there is no resolution to the mystery. Let me say that again: the mystery is not solved at the end of the book. It's not even a "Lady or the Tiger" kind of ending where there is a choice that just hasn't been made yet. Instead, we get the mystery and we get some clues that maybe this isn't just an accidental death but rather a murder. The story is about the mystery itself, not the solving thereof. Mr King's point seems to be that we are surrounded by unsolved mysteries all the time and "just thinking on 'em" is the fun part.

It is also interesting to note that this is the first book Mr King wrote after he completed his huge "Dark Tower" series. Perhaps that leant a hand in his thinking at the time.

If you need to have your mystery novels neatly wrapped up in the final pages then this one is not for you. I won't list this one at the top of my Stephen King "Best of" list but I did enjoy the characterization. And yes, I would also prefer closure to the mystery; otherwise it is just so much existentialist profundity.

"The Jaunt" is the 6th short story in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew collection. First published in the "Twilight Zone Magazine" in 1981 it concerns the process of teleportation as a means of interplanetary travel. Most of the story is about a father describing the history and evolvement of the jaunting process to his kids just before they themselves jaunt to Mars. It is a horrifying and bloody history but the process is safe now as long as the proper procedures are followed. This one is more of a science fiction tale and, indeed, references a classic story written by Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination" back in 1956. This is sort of ironic for me as a reader considering that just this year I read the "Psi Corps" trilogy by J. Gregory Keyes (Babylon 5 Universe) starring a character with the name "Alfred Bester". This all makes me want to seek out a story by the actual Alfred Bester. Anyway, I won't spoil the ending but rest assured that the final page of this story is classic King horror. Chalk up another winner in this collection.

Next up: Impossible Odds, another in the excellent "King's Blades" fantasy series by Dave Duncan.

The Mist

As promised, I am making a seperate blog entry for The Mist by Stephen King. This is the first "short story" in his Skeleton Crew collection. It runs about 150 pages or so, making it a novella by definition. And of course there has been a movie adaptation recently released thus sparking a seperate publication of this story in a stand-alone book. I haven't seen the movie but may rent it now that I've read the story.

This story was among the best I've read by Stephen King (and I've read a lot of his work). Many people have said that Mr King occasionally runs long in his descriptions and can sometimes use a good editor. I don't always agree because I just love the way he writes so much that it's hard to get too much of it. Nevertheless, this story is quite the opposite. Some might think that it is simply an extended version of a short story, that he has done it again by padding the actual story to make it longer. I think just the opposite is the case...it is a very tightly woven story, if anything, a novel condensed down to the bare essentials. The characterization is superb; we get to know and understand the main characters in a remarkably short time. The actual time line of the story takes place over just a few days and we live every moment with them. The structure is a rather basic "bunch of people trapped in a single location with the horror element just waiting for them to come out." But the way in which he builds the horror is pure vintage King. Never too many details to bring the horror into focus and thus diminish the impact but rather crafting the unknown in such a way that the character's imaginations fill in the details and increase the horror that much further. I've never been one to love blatent splatter horror at the expense of true suspenseful horror and King does not disappoint. In fact there is no big discovery of just what the horror in the mist really is nor where it came from. Although we do get just enough of the "tentacle", "leathery wings", "horrid smell" stuff to put us in the proper mood.

My only disappointment comes with the brief sex scene in the middle. At the beginning of the story the protagonist is deeply in love with his wife and yet only 36 hours later, not knowing if she is still alive or not, he and another trapped victim have sexual intercourse. I think the point was that they both "needed something" at that point and the future looked bleak but I found it a bit of a stretch.

All in all a great start to this short story collection and I can't wait to get to more between my other novel reading. And speaking of that I've begun Dave Duncan's fantasy novel Paragon Lost, another in his "King's Blades" series.

Carrie

This is a book that I can't believe has taken me so long to get around to reading! Carrie, by Stephen King is one of the classics of the horror genre and, indeed, was the one that really launched King's career. I haven't actually owned a copy of the book for very long and when I snagged a copy at the used book store, it quickly rose to the top of the "to-be-read" list (horror category).

I have to say that it was pretty much what I expected, at least plot-wise. This is early Stephen King, and I really like early Stephen King. The book was shorter than I had thought but it was told in a unique way (something I often find with King's works). We see the fairly straight forward plot unfold from a variety of viewpoints, from the protagonist's own eyes, from other characters as the events take place, but more uniquely, from the perspective of newspaper accounts, court testamony, and the autobiography of one of the major charcters in the novel. And all of these perspectives are interwoven to tell the tale. Sounds complicated but it all fits together nicely and keeps the reader turning pages.

The plot itself is a bit dated by today's standards of shock horror. The scenes we see are, indeed, shocking...horrifyingly so and yet for somebody like myself that has read lots of King as well as other horror writers...it seemed less shocking somehow. I have never seen the movie staring Sissy Spacek but I have seen pictures from it showing Carrie at the prom, covered in blood. I had visions of reading the book and being grossed out at how so much blood could come to be but it turns out it is cow's blood dropped on her as a prank. This novel is much less a gore fest novel than a novel of a bullied girl that finally has taken all she can take and snaps...to get revenge. We hear of the destruction of the town, bit by bit but we "see" very little of it. Since this is Stephen King's first published novel, it is easy to compare it to his later works and see how he has grown as a writer.

I rounded out the weekend's reading with the next of the Deaver short stories in More Twisted. This one was called "Double Jeopardy" and was one of the best of the batch so far. I like courtroom drama anyway and they often incur "twists" in the plot so this story had a less contrived twist than the others. And when the twist was done, the story ended promptly. No need for explanations on what we just read. Very enjoyable.

Now that I was done with Carrie, I had a dilemma. Normally, I would read a genre that I haven't read in a while...I like to keep things stirred up by not reading too much of any one genre, style, author, etc. in too short a time span. So I was due to read a Western, a Young Adult, or a straight fiction book next. But since I had just read too fairly fast reads in a row I wanted something a bit longer...something into which I could sink my teeth. And I really really wanted to get to what is being talked about so much on all the fantasy forums I visit...the new sensation Patrick Rothfuss and his debut novel, The Name of the Wind. Boy it sure is starting out great and I'll be looking forward to my next blog entry when I can tell you how it worked out!