Stephen King

Signet, 1995 reprint of 1987 original, 380 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-16658-2

When it was first published in 1987, Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon seemed like a significant departure for the author.  Occasional exceptions aside (such as the first novel in the Dark Tower cycle, or The Talisman), audiences had been conditioned, through the first fifteen years of King’s career, to expect adult horror fiction, not a fantasy fairy tale seemingly aimed at younger readers.  Now, of course, King’s brand is associated with a variety of dark fantasy subgenres; The Dark Tower did much to expand his perceived repertoire, and it’s no accident if that series is closely related to The Eyes of the Dragon, all the way to a common antagonist.

And yet, nearly 25 years after its first publication, the distinctiveness of The Eyes of the Dragon remains, and so does its interest.  From the first sentence (“Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons”…), we understand that this is going to be a different kind of reading experience: The story is told as a fairy tale, by a narrator whose presence couldn’t be more obviously felt.  Taking place a long time ago in a country far away, this is a story of a weak king, an evil magician, and two princes.  Tired of waiting for his chance at power, the mage eventually frames the good prince for his father’s death, sets up the weaker prince on the throne and set about to take from the kingdom of everything of value.  Fortunately, a cunning plan is in the works…

But plotting isn’t the main feature of this novel, which is best appreciated as a storytelling exercise.  Reportedly adapted from stories King told his children, The Eyes of the Dragon sometimes feels like a self-imposed dare: different subject matter, different tone, and different rhythm.  The narration becomes its own reason to read the book, as King spends the first half of the book providing us with the backstory, the characters and the motivations.  The narrator is omniscient, but only to a point: He frequently addresses the readers to tell them that he has described everything as it happened, but the audience should make its mind as to what it means.  Meanwhile, the story is told with its own special charm, and the novel quickly gains the trust of its readers from the start.  It is, in other words, a lot of fun to read.

It’s also misleading to keep referring to this as “a fairy-tale for kids”: While the setting, vocabulary and sentence structure may seem destined to a younger audience, King doesn’t limit himself to simple sentiments or emotions in the telling of the story.  The words are simple but the thoughts aren’t, and The Eyes of the Dragon may work better as a fable for grown-ups, creating a sentiment of nostalgia for bedside storytelling while managing to address adult concerns.  There’s more depth to the book than expected, and a lot of sympathy for the fully-sketched characters.

Where The Eyes of the Dragon doesn’t work so well is in its pacing: Ironically, the novel gets a great deal less absorbing once the plot moves forward.  Rather than focus on the protagonists and the palace intrigue, it dissipates by changing focus and following minor characters.  Those characters aren’t so minor in that they are reportedly meant to portray King’s children in the story, but they do send the novel in another, less interesting direction just as it should move toward its conclusion.

Still, the overall impact of the book is strong, and it cements the notion that Stephen King is not just a gifted writer, but one who has continued to try new things along the way.  King scholars will better understand the relationship between The Eyes of the Dragon and the rest of the King universe (most particularly his fantasy work) but you don’t need to be a King aficionado to appreciate this book and what it attempts to do.

Scribner, 2009, 1074 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-4850-1

Frankly, there’s just one thing you need to know about Stephen King’s Under the Dome:  It’s big.  It’s really, really big.  Count the pages and recall the two other King novels of similar heft: The Stand and It.   The page count shows that Under the Dome is King’s third-longest novel, and it certainly feels epic.

The premise is simple: When a small Maine town is cut off from the world by an invisible but impassable barrier, its residents struggle to understand what’s going on and survive the experience.  But such a plot summary glosses over the totality of King’s presentation of the event.  He’s got two thousand viewpoints to play with, and if the action wisely focuses on half a dozen main protagonists, at times it feels as if the omniscient narration gives us a glimpse of every single citizen of Chester’s Mill.  The first chapter alone takes a kaleidoscopic view of what happens when the dome falls, with crashing vehicles, cut-off body parts, interrupted streams, accidents of fate locking some people in or out and other assorted phenomenon.  The omniscient narration can be chatty, but it also goes quiet when it’s time to focus on the main characters.

Because there’s a lot more to Under the Dome than a town physically cut off from the rest of the world: Chester’s Mill has its share of bad apples, and they control the place.  When media attention brought on the city following the fall of the dome threatens to expose secrets that the guilty would rather keep hidden, the dome itself becomes less dangerous than the people inside … Psychotic murderers, crystal-meth entrepreneurs, power-crazy policemen and panicked citizen all show their true colours during the days that follow the fall of the dome.

But it’s the details through which King tells his story that make Under the Dome such an impressive and frustrating book.  On one hand, there is enough time and space here for elaborate plotting, reversals of fortune, copious inner monologues and ample character growth.  When King activates his omniscient narration, it’s like floating above a small town and having direct access to two thousand minds in all their diversity.  On the other hand, that amount of verbiage slows the action down and frequently makes readers wish for the next plot point.  King pulls a bit too obviously on familiar plot threads about religion, serial killers, corrupt authority and civil unrest to avoid a feeling of familiarity throughout much of Under the Dome.

There is, however, quite a bit of allegory going on under the surface of the text.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see the parallels between an isolated and paranoid Chester’s Mill and Bush-administration America.  The division of power between a ruthless sheriff and incompetent politicians has real-world parallels, and much of the popular hysteria cuts a bit too close to headlines of the last decade to be entirely accidental.

Where Under the Dome doesn’t do so well is in its ultimate justification for the Dome.  It moves the novel from the Horror to the Science Fiction genre.  This is not by itself a bad thing, but it will make a number of more rigorous readers cringe given the thinness of the premise and the somewhat arbitrary way the novel is resolved.

Still, that ending is preceded by an apocalyptic sequence that leaves few people standing, so it all evens out.  While Under the Dome can occasionally be exasperating, annoying and underwhelming, it’s also a novel that disappoints because it attempts so much: Even if he misses a few targets along the way, King still manages to hit plenty of them.  The result may not have the quasi-mythical heft of The Stand or the tight focus of “The Mist”, but it’s the kind of wide-screen horror/thriller that has become a bit too rare lately.  King being King, it’s also a book written with clean prose, compelling characters and a thicket of plot developments.  It is, in short, a perfect book for those who want to sink into a lengthy reading experience and blink their eyes back to reality a long time later.

In its own four-pounds fashion, it’s also a powerful advertisement for ebook readers.

Pocket, 2003 reprint of 2002 original, 487 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-1768-2

At this stage of his career, Stephen King can take risks that a younger writer wouldn’t dare.  Risks like a novel that consciously withholds complete satisfaction from the reader, wrapping everything in a preachy blanket of “there are strange things we’re not meant to understand”.  No, I’m not talking about The Colorado Kid, but From a Buick 8, an uncanny novel that does things in ways few genre readers would expect.

Which is just as well, because a very superficial look at the novel immediately summons memories of another King novel: his Christine is the first example that comes to mind whenever talking about “evil car horror novels” for instance.  But the similarities end there: In From a Buick 8, things are far more complicated than just a car haunted by evil spirits.

After all, it’s not even a car.  When Pennsylvania State Troopers are called to a gas station to pick up an abandoned vehicle, they quickly find out that the object that looks like a Buick Roadmaster really isn’t: Not only do the details don’t match (extra decoration elements, oversized wheel, etc.) but the car won’t even move by itself.  Never mind how it got there, or where its driver has gone: Soon enough, the Troopers discover that the materials used to build the car are quite unlike anything they know, and that the car self-repairs when damaged.

But wait: it gets worse.  Periodically, the car starts bending reality.  Temperatures next to it drop by several degrees and the inside of the car lights up with eerie electrical light.  Soon after those events, things either disappear or appear next to the car.  One trooper goes missing.  Repulsive plants and animals pop up next to the car.  Faced with such phenomenon, the troopers safely shutter the car in a shed.  Years pass.

Don’t expect a tidy chronological third-person telling of the tale.  From a Buick 8, also much like The Colorado Kid, is a novel in which a younger protagonist is told things by older, wiser people who have seen it all happen.  In this case, a young teenager, whose recently-killed father knew the secrets of the Buick, prods and asks his father’s colleagues about the car he discovers hanging around the barracks.  Their tale goes from 1979 to the early years of the new century, in bits and pieces given how they don’t want to acknowledge all at once the piece of pure strangeness in the back shed.  The narration is one filled with regional expressions, jaded details, blue-collar vocabulary and homespun turns of phrase.  The teenager wants to know everything as soon as possible, and have it make sense, whereas the older folks know that it’s impossible: The car has been in their lives for decades, and it’s unexplainable as far as they know.

In many ways, it’s a novel about storytelling and how it’s neater than messy reality.  The Buick becomes an irrational part of the characters’ lives, to be locked somewhere in a shed and occasionally confronted as it takes out another piece away from their orderly reality, or spits out something that has no right to exist.  It’s not a scary novel as much as it’s a quietly terrifying one as the characters come to terms with something that will never be explained.  In that regard as well, it’s a precursor to the dirty trick that King would spring on readers with The Colorado Kid, presenting them with a tantalizing mystery that the author refuses to solve.

Yet From a Buick 8 is somewhat friendlier to genre readers than The Colorado Kid in that it does feature a decent amount of chills and thrills even before the conclusion, and that it does offer enough of an explanation and a conclusion to mollify most readers.  The central mystery itself remains, but most of the smaller details are tied together in a final vision, and the epilogue offers a surprisingly reassuring way out of the strangeness.

It amounts to a strange and uncanny novel that works in ways that horror novels usually don’t.  It’s a pleasure to read thanks to the narration and the accumulation of details about the life of state troopers, but it does eventually leads somewhere with its steady freak show of small-scale terror.  The framing device works in large part because the conclusion jumps out of the frame and starts messing with the people telling the story.  Writers will recognize the risks taken by King here, but readers should feel blessed to be in the hands of such a good storyteller.  From a Buick 8 is not your average horror novel, and it’s all the better for it.

Pocket, 1999 mass-market reprint of 1998 original, 732 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-671-02423-9

Halfway through Bag of Bones, I realized that I had come to take Stephen King for granted.  It’s easy to do so: With a decades-long body of work that makes even so-called prolific authors look like slackers, King has been a fixture of the American publishing scene for decades, and while he’s had both high and low points, his work delivers a dependable reading experience.  Studying my reading history, I see that I tend to read King in big batches every five years or so, running up his back-catalogue until I’m (relatively) caught up once again.

Now it’s time for another batch, because clearly I had forgotten how much fun a King novel could be.

Not that Bag of Bones is fun in itself: After all, it begins with the death of our narrator’s wife.  Things don’t necessarily get any better after that: For four years, our scribbling protagonist is physically unable to write even one line of fiction.  It’s only when he returns to their summer home and finds out that she may have been up to a secret project that something changes in him.  This being a King story, our grieving narrator soon finds himself stuck between vengeful ghosts, benevolent spirits, an obsessed billionaire and a cute single mother.

As a reflection of King’s pet themes, Bag of Bones starts out respectably: Our narrator’s status as a well-selling writer of romantic thrillers allows him to talk about the publishing industry with insider’s knowledge, and King manages to make something as esoteric as writer’s block seems accessible to everyone.  Later on, a few twists end up being referred to as plot devices by an all-too-aware narrator.  What’s less familiar is the theme not just of matrimony, but of domestic intimacy that emerges from Bag of Bones’ description of a widower being reminded of what he shared with his deceased wife.  For some reason, that’s an aspect of life that few writers attempt, let alone pull off convincingly.

But Bag of Bones was, for me, another opportunity to be immersed all over again in King’s prose style.  He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a stylist because his writing seems so clear, but the way he manages the technical aspects of his prose are still nothing short of amazing: Inner monologue, action, explanations and flashbacks proceed seamlessly, and the voice of the narrator holds it all together.  The only passages that seem atypical are a pair of lengthy dream sequences that eventually prove far more important to the plot than they seem at first.  Still, King’s prose has rarely been as pitch-perfect as it is here, and he is able to highlight various emotional tones from joy to dread to despair.

Structure-wise, there are a number of sharp turns in the story, some of whom feel gratuitous at first, but all eventually coalesce by the end of the book.  While Bag of Bones is a ghost story, it multiplies the parties involved (both real and occult) to an extent where the usual plot templates don’t readily apply.  The portrayal of small Maine communities has always been one of King’s strengths, and he once again excels at that here.  Add to that the more literary ambitions of a story in which half the battle is a widower getting over his grief and there’s a good chance that non-genre readers pulled away from King’s more bloodthirsty reputation will find much to like in this more nuanced story.  (It’s no accident if the title alone has literal, metaphorical and thematic interpretations.)

Bag of Bones may not have the conceptual punch of some of King’s other novels, but it all adds up to a big book that’s worth the time to read.  It’s well-crafted, strongly characterized, entirely within King’s pet themes and yet a step beyond into powerful reality-based fiction.  It’s a deft blend of genre horror and character-driven fiction.  It’s also a reminder, even ten years after publication, that I happily still have a lot of King left to read: I ended up drawing a list of his titles that I haven’t read yet, and ended up with enough material for the next two years.  By then, he will have probably published three or four new books.  But that’s OK: The only danger in that much of a good thing is that we come to expect it without a proper amount of gratitude.