Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.
It’s time for the annual Spooky Books month! The entire month of October will be devoted to reviews of scary reads: new horror, classic horror, and at least one book that’s been out for a while but I haven’t read yet.
First up is Stephen King’s If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas that follow a similar format to my rules for October books: classic horror tropes (a deal with the “devil”, a text message that’s coming from inside the grave), a brand new idea (the world is ending so who the hell is Chuck Krantz and why is every advertisement thanking him for “39 Great Years”?) and a return to a character we were introduced to four books ago.
A person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer.
One thing that makes Stephen King’s stories so incredibly immersive is the fact that he doesn’t need to hurry up and get to the scary stuff right away. That’s definitely the case for “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone”. Almost half the story is about the early years of young Craig, growing up in a tiny town with his Dad and working for the elderly Mr. Harrigan as a part-time companion (mostly just reading to him and occasionally driving him into town.) We have some of the usual Stephen King Foreshadowing going on (references to the lottery ticket, Mr. Harrigan dying, the unnamed “trouble with Kenny Yanko”), but otherwise there’s nothing ominous going on here. There’s actually a lot of nostalgia for the days when smart phones – specifically iPhones – were something new and more like a fun toy than the ever-present distraction devices they’ve turned into. Craig even manages to win Mr. Harrigan over to the new fad. Harmless fun, right?
Leave it to Stephen King to even make an iPhone unsettling.
I think this is my favorite in the collection. It has all the minutia of life in a small town, the adventures that come with growing up (not all of them fun), a little musing on what exactly having access to all the information on the internet every second of the day might do to people. And of course it has the big question: if you had a way to get revenge on anyone, any time you wanted it, is it really a good idea to use it?
The day Marty Anderson saw the billboard was just before the Internet finally went down for good.
“The Life of Chuck” is an odd, surprisingly warmhearted tale for something that involves the apocalypse and death. It starts with Act III and the end of the world, and then moves backward in time to some of the ways in which that world was beautiful. The billboards and TV ads and, heck, every single advertisement in the entire world being devoted to a cheerful and unexplained message “39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK!” with a picture of a normal-looking person no one’s heard of is a fantastic image. Going into any more detail would involve spoilers, except to say that at least one person gets a massive great big spoiler of their own. And then has to decide how they’re going to live with that information.
Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.
We first met Holly Gibney in the pages of Mr. Mercedes. Back then she was a shy, awkward teenager, forever in the shadow of her beautiful, successful cousin Janey, and forever being reminded of that by a mother who’s completely unqualified to care for a pet rock, much less someone possibly on the spectrum and definitely suffering from OCD and chronic anxiety.
Holly learned in Mr. Mercedes just how brave and successful she was capable of being, and by the time “If It Bleeds” starts she’s in her thirties and running a private investigation company. Her job is mostly investigating lost dogs and employee embezzlement, but she stumbles across something much bigger when a local school is bombed and Holly realizes there’s something…odd about the TV newscaster who’s first on the scene.
Nobody can create a decades-old (possibly centuries?) monster like Stephen King, or write a dysfunctional family that’s so cringingly awful and yet impossible to look away from. The monster that Holly finds herself chasing might possibly be related to the creatures from Dr. Sleep; there’s less psychic shenanigans but the same laser focus on…feeding. It’s an intriguing mashup of noir and supernatural thriller; the problem is that Holly has now been a character in four books (The Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider), and I’ve only read the first of them. There are constant callbacks to events and characters from the previous books, so if you’re jumping into this cold like me then you’re going to get the ending spoiled and you’re not going to know who a lot of the main characters are. King does a good job of exposition-on-the run, but if you really want to enjoy this then you’ll probably need to do your homework.
It was like a splinter, one lodged in his mind instead of under his skin.
The final story in the book, “Rat”, is a classic Stephen King idea from start to finish. Drew, a writer (naturally), is having trouble writing (because of course he is) when he suddenly has the idea of a lifetime, a fully-formed novel that only needs to be written down (and what writer hasn’t dreamed of that happening to them?) He takes a break from his wife and family to go write the book by himself to a family cabin right before a big storm is due to arrive (bad idea, BAD IDEA) and just when he’s managed to get himself into as bad of a situation as you can image he’s offered a literal deal with a devil (or in this case, rat) to get out of it.
And you know the problem with making a deal with the devil? It’s not about whether you’ll get what you want, it’s about whether it’ll be worth what it costs.
King has put in some fascinating tidbits about the writing process, especially the details about the things that can derail the writing process (hint: it’s sometimes the exact opposite of not being able to think of the words). There are perfectly normal reactions to an abnormal situation, family dynamics, and the question of what you’d be willing to give up in order to have something you’ve wanted your entire life. But most importantly it has one of my favorite horror tropes; a writer all on his own, trapped in the middle of the wilderness, slowly losing his mind.