The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.
Stephen King has a new collection of short stories! Which he released last May. I probably should have gotten to this in October, but actually this feels less like a Halloween kind of book, and more like a late January read, when the holidays are over and the days are overcast and the nights are long and cold and you start wondering if there any actual reason for bad things happening or is it just potshots taken by an indifferent universe.
Dark? Yes indeed. There are some heavy themes explored here, but also the never-fail Stephen King style of ordinary people dealing with batshit things. This collection also feels very topical since there are so many references to current(ish) events (politics and COVID measures, mostly). King’s move to South Florida also means I keep getting startled by names from my old stomping grounds: Sarasota, SRQ airport, even Bradenton sneaks in an appearance. Prepare to see callbacks to previous books like Duma Key (and one other classic Stephen King book, more on that later.) Apparently there’s also one or possibly more nods to the later Gunslinger books, but I haven’t read those and I’m not sure it’s necessary to in order to enjoy the stories here.
The book starts out strong with the novella “Two Talented Bastids”, a beautifully narrated story of two men who, late in their forties, became overnight successes when they inexplicably become their best selves. A good portion of the story is focused on little things like a business owning a junkyard, and what types of food are carried on a (fateful) hunting trip. It’s almost hilarious when something like alien invaders (well, visitors anyway) and hints about the end of the world almost fade into the background of questions about what sets the “good” apart from the “great”, and the mundane tragedy of just not being as good as our dreams and…
…wait a minute, what was that about the end of the world?
“When intelligence outraces emotional stability, it’s always just a matter of time.”
A few of the stories in this collection – “The Fifth Step”, “Willie the Weirdo”, and “Red Screen” feel like examples of a common horror story trope. “Gasp! The (insert person, thing, or motivation) was really (different and person, thing, or motivation, only terrifying) all along!” What sets these apart from an episode of The Twilight Zone is all the minutia that King effortlessly drops into his writing: the widower in his daily routine in Manhattan, the outsider child who’s too weird to know he’s weird or to care that his dying grandfather is kind of a creep, the police investigator being told the damndest conspiracy theory about why a relationship crumbles.
Things don’t have to be otherworldly or supernatural to be scary, and that’s made abundantly clear in the next two stories. “On Slide Inn Road” features another creep grandfather, and grandchildren who love him anyway, and a son and daughter-in-law who are weary of pretty much every damn thing. Add in a long car trip and a bad shortcut and you’ve got something to put everyone’s nerves on edge. Nobody can do a character study of relentless disappointment and barely-tamped down rage like King, but this story takes an even darker turn with one of those nasty events that are somehow worse because of their sheer randomness.
For something a little less harsh, but still pretty dark in places, the main character of “Laurie” is one of the many men in this collection who have outlived their partners. Lloyd Sunderland’s sister buys him a puppy and browbeats him into keeping it because he needs someone to care for. Infuriatingly (to Lloyd anyway) she ends up being right. You can just feel the real warmth and coming-back-to-life in this growing relationship between a grieving widower and his pup. This being a Stephen King story, there’s also a wildlife-filled bog in the charmingly named Rattlesnake Key, and more of the aforementioned universe-taking-random-pot-shots. (I usually don’t like spoilers, but I’m not ashamed to say I paged over to the end of this one. Nothing bad happens to the dog. You’re welcome.)
A couple of these are hard to put into categories, like “Turbulence Expert”. Maybe skip this one if you have a fear of flying. Or don’t. In Stephen King’s world, the complete an utter terror you’re feeling during a rough flight might be the only thing keeping everyone alive. And I’d love to know what King was thinking of when he wrote “Finn”, with the unlucky nobody who’s having the weirdest day in his life. Days. Maybe more? Time loses all meaning in this story of mistaken identity and a mob boss with a screw loose. Maybe Finn’s luck turns around here. Maybe it doesn’t. We’ll never know the answer for sure, unless the abruptness of the ending is the answer.
And something about “The Dreamers” feels like a quintessential Stephen King story with Lovecraftian undertones. All the necessary elements are here: the taciturn war veteran plodding aimlessly – but not angrily – through life, an under-the-books job that he takes because why not, and of course the scientist probing into areas he really, really should have left alone.
“What does it say?”
“It says the moon is full of demons.”
Now we come to what I think of as the showstoppers of the collection. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” starts with the titular dream, told in the way only Stephen King can do. They’re just ordinary images, but with this overwhelming feeling of dread: a nighttime walk along a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corn. The tinking sound of something mindlessly swaying in the wind. The square hulk of an abandoned cinderblock gas station. A woman’s corpse being dug up by a scavenging dog.
What happens after the dream is where Danny’s nightmare really kicks into high gear.
Again, the supernatural element in this story is almost (but not quite) completely swallowed by the everyday horror of being found guilty in the court of public opinion, and being relentlessly hounded by an investigator who is convinced he’s found his man. Convinced enough to make up evidence to stand in for the real evidence he knows is just waiting to appear. It really makes you want to reconsider the daily internet pile-on. And question the meaning of life when random shit happens to random people and you just never know why. (Also, I don’t know why Stephen King’s portrayal of OCD is so intriguing, but it really really is.)
His mind has turned on itself, gnawing and biting like a mangy dog snapping at its own flanks until the blood flows.
Speaking of dogs, if you reached the end of the book Cujo and asked “Then what happened??”, then “Rattlesnakes” is the story for you. This sequel to King’s 1981 novel picks up late in the life of Vic Trenton, alone, dealing with old losses and new grief. I’m not sure what I was expecting in a sequel to Cujo, but a haunting by two malevolent ghosts in South Florida definitely wasn’t on the list. I feel like the stronger sections of the story were the parts where Vic reminisces about his life after the death of his son, and his fraught relationship with his wife. (I remember thinking when I finished Cujo that a marriage couldn’t possibly survive everything that happened. And I was right. And wrong.) The haunting elements felt oddly tacked-on, although it does have some pretty horrifying images (tub full of snakes, yikes), and like a lot of stories in this book it dwells on the grieving process, and the sheer randomness of the bad things that happen, not to good or bad people, but to everyone.
Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does.
King does seem to want to wrap up all of his short story collections with something, well, maybe not hopeful, but something with a hell of a lot of heart. “The Answer Man” does just that, a story that was apparently written in two stages, forty years apart. The itinerant 1930’s salesman here feels like a more benign version of the pudgy man from King’s story “Fair Extension,” except he’s not selling a redistribution of suffering, he’s selling answers. Not advice, not parlor tricks, but real answers about what will happen. And once the clock starts ticking you better be ready, because he’ll answer exactly what you ask, and nothing else.
It could be that our protagonist Phil Parker is dreaming the whole thing. It could be that the Answer Man is creating the future somehow. You’ll get no easy answers here, but what you do get is a life. A life of joy and sadness, sickness, war, hard work, triumph, sun-drenched autumn, a desperate search for meaning and no answer to the eternal question “Why me?” unless it’s “Just because.” I’m not sure how King does it, but the Answer Man’s sign on the last time Phill meets him made me teary-eyed. I don’t know if I or anyone else – King included – fully understands his last answer. But I honestly hope it’s true.