Guess what? He’s afraid of growing old…
By Don Stradley
Stephen King is still here – an unabashed bestselling author of
the seventies and eighties who still sells pretty well, even if he’s not the
500-pound gorilla that he used to be, back when people joked he could make a laundry
list and sell it to Hollywood, when even his weak stuff was being gobbled
up for movie projects, and he had enough clout to step behind the camera and
direct his own feature about the trucks that came to life – and that’s cool. To make
the kind of dough King made, with his telekinetic misfits, his revamped
vampires, his apocalyptic smackdowns, his haunted hotels, his haunted cars, his
haunted pets, and his Shawshank redemptions, was a unique, and uniquely
American, phenomenon. It doesn’t matter that nothing in his past 10 books, including
the latest, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, has really stuck to the ribs, or that
I couldn’t name one of his characters since Gerald’s
Game if you pressed a sharp blade to my throat. Like Colonel Sanders, he’s
ours. We can’t get rid of him. By now he probably glows in the dark, like one
of those old Aurora model kits of Frankenstein’s monster.
Early in The Bazaar of Bad
Dreams, a collection of 18 stories and two “poems,” we’re told about a car
that eats people. Dumb, right? But King was in a playful mood, and it
felt good. Unfortunately, it takes only a few stories for you to realize he’s
no longer that sort of writer, not really, which is probably why he put ‘Mile
81’ at the top, the way Lou Reed used to start concerts with ‘Sweet Jane,’ just
to get it out of the way. Nowadays King
sees himself as more of a Ray Bradbury style fantasist. Not the rocket loving
Bradbury, but the Bradbury who wrote about Picasso and time travel and Coke
bottles that predicted the weather. King wallows in that style, but his
slovenly characters are too busy sucking down soft drinks and fruit pies to be
worthy of wonder. King writes in a variety of voices, from the all-knowing
narrator to the trailer park knucklehead, but the stories
collected here are overly long and flabby. While reading them, I felt King
was fiddling and farting. He's like a guy who has the job and knows he’ll never be
fired, so he’s not really compelled to impress anybody. I wanted to poke him so
he’d just get on with it.
Most frustrating is the sense that he’s recycling old material.
‘Bad Little Kid,’ for instance, is a tired reworking of one of his best early
stories, ‘The Bogeyman.’ You can tell how much King has changed as a writer by
comparing the two. The earlier piece, published in Cavalier back in 1973, was succinct, suspenseful, and had a
colorful jolt in nearly every paragraph. The new one is about three times
longer, with several pages between each pop. And I’m sure
someone will one day write a nice essay about how ‘Ur,’ which concerns a Kindle
that predicts the future, is linked to ‘Word Processor of the Gods,’ in that
both are about the frightening consequences that come with new technology. To
me, it was just a rehash. Of course, King can still crank it up when the desire hits him. In
‘The Little Green God of Agony,’ King delights in describing the
nasty thing that shoots out of a sick old man’s mouth during an exorcism, and
how a nurse steps on it: “She felt it splatter beneath her sturdy New Balance
walking shoe. Green stuff shot out in both directions, as if she had stepped on
a balloon filled with snot.” Product placement and the gross-out, King’s peanut
butter and jelly.
John D. MacDonald wrote in the introduction to King’s first
collection of short stories, “Stephen King is not going to restrict himself to
his present field of intense interest.” He added, “He does not write to please
you. He writes to please himself.” MacDonald was correct on both counts. King
has proven to be more than just a horror writer, and he doesn't follow
trends. But I don’t think King is a better writer now than he was in 1978, when
MacDonald was praising the great stories collected in Night Shift. King can still create strange and unsettling scenes, like
in ‘That Bus is Another World,’ where a passenger in a New York cab witnesses a
murder that no one else sees. But so many of the stories here take place in
nursing homes and hospitals, coupled with a constant yammering about the
difficulties of old age, that the reader is overwhelmed by what seems to
be King’s own fear of aging and senility. He writes in one story,“…an old man’s
body is nothing but a sack in which he carries aches and indignities.” There
was a time when King’s characters used to wet their pants out of fear. It
happens in just about all of his novels, and in several of the stories here. In the future, I suppose they’ll be
pissing themselves not from fear, but because they’re incontinent. What next? A scary bedpan,
perhaps. A haunted wheelchair?
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