If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are finishing up King’s first short story collection, Nightshift. In today’s post we cover “The Man Who Loved Flowers.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “One For the Road.”

This piece is only 2,264 words

It isn’t King’s shortest piece. There are nine others that are shorter, listed here in descending order.

• 2114 - Cain Rose Up

• 2108 - The Bone Church

• 1652 - Morning Deliveries

• 1506 - Here there be Tygers

• 1309 - The Beggar and the Diamond

• 855 - Tommy

• 603 - Paranoid: A Chant

• 308 - Brooklyn August

• 250 - For Owen

Still, it is surprisingly short from the same man who penned The Stand and It, both clocking in epic fantasy (nearly biblical) word counts (467,812 and 441,156 respectively).

There’s a lot of push for flash fiction. After all, we live in an age where attention is a commodity, and it’s hard to demand that our readers devote any at all to our writing. Flash fiction and short stories have always been around. Hemingway famously (though it was perhaps erroneously attributed to him) wrote his own short story.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

The idea is how much we can give a reader in so few words. Here, there’s a gut punch with a single sentence. It’s an example of what is possible in such a short structure.

King is, in my opinion, a master on this front. Many say his short stories are much stronger than his novels, where the lack of constraint on length lends itself to a wandering feeling at times. The stories we’ve been reading in Nightshift are decidedly punchier, the endings much more satisfying and tightly woven into the plot. And this story, “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” the shortest in this collection, delivered on its promise.

In such a short time, an evening walk through New York City in 1963, we are escorted, first into the lovely trappings of infatuated love as a young man shops for a gift for his love, Norma. The people at the shops and on doorsteps can’t help but notice the look in his eye and the easy way he walks as if on clouds. He is a young man in love.

But infatuation, like most human emotions, wears many faces. A man in love with a woman who loves him, or knows him, can be a beautiful thing. A man in love with a woman who scorns him, or worse, fears him, is a different thing altogether. Passion can drive people mad, just as the young man in the story knows. His name is love after all, and Norma is the object of his desire.

New York City, 1963

A warm breeze at dusk, the streets filled with smiling people, a rarity in that city, in that time. A radio breathes news of the endless calamities, locally and around the world.

The radio poured out bad news that no one listened to: a hammer murderer was still on the loose; JFK had declared that the situation in a little Asian country called Vietnam (“Vitenum” the guy reading the news call it) would bear watching; an unidentified woman had been pulled from the East River; a grand jury had failed to indict a crime overlord in the current city administration’s war on heroin; the Russians had exploded a nuclear device. None of it seemed real, none of it to matter.

A young man walks briskly, hand in his pocket, as dusk descends. An older woman notices him, remarking on how beautiful he looks because he is a man in love. She would know that face anywhere. An old man working selling flowers can’t help but smile when he sees him, knowing that he’s got a girl on his mind.

“My young friend,” the flower vendor said, as the man in the gray suit came back, running his eyes over the stock in the handcart. The vendor was maybe sixty-eight, wearing a torn gray knitted sweater and a soft cap in spite of the warmth of the evening. His face was a map of wrinkles, his eyes were deep in pouches, and a cigarette jittered between his fingers. But he also remembered how it was to be young in the spring…The vendor’s face was normally sour, but now he smiled a little…

The young man asks how much his flowers are, and they go back and forth, exploring bouquets and combinations, until the vendor has convinced the man to spend more for his love. After all, these aren’t for his mother, right? A young woman loves to be doted on. The man imagines Norma’s face, how happy she’ll be when he gives her the surprise flowers, and he splurges on the tea roses.

The street is a beautiful sight on that romantic evening

“Tonight’s weather looks just the way you’d want it,” the radio said. “Fair and mild, temps in the mid to upper sixties, perfect for a little rooftop stargazing, if you’re the romantic type. Enjoy, Greater New York, enjoy!”

Women sit on porches and push prams. Men stand and talk. Teen girls giggle and a traffic cop notices the dreamy look in his eyes as he passes and turns onto Seventy-third Street.

This street is darker and lined with Italian restaurants. He turns down a narrow lane, and now the night has come. Each trashcan on the street is a shadowy figure, obscured by the darkness. The young man looks at his watch, it’s nearly eight, right when Norma should be coming.

And just there he sees her walking from a courtyard. His heart aches seeing her.

It was always a surprise seeing her for the first time, it was always a sweet shock—she looked so young.

Now his smile shone out—radiated out, and he walked faster.

“Norma!” he said.

She looked up and smiled…but as they drew together, the smile faded.

His own smile trembled a little, and he felt a moment’s disquiet. Her face over the sailor blouse suddenly seemed blurred. It was getting dark now…could he have been mistaken? Surely not. It was Norma.

This is where the story starts to get strange

All along we’ve been led to believe that we are observing a young man in love, on his way to deliver a surprise gift for his sweetheart. Here, we find that he doesn’t quite recognize her, and she doesn’t smile when she sees him.

He hands the flowers to her, and she smiles and hands them back.

“Thank you, but you’re mistaken,” she said. “My name is—”

“Norma,” he whispered, and pulled the short-handled hammer out of his coat pocket where it had been all along.

WHOA!

That seemingly inane detail from the beginning of the story, the radio broadcast that no one seems to be listening to in that warm, spring-ish air on a beautiful evening made for young lovers, comes rushing back. This isn’t Norma, nor were the five other girls who fell to the young man’s hammer.

His Norma has been dead ten years. From what, we don’t know. The flowers spill on the ground, and the woman’s screams are put out before she ever has a chance. When he’s done, he slips the hammer back into his coat pocket, knowing the darkness around him will hide it along with any bloodstains on his suit.

He passes a stickball game and makes his way back up the street.

A middle-aged married couple sitting on the steps of their building watched him go by, head cocked, eyes far away, a half-smile on his lips. When he had passed by the woman said, “How come you never look that way anymore?”

In dark places

King has a way of writing around a character, showing us outside perspectives from extras in the movie that help build suspense and surprise. Without the omniscience of the third person narrator, we’re caught off guard by this protagonist turned antagonist. We see him as the people around him see him, a man in love.

It’s not that different from the reports you hear on the news from neighbors and co-workers who reflect on a grisly crime with the observation, “He was the nicest guy.” The truth is that most people who commit violent crimes have serious red flags if you dig into the accounts of their inner circle, but they may also have a charming exterior that shields them from suspicion from outsiders.

What I find interesting in this story is the time when it was written. Ted Bundy, perhaps America’s first famous sweetheart serial killer, killers who displayed more of the charming and manipulative traits of personality disorders, was first caught in 1975. This story was written in 1977 for Gallery, an adult sex magazine, and a year before Bundy was placed on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list.

He was popularized into something of a celebrity after he escaped from a Colorado jail in 1977, the same year when “The Man Who Loved Flowers” was first published. Bundy was often seen as an intelligent and charming individual by acquaintances, successfully manipulating young women to get in his van or follow him there through faked injuries and a winning smile.

While reports of survivors of some serial killers say things like, the hair on the back of their neck stood up, Bundy seemed to have evoked the opposite. Women were attracted to him, flocking to his court dates and saying things like, “He just doesn’t seem like the type.”

The author uses the example of serial killer and rapist Ted Bundy, who, he says, is “hard-wired”.

“I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, ‘Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four,’” King told Rolling Stone. “Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll f**king kill ourselves.”

—From The Independent, Oct. 2014, by Ella Alexander

Regardless of whether or not Stephen King was writing directly about Bundy here, the story reveals something about his fascination and fear of evil, the reason he has given for why he writes horror to begin with.

It’s why we see the compelling combination of the natural and supernatural horrors in his work, which often play together and make us ask the question, which one was it? Is it The Overlook Hotel that drives Jack Torrance mad? He broke Danny Torrance’s arm before he ever came there. Was it Pennywise who caused Bev’s dad to abuse her? We know he had a heavy hand long before the cycle ever started again.

The countless bullies and villains are emboldened by the supernatural evils in King’s stories, but if we examine them, King’s philosophy on evil builds his worlds and universe. Evil permeates the towns and people because they were already bad. The supernatural entities and powers embolden them to be what they always were all along.

What a wild ride.

This story truly felt like a punch. I was totally thrown off by the sudden direction it took, and only on reading it again could I see all the red flags there all along. The young man was not in love. He is insane, those dreamy eyes carrying him on a murder spree as he searches for his dead lover, Norma.

It reminded me of the scene in Joker, when Arthur’s neighbor, Sophie, whom we believe has been in a relationship with him for months, finds him in her apartment.

What did you all think?

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personal story

If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. This week we cover “The Last Rung On the Ladder.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Man Who Loved Flowers” for next week.

Larry’s childhood home is in Hemingford Home, Nebraska

For those not familiar, this little town shows up in a number of other King stories. It is the home of Mother Abigail in The Stand, the town next to Gatlin from this collection’s previous story, “Children of the Corn.” Ben Hanscom, the boy genius turned architect from It, moves there after he and his mother leave Derry. It is mentioned in The Cell, and is the town where the story “1922,” a novella from the collection Full Dark, No Stars, takes place. One of King’s recent novels, Billy Summers (2021), features the town towards the end of the novel, when Billy and Alice Maxwell stop there.

We get Maine. After all, King grew up there. But what’s with Nebraska?

King’s fascination with Nebraska started young, at only ten years old, when he first heard about Charles Starkweather, a spree killer who was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and who murdered 11 people with his 14-year-old girlfriend, when he was 19 years old. He kept a scrapbook, gathering all the newspaper clippings he could find.

As a child, Stephen King was haunted by images of Starkweather, kept a scrap book of headlines about him, and has stated that he became a horror writer as a result of the fear he felt.

—McArthur, Jeff. “Story That Made Stephen King a Horror Writer Now a Book of Its Own.” 27 June, 2013. Newswire

And here is this quote from The Guardian when journalist Tim Adams interviewed King after the life changing accident that almost took his life.

TA: What was the motivation behind you keeping a scrapbook on Charlie Starkweather, the serial killer?

SK: Well, it was never like 'Yeah go Charlie, kill some more.' It was more like 'Charlie: if I ever see anyone like you, I'll be able to get the hell away.' And I do think that the very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might become.

From that time on, he’s always felt a pull to the heart of America. It’s a place his characters come from and go to. Some are righteous, like old Mother Abigail in The Stand or Billy Summers from the novel of the same name. In today’s story, there is no good and evil character. Just the messy realness of life that is somehow more painful than any murderous monster could ever be. Today, we meet Larry and Kitty.

A divergence in the collection

This story, first published in this collection, falls (I would argue) into the literary category, a side of King that is not celebrated in pop culture, but is notable to anyone who has read the breadth of his work. King broaches suicide often, but one of the more powerful stories, “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” (cheerful right?), doesn’t come close in terms of impact for me personally.

It was gut wrenching, as I believe it is for many readers, not only because of Kitty’s end, but the sadness of her life leading up to it. We watch her go from a playful pigtailed girl with enough faith to swan dive from the beam of a barn, to a lonely call girl who can’t really see the point in living anymore. So many people who start out so trusting and open are beaten down by life circumstances and bad decisions.

With each year of life, I’m astounded to see where the people I grew up with have ended up. Some are the poster children for redemption, wrangling a bad childhood into ambition to succeed and overcome. But others have stumbled, and the obstacles they face now, more difficult than ever to rise above. There are “the statistics.” People raised in a bad home who go on to make bad decisions, and have children that they raise in a bad home.

Our Kitty sadly seems to fall into the second category. A girl with high hopes, whose dreams are shattered, one broken promise at a time. Larry, ever the hero in her eyes, fails to rescue her in the end, too busy to see past his own ambitious career path, which brings him success, but not in relationships. Both of them, in the end, are alone.

This story is a reflection and a lesson, a painful portrait of the choices we make that haunt us. Is there a way forward for our character Larry, who saved his sister in his childhood barn, but couldn’t save her from her life, or in the end, herself?

The Letter

I got Katrina’s letter yesterday, less than a week after my father and I got back from Los Angeles. It was addressed to Wilmington, Delaware, and I’d moved twice since then. People move around so much now, and it’s funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations.

This is where we find Larry, standing in his living room with a letter from his sister Kitty, phone in hand and ready to dial their father. But he can’t bring himself to do it. He knows the news will break his father’s heart, and the sad truth is that he has no one else to call. He has an ex-wife and no close friends. And now, no sister.

His father and him have just come back from a visit to L.A. where Katrina, Kitty to him, worked as a call girl. Until she dove off a building, plummeting to her death.

The Barn

Larry thinks back to his childhood in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, where he and Kitty grew up on a farm. Their roads were all dirt, and their school was only one room. They walked there, and in the spring, they walked barefoot.

And Katrina? But it’s her I want to tell you about.

It happened, the barn thing, one Saturday in early November. To tell you the truth I can’t pin down the actual year, but Ike was still president.

The barn thing is a game Larry and Kitty liked to play when their parents were out. They would climb a rickety old ladder all the way to a beam in the center of the barn. It stood seventy feet above the floor, and they were forbidden to climb on it.

But that fateful day, they found themselves alone, Larry with a list of chores, a few for Kitty to pitch in on. They finished them quickly, and turned to other things to fill their time.

I remember that day very clearly. The sky was overcast and while it wasn’t cold, you could feel it wanting to be cold, wanting to get down to the business of frost and freeze, snow and sleet.

The warmest place was the barn, so Larry and Kitty make their way there to play their little forbidden game. It involves climbing the forty-three rungs up to the cross-beam, edging their way out over the enormous pile of hay in the middle of the barn floor, then dropping into the center of it.

I was ten that year, and thin as Scratch-the-demon, about ninety pounds. Kitty was eight, and twenty pounds lighter. The ladder had always held us before, we thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.

They play until the light changes, and they realize it’s almost time for their parents. to return. Larry climbs up for one last jump. This time feels different. The ladder sways more, and he hears the nails loosening. Once he gets to the top, he feels real fear that the thing will break. But he jumps and lands in the hay safely, just like before.

When he emerges, Kitty is already halfway up. His calls for her to come down do nothing. She wants her last swan dive, but she doesn’t get it. Not then. The rotted ladder snaps, leaving her hanging on to the last rung, her feet dangling in the air. Larry does the only thing he can think to do. He grabs handfuls of hay, and moves it underneath her.

When Kitty can hold on no longer, she falls, and Larry hears a sickening thwack against the wood. He rushes to her, knowing deep inside that she’s dead. Thankfully, he is wrong. Kitty is alive. Her ankle is broken, but Larry saved her life.

They let me in to see her just before bedtime. There was a catbird outside her window, I remember that. Her foot, all wrapped up, was propped on a board.

She looked at me so long and so lovingly that I was uncomfortable. Then she said, “Hay. You put down hay…I knew you must have been doing something to fix it,” she said. “You’re my big brother. I knew you’d take care of me.”

The Career Man

Throughout the story we learn that Larry and Kitty grew up and grew apart. Kitty found love early and married young, while Larry went off to law school. Kitty’s marriage fell apart, and she asked Larry to come. He couldn’t, couldn’t miss classes in law school where the competition was so tight that even a few days meant you’d fall behind.

She remarried, and then divorced again. She wrote, and asked him to come see her. Only he couldn’t. He was working at a big law firm and trying to make partner. Leaving, even for a few days wasn’t an option.

Larry got married, and then divorced, and Kitty and him lost touch for a long while. He moved, and then moved again. And her letter didn’t come until after he and his father had flown out to see her for the last time.

This collection has had a few characters who mirror Larry in their career ambition. It seems to be a theme in King’s writing. The man so driven to succeed that he sacrifices everything else on that altar, never realizing how important the people in his life are to him until it is too late.

Somehow it never ended until nine days ago, when Kitty jumped from the top story of an insurance building in Los Angeles. I still have the clipping from the L.A. Times in my wallet. I guess I’ll always carry it, not in the good way you carry snapshots of people you want to remember or theater tickets from a really good show…I carry that clipping the way you carry something heavy, because carrying it is your work. The headline reads: CALL GIRL SWAN-DIVES TO HER DEATH.

She waited…and he didn’t come

When Larry receives Kitty’s letter, bent and scuffed up from handling and postmarked two weeks before her jump, he realizes she waited. She sent him the letter, and then she waited for him to come rescue her.

Yes, I guess she must have got tired of waiting…But not even that is the reason sleep comes so hard now. When I close my eyes and start to drift off, I see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept up behind her.

She was the one who always knew the hay would be there.

This one stuck with me

I have my own personal story of regret after I didn’t answer a phone call from a loved one who died that night. I remember exactly where I was when I saw her number pop up. It was evening, and she was drunk most nights. I didn’t want to deal with a slurring, emotional conversation that she likely wouldn’t remember the next day. I was too busy.

I remember waking early to a voicemail telling me she had died. It was an overdose.

I later learned she had called everyone, but no one had answered except my little sister.

“I love you,” she had said, and that was it.

That last day she was happy. She bought her neighbors groceries and cat food. She called everyone to say she loved them.

And I was too busy.

Some lessons come too late.

How did you all like this one? I think it may be the saddest King story I’ve ever read.

Every part pricks some memory or place of guilt, reminds us of the people that we have overlooked when they needed us most.

The strange foreshadowing of Kitty nearly dying as a child, only to mimic that brush with death in her own suicide. The irony of Larry finding out too late, knowing he could have saved her, realizing that she trusted that the hay would always be there.

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If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through King’s first short story collection, Nightshift. Today’s post covers the famous “Children of the Corn.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Last Rung on the Ladder” for next week!

Spring is finally edging in as a possibility after an especially cold, snowy winter. The icy path I walk everyday with my dogs is giving way to slush, and the smell of wet earth and pine fills each afternoon. Things will be growing soon in that fertile ground. Today I thought of our protagonist, Burt, as he drove through the endless cornfields of Nebraska, the smell of fertilizer permeating the summer air.

America’s Corn Fields

If you’ve ever driven through middle America, you’ll know that the drive is unremarkable. Nebraska and Kansas are particularly painful jaunts, known for their hundreds of miles of nothing, aside from the occasional gas station and roadside town. Back before cell phones, the drive on country highway could put you in a predicament.

What would happen if you broke down and had to walk sixty miles to the nearest gas station? Even worse, what if you were found by someone with less than good intentions? Is it any wonder then that King has found such success in a short story like “Children of the Corn?” Corn fields are, after all, isolated places. The stalks grow anywhere from 8 to 12 feet, and are so uniform that if a person wanders in, they can easily get lost.

Cornfields are popular contemporary horror settings, but will it surprise you to know that this very story is the genesis of that trope? There are, of course, other stories that center on hidden horrors in rural settings, but none that feature the cornfield itself. Until King.

Published in 1977 in Penthouse, “Children of the Corn” has become a staple among horror films.

There have been at least eleven films and TV series created based off of this single short story. I have to ask myself, why? The story is terrifying, combining religious themes, murderous children, isolation, and a supernatural monster who stalks the cornfields at night, hungry for blood.

But the actual short story is more complex than the films and TV made from it. The children are not all evil. Instead, they seem caught up in an impossible deal with the devil, required to worship some supernatural monster that feeds on the blood of adults. The children themselves will become victim to it when they turn 19. As with many horror stories, there is always the question, one that can frustrate readers and watchers: if they’re scared, why don’t they just leave?

Of course, we can ask ourselves that about the real life cults who mentally imprison their communities, or the abusers who seem to have the ability to strip a person of their own critical thinking and enslave them to a life of fearful subservience. The story is effective then because it is complex, the horror built in layers. Fear of isolation, fear of dark religious control, fear of the demonic, fear of evil.

And of course there’s a thinly veiled question that society was asking in the 70’s: where have we gone wrong with our children?

Other writers and filmmakers explored this idea. Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen. It was a time of dark awakening in America, when people were questioning authority systems and pushing back against religious institutions. High crime haunted America’s big cities, economic turmoil and fear took hold of the populace, and media covered a seemingly endless string of national and international vice.

It’s no wonder that we see some combination of all these themes, the couple on the verge of divorce, a little town where the children have sacrificed their parents to a devil, the murder of innocent people for some supernatural being’s gain.

Quick question: does anyone else think of this episode of The Twilight Zone when they think of the cornfield?

“You’re a bad man! You’re a very bad man!”

“Wish him into the cornfield Anthony.”

I digress, but watch this clip here for some creepy child goodness.

Back to the story.

The Road Trip to Hell

Burt and Vicky are a husband and wife on the verge of divorce. Their long drive through Nebraska is a last ditch effort to try and save their marriage. Some of it has gone well, breathed hope into the cobwebbed resentments that have led their relationship to an impasse, but ever since they got off the turnpike, things have been bad.

Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because they were on the verge of another argument and he didn’t want it to happen. He was desperate for it not to happen.

Vicky said something.

“What?” he shouted.

“Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?”

He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down.

The couple’s bickering is cut short when Burt, distracted by Vicky’s insults, runs over something in the middle of the road.

“A dog,” he said. “Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.”

But it was not a dog. It was a little boy, who ran from the corn fields and disappeared under the car. And just like that, Burt is facing a manslaughter charge. What appears to be a pile of rags in the rearview is actually a boy, around 12 or 13 years old. Burt pulls his car over.

He was halfway between the car and where she stood and something caught his eye on the left, a gaudy splash of red paint amid all the green, as bright as barn paint.

He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that further back in the shadows.

On investigating the scene, Burt finds a suitcase, blood on the ground, and broken stalks of corn. Vicky is sobbing over the body, screaming and then laughing into the sky. The suitcase is tied with rope, blood soaked into the fiber. When Burt turns the body over, he sees that his throat had been cut.

There aren’t any cell phones

The nearest town, Gatlin, is twenty miles away. Burt picks the boy up, and puts his body in the trunk. Vicky is horrified, but Burt can’t shake the feeling that whoever cut this boy’s throat and threw him stumbling into the road might still be watching them. They get in the car and he asks Vicky to open the suitcase as he turns on the radio.

The only station that comes through is a radio preacher.

“HOLY JESUS!” the evangelist shouted, and now the words came in a powerful, pumping cadence, almost as compelling as a driving rock-and-roll beat: “When they gonna know that way is death? When they gonna know that the wages of the world are paid on the other side…The Lord has said there’s many mansions in His house. But there’s no room for the fornicator. No room for the coveter. No room for the defiler of the corn.”

Vicky snaps it off, and we learn that she has left the fire and brimstone religious beliefs of her childhood with no intent to return. There isn’t much in the suitcase. Various pieces of clothing, a string tie with Hopalong Cassidy on it, and a corn husk cross.

“Don’t you think he sounded kind of young? That preacher?”

Burt has no idea how strange the young preacher is, or how wrong the decision to find a constable in the little town of Gatlin will turn out to be.

Signs of life start to appear as they drive.

But there isn’t anyone in the little barns along the highway. The gas station is deserted, so Burt decides to search for some town center.

Where exactly is that population? The stoplight doesn’t work. There isn’t a single flicker of lights or the noise of a small downtown. Everything is silent. Vicky desperately wants to turn around, sensing that they are alone in the town, and more than that, that something isn’t right. Burt refuses to listen to her, instead pulling up to a little restaurant with the open sign in the window.

“Do you hear it?” she asked as he joined her.

“Hear what?”

“The nothing. No cars. No people. No tractors. Nothing.”

And then, from a block over, they heard the high and joyous laughter of children.”

The place is dusty. The prices are cents on the dollar. The calendar on the wall is flipped to 1964, twelve years earlier. The beer taps have been pulled off and scattered across the counter. Not a soul has been in this place for years.

They head back to the car and drive to the Municipal Center, where Burt is convinced he will find someone to turn the body of the child in his trunk over to, when he sees an idyllic white church to his left. The place looks manicured, well kept. He pulls over turns off the car.

Vicky is hysterical. She doesn’t want to go into the church, the images of her unhappy upbringing no doubt flashing in her mind. She gives Burt an ultimatum. If he isn’t out in five minutes, she’ll drive away and leave him there. After all, she has a spare set of keys in her purse.

Burt remedies that, determined not to let her run his life, and walks into the church.

Bread crumbs leading nowhere good.

Suspense thrives on the little clues that set off internal alarm bells for the character and the reader as we witness them experiencing the uncanny. Burt finds large wooden letters in a corner of the vestibule, the only thing in the place that isn’t dusted and tidy. GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH, he eventually makes out.

Why did they take these down? Because they aren’t baptist anymore. So what are they?

For some reason the question caused a trickle of fear…

A portrait of Christ is behind the pulpit, painted in a mural. Sinners burn in a lake of fire, and Christ grins out, his hair green, a mass of summer corn. The pipe organ has been stuffed with corn cobs, the keys ripped off and a sign on a plaque reads MAKE NO MUSIC EXCEPT WITH HUMAN TONGUE SAITH THE LORD GOD.

**This scene and the sense of profane dread in what should be a sacred space reminds me of King’s first story in this collection, “Jerusalem’s Lot.” Do you remember the ghastly discovery that Charles and Calvin make in that old, empty town? The following description is taken from the article I wrote on that story, “Rats in the Walls.”

They reach the church last, its steeple like the one depicted on the map. When they open the doors, the smell of death overwhelms them. In the vestibule is a painting, an obscene take of the madonna and her child, demonic creatures crawling in the background.

On entering the church, they find a golden cross, hung upside down in the “symbol of Satan’s Mass.” When they reach the pulpit, they find a large book open, covered in a mix of ancient runes and Latin. The title of the book, De Vermis Mysteriis, in English, The Mysteries of the Worm. When Charles touches it, the world before him trembles, the church itself shakes.

Nope, nope, nope!

This is where you turn and run Burt, and does he? No. He explores further, pulled in by the dark mysteries of the church. A bible, parts cut to pieces, is spread on the lectern. A book recording the deaths of the townspeople sits on a shelf. The cover stamped with THUS LET THE INIQUITOUS BE CUT DOWN SO THAT THE GROUND MAY BE FERTILE AGAIN SAITH THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS.

The names inscribed in a child’s handwriting show that the adults of the town all died in 1964, the deaths after all on a person’s 19th birthday.

Perhaps a religious mania had swept them. Alone, all alone, cut off from the outside world by hundreds of square miles of the rustling secret corn. Alone under seventy million acres of blue sky. Alone under the watchful eye of God, now a strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The realization comes to him, an almost telepathic knowing. The kids murdered their parents. Shot them, poisoned them, hung them. All for the corn. Maybe driven by bad crops blamed on sin. Whatever the reason, he knows he has to run.

But of course it’s too late.

By the time he gets outside, Vicky has her hand on the horn. From all sides are children, dressed in long brown wool dresses and black pants, bonnets and flat brimmed hats on their heads. They carry farming tools and knives. They go to the car, beat in the windows, stab the tires, and little hands reach in to carry Vicky away.

Burt runs back on the highway, darting into the only place he can hide: the cornfield. Running through the rows of corn, feeling more alive than he has since he was a child, he ducks and darts to avoid being seen by the children, falling in deeper and deeper, until their voices are far away.

He stays there until the sun starts to dip, and he makes his way to a large circle of earth, a clearing he has been pulled to all along.

It was time to go down to the clearing in the corn and see what was there—hadn’t that been the plan all along? All the time he had thought he was cutting back to the highway, hadn’t he been being led to this place?

There he finds Vicky, mounted on a crossbar, her eye sockets stuffed with corn silk, her mouth stuffed with cornhusks. A skeleton in the same position sits beside her, a police chief hat on his head. The corn closes in around the clearing, and Burt hears something large walking towards him. Then he sees it. Something large with terrible red eyes the size of footballs…He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The story ends with the children of the corn, staring at the crucified bodies of Vicky and Burt.

A young boy, only 9, prophesies, saying he had a dream that the Lord was not pleased with the sacrifice. Burts escape meant the demon god had to do the killing himself. And hadn’t he given them a place of killing?

The children wail, knowing another sacrifice must be made.

“So now is the Age of Favor lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen…”

The two eighteen year olds look at one another, the eyes of the others watching to see what will be decided. Malachi, the one who hunted Japheth and cut his throat, and threw him out of the cornfield volunteers, walking into the corn towards the clearing.

Ruth, a young girl pregnant with his child cries as he leaves, her hatred for the corn growing, but not replacing her fear of the demon god that walked there at night.

Out there in the night, something walked, and it saw everything…even the secrets kept in human hearts.

Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased.

So it isn’t just a cult of evil children

These kids are serving some kind of supernatural being who requires human sacrifice to keep the crops growing, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. They themselves are victim to its wishes, following the instructions of the seer, first David and then Isaac, after David gave himself to the corn a year before.

They likely hate the being that rules over them, but their fear drives them to worship by any means necessary. Of course the question is why they don’t leave, but as stated above, that reality is witnessed even absent any supernatural beast stalking the night and demanding sacrifice. Is it really that unrealistic to imagine a dark cult could control its people so effectively that they would never dare to wander up the highway road, searching for a better life?

I think not. It may be the most realistic part of this entire story.

This one has really stuck with me, and on finishing it, I’m not surprised by the place it has taken in the horror genre. King has packed so many layers of terrifying possibility, it only makes sense that others would mimic, expand, and run with the ideas here. Did you like it?

How did you feel about the conclusion, where we find that the children are not just monsters bent on murder, but victims to a vicious corn God who demands sacrifice? Each of them know what their fate will be, and the consequences for not following through? Death.

I couldn’t help but think of three real life horrors while reading this: child soldiers, cult control, and the reality that corn fields are prime places for dumping bodies. A simple google search revealed dozens of recent cases. So if you’re tempted to jump on those old country roads on your next road trip, maybe think twice. Stick to the places where the people are.

In the meantime, Happy Reading.

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Happy Monday, and welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Today’s story has climbed the list of all time favorites in this short story collection. “I Know What You Need” follows the themes and patterns of other works in Night Shift, touching on the occult and dark forces used for control, but in a very personal way.

It is also the first (and only) story in this collection that was written not for a men’s magazine like Playboy or Cavalier, but for a woman’s: Cosmopolitan. The focus of the story naturally is not on the dangers of cleaning a factory basement infested with rats or alien trucks bent on murder. It follows a young woman trying to keep her college scholarship when she meets a young man who seems to have all the answers. He knows what she needs.

If you would like to join in next week, grab a copy of Night Shift and read “Children of the Corn.” Can’t WAIT for this one.

Writing Fear

Last night I watched the beginning of Season 2 of Yellowjackets, a show that has scared the shit out of me every night for the past week. The imagery and storyline is deeply disturbing, and it has me reflecting on why some horror is so effective. When you’re a horror writer, you’re writing to get under someone’s skin, to poke at something deep and primal. You want a reaction that is impossible for the audience to control. Fear goes deeper than logic. It transcends the thinking brain.

King wants to do that too and I’ve heard him say, in some interview (that I could not find though I desperately looked for it) that he wants to hurt the reader. That’s his goal.

So when King wrote for men’s magazines, he wrote for the audience. He wrote fears that would grip the men who read them. He wrote about dangerous work places, the dark side of drinking too much, and monsters that kill your children.

When he wrote for Cosmopolitan, he wrote to a woman’s fear, and in an intimate way. “I Know What You Need” asks, what if this guy you think is so great is not who you think he is? What if you’re falling in love with someone against your own will? Being tricked into it?

Women, it is safe to say, are afraid of men. I know that makes good men feel bad sometimes, but I think they understand what we mean. I think about the situations I put myself in, whether it is after dark, or if there will be people around. In those nightmarish corners of my mind, I imagine what if, and the shape of that fear is in the shadow of some strange man, stronger than me and filled with badness.

Some modern stories have covered this from a different perspective, the Netflix show You, and the gazillion Lifetime original movies I grew up watching. King’s approach is supernatural, the power bigger than any stalker or billionaire or psychopath. For some, that makes the story silly. For others, it touches on the fear that we could be manipulated and lied to by the people closest to us, that there may be skeletons in their closets we eventually find, but too late.

Elizabeth Rogan is about to lose her college scholarship.

We meet her in the middle of a cram session for a sociology exam that could end her time at school. She has a late night ahead of her, sixteen chapters to go, when Ed Hamner, Jr. approaches her in the library. He’s thin, dressed in an enormous green fatigue coat and mismatched socks, and he wants to take her out for strawberry ice cream.

“I know what you need.”

…”You know,” she said, “I doubt that.”

“You need a strawberry double-dip cone. Right?”

He is right. Too right. She had just been thinking of ice cream. But she can’t. Of course she can’t. Her future depends on this test, and besides that, she has a boyfriend, Tony, and they’re practically engaged. But Ed has the answers. Literally. He tells her he’s taken the same course, and the exam is always the same every year. Lucky for her, he’s got a photographic memory, so he copies down the multiple choice questions and answers word for word.

Elizabeth heads back to her room, bewildered and in a daze. When she tells her roommate, Alice, she’s incredulous. She urges her not to rely on some random guys’ notes from memory, and to study the text just in case, but Elizabeth knows the papers given to her by Ed are her only chance to keep her scholarship money.

The following day, she takes the test, and leaves knowing that she aced it, and who is there to celebrate but Ed? He takes her out for a burger, he calls her Beth, just the way she likes it. Tony calls her Liz or Lizzie, both nicknames she doesn’t care for. And with that, she’s headed home for the summer.

She fingered the envelope that poked out of her purse. Notice of her scholarship-loan package for her senior year—two thousand dollars. She and Tony would be working together in Boothbay, Maine, this summer, and the money she would earn there would put her over the top. And thanks to Ed Hamner, it was going to be a beautiful summer. Clear sailing all the way.

But it was the most miserable summer of her life.

Enter, Ed Hamner

When summer comes, the tourists stay home, kept away by a gas shortage. The weather is gloomy and wet, and Tony wants Elizabeth to drop out of school and get married. The idea terrifies her. By July, she finds herself weeping in her apartment, feeling that her life is wrong somehow. And then, the nightmare comes.

She was lying in the bottom of an open grave, unable to move. Rain fell from a white sky onto her upturned face. Then Tony was standing over her, wearing his yellow high-impact construction helmet.

“Marry me, Liz,” he said looking down at her expressionlessly. “Marry me or else.”

She lies paralyzed, unable to say yes, an agreement uttered only to escape death. “Or else it is then,” says Tony, and then moves to a bulldozer, ready to bury Beth alive. She tries desperately to move, to speak, to do anything, but her limbs won’t move, and her lips won’t part.

Just when she thinks it’s too late, she hears Ed Hamner’s voice. “Let her go!” our hero cries. She wakes up sobbing, soaked in sweat and shaking. She’s so scared, she sleeps with the light on. And a week later, Tony turns up dead.

Beth finds herself grieving, but relieved.

She didn’t want to get married, but she didn’t want Tony to die either. Ed turns up in town just in time to find her sobbing alone on a rocky outcrop. Beth is shocked, in disbelieve at his showing up in her hometown.

“How did you know?”

“I ran into your roommate…Alice, is that her name?”

He claims he came as soon as he heard that a little red Fiat had run Tony down while he was working repairing culverts. The car had never even slowed. Beth falls apart right there, and Ed holds her.

He gets her a hot meal and talks her into going back to school in the fall. He offers her menthol cigarettes, her favorite, and mentions her long plane ride, despite the fact she never told him about it. And the phrase that he’s said a couple of times to her rings in her memory.

I know what you need.

Like the voice of a submarine captain tolling off fathoms, the words he had greeted her with followed her down to sleep.

Beth finds herself pining for Ed at the airport. She thought he would see her off. She’s disappointed, when suddenly, an announcement comes over the PA. It’s a phone call for her, from Ed. He’s called to ask if he’ll see her at school, to tell her she’s beautiful and strong, and finally, that he loves her.

If this were Jane Austen, we’d be a chapter away from a double wedding.

But since this is horror, we’re left with a twisted gut. We know something’s wrong, just as Beth does. But she is as powerless to stop what happens as we, the readers, are. Beth’s return to school is met with a cooled relationship between her and her roommate Alice. The girls have shared a dorm since freshman year, but now Alice has retreated a bit. Beth assumes it’s due to a difference in ethics around the sociology exam, and puts it out of her mind.

Everything gets on as usual. Beth studies a little less, goes out a little more, and waits for Ed Hamner to call. He doesn’t, not in September. By October she tries to look him up and fails to find any record of him in the phone book. She doesn’t notice the piles of mail from the private detective agency, addressed to Alice. But she wouldn’t. After all, there’s no return address.

Okay, let’s pause here.

If you haven’t caught it, Alice has hired a private detective agency to do a little digging on Ed Hamner. Is it just me, or does this seem like a bit of an overreaction on her part? That said, what a friend ladies. This is the girl you go to the bar with. She’s smart, observant, and she’s looking out for her friend’s best interests.

Ed does finally swing by.

As soon as Beth sees him in his oversized fatigue jacket and mismatched socks, she knows she loves him. And just like that, he sweeps her off her feet and to a movie.

As the days passed it occurred to her that she had never met anyone, male or female, that seemed to understand her moods and needs so completely or so wordlessly.

That’s because Ed seems to know exactly what Beth wants. He takes her to the right movies, suggests the right food. He always knows what she needs. It looks like a match made in heaven, until Alice finally breaks her silence.

“I have to talk to you, Liz. About Ed.”

“What about him?”

It turns out Alice got suspicious after Beth wrote her and said that Ed had turned up just after Tony died. He claimed Alice had told him about it, and he had come right away.

“But I never saw him, Liz. I was never near the Lakewood Theater last summer.”

“But…”

“But how did he know Tony was dead? I have no idea. I only know he didn’t get it from me.”

It turns out Ed has been lying about a lot of things. He never took that sociology class, which means his claims of photographic memory are a lie. He also knew Beth in grade school, and she remembers a feeling of deja vu that she had when first meeting him in the library.

His father, Ed Sr. worked at an ad agency, and was a compulsive gambler who was down on his luck until he started taking little Ed with him to the casinos. It was illegal, but Ed was a good kid and the owners let it slide. Until he started winning big. It turned out Ed was quite the good luck charm, so good in fact that the casinos all up and down the Las Vegas strip, banned him from gambling there.

So Ed Sr. took up the stock market, and his little boy was good at that too. He seemed to know things before they would happen, seemed to know just what his father needed.

“Mrs. Hamner spent the next six years in and out of various mental institutions. Supposedly for nervous disorders, but the operative talked to an orderly who said she was pretty close to psychotic. She claimed her son was the devil’s henchman. She stabbed him with a pair of scissors in 1964. Tried to kill him. She…Liz? Liz, what is it?”

Liz remembers a scar on Ed’s shoulder, a deep dimple he claimed was from falling on a picket fence as a boy.

After his mother was released from the mental hospital, the family took their last vacation to the San Joaquin Valley. While Ed was collecting firewood at a picnic spot off 101, she drove the car right over the edge with his father in the passenger seat. It could have been an attempt to kill him.

Beth can barely stand it anymore, but Alice is determined to make her listen.

“He’s made you love him by knowing every secret thing you want and need, and that’s not love at all. That’s rape.”

Whoa!

Such an interesting thought experiment around psychic abilities used to manipulate people. If you’ve read The Shining, you might recall that little Danny Torrance, the boy with a gift that includes the ability to read minds, makes a point of not doing it with his parents unless he has to. He feels that doing so is too invasive, a violation of some unwritten law.

Here, King’s universe lays out the morality of mind reading plain as day. To use a gift like that in order to know a person’s thoughts so completely, and even worse, to use it to manipulate them into loving you, is a serious violation. A violation against another person’s will.

Elizabeth slams the door and catches a bus into town.

She isn’t sure if she loves him anymore.

Or if she only loves having someone who knows exactly what she wants and provides it. It’s more like ordering from a menu than a real relationship.

The wind clawed at her face as she stepped out on the corner of Main and Mill, and she winced against it as the bus drew away with a smooth diesel growl. Its taillights twinkled briefly in the snowy night for a moment and were gone.

She had never felt so lonely in her life.

She arrives at Ed’s empty apartment, and finds a spare key to let herself in. The place seems desolate without him, like a strange movie set, everything there in its place just for her. She walks past the living room and into his bedroom, feeling like Goldilocks in the bear den (the chair is just right), when she finds that his bedroom closet door is locked.

She feels for the key on top of the door, and unlocks it against that inner voice that tells her to stop. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the closet is a mess, a jumble of clothes and documents and pipe tobacco. Beth picks up one of the books strewn on the floor, and finds these strange titles.

The Golden Bough. Ancient Rites, Modern Mysteries. Haitian Voodoo. Necronomicom.

I got curious about these books, so I asked Chat GPT what they were. Here’s what I found.

The "Necronomicon" is a fictional grimoire (book of magic) that appears in the works of the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and later writers influenced by his work. Lovecraft first introduced the concept of the Necronomicon in his short stories, and it has since become a popular element in various forms of literature, films, and other media.

The Necronomicon is often depicted as a forbidden and ancient book, associated with dark and occult knowledge. Lovecraft created a sense of mystery around the book, suggesting that its contents could drive readers insane or lead them to encounter otherworldly horrors.

and

"The Golden Bough" is a comprehensive study of mythology, religion, and folklore written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The book was first published in two volumes in 1890 and later expanded to twelve volumes in the third edition, published between 1906 and 1915. The title refers to a bough (branch) that is believed to possess magical properties and is used in rituals, particularly in the context of ancient fertility rites.

I love the Lovecraftian Easter eggs throughout this collection.

I’ve never read Lovecraft myself, but the homage to past horror authors within his own stories is delightful for some reason. If any of you have any details about The Necronomicon, spill in the comments!

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Back to the story…

…she reached for the green fatigue jacket, not admitting to herself that she meant to go through its pockets. But as she lifted it she saw something else. A small tin box…

She opens it and finds a doll on top, an Elizabeth doll, made in her image, dressed in scraps from a red scarf she had lost a few months earlier while at a movie with Ed. The pipe-cleaner arms are draped in Graveyard moss, and fine hair is taped to the doll’s head. Not her hair as it is now, but as it was when she was still a child.

Beneath that she finds the newspaper obituary with his parents’ smiling faces looking back at her, a strange six-sided pattern drawn over their faces. Dolls, fashioned in their images are underneath. A model car falls out, a Fiat, painted red with a piece of Tony’s shirt taped to the front of it. Beth flips it over to find the underside hammered into fragments.

“So you found it, you ungrateful bitch.”

And this the fear at the center of this story.

Not the voodoo or mind rape. At its core, this story is about the fear of manipulation, the ability of a partner to pretend to be something they’re not, and turn on you in the end. It is the story of so many women who ignore the little red flags like Beth did, only to find out that the trail of breadcrumbs was leading to real danger all along.

But Beth stands as a heroine in the end. She doesn’t cower in fear. She doesn’t give in to Ed’s false idea of forced love. She destroys his magical items, throwing them into the river.

When your looks go and men stop trying to give you anything you want, you’ll wish for me!…I know what you need.

But was she so small that she actually needed so little?

Please, dear God, no.

I loved this story, but I want to hear what you think.

Do I love it because I can relate to the fear? Exploring a possible romantic relationship in the beginning, when you don’t know someone can be a scary time. Online dating has taken that reality to a new level, because you meet someone without the context of social circles and mutual friends. Has this fear grown in a modern context?

How did you like this story in comparison to others in this collection which were written for men’s magazines? I really enjoy getting to see how King writes for a different audience, and I think he does it well. The components are very similar (the occult, psychic powers, a book of magic) to other stories we have read in this collection, but the perspective is altered, and in the end, Beth conquers Ed’s control over her, a very different end than many of the other stories we’ve read.

Let me know what you think, and until next week, Happy Reading!

Welcome back to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through Night Shift, King’s first collection of short stories. If you’d like to jump in, grab a copy and read “I Know What You Need” for next week.

Today’s story is “Quitters, Inc.” the only previously unpublished story in this collection. It hits on a couple of interesting themes, namely addiction, and I couldn’t help but relate some of the story to King’s own life or possible thinking at the time. Was it something he wanted to escape from in 1978 when this was published? Did he know he might falter even if the stakes were high?

Addiction

“Quitter’s Inc.” was published in 1978, when King was in the throes of addiction. Proof came when Maine passed a returnable-bottle-and-can law in the early 80’s, and he saw how much he drank in a matter of days. He was an alcoholic.

I thought, I’m an alcoholic…I’ve gotta be really careful, because if somebody says, ‘You’re drinking too much, you have to quit,’ I won’t be able to.

It wasn’t just alcohol. In On Writing, King describes his version of rock bottom, when his wife Tabby brought her children in and some close friends to have an intervention. The deal: get sober or get out. To prove her point, she dumped a trash bag filled with empty beer cans, Xanax, Valium and Listerine bottles, cigarette packs and coke spoons covered in dried blood and snot. He took two weeks to think about it, and then he got sober.

But Nicotine was the last to go. King even admitted that the stimulant helped him write.

I used to be faster than I am now; one of my books (The Running Man) was written in a single week, an accomplishment John Creasey would perhaps have appreciated (although I have read that Creasey wrote several of his mysteries in two days). I think it was quitting smoking that slowed me down; nicotine is a great synapse enhancer. The problem, of course, is that it’s killing you at the same time it’s helping you compose.

—Stephen King, On Writing

King’s early novels often feature addiction riddled characters desperate to quit. Paul Sheldon in Misery, and famously, Jack Torrance in The Shining. At the time, a young King would have scoffed that these characters, or that addiction even, represented him at all. In On Writing, the timeline of recognizing himself in his own pages seems to follow on the heels of sobriety.

The Self Help Nightmare

So it’s no surprise when we open the pages of “Quitters, Inc.” and begin a dark journey into a satirical imagining of the ultimate self-help for addicts. You really wanna quit, the pages seem to say to us. I’ll give you the motivation you need.

We meet Richard Morrison, a hard working business man who spends his time traveling and moving up the company ladder. He eats too much, drinks too much and smokes too much. He stresses and doesn’t sleep well, and he looks it.

All that runs through his mind when he runs into an old friend, Jimmy McCann, at the airport. The man looks fit. He’s succeeding in life. He has everything that Morrison is chasing and more. Morrison chews an antacid as Jimmy McCann tells him about his life before everything changed.

“Well, to put the capper on it, the doc told me I had an incipient ulcer. He told me to quit smoking.” McCann grimaced. “Might as well tell me to quite breathing.

Morrison nodded in perfect understanding. Nonsmokers could afford to be smug. He looked at his own cigarette with distaste and stubbed it out, knowing he would be lighting another in five minutes.

That was it. Quitting smoking. The rest of his vices had fallen like dominoes, and here he was, a year or so later, fit as a fiddle. All with the help of “specialists.” Morrison wants to know how, but that part’s all secret. McCann had to sign a contract he says. But he leaves him a card, in case Morrison is ever interested.

QUITTERS, INC.
Stop Going Up in Smoke!
237 East 46th Street
Treatments by Appointment

Morrison soon forgets, as a man does when he’s busy with business flights and hotel rooms. A month passes when the card falls out of his wallet and onto another bar. And lucky for him, he’s only two blocks away.

**I really enjoy this aspect of King’s stories, the serendipitous nature of things. The seemingly inane course of events leading someone to a perverse kind of destiny, and usually not a good one. I’m not sure if that’s how most bad things happen to good people, but maybe that’s just some kind of defense that keeps me thinking, as long as I do my part, I’ll be okay.

Morrison’s about to find out that isn’t how it works. Not by a long shot.

Quitter’s Inc.

The place isn’t special in any way. People in business suits sit waiting in a reception area. The woman at the desk takes his card and his information, and tells him to take a seat. It isn’t long before he gets called back, the urge to smoke unnerving as always. A gray haired man waits for him, tall and heavyset.

Vic Donatti is his name, and after asking if Morrison really does want to quit smoking, he gets a signature on a form. That is when the curtain starts to lift.

“We employ no drugs. We employ no Dale Carnegie people to sermonize you. We recommend no special diet. And we accept no payment until you have stopped smoking for one year.”

We interrupt this broadcast…

to talk about who Dale Carnegie is. It’s just what the caption above says. He is the father of self improvement, perhaps best known for his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. And judging by King’s tone here, I have a feeling he wasn’t impressed. Maybe that’s reading into the man behind the story a little too much. We do know that Morrison is not impressed.

Which is why he’s drawn to Donatti’s pragmatic approach.

/praɡˈmadik/

adjective

1. dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

Well then, doesn’t that sound nice? We’re in King country, which means it won’t be.

What’s your wife’s name?

That’s when Morrison starts to get a little squirrely, but he answers. Do you love her? If you’re like Morrison, you may be wondering why the good doctor (or whoever he is) would ask that. He asks about his child, a boy with special needs living in a home full time. Which school is that? Donatti asks, but Morrison draws the line there, and doesn’t answer.

He shows up at three the next day for a followup, and Donatti welcomes him back in.

“I’m very glad you came,” Donatti said. “A great many prospective clients never show up again after the initial interview. They discover they don’t want to quit as badly as they thought. It’s going to be a pleasure to work with you on this.”

Donatti asks for his cigarettes, and pummels the pack into the desk. Morrison is unimpressed, and Donatti follows up the little show by giving Morrison all the details of his life. His wife’s name, their address, his son’s name and the name of the home he lives in.

After calming Morrison, Donatti tells him how intense cigarette addiction is, how the relapse rate for Nicotine is higher than heroin. Depriving men of cigarettes in prison leads to riots, and so on, buttering him up to understand why Quitters, Inc. has taken such a pragmatic approach to treatment.

Donatti drew the curtains, discovering a rectangular window that looked into a bare room. No, not quite bare. There was a rabbit on the floor, eating pellets out of a dish.

“Pretty bunny,” Morrison commented.

“Indeed. Watch him.” Donatti pressed a button by the windowsill. The rabbit stopped eating and began to hop about crazily. It seemed to leap higher each time its feet struck the floor. It’s fur stood out spikily in all directions. Its eyes were wild.

That’s right. Donatti, the pragmatist, is electrocuting the rabbit, a practice he calls aversion therapy. Which means, you guessed it, the secret method that makes Quitters, Inc. so successful is their use of aversion therapy. But it isn’t Morrison who will face a shock if he smokes a cigarette. It will be his wife. And not just a shock, but an increasing escalation of punishments. His wife, then his son, and ultimately, if nothing else works?

He opened one of the desk drawers and laid a silenced .45 on the desk. He smiled into Morrison’s eyes. “But even the unregenerate two percent never smoke again. We guarantee it.”

Success at Any Cost

The story continues with Morrison mostly succeeding. When he does slip up and smoke in his car, he comes home to an empty house, and a phone call from Donatti. His wife is shaken, but still proud of him for quitting. She even says she understands.

It’s one of the stranger parts of the story, but in a way it makes sense. She’s willing to undergo a little physical punishment on his behalf if it means he’ll quit smoking. I wouldn’t doubt that many people with loved ones who struggle with an addiction that is killing them would do the same.

Donatti doesn’t stop at smoking. The next call Morrison gets leads to an appointment about his weight. He’s gained a few pounds, but no sweat. Donatti prescribes some illegal diet pills, and gives him his maximum weight. One-eighty-two.

“And what happens if I go over one-eighty two?”

Donatti smiled. “We’ll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife’s finger,” he said. “You can leave through this door, Mr. Morrison. Have a nice day.”

Only eight months later and Morrison is fit, a light one-sixty-seven. He works out, he’s been promoted at work, and he hasn’t touched a cigarette. He passes a card to a guy at a bar, a man who asks how he ever gave up smoking.

I Can’t Help But Wonder…

Is this how King felt about his own addiction? Is this an exercise exploring whether he would be able to stop, given such an ultimatum? The story ends with a double date with Jimmy McCann. When Morrison goes to shake his wife’s hand, he notices something.

Her little finger is missing.

Is that not some sort of admission of defeat? That no matter how high the stakes, the smoking (or drinking, or cocaine use) must go on? Lucky for us, we know how his story ends.

I bargained, because that’s what addicts do. I was charming, because that’s what addicts are. In the end I got two weeks to think about it. In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter’s door shouts. Guy on top of the burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it.

I did think, though—as well as I could in my addled state—and what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that.

What did you all think of the story, “Quitters, Inc.?”

I liked it myself, especially knowing that any autobiographical truth that was present when he wrote and published this in 1978, is no longer ruling over his life.

Or is King still waiting with bated breath, sniffing cigarette cartons and empty beer bottles, glancing to see if Donatti’s guys will catch him, bargaining with himself, deciding if Tabby’s pinky finger is really worth all that.

Maybe. After all, he subscribes to once an addict, always an addict.

But I’d like to think, I’d hope at least, that burden has gotten easier to carry.

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If you’re new to this newsletter welcome. This is The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club where we read, dissect, and discuss all things King. Currently, you’ve caught us in the middle (more like towards the end) of his first published short story collection, Night Shift. If you would like to participate, grab a copy, and read “Quitters, Inc.” for next Monday’s virtual meetup.

If you’re in the States, I hope you’re all staying warm. Frigid temperatures and snow storms have taken hold across the country, and my home state is not immune. It’s zero degrees outside as I write this. The animals are sleeping. My house is warm, but I can hear the wind kicking around outside.

Imagine how strange to finish “The Lawnmower Man,” caught in the thrashings of winter. Picturing fresh cut grass and a cold beer is difficult, but piecing together this strange little tale is even harder. I think, unless my memory fails me, we have found the absolute weirdest of the weird, and I can’t wait to hear what you think.

This post also features additional audio. It is not a voiceover of the article, just some extra thoughts from yours truly. Please listen if you’d like, share your own bookish opinions and comment below!

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I don’t even know where to start, but here we go.

That’s how weird this story is everyone. We’ve hit a low point in this collection. This story, is about a man named Harold Parkette who cares about his manicured lawn. It’s a point of pride, a chance for him to enjoy some beers and listen to the game while ensuring his neighbors think his house looks good.

Until the accident. The summer before our dear protagonist finds an ad for a lawn service in the Sunday paper, he mows the neighbor’s cat. You heard that right. Blood everywhere, his daughter so disgusted she vomits on her new jumper. His wife cries as he cleans the blades.

The whole thing has him on edge, and when the next summer rolls around, he lets the grass grow. And grow it does. The summer weather is perfect, a light rain every couple of days interspersed by pleasant warmth. His yard starts to look more like a meadow than a lawn, and the neighbors can’t help but crack jokes as they walk by.

Which leads him to the paper.

When he sees a woodchuck in the backyard, he knows he can’t ignore it any longer. He decides to hire someone to do the job.

The time had come, he decided. He flicked off the radio, picked up the paper, and turned to the classifieds. And halfway down the Part Time column, he found this: Lawns mowed. Reasonable. 776-2390

So he calls the number, and finds on the other line, a professional voice answering for Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services. Harold waits on the back porch with his beer, dozing off while listening to baseball on the radio. Until the doorbell rings.

A man in grass-stained denim overalls stood on the front stoop, chewing a toothpick. He was fat. The curve of his belly pushed his faded blue overall out to a point where Harold had suspected he had swallowed a basketball

The man is there to mow his lawn, and he seems awfully gleeful about it. Harold is anything but. There’s an uneasy feeling around the whole affair for him, and not just because he’s squeamish about lawnmowers.

He’s also afraid of men like the lawnmower man.

…they were always tanned dark brown, there was always nets of wrinkles around their eyes, and they always knew what to do.

Any city kid who has gone to a farm or a ranch will know this feeling well, and I think that sometimes men feel this when they hire someone to fix something in their house. It’s a strange, vulnerable interaction. I’ve watched it.

A man calls someone in to perform a service. He knows more about plumbing or electricity or carpentry. Sometimes the plumber or electrician lets the other man know that he knows more. All of this is just under the surface, an uncomfortable interaction if you’re on the outside, watching your dad or husband or brother talk too long about the leaky faucet or the busted pipe.

“The back lawn’s the real chore…I’m afraid I’ve let it go.”

'“No sweat, buddy. No strain…The taller, the better. Healthy soil, that’s what you got there, by Circe. That’s what I always say.”

Here’s where I said, wait a minute.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know Greek mythology well. My kids can school me any day of the week, so when I read Circe my mind went to…Game of Thrones. Cast your literary stones. I know. I know. But like I always say, thank Circe for Wikipedia.

Circe was renowned for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs. Through the use of these and a magic wand or staff, she would transform her enemies, or those who offended her, into animals.1

Interesting. But the story goes on with spilled beers, talk of baseball, and a little dive into stocks. Harold starts to doze, thinking of his failed bison burger business venture when the lawnmower roars to life outside. The noise is so loud, he rushes to the window to see it for himself.

The aged red power mower the fat man had brought in his van was running on its own. No one was pushing it; in fact, no one was within five feet of it.

Oh, said I. I know what’s going on here. We’ve got ourselves another machine monster horror story, like the “The Mangler” or “Trucks.”

And to be honest I thought King had tried this too many times in one collection. Sure, the living machines differed in their path to sentience. One was brought to life by demonic possession, and the other through unknown means. Still.

And then shit starts to get strange. Really strange.

The lawnmower man had removed his clothes—every stitch. They were folded neatly in the empty birdbath that was at the center of the black lawn. Naked and grass-stained, he was crawling along about five feet behind the mower, eating the cut grass. Green juice ran down his chin and dripped onto his pendulous belly. And every time the lawnmower whirled around a corner, he rose and did an odd, skipping jump before prostrating himself again.

What. Is. Going. On.

He lost me here. Is it disturbing? Absolutely. Does it make any sense? No. Not to me. We’ve got Circe, we’ve got a naked lawnmower man, a self driving lawnmower, and then the mole. A little mole who had made the grassy yard his home decides to make a run for it, attempting to hide under the porch when—you guessed it—the rabid racing lawnmower turns and goes after the little creature. It gets him, and the lawnmower man? He eats up the remains. The sight is so disgusting that Harold faints.

When he wakes up he thinks it must be his wife Carla, shaking him from some nightmare. But the lawnmower man stands over him, grass stuck between his teeth.

“You fainted buddy, right, huh?”

The lawn is cut, the clippings taken care of by the lawnmower man’s voracious appetite. Green drips down the sides of his mouth. Harold is deeply disturbed, but he has to play it cool in front of the lawnmower man, who explains his strange business as “efficient.”

“Of course every now and then we run into a customer who doesn’t understand—some people got no respect for efficiency, right?—but the boss is always agreeable to a sacrifice. Sort of keeps the wheels greased.”

Did you notice that word, sacrifice? I know I did, and Harold does too. Then we find out who the lawnmower man is working for.

“Pan. Pan’s the boss.”

People, people. This is just…too much.

Pan, the greek god, half goat half man, a pastoral god of fields and wooded areas. In charge of the fat, naked, lawnmower man? Using him to…eat grass and perform the occasional animal sacrifice? Wow. Let’s continue.

He tells the man to go ahead and finish in the back. He’s going in to take a nap. The man is all smiles when he walks out, and Harold immediately calls the police, reporting the only thing he thinks they will believe.

“I’d like to report a case of indecent exposure.”

But while he’s on the phone getting the details sorted, the lawnmower man is back, and he doesn’t like what Harold has done. The lawnmower is cornering Harold, tearing up the rug as it attempts to flank him.

“That won’t do any good, buddy,” the lawnmower man said kindly. “Apt to be messy, too. Now if you was just to show me where you keep your sharpest butcher knife, we could get this sacrifice business out of the way real painless…I think the birdbath would do and then—”

Harold makes a run for it.

But of course, the guy works for Pan. That’s right guys, the lawnmower man has cloven feet—perhaps explained by his brief mention of Circe who was known for turning people she didn’t like into animals—and the owner of Pastoral Greenery is the god, Pan, himself. When Harold goes running, the lawnmower is at his heels. Until he trips and falls, suffering the same fate as the neighborhood cat the summer before.

The story ends with police taking pictures, some patrolmen remarking on how many crazy people were out in the world. Guys who would get naked and call the police on themselves. Guys who drank too much beer and went crazy with the heat.

Goodwin strolled around the house and Cooley followed him. Behind them, the scent of newly mown grass hung pleasantly in the air.

So what’s with the Greek gods?

I found this to be the most wacky insertion in the whole story. We have greek gods and living machines, a man with cloven hooves for feet who munches grass behind the autonomous lawn mower, because his boss, Pan, believes it to be more efficient? No. I’m sorry. King has gone too far.

Okay, okay, okay. Can we suffice it to say that this one was a doozy?

What is going on here? Too much if you ask me dear readers. Between Circe, Pan, the lawnmower man, and the rabid machine, I’m not sure what to say. Did the story work? Barely. Is it good? No. I’d say not. Not by a long shot.

As always, King’s writing is great. He understands how to weave a story together with the right peaks and valleys. But the details here people, the details are insanely ridiculous. I can’t help but think this is influenced in some way by King’s love for B monster movies. For any of you who partake in those flicks, can you enlighten me? Does that hunch track?

Did I hate it? Weirdly no. Do I think it’s a good story? Absolutely not. Period. End of sentence. How did you all feel?

If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s first ever book club. Right now we’re making our way through all things Stephen King. You find us in the middle of his first short story collection, Night Shift. Today’s post is on “The Ledge.”

If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Lawnmower Man.”

This post also features additional audio. It is not a voiceover of the article, just some extra thoughts from your truly. Please listen if you’d like, share your own bookish opinions and comment below!

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Some Inspiration

I always do a little digging on these stories, to see if I can find King’s commentary or any background. This one was an homage to Jack Finney’s "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket,” written in 1956. That short story follows Tom Benecke, a man climbing the corporate ladder, working extra one evening in an effort to impress his boss.

He foregoes a movie with his wife, choosing instead to keep writing a memo after weeks spent working on a marketing project. His yellow legal pad paper is scrawled with notes. He lights a cigarette, but the room is hot. So he decides to open a window.

(You can see where this is going right?)

A gust of wind blows and carries his papers out into the night, where they land on the ledge bordering the apartment building. Desperate to salvage all his hard work, he steps out, balancing on the sliver of concrete building. By the time he retrieves the paper and stuffs it into his pocket, he has nearly fallen a half dozen times. He makes his way carefully back to his apartment window, and on reaching it, he shuts it by accident, trapping himself outside. All he has to break back in are the contents of his pockets, some matches, a silver dollar. But in the end, his fists do the trick. He shatters the window and collapses inside.

The story ends ironically with him safe, but the papers blown away through the open window. The image of his dead body splattered on the sidewalk below, with nothing in his pockets except the scrawl of marketing notes on legal pad had changed him. He decides to go to the movies with his wife.

King first published “The Ledge” in a 1976 issue of Penthouse, and two years later it landed in Night Shift, the collection we’ve been working through over the past couple of months. The tale begins with a deadly interaction between Stan Norris, and a wealthy criminal boss, Cressner. Stan has been sleeping with Cressner’s wife, but the man seems willing to get over it. That is if Stan takes his wager.

The Gist

Either he faces a prison sentence—Mr. Cressner has planted heroin in his car, the discovery of which is only a 911 call away—or he performs a simple task. Walk around the five inch ledge of the high rise apartment building. It’s only forty-three stories up after all. And the wind isn’t so bad. Cold, but only ten miles per hour when it isn’t gusting. Do that, and Stan gets $20,000, Cressner’s wife, and his freedom.

Cressner is a man who likes wagers. He is world weary, a bored man with so much wealth he has little left to entertain him. So he comes up with games to play when people owe him, or wrong him. The deadlier the better. This particular one, he tells Stan, has been attempted six times before, and not a single person has ever made it.

Backed against a wall, Stan takes the wager, making his way along the ledges of the high rise, working to calm his mind through deep breathing, steadying himself using techniques and muscles built through his tennis playing. But if it’s not his own mind actively attempting to buckle his legs, it’s the obstacles he encounters along the way.

A crosswind at the first corner as he rounds the building, Cressner’s startling noisemaker surprise, thrown from a window above, and lastly, a territorial pigeon defending his nest. Slowly by slowly, and step by step, Stan makes his way around. It’s taken him over two hours. His ankles are on fire when he lifts himself over the other side of the Cressner’s balcony.

But his win is too good to be true.

I hauled myself up, wriggled over the top, collapsed thankfully on the floor…and felt the cold steel muzzle of a .45 against my temple.

I looked up and saw a goon ugly enough to stop Big Ben dead in its clockwork. He was grinning.

“Excellent!” Cressner’s voice said from within. “I applaud you, Mr. Norris!” He proceeded to do just that.

Of course he did. He’s the bad guy after all.

The Villain

He was wearing a silk dressing gown on which a dragon was embroidered. His eyes were calm and intelligent behind his glasses. He looked just like what he was: an A-number-one, 500-carat, dyed-in-the-wool son of a bitch.

He’s rich and powerful, a game player who never loses. And Stan Norris is no exception. Cressner has Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. And if that doesn’t work out? He’ll make sure that Stan loses while keeping true to his word.

He is a caricature, but not a totally unbelievable one. His behavior is modeled after the powerful psychopaths who played murder games with their victims. Think Pablo Escobar or Sadam Hussein’s sons, mob families and cartels responsible for thousands of deaths, some conducted in this very manner.

But this is horror, and that means justice…most of the time.

Cressner thought he was safe playing his little game, but he underestimated his pawn.

“I told you I never welsh, and I never do. You won three things, Mr. Norris. The money, your freedom, my wife. You have the first two. You can pick up the third at the county morgue.”

The realization that he’s been played for a fool hits Stan hard. He gets the money, he gets to leave, but Marcia is gone. Filled with rage, and with nothing left to lose, Stan blindsides the hitman Tony, hitting him with the bag of money given as a consolation prize. He grabs the gun, knocking the man across the nose. Cressner is all his.

Cressner was almost out the door when I snapped a shot over his shoulder and said, “Stop right there, or you’re dead.”

And then some of my favorite lines.

He thought about it and stopped. When he turned around, his cosmopolitan world-weary act had curdled a little around the edges.

The game has been upended, and now Stan has his own bet for Cressner. He can face death, a bullet in the head, or take his chances on the ledge.

A Change In Tense

I love it when authors can do this successfully. The entire story has been told in first person, past tense. “I motioned,” “I thought,” etcetera. Until the final paragraphs as Stan watches Cressner round the corner of the building, dressing gown billowing in the wind.

But he probably knows that if I catch him there when I break into the other penthouse, I’ll shoot him down like a dog.

And then

The bank clock says 12:44.

Stan waits, knowing that no matter what happens, Cressner is headed for the morgue.

Cressner said he’s never welshed on a bet.

But I’ve been known to.

A Moment to Appreciate the Craft

I think what I like about this story is that it starts right in the middle, close to the action as they say. There’s an important lesson in story telling here. We’ve all been trapped at a party, listening to that guy blabbering on, taking an hour to tell what should be told in five minutes. We don’t need to know if Stan Norris brushed his teeth or not. And so King starts right where it counts: with the wager.

“Go on,” Cressner said again. “Look in the bag.”

We’re in the penthouse, dizzied by what we quickly realize is a life or death situation.

I love the power of storytelling in its ability to go big, build entire worlds and summarize histories and languages and wars, or to zoom in, and spend twenty pages following one man’s three hour, life altering event.

We can do that with our own stories, our own childhoods and countries and histories. So long as we avoid being that guy, filling the time with nonsense and too much where none is needed. In other words, hurry it up. Get to the good part.

This is one of those stories where King does tension. Suspense. It reminds me of an earlier story we read, “Battleground.” I felt the same about this one as I did the other. It is well written, the tension is good, my attention is caught. But it is not a favorite of mine.

I did appreciate the page-turning quality that I expect from a thriller, and the startling realization that Marcia was dead. It caught me by surprise. I knew things wouldn’t go Stan’s way, but I assumed Cressner would kill him if he made it around the ledge. The alternative didn’t cross my mind, and part of the reason for that is in King’s fast-paced story telling. He takes our minds off of Marcia and sets them right on the ledge with Stan. Brilliant.

How did you all like it?

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Welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. If you’re new here, we have been making our way through Night Shift, King’s first short story collection. Today’s post is on Strawberry Spring, but if you want to join in, grab a copy and read The Ledge for next week!

This story features King’s more literary writing style, something that I really enjoyed from Bag of Bones. I took more imagery from that book, the loons at night and the lonely lake, than I have from any of King’s other stories. I read this in bed while the sun rose. I couldn’t see it, but every time I glanced out the window, the branches of a tree nearby glowed first soft pink, then orange, then finally the shadows were banished by yellow and the sky turned clear blue.

It didn’t fit the story unfolding on the pages I turned, transmuting letters to images, memories I’ll hold in my mind of things that never happened. Fictions. Lies. Tales of a northeastern strawberry spring that brought premature warmth, dense fog, and Springhill Jack.

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Retrospective.

A story in the newspaper takes our narrator back in time to eight years before, when he was a student at New Sharon’s Teacher College, and a serial killer prowled the campus, murdering young women in the fog laden night. It’s a simple premise with a twist I saw coming from a mile away. But the joy for me was not in the mystery—again, there was none—but in the writing. Take this early line describing the sudden break in winter weather as that mythical strawberry spring moved in.

And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. The pines on the mall poked through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of joint, strange, magical.

A strawberry spring, we learn, is a false spring, similar to Indian summer. It’s a change in weather, an illusion that winter is through, just before a great winter storm comes barreling through, dumping winter piles on slush laden streets that only days before were filled with night walkers, lovers and strangers and the sleepless. And, of course, Springhill Jack.

Gale Cerman.

The first girl to be killed. An art major, a mousey thing, at once ugly and cute, is found by another student, her throat slit. Everyone talks. Everyone knew her. Everyone has a suspect in mind, but even as they utter their theories, they watch one another, wondering if the killer is in their own huddled circle, whispering in hushed tones false planted stories to throw everyone off guard. But of course, the boyfriend is the primary suspect.

Amalara.

Carl Amalara, the ex-boyfriend of Gale, is the first to be arrested. A knife under his bed and Gale’s mutilated photo next to it is all the evidence the police need. They had been fighting. They broke up the week before. It seems an obvious catch. Until the fog.

The fog came again that night, not on little cat’s feet but in an improper silent sprawl. I walked that night. I had a headache and I walked for air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wiping away the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year’s grass bare and uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother…

…I walked until nearly midnight, until I was thoroughly mildewed, and I passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily off down the winding paths. Who is to say one of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces.

There has been another murder.

Our anonymous narrator wakes to the bustle of bad news. Amalara was let go. Another body was found. This time, the killer took her head with him. Ann Bray is the unlucky girl, a beauty queen, a baton thrower, a smart student who was president of this and that. Our narrator remembers her as the editor of the school paper who turned down both his column idea, and his date proposition.

The students are of course on edge more than before. Not a crime of passion, but a hunter killing at random. These two girls, apart in social standing and probably never friends, both killed for no other reason than the night and the fog that shielded the murderer.

There was someone dark among us, as dark as the paths which twisted across the mall or wound among the hundred-year-old oaks on the quad in back of the gymnasium. As dark as the hulking Civil War cannons seen through a drifting membrane of fog. We looked into each other’s faces and tried to read the darkness behind one of them.

A quiet hysteria overtakes the campus.

Police crawl the streets surrounding. Students spread rumors, details from the crime scenes. The press finally names the killer, deemed serial by that point. “Springheel Jack,” for the absence of footprints in the muddy earth Ann Bray had been found in. They seem to miss, or purposely ignore, the resemblance our nighttime killer has to Jack the Ripper.

Plainclothes detectives pepper the student body, going undercover to try and tempt—and catch—the illusive serial killer. No one knows who’s real and who’s not. But it’s of no use. The fog rolls in again as our narrator crams for a trig exam, the myth of strawberry spring heavy on his mind. His roommate takes off to play pool, and leaves him alone to wonder: when will the storm come?

For a long time after he was gone, I could only look out the window. And even after I had opened my book and started in, part of me was still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge.

HA! HA!

The words were written in blood on her windshield, her body left propped behind the wheel. Other parts of her scattered in the back seat, and in the trunk. She worked at the Grinder, making burgers for college students five hours a night.

Without any other likely suspects, the police arrest Hanson Gray, “an innocuous homosexual sociology student” who couldn’t remember where he had been the nights of all three murders. But while he’s locked up, Marsha Curran is killed, a nobody who rented a place with a few other girls, and wandered the foggy night to her unlucky end.

Why she had been out and alone is forever beyond knowing—she was a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an apartment in town with three other girls. She had slipped on campus as silently and as easily as Springheel Jack himself. What brought her? Perhaps her need was as deep and as ungovernable as her killer’s, and just as far beyond understanding. Maybe a need for one desperate and passionate romance with the warm night, the warm fog, the smell of the sea, and the cold knife.

The college closes early for spring break, and the narrator heads south with six other people crammed in the car. That winter storm moves in just like the old-timers said it would, and just like that, April is there with its clear nights and showers. Springheel Jack stops his string of murders, and our narrator graduates and moves on with his life, gets married and has a kid.

Until the paper that morning shows up with the killers nickname, given to him those eight years before. The snow is melting, running down the gutters. He can smell the sea from the front porch. The mist is creeping along roads and fields. A girl was killed near those Civil War cannons, her body laid in a snow bank, butchered and missing parts.

My wife is upset. She wants to know where I was last night. I can’t tell her because I don’t remember.

Ah. We’re seeing the pieces come together now.

I’ve been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shape or substance. And I’ve been thinking about the trunk of my car…and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to open it.

All his foggy night walks timed with the murders make sense.

I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.

And oh dear God, I think so too.

DID-Dissociative Identity Disorder.

This story was first published in 1968, the same year that hysterical neurosis, dissociative type, was defined in DSM-II (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Later it would become popularized in media with the case of Billy Milligan, a convicted rapist and murderer who claimed not to remember any of his crimes, due to what would eventually be called multiple personality disorder.

He claimed that severe childhood abuse and trauma had led to personalities of all ages and gender, that would take their turn in the “spotlight,” when they would control his body and actions. Most of the personalities were harmless, but there were a couple that were violent and dangerous. Of course there have been other famous cases. Sybil being another one that led to books and films.

And this bled over into pop culture. Fight Club, Mystic River (though there is some argument around a diagnosis of PTSD vs. DID), and The Host to name a few. But does this work anymore? I know that I saw the twist coming a mile away. It’s akin to our main character waking up, and realizing everything was a dream. The story is well written, entertaining. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and for its time, it was probably a shocking ending.

Can it be done well now? I’m not so sure. I’ve seen some twists on the DID storyline in a recent book I reviewed, but I don’t want to name it, because it completely spoils the ending. Suffice it to say, it flips the trope by making us think the character with DID is the bad guy. It worked for me. I felt surprised by the ending.

Is surprise out altogether? Maybe thriller and horror are entering a new phase. Maybe they can’t shock all of us content saturated readers and watchers. What do you think?

Truly, tell me. Did you see the ending coming? Were you surprised?

And if you’re like me and finding that you can often see the end coming from a mile away, tell me about a story that truly left you flabbergasted. Something you never expected. A twist, a trope flip, whatever it is.

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This weekend we had our first snow, a heavy wet thing that plopped down in inches starting Friday and still hangs in the trees two days later. Sunday morning I woke up to wind gusts so fierce it looked like smoke outside. The snow was whirling in great rolling billows, as close to rough ocean water as I’ll ever get.

I spent most of my time watching out the window and thinking about writing this article, but I’ve been pulled into my own thoughts lately, and opted instead for reminiscing with my husband. We tell each other stories about our past, some we know, others we don’t. I wonder if we’ll reach a day when we run out, either because our memories have dulled with age, or because we’ve talked them all out. Figured out the past. But today is not that day. Today the past is now.

And so it was for our dear Jim Norman, the main character of King’s short story, Sometimes They Come Back. When we meet him, it is 1974. He is married, a young man who just got a job teaching English at a high school. He made it past the interview. He celebrates with a steak dinner. He is happy. Until night falls and he goes to sleep and dreams the same old dream again.

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The breakdown

We know he had one after the first couple of paragraphs. The principal, Fenton, had asked him about it in the interview. To see if Jim was ready to take on the pressures of a teenage audience. He assures them, the circumstances that led to his breakdown were nothing like teaching. Sure, he had been teaching. A practice class as part of his senior year in college.

But it was more than that. His mother had died of cancer, his fiance had been hit by a car. And then there was the issue at the school he interned at. It was a trade school, filled with violent kids, and after one punched him, he couldn’t go back.

“That was it. I had a breakdown. No screaming meemies or crouching in the corner. I just couldn’t go back. When I got near Trades, my chest would tighten up. I couldn’t breathe right, I got cold sweat—”

Something we would call panic attacks. And you can’t blame the guy. Teaching at rough high schools can be dangerous.

But Jim isn’t interviewing at that kind of school anymore.

He gets the job at Davis High, a school with big budget, new desks, and a science wing valued in the millions. But there’s something about it when the building empties and the halls are quiet, something not quite right.

But after the kids were gone, something old and brooding seemed to settle over the halls and whisper in the empty rooms. Some black, noxious beast, never quite in view. Sometimes, as he walked down the Wing 4 corridor toward the parking lot with his new briefcase in one hand, Jim Norman thought he could almost hear it breathing.

Of course it doesn’t help that he keeps having his old nightmare, the one where he relives his brothers brutal murder, the one that happened when he was only nine, and Wayne was twelve. It’s a dream he doesn’t talk about. Only assures he he’s fine when he says, “Sometimes it comes back, that’s all. No sweat.”

Things go by alright until after the Christmas holiday. Before that, the worst complaint he has is period seven, the time of day when he gets the slow learners and tries to inspire them. That’s where the trouble makers are, the jocks who need grades to keep playing sports, but could care less about Living with Literature.

His biggest beef is with a big football player named Chip Osway. He’s failing the class, a grade that’ll see him kicked out of basketball and football, and he’s not happy about it.

“If you flunk me, we’ll get you, you son of a bitch!”

Jim Norman writes the F in his grade book that day.

And that night he has the dream again. It’s him and Wayne in Connecticut. He’s holding his library books and the streets are getting dark. The short way to their destination is under a railroad overpass, but there’s a problem. The local losers hang out there, greasers (it’s 1957) in leather jackets with slicked back hair. Wayne won’t go around. He’s twelve, and the worst thing to be at twelve is a chicken.

So they go past, and they get robbed by three of those losers. A fat kid, a guy with orange-colored hair, and a tall kid with a blond crew cut and a broken nose. Vinnie, one of them is called, laughs when Jim wets himself. He remembers the details of their faces, a strawberry birthmark on one of their chins, a kid with a jittery face.

And then, they kill Wayne, and he gets away. But something has taken hold. After all, it’s nearly twenty years later, and he’s still dreaming about it.

Real life trauma is like that. It follows you, manifests in your body against your will. You might dream it, or react with emotions that far exceed what the situation calls for. You might shake or yell. You might feel scared. You might not be able to sleep.

But Jim’s problem doesn’t stop with the dreams. After winter break, he returns to a new student for period seven. Robert Lawson, a transfer from another school.

“Hey, I’ve got twenty-seven in there right now, Sim. I’m overloaded.”

“You’ve still got twenty-seven. Bill Stearns got killed the Tuesday after Christmas. Car accident. Hit-and-run.”

His new student is a troublemaker to boot. His folder reveals lengthy records of school discipline detailing hundreds of infractions. Jim’s dread peaks when he sees the photo of a kid with a strawberry birthmark on his chin.

If you don’t deal with the past, the past comes looking for you.

The kid named Robert Lawson looks just like the killer from his dreams. He hasn’t changed since 1957. A week later, another student dies falling from a building, and David Garcia joins, a student with a face Jim doesn’t recognize from the picture. It’s not until he sees his flitting eyelids that he realizes his dread is being realized. They’re coming back. The third and final reincarnation of his brother’s murderers goes by the name Vincent Corey, Vinnie for short. He’s there to take Chip Osway’s place. The old lug has suddenly decided football wasn’t for him after all. He’s left the school.

I love the way King sprinkled the tiniest details to give us the same sinking feeling Jim would have experienced. The birthmark, the eyes, and the name. We know it doesn’t make sense. These three can’t have returned twenty years later at the same age as when Wayne was murdered. But we also know no one ever went to jail for the stabbing.

The Inside Scoop.

It’s a horror trope we see over and over. It takes place in libraries and old lady’s houses. It’s how we figure out what’s really going on. And in this story, it’s an old retired cop, Don Nell, who happens to pick up his phone and give Jim the information he desperately needs to know: whatever happened to the suspects in his brother’s case?

There were lineups, but nothing definitive came from them. Jim presses, desperate for anything that could explain how his brother’s murderers ended up in his high school English classroom. Before they hang up and Don Nell goes on to find out about the prime suspects in the case, Jim asks about the school the three boys have all transferred from.

“Is there a Milford High in Stratford?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s what I—”

“Only thing name of Milford around here is Milford Cemetery out on the Ash Heights Road. And no one ever graduated from there.” He chuckled dryly, and to Jim’s ears it sounded like the sudden rattle of bones in a pit.

And just like that, we’re dealing with the undead.

It turns out that Jim is unfinished business, and the violent in life are still violent in death.

“We’re gonna kill you dad. You’ll find out about that hole.”

“Get out of here.”

“Maybe that little wifey of yours too.”

So Jim does what any of us would do. He gets a book on conjuring demons. His wife doesn’t like it. She says so on her way out that night. The night that she dies. When he gets to the hospital, an orderly is waiting for him.

Wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying blood splattered across the front. Cleaning his fingernails with a knife. The orderly looked up and grinned into Jim’s eyes. The orderly was David Garcia.

Jim fainted.

How do you fight three people who are already dead? Jim has an idea. When Vinnie calls to tell him he’s next, he invites him and his buddies to the school. Room 33, where all this mess started. There, he makes his sacrifice. A picture of him and his brother, the blood of a cat he killed on the way, the knife that did it, and a sweatband taken from Wayne’s old baseball cap.

Of course there’s a pentagram and an incantation and the demand of the demon Jim summons. Both index fingers, severed and tossed into the pentagram as an offering. The undead show up, knives ready, lines echoing from the past.

“Give us your money, dad.”

It’s just like it happened before, but the undead never have their revenge. A small boy, maybe twelve years old, steps out of the darkness and into the pentagram. The scene from the past is playing out again, but this time, the ending is different.

He looked up and saw Vinnie, his face stretched into a caricature of hatred, drive his knife into the Wayne-thing just below the breastbone…and then scream, his face collapsing in on itself, charring, blackening, becoming awful.

Then he was gone.

Garcia and Lawson struck a moment later, writhed, charred, and disappeared.

Jim looks up and sees his brother Wayne looking down at him. But it isn’t Wayne at all. The face changes, turning demonic, eyes yellow and horrible, and the demon leaves with a promise: I’ll come back Jim.

Jim straightens the classroom, cleans up his floor, and walks down the dark hall with his disfigured hands to his chest.

Halfway down, something—a shadow, or perhaps only an intuition—made him whirl around.

Something unseen seemed to leap back.

Jim remembered the warning in Raising Demons—the danger involved. You could perhaps summon them…But sometimes they come back.

As horrific as the story is, there’s a dark reality that pierces this fiction.

Sometimes terrible things happen to you, and they never seem to leave. At least not without help or treatment of some kind. They alter you, haunt you, wake you up at night. Even in Jim’s vengeance, he isn’t done dealing with the trauma of his brother’s murder. There’s a promise from that demon after all. For now the fingers will do. But later? I’ll have your soul.

The underlying horror, one that a lot of us know well, is that even without the demon, sometimes memories come back. Parts of our past we wish never happened. Some of them were done to us, like in the case of Wayne’s murder. Some of them we do to ourselves, like Jim’s choice to summon demons. Sometimes, there is no easy way out, and the decisions before us are all bad ones. That is a horror all on its own.

And now to you dear readers.

Did you like this story? It was trope city, but the writing was on point. I love the way King constructed it, the little breadcrumbs of dread he left all along the way. My favorite parts were each character from the past making their appearance in the classroom, one by one.

The demon conjuring was popular with King. We’ve seen it a handful of times in this collection. Was it the time? Were demons a big part of horror in the 70’s? Chime in please if you know.

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More like good night in my part of the world. If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club and a newish section of Kindling that has brought me a lot of joy in these past few months. We’re smack dab in the middle (or are we?) of King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. Tonight we talk “Trucks”, but if you’d like to join in next week, you can pick up a copy and read “Sometimes They Come Back.”

I really enjoyed this story. It was distinctly King, and King at his best if you ask me. He’s at home in dystopia, particularly when it’s at the hands of man’s own creation. A virus released by the military in The Stand, the demon possessed laundry press personified in “The Mangler”, the slime monster from two weeks ago in “Gray Matter.” The characters, the action, the press for survival. It’s all a win for me.

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The fear we all have, a theme we find not only in King's horror, but in much of the techno-horror of the last fifty years, personified in zombies created through viruses and now AI gone awry. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

But King does a good job of bringing it home. His blue collar background steers him clear of complicated science fiction narratives (he skips the periodic table and all the things I don’t understand about biology). Instead, he brings us machines, those common and necessary to our modern, everyday life. 

He seems to have an affinity for automobiles in particular, the idea that they could gain consciousness and come alive, not unlike the industrial laundry press in our earlier story, “The Mangler.” In Trucks, he skips the ancient possession tie-in (no loss there) and aims for a more action-packed, science fiction story. 

The idea isn't new: humans become slaves to their machines. As I type this, I've spent hours of today refreshing social media and email, looking for who knows what notification, lost in a sea of binary come to life on the computer screen. I say all that to say, he isn't far off, not about the reality that we’re tied to our tech. 

We all know that's true, don't we? That in the end our advancements may very well be the end of us? We sense it, encapsulate it in story, set it as a warning sign: DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. (Do people play Monopoly anymore? If not, this reference will be lost on you. Let's just say, it means exactly what it sounds like, namely, STOP.)

Do we ever listen? 

I saw Oppenheimer earlier this year, and I'd venture that we generally don't. The scientists that spend their lives trying to close Pandora's Box do so at their own peril, risk becoming villains at the end of the story. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The pace at which we advance feels automatic, as if the technology wants to exist. That is the exact sentiment that King captures here. 

It begins at a truck stop.

A small group of travelers, a salesman, a truck driver, a kid and his girlfriend, the cook and our narrator are gathered around trying to make contact on a radio. All they get is static. Outside, the low rumble of semi-truck engines, and the scene of a horrific accident.

At the entrance to the truck stop’s turnaround, there was a blasted Cadillac. Its owner stared out of the star-shattered windshield like a gutted fish. Horn rimmed glasses hung from one ear.

Halfway across the lot from it lay the body of a girl in a pink dress. She had jumped from the Caddy when she saw it wasn’t going to make it. She had hit running but never had a chance. She was the worst, even though she was face down. There were flies around her in clouds.

Bam! Just like that, we know she’s been dead long enough for flies to gather. We know that whatever killed her and the Cadillac owner, it had to be violent. Quick. A nervous salesman, Snodgrass, is itching to get out of the stop. The others are trying desperately to talk him down, but it’s of no use. He springs out, tearing loose from our narrator’s grip, and sprinting across the gravel outside.

And that’s when we see. The trucks lunge after him. He turns to look back, trips, and rights himself too late. Snodgrass is a goner, thrown into the drainage ditch by a huge truck that nearly jack-knifes into the ditch itself. The others watch in horror, one girl screaming, the trucker squeezing his glass so hard it breaks. Because there is no driver in the truck. Not in any of them.

Our stranded survivors all escaped runaway Greyhounds, semi-trucks and rigs, somehow driven to kill at the drop of a hat.

“What would do it?” The trucker was worrying. “Electrical storms in the atmosphere? Nuclear testing? What?”

“Maybe they’re mad,” I said.

They fiddle around with the juke box and a cigarette machine, count food supplies to see how long they’ve got before the siege gets the best of them.

“We made them!” the girl cried out with sudden wretchedness. “They can’t!”

The power goes out not long after. Plans for a monthlong stay in the truck stop cooking hamburgers and passing the time listening to Fogerty go out the window. Now the food situation is down to days. The water, a week at most. The pump needs electricity. They fill up buckets and bottles of water, venturing outside to fill up from the toilets, only accessible along the side of the building. They nearly lose their lives doing so. Outside the trucks pace and prowl, some leaving and others coming.

Our narrator falls asleep.

He’s awakened by Snodgrass, the salesman, screaming for help from the ditch where he was thrown. Alive and broken. Alone.

I didn’t have to see him. I could imagine it all too well. Snodgrass lying half in and half out of the drainage ditch, back and legs broken, carefully-pressed suit caked with mud, white, gasping face turned up to the indifferent moon…

Snodgrass cries for a long time, but eventually he stops, and the stranded travelers sleep.

At dawn some hope comes.

The trucker notices that one of the big trucks has run out of gas, but the revelation that survival is merely a waiting game is short-lived. One of the mack trucks starts to honk its horn, the sound so loud it rattles the inside of the truck stop, forces our protagonists to cover their ears. The boy recognizes a pattern, morse code, and writes down what the truck is saying.

ATTENTION.

They realize the trucks want them to help, to come out and pump gas since they can’t do it themselves. An argument ensues. A bulldozer sits ready and facing the stop.

“You want to be their slaves? That’s what it’ll come to. You want to spend the rest of your life changin’ oil filters every time one of those … things blasts its horn? Not me.” He looked out the window. “Let them starve.”

Twenty minutes go by, but destruction comes. The bulldozer roars to life, gunning for the little truck stop, and crashing into the front wall just as the people duck behind the counter.

The Cat reversed and got ready for another charge. New nicks in its blade glittered and heliographed in the sun. It lurched forward with a bellowing roar and this time it took down the main support to the left of what had been the window. That section of the roof fell in with a grinding crash. Plaster dust billowed up.

They make molotov cocktails out of oil drums and ketchup bottles, stuffing scraps of shirt into the top to try and thwart the inevitable destruction, and they succeed, but not without losing the boy and the trucker. Finally, cornered and beaten, the narrator gives in, and makes his way to a gas pump. He starts filling, only stopping to grab the nozzle of a tanker there to fill up more gas when it runs out.

I went over, took it, flipped up the feeder plate on the first tank, and attached the hose. The truck began to pump. The stench of petroleum sank into me—the same stink that the dinosaurs must have died smelling as they went down into the tar pits. I filled the other two tanks and went back to work.

His hands blister, and he starts to feel faint, when the counterman comes to take his place.

We end with the girl asleep, the counterman at five hours of filling, and our narrator staring into a life doomed to serve the machines.

We could run, maybe. It would be easy to make the drainage ditch now, the way they’re stacked up. Run through the fields, through the marshy places where trucks would bog down like mastodons and go—

—back to the caves.

Drawing pictures in charcoal. This is the moon god. This is a tree. This is a Mack semi overwhelming a hunter.

But even that thought is beaten back by the reality of trucks built for rough terrain, the bull dozers and pavers that will raze the forests and turn all the world to pavement. He sees lines of blue collar auto workers, giving their lives to survive, not even for the paycheck.

The counterman is staggering a little now. He’s an old bastard too. I’ve got to wake the girl.

Two planes are leaving silver contrails etched across the darkening eastern horizon.

I wish I could believe there are people in them.

What a stellar ending.

I think I can say that this is my favorite of the collection so far. The loss of autonomy to the machine—becoming a victim to your own creation—all of it hits so close to home. I imagine those same planes he watches flying in the sky, and picture the WWII bombers flying over Europe. I wonder how many people looked up, or listened from bomb shelters, and wondered what it was we had done. What our best minds and hands had made.

It makes the words Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita ring in my mind tonight.

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

And now, to you readers. What did you think? Were you surprised a story named “Trucks” could be so powerful? (I was.)

Are you a fan of techno-horror (horror focused on a fear of technology for those who don’t know)? If you are, do you have any recommendations? I have a feeling this sub-genre might be my next fiction obsession…

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. This week we read through Battleground from King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read Trucks for next week’s post!

Today felt like a diversion from the previous week’s darker stories. Battleground is what Toy Story would be if Stephen King wrote for Pixar (it’s about as light as it gets with him). Still, it got me thinking. There’s something about inanimate objects taking on a life of their own. It crops up in horror stories all the time. Something strange about the plastic eyes glistening, turning towards you as you walk out the door, not seeing that they see you.

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When I was very little, probably preschool aged, my aunt gave my cousin and I two little porcelain dolls. Their faces were stark white, lips painted red. They wore floral prints with bonnets to match. Their faces were not beautiful, their eyes too small, their features so slight as to make them almost faceless.

I broke mine, tossed her off the bed to show my cousin how much better my doll was than hers, and when she was gone I didn’t miss her. At night, I had a feeling she was watching me.

Fast forward a year or two. I had been collecting troll dolls, the ones with jewels for belly buttons and pointed, wild hair of every color. Cabbage patch dolls took a close second place in my world of favorite toys. We had just moved to Texas—my mom, dad, stepmom, baby brother and I—when someone in my family got word that the trolls and cabbage patch dolls had to go.

Like dungeons and dragons, my toys too were part of some Satanic assault on children, demonic, and needed to be thrown out immediately. I can still remember obediently walking those toys to the trash.

I had nightmares about the cabbage patch dolls for years. I remember being in fifth grade and seeing a commercial for one. The company must have been working on a comeback of some kind. That night I dreamed one was chasing me through my house, following me up the stairs, tottering on stiff legs.

Which brings me to Battleground

I would imagine a King rendition of Toy Story to be something akin to the nightmare scenario above. A possessed doll, a cursed possession, something from the dark underworld made manifest in the toy soldiers that came to John Renshaw. Instead I got an adult take on Small Soldiers, adult only in that the man who gets attacked by little green army men is an assassin.

He’s a professional whose expertise has made him a good living, good enough that he lives in a penthouse. He returns home after a successful job in Florida, where he has just killed Hans Morris, the founder and owner of Morris Toy Company. We don’t know why. It’s likely he doesn’t either. He gets a job, takes care of business, and takes the money.

A package awaits him.

It was a bomb.

Of course it wasn’t, but one proceeded as if it were. That was why one had remained upright and taking nourishment while so many others had gone to that great unemployment office in the sky.

It’s how he treats all his packages, a precaution he has to take in case someone decides to get revenge. But the package is not a bomb. The packaging is scrawled in handwriting Renshaw recognizes from his latest target’s office, the quick black lettering of Morris’ mother. When he unwraps it, carefully, he finds a G.I. Joe Vietnam footlocker, the contents of which are printed on the side.

20 Infantryman, 10 Helicopters, 2 BAR Men, 2 Bazooka Men, 2 Medics, 4 Jeeps. Below that: a flag decal. Below that, in the corner: Morris Toy Company, Miami Fla.

When he reaches out to touch it, something moves inside. What proceeds is utter chaos, the equivalent of a pulp action movie the kids used to go nuts for. Toy soldiers spill out, green men that look like toys except for their black, glistening eyes. They move in formation, organize an attack.

Renshaw ducks for cover, grabs a gun, fights back against the spray of tiny guns and the grinding cut of miniature helicopter blades. But every defense is met with more firepower.

In the bathroom mirror an Indian was staring back at him with dazed and haunted eyes, a battlecrazed Indian with thin streamers of red paint drawn from holes no bigger than grains of pepper. A ragged flap of skin dangled from one cheek.

I’m losing.

He ran a shaky hand through his hair.

Renshaw finds himself trapped in the bathroom, cut off from a clear path to the front door. The toys demand a surrender, but John has a better idea. He climbs through the sliver of a bathroom window, balancing dangerously until he can drop onto his living room terrace, the makings of a Molotov cocktail tucked in his clothing.

He ambushes the toy men, but they react quickly, just before the Molotov cocktail explodes.

He never knew what hit him.

It was like the thud that a steel safe would make when dropped from a respectable height. Only this thud ran through the entire high-rise apartment building, thrumming in its steel frame like a tuning fork.

A couple walking below the apartment stops, seeing the white flash and hearing the explosion. A piece of Renshaw’s bloody shirt floats to the street. The couple grabs a cab, eager to get away from what they think must be something police-worthy. A tiny scrap of paper floats to the ground behind them.

Hey kids! Special in this Vietnam Footlocker!

(For a Limited Time Only)

1 Rocket Launcher

20 Surface-to-Air “Twister” Missiles

1 Scale-to-Model Thermonuclear Weapon

Renshaw thought he had an easy target.

The toy maker from Miami. He specializes in making play things. John Renshaw knows about death and survival. But it turns out they’re all wrapped up in one another. The boys that play with army men can grow up and make bombs. Not so far apart after all.

There was something about the ending of Battleground—the paper floating to the ground, the silly message explaining the bomb—that reminded me of one of Ray Bradbury’s stories from The Illustrated Man, “Kaleidoscope.” An astronaut falls to the earth after an explosion throws the crew from the ship.

“When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor. “I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?” The small boy on a country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!” The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. “Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”

—Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

What say you dear reader? Do you see the similarity?

Did you like Battleground? I enjoyed the action, but it will easily be forgotten.

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s first ever book club. Right now, we’re reading through all things Stephen King, working our way through his first short story collection, Night Shift. Today’s post covers Gray Matter, but if you want to join in, grab a copy and read Battleground for next week!

Today we hit a lot of tough topics: alcoholism, isolation, depression. But if you read the story, you know on its surface it’s about a blob monster, one of those old time conjurings that doesn’t make an appearance in the modern fear centers of our brain (at least not mine). Chalk it up to a follow-on to the nuclear fears that permeated the 1950’s up, or a knowledge that the chemicals we were making could have unintended consequences. King’s story takes a slightly different approach.

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Our story begins at a bar one night in Bangor, Maine. A snowstorm has essentially shut the town down, and the regulars gather at a local bar, the Nite-Owl, known mostly for serving college kids beer and wine. The quiet night is broken up when a young kid comes running in scared out of his mind.

The men recognize him as Richie Grenadine’s son, a local man who was injured at the saw mill he worked at, and was awarded a lifetime of worker’s compensation as a result. He was always a drinker, but after losing his job, Richie became a recluse, only leaving to buy the beer he drinks every night. And lately, even that’s stopped.

Anyway, he got awful fat. He hadn’t been in lately, although once in a while I’d seen his boy come in for Richie’s nightly case. Nice enough boy. Henry sold him the beer, for he knew it was only the boy doing as his father said

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Henry, the owner of the bar, takes the boy in to the back to let him talk. The men drink and listen as Henry tries to soothe the boy, and the boy cries in the back. When they come back out, Henry tells the men that the boy is headed upstairs to eat something, and he thinks they should bring Richie’s case to him. The men box up some beer and head out into the cold night.

Billy spoke up, fairly busting: “What’s up? Has Richie been workin’ the kid over?”

“No,” Henry said. “I’d just as soon not say anything just yet. It’d sound crazy. I will show you somethin’ though. The money Timmy had to pay for the beer with.”

He pulls the bills out of his pocket by the corner, each one covered with a gray slime. The men have to walk. Richie lives on a road that will be too slick to drive on in the storm. As they make their way, Henry tells the men the story that Timmy sobbed to him in the back, his gun tucked close in his coat pocket.

It all started with a bad beer.

Timmy is ready for bed one night after finishing his homework when he hears his dad complain about his beer.

“Christ Jesus, that ain’t right.”

And Timmy says, “What’s that, Pop?”

“That beer,” Richie says. “God, that’s the worst taste I ever had in my mouth.”

Most people would wonder why in the name of God he drank it if it tasted so bad, but then, most people have never seen Richie Grenadine go to his beer.

Richie Grenadine is the town drunk. He can outdrink anyone and drink it faster, and that, the men conclude, is the reason he pounded the awful beer. When Timmy smelled the can, it smelled like something dead, and there were gray dribbles around the top.

Over the next few days, Richie becomes light sensitive, refusing to allow Timmy a lamp to do his homework, even in his own room. He doesn’t eat anymore, only drinks warm beer. He stops watching the TV, just sits in the corner of the dark living room in silence and leaves money for his son to buy him cases of beer each night.

One day, after Timmy gets home from school he turns on a light over the sink, and sees his dad wrapped up in a blanket.

“Look,” Richie says, and one hand creeps out from under the blanket. Only it ain’t a hand at all. Something gray, is all the kid could tell Henry. Didn’t look like a hand at all. Just a gray lump.

In fear, Timmy tells his dad he’s going to call the doctor, but Richie begins to tremble, threatening that if he calls anyone, he’ll touch him, and Timmy will turn out just like him. Richie pulls the blanket away from his face, and Timmy sees that his dad is covered in a kind of gray jelly, his features fading, all mashed together.

“Like he was a fungus,” I said.

“Yes,” Henry said. “Sorta like that.”

“You keep that pistol handy,” Bertie said.

Just as the men reach Richie’s flat, Henry tells them what sent the kid running into the bar that night. School got out early when the storm came in, so Timmy headed straight home. He realized as he snuc to the door that he didn’t know what his dad did all day. He hadn’t seen him move from that chair in weeks, not to sleep or go to the bathroom. He peeked through a hole in the door, and saw a gray blob, nothing like a man, slithering on the floor. He watched as the thing reached a snake arm out and pried a board off of the wall. Inside was a dead cat, swollen stiff, covered in maggots.

“And then his dad ate it.”

I tried to swallow and something tasted greasy in my throat.

“That’s when Timmy closed the peephole.” Henry finished softly. “And ran.”

The men reach the third floor where Richie lives. They can smell something putrid emanating from the apartment. On the floor beneath their feet are slimy gray puddles. Henry raises his gun and knocks on the door, telling Richie they brought beer for him. Richie tells them to remove the ring tabs and push the case through. He can’t do it on his own anymore.

“In a minute,” Henry said. “What kind of shape you in, Richie?”

“Never mind that,” the voice said, and it was horribly eager. “Just push in the beer and go!”

“It ain’t just dead cats anymore, is it?” Henry said, and he sounded sad.

In the last few weeks, three people have gone missing, all of them after dark. Two young girls, and a Salvation Army regular, gone without a trace. Richie threatens to come out and get the beer, and Henry readies his gun. The door bulges, slamming open, and Henry opens fire as the two men run, but not before they see the gelatinous blob that has consumed Richie. Down the center, they see a line, and realize the creature is dividing. They run back to the bar and wait to see who will come knocking on the door, Henry or the monster.

The monsters without form.

What does it mean that these creatures, amorphous, formless things that lacked any notable feature or identity, became so popular in horror movies and stories during the 1950’s? The Blob first hit screens in 1958, and it was a hit, especially among teenagers. Monsters always tell us something about the society they emerge from, so this story led me to the question: why a blob?

But on thinking, it makes a lot of sense. A monster that can’t quite be understood, that consumes and overtakes without ever having a face. A force more than a creature. The vampire has his wooden stakes, the werewolf his silver bullets, but a blob? An amorphous mutagen?

What humans feared then, and still fear, though the shape has changed, is technology. There was a general unease with the speed with which humanity was developing. Technology creating weapons of mass destruction, chemicals being manipulated in labs to kill bugs, weeds, people. The blob represented an unstoppable force, something that we couldn’t see or understand, but was certainly on the horizon if guardrails weren’t put in place.

Gray Matter takes that lofty fear, and brings it from the macro to the micro: Richie’s home.

King’s story doesn’t focus on societal breakdown due to nuclear fallout, or an alien monster that takes over the world. He zooms in to one lonely kid who takes care of his disabled, alcoholic father. Timmy is left to fend for himself even before his dad turns into a gelatinous carnivore. He does his homework, puts himself to bed, takes himself to school.

The men in the bar feel sorry for him, and the owner Henry, obviously knows the kid’s life isn’t great. He’s in there nearly every night to buy beer for his dad. What happens to a man who has no purpose anymore? Richie sits in front of the TV and drinks, barely going out except for his cases of beer, seeing less and less of his old bar mates. Friendless, wifeless, and confined mostly to his apartment, he turns into something else, all because of a bad beer. His addiction takes him down. Turns him into a monster who ends up killing people to feed.

It’s a monster that countless children have had to live with. The drunk, depressed father. The addiction is one that countless people have struggled with. The amorphous monster that we can’t quite put our finger on. It’s form, deceiving in the dark, but a clear and present danger.

And now to you dear reader.

What did you make of the story? Very short, a little quick, but punchy and with a good ending in my opinion.

What do you make of the blob monsters from the 50’s? Do they scare you? Too cheesy? Fears from another time? Or is there some deep human fear involving slime that I’m just lacking…

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If you’re new to Kindling, welcome. This is Binge, the section of my newsletter where I give my reading recommendations and ask for yours. Please comment, share what’s moving your week along, making you think, giving you life, helping you check out from the mundane (or check in, whichever you prefer).

Today’s post is a little all over the place. I’m restructuring my daily habits, prioritizing slow things (reading, writing, spending time with my family) and ditching some of the grinding productivity I’ve become addicted to. And something magical is happening.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about some of my more tortured feelings around writing, and I announced some changes I had started to make involving later nights dedicated to writing, a fountain pen, tea, and making time to stare out the window. All in all it’s going well. I’m feeling less edgy, less aggressive about my need to write. The time is there now, carved out on the schedule, reserved for when my family is fast asleep.

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Doing that made me realize how disjointed I’ve been for years now. Obsessing over “making it,” a notion that has changed as time passed and I hit goals like finishing school and getting back to the mountains after living in the Midwest for over a decade. I used to think that nervous compulsion to keep moving forward no matter how my body or mind felt was what helped me across the finish line. Now I’m starting to think I achieved in spite of myself.

I’ve never been a morning person.

Yet I’ve worked as a baker and a barista on the early shift, and an opener at countless jobs. I’ve become an expert at the rush job. Jump out of bed, literally run around getting ready, catapult myself into the car, and crank the air conditioning on the way to work. Sweating. I have gotten better over time.

For example, this year I convinced myself that rather than doing my makeup in the work parking lot, I could just spend the thirty seconds it takes to throw on mascara in my own bathroom, at home, before work. I started drinking a cup of coffee at the counter instead of chugging it in the car. Big things for me.

Then a few weeks ago, I thought about how nice weekend mornings are, because I start them slowly. I stay in bed while I drink my coffee and read. And then I thought about how I could do that every morning really. It might not be for long, maybe twenty minutes, but what a life right?

So I started last week. Instead of my usual pop out of bed, I grabbed my cup of coffee and the book from my nightstand, and I read while my dogs watched pretending to sleep, waiting for any cue that the time for a morning walk had come. One morning I woke up late and only had ten minutes, but I read anyway. It was ten minutes of bliss.

I realized something. I’ve been giving time to news and reddit scrolling and social media first thing for years. Why have I been wasting time waiting for the weekend to read? There is some illusion in my life, a strange haze that has had me convinced that I need hours to find peace, days to enjoy a book. It’s a silly way to live when all I have is now. Each moment precious, every one an opportunity to connect.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve been trading mine in for some pointless, frantic rush to get somewhere.

I’ve been missing out on ten minutes here and there to indulge in a poem or listen to music. I’ve been absorbing information instead of giving space to think my own thoughts, to listen to the world around me, to open a book.

Last night, after only a week (or two?) of my new tiny habits, something happened. I was going to watch a show or scroll mindlessly before bed, something I do nearly every night. I sat on the couch, remote in hand, but the thought of turning on the TV in the gorgeous silence of my sleeping house seemed wrong somehow. Sacrilege.

I remembered a book that I wanted to read before Halloween, The Quiet Tenant by Clèmence Michallon. So I got it on Kindle, laid down in bed next to my sleeping husband, and I started to read. It doesn’t sound like much, but pulling myself away from the screens and back to what I actually like to do has been hard. I don’t know why. I think it comes down to addiction.

Once upon the 1950’s, the television took over the family home. Dinner was moved to TV trays, and shows replaced conversation. I adore story in all its formats, the boob tube is no exception. Now the Internet is here, and so are the dark forecasts by the sociologists. An epidemic of loneliness, disconnection, radicalization, depression. We all know there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. This is the world we live in.

But if you find yourself saying that you wish your week was more like your weekend, or you wish you had time to read, it’s worth finding space for those happy little moments everyday. Ten minutes here. Thirty minutes there. Before you know it, you’re moving backwards in time, curled up with a book smuggled under the sheets long after you were supposed to be asleep.

You can keep reading when you wake up, even if it’s for fifteen minutes before you have to put on clothes and head to an office. You can pretend it’s fifth grade summer and the world is relatively uncomplicated. You can get lost in something that isn’t outrage or doom for a little while. You can learn to read again, fall in love again, remember who you were when you were a kid before the world got in and made you so worried about everything else. You can leave the dishes for one night and just indulge in another world for a while. If you ever needed permission, here you go. You can.

P.S. I’m loving The Quiet Tenant. It’s a story about a serial killer, told from the perspective of those closest to him: his daughter, his girlfriend, and the victim he spared. I’m only a quarter of the way through, but I highly recommend it on prose alone.

What about all of you? Do you have any of your own stories for slowing down life (as much as you’re able)? How is the information age treating you?

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If you would like to join in, grab a copy and read Gray Matter!

I’ve included some audio with extra commentary from yours truly. Give it a lesson if that’s your thing and let me know your own thoughts on this story in the comments below!

Without further ado, let’s head to Dr. Harper’s office, where a new patient, Lester Billings, is telling his story.

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Lester Billings has something to get off his chest.

“I can’t go to a priest because I’m not Catholic. I can’t go to a lawyer because I haven’t done anything to consult a lawyer about. All I did was kill my kids. One at a time. Killed them all.”

Dr. Harper turned on the tape recorder.

Lester Billings was a young father. He married after his girlfriend Rita got pregnant and dropped out of college to take care of her and his new young son Denny. A year after, he had a daughter named Shirl, and that was when the trouble started.

Denny starts having trouble sleeping, crying in the night, refusing to get in his crib. He’s afraid. Initially, the young parents assume it’s because he doesn’t have his bottle anymore, then that he may need a nightlight, but both things are refused the boy for fear of spoiling little Denny.

“But that’s the way kids start off bad. You get permissive with them, spoil them. Then they break your heart. Get some girl knocked up you know, or start shooting dope. Or they get to be sissies. Can you imagine waking up some morning and finding your kid—your son—is a sissy?”

Lester has no patience for Denny’s fears. He has an infant daughter waking him at all hours of the night, and a job he hates loading Pepsi-Cola trucks. He’s tired, distracted. One night, after Denny points to the closet at bedtime and says, “Boogeyman,” Lester wakes up to his screaming. He wants Rita to deal with it, and when she goes in, she finds her son dead. The only thing out of place is a cracked closet door, open despite Lester’s insistence that he shut it before turning out the light.

The authorities rule it crib death, even though the boy was three years old. Lester and Rita quickly move his little sister into her older brother’s room. Lester insists they have to move on with their lives, refusing to give into Rita’s misgivings about moving Shirl into the same room where her brother died.

“So a year goes by. And one night when I’m putting Shirl into her crib she starts to yowl and scream and cry. ‘Boogeyman, Daddy, boogeyman, boogeyman!”

That scares Lester a bit, and he wants to take Shirl into his room. But he doesn’t. A combination of pride—he doesn’t want to admit to his wife that he was wrong about moving her—and the feeling that his job is to toughen his wife up after the loss of their son, makes him act against his better judgment. A month later, Shirl dies too. Her death, due to convulsions according to the doctors. But Lester knows better now.

When Rita returns home after being sedated to help with her grief, Lester again tries to move their lives forward, insisting it is time for them to enjoy one another.

“I knew she’d get over it. When they’re that little, you don’t get so attached to them. After a while you have to go to the bureau drawer and look at a picture to even remember exactly what they looked like.”

A pause here.

Lester Billings, a man who says he loved his children, but never showed an ounce of compassion until they were dead. A father too young and unprepared, stressed by his job and responsibilities, fails to see that his children need him until it is too late.

Throughout the story, we get the sense that he has no respect for Rita. From his constant belittling of her feelings, wishes, and grief, to his comments on her willingness to go to bed with him before they were married. His own mother refused to visit, and never saw her grandchildren because Rita got pregnant out of wedlock. She called her a corner-walker, a prostitute, a word that Lester doesn’t seem too bothered by in reference to his own wife.

His backstory leaves some clues as to why he is the way he is. His mother was overprotective, making him afraid of everything. His reaction is to neglect rather than overparent. We have hints that her influence is what makes him view his wife and children in the dark way he does.

Rita wants another baby.

And despite Lester’s hesitation and an IUD, she ends up pregnant, and has Andy the year after Shirl died. Initially, Lester is upset, but the baby looks like him, more than his other children did.

“Then one night, here I am coming out of a drugstore with a mobile to hang over the kid’s crib. Me! Kids don’t appreciate presents until they’re old enough to say thank you, that was always my motto. But there I was, buying him silly crap and all at once I realize I love him the most of all.”

They move to a new house when Andy turns one. Everything goes by fine the next year. Lester has a good job. They like the new neighborhood. Then something starts to change. First he feels strange in the house, leaving his boots outside the closet to avoid having to open the door. He hears squishy noises and slithering, and becomes convinced the monster has found them.

He becomes irritable, snapping at Rita. He is afraid when he goes to work, but even more afraid when he’s at home.

Rita leaves town after her mom gets hurt in a car crash, leaving Lester to care for Andy on his own. He hires help during the day, and at night he sleeps with Andy in bed, haunted by the the Boogeyman each night. With Rita gone, the monster openly moves through the house, leaving trails of mud, opening doors, laughing in the darkness.

So he moves his son into a different room. He knows the monster will go for Andy. The first night that the boy is in a different room, Lester awakens to screams. “Daddy…boogeyman…wanna go wif Daddy.” But Lester does not take his son. He leaves him there, and an hour later the Boogeyman kills him.

Terrified, Lester flees the house, heading to an all night diner, gulping coffee until morning comes. He calls the police who rule it an accident. The boy must have fallen out of his crib. The closet door is open just a crack.

Lester gets his.

Dr. Harper tells Lester to make a few followup appointments with the nurse outside to help him deal with his feelings of guilt, but when Lester heads to her desk, he finds the place empty. When he goes back in, Dr. Harper is nowhere to be seen, and the closet door is cracked a smidge.

Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself.

“So nice,” the boogeyman said as it shambled out.

It still held its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand.

Unpacking the story.

There’s a lot going on here, at least in my mind. We have a father who seems like he doesn’t want to be a father. His own fears, planted by an overprotective mother during childhood, overtake him. He puts his own safety above his children’s, something that is the antithesis of parenthood and the typical, protective role a father plays.

One of the most telling scenes is when he returns to an empty house after Shirl dies, and has to sleep with a light on because of his fear, the very thing he denied little Denny when Rita asked for a nightlight. He seems to represent a certain kind of abuser. The narcissistic parent who can’t see their child’s needs, or is upset by them, but insists that they be taken care of. Their own emotions trump every other person’s needs.

Even though this is, in some ways, a cheesy horror story, there is a more horrific undertone that I caught. The reality of abusive fathers, neglectful parents, who refuse to see their children’s needs and attend to them. Always opting for the cruelest choice in the endless pursuit to teach children the ever important lessons of the narcissist: you are alone, no one will take care of you, your feelings are irrelevant, your sense of safety doesn’t matter.

I watched the movie and one line from the film stood out.

“It’s that thing that comes for your kids when you’re not paying attention.”

I expected a certain type of story because of this quote. Distracted parents who don’t believe their kids when they cry monster in the night. But King’s story is much darker in my opinion. It’s not just the Boogeyman the kids have to be afraid of. It’s their own father.

What did you all make of this story? This was the first Night Shift story that felt like King to me. The dialogue, the incredibly screwed up main character (I can’t exactly call him the protagonist), the dual physical and supernatural evil forces at play.

Did you hate Lester Billings? I really did and was honestly relieved the Boogeyman got him in the end. Between abandoning his son and his clear detachment and even hatred of his own family, I thought he got what was coming.

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, Kindling’s first book club, where we are working our way through all things Stephen King. Currently, we are reading through Night Shift, King’s first short story collection. This week we read The Mangler, but if you’re interested in joining in, grab a copy and read The Boogeyman for next week. Know someone who might like this dark fiction stuff?

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Are you afraid of machines? I ask because I am. I don’t know if it was over-zealous warnings during childhood (Don’t touch that! It’ll rip your fingers right off!) or a natural overflow of my cautious nature, but anything that looks even remotely like the image above freaks me out.

I don’t like to deal with putting coolant in my car because, if the engine is too hot, it can burn you. When I make bread or baked goods, I have to be ever so careful not to have my hands too close to the mixing attachment when I turn it on. I can imagine my fingers getting caught and twisted up until the motor jams or my hand breaks. Never mind saws and power tools.

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So when I read The Mangler, I felt a kinship with the fear invoked. I see danger in all machines, and sometimes hate how I have to use them for everything. There is something about their indifference to humanity, the reality that my mixer would churn and turn, breaking my bones with absolute stoicism, unmoved. Machines are this extension of ourselves, but without empathy or feeling or intelligence. They keep folding, flattening, smashing, cutting, without regard for what falls under their grip.

But what if a machine grew hungry? Possessed by some ancient evil with feelings alright, but malevolent ones that make it want to pursue and consume you? What if that great unstoppable machine became a predator? And not just an animalistic predator, but an ancient evil monster looking to inflict harm?

Welcome to King’s short story, The Mangler.

Here we have what I see as a blending of two worlds, the old and the new. People used to fear demons, old and powerful beings who hated humans and God, and could possess your body, ruin your life, hurt those you love. The takeaway from those stories? Don’t mess with what you don’t know. Don’t get too curious. Mysteries are mysteries for a reason. Try not to think (or talk about) such things. Stay in line, or else.

And then we have the machine, arguably the result of man’s endless curiosity and questioning. How can I make this better? Could we do this faster? But with all progress comes some new horror, and technology is often the feature in modern horror stories. From Frankenstein to Godzilla, we’re all afraid of what we’ve created, especially when the off button doesn’t work, and the created takes on a life of its own.

On the left wall there were three heavy gray boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry’s electricity. Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself with a huge dying whine.

And still the mangler turned.

Officer Hunton shows up at an industrial laundry to investigate a grisly scene.

He is a seasoned officer, often called to the scene of an accident or crime, but from the start there’s something different about this one. When he walks into the Blue Ribbon Laundry, the workers are huddled in the office, some crying, some quietly milling about. A woman, Adelle Frawley, has just been crushed in a large industrial ironer and folder, coined the mangler by the people that work there, her remains too gruesome to draw the typical curiosity that accidents tend to bring in.

Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through home-welded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. They they can’t look. They can’t—

Hunton saw it.

The assumption is that the laundry had been cutting corners, leaving people to work in dangerous conditions that were bound to result in loss of life or limb. The inspector comes out, and the mangler passes with flying colors. No corner cutting here, so the woman’s cause of death is due to “misadventure,” and the laundry is not found liable.

Disbelieving, Hunton corners an inspector named Roger Martin to see what he thinks. But the inspector seems as dumbfounded as Hunton. The safety bar was intact. The inspectors can’t see how she could have been pulled into the machine unless she had fallen into it from above. Both feet were planted firmly on the ground.

“…I didn’t like that machine. It seemed … almost to be mocking us. I’ve inspected over a dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I wouldn’t leave a dog unleashed around them—the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one…it’s a spook.”

Martin puts Hunton’s unease into words for the first time. There was something not right about the machine altogether, something that gave him a bad feeling from the start. And Martin senses it too.

The ice box, a slight detour folks.

Martin goes on to tell a story about another incident. A man had parked an ice box in his backyard, only to have a woman’s dog get caught in it and suffocate. Police told the man he would have to get rid of it, take it to the town dump. He listened, and that very afternoon a woman called to report her son missing. The kid turned up at the dump, inside the ice box. Two deaths from the same appliance.

“The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No. 58 on the maintenance of public dumping places.” Martin looked at him expressionlessly. “He found six dead birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin. And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing them out. Gave him a hell of a jump.”

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve read about mishaps in ice boxes abandoned at the town dump from King. In It, one of the sideline antagonists, Patrick Hockstetter, uses them to play out his sadistic urges. In The Stand, a woman gets stuck in a walk-in freezer, a fear anyone who has worked in a restaurant has gotten acquainted with. It’s obviously something that played at King’s psyche, and there’s good reason for that.

He was born in 1947, meaning he would have been around 9 years old when The Refrigerator Safety Act of 1956 was passed in America, mandating that fridges be able to open from the inside to prevent the deaths of young children. He would have, no doubt, been warned dozens of times not to play in them, to never go inside one, and the fear lingered and popped up throughout his writing.

We have a sense now that the mangler is alive.

But this story doesn’t stop there. As more accidents happen—Mrs. Gillian is burnt by a sudden steam explosion, George Stanner loses his arm to the shoulder—Hunton and his friend, a college professor named Mark Jackson, start to put the pieces together. The mangler was just fine until a young woman named Sherry Ouelette, young and just out of high school, cut her finger and bled into the machine.

“It wasn’t until after that the bolts started falling off. Adelle was…you know…about a week later. As if the machine had tasted blood and found it liked it. Don’t women get funny ideas sometimes Officer Hinton?”

Jackson has got it into his head that the mangler is not just alive, or haunted, but possessed. He pours over texts on object possession, finding a few “common denominators” that feature across culture and belief: the blood of a virgin, graveyard dirt, the eye of a toad, and the hand of glory, sometimes interpreted as belladonna.

In a ridiculous turn of events, Jackson and Hunton head to Sherry Ouelette’s house to ask her the pressing question…

“Are you a virgin?”

Tale as old as slasher film—the horrorites will understand me here. As it turns out she is, which means of course, the mangler is possessed, and the only way to stop this thing from eating the entirety of the laundry staff and escaping into the world, is to cast the demon out. Jackson reads some books, and determines that all it’ll take is some holy water and “a smidgeon of the Holy Eucharist.”

That should do the trick so long as the demon wasn’t conjured using the hand of glory. But dear readers, we find out that Adelle Fawley, the first victim to the mangler, took an indigestion tablet made with none other than a chemical derivative of belladonna, known in Europe as the hand of glory. Poor thing had dropped some in by accident in the weeks leading up to her death.

There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry—a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.

It was a noise almost like a chuckle.

The mangler began to run with a sudden, lurching grind—belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on.

It was ready for them.

We’ve got virgin blood, we’ve got bats, and the dreaded hand of glory. As you can imagine, the exorcism doesn’t go well.

The mangler is loosed from the concrete that held it, and the demonic machine makes its way into the streets to eat up the town. Some old timey, cheesy, monster movie magic for you. On a scale from snoozefest to blood-curdling scream? I give it a solid chuckle. The scariest thing about this story is the machine itself, the idea that we can be caught and consumed by something that can’t be stopped. As soon as the demons came into play, I was over it.

As usual I turn to you dear readers.

Which is scarier, the demonic possession, or the inanimate appliance that won’t turn off?

Do you have any particular fears around machines or technology? Where did it come from?

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, the section of Kindling where we talk Stephen King. Currently we’re reading through Night Shift, King’s first short story collection. If you’re interested, grab a copy and join us for The Mangler next week.

Today we talk about I Am the Doorway, a science fiction piece that was published in Cavalier magazine in 1971. This was a strange one, so strange in fact that I wrote a little bit about parasites. I didn’t get gross, but fair warning for those who don’t want to know that your cute little cat can give you life altering brain cooties.

I hope you enjoy.

Becoming the doorway.

Around six years ago, I was listening to an interview on NPR in my car. The man speaking had traveled to the Amazon and come back with a rare parasite Western doctors had never encountered. I can’t recall what it was now, only that it made me grateful not to live in the jungle. 

I grew up in the foothills, raised in high desert where you might see ten spiders a year, an ant hill on a hike, a few flies and bees in the middle of summer. But that about does it. In the dark humid places of jungle forests, life thrives. All of it. 

When I think of a parasite, I think of a worm, but they can be more than that. They can do more. They might burrow in your skin and lay eggs, but some can highjack your mind. Have you ever heard that pregnant women aren’t supposed to clean cat litter? I have too. I gladly gave that duty up to my husband when I was pregnant myself, but I never really understood why.

It turns out that there is a parasite common in cats, called Toxoplasmosis. This parasite famously thrives in cat bodies, where it does very little harm and can proliferate without consequence. So how does it get into the cat, you ask?

Let me tell you one way. It enters through mice, invading their neurons, high-jacking their sense of danger and making them fearless risk takers. Rodents infected with toxo are more likely to roam into an open field, or try novel foods. Not only that, but this little parasite makes them attracted to cat pee, which means that mice are more likely to go where cats are. Which…means they get eaten. At which point the parasite is free to procreate and live happily ever after in a cat body.1

You and I can get this too. And we are prone to some of the same behaviors if we do. Risk taking, driving motorcycles, and playing soccer (football to everyone but my fellow Americans) are some of the common behaviors highly correlated with having this parasite. It changes the way you think.

The first time I heard that, and in the times when I’ve since learned of prion diseases that reside in the brains of animals that we humans like to eat—like cows and deer—I’ve had a heightened awareness and fear at what is possible if we become the doorway.

King does sci-fi

Sure, it’s a kind of cosmic horror version of science fiction, but I Am the Doorway is about space travel. When we meet the main character, Arthur, he is disabled, his hands bandaged and itching. A man named Richard sits with him on his porch, asking if he is sure he killed the boy.

“I didn’t dream it. And I didn’t kill him, either—I told you that. They did. I am the doorway.”

Our narrator was a former astronaut, part of a NASA mission to explore deep space, looking for minerals and life on other planets. Arthur went to Venus, a last ditch effort after the moon and Mars turned up nothing but sparse landscape and worthless rock. Man had gone out into his little corner of the universe, and found it empty.

Venus was no different. Arthur and his colleague Cory orbited the yellow planet, sending probes down to the surface that saw nothing but desolate canyons, wind blown and empty.

It was like circling a haunted house in the middle of deep space. I know how unscientific that sounds, but I was scared gutless until we got out of there. I think if our rockets hadn’t gone off, I would have cut my throat on the way down. It’s not like the moon. The moon is desolate but somehow antiseptic. That world we saw was unlike anything that anyone has ever seen. Maybe it’s a good thing that cloud cover is there. It was like a skull that’s been picked clean…

On returning to Earth, Cory is killed and Arthur is crippled when their parachute fails. He earns a Medal of Honor and tries to pick up the pieces of his life. Until his hands start itching. At first he thinks it’s poison ivy, but by nightfall it becomes clear that he has an infection. Little red dots appear on his fingertips, perfect circles, red and soft.

What emerges is no ordinary infection, but an alien mutagen. Tiny eyes and eyelids form on his fingertips and hands, yellow and watching. Not only do they see through his hands, but he is able to see as they do. Earth and the human world around them is as terrifying and alien as Venus was to Arthur.

I raised my hands slowly to my face, catching an eerie vision of my living room turned into a horror house.

I screamed.

There were eyes peering up at me through splits in the flesh of my fingers. And even as I watched the flesh was dilating, retreating, as they pushed their mindless way up to the surface.

But that was not what made me scream. I had looked into my own face and seen a monster.

We fear what we don’t know.

Why would aliens be any different? What exists as a perfectly normal experience for Arthur—reading a book in his living room—is a totally other-worldly and terrifying experience for the creatures that see through his hands. But soon Arthur not only sees as they see. He can feel what they feel.

And little by little I felt them. Them. An anonymous intelligence. I never really wondered what they looked like or where they had come from. It was moot. I was their doorway, and their window on the world. I got enough feedback from them to feel their revulsion and horror, to know that our world was very different form theirs.

The aliens slowly take over his body and mind, manipulating him, even using his physically broken form to do their bidding. When he waves an unbandaged hand absentmindedly to a boy who often passes his house, the eyes watch silently.

I felt my mind side-slip. A moment later my control was gone. The door was open.

Arthur watches helplessly as the alien life form kills the boy, waving his arms about until the boy’s head bursts. In their eyes, they had killed a monster.

Richard’s End.

Richard, the man Arthur has been telling his story to, has been asking to see his hands. Arthur repeatedly tells him no, not unless he has to. After searching in vain for the boy’s body in the sandy dunes where the creatures buried him, Arthur finally begins to unwrap the bandages, warning Richard to run if he tries to hurt him.

The last of the bandages fell away.

I looked at Richard and they looked at Richard. I saw a face I had known for five years and come to love. They saw a distorted, living monolith.

Richard tries to run, but it is too late. The aliens kill him in fear, seeing a monster where Arthur sees a friend. And then the world goes black. Arthur comes to sitting on his porch, the eyes in his hand glazed over, tired from their work. In a desperate attempt to close the doorway, Arthur makes a fire, douses his hands in kerosene, and burns them off.

But fire can’t cure him. The story ends seven years later, where we learn that in spite of the hooks he wears for hands, Arthur is still a doorway.

I get along just fine with these hooks…I shave with them and even tie my own shoelaces. As you can see, my typing is nice and even. I don’t expect to have any trouble putting the shotgun into my mouth and pulling the trigger. It started again three weeks ago, you see.

There is a perfect circle of twelve golden eyes on my chest.

As with all good fiction, there is truth in this tale.

After all, what is a parasite if not an alien life form, invading our bodies without permission, using our cells for its own life? Doesn’t cancer feel the same? What about a virus? Or psychosis? I often think of these material, parallel lines—a body taken over by an unseen force—when I read possession stories.

There is a real fear in losing control of ourselves to another being, another consciousness. Of experiencing our world contrary to reality. Opening a door that can never be shut. Becoming a doorway.

And now to you.

This is the second week where we have covered an utterly depressing King tale. What did you think? Do you like Nihilist King?

I have to say, I’m not sure I like King as a science fiction writer. Maybe it’s because I have a certain expectation when I read his stories, but it seems like whenever he touches sci-fi, his endings are totally devoid of the hope I find in his other works. Is it just me?

Last but not least, I loved the gooey descriptions of the yellow eyes. My fingers feel itchy just thinking about that strange, soft flesh where the eyes emerge. Was it effective? Were you disgusted?

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club, the section of Kindling where we read stories and discuss them. Currently we are reading through his first short story collection, Night Shift. Next week we read I Am the Doorway. As always please feel free to chime in, comment, meet other readers. Happy Reading!

After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach.

I was lying on a blanket in a park when I opened my copy of Night Shift and read this line. I was tired, watching my kids play, a little out of body and un-showered on a Saturday. The sun was shining, poking holes in the trees that will soon shed their green leaves. I remember it a week later, can play it in my mind like a recording.

Maybe I would have remembered that moment anyway. Perhaps it was the light, or the time of day. But I don’t think so. The moment I read that first line is emblazoned there, in memory. Words can do that, freeze a place in time, cut it out and save it for you. Maybe for a year, maybe forever. That’s one of the magical things about reading.

It’s one hell of an opening line. I wonder, now, if by the time I finish this collection, this story will stand out to me most. I thought we had a pack of serial killers on our hands, sociopaths who had murdered a man in cold blood, then went off for a bonfire and a night swim, a group of kids out of the pages of Lord of the Flies. Then I read on.

There were only two radio stations left on the air that we could get.

Meaning something has happened, something big and disastrous.

The Massachusetts station was better, but we could only get it at night. It was a bunch of kids. I guess they took over the transmitting facilities of WRKO or WBZ after everybody left or died.

We follow Bernie and his girlfriend Susie as they make their way down to an empty beach in the night. Bernie remembers when it was filled with people, before A6 came and wiped everyone out. We learn that the man they burned was infected with the virus, Captain Trips. His head and neck were bloated, his mind gone.

But the burning wasn’t done out of necessity, to stop the spread of infection. It was done for novelty, something new to do, egged on by Corey’s superstitious belief that a sacrifice like that might keep them safe from the virus.

It was Corey’s idea to burn him up, but it started off as a joke. He had read all those books about witchcraft and black magic at college, and he kept leering at us in the dark beside Alvin Sackheim’s Lincoln and telling us that if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us against A6.

Each character spends the night haunted in some way by what they’ve done. Susie cries and acts out, desperate for Bernie’s attention. Needles confesses that he has A6, he knows it. Headache, stomachache, painful urination. Corey listens to the radio. And Bernie plays it cool, pretends he doesn’t even think about A6, laughs off Needles’ symptoms even when he shows him the triangular smudges on his jaw, the swelling in his neck.

We smoked and I watched the surf come in and go out. Needles had Captain Trips. That made everything real all over again. It was late August already, and in a couple of weeks the first chill of fall would be creeping in. Time to move inside someplace. Winter. Dead by Christmas, maybe, all of us.

Bernie and Susie head to an empty apartment to sleep. He wakes in early morning, sweating from nightmares about the man they burned. Susie wakes up too, and he tells her about Needles. She’s afraid, grasping for some semblance of security. They all had a virus called A2, before A6 spread throughout the globe. Their theory is that the first variant made them immune. If Needles has it, that means they aren’t safe.

In the first act of kindness from him, he reassures her, tells her that Needles might have lied about his immunity so that he wouldn’t have to be alone. He remembers better days, a few years earlier, when he was in college. He thinks about a day at the beach with Maureen, his college girlfriend, their carefree day spent in the sun, spreading oil on her back, his whole life ahead of him, and he desperately wants to live.

There’s a real sadness in this story. The finality of death in a group of young people, shallow, unprepared for the end despite a plague that has wiped out most of the humans on the planet. They are petty, almost vile in their lack of depth and treatment of one another. And yet, I felt sorry for them. Sorry that they didn’t have more time, more beach days like the one he remembered, more silly fights and failed relationships. More time to learn and grow and love each other.

I put my face in my hands and clutched it, feeling the skin, its grain and texture. It was all narrowing so swiftly, and it was all so mean—there was no dignity in it.

The surf coming in, coming in, coming in. Limitless. Clean and deep.

And now to you dear reader. This was a short one, but it hit me hard. I’ve been thinking about various scenes for days, particularly the burning of Alvin Sackheim. Why did they do it? Had they just given up on life? Become immune to death?

What is with Susie and Bernie’s relationship? Why are they together and why do they treat each other so badly?

Did you like it? I really did, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this story was a precursor to the thoughts that later bloomed into The Stand. What do you think?

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If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. Right now, we are reviewing one story a week from his first short story collection, Night Shift. If you would like to join in, grab a copy and read Night Surf for next week’s post! As always, please comment, engage, and enjoy!

When I graduated high school I got a job at a bagel shop as a baker. That meant early starts, 2 a.m., and days spent rushing bagels and muffins onto baking sheets and into steamy ovens. I loved it, those first couple of hours before the opening supervisor came. I would put on the radio and work, always in the same way, in that serene flow state that comes from repetitive motion.

The place I worked was well run and in a good part of town. The back of house was always clean, and the people who worked there were pleasant. I decided to stick with the same company, and transferred to another location when I moved four months later to Kansas City.

If you’ve been to or lived in the West, you’ll understand my shock when I moved to an older city. In place of new, cookie cutter suburbs were old brick buildings, abandoned industrial plants, old river casinos and highways for days. If you live in New York or Los Angeles or Houston, you’re probably laughing your ass off. Kansas City is small time in the big scheme of things, but to me, it was unknown country.

My new job wasn’t so nice. The people were mostly unhappy. They were older than my last place by ten years at least, with families and small children to support. Like most food service jobs, the pay wasn’t great, and a few people worked side jobs to make ends meet. I got a job cleaning dental offices at night for that very reason.

At some point in my working there, a girl who I got along with fine outside of work, but who was a relentless, micromanaging nitpicker who didn’t work very hard herself and wasn’t that great with people, became my supervisor. You know the type. They always make it to middle management.

(My apologies to all you middle-managers who are actually good at your jobs and great with the humans you work with)

It was awful working for her, having her watch you do something you had done a million times before, and nodding as she picked apart the nuance of placing turkey on a bagel, or spreading cream cheese properly. The girl knew how to criticize, always showed up when you didn’t need her, and seemed busy with managerial duties when you did.

So when King introduced Warwick, Mr. Foreman at the old textile mill that Hall works at, we were fast friends. I know Warwick through and through. I’ve worked for him and with him in the bodies of a dozen other supervisors and co-workers. Over-eager, self-important, joyfully empowered over people who don’t have better jobs for one reason or another and are therefore at your beck and call.

Hall was sitting on the bench by the elevator, the only place on the third floor where a working joe could catch a smoke, when Warwick came up. He wasn’t happy to see Warwick. The foreman wasn’t supposed to show up on three during the graveyard shift; he was supposed to stay down in his office in the basement drinking coffee from the urn that stood on the corner of his desk.

But he won’t stay where he should be, will he? He has to poke, and ask stupid questions like

“What are you up to, Hall?”

And Hall has to tell the truth, that he’s pegging the rats that sit and watch him from rafters and corners, with cans, instead of what he’s paid for.

Working Conditions

The textile mill where Hall works is falling apart. The machines are old, the place is overrun by rats. They sit in plain sight, watching as the men work. But that’s on the main floors of the mill. The basement level is another matter altogether.

When Warwick offers the nightshift workers some extra pay cleaning out the basement, an area no one has touched in years, the men take the job. We all know why. It’s not because they want to. It’s because they need the money.

Every aspect of the work is disgusting, some of it dangerous. High power hoses that can send a man to the hospital, electric wagons—little dump truck contraptions that put off an odor so potent it makes you nauseous, old machinery and bins of fabric, poorly lit by stringed bulbs. There is no electricity in the basement. Once it starts, the work is grueling.

Hall had known it would be bad, but this was murder. For one thing, he hadn’t anticipated the smell. The polluted stink of the river, mixed with the odor of decaying fabric, rotting masonry, vegetable matter.

But nothing, not the darkness or the moss or the smell, can compare to the rats.

…huge ones that made those on third look like dwarfs. God knew what they were eating down here. They were continually overturning boards and bags to reveal huge nests of shredded newspaper, watching with atavistic loathing as the pups fled into the cracks and crannies, their eyes huge and blind with the continuous darkness.

There is a not so thinly veiled correlation between these descriptions and some of the hardest industrial jobs. Mining, grueling factory work, oil rigs—jobs that can take your fingers and give you cancer. That isn’t what Hall faces here, but there’s an allusion to it in these descriptions.

The rats represent the most disgusting parts of those dangerous jobs, especially when they start lashing out. The first man to be bitten is Ray Upson.

“Goddamndest thing I ever saw. Jumped out of a hole in one of those old cloth bags. Must have been big as a cat. Grabbed onto his hand and started chewing.”

As the men make their way further into the bowels of the basement, the rats get worse. More men are bitten, and Warwick does nothing until his hand is forced. The men refuse to work without rubberized gloves. But the problem gets worse.

A huge rat with gray-streaked fur and ugly, glaring eyes had bitten into his shirt and hung there, squeaking and kicking at Carmichael’s belly with its back paws. Carmichael finally knocked it away with his fist, but there was a huge hole in his shirt, and a thin line of blood trickled from above on nipple. The anger faded from his face. He turned away and retched.

The foreman’s response to the men’s disgust and protest at the job? Their refusal to work under such conditions?

“Okay. You and anybody else that wants. But this ain’t no unionized shop, and never has been. Punch out now and you’ll never punch back in. I’ll see to it.”

The working man against his boss. Warwick spends his time in his office behind glass windows, eating cold hamburgers and reading magazines. The men actually doing the hard work, beating rats off their chests and bellies, risking injury and disease, are treated with indifference and disdain. Warwick mocks them, seeming to enjoy their disgust and unease. Tale as old as time.

College Boy

A small detail here, but a noticeable one. Warwick has taken to calling Hall, “college boy,” a nickname we can all infer is meant to be an insult. You were a college boy, and look where you are now. Not better than me. Hell, making minimum wage while I sit in my office. A lot of good it did you.

This culminates when Hall confronts Warwick about working conditions. After a visit to the library, Hall finds out that Warwick has to hire an exterminator to deal with the rats, or risk being shut down.

“Good thing you kept reminding me I was a college boy. I read the town zoning ordinances, Warwick—they were set up in 1911…

Warwick’s eyes were cold. “Take a walk, college boy. You’re fired.”

But Hall isn’t done. He threatens to go to the commissioner with the ordinances and get Warwick fired. And that’s when Warwick gets an idea. They’ve discovered a sub-cellar below the basement, where the rats are no doubt breeding. Warwick wants Hall to do the exterminating, and to that, Hall has another retort—he wants Warwick to come with him, to make sure the management is represented.

The Rat Gods

And after a while the rats came out and sat atop the bags at the back of the long room watching him with their unblinking black eyes. They looked like a jury.

As Hall’s anger at Warwick grows, each offense greater than the last, the story churns towards justice. There has been a foreshadowing all along that Warwick is going to get his, and that we, the readers, are going to enjoy it very much. But something else happens too, something we do not expect.

The vengeance is cut short by what feels like a cosmic evening of the scales. Three men, Hall, Warwick, and the whiny Wisconsky, make their way into the cellar armed with flashlights and a hose, and quickly discover two oddities. The first, a wooden box with the name “Elias Varney 1841” on it. The mill wasn’t built until 1897, meaning the tunnel here is older than the building above it. Hall’s flashlight catches the concrete, outer wall of the mill, the dark tunnel stretching beyond it.

“I’m going back,” Warwick said, suddenly turning around.

Hall grabbed his neck roughly. “You’re not going anywhere foreman.

Hall marches Warwick on, with the hose pointed at his head. Wisconsky bails, seeing his out and taking it. As they step outside the edge of the mill’s outer wall, they find themselves surrounded by staring, unblinking rats. They close in behind them, gnawing at the canvas hose.

Bats roost overhead, and then, the two men see a skull. Then a ribcage. A pelvis. The rats are everywhere, and they’re changing the further underground they go.

Something had happened to the rats back here, some hideous mutation that never could have survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden it. But down here, nature had taken on another ghastly face.

The rats are enormous, some three feet, their rear legs gone and their eyes blind. They drag themselves forward, slither on their bellies, searching. And then, the queen, a large, bloated, blind monstrosity, the mother who birthed all these rats in the tunnels under the mill.

Warwick turned and faced Hall, the smile hanging on by brute willpower. Hall really had to admire him. “We can’t go on, Hall. You must see that.”

“The rats have business with you, I think,” Hall said.

Warwick’s control slipped. “Please,” he said. “Please.”

Hall turns the hose on Warwick, punching him right in the chest with the water and knocking him backwards. The rats attack, tearing Warwick to pieces in the darkness. But Hall is nothing but prey down here himself, and his hose is losing pressure. In the end, he is overtaken by hoards of rats, and succumbs to the same fate as the foreman.

Some Backstory

I’m sensing some obsessions from the young King who wrote Graveyard Shift. Last week, Jerusalem’s Lot brought us booms and bangs, which our protagonist believed were rats in the walls. In this second story, King goes all out and brings us rats, rats, and more rats! They sit watching Hall, a drifter who works at a crumbling textile mill, unfortunate enough to be the subordinate of the unreasonable foreman, Warwick.

The story was inspired after 19-year-old King worked at the local Worumbo Mill. He wanted to volunteer for the dirty time-and-a-half job of cleaning up the basement, but all the slots were taken before they got down to the high school kids. The men who did work came back with tales to tell, and the stories stuck with King.

“The rats down in the basement were big as cats, some of them, goddam if they weren’t big as dogs.”

—Stephen King, On Writing

It wasn’t until King had finished finals and found himself alone with a typewriter in college that Graveyard Shift was written, the seeds for the story sown years before. I’ve found that the same happens to me. A conversation, a brief observation or encounter inspires stories years after. Something sticks and won’t let go.

And now to you dear reader, I ask the big questions:

What was your worst job/boss/or both, and why? Give us some juice here!

Did you feel good when Warwick got his, or did it seem a little extreme?

What does it mean that Hall suffered the same fate? Is there a lesson on anger in there? Something about how the working man never comes out on top? Am I reading too much into what amounts to a gross rat horror story?

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If you’re new here, this is Binge, the section of Kindling where I give you my current reading, watching, listening obsessions, and I ask for yours in return. This week I dive deep into a song I first heard over a year ago, and have been madly in love with ever since. I hope you enjoy!

Earlier this year I discovered the show Mindhunter. It tells the story of the creation of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI. Until its inception, and the project to profile psychopaths and repeat killers began, the term serial killer had not been invented. Little was known about the people who planned and committed such crimes.

As an 80’s baby, I had no knowledge of this. Like any generation, I naively believed that the world as I know it was something that always existed, or at least existed for hundreds of years. I mean, Jack the Ripper anyone? The crimes themselves weren’t new, but the understanding of the people who perpetrated them can be traced back to that unit and its interviews with known serial killers who were in prison for their crimes at the time.

In Season 1, Episode 2, Holden Ford, the young FBI agent determined to profile series killers (as they were being called by the unit), interviews renowned serial killer Ed Kemper. This leads to the effort by the unit to study psychopaths and serial killers by interviewing them, getting an idea of their methods and motives. The episode ends with Holden and his boss Bill Tench carrying their office belongings in an elevator as it makes its way to the lowest level of the building.

Holden stares straight ahead, Bill stands next to him, waiting as the floors tick down, and down again. A song comes on. First a bass line, low and funky. Then, an electric guitar comes in clear and cool, with a rhythmic strumming pattern. And David Byrne, starts singing.

I can’t seem to face up to the facts

I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax

I can’t sleep ‘cause my bed’s on fire

Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire

Those are some strange lyrics. You wonder what they could mean. A man strung out on coke? A performer about to go on stage? We’re all pins and needles when the chorus kicks in.

Psycho killer

Qu’est-ce que c’est?

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, better

Run, run, run, run, run, run away, oh-oh-oh

Whoa! I heard that and thought, what a provocative song. I mean, it’s a little wild to sing about a psychopath, right? Especially when you’re just putting it all out there like that. And as a listener I’m being tricked, aren’t I? I’ve got this great bass line, my toes are tapping, my head is nodding to the beat. I like the song, whether I want to or not. (I’ve experienced similar feelings when I listen to Eminem.)

Surely, I thought, this is some mysterious, poetic sleight of hand. This song can’t be about an actual, flesh and blood psycho killer.

But apparently the 70’s weren’t that complicated. The same time that ramped up the popularity of the horror genre also had a lot of room for the macabre and strange in music. David Byrne in later interviews would say that he was inspired to write the song on the basis of this question: what if Randy Newman, singer of the “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” song from Toy Story, and Alice Cooper, the gothic rock star most famously known for “School’s Out”, wrote a song? “Psycho Killer” emerged from that birth place of his imagination.

The song itself was inspired by Alice Cooper, who at the time had a popular album, Billion Dollar Babies. The album was a horror album, dedicated to the shock rock that Cooper became famous for. The lyrics covered themes like necrophilia and sexual harassment.

David Byrne wanted to explore the dark side of humanity, but from a different vein. He wanted to see things through the eyes of the killer, rather than exploring the acts of horror themselves.

I remember I thought, I wanted to write about this dramatic subject in a non-dramatic way. I wanted to write from inside this person’s head. It was not going to be a slasher movie. It was going to be a little bit calmer than that.

—Hyman, Dan. “When Wet Leg Met Wet Leg Superfan David Byrne.” Vulture. August 12, 2022

This was only the second song written by Talking Heads, and of course it went on to be one of their most popular. I’ve heard it in half a dozen movies and shows, and the effect is undeniable. Think of the illusion here, that we tap our heads and dance to a song written from the mind of the real life monsters we fear most.

Then there’s the french, randomly inserted into the chorus, asking What is this or What is it? That little detail was all Byrne’s idea. He wanted the bridge to be sung in a foreign language, but according to Chris Frantz, the drummer for Talking Heads, that didn’t originally go to plan. Byrne asked a Japanese girl to translate the bridge for him, but after she found out the name of the song, she refused to participate. They turned to bandmate Tina Weymouth, asking her to translate it into French since her mother spoke it at home.1

Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir-là

Ce qu'elle a dit, ce soir-là

Réalisant mon espoir

Je me lance vers la gloire, okay

The translation echoes eerily in my mind.

What I did, that evening

What she said, that evening

Fulfilling my hope

Headlong I go for glory, okay

Absolutely chilling knowing who is thinking those thoughts. The year before the song was released, serial killer Son of Sam pled guilty to eight shootings. Speculation ran that the song was inspired by him. But David Byrne and the band have reiterated in interviews repeatedly that it was a response to Alice Cooper’s horror music, two artists giving their takes on the same subject. Whatever it was, I’m glad I get to hear it.

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If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. This is our first short story. For the next 19 weeks, we’re reading through his first collection, Night Shift. If you want to join in, Graveyard Shift is next!

As always please comment, engage, share with anyone who might enjoy. Happy Reading!

I read this story over two nights after my family had gone to bed. The nights are still hot where I am. The end of summer has brought some surprising heat, but Jerusalem’s Lot transported me to the Maine coast. As always, I am grateful and amazed by the ability the written word has to take us out of our lives, and put us in another’s mind and body for a while. But after finishing my reading, I can say that I am unequivocally thrilled that the world of Jerusalem’s Lot resides in the land of make believe.

I don’t know if there is any town I have despised more. ‘Salem’s Lot revealed her evil slowly, peeling back layers bit by bit. Somehow that made the landing softer. This shorter work was potent, a shock to the system. The evil described felt closer to the skin, made more so by the mention of noises in the night, attributed to rats in the walls. Right now my own house is quiet. Crickets sing outside. For sleep’s sake, let’s pray it stays that way.

My Dear Bones

It was fun to read a King story written through a series of journal entries and letters. His voice was perfectly adapted to a man writing in the 1800’s. Fevers, omens, and chills were all in good supply, which made me wonder: is this Jane Austen or the Master of Horror?

This is something that King excels at, bringing in other mediums of writing in his stories, be it newspapers, interviews, scientific journals, and in this story, personal letters. He seems able to adapt his writing to any format and style, and portray it convincingly. Think of the newspapers Jack Torrance discovers in The Shining or the articles, interviews and court transcripts throughout Carrie.

Fevers, Insanity, Charles Boone

Aristocrat Charles Boone takes up residence in a family home, Chapelwaite, near the ocean. Through various mentions, we learn that he has suffered from a fever at some point in the past, one that drove him to temporary insanity of some kind following his wife’s death.

To me, this is old speak for a nervous breakdown. His health is a constant concern of his manservant Calvin, as revealed in the few journal entries we read alongside Charles’ letters to his good friend, Bones. The man seems to go to his inherited family home seeking refuge and to regain his health fully. Instead, he stumbles upon an evil family secret that leads to his undoing.

The Townspeople

The old mansion is the talk of the nearby town, Preacher’s Corners. Like the Marsten House in ‘Salem’s Lot, Chapelwaite is a “bad house.” Everyone who has lived there has met some evil end. When an elderly house cleaner Mrs. Cloris brings a cleaning crew to the place, Charles notices that the women seem nervous there.

They all seemed a little nervous as they went about their chores; indeed, one flighty miss uttered a small screech when I entered the upstairs parlour as she dusted.

I asked Mrs. Cloris about this…and she turned to me and said with an air of determination: “They don’t like the house, and I don’t like the house, sir, because it has always been a bad house.”

Mrs. Cloris goes on to give the Boone family history, pointing to the crux of bad happenings.

“…and no Boone has ever been happy here since your grandfather Robert and his brother Philip fell out over stolen items in seventeen and eighty-nine.”

Here we have a mystery. An old family feud and the unhappy events that have unfolded in the house ever since. People have disappeared. Charles’ Uncle Randolph hung himself after his daughter Marcella fell down the cellar stairs.

“I have worked here, Mr. Boone, and I am neither blind nor deaf. I’ve heard awful sounds in the walls sir, awful sounds—thumpings and crashings and once a strange wailing that was half-laughter. It made my blood curdle. It’s a dark place, sir.”

A Discovery

The evening after his discussion with Mrs. Cloris, Charles’ manservant, Calvin McCann, comes to him in the living room to tell him that he’s found something, something Charles should see. As they climb the stairs, he explains that he was reading a strange book in the study when he heard a noise behind the wall.

“Rats,” I said. “Is that all?”

“Not rats,” Cal said. “There was a kind of blundering, thudding sound from behind the book-cases, and then a horrible gurgling—horrible, sir. And scratching, as if something were struggling to get out…to get at me!”

The noises moved, leading him to one part of the bookshelf. Charles is shocked, given that Calvin is not a superstitious type, and follows Calving into the study. Next to the book case is a square black hole, once covered by dummy books that, when moved, revealed a hiding place. Inside was a yellowed map of a town. There were seven buildings portrayed, one with a steeple with the words “The Worm That Doth Corrupt” inscribed beneath it.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

Their curiosity piqued, the two men decide to attempt to find the town the following day. They discover an overgrown road and follow it until they hear rushing water. A footbridge leads the way to the abandoned town of Jerusalem’s Lot.

The two men make their way through the worn but otherwise untouched houses and a tavern. The furniture is still as it was. Beds are made in the Boars Head Inn And Tavern. Only there is a rotten smell in all the buildings, so bad that Charles and Calvin have to cover their noses and mouths.

Such a stench as might issue from corrupt coffins or violated tombs.

Both are astounded that none of the windows have been broken, and not a single young person has vandalized the place. The townspeople surrounding are so afraid, no one has entered the town for what looks like decades.

They reach the church last, its steeple like the one depicted on the map. When they open the doors, the smell of death overwhelms them. In the vestibule is a painting, an obscene take of a madonna and her child, demonic creatures crawling in the background.

On entering the church, they find a golden cross, hung upside down in the “symbol of Satan’s Mass.” When they reach the pulpit, they find a large book open, covered in a mix of ancient runes and Latin. The title of the book, De Vermis Mysteriis, in English, The Mysteries of the Worm. When Charles touches it, the world before him trembles, the church itself shakes.

Calvin and Charles leave that place without speaking, but the damage has been done. The sounds in their house grow louder, and on investigating the “rat” problem in the cellar, Calvin and Charles are attacked by the undead, his Uncle Randolph and daughter Marcella. The bumps and pounding in the walls were not rats after all, but the slinking half-dead bodies of his relatives.

The Diary

The town of Preacher’s Corner is affected too. Bad omens, blood moons, a child born blind, all serve as warnings to them that something has been awakened. When Calvin discovers Robert Boone’s diary, Charles’ grandfather, the story of Jerusalem’s Lot is uncovered.

The town was founded by a Puritan sect, led by James Boon, a religious fanatic who surrounded himself with women, and created an inbred town filled with people who looked disturbingly like himself. They embraced witchcraft and the occult. When Robert’s brother Philip becomes obsessed with the man and joins the cult, Robert investigates the town, eventually feeling pulled to visit. He disappears after his last entry in his diary.

And yet I feel the urge to go again, to watch, to see. It seems that philip himself calls me, and the old Man.

The Birds.

cursed cursed cursed

Charles realizes that whatever Jerusalem’s Lot is, it is blood bound. His family line is cursed in some way, and his entry into the house and venture into Jerusalem’s Lot has brought some evil back to life.

Calvin, seeing the way Charles’ mind is starting to fail, gives him sleeping powder and tries to arrange for their departure, but it is too late. Charles is pulled to go back to Jerusalem’s Lot, to obtain The Mystery of the Worm and destroy it.

On entering the church for the last time, they find the door ajar, the pews overturned, and a dead lamb laying on the pulpit, a Satanic sacrifice. As soon as they disturb the book, the walls come alive with the sound of chanting. The floor beneath them shakes. The pulpit splits in two, and Charles utters a profane prayer, overtaken by an ancient presence.

Calvin knocks him down, restoring his mind, and Charles lights the book on fire, destroying it. What follows is a screech, as of something in pain, and a great worm breaks through the floor, throwing Calvin aside and killing him.

And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground.

From the hole where it broke through, the undead James Boon emerges, meaning to take Charles with him. Charles flees back to Chapelwaite, realizing that he would never escape this evil that meant to use him, to take him.

He still lives somewhere in the twisted, lightless wanderings beneath Jerusalem’s Lot and Chapelwaite—and It still lives. The burning of the book thwarted It, but there are other copies.

Yet I am the gateway, and I am the last of the Boone blood. For the good of all humanity I must die…and break the chain forever.

I go to the sea now, Bones. My journey, like my story, is at an end.

Lovecraft Anyone?

Small confession: I haven’t read any Lovecraft. The only knowledge I have of the connection between this story and Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls has been provided by articles and commentary I read in preparing this article. All of you better versed, please feel free to chime in, correct, etc.

This story was actually written as a school assignment while King was in college. Its inception led to King’s eventual writing of ‘Salem’s Lot, a novel that is written in his voice rather than the one we read here. If I picked this up without an author credited, there would be nothing in it to indicate it was written by Stephen King, which given the background, makes perfect sense.

The Worm that breaks through the church floors in Jerusalem’s Lot, is apparently an incarnation of Shudde M’ell, “a mile long great grey worm-like creature that burrows through the earth.” The storylines of The Rats in the Wall and Jerusalem’s Lot also appear to hit similar plot points, though as stated above, I’ll leave that to the people who have actually read both stories.

1971

The story ends with a descendent of Charles Boone, James Robert Boone, who we learn has taken up residence in Chapelwaite himself. He finds and reads these accounts, and attributes them to nothing more than some type of insanity brought on by the loss of his relative’s wife. He believes that Charles murdered Calvin, and forged the diary entries therein to make sense of his paranoid delusions before killing himself.

The only fact he can agree with, is that Chapelwaite indeed must have a rat problem. Big ones by the sound of it.

‘Salem’s Lot Connections

I went into this story imagining there would be a more direct connection to ‘Salem’s Lot. While I enjoyed the story, I didn’t find much to go on other than the land itself being cursed and evil. There weren’t any vampires to be found, unless the undead in the story are some type of vampire and I missed it.

I enjoyed the story, was even scared by parts of it, but the voice doesn’t read as original. It seems like a copy, fitting for something that is an epistolatory work set in the 1800’s, but not what I have come to expect from King.

And now over to you.

Did you see any connections that I missed between this story and ‘Salem’s Lot?

If you have read Lovecraft, did it seem like a copy of The Rats in the Walls the way that some critics have written it is?

Did any of you catch the reference to “It” when Charles describes the worm? Is this connected in any way to our ancient monster Pennywise who lives in the sewer tunnels beneath Derry?

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