The Toy Maker's Revenge

Battleground, where King takes on action

Good evening.

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.

Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash

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.

From the Troll Hole Museum

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.

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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.