The Inevitability of Stephen King Originally published in The Bookpress, May 2001. Dreamcatcher by Stephen King. Scribner, 2001. 620 pages If you’re a writer between the ages of thirty and forty, especially a male one, especially a white one, you are likely to have a cardboard box of paperback books stashed in your parents’ attic. These are not books you talk about very often, or even admit to having read. Maybe some of them are by Isaac Asimov: the Foundation or Robots series. Maybe The Lord of the Rings is in there. But it’s nearly certain, if you have such a box, that it contains at least one book, and maybe three or four, and quite possibly a dozen, by Stephen King. The Stand, certainly, The Shining, Carrie. Maybe Firestarter, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, or Night Shift. These are not books you brought up in your MFA workshop, or your Contemporary American Literature seminar, or (god forbid) your PhD dissertation. They aren’t books you talk about at dinner parties. You don’t recommend them to friends, you don’t cite them during job interviews, and you don’t allude to them—not on purpose, anyway—in your own writing. But when you’re taking out the garbage at midnight and the neighbor’s dog startles you with its barks, you are not reminded of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. When you’re unlocking your car in a barren parking lot and a ghostly pair of headlights appears in the middle distance, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems do not spring suddenly to mind. And lines from Conrad’s Victory do not form on your lips when you see a girl in a prom dress. No, what you think of, respectively, are the monstrous dog from Cujo, the evil Chevy from Christine, and Carrie, the telekinetic teen, drenched in pig’s blood. You don’t even have to have read these books to be reminded of them: you could have seen the movies, or you could know somebody who’s seen the movies. Even if you don’t have friends, or have never been to the movies, you still know that Cujo’s a dog and that Carrie didn’t have a good time at the dance. Let’s face it: there’s no getting away from Stephen King. Believe me, I tried. I had a bad experience with a Stephen King book in my mid-teens (the dreadful It) and quit him cold turkey, but damned if he didn’t keep writing them, and damned if I didn’t sneak peeks in bookstores and libraries when I thought nobody was looking, and damned if I’m not being sucked in again. I’ve read his last three, and I’ll probably read the next one too, and the one after that. Just recently I made the final revisions to a novel I’ve been working on for two years, and only now, at this late stage, does it occur to me that the dead mobster who haunts my protagonist’s dreams is a product of my lifelong affair with Stephen King. Now, I am not going to tell you that King is a great writer, because he isn’t. Sometimes, however, he can be pretty good. His particular pretty good is not the kind you can appreciate by reading a couple of paragraphs; you might not even notice it after reading an entire book. An entire book will be plenty for some people: King does indeed test the patience of the refined reader. He has got a logorrhea problem, for one thing. Here’s a paragraph from the first page of Dreamcatcher, his occasionally pretty interesting new novel: To say that Beaver’s marriage didn’t work would be like saying that the launch of the Challenger space shuttle went a little bit wrong. Joe “Beaver” Clarendon and Laurie Sue Kenopensky made it through eight months and then kapow, there goes my baby, somebody help me pick up the fuckin pieces. You could get rid of almost everything in this paragraph: the Challenger metaphor in the first sentence, the characters’ full names, the “kapow,” the “there goes my baby,” the “somebody pick up the fuckin pieces.” It’s all filler, except for “Beaver’s marriage…made it through eight months.” And even that could be shortened without any loss in sense. But if you’re going to read Stephen King, you are going to have to get used to it. It’s just the way he is. You might say to hell with it then, and you’d be justified in doing so, but those of us who have fallen under his shaggy, twelve-steppin’, bear-huggin’ spell have no such option. King is annoying, all right, but so are some of your friends (I’m sure I’ve been an annoying friend myself), and you like them just fine. They are probably the oldest friends you have, in fact. And that’s what King wants: to be your friend, forever. His books are all written in the same style, and it is a rhetorical style—a bar-yarn style—and not a literary style. Every idea is fully expressed several dozen times, usually in a colloquial, rib-elbowing way, with some song lyrics thrown in, a few literary references (often to his other books), and plenty of puns and one-liners and scatological gags. His female characters are always plucky and self-sacrificing; his male characters are smart, book-readin’ (and often book-writin’) fellas who nonetheless have excellent working-class street cred. This is a major concern of King’s. He is one of the most class-conscious writers in America: in interviews this man of letters is always quick to remind his fans that he grew up poor, that he kicked booze and drugs, that he rides a motorcycle, that he plays guitar in a rock band. Frankly, I am not immune to this kind of charm; it’s what I want from a bar-yarn-spinner. King is not a jerk—he takes himself plenty seriously, but he always seems to be having a great time, and fully expects that you’ll have one, too. He exemplifies a certain bootstrap-yanking, leather-jacketed American type: the smart guy who loves his wife, knows how to fix his own truck, and can quote Theodore Roethke and the theme song from “Scooby-Doo” in the same breath. This is a fine type to exemplify, an emphatic type. On the page, this emphasis reveals itself in exclamatory dialogue (“Get off the road! his mind screamed”) and in typographical highlighting: King likes italics, he likes ALL CAPS, he even likes boldface from time to time. He loves single-sentence paragraphs. But what King really appears to like is writing. He does it incessantly, at a rate of eight pages a day (according to his memoir/handbook On Writing) and significantly more than a book a year. His prose, slapdash as it seems, can be a lot of fun to read, if you’re willing to accept the King persona, with all its excesses. He is, like the fungal menace in Dreamcatcher, infectious. Because here’s the thing: Stephen King has good ideas. He can’t always distinguish them from his bad ideas, and his is not prose you’ll want to return to again and again, but there is something to him that is hard to ignore. He has access to, and control of, a powerful iconography that really does get at the heart of America’s fear and shame. He’s our sin-eater, the guy who shoulders the burden of our nastiest thoughts, who poisons the wellspring of our vanity, and for this service we have made him one of the wealthiest people in the state of Maine. And more power to him. Dreamcatcher begins with four short sections, from four separate points of view, that introduce four childhood friends: Henry, Jonesy, Beaver and Pete. They’re adults now, each of them wallowing in one or another form of discontent, but they do have at least one good week each year, when they gather at Hole in the Wall, Beaver’s family cabin in the Maine woods, for a hunting trip. They share a particular bond, these guys, above and beyond nostalgia: each has a kind of weird empathic power that borders on telepathy. Henry, a psychologist, knows a little too much about his patients; Pete, a used-car salesman, has a knack for finding lost things. James can detect cheaters in his history classes at Harvard, and the gregarious Beaver’s casual insights into the lives of those around him have depressed him and made him a loner. These powers seem to be connected to another friend, a man with Down’s Syndrome named Duddits (after his own mispronunciation of Douglas, his real name), who the four once saved from the tortures of a cruel high school football star. The guys treated Duddits like a normal kid, including him in all their fun, but now everyone’s grown up, and Duddits has been left behind with his mother. We are brought to the present day (November 2001), when this year’s hunting trip (it will be the last one ever, King ominously informs us) is in full swing. We are with Jonesy in a deer blind. He sees movement in the trees and raises his rifle, but it isn’t a buck: it’s a man, staggering like a drunk and mumbling “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” Jonesy leads him back to Hole in the Wall. Turns out the man has been wandering for days, and he has come down with something: a red, mossy growth is spreading on his cheek and he suffers painful abdominal distress. Within a hundred or so pages, three of the four main characters have either had their minds overtaken by a sentient alien mold or been eviscerated by legless space weasels. You see, there’s been a UFO crash in the woods. The Army has swooped in, cordoned off the area, and blown the helpless aliens (they’re the little gray guys you hear so much about these days) to smithereens. But some kind of spores have been released, and the Maine woods are lousy with red fungus, and hundreds of people are infected. In some, we are given to understand, this fungus (“the byrus”) has metamorphosed into the aforementioned weasels (“the byrum”), which burst from their hosts’ bodies and lay eggs. The Army, under the command of a ludicrously nasty figure named Kurtz (a name he gave himself, and I don’t think I need to tell you why), rounds up the infected, sticks them in a barn, and makes plans to kill them all, then nuke central Maine. Several complications arise, however. The byrus and byrum, as it turns out, don’t last long in the earth’s hostile chemistry, and don’t pose a significant long-term threat, making Kurtz’s plan seem a tad excessive. And the byrus—this is the fungus, remember—happens to have the effect of imbuing its host with the ability to read minds. It is this last that allows the mildly infected and Army-corralled Henry, already pretty telepathic himself, to learn of Kurtz’s plan. He must convince Owen Underhill, Kurtz’s right-hand man, to betray his boss, set the infected citizens free, and prevent the nuclear explosion. Meanwhile, Jonesy’s mind is taken over by an alien presence he calls Mr. Gray. Gray has access to Jonesy’s memories, and ransacks them for a good way to get the byrus into New England’s water supply. He takes control of Jonesy’s body and slips out of the quarantine area, casually murdering strangers and stealing their cars along the way. Pete and Beaver, sadly, have succumbed to the aliens by now. Up to this point, the story proper of the novel has taken the form of an action thriller; the plot dominates. But interspersed here and there are bits of the four friends’ adventures with Duddits, and their gradual recognition that he has somehow given them their bizarre abilities, and these sections, both lurid and psychologically complex, are the kind of thing King is best at. We see Duddits’s rescue from the sinister Richie Grenadeau, and the subsequent “accident” Richie is killed by, which we understand was really caused by the collective effort of the five telepaths, in their sleep, no less. We also watch the five use their powers to rescue a lost girl. The friends feel guilty about the killing of Grenadeau, however just it might have seemed; they feel guilty that they didn’t, after rescuing the girl, use their powers for good. In general, they all feel that they’ve blown it, that they’ve ignored the powers when it would have been right to engage them. This present crisis, we’re meant to imagine, might be a way to make amends. That brings us through the first two parts of the book, which have been pretty exciting, if perhaps a little serendipitously complex. Is it just a coincidence that the already-telepathic friends happened to be camped in the woods invaded by the telepathic aliens? Where do the gray guys fit into this whole byrus-byrum scheme? But never mind: King will resolve these problems (in a monumentally unsatisfying way, I’m afraid). Part three awaits: simultaneously the dumbest and most interesting of the book. Orders have come down to Kurtz from on high: the mission is over. But Kurtz goes off on a frolic of his own, determined to chase down Owen, who has betrayed him by releasing the prisoners. Meanwhile, Owen and Henry are on a mission, too: they’re chasing Jonesy/Mr. Gray, who are on their way to dump a byrum-infested dog into the Boston water supply. Mr. Gray’s only concern is the perpetuation of his species, no matter the odds, and now millions of people’s lives hang in the balance. This triple-chase happens in, um, Humvees. That’s the dumb part. Many, many, pages are filled with scenes of people driving Humvees through the snow, trying to read each other’s minds (they’ve all got the byrus). Owen and Henry need Duddits to do this properly, so they go to Derry to pick him up. The Humvee chase, however, is interspersed with the interesting stuff: the battle being waged in Jonesy’s head. My. Gray has moved in, confining Jonesy to a tiny corner of his mind. After awhile, this corner takes on visual form: the dusty office of a Derry warehouse where Jonesy once had a childhood adventure. Jonesy paces here, trying to figure out how to get his mind back, and gradually his makes a discovery. He can change the room, add a poster here and there, add a telephone, put in new walls. When he manifests a door, he peeks behind it and discovers a warehouse filled with boxes: his own memories. He hustles a few of the boxes back into his office—memories of Duddits, as it happens—before Mr. Gray discovers what he’s up to and stops it. Because Gray is engaged in a mental battle of his own: he wants to get into Jonesy’s office, thus taking over his mind completely. If Jonesy creates windows to look out of, Gray claps steel shutters over them. If Jonesy creates a fax machine to send telepathic messages by, Gray cuts the lines. And Gray is faced with another problem. His race is intelligent and tenacious, but lacks emotion; as time passes in Jonesy’s body, Gray begins to feel all too much at home. He craves bacon, he laughs at a joke. He is going native. The end of the book is a little ridiculous, a series of artificial close calls, near misses and timely reversals, complete with a tearjerker, a bloodbath, and lots of clever one-liners (“That’s right, beautiful,” Owen manages to say before blowing the byrum away, “smile for the camera”) uttered at unlikely moments. But the psychological battle that precedes it truly is a pleasure. Jonesy discovers that he can expand his mental prison by remembering and analyzing the events of his life; King is implying (as he does in many of his books) that imaginative memory is our primary tool for enhancing our own consciousness. The four friends were granted their telepathy—really, a souped-up form of empathy—by committing an act of kindness and compassion, and this empathy (along with a lot of stolen military equipment) is what saves half of New England from having to incubate the byrum. It’s no accident that the surviving friends are the history professor and the shrink; they represent those human qualities, memory and emotion, that King finds most redemptive. That’s why I like King, in the end; he loves humanity, and lets his characters succeed (or fail) for the right reasons. And yet, though King is a very smart man, the very smart reader may want to throw this book across the room. Sometimes his writing is simply bad, the kind of bad that comes from a disrespect for the reader’s intelligence. I won’t burden you, or insult King, with a list of literary crimes—like I said, you have to take it or leave it—but I have to mention this problem, for King’s mind (byrus-free, we must assume) is otherwise so agile and sympathetic. There are really nice touches: the way Mr. Gray comes to a complete stop at a stop sign, his regimented alien conscience trumping, briefly, his need to reproduce; the way Duddits’s mother, anticipating her son’s death, is moved to tears by the smell of the balm she applies to his muscles. Occasionally the prose is quite deft—“Dead trees clutched at the white sky, as if to snatch the clouds open”; “He…felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark”—and reading it, you wonder why you’re also being asked to read lines like “His second shot went right through the weasel’s humorless grin.” It’s awfully tempting to say that King writes too many books, too fast. People have said this about him before, and King has responded (King always responds to his critics) to the effect that there were plenty of great writers who wrote copiously, and plenty of bad ones who labored over every word. He’s right, but he’s wrong: the process is different for everyone. Stephen King does write too many books, and he writes them too fast, and they would all be better if he took more time to reconsider what he does in them, and how. I say this because I feel like King is robbing himself of a decent legacy. His imagination has had a real effect on our popular culture, but his words haven’t influenced our literate culture, because they don’t measure up to his imagination. And yet he seems blind to this possibility. The eight pages a day he cites in On Writing are not simply his own personal habit; this is how much he thinks everyone should write. Tinkerers, he believes, are simply lazy; self-doubters are wimps. This is self-justifying. Flannery O’Connor’s four books of fiction, for instance, are going to outlast King’s fifty or so, at least as works of literature, because she wrote the way it was necessary for her to write, to create the best work she could. King, on the other hand, is never truly at the top of his form; unlike, say, Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy, who are hacks, he has got a really good writer in him somewhere. I can see this ideal writer, trapped in Jonesy’s dusty office, trying to imagine his way out. And who is King’s Mr. Gray? Probably his next idea, his next story or novel or screenplay. King’s ideal writer succumbs, I think, to the ferocity of his inspiration. But really, there are worse things to succumb to. Money, for instance, or fame. For all of King’s millions, his insistence that he doesn’t care about money is to be believed: the books, for all their flaws, are passionate, infused with a frenetic, obsessive energy; and his best images and characters, in spite of the words that brought them to life, will last longer than he does. c2001 by J. Robert Lennon.