Tapping Into Primal Fears - Inanimate Object Horror in The Mangler, Battleground, Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back

First off: I was initially going to follow the order of short stories in Night Shift for this my column "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King": with The Mangler, The Boogeyman and Gray Matter up next. But considering that the latter two are both in an island position between many stories which deal with the horror of inanimate objects coming to life, I decided to go rather thematically just for this once. So, in this post we'll take a look at The Mangler, Battleground, Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back which all deal with lifeless things who have no business being alive and moving around.

The fear of the inanimate animate, moving objects, the unexplainable, the unscientific is, as is well-known, a big fear of mine. Taking this fear beyond the initial "boo!" moment, King shows how to turn that shock into dread and terror, or even dystopia, and there's arguably no other book of his with a wider range of short stories about objects coming to life in order to harm humans than this very first short story collection of his. Let's take a look at them.

The Mangler (Cavalier 1972)

The Mangler is set in an industrial laundry in a US small town. It centers around Detective Hunton and his English professor friend Jackson who discuss the police officer's cases over a beer in the evenings. They come up with a bold theory about the accidents happening at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, in which various workers have been pulled into or burned by the laundry's ironing and folding machine: the professor suggests that the gory accidents are caused by an absurd chain of events that activated a blood curse. The blood of a virgin (by one of the workers' bleeding finger), bat's blood (from a bat who nested over the machine), horse hooves (from jell-O's gelatin), and belladonna plant (an ingredient of medical pills) all found their way into the mangler. Incidentally these are the necessary ingredients for a successful occult ritual, which in this case inadvertently summoned a demon, who is now possessing the machine and causing mayhem. Rumor has it, similar strange incidents happened with other appliances, such as an old fridge. Hunton and Jackson prepare to exorcise the machine, but through a miscalculation summon an even bigger trouble.

According to King, he has previously worked in an industrial laundry, and I bet there's no better way to get some revenge from former employers by writing a nasty horror story about them, stuffing it with lots of critique about the American blue collar working conditions. Something similar happens in the rat story Graveyard Shift.

To animate a lifeless object you need a propeller, a believable source for this kind of abnormality, this kind of magic. Something you can suspend your disbelief to. So why not make it sorcery? Not conventional sorcery, mind you, we're dealing with unintentional sorcery, which makes the whole ordeal even more absurd. Despite its absurdity, it still adheres to a certain set of rules - the rules of the occult ritual and its traditions. Neat.

As a final supernatural touch bordering on the absurd we have the use of belladonna, which the two investigators overlook, but which was fed to the murder mangler in the shape of stomach pills accidentally falling into the bloodthirsty machine. (Just as an aside - the amount of stuff falling into the thing beside human extremities is staggering and makes you wonder if that's an element he picked up from his real life experience.) This strengthens the already evil demon, prompting the machine to go out on the streets and actively look for prey. I'm tempted to think a mangler wandering in the streets looking for human victims to iron flat is... a little bit ridiculous and not very scary. But, whatever.

There is a movie, yes, from legendary filmmaker Tobe Hooper, starring two luminaries of horror cinema, Robert Englund who infamously played Freddy Kruger in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and The Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill, Ted Levine (nowadays he's better known as Monk's grumpy but lovable Captain Stottlemeyer).

It's a very gory movie as expected. What Hooper does differently is that he gives the evil a face, the face of Englund who plays the cruel capitalist owner of the laundry, "pressing" his workers to keep working and working faster. That kind of material representation of an abstract evil, in my opinion, proves Hooper's genius, as Englund was widely perceived as the epitome of evil because of Freddy, and also allows a nice twist towards the end of the story, hinting at the continuation of the nightmare, as it is also the case in the short story.  

Battleground (Cavalier 1972)

Long before the Major character in Ada Palmers' Too Like the Lightning took over our hearts, there was Battleground by Stephen King, which sees a set of toy soldiers coming to life in order to avenge their maker and kill the hired assassin who took his life. The entire short story is about killer Renshaw receiving a package, which seems to be sent by the toy maker's mom (his "number one idea girl"), and the soldiers coming out of that package immediately attacking him. And they mean business! The package also contains tiny appliances like weapons, jeeps, and helicopters too. Renshaw struggles to defend himself against this complete army and hides in the bathroom. After he refuses to surrender, he attempts to blow them up with a makeshift Molotov cocktail, but is ultimately lethally surprised and blast to hell by a tiny thermonuclear weapon.

There's something inherently adorable about a handful of toys avenging the death of a toy maker. Not that that's the focal point of Battleground, but the redemption nevertheless sets the tone in this one. This is a story about war, there are descriptions of attacks and lots of war terminology, albeit in the home of an individual person who tries to figure out how to get out of this situation. The fact that a mother is behind the attack and the attacked being a hired killer strengthens the mentioned redemptive tone and makes the soldiers all the more rootable.

Battleground was filmed as the inaugural episode of the mini series Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, starring an excellent William Hurt and without a single dialogue in the entire episode. A very worthwhile mini series if you haven't seen it yet.

Trucks (Cavalier 1973)

As we dive further into the short works of King, we will see that many of them (but let's not exclude his longer work and novels) feature recurring tropes, themes and elements combined and merged into each other in different ways, leaving a unique impression of familiarity but also enough novelty to be interesting and original. In Trucks, for instance, the setup is pretty similar to Night Surf (but also to The Mist, which we haven't discussed yet): an apocalyptic setting, a group of survivors trying to keep on surviving in the face of a threat that came seemingly out of the blue. That threat is in Trucks, you guessed it, trucks, semi-trailers and all large vehicles who somehow achieved autonomous life, and are now killing humans, wrecking cars - the latter are still inanimate machines and thus are being wrecked by trucks. The story suitably takes place in a truck stop on a US freeway, typically equipped with diner, gas station, and convenience store, where the six survivors are trapped.

But they’re machines. No matter what’s happened to them, what mass consciousness we’ve given them, they can’t reproduce.

When the trucks begin to run out of fuel, they seek in Morse code emitted by horn blasts an understanding; they demand humans start pumping fuel and assure they won't attack those humans who refuel them. 

After a last stand, the story ends on a super pessimistic note where remaining humans are basically enslaved and doomed to perpetually fill up trucks and tractors and the terrifying possibility that airplanes too have now joined their ranks. In fact, I'm suspecting the trucks stand as a metaphor for the American nation who we have to feed with oil and petrol so they let us live. Maybe King did intend to say that, maybe not.

Anyhow, wow! Dark, darker, Trucks.

Luckily, there are not one, but two film adaptations, and they leave some more space for hope concerning the future of humanity: Maximum Overdrive (1986) and Trucks (1997), the latter of these two attributes the attacks to a strategy of extraterrestrial aliens invading Earth. Whether you're a fan of trucks or not, both movies are hugely enjoyable and watchable as mindless fun during a Stephen King marathon on a Sunday afternoon, why not?

Sometimes They Come Back (Cavalier 1974)

Finally - what surely doesn't have any business being alive is... dead people. But apparently sometimes they come back. They sure do in this short story about a man, Jim Norman, who returns years after living elsewhere to his hometown where he starts working as an English teacher. He has serious childhood PTSD because of his twelve-year-old brother being killed before his eyes by high school bullies.

His fresh start is soon blotched by some of his students dying, and being replaced one by one by the group of bullies who killed his brother: and miraculously, they look exactly the same age as back then. Nobody he turns to can offer real help, and after his wife is killed after being driven off the road by said bullies, Jim finally does what we all do when the going gets rough, he resorts to the supernatural and with the help of an occult book, he summons a demon. The demon comes to him in the shape of Wayne, his older brother, and single-handedly takes the bully souls to hell. The story closes with the unsettling warning that demons can be summoned and banished, but "sometimes they come back".

Surely the most touching and authentic part in this piece of writing is the descriptive passages about bullying, and the lasting effects it has on a person. If today Stephen King is very vocal on social media platforms about certain people, it is because he knows a bully when he sees one and doesn't shy of calling them out. That's what his books have taught me as a child, that's the right way to go. Only recently did we witness on the international platform how bullying methods used by the US of A force people into defeat, allowing greedy attackers to exploit victims some more. It's important King does what he does, even though he's being trashed lots for it. If you look at his writing, even this early stuff, you can clearly see where he comes from and where he stands, and that's a good thing in a world like ours.

There is a movie adaptation, of course, but I haven't seen it yet. The trailer reminds me of the 1989 Pet Sematary visuals and gives intense IT vibes, so can't actually wait to see this.

Next up; The Boogeyman, Gray Matter and Strawberry Spring. Have a great time until then!