Gray Matter (Cavalier 1973)
Very vividly do I remember the first time I read this story, and the dread it left in the pit of my stomach, that ending as direful, ominous and doom-ful as they come.
We are ushered through Grey Matter by an older local man hanging out with his friends during a heavy snowstorm in a general store in Bangor, Maine, when the boy Timmy Grenadine storms in. Due to a work accident Timmy's father Richie has been able to live on compensation money, and as it sometimes happens with people who lose social pressure from the outside, he let himself go and dedicated his life to drinking cheap beer. Lately it was only Timmy who came to buy his beer to the store (because our parents did that with us, it was normal I was sent to the store to buy cigarettes and booze as a six year old).
After a talk with the panicked kid, store owner Henry decides that a group of men will bring Richie his beer personally. On the way there he reports the chilling things Timmy told him. Apparently Richie drank what his son called a "bad" can of beer, and after that he has been slowly transforming into a light-hating, cat-eating, warm-beer-craving, blob-like creature. When they get there, they discover that it weren't only cats he has been eating, and all of them, except Henry, decide to just flee running. The narrator, from the glimpse of the creature, sees that it was in the process of dividing itself in two, and back at the store, he calculates the exponential growth of the creature, in case Henry looses the battle.
I don't know what was going on in his mind, but I know well enough what was in mine: the multiplication table. Two times two is four, four times two is eight, eight times to is sixteen, sixteen times two is -
Highly reminiscent of another King short story, namely Weeds aka The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill, I'd like to believe that here too the source of the ever spreading horror is extraterrestrial, although Gray Matter leaves much to our imagination and offers only a double open ending, both the source of the horror as well as the fate of humanity, so the past and the future are open-ended, intensifying the dread. A horror hanging in the air, in the now.
Gray Matter was adapted into various short movies and even one Creepshow episode. I especially enjoy the more creative adaptation of a fake true crime podcast based on this story, made by the Stephen King Book Club on YouTube.
The Boogeyman (Cavalier 1973)
Although this post is all about solid unhappy endings, let's talk about the beginnings too. More specifically, the very wide range of settings King places his stories in, so they never get monotone or boring. Beside the classical ways of entering a story, classically narrated from an omniscient point of view, King has a knack for opening a tale anywhere and anytime without alienating his readers, binding them with interesting, even shocking plot lines and most of all characters you really want to follow. In this collection alone we have stories beginning in unconventional places like the beach following the end of the world, often people stuck in a convenience store or the like, and even more often in the middle of a conversation.
The Boogeyman is one of those stories. It starts with a conversation in a doctor's office, a dialogue between a man and his psychiatrist, to be exact. Dr. Harper is trying to get to the bottom of Lester Billings' problems, who claims all his three little children have been murdered over the past several years by a supernatural entity called the Boogeyman. The first two children died of mysterious causes like a crib death and convulsions, while his third child, a son he loved most of all because he looked like himself, apparently broke his neck while trying to climb out of his crib.
All children cried "Boogeyman!" before dying and the closet door in their room was open when their little bodies were found. Lester's story becomes gradually more emotional, and even though he's a character I doubt anyone can ever have sympathy with, as it is implied he is violent against his wife, and has no particularly great love for his children except for little Andy, his last boy, his pain and frustration upon losing them is palpable.
As he finishes the session and gets ready to leave, but needs to return into the doctor's office for a second time, Lester finds it empty, with the closet door ajar. And out of it jumps the boogeyman, taking off his (shock, shock, shock) Dr. Harper mask!!!!
Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself.This "boo!" ending is surprising in so many ways, but during the first read it might come across as a little childish or paltry, even a little bit ridiculous maybe. The more I think about it, the better it gets for me, though. First off , such an ending denigrates the whole setting and situation of the story. Everything was a lie, and that's bitter, that's treason. Secondly, it seems ironic that Lester should seek help at someone who is, in fact, the perpetrator in disguise. A doctor's, a psychiatrist's office should be a place of healing, of soothing. So it's a good thing Lester very possibly died after this attack, because he never would have been able to restore his sense of trust in life after this session. It's alarming for us too! Next time you're at counseling you'd better take a good look at the person before you.
There is a fairly recent film adaptation, which is shit, if I may say so. The therapist is the father of two in the movie, and the family has lost their mother, Lester is but a former client of his, and the Boogeyman is disturbing the therapist's children.
I am intensely bothered by something a lot of filmmakers do, possibly in order to make the movie longer and fill in their 90 minutes. This becomes a problem especially when the horror is in brevity, and there's a certain shock moment you shouldn't exhaust too early.
Take the short story. There is exactly one jump scare in The Boogeyman and it comes at the ending, to close the story. The movie on the other hand, is your typical Hollywood horror film which exhausts this element, and ends up making it work against itself. A movie which overuses the jump scare will finish that potential in its audience early on too. It is a means which is most effective when used scarcely. The reaction your body gives in a jump scare is related to your fear reaction, and it is finite. If you scare yourself too much, your body will shift into self-preservation mode and start recovering from fear, and you physically won't be able to be scared for the next so and so minutes depending on your constituency. That's why your psychiatrist will recommend you to take deep breaths and to sit out a panic attack, because your body will eventually get tired and it will pass. If you use shock scaring too much and too early in the film, you won't be able to have the desired effect when the finale punch line comes. This movie in this case is thus being counterproductive and unsatisfying, and so are hundreds of mainstream horror movies released each year.
There is, on the other hand, a really really good audio narrated version for the "Spooktober 2023: Hell to the King" series. I'm a fan of this narrator and he does a great work here too.
Strawberry Spring (Ubris 1968)
Of course, an author who tries out as many writing styles and techniques as King does, will at some point obligatorily revere to Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime. For Strawberry Spring he indeed pulls a Roger Ackroyd.
If you're unsure of what that means: the reader is being fooled by the unreliable narrator who narrates the story of various murders, only to find out in the very end that the narrator is in fact the murderer. It can be quite the mind fuck because you tend to identify yourself with the narrator, but you don't want to feel too close to a killer.
The story opens with our lead character and unnamed narrator opening the newspaper to see the words "Springheel Jack" which catapults him to his college years, especially to March 1968, when a serial killer of the said name started killing girls during the strawberry spring, a "false" spring which comes only every eight years or so and brings a thick fog along. We're being shown the reactions of the college community and a little bit of insight into the police procedural, but then the killings end with the end of the strawberry spring. When it reappears in eight years the murders begin again and the narrator realizes that he, in fact, is Springheel Jack.
Certainly one of the weaker stories in Night Shift, this can nevertheless be seen as a precursor to King's crime novels, although it's rather on the duller side, and not necessarily surprising or enthralling, but readable.
There is, however, a really amazingly done podcast series in eight episodes on Spotify which can certainly brighten up a slow work day or an evening with nothing good on TV.
The Ledge (Penthouse 1976)
Another first person narrator who will surprise (or disappoint) awaits us in the next story, The Ledge.
I purposely chose the still on the left from the King anthology Cat's Eye (1985) to publish here because, I have to admit, I didn't fully understand this text on a textual level when I first read it, just because I'm not very familiar with terms like "ledge" or "circumambulate" in any language I speak, and same thing with architecture terms. So I wanted that still as a visual clue as to what's going on.
Our protagonist Stan Norris is being held captive by his lover's husband Cressner, who is some sort of mob or mafia, and who wants to struck a deal - Norris is to walk on this really narrow ledge surrounding Cressner's penthouse apartment and if he makes it out alive, he can have 20.000 Dollars and his wife. After overcoming various obstacles, like those damn pigeons or balance problems, he actually makes it, but only to find out that the woman he loves has already been killed. In a twist of fate, Norris with his newly found power kills Cressner's bodyguard and takes his gun. Now it's he who proposes a bet to see if Cressner himself can complete the tour around his house. Clue: He likely won't.
The Ledge is an homage to Jack Finney's 1956 short story Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket which is a suspenseful piece of writing about work-life balance, if you want, and as I mentioned above, there is an adaptation which is fairly true to the source material and very enjoyable. The complete anthology Cat's Eye comprises two stories by King, Quitter Inc., The Ledge, plus an additional story, General, written for the movie. Unlike The Boogeyman adaptation, there are some added elements here which work really well and even enrich the story instead of dragging it, like Cressner blowing a horn from one of the windows to surprise Norris and make him fall, or doing other nasty tricks.
I like that consistent with his last name, Norris truly acts like a Norris (even though it's much before the time of the internet phenomenon surrounding Chuck Norris) and manages to impossibly turn around the situation like a true action hero. Also, implying that he will cheat if he has to gives his whole persona a new twist, which might be understandable given the circumstances.
So, my friends, next time I will be talking about only one story, The Lawnmower Man. It will be the only story because I don't want to take away from its glory, and the space it occupies on my blog should not be shared. You guessed right if you guessed that it is my favorite story in Night Shift and I can't wait to discuss it here.
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