God Bless the Grass: Reviewing King's The Lawnmower Man

It would be good  to read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, because I'll spoil everything!

Americans are obsessed with many things: college sports, high school life, peanut butter, haunted houses, ice in their drinks, UFO's... Out of their many strange obsessions, though, the strangest of them all surely must be the love for their lawns. I can't claim to understand how and why the small piece of green grass around their houses became some sort of status symbol, but I can accept it, as it seems relatively harmless compared to other stuff.

(As an unrelated aside, there is an excellent episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete on the subject - this series from the 90s is one of the main sources for my taste in the weird and the absurd.)

Ah yes, the lawn... An indispensable element of the conservative petty bourgeoisie... And art follows life, imitating this staple of the traditional lifestyle. Such as Stephen King's 1975 short story, The Lawnmower Man, which was first published in Cavalier Magazine, and messes with the pride and joy of those Midwest dads who treasure the sight of lush green from their porches and the smell of freshly cut grass in the morning.

Harold Parkette is one of these dads living the suburban dream - until that dream is disturbed by his very own beloved lawnmower machine when the neighbor's cat ends up butchered within its blades. The incident is so traumatic for the whole family that Harold sells his mower and neglects to hire help to cut his lawn during summer. The weather, meanwhile, proves extraordinarily favorable for growing grass (three days of sunshine followed by one day of rain) and mid-July Parkette finds himself at the butt of neighbors' jokes about his very wild and meadow-like garden, and it irritates him, he doesn't want to appear unorthodox or unsocial, especially to his Democrat neighbors. That's how he finds the professional lawnmowers "Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services" in the classified ads.

As a good Republican, he considered the Wall Street executives behind the columned type to be at least minor demigods.

Ignoring a feeling of unease (big mistake, you should always listen to your gut), he hires the company, but he feels this is a job supposed to be done by kids for some pocket money, not a job for a professional business. Parkette is even more flabbergasted when within half an hour the Lawnmower Man appears at his door: a fat, hairy, unkempt man wearing jeans overalls and a baseball cap, undeniably working class, a type of man he looks down upon, but is also a little afraid of. Even their taste in baseball collide - while Harold is a fan of the Boston Red Sox, the Lawnmower Man supports the Yankees from the Bronx.

Harold rests while reading the newspapers (which seems to be all he ever does) and wonders about the exclamation "by Circe!" coming out of the Lawnmower Man's mouth, when it occurs to him to check on the man, and he witnesses a scenery he wasn't expecting at all. Something which repulses and terrorizes him equally.

The overripe smell of cut grass hung in the air like sour wine. 

The mower, apparently having come to life, mows the grass on its own, while the Lawnmower Man, buck naked, crawls on all fours behind the machine, and eats the grass it just has mowed. The last straw breaks when the machine chases and kills a terrified mole, which the man then devours with pleasure. Harold vomits and passes out in terror. During the following strange interaction between the two men, the Lawnmower explains that his job has substantial benefits, and his boss makes sacrificial victims of customers who cannot appreciate the new system.

Harold plays along, and for some reason he can't even explain to himself he mentions the title of a song which seems fitting in the situation (God Bless the Grass, an environmentalist song by Pete Seeger from 1966), and he's right, the brute man is delighted. As soon as the man goes back to work, though, he runs to the phone and tries to call the police, but is interrupted by the Lawnmower Man coming after him with the mower. He mentions his boss is the ancient god Pan and he wrongly thought that Parkett could have joined them. Harold ends up being brutally slaughtered in his own living room, and the police concludes that he was murdered by a schizophrenic sex maniac, hahaha.

This, my friends, is exactly the kind of nonsense I'm living for. You can't help but laugh at the absurdity of the lengths King would go to take a jab Republican America, and here, the avenger being a brute of a man working on behalf of a pastoral deity, a god of sexual prowess, nature and wilderness, who looks like the opposite of everything one would think of by the mention of a pastoral deity. I'm sure there are analyses and reviews somewhere of this masterpiece, I personally love to read it and let its charm work on me without further questioning the aim and purpose of the story. For me, it is above all, the kind of nonsense only King can write and can make work.

There is  a movie with the same title, but has nothing to do with the story. The reason it bears the same title is that the makers somehow bought all rights to Night Shift, but decided to do what most filmmakers do and mix it with some other elements which alienated the movie from the book so far that it turned into something else entirely, a kind of futuristic Flowers for Algernon in this case.

If you're looking for further media, there is a decent audiobook version and a short film from ages ago, unfortunately of very bad quality, but which is true to the written work and I also love the cast.

Up next in The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King; two of King's most famous horror works, we're turning to addiction management and the epitome of the creepy kid trope, Quitters Inc. and Children of the Corn.