The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King - Skeleton Crew Pt. 2 - Tigers, Shooters, and Portals to Uncanny Worlds

After breaking routine in the last installment of "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King" and comparing a novella with its film adaptation, here we are back to our usual, continuing discussing the short stories in the second King collection Skeleton Crew.

It would be good if you read along, or at least know or be familiar with the stories because I will spoil everything! Let's go!

Here, There Be Tygers (Ubris 1968)

As I never parented any children, and in Türkiye we say that an aunt is half a mother, I concentrated that energy on my poor niece, whose horror education I took upon myself. So, when she turned eleven years old, I gifted her Pet Sematary and with twelve she got Skeleton Crew, in which I marked with colorful sticky notes which story she can read at what age. Here, There Be Tygers was the first story she read. She closed the book, later in the day she took pink cardboard paper on which she drew a unicorn and a rainbow, she glued that picture over the book's cover picture (which is of the creepy cymbal-monkey from The Monkey) and very probably never opened it again...

Despite this crushing failure of my half-parenting skills in this, I still hold on to the claim that Here, There Be Tygers is the best piece of writing for young readers to start reading Stephen King. First of all, it's about a third-grader, Charles, who, during class, asks for permission to go to pee. And that's an uncomfortable feeling every child can relate to. His mean teacher Miss Bird then humiliates him in front of the class, which is also relatable even for the youngest ones. When he arrives and stands at the bathroom door, he finds a real tiger lying on the floor, which is not so common an experience, and he kind of loses the adult reader, but not the child whose imagination is still vivid. The beast then attacks and eats first his friend Kenny (yes, they killed Kenny), and later, Miss Bird too.

This is the first story King ever wrote as a high-school student, so it is basically written by a young person for other young persons. And that's also why I think, even though some people tried to make up some explanations as to deeper meanings of the story, there is none. This is a story about a boy who finds a tiger in the school's bathroom. It's not that deep.

There is an official Dollar Baby adaptation and a very amateur but very enjoyable indie short film adaptation here.

Cain Rose Up (Ubris 1968)

Staying in educational institutions, we move up in age in the next short story. Cain Rose Up, plain and simple, is the story of college student Curt Garrish who one day goes crazy and starts shooting people on campus from his dorm room. He has had a particularly hard day, takes his rifle hidden in the closet, tells a student who has some business in his room the story of Cain and Abel, and just begins shooting.

This short story is raw, matter-of-fact, and immediately cuts to the chase. It is meant as an excerpt with a minimal amount of time to build up enough tension leading to the devastation point. Some points have been made that are critical of writing about a shooter, though the protagonist is not a hero and there is neither redemption nor empathy for him here. 

Interestingly there are so many short film adaptations that I'll list them by the year for the sake of easiness; 1989 (by David C. Spillers), 2010 (by Robert Livings), 2010 (by Jeven Dovey), 2011 (by Stacey Colinares), 2013 (by Ranjeet S. Marwa), 2017 (by Jesse James Marshall - follow link the watch the full short film), 2018 (by A. J. Gribble), 2019 (by Zack Speed), 2021 (by Amy Nigro), 2021 (by Justin Tackett), 2021 (by Cooper Wood), 2022 (by Craig Douglas), and finally 2022 again (by Miguel Marquez). The David C. Spillers, A.J. Gribble and Miguel Marquez versions are all Dollar Baby productions.

I think this was so far the one single short story that has the most film adaptations. Can we draw any conclusions from that? Possibly. That Americans are obsessed with shooters. It's really far from being his best short story, not even the best in this collection. Or maybe it leaves lots of space for interpretation and is thus good material for a filmmaker to work with. I don't know.

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut (Redbook Magazine, 1984)

That woman was mad for a shortcut.

If there were the one character written by King that I relate to most, it's not the downtrodden Carrie White, not the obsessive fan Annie Wilkes, nor the resilient Dolores Claiborne. It is Ophelia Todd. Mrs. Todd who loses sleep at night because of her perpetual search for the best shortcut. Now, I don't drive a car, I only have my bike, but that only strengthens this habit of mine of constantly calculating the shorter and best way to reach my destination because I can ride on more routes than a car can. And if I had to fold time and space and create a wormhole, I would. Just like Mrs. Todd does.

Her story, told from the point of view of the now elderly Homer Buckland to our narrator David, who, in his easy New England manner, hangs out at a small town gas station and chatters with his friend, is a delight to read on two levels. The first is the naturalistic quality of the story; these two men sitting there chatting in their Maine accent, like I can see the two guys before my inner eye, it is such an enjoyable piece of Americana.

The second level is the supernatural aspect, because following her obsession of finding an ever shorter shortcut, Mrs. Todd discovers a way to jump between worlds. She lets Homer in on her secret and lets him accompany her when she crosses the borders of reality and dimension, not only finding new worlds along the way but also terrible local flora and fauna, like moving trees, or horrifying rodent-like creatures, the latter possibly being a billy-bumbler, a reference to The Dark Tower. She also discovers that these little trips make her younger, so it is also a means of time travel, perhaps.

This "crossover" between the mundane and inter-dimensional travel is beautiful, and the story ending in the wholesome way it does, this is just one of the best stories in this collection. But not the best, because that's still to come.

The Jaunt (The Twilight Zone Magazine, 1981)

Let's jump, or "jaunt" to another rapid travel option, as it is a common transportation/teleportation mode in the short story of the same name. The Jaunt orbits around a family in the 24th century preparing to jaunt to Mars and having about half an hour left until their departure, the father telling his two children, who will jaunt for the first time, the story of how jaunting was invented. It turns out it is of imminent importance to be unconscious during the jaunt, because otherwise your conscious mind is left alone with its own thoughts in an endless field of white, an eternity, and causes for that person to go insane or die of the shock thereof. The father, not wanting to scare his children, omits the part where many many people and laboratory mice died in the process of the discovery. In the end, it is this omission that leads to a catastrophe, as his curious son finds a way to evade the anesthesia and ends the story, his hair turned all white, with his last words "Longer than you think! Longer than you think!" and gauges out his own eyes.

If you're not familiar with the sfnal trope "jaunting", it stems from Alfred Bester's excellent classic The Stars My Destination, in which the mode of transportation was discovered by a scientist, who accidentally causes a fire in his laboratory, and wishes so much to be elsewhere that it comes true. Having found out that this is possible through sheer mental power, but only when he is really really pressed with urgency, a hoard of scientists start a series of murder attempts in order to find out how he did it. All in the name of science... It's hilarious, to be frank. The origin story in The Jaunt is a different one, and yours to discover.

The Jaunt is above all low-key environmental; humanity exhausted Earth's oil reserves, natural resources, especially water has dried out and jaunting offers humanity a solution for all of this - just travel around and colonize new places. For instance, Jupiter's water reserves can last a further 20.000 years, which is amazing for mankind, who, instead of analyzing and moderating his own consumption, instead starts exploiting new places, killing other planets' environments.

Apart from that, the concept of the horror related here, the horror of eternal consciousness, is uncanny as hell, especially for overthinkers like me. The mind is meant to be finite, just imagine what it would feel like to stretch it over an eternity... King also throws in the word "unthinkable", combined with the unknowable nature of this horror, the result is a very fine, very unique sort of cosmic horror.  

I didn't find any worthwhile free audiobook productions, but you can purchase the audiobook and listen to the excellent Robert Petkoff narration. There's a rumored TV series coming up, so let's wait and see what that brings. Just as an aside - Why does it have to be a show and not a movie? Why do they want to stretch our finite minds over many episodes of time and space?

The Jaunt, again, is one of the better stories in Skeleton Crew, but I would put it on number two of my favorites. If you already have read the whole book, then I think you might guess what my number one story is, like with everything you guys know about me and my taste in books, it's not hard to guess. We're getting closer there, but not quite yet...

Next off: The Wedding Gig, Paranoid: A Chant, The Raft, Word Processor of the Gods, and The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands.