In my introductory blog post to Skeleton Crew I stated that there are stories in this collection that outright bother me, that I don't like, and even yes, I hate. I don't mean to be preachy or judgy, but some of these are extremely mean - especially against people above a certain weight. I don't want to claim that King is fat-phobic, but after re-reading these stories, I almost think he might be. I certainly hope it was a phase and he's not like that still, because it is a bitter pill to swallow for me, as I'm obviously a fan of his.
Where do we draw the line in such cases, though? How can a reader discriminate between an author writing a character realistically, with their flaws, misogynistic, racist, homophobic characters because in real life they exist and should be written about; and an author being himself misogynistic, racist, homophobic and using a character as his mouthpiece? This is a difficult task for any reader and I'm usually very lenient and give authors plenty benefit of the doubt.
It very much depends on the piece of writing, too, as you will see below. The short story The Wedding Gig has a heavy woman as the lead, and King makes you feel like he only wrote about her to get riled up about fat people. The whole story revolves around her being fat and her husband smaller than her and making fun of and diminishing her because of her weight. King even compares black people to fat people, as for the narrator in the story both states are undesirable, but black people can't do anything about it, while fat people can stop eating. Which isn't true, and a harmful opinion. And this whole discussion is just stupid, people are like they are and everybody should mind their own business, full stop.
The next loathed story, Word Processor of the Gods, revolves around a man acting like he's the victim in his family constellation, as if it wasn't his own choice who he married and in what manner his child was raised. Instead of taking accountability for his own life, like maybe getting a divorce, he opts for "deleting" his wife and his son and inserts instead the person he thinks he should have married and the child he should have had. Oh yeah, and his wife he deletes is fat, and the wife he was given is not. This is just mean-spirited...
So in this post, I'll take a look at two of those problematic stories which go beyond the usual weirdly sexual undertone present in most of King's early work and which cross the line of good taste. The other stories in today's post just had the misfortune of being placed between and around these two stories.
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!
Welcome to my least favorite Stephen King story of all time! (It's OK, I love Stephen King but I can't love everything he wrote...)
The Wedding Gig is told from the viewpoint of a musician, a man who leads a jazz band in the year 1927 in Chicago during the Prohibition era. He and his band are hired by Irish American mafia boss Mike Scollay to play at the wedding of his sister Maureen who is overweight. During the wedding Mike is confronted by a guy sent from his arch enemy "the Greek" who openly insults Maureen and shortly after, Mike is shot down in a gunfire.
Later, our narrator talks to Maureen in a bar. She is devastated by the guilt of having caused her brother's death and is filled with self-hate for being overweight. After that night, the narrator never sees her again, but hears from her, as she overtakes her brother's position and grows the business even more than her brother or the Greek ever could. Of course, she gets her revenge but dies shortly after, it is said that her weight had even increased more than her already large size.
So the unnamed narrator of this story has a strange sort of personality and King definitely wanted to tell us something about MC's view of marginalized groups. But what? Before he even talks about Maureen, he mentions an exchange with one of his black band members and calls him a slur-word, only to apologize later and reflect upon himself. His band-mate takes offense at it and leaves the band to go on and join an all black band.
In the same way he has a very unlikable attitude towards Maureen and keeps on insulting her and making fun of her weight (all in his own head, he wouldn't be honest enough to say it to her face), but somewhere it feels like he wants to have empathy with her... if only she weren't that damn fat! So like it's clearly Maureen's own fault to look the way she looks.
All in all, honestly, I'm not sure what this story is trying to do, is trying to say. The narrator is very aware of his own bias, it's the Jim Crow era and at least he tries to be kind to his band mate, and feels bad for Maureen. But then again can't stop discriminating against them. Obviously I don't really like people who act like that neither in real life nor in fiction. We are not our bodies.
Paranoid: A Chant
Every now and then King will publish a poem, and he's above moderately skilled at it. Paranoid: A Chant is a 100-line recursive poem which ends with the same lines it begins with, the stanza "I can't go out no more. There's a man by the door in a raincoat". It is a first-person account of a person with paranoid schizophrenia who complains about various seemingly imagined/hallucinated horrors inflicted to him by various people around him - his neighbor, the waitress etc.
The narrator has written 500 journals with 500 pages in each with all the wrongs done to him. There's a big conspiracy against him, and as it mentions "A dark man with no face", thus Randall Flagg, it is connected to The Dark Tower series. In order to protect himself he resorts to chants and charms.
There is a Dollar Baby adaptation by director Jay Holben, who went on to direct some episodes of Dexter, and another film with the full name Paranoid: A Chant, by Alex Horton, both from the year 2000. And an infinite number of audio versions and short films you can find on YouTube, just pick one.
I do like this poem even though I'm not very much into horror in verse form, but the subject matter is one that touches me because I had a relative with this condition and it's not very fun. Not as sensational as one might think, but it's indeed very creepy by design. Although the poem does not reflect what I understand under "paranoid schizophrenia", it's a nice read anyway.
The Raft (Gallery, 1982)
Swimming in a lake, or any non flowing water, is disgusting if you think about it. On the few hot days I decided to go swimming in a lake around Berlin I have been unexceptionally each time grossed out by the stinking algae, the lukewarm water, and the little insects and bacilli swimming ashore, yuck! So to see a black, slick film of oil-like thing floating on the surface of a lake, doesn't sound like fiction to me. It's Berliner reality.
The short story was adapted as a segment of the 1987 horror anthology film Creepshow 2, I highly recommend watching the whole anthology part 1 and 2. There's also a quite well narrated audio version.
For me, this story boils down to two things: firstly, the aggressive virility of the main character and secondly, the eco-horror.
Randy's head is a very uncomfortable place for me to be in. I never claimed to be able to relate to a college frat boy whose hormones work on full swing, and who only sees competition in friends and mating opportunities in friends who are girls. That's an exhausting place to be, a very tiring lens to look through. Stephen King, on the other hand, must know how it is to be a young men, so I'll trust his judgement on that. This kind of psychology, when placed in an environment of imminent mortal danger, creates a special kind of tension where this seeming "masculinity" clashes with the childish, primitive urge to just run away and save one's own life. In the short film adaptation this is highlighted even better than in the written work, as Randy waits for the oily thing to attack his love interest, and while it is busy eating her, he uses that to quickly disappear. His "animal manliness" though, when he finally reaches the shore, makes him turn around and yell at the creature (how stupid), and turns him into a victim of his own manly pride... I prefer the ending in the movie, to be honest.
The monster in this story is a biggish, black film of oily substance on the surface of the lake, and it's clearly reminiscent of the pictures of leaked oil tankers and animals, birds, fish, seals covered in the hazardous substance, dying of it. And it has come into this story to take revenge from humans, nature's revenge. It has hands now and can grab too. And the more it eats, the more it grows... This is the same kind of open-end horror as in The Mist, Grey Matter, or even I Am the Doorway, where we follow the main character experiencing the initial impact of a newly settling horror, being vanquished by it, only for the horror then to expand into unthinkable dimensions. Who knows how far this oil stain will extend?
Word Processor of the Gods (Playboy, 1983)
Writer Richard Hagstrom, middle-aged, married to a woman he hates, father to a son he even hates more, receives a birthday present from his nephew Jonathan from beyond the grave. The teenager who died in a car accident (caused by Richard's brother driving drunk) was a sort of genius and built a word processor, but not any word processor, this one can make wishes come true... You just have to type it in.
Richard blames his wife, who is clearly frustrated herself in their marriage, for having gained weight and not being attractive and being mean to him. His son Seth, that he himself, along with his wife, brought into this world and raised the way he turned out to be, is annoying him. So instead of taking responsibility for the reality he chose and created for himself he decides to just create for himself a new reality without his wife and son. He decides he wants to have his brother's wife and son instead, and he writes that and it becomes true.
I don't get this story, really. Is this a kind of fairy tale for people who don't like to face the truth and the consequences to their actions? Why do you have to delete people from this Earth, just get a divorce? Your son is mean, maybe do some parenting? Plus, he now has a fake family he doesn't have any memories with or any genuine feelings for, only the envy he felt for his brother's life.
There's again so much fat shaming here, it's annoying. Some of the best people I know weigh heavy and I never felt attracted to people looking conventionally good. In fact I used to have a boyfriend whose character changed when he lost weight and became this insufferable person, while before losing weight he was so much fun to be with, thus attractive. I don't know... As a person who was very much influenced by King in my formative years, this is a perspective that I guess I don't really want to have anything to do with. Not this time!
A good audio version can be found here. It was filmed as an episode for Tales from the Dark Side and I have seen that episode years ago and remember it very vaguely, but I'm not sure where you can watch it currently.
The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands (Shadows 4, 1982)
A story within a story, told by a man who went to play a couple of rounds of card games in a New York private club and met the titular winner of the game who refused to shake hands with anyone. When someone goes ahead and enthusiastically shakes his hands anyway, he (the person who went and shook his hands) dies shortly thereafter. Our narrator Gregson does a little research and finds out that the man was cursed in Bombay after accidentally causing the death of a boy, and whoever he touches, is bound to die.
One of the first books I have read by King was Thinner, which too is about a curse. The constant anxiety, stress, uneasiness of a person burdened with the inescapability of a curse is something King can convey very well. The observation skills of the narrator are off the charts, and so is his will to research the mystery behind this man he only once saw and talked to.
I wouldn't place this story among the best of this collection, but not among the worsts either, so it ranks somewhere in the middle I guess.
There are lots of adaptations, short and long: 2009 (dir. Ian Klink), 2013 (Brandon Herron), a Turkish Dollar Baby version from 2023 (dir. Mila Safiye), 2022 (dir. Nicholas Bromund), 2023 (dir. Giancarlo Bustos), 2025 (dir. Richard Thompson), but I guess the record holder is still Cain Rose Up.
So, that was that, see you next time - don't shake too many hands, mind what you type and where you swim, and be nice to people! You never know...
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