Snail-paced, we finally made it to the third Stephen King short story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, in almost two years, and at whopping 993 pages it looks like we're going to dwell here for a while.
Published in 1993, King jokes in his prologue that he likes to publish a short story collection every seven years because the interval between his first three collections follow that pattern (we have to keep an eye on the future collections to see if he breaks that rule).
The collection which is dedicated to writer Thomas Williams consists of 24 pieces of writing: one novella (Dolan's Cadillac), one teleplay (Sorry, Right Number), one non-fiction essay (Head Down), one poem (Brooklyn August) and twenty short stories (The End of the Whole Mess, Suffer the Little Children, The Night Flier, Popsy, It Grows On You, Chattery Teeth, Dedication, The Moving Finger, Sneakers, You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, Home Delivery, Rainy Season, My Pretty Pony, The Ten O'Clock People, Crouch End, The House on Maple Street, The Fifth Quarter, The Doctor's Case, Umney's Last Case and The Beggar and the Diamond.)
There is a whole mini series that shares the collection's title, but it is not an absolute adaptation; three of the eight episodes are based on short stories from two other collections; Battleground is from Night Shift (we've already discussed that one) and The Road Virus Heads North as well as Autopsy Room Four stem from his fifth short story collection Everything's Eventual. The stories adapted from Nightmares and Dreamscapes are Crouch End, Umney's Last Case, The End of the Whole Mess, The Fifth Quarter, and finally You Know They Got a Hell of a Band. As of now, you can find all episodes on YouTube for free.
As you see, we have a lot to read and a lot to watch next season, so let us not lose time and let's go! Please remember that I use spoilers all over and that it would be good to read along and watch along!
Dolan's Cadillac (originally published in Castle Rock, King's official newsletter, in monthly installments from February to June 1985)
Dolan is a crazy rich and evil crime lord living in Las Vegas. He leads a life of money and glory, but what he doesn't know is that he has a secret nemesis: schoolteacher Robinson. What does a mob boss have to do with a teacher, you say? Well, a whole lot, if you ask Robinson. Because Dolan is Robinson's whole life.
You see, Robinson's beloved late wife saw something Dolan did. The short story never explains what, only the term "Dolan slipped" is used and we're told to look it up in the newspapers, so we know it's something illegal but it's left to our imagination what specifically it is. Human trafficking? Contraband? Murder? Whatever you want. The police fails to protect her in a witness protection program she joins and she is killed by a car bomb.
Haunted by the idea of Dolan, Robinson swears revenge and does something very strange to get it. After seven years of brooding, he devises a scheme for which he will need to join a road paving crew and become a construction worker. He has been observing Dolan for seven years and knows the times he is driven in his Cadillac using the same route every time he travels to California. He plots to force the car into taking a different route through fake street signs and make it fall into a trench he will have dug and then bury it into the ground, including Dolan and his chauffeur.
Robinson joins the road crew who works under inhuman conditions under the sun even though he isn't built for the job, but they tolerate him and he learns how to operate the heavy equipment to excavate the hole.
Dolan is very well protected and his car is armored, so there is only one way to trap him and only this one chance to make it but luckily on a fateful 4th of July weekend it all works perfectly. Robinson can even enjoy some satisfaction by listening to Dolan plead and beg for his life while trapped in the tightly enclosed car, and buries his living enemy into the ground to suffocate and die painfully.
The newspapers report Dolan's disappearance but no one really mourns or misses him, and Robinson actually gets away with it.
Now, if you think this is all a little unrealistic or extreme, hear me out. Robinson is a schoolteacher and he has a friend who is a mathematician. Mathematician, I say! So a big chunk of this story is about calculations on how to dig a hole where a Cadillac will be trapped without anyone noticing. Although I still don't completely understand how to do it, I can appreciate a thorough job and exact calculations, and Robinson seems to be a master in that.
King has a way to write about criminals, especially (but not always) organized criminals, and an underdog fighting against this system by doing something criminal themselves: The Ledge, Survivor Type, Dolan's Cadillac, The Death of Jack Hamilton, The Wedding Gig... There is certainly a kind of fascination with "The Family" that keeps tickling King's fancy so much so that it is one of his recurrent tropes. At university I attended a course about the mob in fiction and we used to watch stuff like The Sopranos or Mulholland Drive and analyze the Mafia structures in these and I can't recall much anymore, but I remember the fascination has something to do with the wish of the individual to break free from society, but with the mafia it is at the expense of being trapped in another little societal structure.
The movie adaptation clarifies why Robinson's wife had to die and offers a good-looking and unlikable Dolan played by Christian Slater. That's actually everything good I can say about the movie because the acting is super forced and over the top and the movie itself is nothing but a run of the mill action thriller and very far from being my favorite movie. Although I like the published short story.
There were loud and dusty construction works at the railway behind my flat while I was reading this story and I really hope that none of those workers has beef with me.
The End of the Whole Mess (originally published in Omni Magazine in 1986)
...and we fucked up.
I was going to write that King's short story The End of the Whole Mess follows the post apocalyptic tradition of Margaret Atwood's kick-ass Madaddam Trilogy, especially the first book Oryx and Crake, but then I realized that King's story was published a good fifteen years earlier. So, it is more like The End of the Whole Mess is foreshadowing Atwood's successful dystopia, but King isn't listed as an influence for it, and as far as I remember Atwood distanced herself from Science Fiction all together, I forget the reason.
Both stories have the same skeleton, though: the narrator is a survivor of some sort of cataclysm that was brought about some crazy genius who was in a close relationship with the narrator. Here, the genius and the complicit narrator are brothers.
Howard Fornoy relates in his personal journal (written on a typewriter) the life of his younger brother Bobby, a child prodigy and later Messiah. Throughout his tale he specifies that he needs to hurry up and that he doesn't have much time to tell the end of everything. We know he has injected himself with something so he can focus well enough to tell his story. We are also told from the beginning that Howard has just killed Bobby.
While growing up, Bobby was always ahead in his development and had a very bright and alert personality on top of his scientific genius. One summer he leaves his home for Texas to conduct some sociological experiment, and comes back a changed person, obsessed with the effects of geography on violence and crime statistics. According to a map he drew, crime levels diminish around the town of La Plata which he investigated and came to the conclusion that a substance in the town's water supply calms down living beings, erasing anger and violence.
In order to prevent an impending nuclear war Bobby and Howard plan on catapulting this substance all around the world with the help of the expulsion force of a volcano in Borneo which will send tons of the substance into Earth's atmosphere. The experiment indeed causes a reduction in crime and hostilities, but it turns out there is a side effect: people that were introduced to this substance gradually start showing symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer, and eventually turn into "drooling and babbling idiots" as King so tactfully puts it, resulting inevitably in death.
As soon as Howard makes this announcement in his journal his grammatical style and spelling start deteriorating, and the reader now understands why he kept saying he didn't have much time. Howard injected himself with an antidote that would give him the limited time to record his confession. Slowly his writing becomes incoherent and in the end we lose the poor sod.
We find here a stylistic method that King seems to enjoy a lot because he used it before in Survivor Type - the Flowers for Algernon's Charlie Gordon type of descent into madness. I've discussed this in depth here, and I would argue that in this story the device is less effective, almost like he wrote the story to be able to use this method. That's my impression.
The idea of humanity coming to an end with most people "either dead or dibbling idiots" is a deeply, deeply sarcastic idea and very darkly funny. And a very King kind of idea. He has these small, usual, maybe insignificant things sparking a reaction that snowballs into the end of the world: a flu virus in The Stand, mobile phones in Cell, human paranoia in The Dome, the death of a person in "The Life of Chuck" and so forth and so on. Plus, a crazy genius wanting to end all wars is exactly the kind of thing that can go majorly wrong in any sort of universe.
There is a movie adaptation, or rather an episode of the series Nightmares and Dreamscapes in almost movie length. The narrator Howard is a writer in the short story, but the adaptation changed his profession to a documentary filmmaker, and his written journal turns into a video. Finally, the two brothers commit suicide together in the series rather than Howard killing Bobby, which is a logically more coherent ending in my opinion. You can watch it here.
Suffer the Little Children (originally published in Cavalier in 1972)
Are you too a person afraid of children in masses? Do you change the subway wagon you're in as soon as a class of children enters? Do you cup your ears and flee when the PE class sharing your gym or pool starts getting loud and wild? Then, you're on my team, and this King story is all the more real for people like us.
Miss Emily is a third grade teacher and one day she has this eerie feeling that one of her students, Robert, is staring at her. He indeed has his creepy gaze fixed on her, making Emily gradually more nervous and annoyed by him. She starts punishing him but Robert implies that he can shapeshift and unnerves her some more and adds fuel to the fire by keeping on taunting her. Day after day Emily gets more and more paranoid, almost hysterical, one time she even almost gets run over by a bus.
Robert then tells her that there are many students that have been replaced by little monsters, and while the real students are imprisoned, their doppelgängers roam around. He says of the real Robert: "I can hear him screaming, Miss Sidley. He wants me to let him out." (Does this remind you of a certain horror movie made this year?;)
Emily's terror and paranoia reach the point where one day she takes her brother's gun to school and kills twelve children... She then is sent to a mental hospital and her therapy includes contact with children. Working with them on her mental state, she realizes that they stare fixedly at her and asks to be removed from the room. Following the incident, she commits suicide.
Well, this was dark.
The augmenting tension in the story is, of course, due to the uncertainty of whether these little monsters are really snatching little childrens' bodies or if Ms Emily is really batshit insane. It was published as early as 1972, so it must have ridden the third wave of creepy kid-mania along with works like The Omen or The Exorcist, which came after its invention in the Victorian age, and a mid twentieh century second wave (Midwitch Cuckoos, The Bad Seed etc). Extremely disturbing, yet perfectly written, Suffer the Little Children will make you want to read and re-read it in the hopes of finding a clue as to which one is culprid, insanity or shapeshifting monsters, and leave you in the same delicious uncertainty each time.
There are three short film adaptations, 2006 (a Dollar Baby production), 2012, 2015, and apparently a feature is in the making. I'd really love to see that movie.
So, my friends and fellow constant readers, we have broken in a new short story collection and we're here to stay for a while, so make yourself cozy. There are many good short stories ahead of us and next we'll discuss; The Night Flier, Popsy, It Grows On You, Chattery Teeth, and Dedication.
Stay safe!
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