The Twisting Lens of Fractal Time and the Beautiful Ravages of the Snotpocalypse* (THE STAND, 1978, 1990)

THE STAND (1978, 1990)

The world catches the flu and drops dead. If things weren't bad enough, a psychotic, narcissistic, jiveturkey clown drives the surviving population to cataclysmic ends using fear, lies, and the malignant power of the cult of personality...heyyyy...

I'm not going to say anything about this cover
other than the painfully obvious: it has nothing
whatsoever to do with the book. I couldn't torture
a guess out of this even if I wanted to try. 

I started reading the original version of The Stand (published 1978, set in the early 80s) as a snot-nosed high schooler. The Stand remained my very favorite Stephen King novel until It came along and stole this Loser's heart, in many ways, forevermore. The original publication, a relatively slim 800+ pages, was still a hefty undertaking for a kid that had never tackled anything thicker than 500 pages at that point. Packed within those pages, with careful plotting and an underlying moral so clear even a squirrel-headed teeny could catch the drift, was a story thick with interesting and conflicted characters, creeping horrors that revved up to roaring terrors, and a doubling down of misfortunes so sinister in conception one wonders if the lesson was all that clear after all.

A grimly humorous irony--and cherished memory--was the fact that the only time I could ever devote to reading The Stand the way I wanted to (straight through, no interruptions save the necessary) was either during summer break or, as I was more keen to do, when I was home sick from school with hours of hacking, coughing, and sneezing time to spare. There was something deliciously twisted about delving into the demise of the human race under the relentless virulence of the US government created superflu, Project Blue (aka Captain Trips), while combating my own garden variety virus. The very first time I read The Stand was under the heady fog of flu, propped up on pillows and swimming in tissues. The bonus visceral experience made that reading just as scary as you'd imagine. I've often wondered if that inaugural reading hardwired me to enjoy the first half of the novel just slightly more than the last. To this day, it remains true, though it's balanced out some over the years. It's either that, or perhaps because the first half of the novel is primarily rooted in reality--germ warfare is real, human egomania is boundless, stupid happens--whereas the back half is steeped in fairy-tale mysticism and the cruel extension of trials, a seemingly never-ending battering of heartache, disappointment, failures, and the looming threat of complete annihilation.

Same as above...and the description is wrong.
What the hell, dude.

So I read The Stand during various outbreaks of colds and flu, gleefully suffering from some of the same symptoms that were so effectively killing people in the story, enjoying a sick thrill not dissimilar to those movie-rides at Disney where the seats jimble jamble and they mist you in the face to heighten the experience. By the time the "complete and uncut" version of The Stand came out in 1990, I'd read the original more than a half a dozen times. It was well-worn and well-known. When I finally got around to the new edition, it was more of a curiosity and less a thrill. Nonetheless, I loved many of the additions, especially the confrontation between Frannie and her mother, and felt that most of what King added back served to strengthen the overall story. All in all, though, I had "moved on." There were quite a few King works that lit my fire hotter and brighter than the dusty ol' Stand, and college was expanding my tastes in insatiable bounds, so my copy of the complete and uncut edition of The Stand got shelved for a once-a-decade read through (if that) if for nothing else, a tiny, faded taste of nostalgia...me on my bed, buoyed by blankets and tissues, goggle eyed and snorting through the demise of the world. Good times.

Before I go on, I must acknowledge a certain elephant, for he is quite lorge, full trumpet-y, and stinky. It's been weighing on me ever since I started re-reading these first King novels, so I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about the rotten facts of bigotry. I can't speak for every popular novel from the past, but I'd imagine similar levels of sexism, racism, and homophobia are smattered through the pages of many bestselling mass market paperbacks with yellowed edges and cracked spines. When portraying the general populous, or at least the primarily white-faced facets of it, the truth is laid bare for all to see. In the 1980s, women may have "come a long way," but they were expected to marry and reproduce. They might work, but they better fix dinner, bake pies, do the laundry, raise the children, and clean that house Spic-n-Span. People of color were gaining traction, but racism was rampant, systemic, and largely unacknowledged by whites (imagine now but much, much worse). And homophobia? Standard. Remember that an entire generation of gay men were left to die of a literal plague because people, at best, didn't want to talk about it and, at worst, believed that a "chosen lifestyle" was being punished by God. We all have indeed come a long way, baby. There are miles to go, even so.

You can see the decorative elements added to the first page of
each chapter, full bleed art. 

Inside cover showing embossed
stamping, first class. 

The Stand is a worthwhile read, but I would be lying if I said some passages weren't grating and sometimes downright infuriating, especially when the bigotry seeps in so casually, so matter-of-fact, that you just have to stop and take a breath. It's a relic of a bygone age. The world still requires changing, and some deep introspection and unfettered honesty, but I know the breadth and depth of my own understanding and empathy for other human beings has expanded greatly since 1978, 1987, 1992, 2001...right to the here and now. I would never claim to be perfectly "woke"--no one should--but I believe true compassion is a process and no more black and white than the protagonists and antagonists in King's The Stand. I would expect any modern casual reader of The Stand to suffer similar misgivings, discomfort, and inner conflict.

To bear the casual, ignorant, even well-intended bigotry, I've tried to see these early King works as artifacts as much as they are entertainment or art, similar to how I choose to view the almost unbearable Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, oft taught and repeatedly (understandably) challenged. Denying history--how people truly treated one another: the sorrow, the pain, and the dehumanization, both radical and casual--dooms us to repeat it. The answer to these uncomfortable/offensive uses of language and stereotypes is not censorship or incineration. The answer is definitely not to jam such "great works" as Huck Finn down highschooler's throats simply because some old, dusty mummy declared it part of the sacred Western lit canon. A thoughtful approach is required, teaching history and literature in the same breath, with a clear understanding that we are reading from a modern lens, bent to our perceptions in the Now. If wishing it could only make it true. Unfortunately, the bleak status of the public school curriculum makes it unlikely to ever expect a qualified approach to such texts, even if there were time between all those "vital" standardized tests.

First page (i) of the preliminaries, a seriously glowing
praise page. Many King fans consider The Stand his
best work and, at the very least, their favorite.

Third page of the preliminaries (iii). standard,
current-to-this-edition author bio page.

The bent lens, the perspective of Now, is always at the fore of these re-readings of King's works. Truth be told, every offhand use of the n-word bugs the living shit out of me. But I'm working on keeping that separation, working hard, because the biggest challenge is around the corner and, quite frankly, I'm already dreading it. My sentimental favorite is coming up soon. Anyone who's read It knows it is all kinds of problematic, but I'm gritting my teeth especially against the memory of Trashmouth Richie Tozier and his godforsaken "Voices," one of which is...well, predictable. There's a difference between the racist ranting of the bully Henry Bowers and the embarrassing antics of Richie's very worst "Voices," just like any portrayal of a racist ass racist being a POS racist is different from, say, a certain author who makes every African American character speak in some form of jive. Acute, virulent racism is easy to condemn; it is the sneaking, systemic racism that is harder to pin down. It's the same kind of racism that provokes such sour defenses as "I didn't mean it like that," or "you people take yourselves too seriously," or my favorite, "Obama was president, racism is gone, why can't you get over it."

I don't want to misportray The Stand as some sort of post-apocalyptic romp through the song of the South--it is absolutely not--but the blips of casual racism smart, like cutting little slivers of ice against your cheek, and if nothing else reminds the reader of just how much closer we are to understanding one another. No, not all of us, but enough to make a difference. And enough to make rereading beloved novels from yesterday a bittersweet endeavor.

I hadn't read The Stand for at least ten years when I picked up a paperback copy at the library some weeks ago (my hardcover 1990 edition went to the Strand; the original paperback is lost in the loose pages of time). Even with that gulf of time between us, I was prepared to be bored. I have read The Stand many, many times. And I'm not going to lie. This last read-through was a bit of a slog. Lots of been there, done that, and more lines and sections memorized than even I expected. But though it was sometimes tediously familiar, I still found things that surprised me, more in how my perspective had changed than anything I'd missed or forgotten.

Prelim page iv, the staggering ad page,
updated to 2014 so very interesting...

One of the biggest (and most welcome) differences was re-experiencing a post-apocalyptic novel that, for all its death and doom, still remains much sunnier than the more modern post-apocalyptic works. Much, much sunnier. When I was in my prime The Stand-reading era, the world was still years from enduring the beautiful torture that is Cormac McCarthy's The Road or the evolving ugliness of The Walking Dead. A cornerstone theme in both works is the driving Evil of Man, that once society breaks down, the survivors devolve into unspeakable violence against one another. In at least the original version of The Stand, even the "bad" side was the law and order sort of bad. Sure, mass murder was on the menu, and yes, people who broke the rules were regularly crucified, but all that rape plus rape and more rape with a side of cannibalism was a big no-no, even in the Dark Man's land. Now, the new and revised edition does feature a backstory to secondary characters Susan Stern and Dayna Jurgens, both of whom had been captured and held for purposes of sexual-sadistic pleasures of men with guns in what was leeringly called "the zoo." But even this scenario is depicted as more of an outlier, not an eventuality, and while it was hard to read, the ugly situation was readily rectified by the women of the zoo itself, taking the chance to even the odds during the tense clash between their group and that of our already established heroes, who were on the road to find Mother Abigail and her like-minded flock of "good people."

You know I love a full title page that pulls
elements from the cover design, y'alllll. Too bad
it's from the 1990 edition so doesn't match with
anything other than our wistful memories I guess.

Copyright page identifying this printing as a
2012 Anchor Books edition, the same as the
library copy of Night Shift. If properly
updated. this was the 15th reprint of
this edition.

I grew up during the Cold War in a small city surrounded by both loaded missile silos and an Air Force base, so it was a common childhood "joke" to claim that once World War III broke out and all the missiles were flying, my friends and I would simply step outside and wait for the white flash of oblivion. These declarations became commonplace especially after watching The Day After on network television; the very idea of surviving an nuclear apocalypse was more terrifying than dying in one. Despite the sadness and shock of losing loved ones and just about everyone else, the protagonists of The Stand also find adventure, new beginnings, new challenges, new community, and an underlying, driving need to congregate for a greater purpose, to make one final stand. And while Captain Trips was cataclysmic to human, canine, and horse populations, the summer of death leaves the land still vibrant and green; the grass grows wild and the deer are plentiful. The roads may be crammed with traffic jams and stalled cars full of dead bodies, but the stores are fully stocked with nonperishable foods and a comical surplus of goods. And sure, there's a capering demon set on destroying the people of the Free Zone, but they're together for now, picking whatever homes they wish to live in, working on getting the electricity back on, and setting about making some sort of society. The worst civil issues are drunks breaking windows and teenagers hotrodding into abandoned cars. As grim as the work can be (clearing bodies and burying them in mass graves, for example), the post-apocalypse is, at times, relentlessly cheery. There are picnics, for God's sake. It's sweet.

Decorative gutter on the dedication page.

The updated edition included this preface
explaining the new edition and why it
happened. I can't imagine even the tamest
King fan passing up a chance to read this
version. A very smart decision on the
part of the publisher, indeed.

That same perspective, the eyes of Now, also renders characters I once loved into something tarnished and even curdled. Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith are arguably the main protagonists in a very wide pyramid of incrementally less "important" characters. When I was a teenager I loved them both; I imagined Redman to be a male model Marlboro Man (and later almost identical to my imaginings of the Gunslinger), rugged with a steel jaw and beautiful eyes. He was heroic but accessible. I always imagined Frannie to be insanely beautiful, which at the time translated to Alexandra Paul in the movie of King's novel Christine, as the cross referencing, King-obsessed teenage brain is destined to do. Frannie Goldsmith was relentlessly funny, spunky, sassy, and fierce. Sure, she cried a lot, but during the time of those first readings, so did I. Then thirty years happened and hoooooo boy.

Redman is fine, maybe not so romantic, maybe not so heroic, maybe a little more steeped in reality, a little more homely in my mind's eye. His musings over his dead friends' and acquaintances' character or serious lack thereof is, in and of itself, a diminishing indictment against his own flawed nature. Redman's indulgent recollections of the dearly departed "good people" of Arnette, Texas are bracingly grim: one good ol' boy beat the shit out of his kids and another controlled the feral cat population around the homestead by crushing kitten heads under his boots. Yet nothing is quite so mystifying as Redman's unquestioning love of the extremely annoying and wildly immature Frannie Goldsmith who CRIES every minute of every day, becomes more and more shrill throughout the course of the novel, and remains infuriatingly obtuse, especially once they settle down in Boulder, Colorado. The fact that I loved her as a teen and find her obnoxious now is no surprise, I suppose, but it's more than just my transformation from youthful idiot to knowing crone. She really is just awful. Alexandra Paul in Christine would never...

Funny enough, while my sympathy for Redman and Goldsmith has dimmed, my compassion for the squeaky third wheel on their twisted lovecycle has grown. Sure, Harold Lauder is an entitled, childish, snotty little asshole, but his is a sadder story to me now. While I imagined Stu and Frannie as prom picturesque, from the very first reading I saw the angry, alienated Harold Lauder as a version of Stephen King himself. Not the man King--the wildly successful, happily married and seemingly well-adjusted King--but a sort of mangled teenage version of him: tubby, be-pimpled, black, greasy hair and lumberingly tall...I mean, how could you not see it? Harold's a frustrated writer to boot. Lauder is King if King had swerved wrong, had a different upbringing, and developed in low light all twisted and bitter.

King readers know he loves a good epigraph or
sixty, but this was one of the first to really woo
the hell out of me, I mean that BOC quote from
my (then) favorite song kicking off a book by
my favorite author? Scree. 

First page of the introductory chapter. I'd like to
point out that this gentleman is not, in fact, an
escaped patient from a "biological testing
facility." Ugh.

As I read through The Stand this last time around, I already knew Frannie would irritate (I was in my 20s when I started realizing just how dreadful she really was), but this is the first time I wondered if King deliberately wrote them that way. The strapping handsome hero and his ill-begotten prom queen, the girl Harold (Stephen) could never get except in his pubescent fantasies...were they deliberately written to vex? In the midst of all these revolving characters, each grappling with their own development and challenges, the reader must endure multiple visits to Redman and Goldsmith's love nest to witness teasing, babysitter's club notions of naughty domesticity, where they trade sly, sophomoric come ons that seem more and more disjointed from the greater narrative as each cringe-y encounter ticks off, a sort of craven, sitcom silliness in the midst of real, grownup problems including Actual, Imminent Doom. It's not to say that these characters can't be light and fun, but it happens one or three too many times by my accounting, so much so that it took me out of the story to wonder just what the hell King was up to. Trying to make us like them more...or less? I suppose it depends if you're more the Frannie or the Harold. Over the years my compassion has expanded for The Stand's various broken little boys--Trashcan Man, Larry Underwood, and even Harold--all while my patience for the patriarchy in the real world has thinned to the breadth of the last hair on Glen Bateman's head. Perhaps that is why Frannie Goldsmith's glaring shortcomings bother me so much. Goldsmith's character stalls out at "pregnant, hysterical female" and her development is hinged only on whether Stu and/or her baby survive. Any depth she might've displayed early in the novel is mired down in the grind of her screeching antics. She becomes a thing, a vessel, a come-on sexbot for her Hero Man, a carrier of the future of mankind, a sniveling wrench in the works of the Righteous. It's disappointing to say the least.

Epigraph and art plate opposite book I header.

This element does not translate well to amateur
photography. Kind of looks like old school
tv snow, doesn't it? Back when stations went
off air after the "Star Spangled Banner"?

Years grant perspective, at least if you let them, but it was still a soft surprise to find my initial resentment of other characters had lessened if not entirely evaporated. Mother Abigail was always problematic for me. I grew up going to church only under protest, a heathen child sulking in the car during Sunday school since I refused to participate, running my cassette of INXS' Shabooh Shoobah thin and squealy with the volume turned as high as I would dare in such close proximity to the frowning church. Mother Abigail's evangelical identity was completely alien, and her motivations were as confounding to me as they were non-negotiable to her. I understood her on paper, but had limited experience with the world and could not conceive of true faith. I'm no more religious now than I was then, but I understood her perfectly this time around. The same was true for Larry Underwood, the flawed hero, mega asshole who wants to be good but fails again and again. When I was a kid, I could not stand him, not one thing about him, from the beginning of the novel to the end. I didn't care that he'd improved, become a better person, or had the presence of mind to want to be good. He was just a selfish, mean little jerk with a highly stupid song whose lyrics made me want to take my fingerclaws and rake my brain (more on that in a minute). I couldn't understand Larry Underwood because I was a kid, the world was black and white, and I believed wholeheartedly that everyone chooses to be the way they are. So, if you walk like an anus, talk like an anus? You are a giant, gross butthole, sir. On purpose. It took a lot of mistakes to learn how wrong I was about that but here on the other side of the lens, Larry, while still anus-adjacent, earns some respect. He's a complex character who grows up over the course of the novel to become a person worthy and able of making that last stand...

Aside from adding depth and color to characters by
reintroducing previously cut text, the 1990 edition of
The Stand is exquisitely illustrated by Bernie Wrightson.
This panel depicts Stu, Tom, and Kojak heading home.

...against Randall Fartface Flagg. Sigh. Folks, I hate him. Young me thought he was funny and sort of scary, and Lord Have Mercy that sex scene in the desert just about scarred me for life...but in the end he's just another Pennywise in a jean jacket and sprung cowboy boots, almost too silly to take very seriously. Glen Bateman sees through the artifice, laughs his ass off at him, in fact, so perhaps it's all by design, but it sure is a lot of build up to get basically nowhere. It is possible I'm holding a grudge against the character for more general reasons specifically relating to the curve the Kingverse took sometime in the midst of the last Gunslinger books and other related novels. Perhaps the glamour just wore off. As I read The Stand this time around, everything he did and said seemed more like a gimmick than anything truly threatening...and Nadine's seduction is nothing short of ridiculous. The seduction of Nadine and Harold, really. I mean, what did they expect? He's a capering lunatic, a jeering fraud, and still they fell for it. As did everyone who chose to follow the Dark Man. But I guess we already know that people will follow an Evil Foole if he tells them what they want to hear. And maybe that's why Flagg is all the more ridiculous to me now. The parallels between that capering clown in The Stand and the dunce in the White House are chilling. The fat head full of dense, flat thoughts of Big Winning and Quite Tremendous egomania. And consider the buttons Flagg wears on his jacket...one a yellow smiley face, one a pig face wearing a cop's hat with the caption How's Your Pork? He's on any side and every side so long as the shit stirs and he can sit at the center of it and drink the tears, bathe in the blood. But they are just hollow men, headpiece filled with straw.

The Trashcan Man's last gift to the Dark Man
(Bernie Wrightson).

One thing remains the same: The Stand is an expansive, ambitious, and impressive novel. Every time I read it, I try to imagine all those spinning plates, King keeping track of every one, and somehow bringing it all home more or less to satisfaction. It's an incredible achievement. A reader could understand a continuity gap or two. Both editions have been in circulation for decades, however, which leads to some editorial curiosities. I should note that, once upon a time, I worked for a scholarly publisher. Emphasis on scholarly. Over the course of 15 years, I was entrusted with many responsibilities, both publishing-specific and managerial. At different times I was a proofreader, copyeditor, tech support, liaison, project manager, author wrangler, mean ol' department manager, and on. I worked on first editions from raw manuscript to printed book, and I worked on reprints, second editions, paperbacks, and offsets. Depending on the influence and prestige of the author (which walked almost exclusively hand-in-hand with having an agent), some of our trade authors were allowed to make corrections to the paperback editions of their books. If we went forward with a paperback at all. Authors of scholarly works were almost never afforded corrections, especially if they were minimal. The margins on scholarly works are microscopic. The print runs are tiny (if they even have a first print anymore--it's just as likely to go print on demand from the start) and the price points are enormous compared to trade titles. And no matter how much an author demands his work is the Last Word on Shakespeare, The Very Last, I Say, it is a simple matter of supply and demand. Very few people (and mostly just libraries) are going to need a densely written scholarly tome on Venetian coins in the 1100s. Barnes and Noble is not going to want a copy. It's not meant to be mean. It just is.

Truth be told, I loathe the addition of the last chapter to
the uncut version. It starts cute enough, but the trope is
tired and the message is already received (Flagg's New
Flock, Bernie Wrightson).

But King? He's a bestseller out of the gate, every time, a zillion times over. He's been a powerful, influential institution for decades. Now, The Stand came out near the beginning of his already extremely promising career--King didn't have the chops yet, the big belt buckle, and all those championship rings to knock that publisher into letting him have the full volume. That's why he had to cut some 400 pages and let it (ahem) stand with what was left. Ten years later he was a proven juggernaut, an unstoppable force of publishing and nature, so they could afford to add back in whatever King deemed still vital to the cut. It's a fantastic turn of events, one so few authors can be afforded. Which makes it extra galling that they screwed it up as much as they did.

The first time I barked aloud reading any book, this page right here. It's not
my very favorite line, but man is it up there. Such deliciously awful imagery.

If he wanted, Stephen King could have any and all of his books corrected. They could pulp whatever is in the warehouse, update all the files with corrected versions, and make all the next printings as clean as could be. He makes massive amounts of money for himself, his staff, and his publishers. His backlist is alive and well. There is no struggle on the publisher's part to make ends meet. The margins are double wide and extra roomy. The only reason they have not done this for The Stand or any other King novel must be because King doesn't want it. Maybe he values the book as an artifact, as well, a perfect time capsule from the past, where all the warts remain, even if they would be sooooo easy to fix. Tweak a couple of words, upload the files, next printing is perfect, why not? For example, when Nadine and Harold flee the Free Zone to join Flagg's people in Las Vegas, Flagg prepares a trap for Harold, which is meant to send him over an embankment to his death. It doesn't work out quite as expected, but in the end Harold is abandoned with a badly broken leg that will inevitably lead to his demise. In his last hours, he writes one last highly pathetic journal entry, signs off as "Hawk" and tucks the Permacover notebook into his saddlebag just before blowing his brains out. Later, when the four remaining male members of the Free Zone committee happen upon him, the notebook is somehow miraculously in his hands. So small, this continuity problem, so, so easy to fix. Whether it was a mistake from the original publication or the 1990 edition, I do not know, but it does lead us to the more egregious, over arching problem with the complete and uncut version of The Stand...

Acknowledgement page relegated to the back
for lack of space in the prelimiaries. SOP.

Releasing a new and restored edition of a novel set "in the near present" requires not only evening out the seams created when the extractions first took place, but demands updating the setting, vernacular, pop culture, and other miscellany to match what was then the late 1980s / early 1990s. Who wants to read about a catastrophe that definitely didn't happen back in 1980 when you could read about one that might be right around the corner? So they updated it, kind of. The problem is that there are tons of references, objects, phrases, et freaking cetera, that belong solidly and without question in the late 70s. Little things, inconsequential things, but still like sand in your sock, it grates. I found myself twitching every time I would stumble across one. I should have made a list but here are just a few from the top of my head: the "boogie down" notebook would be a rare find in 1990 because disco hatred was at an all time high so where did Stu find it in some guy's attic I think not; many, many references to the gas and oil shortages that were all the rage when this book was originally written but were a part of history when the new edition is set so why are people thinking and talking about it like it just happened or was happening when the flu descended; Flagg's politics and buttons are even more antiquated and weird with ten years between not to mention the fact that dates and ages don't add up quite right every time, either. The worst Offense? That horrid song, "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"--a phrase that sends me rocketing to Hell every time I even think about it--would never, EVER get traction on popular radio anywhere in the late 80s or early 90s. Maybe mid-90s? Mid to late? Maybe. My teenage brain incinerated into a tiny black briquette of hate every time I had to read that song title or any part of the song lyrics because NO. Disco was dead, "dig" was deader, and referring to oneself as "Your Man" was in the same crypt as calling female sex partners "Mama," sophisticated or otherwise. Ridiculous cheese factor aside, every mention of the song effectively catapults the reader out of the story. When I read my original paperback, it rankled the tarts, but I understood that the book was written pre-1978. It made sense even if my 1987+ sensibilities made the bitter lemon face every single time I read it. But the updated version? Set in 1990? Homey don't play that.

But maybe they already know all this, and maybe they know it would be too gargantuan an undertaking to do anything about it now, some thirty years after the uncut edition's release. And maybe that's why Harold's magical notebook will forever exist both in and out of the saddlebag for all time. Why bother correcting a continuity problem when there are so many timeline problems too difficult to correct now? After all, it isn't like there is a maniac out there with editing experience who knows the 1980s so obsessively she could reconstruct them from, like, memory.**

Grade: B+ (issues aside, it's still a helluva good yarn)
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 7. Lots of scary moments and there's no arguing the spread of Captain Trips evokes a very real, creeping horror for anyone who's suffered from respiratory ailments, especially for the first read around. I highly recommend enjoying The Stand while sick as dog.
Warnings: Casual bigotry, profanity (sometimes inspired), mid-range gore (nothing pornographic), "Baby Can You Dig Your Man?," megrims/vapors/hysteria/female problems (Frannie because She's-Pregnant), He's a Righteous Man, a sweet treat, desert monster sex.
Artifact: 2012 edition reprint from the same people who brought you the 2012 reprint of Night Shift. Paperback, flat cut, trade pulp, embossed CMYK cover. This library edition was in remarkable shape considering it is one of King's more popular novels, it is one of King's longer novels, and it is a paperback. The printing and binding were near perfect and there was virtually no wear and tear. It is possible it was a newly acquired copy, but it was still impressive. That being said, the jacket redesign is a shocking travesty, with nonsensical cover art and embarrassingly inaccurate cover copy. The ad page was updated sometime after the 2012 first Anchor Books edition, which makes the mistakes both in the novel and especially in the back cover blurb all the more galling. Sure, maybe the actual book must remain untouched for whatever reason, but they can't fix the jacket copy? (Disclaimer: I am aware that this is a library copy and realize that one or all of these errors may be updated in more recent printings. The next time I'm in Barnes & Noble I'll give it another look.)

*Not to be confused with Gregg Braden's Fractal Time, though some of the themes certainly intersect. 
**This same maniac nearly had an aneurysm during her first viewing of The Wedding Singer, a movie allegedly set in the 80s that took such outrageous liberties with the timeline that said maniac was nearly panting with rage by the end of it. The more contemporary tv show The Goldbergs takes these same liberties in every episode, but said maniac is now used to these perversions. Every depiction of the 1980s in television and movies today--and there are so many--is at least twenty percent wrong. Usually more. 

NIGHT SHIFT (1978)

Vampires and pigeons and rats O MY.

Fifty Shades of Wheat.

In a coincidence straight from the bowels of a certain wreck of a factory, I happened to read Stephen King's Night Shift short story collection around the same time the song of the same name was topping the charts back in 1985. Much like the Night Shift short story and subsequent movie adaption of "The Lawnmower Man," King's collection and the Commodores' song have little in common.

Nevertheless, my mind plays the song whenever I pick the book up to read it anew, much like it has since I first got my hands on the ratty, used paperback edition (whose back I cracked without mercy or regret the first go around). It was the version with the hand on the cover, the hand full OF EYES. Creepy and humorless, thus completely fitting for the work. There's no question of the inspiration--the doomed astronaut in "I Am the Doorway"--and the cover art does what the cover art is supposed to do: make the buyer want, no need to know just what the hell is going on in these here pages. It fits. It works. No discordant disconnect. Like how the song plays in my head whenever I set eyes on the book.

I wish I could say the same for the newer, library version I recently finished. I guess the cover art is meant to allude to the short story "Children of the Corn" but it's the worst kind of faceplant fail for a couple of very valid reasons. According to the copyright page, the library paperback is a reprint of the August 2012 Anchor Books edition. Can you guess which raunchy little indie-penned trilogy was released commercially earlier that same year? None other than the saucy, slap and tickle romp through one seriously bad relationship: the Fifty Shades of Grey series. And sure, there is a "bound woman" in "Children of the Corn" but she's not tied up with sexy ribbon. She's crucified. With barbed wire. Her eyes have been gouged out and her sockets and mouth have been jammed with cornsilk. Not remotely sexy.

Great author photo, tho.

It's not the first time I've seen similarly sad attempts to capitalize on another newer or more popular book's comet ride to fame and fortune. I once worked on a book for a distribution client whose nonfiction cover design for something completely unrelated to teen vampires turned out to be a blatant rip off of the first edition design of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. I don't recall the outcome of the uncomfortable conversation with the client, but I do remember that the design was changed. What was the big deal? It was borderline stealing and full-on LAME. Ugh. This isn't the same, but it is stylistically suggestive and not immediately evocative of the source material, that which the cover is trying to sell, allegedly. Clang clang clang.

Also, look across the bottom of the front and back covers. I'm pretty sure that's wheat, not corn. Maybe it's meant to be corn tassels but I don't think so. It certainly isn't the standard image one would use to say "CORN field," especially if you are alluding to a story about children of the CORN--you'd think more green husks, lines of leafy plants, etc. To be fair, stock photos can be criminally mislabeled (it happens more than you'd think)--just Google "corn field close up" and you will see plenty of...wheat.

In the long run, does all this matter? Yesno. It matters to foolios like me who would have loved to work on any edition of Stephen King's work, past or present. It irritates me that they didn't try harder.

Aside from production woes, the most striking thing about Night Shift the actual book (what really matters, I know I know) is how perfectly it encapsulates a specific time. The dark swell of the late 60s, the gritty undertow of the 70s. There's a pervasive gloom hanging over the whole work. It is a weird trip back to an era growing dimmer in the rearview, where so many customs once so common would be met with outrage now. The ubiquity of smoking, for example--how it was literally everywhere, so casual, so common, so accepted. All throughout Night Shift, characters just smoke. They go into buildings smoking...they take a seat in waiting rooms ready to light up...there's even a scene in a hospital where a son helps his dying mother smoke one last cigarette. They won't let her have aspirin, oh no, but the cigarettes in her nightstand are totally fine. For the cancer patient. In a hospital.

I love that the library had to add the little
label for the title. For the sake of uniformity,
ya gotta. Katie says hi.

Flat cut trim--it's uncommon, but I have seen rough
cut trims on paperbacks. It is the very definition of
"extra," though, and entirely unnecessary. Further,
it makes page turning a chore.

I lived during this age, smoked in fast food joints and restaurants, smoked in bars and clubs, smoked in people's houses, at parties, in stairwells, all the designated smoking areas. I even got to experience smoking on planes, though only as an observing child sucking up all the extra second-hand smoke that my little lungs could absorb. I remember what it was like to drink down the bar to closing time, roll into bed half dead, and wake up the next morning smelling like a charred hellhound. There's a wide gulf of time between the days when smoking was the norm, when at least half the people you knew were regulars, and the here and now, where smoking is banned everywhere (with noted exceptions, hello casino jones), and the social contract has all but shut out those dirty birdy smokers. There was a reason my last years of smoking took place in my apartment and nowhere else--societal pressure, baby. It's a hell of a drug. But in Night Shift, smoking just is. It is a pastime as all-American as apple pie (with a smoldering butt jammed in the middle).

There's also some casual drunk driving, another throw back to a stupider era. It's not to say that society collectively embraced such reckless behavior back in the pickled past, but the seriousness of it, and the underlying sense of gravity and shame associated with drunk driving today, was far less common prior to educational campaigns and the unwavering tenacity of groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). I liken those olden golden days to the current trend of Wine Moms and their shrill slogans plastered on t-shirts, wall art, bumper stickers. Drinking two bottles of wine a night is fine as long as we're all doing it, amiright?

Even worse, depending on the state, the drunk driving laws could be very lax, sometimes just the equivalent of a whoopsy daisy you had a little boom boom. Prime example: I know a person who totaled their car, woke up covered in blood and glass in the hospital with a cop standing over them, face serious, judgmental but fatherly, who said, I'm gonna give you a warning, just don't do it again. That was it. And wouldn't you just know it...my acquaintance did it again...and again. They just didn't get caught. Hell, I had relatives who regularly drove while intoxicated. Friends, too. But ever so slowly, people stopped being so casual about it and started taking drunk driving seriously.

The best kind of praise page. No references to this or any
other work, just an unabashed lovefest for an author
who stands at the very top of his field.

In some ways, you can align the changes in societal mores in terms of overall safety with the dawning of the squeaky, straight-edged 80s. Imagine the terror of the 60s, the unparalleled social upheaval from coast to coast: the war, civil rights, women's rights, the counterculture, hippies, dippies, and Charlie Manson and his clean-cut little coven capering on the news. Then came the inevitable, crippling hangover of the 70s, burnouts and serial killers run amok, gas prices soaring, the economy circling the drain, all the kids self-medicating, all the adults half bombed and starting to think this American Dream shit is nothing but ass vapors. On so many levels the trust was broken, blown out, burnt to the ground.

Embossing evident on the back of the front cover.

Then came the 80s. New romantic skinny ties with gelled hair and coke habits. Citizens rebranded to Consumers and gave each other permission to find purpose in materialism, the pathological accumulation of Things. Cars and picture frames and houses and projection tvs and boats and track suits and motorcycles and wine racks and ottomans and 100 percent pure cubic zirconia. The Home Shopping Network delivered more delicious Things, more stuff to pile on top of other stuff crammed in dusty hutches while the oldest stuff found its way to the basement or the attic or the closet or the yard sale because more was good, but newer was better. MALLS were a brilliant thing, a beautiful neontopia to drop ten or a thousand dollars on any given Saturday. There were no limits to the number of jeans! Blue jeans, black jeans, pegged jeans, stone washed, acid washed, multi-toned, even pin-striped. Chic, Lee, Guess, Jordache, Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Levi's but only 501's with the button fly-eye-eye. So many chunky, over-sized sweaters with wild graphics, and layers and layers of popped collar Oxfords to wear underneath--Izod, Polo, Ocean Pacific board shorts and don't you dare forget the forty-seven Swatch watches to wear up and down each arm like a goddamned postapocalyptic psychobabe on her way Bartertown to bet on Thunderdome. Things!

Author bio page also shows that bad glue job. There
shouldn't be such an uneven gap in the gutter.

I've lived this nightmare. You have to update the
previous publications page, but there are so manyyy.
So you set it in a smaller and smaller font until
it virtually squeaks.

Pegged pants, rolled sleeves, feathered hair lacquered with various gels, mousses, hairsprays; everything tight, tight, tight. Even the music seemed tighter, seamless and produced to perfection...no more smelly, hairy, drunk Golden Gods swaying at the microphone with their fuzzy navels out. No more grit, not one speck...at least not on the commercial stations. Just clean, coiffed, pancaked mannequins tripping tight, tight, tight dance moves to swift, tinny beats. Clean, tight...and safe. Just Say No. This Is Your Brain On Drugs Any Questions. Greed Is Good. Love Shack, Baby Love Shack.

It was like the 60s were the shock and awe, where the ugly undertruth was churned up and exposed to the bitter light, and the 70s rumbled with queasy aftershocks of too much reality and not enough weed in the world to dull it. The 80s opened its eyes to the horror and deemed it solvable. We became suddenly aware of the concept of child molestation, child kidnapping, child murder, and the faceless boogiemonster everyone could get behind with a pitchfork: stranger danger. Donahue and Oprah taught us the perils of freedom, the worst of what could be, the stories behind the faces on the milk carton. Letting your kids run wild in the streets was truly at your peril. As long as we were protecting the children from outside harm, we realized we'd had just about enough with all the babies flying through wrecked windshields, so child safety seats morphed from optional to required by law. There would be no more joyriding in the back of the pickup and no more calling shotgun. Then, as if our tight little coked up minds could bear one more outrage, some psychopath tampered with over-the-counter pain killers, so now just about everything requires some sort of safety seal to assure Consumers that their drugs (and juice and sour cream and...) are safe. Safety cords on blinds, plastic bottles instead of glass, flat beds with no fluffy blankies for infants, wacky rubber playgrounds! And no more sticking keys and forks in outlets to find out about electricity the hard way. There was something to purchase for every safety need.

More glue shenanigans.

But Night Shift's stories take place right before all that, at the cusp of it, in the wasted embers of what was left after the 60s blew out the circuits and jam banded into oblivion. There is a grating anger running through so many of the stories; angry couples on the verge of relationship collapse ("Children of the Corn"); shitty, resentful husbands ("The Lawnmower Man"), angry fathers unleashing punishment for next to nothing ("The Boogeyman"), angry vermin ("Graveyard Shift"), angry aliens ("I Am the Doorway"), even angry trucks ("Trucks" lol) for God's sake, all bent on vengeance, murder, obliteration. Then there are the shitty, shitty men: hateful men, malevolent men...from manipulative Lotharios ("I Know What You Need"), to cruel post-apocalyptic boyfriends ("Night Surf"), to happy-go-lucky serial killers ("The Man Who Loved Flowers"). It is difficult to find a sympathetic character in these stories, though there are a few outliers (the doomed protagonist from "Jerusalem's Lot," for one).

Half title page.

I haven't read Danse Macabre or On Writing in ages, so I hope to get some enlightenment there. Are the stories collected in Night Shift meant to serve as an extended exercise in unreliable, sometimes wildly flawed characters? After all, you wouldn't want to read Night Shift assuming that's just how people were back then--assholes, basically--and I certainly don't remember my childhood that way...exactly. Though the sexism and racism were definitely unchecked and festering. Watching a truly bad character get what's coming to him can be satisfying, but even characters that we're supposed to root for are too unsympathetic to bother. It is clear that King is stretching his creative muscles in terms of plot and story--the more outlandish and weird, the better--and it seems he was game for just about any wild notion ("The Mangler" is somehow both hilarious and deeply horrible, an absurd but delightful detour through Hell)--but his early character work is all over the place. The women remain flat, though some spark ("The Last Rung on the Ladder") and at least one catches fire ("The Woman in the Room"). The men are more fleshed out, though some remain inscrutable, one at least by nature ("Battleground"--fantastic fun). One too many of the "heroes" read as obnoxious little assholes, however, and one wonders if this is authorial counterintuitive manipulation or simply a "sign of the times." Whatever the case, King is cutting his teeth, working it out, and in every subsequent novel and collection the "constant reader" can see how he's getting better and better.

Full title page.

Full fledged copyright page, resplendent with
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
(cip) information. This was the eighth reprint
of this particular edition.

Some of the stories live only within the pages of Night Shift, others were adapted into student films (dollar babies!), but several are easily recognizable especially to 80s Cablevision zombies like me. "Children of the Corn" is probably the most recognizable to anyone, having spawned film adaptions and sequels and too many cultural references to count. I hadn't read the short story in decades so was relieved to find it far more economical in plot than the 1984 film which was, for lack of a better word, silly. "The Ledge" and "Quitters, Inc." were part of the Cat's Eye compilation film, both of which are solid, simple concepts on the surface, but are annoying in execution as the characters in both stories are products of "the times," i.e. when women were peripheral pawns in the Stories of Men. Funny aside: I was relating the gnarlier details of "Quitters, Inc." to my mother over pasta and breadsticks at Ye Olde Olive Garden when a server caught the tail end of a sentence that went something like "...and if he gains too much weight, they cut off one of his wife's fingers." To which said server yipped, "what!" And I had to explain, no sir, just, ugh, Stephen King. Short story. Horror guy? That one. Sorry. There wasn't time in the exchange to mention that it was in the sexy old days when your wife was property enough to get the first punishment if her husband happened to take even a single drag of a nasty ol' cigarette. Yeah.

What makes me think this is from the original
printing? The typeface, for one, is very familiar,
and reminiscent of the early published SK works.
The type is also heavier than the new prelim
material. In cases where we didn't have original
electronic print files, we would scan in and print
from the original, adding on our own prelim
pages as needed to update the publisher info.
The end product always looked very similar
to this edition of Night Shift. 

Permissions page, the best way to "place" the
contemporary narratives. 

And of course there is "Trucks," a not terribly fleshed out little story about semis driving themselves, running down humans with murderous glee, and enslaving the rest to feed them fuel until...well, the story never says. (Un)fortunately, someone decided to give Stephen King a hat that said "Director" on it and he made a little film called Maximum Overdrive starring the beefy jock from The Breakfast Club, Emilio Estevez. Hoo boy. The movie expands on the revolution, so that not only semis and construction vehicles are autonomous, but soda machines, ATMs, and hair dryers (one of the more hilarious "death tableaus" of the movie)--basically any "machine" is revving up and ready to kill. There is also an attempt to explain the cause (aliens and/or comets) and a relatively upbeat resolution that in no way strengthens the story. The movie does have truly funny and clever bits, and who couldn't love an AC/DC soundtrack, but the best part by miles is Stephen King's cameo. King is a born hambone, and this brief clip is just about the right amount of clown. Little slivers of humor can't make up for what a stinker the movie turned out to be overall, but as with many of King's works, sometimes it's better to leave it on the page.

The weirdest "updated" section of backmatter,
an ad page for the novels that preceded Night
Shift (and The Stand which was first published
that same year). It's only weird because they
bothered to update the previous publications.
The inclusion of the ad pages in the backmatter
is very old school, and usually when you're still
trying to "sell" your author, something Stephen
King surpassed--by lightyears--decades ago.

See? It's weird. Just one more paragraph
about The Shining and then miles of blank
space because...why? Only the publisher knows!

While the upcoming Skeleton Crew short story collection will always be my favorite (and contains within it a story that scared me so bad I had nightmares for weeks), Night Shift does deliver, if not so much in scares than in memorable ideas, that 70s gloom of a mood, and special, bell-bottomed weirdness that makes a few of the stories really stick. My personal favorites are "The Mangler" (insane), "Battleground" (gonzo), and funnily enough, "The Lawnmower Man." The movie is pure shit and largely unrelated to the short story, even if you squint at it through your third eye. It does King's short story a great disservice merely by existing and every copy should be burned and dropped in a deep trench. The actual story, however, is classic King on a mind melting tear. The narrative starts off insipidly mundane (lazy husband has to get the lawn mowed, boo hoo hoo woe is Man) and then goes completely B-A-N-A-N-A-S in a direction that, at first reading, my little 14-year-old mind could not adequately absorb (mythology and gophers and PAN o effing MY??). My old woman mind, however, reels. It's deranged, delicious, hilarious and just...wrong. If you read Night Shift for nothing else, read it to redeem the poorly maligned "Lawnmower Man." Wonderfully weird stuff.

Grade: C
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. Overall I would classify the collection as more unsettling than anything. Unless you are afraid of rats, kids, or SMOKING.
Warnings: More casual bigotry, common profanity, proportionate gore, general human shittiness, SMOKING.
Artifact: Flawed 2012 edition reprint. Paperback, flat cut, trade pulp, embossed CMYK cover. The typeface for the bulk of the book (contents, stories) appears to be the original type, but the add-ons in the prelims (updated for this publisher's edition: title pages, copyright, ad, author, praise, etc.) don't match and are frankly all over the place in terms of design. The cover is a misfire for the aforementioned reasons. And, personal peeve, the text block is not glued evenly, so there are weird gaps and tears in the gutter that simply should not be there. It's not so egregious that you'd kick it back to the printer for a do over, but it's not good, either. (RIP my 1978 edition. It smelled heavenly, too, like imagination run wild, not unlike a possessed steam-iron-folding machine unleashed on the streets, shrieking bloodlust through the night(shift)).

GET HER, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shelley Duvall (The Shining, 1977, 1980)

THE SHINING (book - 1977, movie - 1980)

The Torrance family winters at the beautiful, isolated, historic Overlook Hotel. In thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime honor, they blow it up and let it burn to the ground.*

Shelley Duvall should never have been cast as Wendy Torrance. There. I said it.

Sad, pleather loneliness. For want of a
dust jacket, the kingdom was lost.

I've said it many times. Over many years. And in many ears, both piqued and bored. Why should anyone care who plays Wendy when Crazy Train Jack Torrance is played by Wild Child Jack Nicholson and he's the "main guy," anyway. The character of Wendy Torrance is simply a tool, a device, a whining obstacle. And the survival of little Danny Torrance is all that really matters, in the end...the sweet baby child with the enormous supernatural gift who must somehow stand and face his beloved, sick, frustrated, failure of a father, weakened by untreated alcohol addiction and compromised by malevolent forces in the hotel whose only interest is adding one special, psychic boy to their cast of misfit, murderous party guests, the white hot fuel to their ethereal existence. Wendy's just some puling ninny flailing a bat as she's backed up the stairs by a mean mouthed dull boy who calls her darling (light of my life) in one breath, then threatens to bash her brains in at the next.

Except she's not. At all.

I believe this started as a glossy yellow
stamping, but it very well might've been
yellow matte, gold matte, who knows.
The years have taken their toll.

That was Kubrick's vision for his classic movie version of The Shining; a vision that departed quite critically from King's novel in many ways, both minor and major. I could pick apart every last one of them (hedge animals vs. hedge maze, explosive fire vs. freezing in the snow, the fate of Hallorann, the downplay of the history and supernatural elements of the hotel) but the one decision I could never respect was turning struggling, depressed, hopeful, imperfect, protective, and strong mother Wendy Torrance into the lilting, mealy-mouthed, placating, weak, helpless sad sack who just happened to get lucky with the swing of a bat.

The Shining was the first Big Person novel I ever read. I consumed it like anniversary cake over a few breathless, hot August days at the end of a summer packed with crushing transitions. For the previous two years, I'd attended a miracle of modern education, a place so completely different from the usual public school routine, it was literally a dream come true for someone like me. Isely Alternative was a primary school for gifted students grades 4-6. The classes were mixed, and much of the work was completed on each student's own self-managed time via contracts due every week. There were focused sessions for math, music, and other subjects (lost in memory), but otherwise it was a fairly easygoing learning environment with non-traditional classrooms and a motley crew of crunchy, artistic, wild, and winsome teachers piloting the ship. Each class environment was primed for free thinking, with lounge-y lofts, bric-a-brac study tables instead of uniform rows of individual desks, beverages for sale by the office and a canteen out of Mr. D's classroom window during recess. We could listen to our Walkman (if we had one), eat a big pickle, read sci fi graphic novels from the fun bins by the windows, and even converse if it was low and respectful of others. The time was ours to learn and grow. There were no grades. No As, Bs, and Cs on report cards--we were just expected to complete the work and concentrate on areas for improvement.

As shameful as it is to admit it, with maybe one brief
reprieve, this book spent the entirety of my alcohol
abuse stage being kicked around the floor, jacketless
and severely devalued. It should be no surprise at all
that I could barely keep up with a simple
Entertainment Weekly subscription, let alone tackle
whole books during this period of time.

Unfortunately for me, my primary area for improvement was completing contracts at all. I had all the time in the world for the things I enjoyed (reading, writing, music, art), but struggled with pretty much all the rest of it. I even got a Talking To by the principal in front of my whole class--humiliating--and was excluded from Track and Field day--liberating, but still humiliating. It was one thing to get to rewrite all the dialogue for my character in our traveling performance troupe (the original script was written in the groovy language of the 60s/70s and needed updating to the totally gnarly 80s), but Math? Science? History? Ech. Not remotely fun, even to the groove of Hall and Oates' H2O boppin through the headphones. Fer. Sher.

I didn't get kicked out (thank goodness, and Mrs. Terrill) and made it all the way to the end, when on the last day, during the last half hour of school, all the kids were allowed to go out into the halls and say one last goodbye to each other. Let me tell you something: This was a Scene. Every year, without fail, a Major, Whole Scene. Imagine all these little kids in their Jordache jeans, Lacoste shirts (then known as Izods), rainbow heart shoestrings in their hair, the boys all briny and yodeling, the girls bawling like it was END of EVERYTHING. Imagine the little faces, boys embarrassed shuffling, tracks of black mascara running down the babyfat cheeks of those so-grown sixth grade girls, red little noses, hugging as though Death itself was waiting outside those double doors and not the usual fleet of buses that would take us safely home, just like any other day. It was wrenching to be in, and the very pinnacle of preadolescent ends of innocence, so endearing and bittersweet.

Gnarled, but still all in one piece. I cannot overemphasize how amazing this
is. The binding has stood the test of time (and my kicky foot, so so sorry).

Of course for the sixth graders it was the end of the world, more for some than others. The transition to a new school is challenging for everyone, but graduating from grade school to junior high is a whole other level of trauma. So many seventh graders really are still just kids and are in no way prepared for the hormonal storm broiling on the horizon. If you're not getting harassed into a corner by some friendly fingered Lothario, you're getting shouted into the mud by friends (or foes) that you're a Prude, a Tease, a Baby, etc., and should get on the same sticky Hustler page as everyone else.

I knew the kids at Isely were definitely at different stages of sexual interest and experimentation, and there was certainly a lot of Big Talk out of little lying mouths in the schoolyard during recess or on the rowdy bus home every day, but it was a largely innocent place with starched little problems that were kept civil and in the light, so to speak. I think the biggest controversies my sixth grade year were The Slap Heard Round the Quad (an African American girl had it up to Here and smacked a very entitled white girl who also happened to ride my bus and acted like the Queen of the Scene which she was not) and Let's Play the Choking Game and Try to Die (popular boys who tried it at school of all places and of course got caught so that we were all subjected grave talks about it afterward because the adults were hyperpissed). That was it. Things were cliquish, sure, but I don't remember fistfights or hair pulling in the halls. And I was never touched without consent. No awkward come ons, either, let alone verbal assaults. I think I held my sixth grade boyfriend's hand once, for like three minutes. Ooo la la. Scandale!

Rough cut sexiness does get a bit mushy over time
and use. Still looks pretty good, though.

So, transitions. I cried my eyes out on the last day of school at beautiful, idyllic Isely, got on the bus and went home to our modest neighborhood on the east side of town. A couple of weeks later, at my birthday dinner at Chi Chi's no less, I was told that my mother was about to be laid off from her job. Not long after that, we learned that my best friend and closest confidant would be going to Venezuela on an extended stay with her mother, three months max (it was ten, but who is counting? and she only came back to visit, so more like 2-3 years?). I spent the summer watching my mother sell off some of our irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind furniture, shopping with my friend and her mother for fun clothes for their grand tour, boxing up what was left of our belongings to soon be moved to another part of town, and cleaning this simple, most beloved little home to, most memorably, the premier of a new song called "Drive" by the Cars (now forever imprinted as a terrible, horrible, no good song, at least in my mind, world without end, amen). Even now I can't hear that horrid song without falling into a mean sort of melancholy, where I feel both sad and slightly homicidal. Being a child is a helpless sort of thing is so many ways; your choices are limited your fortunes are completely out of your hands. Adults ask a lot of questions, but they rarely care what you think, especially when it's not what they want (or think they want). King has a keen sense of the helpless fury of teenhood, coming up soon in Christine...but more on that later.

My friend left in July, and in the days beforehand, her mother's family decided to throw an anniversary party for their parents, the lauded maternal grandparents--a kind, wry old gent and the Meanest Grandma on Earth. In the chaos of the party and the packing, all that was left for our last nights of giggling and gossiping and general goofery was a tv and betamax, a mattress on the floor, and a freezer full of cake. We watched Grease 2 and similar cinematic fare from sun up to sun down, lazed about the pool, laughed, tanned, stole cigarettes and smoked them around corners, forever giggling, and ate white cake with white icing until even we could only beg No More. Then she was gone. No internet, no cell phones, not even an address to reach her. It was several months before I got a letter.  Just gone.

Dueling bookplates. The first is my mother's--the true owner; the second
was mine, full-fledged fancy pantsin. Names blurred to protect the
folio foolios.

Soon afterward, my mother and I moved to the little dark house with a tiny fenced yard in an unfamiliar neighborhood. A shadow of unhappiness clung to everything, every day. Once a thin rail of a thing, I started eating to create pleasure. Especially sugar confections. I wandered through the annals of my fledgling teenage obsessions--glossy magazines full of British bands, scrapbooks pasted with lyrics and mementos, things once cherished beyond price--but the bands were all breaking up and the songs on the radio had all changed. The unknown quantity that was middle school was on the immediate horizon, and I felt both excited and fearful at the same time. How it turned out--far worse than I ever imagined--was probably a major cornerstone to the catastrophic thinking I battle to this day.

Half title simplicity.

I spent that summer in a constant state of low dread. Dreading the move, dreading losing my friend, dreading the new school. There was an ever present pit in my stomach...except for those glorious days I spent reading Stephen King's The Shining. It was completely immersive and engaging, fascinating, and intense. It was profoundly disturbing and unblinkingly terrifying. I was wrapped so tight around the plot shifts in that book, I could barely stop to do anything else. I belonged to it, lived in it, felt the cold of the snow, the low terror and cloying claustrophobia of being trapped in a place with monsters, both unknown and piercingly familiar, even beloved. I was wrecked. But good wrecked. Someone else's dread, someone else's horror, somehow soothed my own. I didn't get it then, but I get it in the full 360 degrees now.

But the moment that got me the most, the passage that imprinted on me so hard I can still feel the dent in my bones, is the real showdown between Wendy and Jack Torrance. There's no need to embellish. She didn't reload a shotgun with one arm like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. She didn't strip to her Amazonian battle suit and charge through a field of gunfire like Wonder Woman. But she sure as fuck didn't totter up the stairs bleating "stay away from me" while whimpering and crying and swinging the bat with no real intent at all. No. In the book, he comes for her and they fight. It's horrible. It's violent. It's painful to read and to imagine. Through all of their tenuous hopes for the future, the brittle past, the outrage, the desperation, the shame, and the love--real, devoted love--it all breaks down to this. A brawl on the staircase, blood, bone, a butcher's knife, a roque mallet, sweaty, grunting, growling, screaming.

At the start of it all, Wendy Torrance is a lovely housewife with a five year old son and a troubled, struggling husband. Her son is prone to trances and talks regularly with an imaginary friend named Tony. He knows things he shouldn't know, says things that are beyond his wisdom, and scares her badly. Her boy loves his daddy. She loves her husband. She is committed to the marriage, sees signs of hope, goes where they need to go to make a new start, even if it means being trapped in a hotel up in the American Rockies while swells of snow bunch up against the doors, potentially isolating them from the world for months. She nags, she worries, she dotes. She's as good as a female character gets in the early King works. And you know what else? She argues. She gets angry. She gets in Jack's face, throws a mask from a ghost party that should not be possible but somehow is (bringing the hotel alive in fits and starts in the middle of the night) and screams at him. She doesn't speak in light, baby tones of ever present acquiescence. When things start to get crazy, Wendy states her mind. And when Jack finally comes for her, she fights.

I absolutely adore these first edition ad pages. There's
so much more to come. It is hard to imagine the
depth and wealth of worldbuidling just over the
horizon. I mean...my heart?

That's Wendy Torrance. And it stuck with me. Reading The Shining didn't save me from the ugliness that happened in my personal life over the next two years, but it helped. I was never happy when my mother made her various stands (because so often the showdown happened on shaky ethical ground, e.g. fighting with chattering moviegoers in a theater we snuck into without paying I shit you not) but I did know right from wrong, and I certainly knew that no man (or little greasymouthed middle school boy, for that matter) had a right to touch me without my permission. How many times did I say "no" or "stop" and practice my Karate Kid parrying moves in middle school? Infinity. Infinity times, that's how many. How many times did I wish I could Wendy up, so to speak, and knock some handsy kid's teeth in? Not as many as you'd think. Because I desperately wanted to be liked...and didn't have the advantage of adulthood, driving destiny, completely in control of my Self. Wendy Torrance--and even the brass knuckle that was my mother--was aspirational. In the haze of preteen hormone glaze, I could only hope to someday lift my head and try to do half as well as Wendy Torrance did on that staircase of the Overlook Hotel.

I used to direct all of my vitriol in the wrong direction, but I'm older now, better now, and genuinely sorry that I ever bad mouthed Shelley Duvall. She shouldn't have been cast as Wendy Torrance. But she was only part of the problem. As we all know now, Kubrick verbally herded her into submission, and in an act of truly toxic "method" directing, psychologically and emotionally abused her into the cowed, puling idiot that so much of the world knows as "Jack Nicholson's wife in that horror movie" [1]. It was Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson who decided to rewrite King's character into the wet mop so many are familiar with today [2]. You can forgive many of the changes (animated animal hedges would have been impossible in 1979 without looking exceedingly claymation-dorky and probably would have come off more silly than scary no matter how they shot it) but shortchanging the Wendy Torrance character is the truly unforgivable decision. You can argue that shooting a psychological breakdown is more relatable and convincing than allowing the hotel the full force of its supernatural influence. You can say Hallorann had to die so that the stakes would be that much higher (but...no). You can even justify all the joyful hamming that Nicholson brought to the character of Jack Torrance (sellz ticketzzz?). The mood and cinematography are LIT, but bareass truth be told: the only dialog I have ever enjoyed in Kubrick's The Shining has been (and will always be) the scene on the goddamned stairs. It's true. Because I've divorced the two works in my mind. I had to. Every movie made from (or inspired by) a book is just an interpretation in the end. They rarely follow the exact events of the book, and sometimes have almost zero in common with the source material (ask Stephen King how he feels about Lawnmower Man). Sometimes the reinterpretation is successful, sometimes it's just a goddamned shame. In this case, the book and the movie are about a man who takes a job as a winter caretaker for a ritzy mountain hotel and brings his family along for the season. And it goes just awful. The end. Best keep the details separate.

Full title matches half title and that's how
you do it.

I can enjoy the scene on the stairs because I am a sick, sick individual. I also believe that this was the intent of Kubrick all along. Duvall's Wendy Torrance is not sympathetic. Certainly not in modern times, but I'd argue it was a stretch even in the olden days of "the traditional family," e.g. working pop, homemaker mom, 2.5 kiddies in crisp, clean clothes and a dog named Spot. Even if you can stretch your mind around that image, where daddy is the only adult and mommy is a sort of sub adult that obeys her husband and follows his every lead, you still end up yelling at the screen "For God's sake woman, do something, you've got the bat, knock him out, fight for your child, fight for yourself, what are you dooooooing?" To which Duvall swings ever so lightly and says she wants to go to her room and take...a...nap? It's an outrage. And a dirty trick.

I rarely danced as a child and totally flunked out of ballet when I was six, but ask me how much I danced at my eighth grade graduation. All. Night. Long. I had no idea how "over" it was about to be (so many kids dropped out between middle school and high school it should have been newsworthy), but I must have sensed that transitioning out of my nightmare middle school and into the unknown (but at least familiar) high school was going to improve my situation at least...enough. And in that very summer after I left the horror of middle school behind (all play and no work make Jack a sick boy), something incredible happened.

On July 18, 1986, James Cameron's Aliens was released in theaters [3]. My mother and I watched it at the old Twin Lakes cinema (RIP), old standard seating, speakers turned up to eleven. It was electrifying. First, let's just state facts: Aliens is a first-class action movie and a rip roaring horror romp. It is a fantastic film jammed with harrowing plot twists, thrilling slogs through dread and racing shocks of terror, characters you jeer for, cheer for, and will love for frickin evermore, and a  take-no-shit, suffer-no-fools, badass, kickass, knock your ass to the ground and step on your crying little head heroine extraordinaire, Ellen Fucking Ripley. I sat in that theater with my hands clenched to the rests, careening with every turn of fate that woman endured, managed, and just fucking handled. It was galvanizing.

Aside from the credits, another spare copyright page,
direct and to the point.

When my mother and I recently discussed sad Wendy Torrance in Kubrick's The Shining, the subject of believability came directly to the fore. In a novel published in 1977 and a movie released in 1980, would audiences believe that a simple housewife could go toe-to-toe with her roque/ax wielding, completely psychotic husband? Maybe not. I was a kid growing up in a one-parent household. I never saw my mother acquiesce to anyone, let alone some Dull Boy with crazy eyebrows and an over-inflated sense of self worth. But she was an adult during this period, navigated the tempestuous waters of women in the workplace during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and knew firsthand how demoralizing and flat out dehumanizing the experience could be. So maybe Kubrick believed that King's version of Wendy was too much for the average moviegoer. Maybe they wouldn't buy it, or maybe he thought she would be somehow less sympathetic if she fought back in earnest, spoke her mind so readily, and didn't mince around the kitchen heating soup and asking everyone if everything was okay and let's all be nice to each other. Maybe Kubrick himself didn't believe Wendy was a realistic representation of a late 1970s American housewife. Yet a mere six years later, there stood Ellen Ripley, hipshot and exhausted but holding tight to sweet little orphan and survivor Newt in one arm and the Biggest Fucking Gun in the History Guns in the other, quietly considering a literal field of monster eggs, with the biggest, most terrifying xenomorph Queen in the universe hulked, hissing and all teeth bared, above them. With one greasy crack of an egg and and one "Oh Fucking Well" tip of an expression, Ripley laid waste to the future of the Queen's hive with a flamethrower and ran, Newt and Gun still clutched in her arms, for their very lives. A mere six years later.

And I'd argue that there have certainly been Very Assertive Women in media since forever. Scarlett O'Hara (Gone with the Wind, 1939) in that ruby dress with blue eyes shining, just daring anyone to say one goddamned thing as she walks her tricky ass into that party. Could you ever imagine Margo Channing (All About Eve, 1950) being backed up those stairs by smarmy-mouthed, snothead Jack? She would no doubt have given him a very bumpy ride. And it would be remiss not to mention that Ripley herself was fighting sexism and space aliens on screen a year before Kubrick's The Shining debuted [4]. So what gives?

Maybe Kubrick needed more than a haunted hotel, isolation, cabin fever, and a bloviating, mentally unstable dry drunk to justify the murderous conclusion of The Shining. And what's the one thing all miserable married men can relate to? He asks them to imagine being snowed in a freaky hotel with a creepy kid, a burning addiction that thirsts forevermore, and a whimpering, simpering, weak nag of a dreary wife that just...won't...back off. A mewling cunt that dares to read his non-manuscript without permission then pleads her excuses up, up, up the stairs only to tap him on the head with a bat and lock him in a pantry. Well, any man could relate. Any man might not pick up and ax and here's Johnny his way through an apartment while his wife is screaming bloody murder and his son--a baby, a tiny five-year-old child--has what amounts to a seizure in the next room. Any man, whose flaws are badges of honor--the drunken father, the alcoholic chaos, the good times rolling until crashing to a discordant jangle of a wrecked job, frightened and vulnerable family, and a stalled writing career--who is truly not responsible for what life has unleashed upon him. If not for the kid, if not for the boss, if not for circumstances, if not for that godforsaken NAG.

Still one of the best first lines, ever. Also note the last line
included in the picture...need I really say more? 

Think about it. Maybe Kubrick wanted everyone to look at Duvall's Wendy the same way I always have: with contempt. She starts off grating and just gets worse and worse. Once you've got her on the stairs, it is difficult not to see it as high comedy. Sick, but still. I've even yelled "Get her" at the screen, because I wanted her to shut up, too. Stop being...that. And later when he takes an ax to to bathroom door, are her shrieks not a carillon of deliverance? Get. Her.

But he doesn't, neither in the movie nor the book. Hallorann comes to the rescue via snowmobile. In the book, all three make it out alive. In the movie, only Wendy and Danny escape. We cheer when they rumble off, as the croaking shrieks of "Danny, Dannyyyy" get weaker and weaker as Jack flails through the snowy hedge maze, lost. But I was never really cheering for Wendy, except for the fact that she was the tool necessary to get the boy to safety. In King's book, you're cheering for everyone...even Jack at one point. Alas, that aspect of the character would have been too complicated for the "average" American audience to understand (though they seemed to get it just fine from the bestselling book, but whatever)...or maybe it didn't fit into Kubrick's vision, either. So little did.

[All subsequent commentary will be directed to the book only.]
Grade: A
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 8, you legit might die.
Warnings: Casual bigotry, n-word, mean dandies, magical negro, fledgling jive talk, redrum detpmetta.
Artifact: Beaten to hell hardcover, black leather(ette) casing, glossy yellow stamping, no headbands, rough cut, white endpapers, thick cream stock. The jacket was saved separately in a folder for decades but has now gone missing (possibly in that NYC landfill, oh well). Examples of the design can be seen here. I have read this edition into the ground, but the spine adhesive still holds strong, if not a bit wobbly, which is a testament to the quality of the craftsmanship.

*Horace Derwent wrote this intro lol. Medoc says hi.