Wicked Women Drivers and Mediocre Men in the Mist (Skeleton Crew, 1985)

Skeleton Crew (1985)

"Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. . . . A short story is a different thing altogether--a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger." -- Stephen King, "Introduction," Skeleton Crew

Signet 1986 paperback identical to the edition
I owned for 30 years.

Skeleton Crew has always been my favorite King short story collection and that will never change. A big part of its magic is, predictably, the inclusion of some very classic King works ("The Raft" and "Survivor Type" spring immediately to mind), but my own, foundational reason is simply how it made me feel the first time I read it during (when else) the dark, latter days of middle school maudlinmania. There is no way to know how many times I read Skeleton Crew during of my adolescence. By the time I was in New York, the paperback's pages were loose and the spine was so cracked it was unreadable. It stayed until the end. I would never replace it. By then, the artifact was part of the experience. The idea of reading a crisp, new hardcover, for instance, would have been . . . wrong. There's no adequate way to explain why, other than the familiarity of the rough grain of that paperback pulp paper, the set of the type, the yellowing pages, the creaky, knocked about smell. Reading Skeleton Crew in any other way would have . . . tasted funny. 

"woman driver" okay, Signet.

I thoroughly enjoyed this Walter White SAY MY NAME marketing ploy.
Have no doubt: The marketing department is completely unrepentant. 

My conversion to a more minimalist lifestyle upon leaving New York, and the more recent Covid sequester, has turned my previously rigid reading practices to chaos, and I've been rolling with it because why not. It's not going to burst a blood vessel, though at times it does feel like a bit of a papercut to the brain (all wrong all wrong) but then I just do my deep breathing and carry on. It does explain why I always seek out the previously owned every time I borrow a book from the Internet Archive. Even though these books are presented electronically via PDF on a laptop screen, some of that old comfort comes through, although it is like a picture of a picture of a picture. 

The inclusion of Four Past Midnight puts this reprint at press
sometime between 1990 and 1991.

This time around, I endeavored to experience Skeleton Crew on audiobook, intrigued at the idea of a different narrator for every story, and wanting very much the extra freedoms allowed with the audiobook option. It was, as a whole, a delight. For one, short stories are just different. As King says in his introduction, it's a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger, a hot thrill, a brief, bright shot of life, a moment, a tale, an afternoon yarn. Each of the voice actors had something new and special to bring each story to life. Some were wonderful, others were great, one or two were adequate...and one in particular just irritated the living shiznit out of me.

Combination copyright and credits pages. 

Upon finishing the audiobook of Skeleton Crew, I ended up borrowing a scan of the same edition I owned from the Internet Archive, since the audiobook does not include either the introduction or notes sections. A "Constant Reader" misses those little extras in the audiobook presentation, and a former book production manager craves a full meal of front and back matter; to delve into the fussy copyright page, pick apart the typesetting of the table of contents, or savor what strange, wonderful, or beguiling thing King has chosen as a epigraph this time around. It was fun to see someone else's abuses to their own copy, the highlights on the contents page for example, as it reminded me of my own defacement of Skeleton Crew, underlining half the book of favorite lines like some green-eyed little Heather with an eating disorder. But instead of underlining "Eskimo" I was underlining things like "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat!" without even a whisper of irony. At that point in my life, King was akin to some sort of crass, jokester deity, and everything he wrote was a revelation.

Dedication to King's literary agent and his wife.

Not that I loved every story in Skeleton Crew during those youngster days. Some were half-liked, others were just, well...boring. Over all those re-reads in my youth, there were stories I almost always skipped, others I would read if I was in the mood. My absolute favorites were "Cain Rose Up," "The Raft," "Survivor Type," and above all others, "The Jaunt." That last story, just as much future/sci-fi as it is horror, held the top spot in my developing psyche because nothing I'd read, to that point, had scared me as much as this simple story of a family taking a little trip. I obsessed over it for weeks. I'd be sitting in Biology, half-listening, half dozing through the sprawling, squalling class of Aves, when suddenly "longer than you think" would echo outward from somewhere deep and I'd be sitting up straight, frowning, troubled, and wide awake. While the driving theories behind the horrific turn in the story have no doubt existed for at least a century, it was the first time I'd ever encountered such horrible possibilities. Much like a wakeful jaunt, my little monkey mind simple could not handle it. 

We love a marked up Contents page! The best I can say for my own
vandalized copy was that it was all done in pencil. Mostly.

This time around, all these years and lifetimes of living later, "The Jaunt" was fun to hear, but it was old gold, well-worn and a little dusty, every little link familiar. The reader was fine, the story was efficient and brutal as ever, but I knew it back and front and there was nothing new to feel about it. What a wonder it was, then, to find new life in such an old, well-loved book, in stories that had once been above my head or beyond my experiences that were now present and sharp, or stories that I liked just fine back in the olden days of the 80s that were breathed to vibrant, incredible life by the talent selected to read them. I almost always skipped the last tale in the book, "The Reach," because it was "boring," What a difference 30 years makes. The narrator (Lois Smith; Twister, Minority Report) is fantastic, but the story itself is wonderful: A complete world spun from nothing but simple words. And imagine my surprise at finding that the scariest story in the collection, which for me had been "The Jaunt" without reservation and for so long, had now replaced by a story that I once found mildly amusing but would skip half the time because it simply did not speak to me: "Gramma." 

My! God!

Epigraph page. Point of interest: This epigraph always bugged the hell out of me
because in 1986 disco was forbidden. I was into heavy, light, alternative, and trippy
metal plus a whole lot of Top 40 which seriously borrowed and stole from disco but
I was not interested in acknowledging such nonsense. 

Look, I am nearly fifty years old. I have seen things, done things. I do not believe in ghosts or poltergeists (except maybe a little when the cats stare at things unseen with avid curiosity in the black of 2 a.m.), I do not believe in devils or possession, and I mostly do not believe in wicked witches, though I know there are nature witches which are entirely different and truth be told I still am a little scared of witches (but only a little). Listening to "Gramma" at night alone in the apartment was an unexpected experience. I've read it before, I knew the general plot (though I forgot the ending eeeeeep), yet I found myself jumping, gasping, and yelling expletives at my laptop as the narrator (Frances Sternhagen; Misery, Sex and the City) unfurled this Incredibly Scary, Absolutely Terrifying short story. Afterward, I felt discombobulated, paranoid, and seriously wondered if there would be nightmares. I had to put on a few episodes of Schitt's Creek to cleanse my brain of the willies.

Ope, Miss Millie I think she said Hell, No.

Better than finding new scares in old stories was my first experience with a female audiobook narrator, Dana Ivey, a much decorated Broadway actress who has appeared in many movies and television shows. I remember her most clearly as the shrill mayor's wife, Miss Millie, in The Color Purple. As I think back to the performances I can remember (The Adams Family, an episode of Frasier), I do recall a certain clarity in the tone of her voice, but those piercing eyes and flaring nostrils steal some of her considerable show. Listening to her narrate "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" helped me see and understand her in a totally new and breathtaking light. The fact that she is a great, effective actress has never been a question, even if only viewed through a collection of bit parts, little moments made big by her presence. But with this audiobook performance, everything Dana Ivey embodies as an actress is poured into this condensed, precise, perfect rendering of King's story. Her voice elevates the narrative and, in my very humble opinion, "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" is Skeleton Crew's most brilliant voice adaptation. Ivey's accents are spot on and her voice changes with each character in such nuanced, intelligent ways. I feel vindicated for some of the rampages I've had over audiobooks in these very blog posts. Portraying men and women out of one voice can not only be done well, it can be done artfully, beautifully, seamlessly. "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" was one of those stories that I'd skip more than read every time I'd revisit the pages of Skeleton Crew as a teen. Dana Ivey's reading of it is, by far, the best version of the story that exists, period. 

Screengrab from Frank Darabont's The Mist.

This leads me, inevitably, to "The Mist." I've never liked "The Mist." I've always been partial to King's "society breaks down" stories and novels, but this one always left a bad taste in my mouth. It is no mystery why, either. King even references it in the "Notes" section of Skeleton Crew:

"I never liked it that much until the rewrite--I particularly didn't like David Drayton sleeping with Amanda and then never finding out what happened to his wife. That seemed cowardly to me."

Okay. So whydja write it? Dammit?? The thing is, it's only the worst thing the main "protagonist" does in "The Mist." While the "hero" of any given story doesn't have to be morally or ethically flawless, you expect to find some redeeming qualities in the character. There is very little relate to in the character of David Drayton, though you are clearly supposed to see him in the protagonist/hero light. He has a 5-year-old son in tow, but he leaves the kid sleeping unsupervised in an aisle of the grocery store in which they are trapped to go do manly-man busybody stuff. He pawns the kid off on the babysitter the rest of the time. He uses his fists to settle arguments and one of the first things the reader learns about him prior to the main events of the story is that he has some sort of petty property line grievance with his neighbor. Drayton is a man of means with no discernable personality beyond hipshot heroics; a narcissistic, mediocre male with delusions of grandeur. He only seems like a hero because everyone else in "The Mist" is either 2-dimensional or a complete shit.

Do you love? is a theme the runs throughout Skeleton Crew.

As previously mentioned in other posts, King's early writing tends to struggle with portrayals of women. This period of his work quite often finds the narration viewing women of a certain age through an adolescent T&A lens, which is evident in several of Skeleton Crew's stories. In "The Mist" Drayton's wife is seen through this lens--yet another of King's wide-eyed idiot women--and later, a sexy stranger in the grocery store is described in that same, slobbery-dog perspective. 

When I was a kid, all the T&A language never gave me a second thought. First, I was thirteen. Every boy I knew thought and talked this way, and worse. Second, it was the 80s. "Me too" was decades in the future. Sure, "sexual harassment" was a known concept in the culture . . . as something to be sniggered at and circumvented. Listening to these portrayals now--which are not wholly told through the perspectives of characters, either, so no help there--is just embarrassing. Much like the bigoted crap, it reflects the times as much as anything. 

So, Drayton fist fights with the locals, abandons the kid to the babysitter, then screws some hot chick after mere hours of separation from his supposedly beloved wife because . . . what? He's stressed out. I guess. And all the rest of the cast of characters are either one-note blips or obnoxious, despicable, completely irredeemable turds. It was going to be a long shot that the audiobook performance would make me like "The Mist" (although a hat tip is warranted for the saving grace that was the 2007 movie, more on that later). Perhaps, at least, I would hear a great rendering of an otherwise unlikable story.  

"Here's some more short stories, if you want them." Like he doesn't know. Note 
that I didn't bother tracking the frontmatter page numbers because the heathens
over at Signet were just like Whatevs and numbered the frontmatter like the main text.

I've mentioned before my disdain for the sample audio of The Talisman. I have since listened to other samples from this same narrator, and my dislike of his style has only deepened. Frank Muller is a legend in the field and was a favorite of King's. In fact, the original audio version of Skeleton Crew (books on tape!) was performed by Muller. He died in 2008 after a years-long hospitalization from a motorcycle accident. I feel mean, guilty, and frankly confused about my inability to appreciate whatever it is that many others value so highly in Muller's audiobook work. It bothers me, a lot. What am I missing? Perhaps it is simply the newness of the format to me, specifically that I never experienced it in its infancy, and maybe the majority of performers back when audiobooks first began were flat-toned, lifeless bores. I remember when DVDs started to become the norm, discovering these snappy little add-ons, like trailers, behind the scenes, and options to watch the movies with commentary from the cast, the director, etc. What fun! And what a shock it was to watch my very first movie with commentary, the iconic 1984 Ghostbusters, and find the droning buzz of Dan Ackroyd, all business, absolutely no fun at all, through two hours of grinding monotone. 

So maybe Frank Muller was the first gonzo bonzo glitterfest spectacularrrrrr performer to ever grace the audiobook world. To my ear, he sounds, at best, like a well-meaning camp counselor telling ghost stories to sticky-mouthed little nose pickers around the midnight misty campfire, the woods aspookity with clicks and clatters. It's over the top, double-baked, extra cheese. I don't get it. I never will. As the Canadians say, Srry!

Back matter notes section. He only explains the origins of some stories (srry!).

The narrator of "The Mist" (as well as "Paranoid: A Chant," a poem with a schizophrenic perspective) follows that same school of exaggerated dramatics. Now, I adore Will Patton (Armageddon, Yellowstone). He is always reliably weird, spooky, compelling . . . interesting. I've never considered him to be an "over actor." I don't know if his performance was a kind of homage to Muller or if that's just how he chooses to perform audiobooks. Whatever the case may be, it grates. So I suppose the voice matches the story in the end, and it is for the best that "The Mist" is the very first story in Skeleton Crew. It could only get better from there. 

Reading King over these many years should have prepared me for how people
reacted to Covid-19, but alas.

Everyone who has ever read the story "The Mist," then watched the 2007 Frank Darabont movie starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden, likely share the same takeaway: OMG that ending. I don't remember much about the movie (though the Wikipedia article confirms that the dipshit adultery was not included, so big improvement at least on that score), but no one forgets that ending. Love it or hate it, it was fearless. I think it's what makes Darabont's The Mist one of the more successful film adaptations of King's work. There are plenty of King stories depicting what idiotic sheep we all are under duress (The Stand, Needful Things, Under the Dome), plenty more depicting crazy/manipulative/hyperreligious megalomaniacs taking advantage of the chaos (Carrie, The Gunslinger, The Dead Zone), but it's rare to find such nihilistic glee in mainstream King (his dark half, Bachman, is another story). The story itself eludes to the possibility of such an ending (the first half of it, anyway), but the twist is what makes it so gloriously awful and unshakably memorable. 

About the Author dates back to the original hardcover release (85).

Ad page and back cover. Point of interest, epilogue: "Allow a minimum of 4-6 weeks
for delivery" is similar to what they tell you when you order CD collections off the
television at midnight in 1993. I know this because I still own The Ultimate Party Album
which is resplendent with copious amounts of boogie oogie oogie disco, hot mamas.
In other words, I repent!

I think what's made this Skeleton Crew experience so fulfilling is the sense of community and depth of experience that has accumulated since those early days in mid-80s, jonesing for some cheap thrill-kills, slow burn, hot ash scares so bracing they lasted all the way through casserole dinner to bedtime, wide awake and staring into the rustling dark. I still adore the shocking horror of "The Jaunt," the lonely terror of "The Raft," and the (ha ha) maniacally hideous-yet-humorous grotesquery of "Survivor Type," but I love the fact that I have found some of these stories come suddenly alive and anew, sometimes because of the narrator, more times because I'm a different person, ofttimes due to some combination of both. Even though I've read these stories plenty of times before, it was as though I'd never read them: "The Wedding Gig" brought to full color by Paul Giamatti, "Gramma" so effective and unnerving from the wonderful voice of Frances Sternhagen, "The Reach" a 3-dimensional woman at the end of her long life brought in clear focus by Lois Smith, and of course "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," an unforgettable performance by Dana Ivey that will stand unrivaled for a good, long time. 

All these different voices, different interpretations, reminded me that while I was very much alone in my King universe when I was a kid (though my mother eventually got into reading him from time to time), there was a whole world of people out there who read and loved his work, too. For every person similar to me, loving It and Lisey's Story, there are plenty more who count dopey Salem's Lot as a favorite, or thoroughly enjoy the yank-and-thrust, gritty cadences of Frank Muller. There's room for all of us in this jacked up '58 Plymouth Fury, so long as King picks the music and shotgun agrees to shut their collective cakeholes and just enjoy the ride.

I have to give a shout out to the version of "The Raft" that appeared in 1987's
Creepshow 2. It was simple and straightforward, similar to the story, but
with another twist ending that, while not as abusively shocking as Darabont's
The Mist, still delivers a nice Zing! of surprise. This shot (grabbed from YouTube)
always haunted the hell out of me. The giant, evil trash bag will dissolve you in seconds!

Grade: B+ 

Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 9. While most of the stories included in Skeleton Crew could be classified as "horror," some are just straight storytelling without any elements of horror ("The Wedding Gig", "For Owen," "The Reach"). Others are a teaspoon of horror with fantasy or science fiction on the side. But the scare-factor gets a solid 9 rating from me based on "Gramma," "The Jaunt," "The Monkey," "The Raft," and several others. 

Warnings: Bigotry, wide-eyed idiot women, cannibalism, completely gratuitous adultery, bros being bros, fornits, Ace Merrill sighting, fat phobia. 

Artifact: I get all of my audiobooks from Audible. I have a membership that has gotten away from me like Mickey with all his dancing broomsticks. I've started taking little breaks in between Stephen King books to delve into a reading list curated from very helpful Reddit users and uber fans of my very favorite show, Halt and Catch Fire. The thing we've all agreed upon is that once you've finished the first viewing of HACF, all you want is more. The show is perfect as is, and no one would want to bloat it up just to make more, so someone in the fandom was like, "Are there any books like HACF?" And the list is plentiful and dear. I borrowed two from the IA (Masters of Doom and The Soul of a New Machine), and just started The Cuckoo's Egg on Audible. None of them are exactly like Halt and Catch Fire, but the flavor profiles are similar. YUM, early computer history books.

While I'm loathe to spend money on anything non-essential (save lights, always lights), I do like how easy Audible has been. Prospective buyers can listen to a sample of the reading and there are plenty of reviews to give an idea of what to expect from the performance (and the book itself, though I tend to ignore those reviews for my purposes). Buyers can even return books when warranted. While I like the story Thinner well enough, the audiobook was an abomination. Not only should no one pay for it, whoever is responsible for that production should be punished. At least with some hand smacks. I didn't dive deep to find out, but I wonder if the producers of Skeleton Crew and Thinner were the same or at least in some way affiliated. There are different, short musical interludes between each of the stories in Skeleton Crew, most of which are fine, though there are a couple of jangledy-bangledy transitions that reminded me of the atrocious music that disrupted, mangled, tortured, and maimed the otherwise fine Thinner. In Skeleton Crew, the transition music makes at least some sense, but there really is no need for it.

This shot from "The Raft" is probably one of the most chilling scenes of any King
film, with its tranquil desperation. The open car door, the clothes discarded
along the beach, the still water. It's just a short, easy swim from the raft to the
safety of the car. The story was a gruesome and troubling read, but this shot
really captures the isolation and terror of the moment. No one knows where
they are, no one is coming.

Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! The Exquisite Gift of Time to Memory (The Talisman, 1984, co-authored with Peter Straub)

The Talisman (1984)

"All will be well . . . all will be well . . . and all manner of things will be well."

My very first job began in June of 1988, working summer custodial for the USD 259 in Wichita, Kansas. I was still half a month shy of sixteen, but they cut me a break since I'd gotten the job through my sister's adoptive father who had recently served as deputy superintendent of schools for the district. It was a huge boon, not to be taken for granted, but I was still resistant to the idea and nervous about what the post might require. It paid very well, far better than the standard minimum wage back in those days (it was over $5/hour when the minimum wage was just $3.35/hour in 1988), but it required a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday schedule doing light manual labor in an unairconditioned environment. 

Scuffed with love, gotta admire an embossed cover.

I'd grown up going to school in the same district and was familiar enough with how uncomfortably hot those classrooms would get at the start and end of the school year, but I was soon to discover that the summers were far, far worse. I started the job in my standard street clothes, cute but comfortable, but quickly learned to mine the depths of dresser dregs to find clothes a wash or two away from being stripped to rags: torn, stained, and Not Cute At All. Aside from the work (disinfecting lockers, trash cans, desks, scraping gum from the underside of every possible place a baby teen could conceive of, swabbing toilets, wiping walls, scrub scrub scrub), all we did from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. every single wretched summer weekday was sweat. We did not glow. We did not experience localized pit-sweat to be covered by the clever shift in stance. We dripped sweat, all day, every day. 

They look like two math teachers at a slide rule convention.
This is a prime example of being spendy for spendy sake.
This is a gloss, tip-in insert page, a very expensive add-on
flair to the printing process. I love it because it is insane
and wholly unnecessary.  

It was a gross job. I saw things I can never unsee. I cleaned things that were permanently unclean: the rancid, rusted metal trashcans from some turn-of-the-century child-labor sweatshop spring immediately to mind. Every locker was a suspenseful knock on Twilight Zone's creaking door ,where predictable avalanches of paper, notebooks, pens, and erasers might also unleash a torrent of evil odors, unidentifiable ichor, and living spoors eying us from dark corners with stupid menace. Sometimes there were prizes--I was a paper collector, especially notebooks, and was happy to take any clean offerings we found. I even scored a bitchen jean jacket once. 

Page i, author bios

It wasn't hard work compared to working out in the beating sun or, say, the lethal rigors of logging, but it was hard in the way that scrubbing and cleaning can be, doubly so in the constant, unrelenting Kansas heat. The pay was the thing, however, and no amount of scrubbing or sweating could deny the power of that much cash in a teenager's hot little hands. This is why I worked the custodial job two summers in a row. The second summer was far easier (and more productive) because my boss was a no-nonsense professional who I respected and liked. That first summer, however, was a different story.

I do not remember his name. I do remember the first day, reporting to work in my first "real" boss's basement office, walls filled with equipment, tools, hardware, everything layered in black grease and time. He was somewhere in his fifties, maybe sixties, gray and balding, but with an overlong fringe of locks wrapped around his head, and a permanently tanned crown smooth as butter atop. He had a very monotone, robotic manner of speaking and I have no doubt, all these years later, that he was on the spectrum. At the time, a mere fifteen years of lazy knowledge behind me, I simply thought he was creepy. His first comments and questions to me did not help. I was asked my name, where I went to school, how old I was. All standard stuff. He had these penetrating, ice-blue eyes that stared, unblinking. He commented that I was a pretty girl. He asked if I had a boyfriend. When I said no, he asked why I didn't have a boyfriend. When I had no acceptable answer other than stammering um, uh, well, I don't know, he went on to tell me that of course I should have a boyfriend, a pretty girl like me must have a boyfriend, that it was strange that a pretty girl like me did not have a boyfriend. It was--yay!--my first workplace harassment. I was, I remind you, fifteen.

Page ii, previous publications.
This spacing makes my eye twitch.

The one thing my boss had going for him, that everyone on the crew learned to respond to like Pavlovian dogs, was his key set. He carried an enormous confabulation of rings and keys of many sizes and colors clipped to his hip, which made his comings and goings easy to detect. For a motley crew of teens and young adults trapped in a junior high, light-headed from cleaning chemicals, sweating their body weight from 7 to 3, it was a jingle-jangly Godsend. 

While no one ever tried copping a nap or anything so egregious, work would slow and even stop when we knew he wasn't around. We'd talk, lay in the middle of the floor with a long line of lockers open at attention in the dark inner gloom of a sleeping school, lights out unless needed, sweating, sweating, always sweating. Then, in the distance, we'd hear the tune (ting! ting! Ting!) as he approached, rising to the full jangle as he finally arrived, blue eyes wide and assessing his crew, now scrubbing, wiping, scraping the undersides of desks, closet corners, drawers. 

Page iii, full title page

It was a good summer job that paid extremely well. I would not trade it for another. It gave me perspective, for one, but it also gave me hot cash money of my very own. The two babysitting jobs that preceded the custodial gig provided cash money, too, but I never count them as "real." It is not because I do not respect the responsibility of child care. The truth is the exact opposite. They were not real jobs to me because I barely did the jobs at all. The cash was just as green in both circumstances, but the experience of spending that money was completely different. The custodial job was repetitive and boring, but I was never unclear about what I had accomplished at the end of every day. With my first USD 259 check, I bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). With my second, I bought a VCR, a treasure my little family had never owned. My two biggest dream purchases that I had coveted so keenly were mine, bought with my money, made with my sweat. There's no comparison to the thrill of buying something you always wanted but could never have and doing so with your very own, truly-earned money. 

Page iv, crite page. I do not pretend to know the nuances
of early 80s trade paperback publishing, but it is weird
to see no printing line on a copyright page. I'm sure
there was a reason for it. Also note: mimeograph (!)

I was paid for the babysitting gigs, but the circumstances were very different. The first was too easy because the kids were asleep the whole time (my absolute angel cousins) and I got to watch MTV all night. It could not have been easier. The second was a summer-long job I fought against tooth and nail but was given no choice but to accept. I was living with my grandparents at the time, I was fourteen, and I had been deemed to be sinfully lazy.  It was decided that I would babysit the neighbor's nine-year-old, petty criminal, half-feral son every weekday for the entirety of the summer. I was a child who did not particularly care for children so it was not going to go well. 

Little Damian immediately busied himself with testing my boundaries and found that as long as he left me alone he could get away with anything short of murder. I let the were-boy run wild. If he tried to argue with me I would use manipulation tactics to shut him up (wait 'til your dad gets home), but most of the time he just ran the streets, doing God knows what, and I let him. He would get into trouble somewhere nearby, then hightail it home to hide, pretending nothing had transpired when his guilty face was all I needed to know he'd committed a crime against humanity somewhere in the neighborhood. I'd hear about it later via hectoring from my grandmother, the mastermind to this whole, misguided endeavor; how I'd failed the kid, how my job was to look after him, how I would be paid at the end of the summer for my work and didn't I want to learn a Good Work Ethic? (My childhood was one lecture about work ethic after another, with dust rags and cans of Pledge and pennies hidden under planters to "pay" me for my labor. A day's work might earn enough for a whole nickel bubblegum; the pink, sticky kind wrapped in blue and red wax paper that filled your mouth with sickly sweet chemicals and sugary shame. I was already suspicious of this whole "work ethic" concept.)

Page v, credits

On one occasion, little Damian's flights from crime brought with him a very out-of-breath, red-faced adult, erupting in fury for whatever trespass, destruction, or injury the demonoid had wrought, and I was left stammering at the door as young Damian cowered in his bedroom closet. I somehow got the man to leave (after some threats were lobbed and fingers were thrust inches from my face) and it was enough to pull me from the MTV-induced stupor I'd been swimming in for the past two or so months of "watching" the Tasmanian devil-child. I did not yell at him, but instead drew on an authoritative persona that mirrored my mother at her most intimidating. I clenched my teeth, widened my eyes, locked my posture, and whisper-purred that he would stay in his room until his father got home and that he was in the biggest trouble of his long and probably very short life. Much to my surprise, he burst into sobs, begged forgiveness, and vowed to be the best boy this planet has ever known if I would not tell. Despite my shock at this human turn of events, I informed him that his dad was going to know about what he'd done because one of the repeated threats from the aggrieved neighbor was that he would most definitely return. Best to be honest now...or pay double later.

What did Damian do? Throw rocks at a house? Key a car? Levitate a running lawnmower? Explode a dog with his mind? We'll never know. The aggrieved party was so wild with rage, he wasn't communicating clearly. I recall there were repercussions, most directly for Damian, but for me as well. I was too old to spank, but I got a serious talking-to, and there was a question as to whether I would be paid for the summer at all. The condition, of course, was to finish the job with no further incidents. I got the message. While I found the experience did nothing for my work ethic, I was able to control the boy for the rest of the summer, specifically by never letting him step foot outside the house. He spent the rest of his vacation destroying his room, asking for snacks, smashing his toys, asking for more snacks, and reinforcing my feelings about children for all time. 

Page vii, dedication page. I have always wondered if
King was in some part inspired to write this novel
because of his own mother's death from cancer.
If he addressed it in either of his non-fiction works
(or via articles, interviews), I am unaware.
Either way, the book is dedicated to their mothers.

At the end of the summer, the neighbor begrudgingly handed over the cash to my grandmother who, in turn, dictated exactly how it would be spent: back-to-school clothes. I remember being excited to get new clothes, and I remember a very specific pair of boots procured on that long day at Towne West Mall, but I also remember the trip was not without punishment. As we walked from store to store, I endured lectures about money not well-earned, and how I was lucky I got anything at all. After that, the purchases were effectively sullied. Every time I would look at the white boots I would remember what a piece of shit I was, how I had no work ethic, and how I didn't deserve anything half as nice as those boots. I had done a bad job.

You can see why it doesn't count, right? Folks. Teach your kids work ethic by example. There are better ways to develop healthy, engaged, well-adjusted future capitalists. Employment via coercion and emotional manipulation are not helpful to the foundation of a "good" work ethic.

Page viii, epigraphs

By the time I was almost sixteen I was ready to work for my own money, though honestly all I wanted to do all summer was a whole lot of nothing: hang out with friends, listen to music, flirt with boys when possible, giggles, gossip, go to the mall, and so on. Were we richer types, my dream would have been to live in the pool June through August, sleep under the stars. But driving around town with the windows down and 107.3 KKRD blasting the bops would certainly suffice. 

Aside from just wanting to chill over break, most of what made that first summer of janitorial work challenging was the combination of the aforementioned elements: the work itself, the weird boss and his random awkward and sometimes inappropriate comments, and the oppressive summer heat. Sometime midway through that first summer, a new element was introduced by way of one of the work crews that came through to complete a particular service for all schools. My sister had worked one of these traveling crews when she was on the USD 259 circuit, specifically the typewriter cleaning crew. I believe the crew in question may have been one of the light crews were in charge of checking and replacing lights throughout the district.

Pages ix and x, contents. Look. At these Margins.

Paperbacks are notorious for skating the edges
of safety in terms of margin control, so skirting
up against the edge of insanity where the paper is
cut is standard if not entirely acceptable . . .
except look at the spacing between sections.
Wide plains of nothing! White space for days!
WHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYY

One member of the crew, a tall, almost-attractive, blond, 20-year-old married man, decided I was the Ren-fest fairy goddess of his dreams and proceeded to try to seduce me. He no doubt imagined himself some elfin warrior, stepped out of time and universe to this plebian existence in the wastelands of Wichita, anchored to some withered woman once winsome and stirring, now older and dulling by the moment. And here I was, young and supple and hopefully stupid. 

And how did fair knight charm the young fairy goddess? With McDonald's cheeseburgers, of course. I would talk to him as I worked, he'd sweep back his thin, feathered hair and adjust his mirrored sunglasses and stand as knights do, leg cocked, tight jeans and concert T pristine. He'd talk about their work crew, where they'd been, where they were going next, how his boss thought he was the greatest thing since Iron Maiden ran for the hills, what he did last weekend, what he was doing next weekend and, eventually and almost entirely, what an ungrateful bitch his wife was. He had a mole on his upper lip and I would watch it jut and jive as he talked, endlessly talked, about himself and all things as they pertained to him, the center of this universe and all universes, that mole working overtime. 

Page 1, section plate (1). We love a stylized plate.
It sets a tone from the very start.

It went from being flattering, to a nuisance, to a concern in no time flat. This is where we forgive my first boss, he of the staring ice-blue eyes, for all his trespasses. He didn't like Sir Tightpants one bit. He couldn't get him fired (remember, yon elven knight could do no wrong), but he could control me. This is how I was assigned the insane task of scraping decades of floorwax from the entire perimeter of the school's cafeteria. It required me to sit on the floor using a little hand-held scraper blade to remove wax along the curved floor/wall, inch by inch, for three solid weeks. And because it was his kingdom, my boss dictated that absolutely no one was allowed in the cafeteria at this time, including loathsome lotharios. 

Page 3, main text. The thoughtful use of classic,
ye olde, serif typeface also sets the tone. You are
about to go on a journey and it is going to be Epic.

Sometime earlier that summer, my mother had procured a paperback copy of The Talisman, but I had been putting off reading it for two reasons. First, I was tired all the time. I'm a lifelong night owl and those 7 a.m. start times were brutal. Second, I wasn't excited to read something co-written by someone else. I knew who Straub was from Ghost Story, but I wasn't sure he was going to be the complementary peanut butter to my beloved chocolate, Stephen King. The jacket description didn't sound much like horror and it was about a Dumb Boy which little Damian and many other Dumb Boys my own age had proved less than heroic or even redeemable over the past few years of my pre- and teen existence. I would read it eventually, but I wasn't tripping over myself to get there. 

As you might imagine, working alone scraping wax for seven hours a day (one hour for lunch) was incredibly dull. The boss would come in from time to time to assess my progress and give me pointers, sometimes asking me to do whole sections over again, and it wasn't entirely mindless work since I had to make sure I was scraping wax without cutting the actual flooring, but for the most part I was alone for hours at a time. Scraping, thinking, scraping, sweating, scraping, scraping, scraping. Early on in the task I slyly remembered that my boss had his very own built-in alert system via the jangly keys one could hear well ahead of the man himself given the long, bare halls' acoustics. I decided to bring The Talisman to work so that I could "read during lunch."

No lie, I absolutely read during lunch. I also read between scrapings. Scrape, scrape, scrape, read, scrape, scrape, scrape, read. Always with an ear out for that jingle jangle. Of course I was dead wrong on my assumptions about The Talisman. It was riveting from the start, and absolute thrill of a read, and I loved every fantastical page of it. I got so completely immersed in the adventures of Jack Sawyer, his were-friend Wolf, and his best friend Rational Richard Sloat, that I inevitably got caught by my boss, cacophony of keys and all, and had to make up some story about "resting my wrist," which really was smarting at that point because of the repetition and awkward angles of the task at hand but ohhh man, what a little liar. Wrist or no wrist, I still would have been pouring over those pages. And even though the boss's visits increased, and I was obliged to keep part of my mind on alert at all times, I still continued to take breaks to flip into the world of The Talisman. 

Back matter, ad/sales page (recto). I love how
all the 70s and 80s horror works sound exactly
the same and could mean just about anything
(Whispers! Phantoms! Night Chills!)

To this day, it remains an incomparable first-read of my life. We all have adventure books that are foundational to our upbringing (even if they are just adventure movies, they still count)--the Huckleberry Finn epigraphs at the start of The Talisman are a likely tell for King and Straub, and they'd no doubt count Lord of the Rings, as well--but for myself the apex of adventure began with Star Wars, peaked with Empire Strikes Back and, a bit later, grew deeper and more meaningful with A Wrinkle in Time. The Talisman, however, holds a specific place in my heart all on its own, apart and above.

Perhaps it is because I first read it at an age that I could truly appreciate Jack's predicament, to be a kid on the cusp of learning about adulthood, not being trusted to care for yourself, make decisions, or do anything of real consequence, and in many ways rightly so (see: babysitting Damian). Coming to terms with having to do hard things when you don't want to, to press on even when you are tired and wish to be carried, to be strong when all you want is your mommy. Worse, when that sole protector, your only parent, is in some way compromised. Jack's mother has cancer, my mother suffered other demons. I understood that feeling of helplessness, fury, and the overwhelming drive to fix things. In The Talisman, Jack is given the opportunity to do just that, but he must toughen up on the road to be able to achieve his goal. 

I would never directly compare the hardship Jack Sawyer endures to the rigors of my first, official summer job, but parallels have since occurred to me in subsequent readings, especially as my work life expanded and matured, and in a different way when I suffered through my own personal demons to somehow come out the other side, alive and happy. It is impossible to "what if" a trip through dependency, to play that "if only" game, because I was not the person then that I am now. It's not possible to be standing here as I am in the present without having traversed that hideous, painful, humiliating path through addiction. Might I have somehow avoided it some other way? Perhaps. But forays into regret must always be accompanied by the brutal truth that you are who you are at any given time and no amount of hindsight can change your trajectory or development. Jack Sawyer couldn't have put his hand on the talisman and survived without suffering the experiences of his journey across the States and the Territories any more than I could have packed up a car with camping gear and set off for a seventeen-state journey across the American West, sleeping in my car, setting up campsites, and successfully, safely, and joyfully experiencing the ultimate road trip without first suffering through the harrowing process of addiction and recovery. 

Back matter ad/sales (verso).
Good lord that's a lot a freaking ink. 

What's been particularly fun this read around is the treasure trove of memories The Talisman has churned up, all shiny and bright and spectacularly weird. Some memories are mundane, like how my favorite lunch during that summer was a tuna sandwich with O'Grady's Au Gratin potato chips (long discontinued, hark! an angel has lost its wings for such an outrage). Or how I eventually came to picture the talisman itself as a white/rainbow variant of the spiritual stones from 1998's blockbuster videogame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (even though the description in the book is not even close). 

As I encountered the villainous character Osmond for the first time in years, I remembered how I'd imagined him during that first reading, sort of an amalgam of the lead singer from Device (Paul Engemann) and the "snotty" restaurant host (Jonathan Schmock) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which led me to remembering that I'd always imagined the primary villain, Morgan Sloat, as another character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the single-minded school principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones). While that particular actor's legal troubles may make him villainous in real life, this likely doesn't translate to wanting to see him on film in any capacity. When I was a kid, though, his face fit the bill to a T. 

Reliving those first impressions led me to Jack Sawyer, the main protagonist (and not at all "Dumb Boy" I'd feared). Who had I envisioned in that role? For obvious reasons, instead of calling forth a famous face, my mind settled resolutely on a boy from my school. Someone real that I could identify with . . . even if I was only projecting my impressions of the heroic Jack Sawyer. We were not in the same grade and I don't remember his name or even if we shared any classes. He was one of the poor kids, the shop-class kids, and a big fan of those omnipresent, 80s muscle shirts. He was very shy under that pretense of machismo. Still, I barely knew him, not even enough to say whether he was nice or mean, but he had a closed, handsome face, a guarded and self-conscious way about him that was still affecting. I remember thinking he was cute in a passive, non-committal way when school was still in session, and for whatever brain-chemical-associative-mindclick reason, he became Jack Sawyer to me before I was even out of the first chapter.

Isn't it wild to think that all these years later, someone would remember you so specifically and in such an auspicious light? As the years stretch, it is harder to remember the people I did talk to back when I was young. Not close friends of course, but passing friends, History class friends, frienemies, acquaintances, contraband hookups, friends of friends. But I remember that guy. The memory is a little blurry, but it's there.

Back cover. It's no surprise that the copy is so misleading.
King was so hot at this point in his career he could have
put out a cookbook of Maine coastal cuisine with a picture
of a happy lobster on the front and the damn thing would
have sold millions. But why take the chance of missing even
a single sale should the buyer believe the book is anything
but HORROR? At least the first praise quote tells it like it is.
The Talisman is solidly a fantasy/adventure novel with some
scary elements. It's no more "horror" than Lord of the Rings.

The best recollection of the events of that first read through The Talisman, by far, I have saved for last. There was a great swath of time during my younger adulthood that wild horses would not have dragged this information out of me. Now, in my early elderlies, I just think it's a hoot. 

My mother worked for the city government of tiny Medicine Lodge, Kansas, for less than a year in 1986. From that, she gained two things: The knowledge that small-town life was not her Jam and an assortment of massive poster paper pads. I did not understand what they could have been used for in a city finance office (as an innocent youth, I had not yet experienced the hellfire that is corporate meetings) but I was a gleeful recipient, busying myself with expansive, awkward drawings of desert landscapes heavily influenced by the music video for Fleetwood Mac's "Hold Me." 

The summer I read The Talisman, I was wrecked with an overabundance of imagination and excitement over Jack Sawyer's incredible adventure across America and the Territories. Nothing had inspired me like King and Straub's story since The Empire Strikes Back (which had set my little 8-year-old brain ablaze for months afterward, utterly obsessed). One night in a frenzy of adoration and inspiration, I sat on my bed with the oversized sketch pads and created The Talisman Board Game. It had dual twisting roads (one for the States, one for the Territories) that you could flip back and forth from, all the characters, all the plot points (and clever side quests), and an ending objective to attain (what else?) the talisman! I wish I could remember more, but since it has been decades since I've even remembered that it existed at all, most of those synaptic connections have died. It was detailed, and I think I may have given it a different name like maybe the "Heart of Glass" but in French? Something "coeur," anyway, because I, a sixteen-year-old Kansan in 1988 Kansas, believed in copyright laws, I guess?

At some point that year or the next, I grew ashamed of my "babyish" board game and threw it out. I never even got a photo of it. Frankly, I think I shuttered the whole memory because it embarrassed a slightly-older version of me and then simply forgot all about it. Now, all these decades later, in a moment of reverie after just completing my most recent reread of The Talisman, I am turning over the experience in my mind. What to write, how it connects to me now, my first childish forays into "work ethic," the changes we all experience through hardships, victories, and time. Then POINK!: I remembered the board game. And of course my very second thought was not one of shame or self-consciousness: it was unvarnished glee. Joy. Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow!

I read a book on the sly at my sweaty first job. I loved it so dearly that I created a board game in honor of it. It lit up my whole life with rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! I applied a little work ethic in the midst of slovenly teen mopetown drudgery to create a sweet, immersive homage to a one-of-a-kind tale. Decades later, after a very sad couple of years, I was gifted with this memory salvaged from the deep; another, better boon than even that bux deluxe custodial gig in 1988. A perfect gift from The Talisman.

Scene of the Crime, first custodial job, 1988, Allison Middle School. Many of the
schools around the district were retrofitted with add-ons to the original buildings
so Allison doesn't look like it did back in 1988. I suppose there was no other way
to add space, but it sucks that the brick doesn't match.

Thanks to Google Maps for documenting the area surrounding Allison
Middle School (which really hasn't changed much). Those golden arches
peeking over the Taco Rio are the very same from whence 
the solicitous cheeseburger offerings were procured.

Jardine Middle School, second custodial job (1989). I am pleased to report
that most (if not all) USD 259 schools now have air-conditioning.

Grade: A+ (without reservation, forever)

Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. While I would categorize The Talisman as an adventure fantasy, there are dark elements and terrifying moments that do deliver the scares. There are harrowing chase scenes and more than one instance of were-violence. 

Warnings: The casual bigotry and racism is on full parade and not just out of the mouths and thoughts of villains. At this point I am actively attempting to compartmentalize these regrettable echoes of time, but I was especially annoyed this time around because of the sheer variety of assery on display. Everyone got a shout out. The one positive(?) spin is acknowledgment of how commonplace bigoted behavior and speech was up until the very recent present ("Paging doctor f___" from The Hangover springs immediately to mind). Adults aged 40+ claiming racism doesn't exist and they were, in fact, a baby lamb of complete innocence in high school (lookin' at you, Kavanaugh) who would never, ever call someone a derogatory term are more than likely lying their wooly little butts off. Memory sides with the victor, and since we are all the heroes of our interior histories, it's easy enough to imagine that those very adults have selectively chosen to forget bad acts of the past, perhaps because they were ashamed, more often because it was just "kids stuff," or they simply do not care ("what's the big deal?"). I wish the bigoted trash was not in The Talisman, but maybe it stands as an artifact of the time it reflects, and that every time someone blats defensively about racism and bigotry being a non-issue since the Civil Rights Movement, it is at least one example (among too many) that this is simply wishful thinking. 

Artifact: Once again, I relied upon the magical resources of the Internet Archive to download the PDF scan of the same paperback edition I owned back in 1988. I wanted to give the audiobook a try, but the sample was too grating and dreadful to bear. This was the first time I seriously considered the possibility of engaging with the public library again, but I just could not bring myself to do it. I am vaccinated, but my lungs are less than perfect and my curves are extra curvular, so I'm not playing games with even the slight possibility of catching covid. I feel much safer, for sure, but not enough to borrow a book from the library to have in my home and somehow read without a mask, gloves, and tongs. It was a huge stretch by my germaphobic nature to check out books and DVDs from the library before all this covid crap started, so yeahhhhh, NO. Maybe someday, but frankly, the way things are going, this may just be a new way of life. 

Endnote: When doing some research prior to writing this post, an inevitable and oft repeated question surfaced in my mind: Why has this book never been adapted to film? Well, apparently there have been attempts, with varying levels of promise, but alas, The Talisman has stayed firmly imprisoned in book form. Until Now! When the news broke in March that the Duffer Brothers would be creating a Netflix limited series of The Talisman I was deep in the grieving process for my mother. That is the only reason such news would have escaped me. I had no idea that Steven Spielberg owned the rights to The Talisman in the first place, but to then collaborate with the Duffer Brothers??? For a series???? My cup hath exploded. I couldn't think of a better time, a better set of creators, or a better platform to finally bring this story to screen. To say that I am excited is an understatement.  

Library Legs, Spring and Fall 2017, A Terrible, Terrible Visual Representation

First of all, I apologize. 

I had to share it. It sat there looking at me from my desktop, daring me to do it, for nine-ish months. There's no denying I've been distracted in 2021, but you could understand my hesitation in sharing it at all. Look at it. 

Such meaningful shenanigans corner me into one particular existential corner: Am I or am I not a Serious Person? 

Or am I but a Dancing Monkey? A Cop from Keystone? A Gibbering Foole?

Finally, in this year of our lord 2021, can I not be all? The truth of the matter is that I had great, dissociative fun making this insane map. And if you've clicked the link to get this far, I've made you look. That's good enough for me.

It started semi-seriously. I just wanted to see a visual representation of my travels. After all, I'd trekked some 13,000 miles (not including in-town back and forth from lodging to libraries to dinner to tourist sites, etc.). It was worth seeing the whole picture. 

Any endeavor to "make" a map from scratch was immediately out the door. A quick Google search reminded me of ye olde publishing days, when more than one author asked, miffed: Can't you just make a map? As though we had cartography interns on call, ready to scratch out a detailed rendering of 1756 South America, denoting cultural shifts, death tolls, political upheavals and in all the eye-friendly colors of the world. If Google Maps served me so well on the road, it could do it once more, by way of entering all the destinations up and taking a screenshot* of whatever came up at the end. 

It was more challenging than expected. For one, there are limits to the number of destinations you can add to one trip in Google Maps. It would have made my life much simpler if Google had allowed them all, but I was happy to at least get the general outline of the trip, regardless. 

The lucky break to the whole, messy undertaking was the fact that I'd saved links to every single destination in the spreadsheet I made to plan the trips back in 2017. Every city, place I stayed, every site I visited. It should surprise no one that I had the whole adventure planned with very little room for spontaneity. Not to say I was never spontaneous, especially when I had no choice, like when I got elevation sickness in Colorado followed closely by the flu in California. There were times I could not bear the idea of sleeping in the car, whether I was jonesing for a bed, a bathroom, and privacy or just getting a bad vibe from a rest stop, so made a reservation at a hotel instead. This may not be so much "spontaneous" (which suggests positive attributes like courage, fun, outgoing, and so on) as it is just "less rigid," but being able to roll with the changes was still a significant departure from the person I'd become in New York: sequestered, heart-sick, and deeply anxious. It still shakes me up that I did any of this at all.

So, the map.

Hearts mark cities and sites I visited, though they do not represent every single place I went (impossible in this format); lizard eyes mark where I bunkered down, sick as hell; places in gray are Google; places in purple and orange are mine; dark blue line is leg one; light blue line is leg two. Note the directional arrows! I visited every state in the Western United States, with the starting point in Wichita noted with the giant smiley star. Why stop there? I added clips of photos I took on my journeys (which rendered crazy) and then, for reasons known only to my 2020-sequestered-psychologically-addled mind, I added pictures of my cats, too. WHY NOT. After all, it was during one of the first car-sleeps during leg two that I realized how completely I loved them as I laid there in the dark of my Rogue feeling blue and keening for their little fur-faces, followed immediately by snorting in derision at what a marshmallow peep I'd become. But if you find maps boring...well, that's weird, but if you do, the cats really add a level of zip and zing most maps could never offer. Look at those little faces. A few twerpy cats would have certainly spiced up some of our scholarly monograph maps. This is a fact.

Why the giant yellow eye icon at Loveland Pass? Why the rainbow sticker at Jackson, Wyoming? Follow the links and relive my library tour of the western United States! I'm doing a bit of that myself over on my new Instagram page, created primarily to supplement my new freelancing website, though it has been a blast revisiting these travels. Even more so after the grim, anxiety-ridden wake of 2020. 

So does my fever dream of a Library Trip 2017 Map make me less of a Serious Person? More of a Giant Doof? Does it matter? And that's what made me finally post it. It's stupid and I love it. And it shows just how far I went...and how far I've come. Liberation from constant panic is next door to one's best conception of heaven. Next up: liberation from self-consciousness. That would take care of the serious/not question for EVER.

Actually, I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry at all.

*fair use, look it up, bay-be