The Apt Bodyshank Method (Different Seasons, 1982)

Different Seasons (1982)

Grab the popcorn and put the book back on the shelf. You'll thank me later. 

I had the 1983 Signet edition featuring the original
hardcover art. It depicted the seasons and was
breathtakingly beautiful. I have no idea what
 moon baby is up to in this edition.

One of the interesting consequences to re-reading all of Stephen King's novels and collections in chronological order is the strange doubling of psyche, like viewing myself through a smeary prism, the light flashing me blind, the warped cut of the glass twisting backflips into a black lake. What was I thinking when I read this? What impressions did it make? Why didn't I notice then some of the things that are achingly glaring now? What did this mean to me? And what does that say about who I was?

I read The Shining and Carrie a summer apart; the first during enormous change both financially and socially, the second when I was well submerged in the pit; fractured, volatile, and resentfully wiser. Yet if none of the personal upheaval had happened--had we stayed in our east side home, had I gone to the school I was supposed to attend that next year, had it all gone as I believed it would up until that fateful birthday at Chi Chi's, all strained reverie with a nasty surprise at the end (your mother lost her job, you are probably going to move, who can guess where you will go to school now, blow out the candles)--I still would have been deep in the snarling thickets of puberty. I still would have been cliquish, selfish, immature, and v-o-l-a-t-i-l-e. So very volatile.

Instead of the scan of the inside cover, the second "page" is an Internet Archive notification. 

I wonder if I would have become so completely obsessed with King's works as I did, or if I would have wandered across them eventually, never needing the distraction the way I did that first summer, bored and scared all at once, pent up alone in a strange new house in a neighborhood where I knew no one, worried about starting at a new school (middle school no less) and looking for just about anything to distract me. I'd been hurt by my mother's interests before, seeing movies I should never have seen from as far back into my childhood as I can remember, so skimming over those rows of titles--on bookcases, shelves propped on cinder blocks, stacked here, stacked there--I was loathe to get into anything I knew she truly loved. It was mostly sci fi/fantasy garbagio, and I wasn't taking that bait. Who knew how much incestuous (Excalibur), gang-rapey (some Western), robot sex (Heavy Metal) might be lurking in those pages?

The fact that I knew there would be a nekkid dead lady trying to seduce the main pro/antagonist didn't deter me from reading The Shining because I already knew that it was the worst thing that would happen in the book. Probably. I remembered that part of the movie from an ill-advised home cable viewing at my aunt's house at the dear, sweet age of nine. I had suffered my own bathroom fears because of it, watching the light from the hall through a crack in the door convinced I'd seen a flutter of movement, but in my opinion the scene still wasn't on par with the degenerate "sex stuff" I'd come to loathe and, even if someone might claim that it was still "sex stuff," it couldn't be happening to a nicer guy.

Evidence of a quick scan?
 The bottom of every page is missing.

By the time I read Carrie, I was well ensconced in vengeful thinking, mentally smiting my enemies with dark thoughts and vicious wishes. But while the stress at home compounded my suffering, I wonder if the travails of middle school would have been much different under subjectively "better" circumstances. It seems that junior high is a universal proving ground for us all, the teenage thunderdome if you will, a punch-out death match where someone, somewhere hates you with a fire of a thousand suns. Everyone suffers in junior high. Or so I've heard. I also heard that high school is like that for many, though that was not my experience. It is likely someone hated me in high school, more than one someone, even, and of course the boys barked in the yard, but by then it was amateur hour. All the real brawlers had dropped out before ninth grade.

Don't fret. I'm not suggesting my proving ground was bigger, meaner, or crueler than yours . . . I'm stating it as a fact. *BlessT*

These one word praise pages are delivering the synonyms.

Rereading Different Seasons now was as disorienting as attending junior high then. The doubling, tripling reflections of me then and me now are more than a little alienating. It is important to note that Different Seasons was one of the King works I clung to the hardest for a sense of sanity during an otherwise chaotic period. I didn't care that it wasn't horror. What mattered was that now-familiar Voice. King's clear, unwavering, one-of-a-kind Voice packed into four whole and living stories. King's works would take me out of the tension of constant surveillance, harassment, touching, shoving, name-calling, and assault . . . and would send me places where broken, haunted people were facing down their worst nightmares: blood-soaked prom, mad daddy with a mallet, possessed laundry machine, an innocent man serving life. It was always a thrill, a magnificent ride through the screaming dark, to watch others fight, claw, earn their lives. It made my own problems recede, even if it was a temporary reprieve.

"Great."

I read Different Seasons sometime during the 8th grade school year, the hot zone, the shit show, the heart of darkness, with the soundtrack to Pink Floyd's The Wall seamed into my off-brand portable tape player, my aching brain thrumming to the beat like a deep basement of rumbling mainframes hissing, pulsing in the dark. King's collection of novellas was a life raft, a lullaby. Mostly. I found the last tale in the tome exceedingly long and shockingly dull despite the gruesome crescendo to the story-within-the-story. On the bright side, every time I come back around to The Breathing Method, it's a brand new tale. It will not stick. Not because it is too horrifying (it is, in an Amazing Stories meets Clive Barker sort of way), but because it simply doesn't resonate. Whenever I would speak of Different Seasons to my friends, with all the unabashed glowing of a preteen who has just discovered Fine Art, I would tell them to skip the last one. Or just tell them where to find the oogy part and be done with it, like snatching a peek at a Hustler hidden in the garage.

Buy my wares!

The other three tales were a revelation, each with their own merits, each sterling and shining in the soft glow of miraculous creation, to be revered, showcased, and dusted frequently. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption was my first prison story, a deep dive into the ugly world of mid-20th century American incarceration. I believed every word as gospel and was completely gobsmacked by the tale itself: wrenching, extraordinary, inspiring. The Body was equally entertaining and much closer to home, though boys were alien fart-beasts, we still had enough in common to relate, especially to the stormy steeplechase of friendships over the course of any given day and into the long span of years. Apt Pupil challenged me the most, however, because I'd never encountered a story where there was no real protagonist. I had zero empathy for guidance counselors at the time (for reasons), but in retrospect Rubber Ed was the closest the story got to any real protagonist, save of course poor Mr. Heisel who not only breaks his back and lands himself in the hospital, but realizes the man he's been cohabitating with in shared convalescence is none other than the Nazi monster who killed his family during the war. These are bit players, however, so they can't really carry the "protagonist" moniker. Instead, Apt Pupil is just one little monster and one big monster waxing sentimental about the Holocaust and trying to outmonster each other in the process, broiling live cats and killing homeless men for sport. It's a well-written yarn, but taxing. For a thirteen-year-old who knew next-to-nothing about the Holocaust at the time, it was overwhelming.

Thirty-fifth reprint, y'all. I can't even.

Thirty-five years later and a world of events apart, Different Seasons is a whole different book. With the exception of Apt Pupil, the movies outshine the stories by miles and in ways I never noticed when they were released in theaters. I vaguely knew that they were altered from the source material, but had forgotten just how altered. We're not talking Running- and/or "Lawnmower Man" levels of disconnect, but enough to shift my entire perception of the book as a whole. And, sorry, much like my adolescence, we're going to pretend that The Breathing Method doesn't exist.

Apt Pupil is pretty much the same as I remembered it, though a bit clunky and a lot gimmicky, specifically when young Todd's mother repeatedly tells people he is an "apt pupil." It was already jarring phrasing from a 1985 perspective, like some cornball dialogue from the 1950s, but it simply was not clever enough to repeat beyond the first time. We got it. He's an all-American little asshole: blonde, athletic, sociopathic, and a very apt pupil.

Otherwise it is an engaging tale, certainly one that sparked many a fan to wonder how the hell King thinks up this kind of stuff. I saw the movie once and vaguely remember it. I don't think it added or took away from the overall merit of the story. What I remember more than the actual movie itself was the fact that it was an old bootleg copy, the kind people sell on the streets of NYC, of which my then boyfriend had an endless supply. I played it in his sunlit Sunday kitchen on one of those cheap, early flatscreens with the built-in DVD player. You know the kind with the white film across the picture, where even the most HD-perfect program was rendered sort of gauzy and ill-defined? Imagine watching a bootleg of that dark-ass movie on one of those. I think the bootleg even skipped parts. I was okay with it. Like I said, it's a taxing tale.

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption was a disappointment this time around. The chasm between preteen me and ancient ogress me is indeed wide. I remembered it so differently. Prisms, prisms. What has time done to you, O Shawshank? It's a very basic narrative tale, sparingly descriptive, which allows the reader to fill in the color and texture of the world, I suppose . . . except that it is largely impossible to do now. Few of King's book-to-movie works stand as highly respected and beloved as The Shawshank Redemption. I remember the swell of pride that I felt when the movie came out and everyone was shocked that such a straightforward, emotional story came from that Stephen King. I was happy for him . . . and glad that this weird little bespectacled dude known for really hyucking it up in those film adaptation cameos was being recognized as a great storyteller, not just "some horror writer."

After the contents, everything gets churned up and spit out of the
 awkward mechanism of e-book conversion. Each novella is proceeded
by a different piece of art (as seen here) which they've jammed in there
for your viewing pleasure.

So many things going on here. I can almost smell the smoke.

Speaking of which: My newfound disenchantment with a few of his earlier works aside, I have never understood the blinding hatred some critics have harbored for Stephen King. I don't understand the compulsion to box writers like King into their respective genres. Horror, Westerns, Romance, Sci Fi . . . totally cool if that's your jam and what you are known for and what readers flock to your work in droves to feast and feast and clamor for more, but why the snotfest from reviewers, academics, and other, miscellaneous literary snobs? There's always this undercurrent of disdain, no matter what the writer does, what he writes, how fucking good he is at his craft, like the Tedious VonSnotwinkles of the world were made to walk through sludge and must scrape off a scalding review for having been forced to endure it. Even the much beloved Shawshank film is "shit" because it is commercial, too broadly attractive to the smelly masses, a silly reverie, an unrealistic fantasy spun by a whittler of wooden gargoyles. The fact that it was nominated for an Academy Award is irrelevant.

Here are the facts: King has written things that have brought me to honking, inconsolable tears. He has knocked the breath out of me and left me thrumming with joy. Horror or not, he's a Great Fucking Writer.

Even so, there are the disappointments, though in this case it is hard to hold the novella accountable against the lasting success of the movie. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is a pale thing, an outline, even. Because the movie punched color and breath into the thing and made it Sing. They took King's story and simplified it, condensed all the bad guys (a series of wardens and guards) into a single set of monsters (the Warden, the Guard), cranked up the severity of the stakes (the kid who knows who really killed Andy Dufresne's wife doesn't die in the book), and turned the big reveal into poetry with the power of Morgan Freeman's narration and that single defining shot of Tim Robbins standing in the rain, arms outstretched, free, free, free. The movie rocks and rolls, punches low and hard ("Brooks was here") and lifts you up into the sky, zero g's and yelling. It is a hard story, an unfair story, terrifying and infuriating . . . but the payoff is king. The book does a good job in the telling, but the movie soars. It's an American classic.

Wil Wheaton (Gordie), River Phoenix (Chris), Jerry O'Connell
(Vern), and Corey Feldman (Teddy)

While Shawshank is a standard favorite of the masses, no other movie sprung from King's oeuvre will ever come close to rivaling for my affections as the adaptation of The Body, better known as Stand By Me. I liked the story a great deal when I read it, felt connected to Gordie Lachance because I too was a fledgling peep of a writer batting around her little nest. Set again in the fictitious town of Castle Rock, King is deep in his descriptive mode, as he so often is when the place is its own character, one that requires detail and grit. The Body wasn't a favorite among the books and stories that I'd read to that point, but it stood securely somewhere in the middle.

The next year, the movie Stand By Me came out and eclipsed my memory of the novella completely. I saw it in the theater and was transported. Once it made its way to cable, it became a part of my culture, endlessly quoted, constantly referenced. We taped it off of HBO, of course, and still watched it every time it came on, anyway, reciting the movie ad nauseam and to our never-ending delight. In every yearbook thereafter, if I wasn't quoting Real Science ("I drank what?") I was quoting our favorite line from Stand By Me, delivered with withering care by Wil Wheaton, "No, Vern. They just let him in." It was sweet, stupid, wonderful, emotional, and weird. We loved Stand By Me.

At the time, as perfect as I thought the movie was, I still had two problems with it: First, it is unabashedly dorky. For example, when they are telling each other what a great time they are having ("A blast") and being hokey beyond all reason. Maybe it's a Maine thing, like saying a'yuh. I don't know. It was jarring in the book and doubly jarring in the movie. I think kids say stuff like that when they're five, but twelve or thirteen? Only if they want to get ranked to the dogs and back.

Second, that title. To be fair, The Body isn't great, either, but it's like they stretched it to fit around being able to use the song. Technically, it fits, because Chris literally stands by Gordie during the showdown with the town thugs . . . buuuuuuuuuuut, come on. It's a bit on the nose, cutesy wootsy, holding hands and telling each other this is really a good time, the most.

These are small things, though, in comparison to the goofiness, bravado, hilarity, and raw emotion of preteen boys on a dubious adventure, following the railroad tracks for miles to see a dead body. The young actors are extraordinary, each inhabiting his role like a second skin, and while there might be minor wobbles in reality here and there, they are so goddamned good it's criminal. It is important to remember how hammy child acting could be back then (and through time immemorial, really), so overwrought and shrill, and the audience just had to live with it because what else could you expect of kid actors? It was enough that they remembered their lines. Every once in awhile you'd see a performance from a kid that was 100% authentic (Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun and all the kids in E.T. come immediately to mind), but mostly it was cheesecake bullshit custom made to fit whatever adults thought kids should sound like at the time. Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell were phenomenal.

What a revelation it was to read The Body again after so many years. I was surprised by Shawshank, but absolutely floored by The Body. I suspect my love for the movie effectively wiped out my memory of King's story. It's not entirely different, the basic story remains the same, but there are changes to the plot in the movie that enhanced pivotal moments (such as when Chris confesses that he stole the milk money) or deepened the meaning behind the character's motivations. For example, in the book, Gordie is far more conflicted about his relationship with his recently deceased brother. In the movie, Gordie adores his brother, as is depicted in several soft-focus flashbacks. And the feeling is mutual. In the book, he is more of a stranger, still idolized by their parents, but removed from Gordie. In Gordie's nightmare, it is his deceased brother, rather than their bitter father, who tells him, "It should have been you."

Technically, there's a third thing that used to bug me about the movie that I've
come to love over the years: The corner-cutting on the barf-o-rama scene.
To be fair, it's not meant to be watched repeatedly and picked apart by random
viewers, but it's hard not to notice how everyone is puking pie even though
only the contestants were gorging on it. I suppose you could assume that every
single person in the audience had just eaten pie, but nah. Also, the hilarious
jets of vomit often do not align with the actor's mouths, as above.
It's still funny, though.

"Did Lard Ass have to pay to get into the contest?"

Of course I had a massive crush on him. Who didn't?

In the book, Ace Merrill and his merry band of miscreants are only seen at the confrontation at the body (with subsequent mentions in the epilogue as each of the boys gets a beat down for their defiance), where in the movie he and his idiot friends play far more important roles. When Ace faces off with Gordie and Chris in the book, it is Chris who pulls the gun on him, while in the movie Gordie is the one who pulls the gun. Only the movie has that chilling exchange, "What are you going to do? Shoot us all?" "No, Ace. Just you." (This was also the premier of a long line of Fabulous Assholes played to perfection by Kiefer Sutherland, bringing his simmering intimidation A-game to the fore. When he passed us one day on the streets of New York, my first thought wasn't O my gingersnaps it's Jack Twenty-four, it was holy jingleballs it's Ace Fucking Merrill.)

There are ton of little details like that, things that vary from the book in heft, in focus, in depth. But the most striking thing of all--the thing that just knocked me out of my Keds this time around--was how dark and ugly the book is by comparison. When I saw the movie in the theater, I knew they'd sanitized it (though at the time I didn't have the word for it), but until now I hadn't realized just how much had changed. There's no lovable dummy, for one. In the book, Vern and Teddy are both average to below-average kids, while Chris and Gordie are similar to the screen depictions, but tougher, and much more rough around the edges. As a group, they are meaner and not nearly as funny. Vern with his comb and seven cents, crawling across the trestle at a snail's pace, none of that levity is there. There is only a passing reference to the myriad of topics they discuss before bedding down for the night. And while the pie eating contest does appear in the book, so does a moody little story called "Stud City" which is all kinds of uncomfortably grim.

Still, there was more to that sense of darkness than just a few missing jokes and jolly sing-alongs.

I knew when I started reading Different Seasons that I would be encountering yet more of the cursed "n-word," because how could you not when the very first story is set almost entirely in a prison? When I started this little project all the way back at Carrie, I made a point to mentally mark bigoted words as a passing warning, figuring that if they were jarring to me in 2020, they'd be jarring to anyone else unfamiliar or far removed from informal, lackadaisical depictions bigotry. I didn't keep a scorecard because I didn't want to overemphasize something I considered to be a foul but undeniable facet of American culture. I would make note of it in the postscript of each blog entry and be done with it. Even then, I wondered if I was overreacting since everyone knows that social mores have changed over time, that authors like King have been taken to task for this kind of crap already, etc. etc., so did it matter if I made a note of casual bigotry or not? Was I just overreacting?

This parting shot of River Phoenix was always wrenching, but became all the
more poignant when he died of a drug overdose at the age of 23. It was
impossible not to draw connections between the character Chris and the
actor River, both with unlimited potential, both gone far too young. 

This time I decided to screenshot every instance I encountered. It turns out Different Seasons is the reigning champion of derogatory word usage in the King bibliography thus far in the chronology. The novel It will knock Different Seasons out of the park (and off the planet, probably), but it was still far worse than I remembered. And so varied in usages, too, like a colorful spray of mean-mouthed, poisonous flowers.

If you are thinking the majority of the usage is in prison-yard smack talk or teenage verbal brawling, think again. Most of the bigotry is passive, matter-of-fact narrative flair. The Body has almost twice the pejorative terms as nazi-fied Apt Pupil and prison-set Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption combined.

I sound like a puerile, Nitty Nancy little snitch, but it is the power of the words themselves that tell a broader story. When I read The Body back in 1985, the only term I might've flinched at was the one use of the n-word because it is said in a particularly ugly and unexpected way. Might have. Because hey, these are kids in the fifties or sixties or something, way back when and that's just how they talked smack, right? But here is the thing: I guarantee you I never flinched at "polack," "you ain't gonna jap me," "doing the Allah bit--'Salami, salami, baloney,'" "It ain't pussy . . . you ain't no queer," "going faggot," "gyp," or "retard." Because our world was packed with that bullshit from sun up to sun down 24-7, except (maybe) church. If anyone tells you different, they are straight up lying.

Those prisms cut with sharp light. It may seem that I'm piling on King or society as a whole, but never doubt I'm reserving a whole whopping helping for myself. Back in the late aughts, I loaned a copy of my favorite King title (at the time) to a close friend, only to have it returned to me the following day. She said she started it, but realized she wasn't going to be able to read it, that it wasn't her kind of book. It stung. We made a pact never to discuss it further, first because it wouldn't have been productive to argue over whatever it was that turned her off, and second to keep my love for the book largely unsullied. Though, to be completely honest, I never forgot it. We haven't discussed it since, but I've imagined the reasons why she rejected it because that is just my nature. If there's something to worry at, I'm gonna. And if I had to venture a guess I'd tell you it was likely that first scene, set in 1985 Derry, Maine, where two gay men are assaulted by a gang of homophobic jackals. It's written about as empathetically as one might expect from an author who just a few years prior uses the "fa-word" in all seriousness as a grown-ass narrator questioning his own hyper-vigilant, paper-thin masculinity just because he cares for his boyhood friend. Still, it's a fumble, and reading the onslaught of hate-filled verbal and physical assaults is punishing. When the same friend said they turned off The Hangover right after the "Paging Dr. Fa**ot" line, I pretty much knew. Even so, I thought she was being sensitive.

She wasn't. I was being insensitive. I was not mature enough (or strong enough) to do the intellectual work required to get from focusing on my discomfort (and facing my own prejudices, lazy as they were) to acknowledging that words can be weapons, words can hurt, and normalizing these words only serves to diminish, devalue, and destroy someone else. If that was a mere decade ago, imagine the thirteen-year-old Kansas girl in 1985. (Side note, good advice and please take it: If someone in your life has a habit of telling you that you are "too sensitive" when you react defensively to "teasing," please know that this is gaslighting bullshit and you have the right to uphold and defend your boundaries. You are not "too sensitive," they are being insensitive. Standing up for yourself is far braver than whingeing over being called out for bad behavior.)

Today, most of the terms above are making their desultory drag to the garbage bin of history, filing one by one to the bottom of the dark barrel as the times that bred them and the people that kept them alive have passed. Every last one has required some sort of level-headed intervention, one voice, a group of voices who stand make the case for why the term is derogatory and should not be used. Sometimes words are used with the full force of knowledge behind them, other times it is just ignorance. For instance, never having seen the term "gyp" in writing until I read this story, I believed the word was "jip," a benign word with no offensive origin. Furthermore, my "gypsy" knowledge was extremely narrow, focused mainly on the Stevie Nicks interpretation (e.g. magical, mysterious, twirly), palm readers, and caravans of free spirits selling wares and following astrological charts. Basically, a cartoonish interpretation based entirely on scraps of pop culture majoring in Welsh Witch Megrims and minoring in Muppet Show mysticism.

It is the most violent, hateful, virulent words that endure. The fearful and willfully ignorant cling to them like air, the only power of the impotently enraged. This is why I warn. Because across a wide ocean of media and my own memories of those days gone by, it is impossible not to see how prevalent and casual the bigotry was, ugly language scattershot into a crowd to demean and invalidate anyone who was different. It was far too easy, far too common. While the often meandering drive to eradicate hate speech has flushed the true blue bigots out into the light, there are far too many go-along-get-along Larrys left who are unhappy to be corrected at all. These days, the ones screaming "snowflakes" the loudest are calling themselves out.

Rereading early King reminded me of a particularly bizarre pejorative term that I believed to be all but dead: the Polish joke. It is all over Different Seasons and remains mystifying, despite now knowing more of the history behind it. I literally had to look it up because until right here and now I had no idea why it existed at all. I still don't understand why it remained prevalent when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was particularly common in grade school. The gist, always, was that they were stupid. None of us little snotnoses knew why. No one had any idea where it started or for what reason. But, kids being kids, the jokes went round and round. As far as I recall, no one knew anyone Polish. Not in white bread, generations upon generations of Euro-mixed Kansas. It was likely picked up from parents and grandparents grinding their own xenophobic nonsense.

When I started reading Different Seasons I thought it would be like sliding back into a hot sudsy tub of familiar, foamy fun. Prison lite. Field trip from Ha-ha-Hell. These crazy Nazi assholes who deserve each other. That other one. But it was a stinging-cold camp shower in the brittle blue light of morning, mosquito bitten and water logged. I am glad King created these stories so that they could find their way to screen, warts and all. I am glad for the shock of it, too, the bleary prism between now and the not so way back when. I'm not the one who decides whether there's merit in portraying a time period as it truly was, casual racism and cruel bigotry and all, but it does tint the experience in a light that may be too harsh to bear.

Grade: B
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. Apt Pupil and The Breathing Method have the "scariest" elements, but the first is more of a thriller and the last just has that one shocker that isn't so much scary as it is, well, gnarly.
Warnings: Cornucopia of offensive language, covered above. Interestingly, the reviewers on Commonsensemedia.com spend a good amount of time warning parents about the copious "f-word" and "s-word" usage in the film, but no one mentions the "fa-word" which is uttered twice, though it is used far less in the film depiction than the novella. There is also a great deal of concern over the smoking O MY. Also note: Depictions of prison gang rape (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and torture rape (Apt Pupil). The horrific atrocities enacted upon the victims of the Holocaust are portrayed to varying degree in Apt Pupil, and can be too much to absorb especially if you know little to nothing about those events.

Artifact: The Internet Archive strikes again! Turns out, they were only making the archive completely "open" until mid-June, which likely explains why most of the Firestarter scans "disappeared" when I went back to double check some things. However! The Internet Archive is still available, though now I'm limited to checking out just one item at a time. This works for me since I've never been keen on reading multiple books at a time, anyway. This time around, I took what I could get, a scan of a beat to hell paperback edition that published well after the version I used to own. The preliminaries and the back cover are straight scans, while the rest of it is a scanned-in ebook file, resplendent with weird breaks, glaring errors, and missing chunks of text. It has been a real pleasure to dive back into the olden, golden days of e-publishing! It wasn't bothersome since I've read Different Seasons so many times, anyway, but it was funny in a sort of horrible flashback kind of way. I've had the pleasure of taking calls from authors and customers hollering about all the unforgivable and shocking mistakes found in those early ebooks, one especially memorable incident with a Random House customer who would not accept that publishers were, sadly, not all linked under one titanic mothership. He was absolutely furious that I would not personally correct his ebook . . . from another publisher . . . through the phone. Really a good time . . . the most . . . a blast.

Conversion woes, example 1: "TrmnT," e.g. "Train!"
Also, half the time it was "Vern," the other half, "Vera." 

Something's missing. Probably wasn't important.

My favorite quirk in the conversion--BY FAR--was the inconsistent and totally
wild running heads that would pop up mid-sentence or just wherever because,
ya know, they're wildin. This was my favorite because there is a random "Hi"
at the top as if some bored intern who had no idea what was happening
just typed "Hi" into the master file like a Vern/Vera.

Keeping Your Cool in the Cruel Summer Blues (Cujo, 1981)

Cujo (1981)

Good dog gone bad.

Scary cover alluding to a monster you
cannot see. It matches the disquieting fog
from which Cujo emerges, growling at his
beloved boy, Brett Camber. Before Cujo
attacks, he remembers who he is one last
time, and retreats into the mist. It is the
last time Cujo is his true self, and it is the
last time Brett sees him.

If anyone asked me what we studied in 9th grade Honors Physical Science, I'd plead mercy for my decrepit old brain cells since it was more than thirty years ago and who could remember with such a broadly-named subject, anyway . . . but the truth of the matter is that I'd be hard pressed to recall much even a year after its conclusion, let alone five years, ten years, or old-ass thirty years. There were likely assignments of some sort, and I do remember tests because we all cheated on at least one en masse (more on that in a sec), but what I remember most of all was our Very Notorious Teacher. She was small, vociferous, and nutty as a Peanut Buster Parfait. To protect her reputation (which she took no measures to protect on her own), we'll call her Professor Zee.

Professor Zee probably taught us things, but I'd be willing to bet that most of us remember her tangents more than any scrap of "physical" science, because they were generally off-topic, long-winded, highly personal, largely inappropriate, and relentlessly zany. Relating any details would be a dead giveaway, but I will say there were plenty of "husband" stories and almost none of them were chaste, Dagwood-variety antics with the two separate beds and innocent kisses on the cheek goodnight. Professor Zee was wildly entertaining, certainly unhinged, and very popular with all of her students. It should not shock you in the least that it was Professor Zee herself who urged us to cheat on that test.

The absolute bedlam of the early King praise
pages cannot be undersold. First, these
screaming, writhing, orgasmic blurbs
could be about any King title, so just cut and
paste with each new publication, who would
notice?? The most delightful part by far is
the publisher's helpful guide to turning
pages. I just want to kiss it on the mouth,
it's so stupid.

I had the half-baked maturity to know we were getting away with physical science (honors!) murder, and knew enough to be vaguely ashamed of it, but I still took my varnished A's home with a big, faux-proud grin and presented them to my mother as genuine and earned. Professor Zee was a chaotic, messy, reckless force that no one bothered to reckon with (or snitch out) and I was still recovering from the educational joke that was my middle school experience. My grasp of basic ethics was shaky at best. Yet, I knew it was wrong. Not gonna lie now, especially when it was thirty years ago.

Sometime around Halloween, we were revving up another cacophonous class of semi-learning, but Professor Zee was either out of gas or feeling magnanimous and offered the stage to someone else for a rare change. The question was posed, "Does anyone know any scary stories?" By ninth grade, who didn't? But one of my friends (which I could not tell you, my merciful memory spares both of us the chagrin) decides to pipe up, "Ooo Erin knows! Erin knows lots of scary stories." This was no doubt because I was known as a rabid (natch) Stephen King fan. While I cajoled some friends into reading most of my own short stories, I kept the darker stuff pretty close to the vest since those stories were, without question, thinly veiled murder fantasies about my real-life bullies. I don't think I even changed the names, for God's sake. So, I'm pretty sure I got "elected" to tell a scary story to the honors physical science class that afternoon for no other reason than my well-known obsession with all things Stephen King.

A little more specificity here, but what I truly love this time around is how
they're actually right, if not, in some cases, just a little coked up on the hype.
Minneapolis Tribune is about to pop a vein.

Mildly panicked and surely sweating, I scrambled to remember the most recent read, Cujo, to retell to the class. Professor Zee even turned off the overhead fluorescents to properly gloom the mood. In the silence, I took a breath, all eyes on me, and unfurled a scene of ball-constricting fear and gut-punching horror. I watched their expressions darken, my classmates, all middle-school survivors, as their faces drained, their eyes went dead with shock, their skin no doubt crawling . . . because I was so fucking BAD at storytelling it was criminal, y'all. The word "um" was uttered no less than one hundred million times on this planet that afternoon, and ninety-nine million were mine all mine. UMM, like, it was a disaster, a discombobulated, stuttering mess. Ugh. The humiliation. It was a wet and slithering thing and it was all over me. When you see that many faces looking at you with unmistakable pity . . . hoo boy, let me tell you. I cratered. I think I apologized at the end. I think I stopped my own heart. I remember feeling floaty and full of brimming vomit. Did Professor Zee sigh and make me take a bow or did I hallucinate that? We'll never know.

What I do know is that virtually no horror story is truly scary unless it's told by the right storyteller. Stephen King is a phenomenal storyteller. Ninth grade me was decidedly not.

New American Library is not messing around with the revenue. They jam
these paperbacks with as many ad/order pages as they can get away with,
and probably wished they could have done more. Note the title typeface
does not match the cover type, so this is likely just a reprint directly from
the hardcover edition with the prelim and end pages updated accordingly.

Whether it was the old memory or the recent Firestarter debacle, I was dreading rereading Cujo. I remembered enjoying every previous reading, but it had been maybe decades since I'd last dug in, so who knew what cringing horrors awaited me. On a whim I listened to the first few sentences of the audiobook only to slam that stop button before the voice stuck and ruined the book forever. I couldn't tell you if Lorna Raver did a good job, any better or worse than Dennis Boutsikaris did on the audiobook for Firestarter, but I do know now that I'm extremely unlikely to try audiobook fiction ever again. There are likely benefits to experiencing nonfiction in audio form, but the single voice is far too limiting in fiction where worlds are created and populated by so many different beings. I need a blank space, my own headvoice, entirely neutral and open to interpret and create those voices in my mind.

I am delighted to say that I still love Cujo. Sure, the horror tropes are a bit thin by now (1981!), but I still felt the anxiety, the terror, and the decompressing emotion that packs such and visceral, hateful, anguishing punch at the climax of the life-or-death showdown between a terrified, injured mom and a sick, mad dog. I finished it in a few big gulps of time, racing through the story as any good horror/thriller writer can only hope for, and left it by with my eyes still shining with tears and satisfaction. Good book, great storytelling. King's ability to herd the reader from one harrowing plot point to another, the threat ever building, the fear percolating until it explodes in a scorching shot of confrontation, is a finely tuned, 200-pound-machine of charging death from start to finish.

The numbering is a bit weird, but this is probably a scan of the fifth reprint
of the 1982 movie-tie-in paperback. See NAL hustling at the top? 

My first knowledge of Cujo was via the movie trailer shown on television, a teaser trailer that does not show the dog at all, but a series of tense moments and the title running spookily together in blood. I literally did not know what Cujo was, thinking it might be some sort of monster or alien, until someone at school told me it was a Saint Bernard, an idea so ludicrous it was impossible to take seriously. I mean, that ominous movie poster (the same as the original paperback, see above), the trailer never showing the dog, no explanations and just flashes of terror . . . what a fantastic marketing ploy, right? But once you find out it's a Saint Bernard it all falls apart. When I was a kid, Saint Bernards were the adorable lumps with the first aid casks around their necks (a fiction, by the way), saving people in the snow. Saint Bernards were slobbery, dopey, and fluffy. Who would make a horror movie about a dumb Saint Bernard?

The movie came out a couple of years before I ever read King, but I saw Cujo on cable eventually (well before I read it) and man oh man was that ever Gross. They were just like, okay, let's train these dogs to snarl and lunge, drown em in fake blood and puss, and have em attack the ever-lovin shit out of this little car, smearing the muddy, bloody, sick slime all over everything in the height of summer while pretty Dee Wallace and adorable Danny Pintauro sweat in terror and the greenhouse effect until everyone cries because it's seriously so awful to watch. It is gruesome, frightening, and just . . . rough. They did manage to make a Saint Bernard scary. And they created an effective public service announcement for vaccinating animals against rabies.

Dedication page (vii)

Perhaps the filmmakers knew they could only pile so much punishment on an American audience since (spoiler alert) the movie ends differently from the book. It stays fairly faithful to King's story until then, with the infidelity and career derailment subplots largely intact, but it seems the filmmakers simply could not stomach the idea of killing the kid. When I first read the book at age thirteen or fourteen, I recall bounding around the room in a frenzy because it really is a thriller, the woman and boy trapped and in peril, the cops and husband knowing something is terribly wrong but chasing all the wrong leads. But I was particularly struck by the ending, shocked that 4-year-old Tad Trenton not only dies, but dies of something so preventable and mundane: dehydration and heat exhaustion. The monster from his bedroom closet, something he's feared incessantly while snugged in his bed every night and something Cujo becomes in Tad's mind the first time he charges their car, never sets a nail or tooth to Tad. Instead, he dies from fear and shock; the fear of the monster, the fear of being hurt, the fear of being killed, his mother's fear of taking a risk to try for the house (and a phone) only to possibly fail and lose everything. It's absolutely devastating.

Only King, who reportedly does not recall writing Cujo due to a cocaine binge, could explain why there is such a marked difference between Firestarter's two-dimensional Charlie and Cujo's fully realized human child, Tad Trenton. Both books were written around the same time, so the disconnect is perplexing. There is such a tender care to Tad's creation, with beautiful, strange, funny, beguiling details about his thinking, his habits, his world and the ways he moves within it, that make Tad as real as anyone who's walked this earth. His death, and Donna's completely feral reaction to it, packs a significant, lingering punch.

I love Stephen King's compulsion to
always add epigraphs, sometimes a whole
bouquet of pertinent quotes, almost as
much as I love his twisted sense of humor.
I don't delve into the Sharp Cereal fiasco
that complicates the Trentons' lives, but
it starts with a very Stand By Me (The
Body) pie eating contest kind of gruesome
scene of hilarity which leads to an
engaging side story of its own.

I think Cujo was the first King book that worked on me in ways beyond the often clever but sometimes cheap thrills of horror. The genre is compelling for the most simple of reasons: Being chased by someone or thing to be maimed and/or eaten is the cornerstone to our entire existence from the beginning of complex life on earth. Fight or flight, all the way down into our slugfish DNA. If humans have nothing else in common with one another, this fundamental evolutionary survival instinct is it. But with Cujo, King delved deeper, into the sly horrors of domesticity, stagnancy, forgetting who we are and what we are meant to be or do.

The world-building part of the story is just as engaging as the jump scares and swooning terror of Donna and Tad trapped in that Pinto by a rabid-mad, massive dog. Donna's infidelity, and the plain but piercing reasoning behind it, were especially eye-opening. None of the reasons were good enough, yet they were all valid in their own way. Reading Cujo at that particular age, the dead-end housewife life Donna Trenton was leading certainly seemed like a version of a horror story. Even at thirteen, I knew intellectually that things were rarely black and white, but there was something about the way Donna comes to understand her inner conflict, how lucidly she brings together the fragments of reasoning that led her down this path, even as she condemns herself for allowing it to happen, and how much harder it is to convey those feelings in any truly effective way during that first confrontation, with her husband deeply hurt and betrayed, and Donna supplicant but still suffering under the weight of her worries, not one of which benefited from the betrayal, even if they were the cause.

"It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman--no, for me--that's a brutal thing to have to face. . . . Men . . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are . . . They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down. And what a woman does--what I did--was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone." (King, 91)

I felt that last part in my chest, always remembered it, and it bookmarks the place in my own history where I first read Cujo, even more than the embarrassing retelling of the tale in Professor Zee's Honors Physical Science Fiasco. My little family had gone through a particularly rough patch of years--a job loss, moving from a relatively happy home to a series of elsewheres, two years of wretched middle school, the humiliation of food stamps, begging off bill collectors, selling off irreplaceable heirlooms--to come out the other side shaky but still together, mom and me against the world, her in a new job, me in the mercifully anonymous halls of high school, both of us living in a better place with fewer worries and less stress. As much as the previous two years hurt, they taught me a great deal of perspective. I was still a brat, mind you, but a more empathetic brat. I knew what Donna meant when she said she got scared of the way the house sounded, for her when Tad was gone, for me the echoing clang or the grinding creak of another strange smelling old rental, temporary, dimly lit, each one farther from comfort, pushing us back into the proverbial washout, deep in the weeds with a broken compass, lost and keening for Home. Even though the concept of "home" was already overexposed and sun bleached from too much obsessing and not enough cohesion. Having moved around all my life, what was home, anyway? A rumor. A fiction. Home is where the boxes sit half unpacked.

King in full KING mode, one whole page
to set up a fairy tale introduction...

I remember the novelty of a new kind of perception, how I expected to feel nothing but judgement for Donna Trenton's infidelity at the first mention of it, but instead found myself relating to her, understanding her, empathizing with her. For once King had created a female character with agency, a woman motivated by complex emotions and experiences. Donna is a wife and mother, and she focuses on her husband and her child, but they are not the sum total of her. King's wisdom in setting the scene with Donna in conflict with her husband, heartsick with worry over the future and the consequences of her betrayal, all while mothering sweet Tad and still going about the grueling tedium of life--the simple act of getting her car fixed by a local mechanic--prime the reader to inhabit the world beside her, trundling down that dusty road in the failing Pinto. Donna is a real person, finally and praise Jaysus hallelujah, a three dimensional human woman. It makes every harrowing experience in the Cambers' dooryard all the more gripping and brutal. She is real, Tad is real, and the stakes are excruciatingly high.

...only to start the book off reminding
everyone of The Dead Zone's side-
creep and Castle Rock's very own
deputy dawg and serial killer,
Frank Dodd.

Still, what was more striking this read around was the narrative that follows Donna's lover after the ugly break between them (he considers raping her) and his subsequent retaliation over her rejection. Steve Kemp is a traveling jack of all trades, with a side business refinishing antiques and a side hustle as a sore loser tennis pro, whose part-time ambitions of laying married women and beating their husbands on the court pale next to his delusions of distinction as a writer. He even has a van with a mural painting on the side. While Steve the Choad is a bit of a stale toad as a character, there is a spark of genuine relevance to him, aside from being a terrible life lesson for Donna and a clear plot device for King.

After his scrap with Donna and subsequent mailing of a very authentic, hard to refute revelatory letter to Donna's husband, Steve Kemp decides to blow town for the next gig, somewhere west and away, to keep on truckin, as it were, and live his rolling-stone life just as any real writer should aspire to do. His temper, and his appalling lack of character, get the better of him, so he decides to turn around and head back to Castle Rock to serve out some more punishment for Donna's impudence. He drops in on the Trentons' home, let's himself in, and finds the house empty (Donna and Tad are already in the midst of their fated encounter with Cujo). In a frenzy best described as childishly terrifying, Kemp trashes the house, smashing, breaking, crashing, destroying . . . then concludes his tantrum by jacking off on the Trentons' bed and leaving a snide note on the refrigerator "Left something upstairs for you, baby."

As Steve Kemp puts distance between himself and what he's done, something remarkable and grotesque happens. It's so common, so familiar, and yet it never struck me so hard as it did this time around:

Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So what if she didn't want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddam house. Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at? 

He began to work on these questions a little at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. . . . [H]e tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it . . . until the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could live with. (King, 201)

As Kemp settles into the revised perception of what he's done, literally leaving it in the rear-view mirror as he drives toward Idaho, he revels in the familiar grift of his lifecycle, his belief that rolling on will keep him honest, enrich his writing, make him the man we wants to be perceived as.

He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won. (King, 202)

By the end of the first day's drive, Kemp has not only absolved himself from his monstrous acts, he has canonized himself a modern day Che Guevara.

His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons' house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy--offing a couple of fat middle-class pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It had been his way of saying "power to the people," an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems. (King, 202)

The reason why this particular human failing struck me so hard at this time around should be abundantly clear when framed in the events of the world as I write this (June 2020). After months of Covid-19 quarantine, the world watched a nine minute murder via Twitter and an enormous number of society took a deep, shaking breath and said, "Stop." There have been protests, marches, looting, lynchings, and widespread police brutality, recorded, documented, and put on blast for anyone with an internet connection to see. It seems the answer to an unforgivable act of police brutality has been . . . more police brutality. In so many of these cases, mirroring countless police-involved shootings and deaths that came before, there is a flashfire, emotional reaction to a situation where minimal professionalism requires there should be none. The person with the badge and gun gets called something he doesn't like, or isn't obeyed immediately even as a suspect is asking why he's been pulled over while the officer refuses to answer, or perhaps someone just runs . . . and that is all it takes for that officer to lose all composure and attack, far too often with deadly force. Sometimes it is a baton, sometimes it is a shove, sometimes it is a rubber bullet. And sometimes it is a real bullet. It has been a sickening though not surprising display.

A fundamental fact of the human condition is hating to admit when we're wrong . . . or weak, or flawed. Some people go their entire lives in a constant state of self-absolution. "I would never do that," "I'm a good person," "how dare you question me." And on. It's an incredible feat of denial and one hundred percent excrement.

Gloss stock, black and white, movie
still inserts. Dee Wallace and Danny
Pintauro were perfectly cast in the roles
of Donna and Tad Trenton. 

I am very flawed. Lots of flaws. Beautiful flaws. Most flawed. I've got lots of shiny feathers, too, glorious, iridescent coloring, and empathy to the moon and back. But with a mean streak, and a permanent wall between me and pretty much anyone. There are doors, but they are hidden, require keys, sometimes passwords. And they move around. A lot. My temper is a living, sharp-toothed thing, springloaded in the dark corner. My love is true. I've had successes and failures. I've been a good listener and a bad friend. In all things, I'm Working On It.

The first time I heard the contrarian phrase "All Lives Matter" my first thought was, "okay, understandable." It was easy to be flippant since, as a white woman, I literally had no skin in the game. Upon further reading, I was made to understand the full meaning of the phrase "Black Lives Matter" . . . and the thoughtless insensitivity of the All Lives Matter response. When shouted in public, meme, or blog post today, at best, it is just ignorant. Worse, it is deliberately ignorant. The very worst, it is toxic narcissism. I'm starting to believe that most people still countering with the All Lives mantra are the latter. The phrase "Black Lives Matter" and every conceivable, patient explanation of the meaning, the history, and the importance of the movement have all been around long enough for everyone to understand what it means if they really wanted to.

Let's face facts, some people don't give a shit and never will. Others are steaming in that subjectivity bath and are positively sodden in wrinkly denial.

King, epigraphing even at the close. 

The juxtaposition of Donna Trenton's striving toward emotional maturity--coming to terms with her weaknesses and attempting to understand her motivations--and Steve Kemp's stubborn, stunted self absorption that leaves him in an endless cycle of reactionary immaturity and vain self delusion is a microcosmic diorama of America today. It's hard as hell to see your own failings, harder yet to own up to them. But if you can do it, you can come out the other side better educated and stronger than you were before.

The first time I saw someone write "I hate white people" on social media, I reacted as though they were attacking me personally. How could I not take it personally? I'm a good person! I am a white people! I shall clutch my pearls and squawk indignantly! First of all, not everything is about me. Second of all, even though whoever said it (and liked it, and shared it . . . ) probably meant "White People (TM)" there have undoubtedly been times in my life where I was acting like white people (TM). Third of all, I am generally a good person, but I do take things personally even when they are not directed at me and also are you mad at me you seem mad at me if you are mad at me that is not fair so I am now mad at you also fuk u and your entire ancestry and we are at WAR.

Denial is so much easier, and defensive anger stands point to beat those ugly truths into the ground. It poisons you, though, pickles your heart, turns your brain into a rancorous tumor of reactive rage. There is no peace in that. One of the longest, most harrowing breaches to traverse is coming to terms with white privilege and the simple truth that you have benefited from it even if you never asked for it. You can't hot potato privilege to someone else and scream "not mine." It just is. And there is no WAR in acceptance.

See? NAL is selling all its wares -- blanks are not allowed!

I had to go to a lot of therapy to work on My Shit (TM) and I'm still a work in progress. After the stress of quarantine and the collective trauma of seeing a man murdered by an officer of the law, we are all due for some therapy. The toxic narcissists who believe others should die to maintain their aggressively uninspired, frosted tip, latte laden, supershopper, Applebee's happyhour status quo while screechily cricketing All Lives Matter with no sense of irony at all should get in the front of the Extreme Therapy line. Every American should get a primary care physician and mandatory psychological analysis as part of standard, baseline healthcare. Therapists should be as commonplace and necessary as dentists. One EMDR session with every cleaning!

All the introspection and emotional maturity in the world isn't going to save Donna Trenton from the shattering Hell that she must face, first by stepping out of her car for the last time, desperate to save her failing child, committed to battle the beast that has already laid her open and infected her with the rabies virus. She faces off with him, beats him with a bat, her rage and terror pushing her on even as he refuses to die, keeps at her, gnashing, biting her. Even when he is finally dead, she's crossed into some haze of delirium, beating his dead body to a pulp as her husband finally pulls into the Cambers' dooryard to find her there, a wretched, wasted figure in an ecstasy of annihilation. Despite everything, it is too late for Tad Trenton. Donna tries desperately to revive him, hissing and biting at her husband, later the paramedics, but he is gone.

Not! One! Blank! Page! Dammit!

But that is not the end of Cujo, as the much sunnier movie version leaves off with Donna holding a living Tad, instead we see the aftermath for the Cambers, the Trentons, Cujo, and even the hole he jammed his head in at the beginning of the story only to find it full of buzzing squealing flapping batwings with razor teeth. Cujo's remains go to the dump, no one ever finds the hole, the Cambers get a new dog (with all his shots), and the Trentons begin the excruciating work of creating a new life without the light that was once at the center of it, Tad. The healing for the Trentons is slow and painful, but it progresses. The future is not certain, but there is an undeniable hope cast over the epilogue, despite going through something so singularly horrible and losing someone so deeply loved, they manage to stick together, deliberately and thoughtfully. It doesn't break them.

What of Steve Kemp? The book never says. He is of no true consequence other than the fleeting destruction and bad karma he leaves in his wake. This is where stunted fools who refuse to learn and grow belong, dead-end footnotes in the ten cent bin.

To my recollection, this was a metallic
silver back cover, similar to Crayola silver,
pretty but not critical. Metallic inks are
generally more expensive than flat colors,
though it can depend on the type of
printing. Since this is old school, I can
assure you it was offset, and definitely
more costly. However! When you're
running thousands of copies in each
printing, the costs drop dramatically.
Whenever I see this particular shade of
metallic silver, I remember how one
almost exactly like it was our imprint's
"signature color," which means it appeared
on all promo material, logos and logotypes,
etc. Unfortunately, most of our books
could not use it since the print runs were
tiny (academic!) and the ink was too costly.

Imagine the strength true emotional maturity requires. The resolve to stand back and assess instead of lashing out defensively at the slightest hint of antagonism. The perspective needed to stay calm, listen, and at least try to empathize. The character it takes to stay cool under pressure, not allow the emotional outbursts of others get the best of you, and manage tense situations with sensible authority. Imagine aspiring to that, something to emulate and admire, instead of allowing oneself to go low, weasel-like, reactionary, thin-skinned, terrified, permanently aggrieved, badly behaved like chest beating teenagers with weapons of war and a licence to harm and hospitalize instead of serve and protect. It seems reasonable to expect the very best of the people armed to do the most harm, some semblance of emotional maturity being the least of it. "Not All Cops" is still one bad cop too many.

This, of course, is but one aspect of an enormous problem. But each individual can start by being personally accountable and reverent to the awesome responsibility of policing.

Anyway, aspire to be a mighty Donna Trenton. Don't be a mini-balled Steve Kemp. Black lives matter.

Grade: B+
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 8. Lots of building dread leading up to calamitous jump scares and shots of sheer terror. A solid work of unapologetic horror.
Warnings: Yes, n-word. Spoken by the turdy, mean country folk, of course. I want to say the usage is not as flippant as previous novels, but I'm probably reaching. Just a warning that it's there, an ugly, festering little sore of a word. Otherwise, the biggest warning is Tad. Even with the spoilers, it's hard to read. The kid gets under your skin and the blast circumference of the pain is miles wide.

Artifact: The Internet Archive wins the day yet again! I did notice that things come and go from these collections, so that's something to keep in mind. I've been able to find everything I've needed so far (in chronological order), but upon searching for Firestarter to look something up, I found all the print scans were suddenly gone. Not sure why that was, but it seemed important to mention. For Cujo, I downloaded the same paperback edition I had as a kid: same cover, same interior, same browning around the edges. I'd never read a novel via the laptop before, but once I got into a rhythm with the scrolling, it was mostly fine. Books still rule, though. I'm probably never going to sway from that belief no matter what technology they come up with . . . unless they make a hologram Stephen King that sits on my couch and reads to me, I guess.

Nah. Books rule, the rest drools.