Starless and Bible black
There’s a definite point in Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King’s latest story collection, where you feel the master of horror fiction has taken the cruise control off and is chucking his big old engines into gear. That would be the second story, “Big Driver,” wherein King playfully subverts the genre of some of his best-seller-list colleagues, steering the tale into an offramp of revenge, blood and guts. And he really seems to be grinning it up while he’s doing it.
In “Big Driver,” King’s protagonist is Tess Jean, a moderately successful author of “cozy mysteries,” a fiction genre that probably began with Miss Marple and now appeals to older ladies of the Murder, She Wrote persuasion. Tess is on a book tour, by car, to promote her latest Willow Grove Knitting Society mystery novel (The Willow Grove Knitting Society Ladies Go Spelunking). She has her genial GPS system, but takes the shortcut advice given by the local librarian who hosted her speaking engagement. A blowout (that was no accident!) along the dark off-road leads to a series of adventures and reversals, where the not-so-spinsterish Tess is forced to adopt the tools and devices of a very different genre of fiction — crime and horror — in order to survive.
“Big Driver” stands out in this quartet of stories because here you feel that King is not just processing his words with the steady regularity and consistency of a daily bowel movement; he’s enjoying himself. Sure, he’s poking fun at those who write and read “cozy” mysteries, but then he does this neat crossover move — like the second half of Adaptation, where Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay meditation on The Orchid Thief turns into a wild B-movie thriller set in Florida gator swamps — and “Big Driver” swerves the “cozy” genre straight into revenge fantasy.
At the same time, King pokes fun at his own game: every time Tess approaches a spooky house or touches a doorknob, she’s reminded of all the splatter movies that she’s avoided watching her whole life. Every creepy turn is a horror cliché, but King points out each signpost along the way, as though to say we can learn something from those scary movies. Indeed, Tess later rents and watches revenge flicks like Jodie Foster’s The Brave One and Last House on the Left to brush up on her revenge mojo.
It’s not the first time Stephen King’s gone postmodern or meta, but “Big Driver” accomplishes that trick the horror writer can still achieve so effortlessly when he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work: it has you turning page after page after page. Typically, by the end it wraps itself up with a little bit more moralism than you might want from a horror writer. But it’s enough to remind the reader: King’s still got it.
Other tales in Full Dark, No Stars are perhaps less memorable, but no less dipped in the patented King Sauce. This quartet follows in the footsteps of Four Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which led to such Hollywood versions as Stand By Me, Apt Pupil and The Shawshank Redemption. The pleasures here are more down-home, closer to King’s haven of Bangor, Maine. The exploration lies mostly within the darkness of the human mind.
Opener “1922” is a long tale about bad things done on a Midwestern farm right before the Great Depression. Farmer Wilfred James plots to get rid of a wife who is bent on selling her inherited land to a local hog farmer, and he recruits his son in the gruesome unfolding. It’s a well-scripted tale, though sometimes the ‘20s jargon seems anachronistic.
In “Fair Extension,” King imagines a Mephistophelean seller of extensions — whether in penis size, hair growth, or life expectancy — who operates a vendor’s booth out on an airport service road. Cancer-stricken Dave Streeter notices the funny little man named Elvid (duh!) and takes him up on his offer to extend his life, in exchange for doling out a series of dire consequences to an old pal and neighbor. (It reminds me of that question they keep asking rock stars in Mojo or Uncut magazine: “If you could walk away with a suitcase containing a million dollars, would you do it if, in doing so, you would cause an anonymous Chinese man to fall off his bicycle and die?” I always thought the question was a bit racist: why an anonymous Chinese man?) In any case, “Fair Extension” is a modern spin on “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and other Faustian-bargain tales, but sprinkled with topical allusions from the past decade or so: Dave lives, but the Twin Towers fall; Winona Ryder is arrested for shoplifting, and Kiefer Sutherland gets a couple DUI charges. It’s King commenting on the moral relativism of our times, of course, and like so many Wall Street hustlers, Streeter escapes the soul-snatching that we usually expect from a Lucifer-type broker. In fact, his final air of smugness recalls the banality of evil explored in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, though it could just be the calm before the storm suggested in, say, the final Sopranos episode’s closing fade-out.
“A Good Marriage” dips further into dark waters, resurrecting the not-quite-domestic-bliss that the author examined in Lisey’s Story and other recent novels exploring female characters. He has fun listing the banal details of Bob and Darcy’s 27-year marriage, the “ten thousand little things” about each other “that comprise the secret history of a marriage.” But of course, Bob is not quite what he seems, as she discovers one night while poking around in the garage for a set of AA batteries.
With King, what you see is usually what you get. In his afterword, he writes, “The stories in this book are harsh.” If we, the readers, found them hard to read at times, King assures us he “found them hard to write at times.” But the author really does play God in any created work: the characters’ justice (or lack of justice) is the author laying his hand upon their brows and saying “Yea” or “Nay.” That’s the nature of the profession. To King, the best fiction is “propulsive and assaultive.” “Getting people to think while they read is not my deal,” he proclaims, somewhat defensively and not without pride. Getting them to turn pages is still his deal, though.
