5. 'Night Surf', and 6. 'The Reaper's Image' (1969).
Lockdown continues, but so does the beautiful sunshine. This is perfect weather for the next two stories, which are real summer horrors. They are, in many ways, nothing alike, but I've placed them together because they feel like trial runs of some of King's later heavy hitters. Both of them have a slightly unfinished quality, which could be intentional, but may result from them belonging as part of a much bigger whole.
Night Surf
Night Surf, collected in Night Shift, is set in the aftermath of a world-sweeping illness called Captain Trips, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same name given to the population-ending virus from The Stand, published eight years later. In this short story, the flu-like illness is pretty much the same, except that victims heads swell to bizarre proportions just before death, which is something I don't recall from The Stand.
It's an interesting snippet which doesn't feel particularly finished, and wouldn't have seemed out of place in the short 'seconds deaths' section in Chapter 38 of The Stand, where we are told of the various accidental or otherwise non-Captain Trips related deaths of some of the immune survivors.
The characters are entirely unpleasant, which is unlike King, and I struggled to feel much sympathy for anyone, particularly given that the story starts with the revelation that they have just burned an already dying man alive in some sort of weird, half-serious ritual. This is almost brushed over, as though the characters have lost all ability to understand the gravitas of the act they have perpetrated.
There isn't an awful lot of narrative, more a collection of interesting ideas and images as the characters wander across a deserted beach in late August - a radio station manned by an increasingly deranged and desperate deejay; a now-pointless lifeguard tower; an abandoned souvenir shop.
I'm reluctant to call this ending out as unsatisfactory because I see this as a practice for a much (much!) bigger project, and so I won't. It's certainly an interesting read for any fan of The Stand, and, in a bleak way, rather beautiful.
The Reaper's Image
King's other book of this year, later collected in Skeleton Crew, is a much sillier affair which is more lightly creepy entertainment than all out horror. It tells the story of the ridiculously named Johnson Spangler (I can't even type that without getting the giggles), who visits a small museum in the hopes of acquiring a very rare, very valuable mirror. The museum's curator is a doom-teller in the style of Gerald Olin from 1408, the gothic trope of the ignored prophet in action.
Whilst I enjoyed this story, and thought it had the potential to be truly frightening, it didn't scare me. There is something too obvious and hokey about the Grim Reaper to really get under my skin, and the build up is somewhat underdeveloped. We never quite understand what the mirror actually does, and so it's tricky to get wound up about it.
I'm also calling an unsatisfactory ending alert on this one. It's as though King had a great, spooky dream about a haunted mirror, but then couldn't remember how it ended once he woke up.
The saving graces for this story are the highly entertaining museum curator, and the wonderful description of the setting, which conjures up images of monstrous mahogany furniture, the sickly scent of polish, and bright shafts of summer light, illuminating dust motes.
Overall, good fun, but done much better in 1408.
Next up, we move into the 70's...
Night Surf, collected in Night Shift, is set in the aftermath of a world-sweeping illness called Captain Trips, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same name given to the population-ending virus from The Stand, published eight years later. In this short story, the flu-like illness is pretty much the same, except that victims heads swell to bizarre proportions just before death, which is something I don't recall from The Stand.
It's an interesting snippet which doesn't feel particularly finished, and wouldn't have seemed out of place in the short 'seconds deaths' section in Chapter 38 of The Stand, where we are told of the various accidental or otherwise non-Captain Trips related deaths of some of the immune survivors.
The characters are entirely unpleasant, which is unlike King, and I struggled to feel much sympathy for anyone, particularly given that the story starts with the revelation that they have just burned an already dying man alive in some sort of weird, half-serious ritual. This is almost brushed over, as though the characters have lost all ability to understand the gravitas of the act they have perpetrated.
There isn't an awful lot of narrative, more a collection of interesting ideas and images as the characters wander across a deserted beach in late August - a radio station manned by an increasingly deranged and desperate deejay; a now-pointless lifeguard tower; an abandoned souvenir shop.
I'm reluctant to call this ending out as unsatisfactory because I see this as a practice for a much (much!) bigger project, and so I won't. It's certainly an interesting read for any fan of The Stand, and, in a bleak way, rather beautiful.
The Reaper's Image
King's other book of this year, later collected in Skeleton Crew, is a much sillier affair which is more lightly creepy entertainment than all out horror. It tells the story of the ridiculously named Johnson Spangler (I can't even type that without getting the giggles), who visits a small museum in the hopes of acquiring a very rare, very valuable mirror. The museum's curator is a doom-teller in the style of Gerald Olin from 1408, the gothic trope of the ignored prophet in action.
Whilst I enjoyed this story, and thought it had the potential to be truly frightening, it didn't scare me. There is something too obvious and hokey about the Grim Reaper to really get under my skin, and the build up is somewhat underdeveloped. We never quite understand what the mirror actually does, and so it's tricky to get wound up about it.
I'm also calling an unsatisfactory ending alert on this one. It's as though King had a great, spooky dream about a haunted mirror, but then couldn't remember how it ended once he woke up.
The saving graces for this story are the highly entertaining museum curator, and the wonderful description of the setting, which conjures up images of monstrous mahogany furniture, the sickly scent of polish, and bright shafts of summer light, illuminating dust motes.
Overall, good fun, but done much better in 1408.
Next up, we move into the 70's...
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