11. 'The Fifth Quarter' and 12. 'Battleground' (both 1972).

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The next two stories on the extensive first list were easy to slot together; they share similar characters, similar ideas, a similar vibe. The only major difference, other than obvious content-based
ones, is that I really liked one and really hated the other.

The Fifth Quarter

 I'm going to start this by saying I am a bit of a King purist; I don't gravitate towards work that is out of his normal zone. I haven't read all of the Dark Towers series, for example (don't hurt me, I promise I will!), and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the Bill Hodges trilogy. I like King horror. Of course, there are exceptions, like the unquestinably wonderful Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, but generally, you'll find my favourites sitting comfortably in the horror section of the bookshop.

The Fifth Quarter is a gangster story. In it, Jerry Tarkanian (the first of several ridiculously over the top gangster names) hunts down the men who killed his friend, and attempts to retrieve enough parts of a mysterious map to find the loot he was killed for.

I found the characters in this story pretty caricaturish, from their names to their behaviour. 'Sarge', for example, an enormous, greasy monster who barely speaks but is, obviously, deadly. 'Jagger', a second stupidly named scary-person, who is such a fine figure of a gangster that he trips over a dead body twice rather than killing the much weaker, much less experienced man he has trapped in a bathtub.

My lord, what a silly story. I'm all for experimentation, but I hope Stephen King avoids gangsters in future.

Battleground

 It should tell you something about The Fifth Quarter, which I have referred to as both silly and ridiculous, that I much preferred this story.

Battleground is like Toy Story on acid. In it, a hit-man named Renshaw is paid to kill a toy-maker. When he returns to his penthouse apartment he finds a package which has been sent to him by the dead man's mother. In it is a box of tiny soldiers and equipment, which immediately starts to attack him. They have teeny helicopters, little dinky rocket launchers, but these things hurt, even in miniature.

Is this a ridiculous idea? Sure. Is it well executed? Yes, absolutely. This particularly story made me laugh throughout, but still felt much more realistic than the story before. Also, as a petite 5'2" myself, I do like it when the little guy wins.

Renshaw is a great character, well drawn with almost no dialogue at all. He is an animal, focused purely on his own survival, and pitted against tiny creatures who don't care about their own at all. Maybe that's why they ultimately win; their end goal is far more important than their lives, which they were never meant to have anyway.

One thing I particularly liked about this story is that it made me question the potential for a scenario like it. Did the tiny toy soldiers need to eat, sleep, or pee? If you fished their little bullets out of your skin, would they have ballooned and changed shape like real ones? What the hell was the final, penthouse-devastating weapon made of?

Battleground proved to me that writer's should always write what they know. King might like gangster movies, but he understood those little toy soldiers. I bet he had a box-full just like them.

Quick, march! To the next post!

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