The Girl Who Loved Stephen King

This particular blog post won't be a long one - from what I can tell there is only one short story separating Carrie  from Salem's Lot , and it's not one which has a huge amount to say for itself. It's a bonkers, gruesome, pretty silly story, that I enjoyed in less than fifteen minutes. The Lawnmower Man It's difficult to outline the premise of this story without simply spilling the entire thing. It's told from the perspective of a fairly ordinary, suburban family man, Harold Parkette, who is reluctant to get his lawn cut after an unpleasant accident caused his neighbour's cat to be run over by his lawnmower the year before. When the lawn eventually gets out of control, Harold calls a new service he finds advertised in the newspaper, and unfortunately for him, discovers that the service provided is anything but ordinary. This is a short story even by short story standards, and I was initially baffled by how anyone could have made a feature length pic...

This next story stands alone for me as a particularly memorable and unusual. Many of King's early stories take inspiration from sources in his childhood and his own favourite authors and filmmakers ( Trucks  and Duel , Grey Matter  and The Blob, etc), but this feels all his own. Sometimes They Come Back Sometimes They Come Back  is an updated, original take on a haunting, where the 'ghosts' take on a more solid shape. This is one of the best known of Stephen King's short stories, mainly due to the three movies it spawned (one made-for-TV, two straight to video). The material probably is meaty enough to make a movie out of, although the director took significant liberties with the source material, fluffing out a simpler, harsher story that probably would have created a more subtle, streamlined film. The story is centred on Jim Norman, a young English teacher with a dark history. As a boy, Jim narrowly escaped being killed by a gang of bullies on the way to the loca...

The next two stories on my list don't have a huge amount in common, but I've popped these two together because I thought both were a little thin, like snippets of much bigger ideas. Many of these early King stories have felt like practice runs for his bigger novels, and perhaps that's what some of them are. It Grows on You It wasn't that I didn't like  It Grows on You , exactly, I just couldn't quite work out where it was going. Just as with Night Surf , four years earlier, I felt like this was more a collection of interesting ideas and a concept that King wanted to explore, but couldn't quite get a handle on. The story is the first set in King's famous fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, and is told through the gossipy old man conversations of a small group in a general store. The town of Castle Rock is dying, but the Newall house, visible from the store, is alive and growing. It's a house with a history of death and devastation; among other ...

The next two stories show what a difference a likeable main character can make. Both The Boogeyman  and Trucks are interesting ideas, well executed, but Trucks  is, in my opinion, easily the more successful, in the main because the narrator takes us with him. We like him and want him to survive. In The Boogeyman , the final appearance of the monster, come to take away the dreadful Lester Billings, comes as a bit of a relief. The Boogeyman We hear this story through the ears of the psychiatrist Dr Harper, who is listening to the wretched tale of Lester Billings, who claims that each of his three children was murdered by an evil monster they called 'The Boogeyman'. This monster, Billings claims, appeared from the children's closets, each time shortly after Billings insisted upon them moving into their own rooms, against his wife's wishes. Billings is a horrid character, almost entirely unsympathetic in spite of the horrendous trauma he and his family have gone throu...

I'm going to start this post by making it clear that I fully understand if anyone reading my previous posts is baffled by my admiration and enthusiasm for this particular story. I have, on several occasions, referred to some of the stories I have read as 'silly' or 'ridiculous', and there is very little I can think of that is more ridiculous than a haunted laundry machine. But, like the fairly stupid sounding premise of The Day of the Triffids, for some reason, it just works. The Mangler I loved this story. It's about a detective who is investigating the horrifically grisly death of a woman who worked on 'the Mangler' - a supersized folding and ironing machine - after she was pulled into its workings, despite safety apparatus which should have made this impossible. The detective soon discovers that this is not the first 'accident' involving this particular machine, and starts to believe that it may be possessed by an evil force. Now, do...

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, an...

Apparently, this is an air compressor. Who knew? I had mixed feelings about the next two Kings on the list, mainly because I am not a big fan of either self-aware fiction, or science fiction. The Blue Air Compressor  is more self aware than all the Scream  movies put together, and I Am the Doorway  is wandering the fine line between horror-sci-fi and pure science fiction. So, neither would be my choice for preferred King style, but they're on my list, so read them I must. The Blue Air Compressor This story is pretty ordinary King at first glance. A young man named Gerald Nately writes a story about the enormously fat woman he is living with. The woman finds the manuscript and laughs at it (oh dear), suggesting that she was just too much woman for Gerald to write about. Gerald takes this insult to heart, and murders her by shoving an air compressor (a piece of machinery I had to google) down her throat and essentially inflating her to death. All in all it's a fun...

It's lockdown week 2. Both reading and blogging have been a challenge this week, as my husband and I juggled setting remote learning, heading into work to look after key worker children, and trying to stop our own child from devouring her crayons. But, I'm making progress, and Carrie is tantalisingly closer every day. Although this blog post will be relatively short, Graveyard Shift feels like it needs its own entry. It doesn't really fit with any of the other stories just before or after it, and stands alone both in length and in content. Graveyard Shift This is one of King's better known short stories, partly because of the 1990 movie adapted from it. I've not seen the movie yet, so watch this space for my thoughts on it. It received a hilariously low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that's a score I've rarely seen beaten. I'm hoping it fits in the 'so bad it's good' category. Fingers crossed. For those of you that aren't fa...

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...

In a busy first week of lockdown, I've been setting remote learning for my students, answering millions of (usually ridiculous) questions, chasing my tiny tornado of a toddler, and ploughing through the first big group of King's short stories. I'll admit that I hadn't realised just how many short stories King had published before Carrie came out in '74; I even had my copy out and ready when I started compiling my list of his works and organising it. It wasn't to be. King was pretty prolific even before Carrie  made him a household name. If you don't include Jumper  and Rush Call , by my count he'd written eighteen stories and one essay before his big break. Rather than dedicating a blog post to every story, I thought I'd put them together into groups which felt connected, not necessarily by theme or subject matter, but by a feel of the writing. Occasionally, where a story really speaks to me, I'll give it its own post. Cain Rose Up From t...