Stephen King appears quite a lot in our reviews. See Gerald’s Game or Doctor Sleep for two examples. Why do we review him so much? Because of his excellent narrative powers, his ability to draw you into a tale and, frankly things he tries anew, like this book for example.
Andy Bissette and Frank Proux, two policemen are interviewing an old lady, the titular Dolores Claiborne. The whole book is pretty much a conversation, with Dolores doing most of the talking. Stephen King has written a book about a gripping story, all of which happens in a conversation! He really likes to try out things, does he not?
The lady came to argue that she was not the one who killed Vera Donovan. Who is Vera? The story explains.
She admits to killing her husband Joe St George but that was twenty nine years ago! At that time she had three kids : fifteen year old Selena, thirteen year old Joe Junior and nine year old Little Pete. Joe left her nothing, and was a drunk husband with no sense of his responsibilities. At that very time, Vera Donovan decided to come live full time on the island and offers Dolores a job as a housekeeper. Dolores had no money so she jumped at the offer.
Vera was rich, her husband made a fortune and left everything to her when he died. Vera was a virago, and would not quit smoking or drinking even after her heart attacks. Dolores was a stay at home companion to Vera even after her children had left (and Little Pete had left the world)..
Vera was a harridan but Dolores stuck with her through the screaming and bad manners. Vera’s kids never visited her from town and she did not have anyone else either, living alone in the big mansion (except Dolores, her housekeeper).
On top of all that, she was in a wheelchair when she was not in bed.
Her evil streak did not abate. She was harsh to servants with strict instructions and whenever they were flouted thrice the person was out. Dolores was the only one who could stay but then she had to put up with a lot. This is even before her cunning where she deliberately soiled the bed at unexpected times and expected a clean up. On one particularly egregious occasion Dolores was mad enough to scream ‘I will kill you!’ at her highest voice; every servant in the house would have heard it.
But really Vera was a tormented soul, seeing ghouls and monsters in everything, even dust bunnies and had to be calmed out of her raging terror and hysteria, and only Dolores was able to do that.
There is a horrible contest between them of Vera trying to make as much mess with her poop – outside the diaper – as she could when Dolores was away working and how Dolores managed to outwit her after several ‘defeats’.
She then moves over to her husband Joe. Joe was her sweetheart in high school and after marriage she found that he was a drunk and also that he had a temper. On one particularly painful hit, she ‘fixes him’ by smashing a pitcher on his cheek, wounding and bruising him. When he rises in anger, she gives him an axe handle first and says ‘If you want to finish it, now is the time; but you will rot in jail for the rest of your life’.
She protects her two kids Mark and Selena from any knowledge of the beatings and the ugliness in the marriage.
However, Joe seems ‘cured’ of wanting to sexually assault Helena but when she finds out that Joe had stolen the kids’ savings she had put in the joint account, she knows she needs to get rid of Joe. On a full eclipse of the sun, while the entire town is away either on the beach or on Vera’s rented boat on the sea, she manages to get Joe drunk and lure him to the abandoned well in a drunk state.
What follows is pure adrenaline filled action : Though Joe is trapped and falls, he does not die and there are several times when Joe seems to outwit her, severely injured though he is. In the end, she manages to come out on the top. But pays a very heavy price for it with her relationship with the children later.
Excellent stuff. In fact the entire book is told in the racy conversation style of a woman past her prime, not very well educated and struggling with the slings and arrows of a fortune intent on heaping problems after problems on her. One of his best books, in my opinion.
And then she is grilled by a Scottish detective who is highly suspicious and tries to trap her into admitting her guilt. He pulls apart her story and cross examines her grimly and she comes very close to giving up and admitting her part. But at the very last moment, she gains control and he retreats, unsatisfied but knowing that he is defeated. This is an excellent part in the story and keeps you turning pages.
After that the story moves towards its conclusion very fast. We learn what happens to Vera Donovan and why Dolores is in the police station. Even those events are well told and tied beautifully to the earlier events where Vera’s mind was going and she was seeing monsters everywhere and Dolores had to go and comfort her at every turn.
Now, the latest episode happened while Dolores was out hanging the clothes and the book races towards its conclusion.
A superb job of plotting and execution and it keeps you tense and absorbed until the very end.
For the murder she did not commit, she is harassed and hauled over the coals, which is heartrending. The townspeople start bullying and threatening her anonymously. Notices on her door, phone calls, drunk groups shooting near her house, the whole nine yeards.
The whole thing is touching – how it happened and how it looked like to the townsfolk who caught her in suspicious circumstances always. And the phone call from Vera’s lawyer is the icing on this cake. As if the story is not already top notch, there are things revealed at the end that make you stunned. I know it is an old book and I know that most of you would have already read it, but I will refrain from giving anything away except to urge you to read it if you have not already!
Unlike many of the novels we have reviewed by the same author (See Under the Dome or Christine for two samples) this one seems to be a short story. I subsequently learnt that this is a novella that has been compiled into the author’s Nightmare and Dreamscapes collection. It seems oddly shorter than his other novellas and closer to a short story length and format.
But since it exist as a standalone ebook, I will review it here and if I get to read the collection, perhaps skip commenting on this one story within that collection.
The narrator Robinson waits for revenge on Dolan. We learn that Dolan is a rich criminal and when the narrator’s wife Elizabeth managed to witness and reported to the police and agreed with the FBI to testify against Dolan, she was removed. Dynamite connected to her car’s ignition saw to it.
He watches, follows, and waits. For months. He does not know how he can get to Dolan, heavily guarded at all times and traveling only in an armored vehicle. An idea occurs to him at last.
It occurs to him when he goes to explore a side road and finds Dolan’s car on the side waiting for some repairs. He goes on a life altering exercise and loses weight and builds muscle patiently.
He also joins roadwork to get the magazine about road closures. One long weekend, he gets what he is looking for : Roadwork on the main highway and he ensures that Dolan will be coming to that city again that time. All his plan requirements are ready.
He goes to the road on Saturday and nearly kills himself digging a hole. Before all that he goes to an engineer friend of his with a science fiction story he is writing, where an alien tank-like vehicle is buried in the ground by a clever hole dug in the ground. The engineer gives him the angle and the dimensions to make the story realistic, upon his explicit request.
Armed with the knowledge, and the knowledge of the road repair engines gleaned when he had worked for real, he sets a trap and nearly kills himself spending two full days digging behind the detour sign. He also jerry rigs the ignition of a huge ground digging vehicle left on the side of the road by the city.
Finally he manages an adequate camouflage on top of the hole and, surveying Dolan’s car with binoculars from afar, just removes the detour sign and the cones, so that the car would come straight where he had dug the disguided hole.
What happens after is the rest of the story. Stephen King does, as he does most things, revenge stories well. This is a fun story to read and keeps you entertained. It is short enough to read in one sitting, which is so unlike this author who, with the exception of very few books, has never written short books!
Of course, we have reviewed many of the author’s books here earlier. Samples include Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, to name just two.
Four long novellas into one collection. Often, in a collection like this, you get some good stories mixed in with some so-so stories. (Read our review of Bazaar of Bad Dreams as an example). But in this book, each of the four stories is amazing, and so this one is a fine collection and exciting till the last page. Literally the last page.
The first story is Langoliers, which, if my memory serves me right, was made into a movie all by itself. Brian Engle, a pilot, has narrowly averted disaster in a flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles and would like nothing more than to go to his hotel and have a long sleep. But he hears that his ex wife, Anne, is dead in an accident involving apartment fire and he immediately takes a red eye flight to Boston. Fellow passengers include a blonde woman with her blind daughter – Dinah was the girl and Aunt Vicky. When Dina awakens about three hours into the flight, she is disturbed to see that Aunt Vicky is not in her seat but her purse is. A disquiet grows inside her.
The author skilfully brings home the fact that most of the passengers in the plane have simply disappeared. Brian Eagle was the lone passenger in the first class that was previously full. In business class, there is an old man suffering from arthritis (but now fast asleep). In the ‘cattle class’ there is Dinah and Albert Kaussner, a teenage Jewish boy and at least three other passengers. The plane was not exactly empty but most passengers seem to have simply disappeared, including the stewardess (are we allowed to use this job title anymore?) who attended to Brian Engle when he boarded this flight.
We get to know the other passengers slowly : Laurel Stevensen, whom Dinah identifies just by her tone as a teacher; a seemingly unflappable Brit called Nick Hopewell; the obligatory meanie – an investment banker – in a crew neck jersey brimming with self importance. Don Gaffney, whom we first only know as ‘the man in the red shirt’. There is also a young girl there who seems bright for her age – called Bethany. Bob Jenkins, a writer who has written mysteries, is also there.
Meanwhile, Brian realizes that all the lights down below are gone, and there is no radio communication either. And we learn that on the plane, only those who were fast asleep did not disappear. Brian makes a decision to revert to Maine instead of Boston as that is closer and he wants to land the plane at the nearest safe place.
When the meanie – Greg Toomie – throws his weight around, he is subdued and sent packing to his seat where he sits, planning mayhem in anger that they had refused to go to the original destination so that he could be there for the deal of his life. We learn of his strict disciplinarian background which made him give up his dreams for ‘success’ and his slowly unraveling mind.
When Brian lands the plane in Maine, he is relieved to see that the runway and the airport – complete with the shops around it – are still there and have not disappeared. However, he cannot raise anyone on the wireless, nor are the runway lights on, when he lands the plane.
They get down in the airport and what follows is the split scenes that Stephen King does so well (and has done in other stories, like Under The Dome or Desperation. ) Toomey goes to the security room and gets a pistol. In the meanwhile, Don has an inkling of what may have happened to them – he correctly guesses that all the food and the drinks are tasteless and the matches do not work – except those that they had with them in the plane.
He surmises that the world has not lost all its inhabitants – it is they who have crossed over to another dimension or something. The world is ‘ticking along fine somewhere out there’.
Meanwhile both Toomey and the girl both realize that something evil is coming their way but in different ways. Toomey fears the Langoliers, used as a threat by his dad to discipline him as a child. Dinah simply feels and knows that something unspeakably evil is headed their way.
We get to know that the teacher Laurel is going for a fling with a man she met online and barely knew, to add spice to her life. Toomey was coached to excel and incredible pressure was put on him but he was going to face exposure after the greatest cheating game he had employed – his mind finally gave up.
Nick seems to be some kind of a special agent with a British accent – but refuses to talk about himself.
The airport has some interesting scenes. Toomey get a gun from the guardroom and then tries to threaten everyone by holding Jennifer, a young girl, hostage. Albert bravely tries to intervene and Toomie shoots him.
That should have been the end of Albert but the bullet does not come with any speed and touches him and falls off. Toomey is trussed and left.
They also know that they need to leave right away. But where to? If their assumption is right, they have entered a world unpopulated and wherever they go, they will be in the same situation as the Bangor airport, here. But Nick has an idea. What if they reversed course and see if the rent in the fabric that brought them here is still open, and head back into ‘their’ world through it?
But how? Getting petrol from the airport back to the plane will give non burning fuel to the plane and so it cannot work, right? In addition, even the stuff they brought from the plane starts fading in potency. The matchsticks from Jennifer do not burn as quickly anymore.
Now Albert has another brainwave. They go into the plane and see that the tasteless beer stars fizzing (slowly) and the matches ‘come back to life’. The plan seems to be carrying something from the ‘other side’ if their theories are correct.
Toomey manages to escape and goes to the service elevator. When Albert and Gaffney go there, Toomey manages to kill Gaffney with a letter opener. Gaffney had no chance because it was dark there. Albert, however, manages to overpower him using a toaster strung in a rope as a weapon.
Nick, who arrives there, wants to kill Toomey but he remembers Dinah’s request to ‘leave him alive because I sense we will need him later’ and, against his own instincts, leaves him alone.
Dinah mentally incites Craig to get up and go ‘confront the bankers’ who seemed to be waiting for him in a piece of (empty) lawn. She seems to be using him for a deep purpose and she herself seems to be dying on the stretcher. It becomes clear when the langoliers come and swarm on him, giving the plan precious extra time to escape. The langoliers are ‘eating the world and all that are in there’ as one man in the plane puts it.
Dinah does not survive the wounds. Meanwhile, when they find the rip where they expected it to be, they want to go through it to the ‘normal side’ but the writer Bob realizes that there is something missing. When they came through the rip, the only ones who survived were the ones who were asleep at that time. Now, they were all awake.
Realizing this from Bob, Brian manages to avoid going through the rip at the last minute and they hatch a plan of how to manage this problem and still arrive alive on the other side. The ending is brilliant, with another little puzzle on the way.
Excellent story, and wonderful narration, a joy to read.
The second story is ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’. It is about an author called Morton Rainey. One day he is accosted at his home by a stranger who accuses him of stealing his, the stranger’s, story. He initially just swats it away but when he reads the story, is struck by how similar these are.
When the pesky stranger, John Shooter, comes back, he gives an irrefutable argument as to why this was not stolen from Shooter. He happened to publish the story a few years earlier in a magazine and Shooter wrote his version, as per his claim, after that date. Shooter refuses to believe him and says that he will accept, if within the next three days, he, Morton, can produce the magazine, he will accept that Morton’s story is not plagiarized.
To drive home the point, he leaves a message to Mort: A note saying that ‘I am serious; you have three days’ and his cat Bump, nailed to the garbage can with a screwdriver through the chest. Mort is now worried enough to call his ex wife Amy, only to find that his house has burned down due to an arson attack. He checks next with his longtime agent, only to find that the agent does not have a copy of the magazine either, as he became Mort’s agent only after that magazine article was published.
The title shocks him because it was something that Amy, his ex wife, had suggested. He is now puzzled as to how Shooter came by the title. In addition, when Amy’s current flame Ted informs him that he came from Tennessee and was born in a town called Shooter, it momentarily knocks Mort off – marveling at the coincidence, if coincidence is what it was.
But more of the efforts of Mort to get a copy of the magazine comes to nought. In a surprising turn, when Mort asks Greg to find Tom Greenleaf and ask him about seeing both Mort and Shooter, Greg comes with the surprising response later : Tom saw Mort but he was alone. There was no man or indeed no car (Shooter’s) with him! Mort, however, not only remembers Shooter but remembers being painfully gripped above his elbow and shoved against Shooter’s car. He begins to wonder if Tom was ‘persuaded’ by Shooter or whether he is going nuts.
Especially when Shooter seems to be able to get into his house at will (He stole the keys of Mort’s car, moved it, and put the keys back but not in the usual place and even left his felt hat on the back porch for Mort to find).
When Mort still wavers and shows no sign of moving towards Shooter’s compensation – which is that Mort write a short story and give it to Shooter in lieu of the one he stole – he calls Mort and directs him to a desolate place where Mort finds both Tom and Greg lying dead, with Mort’s screwdriver and knife from the toolshed used for the purpose.
He is now genuinely scared but still stubborn enough not to go to the cops. Unusually in Stephen King’s stories, this irrationality grates.
Finally he knocks Shooter off balance by disclosing that he is getting a magazine by mail that day – original, no less.
Then the magazine arrives by post and when he opens, after going back home, he finds that the magazine has no index and a few pages are missing – exactly the pages where his story should have been. He wonders how Shooter was able to get to the magazine which was in registered post – impossible!
When the twist comes it is like a punch in the gut and even the weird things like the reluctance of Mort to declare to the police that he was being blackmailed, how his story with the exact wording but a different title could have been created by Shooter, how Shooter’s location was related to Amy’s boyfriend’s city – all fall into place. I know that the same twist has been employed by other authors in other stories but still it came as a totally unexpected shock to me.
I don’t want to give anything away – so no spoilers here – but this story in total is as interesting as Langoliers – which I did not think it was, when I was reading through it initially. The only gripe I have is that after what I thought was the perfect ending, the author had to go and spoil it with intimations of something supernatural to boot. That kind of brings the story a bit down, in my opinion but still an exhilarating story.
The Library Policeman is the next story. Sam Peebles is the owner of a small Realty company in Junction city. They had arranged for a circus acrobat to speak in Rotary Club. But since he had an accident, Craig Jones, the President of the Rotary Club, compels Sam to stand in for a half an hour speech on something – anything.
Sam writes the speech but his agent/ consultant advises him to add some humorous bits in it and he agrees. He goes to the library to find a book and finds the library deserted and extremely spooky. Spooky enough for him to momentarily consider turning around and leaving.
He finds several freaky pictures even in the children’s section and then meets the librarian, to all intents and purposes a kindly old lady with gray hair but with eyes that are disturbing. He is warned to return the book in a week and he manages to rub her the wrong way in the process by asking questions that annoy her. Her name was Ardelia Lortz.
His talk is a roaring success. But in the drunken stupor, he has put the book in a box which is cleared by a person who collects old papers from him and then sends it to be recycled! When he misses the deadline, he gets a curt phone call from the librarian reminding him that the book is overdue and she is very disappointed. She however gives him until next week to return the book before sending the library police after him. When he discovers that the book is gone, he panics and tries to retrieve it, to no avail. When he finds it has been destroyed, he simply feels he needs to pay for it, that is all.
When he goes to the library (in broad daylight) to pay for the books, he finds that the library is transformed – modern ceilings, different posters and books, and a different librarian too. Changes that could not have been made in just two days. When he tries to find out who Ardelia Lortz is, either no one knows or an old lady who seems to know chews his head off for mentioning her name, without explaining why.
He is feeling increasingly spooky! When he has just decided that – even though there was a concrete voice mail from Ardelia that reminded him that the book was due the next day – which he unfortunately deleted in a hurry – he concludes that the whole thing was his imagination alone. Then he gets a visitor – the library police ‘itself’ – who makes him pee in his pants in fear. He is warned not to ‘ask questions but find the book in the 24 hours he has’. He knows that he does need to find his solution and goes to a newspaper office in search of old microfilm archives. His old friend Donna finds him there. He tells her everything that happened.
They find Dave and Dave tells the old story of how Ardelia waltzed into the town and how he was in love with her, and how she played hide and seek with him in the fields, impossibly moving locations. It gets worse. When Ardelia joins the library, she actively scares the kids. Slowly, even through the drunken stupor, Dave realizes that she is a kind of an emotional vampire and has killed the librarian xxx to get his post too. She only gets the kids to see the real scary tales but they seem fully hypnotized and under her control.
Dave has lost everything not caring about his work, friends, anyone until she tells him that she needs to sleep and whether Dave can join her. Just before, Dave has witnessed an eerie scene – from a hidden place – where he sees Ardelia as she really is – insectile, with a proboscis, trying to physically suck the fear from the totally frightened children!
Meanwhile the assistant Police Chief gets suspicious about her and she has to leave. She is hoping to either take Dave to be her eternal companion or kill him, since he knows already too much about her. He says he wants to join her and deceives her later.
He gets knocked out under the bridge after warning the chief to ‘protect her daughter’. When the chief goes investigating, Ardelia kills him and the two kids. Realizing that the ‘submissive darling Dave’ has betrayed her, she tries to ‘find him’ with her supernatural gifts but could not ‘see’ him because he was knocked out at a deeper level. Dave would not be alive today if he was conscious then.
Meanwhile Dave tells Sam that Ardelia has him, Sam Peebles, in her sight. Not to use him like she did Dave but actually become him. He says that the ‘real’ Ardelia was taken over by the inhuman thing there, and when the time came it left the body to ‘sleep’ and recover. Now it is back and wants another body to inhabit. Sam is the ‘chosen one’. Freaky imagination.
The three – Dave, Sam and Donna decide to fight back because it is not just Sam’s fight anymore. The moment “it” becomes Sam, the next thing he would do is to kill the two who betrayed her – and officer’s daughter to complete the earlier debt, and then move to another city to become a librarian there. How they do it is the rest of the story. Just another brilliant gem in the quartet of yarns that Stephen King has skillfully woven. Donna and Sam seem to be falling in love with each other as they work together to extricate themselves from the revenge of the thing that was Ardelia.
They now get the library book back from an obscure bookshop and return to confront the thing that is Ardelia. He now has to remember his “library policeman” who is a pedophile who waylaid Sam when he was a kid and forced himself on Sam, much to the terror of the kid.
He buys licorice from the shop as a ‘gift’ to Ardelia and they set out.
Then the story goes to its climax. They wait for the library to move from the ‘new’ to ‘old’ and Sam first confronts the Library Policeman and returns the books with the fine. Then he faces Ardelia, who is changing into a spider like thing. Will not go into details but Dave, Sam and Donna go against the supernatural thing where they lose a life.
The destruction of Ardelia “thing” is brilliantly told but that is not the end. There is another remnant of the thing in one of the survivors and Sam also manages to destroy it at the end. I know I am being cryptic and vague here but I do not want to give everything away in this review. Definitely a brilliant read.
The last story in the quartet is Sun Dog. The story happens in Castle Rock, the fictional town in Maine that features in many of Stephen King’s books. (Needful Things is one and The Dark Half is another). This tale stars with the fifteenth birthday of Kevin Delevan, who gets a Poloroid camera (Sun 660) for his birthday as a gift. Kevin has a sister, Meg.
When he takes a picture, though, he sees an unrelated outside scene with some folks in it. He thinks that the camera has a malfunction but it cannot be returned as it fell down accidentally and got chipped. They decide that Kevin should keep it for a bit. He has a strong mental impulse that cries It is mine!
He goes to the local store owner Pop to discuss this. Pop gets very interested and even puts up some money for another reel and asks Kevin to take pictures at specific intervals. When Kevin looks at the pictures, he is scared and is convinced that he should smash the camera right away.
Pop convinces him to hold on for a week and then bring his dad to his shop one week later, where he will help Kevin smash it. But he has a diabolical plan of his own: He fakes another camera with the same kind of chipped piece as Kevin’s before they come.
His dad knows how evil Pop is and is extremely upset to go with Kevin. He explains how he got involved in Pop due to losing money in a very stupid bet and how it nearly killed him before he could pay the usurious interest and the principal. Kevin is astounded.
Pop manages to palm off the camera and destroy an identical looking fake, convincing them that the evil camera has been finally destroyed. Then he tries to sell this supernatural camera to his clients who have in the past been interested in (faked) supernatural phenomena from him. His first attempt fails miserably as his client accuses him of mechanical trickery and throws him out. Then he goes to the Pus Sisters (yes, his nickname for them as both their first names end in ‘pus’) and they reject it in revulsion.
Meanwhile every demonstration reveals the dog transforming into something else with ugly fangs and red eyes. (There is a reference to Cujo of the eponymous book Cujo somewhere in the middle).
The story completely moves to Pop and he tries to sell the camera but one by one all those clients who bought (worthless) paranormal stuff from Pop decline – one of them accusing him of trying to sell a clever mechanical fake and breaking off relationship. When Pop finally realizes how dangerous it is, he decides to destroy it after all but as he is about to do so, goes into a trance and destroys a cuckoo clock instead. He actually ‘sees’ the camera being destroyed as he is smashing the clock. And then, next day, he goes and buys a new role of polaroid film!
Meanwhile, convinced by his recurring dreams, Kevin is convinced that Pop probably did a switcheroo on him and his dad. He convinces his dad by providing proof – retrospectively. When they smashed ‘his’ camera, there was film in it, which would have been impossible as Kevin had shot all films from the problematic camera before handing it to Pop. His dad takes Kevin to confront Pop.
There are impressive scenes where Pop, still under trance, avoids the father son duo and Kevin seems to ‘sense’ the fact that the dog in the picture is about to be unleashed in the real world, spelling the end of his, Kevin’s, own life. The descriptions here are classic King, ratcheting up the tension one little bit at a time!
The story reaches a crescendo at the end, and what happens, as I said earlier, is so taut and thrilling that you can’t turn the pages fast enough.
We have reviewed so many books of this author earlier – See Revival and Duma Key for two samples.
The story takes off right where the first part (The Shining) ends. If you read this one right after the prequel, it is the book reading equivalent of binge watching! However, you soon realize that this is a totally different story after a few pages of continuity abruptly ends and the story leaps forward many years.
On that note, yes, this book can be read as a standalone story but to get the full enjoyment of the book, I would strongly recommend that you read the earlier book first as multiple references in this book hark back to the events in the previous book.
And this one is breathtakingly beautiful.
The story starts with Danny Torrence and his mother Wendy, the survivors in the previous novel settling down in an apartment. The man who rescued them, Halloran, comes to visit as the boy and Halloran specifically share a deep mental bond and also share the extrasensory perception that they share (‘The Shining’).
Danny realizes that the dead woman in the hotel room (the first book has the details) has followed him to the apartment. He freaks out and his mom sends for Dick Halloran who comes promptly.
Dick tells his own story to Danny. His grandma who was the White Grandma who was his mother’s mother (not because of skin colour but her good intentions) and his Dark Grandpa (his father’s father) who was drunk, and physically and mentally abusive to Dick.
When that man died, he ‘came back’ and Dick was told by his White Grandma, who also had a strong ‘Shining’ how to lock him in. Danny successfully uses it against the old lady and also another of the older book’s hotel’s occupant who had come calling. He assumes that he now does not have to fear the resurrected spirits. Ever. He was very wrong.
The story shifts now to a girl Andi Steiner, who uses men to get free meals and movies in a ‘date’. At the crucial moment in the theatre, where the man tries to get too close, she simply ‘makes him’ fall into a trance akin to sleep instantly. She takes his money and putting him in deeper sleep slashes his cheek with a knife – as a lesson for those perverts who go around looking for young girls in bars to seduce when they have a family elsewhere.
Rose O’Hara and Barry Smith watch from behind. Barry has seen her do this before. Once she prepares to leave, Andi feels restrained inside her head and loses consciousness. Only to wake up inside Rose’s EarthCruiser later.
They convince her to join them and become immortal. They ask her to “take the steam”. She does and becomes ‘something more than human’.
Meanwhile, Daniel, now grown up, has gone to seed. He wakes up after another huge drunken night and a brawl in the company of a girl he barely knew, with a massive hangover. He steals the money she had in her purse before slipping away. He is traumatized to know that she was probably underage and had a son who was abused to boot and neglected.
He roams from city to city, unable to kick his drinking habit or keep his job as an unskilled worker.
Later, he settled down in a small tourist town and gets a job as worksman in an amusement park with a toy train. He gets the shining back in that town.
When he starts seeing things (both the girl he stole money from as well as the small kid were killed and come back to his room at night) he weakens and tries to go back to his booze. The man who he met (Freeman who has a little bit of shining) stops him on time.
Meanwhile grandma Concetta and parents Dave and Lucy find that a newborn girl Abra seems to have powerful abilities. She seems to feel the Twin Tower catastrophe of Sep 11 in her bones. She knows that the old lady in the opposite house, Wanda, fell and hurt her head and gets their parents to take Wanda to the hospital in time to save her life. She seems to play piano (before she could even walk) from afar; She makes all channels on TV play Simpsons at one time. And so on.
Dan once finds his blackboard contents in his room erased and replaced by a single word ‘Hello‘. He gets the name ‘Abra’ in his mental space.
Abra in the meanwhile – during her birthday – has made all the spoons in the kitchen stick to the ceiling. She was far away from the kitchen, in the backyard, in a party, watching a clown stick a spoon on his face.
Meanwhile there is a Cat in the old people’s home which unerringly comes into the room of the ‘guest’ at the time of his death.
Concetta falls down at her home, breaks her hip and when she reaches the hospital, finds that she has but a few weeks to live. She has Stage IV cancer. Abra seems to know it already – she is far away in a summer camp – calls her mom Lucy and wants to come home immediately!
Lucy moves in with Concetta to look after her. Meanwhile a missing person’s photo is seen by Abra bringing back all memories of the boy who was murdered. She uses her growing psychic powers to see where the event happened and goes back in time and travels with the group to see where the boy’s body was buried. (Exciting descriptions of what she experiences and how she can rewind and slow down as needed to read the signs). Oh yes, Abra now is much older – still a kid but pre pubescent kid.
She then is drawn into Rose’s body and realizes with a panic that Rose is now trying to look into her head. She violently cuts Rose off, making Rose stagger and almost fall (she was shopping in a supermarket). Rose is shocked at the power and is now determined to find the ‘child’ who tried to get into her head! She also realizes that the “steam” that they can get by killing this child would feed them for a very, very long time!
The True Knot, the group of vampire-like people who live very long and are rejuvenated by the life force of tortured kids are led by Rose the Hat. (She wears a hat at an impossible angle and is the true leader of the group). Every time they take ‘steam’ or the white life force, they become younger instantly. If the person being killed has a strong power (shining) there is enough steam to store in canisters and use for a very long time.
They take the life of a young, baseball loving kid called Brad Trevor. When they are torturing him and dying, Rose feels being watched. The girl who is doing the watching from far away is Abra. Rose is surprised but decides to keep the girl in mind – she wants to go after the girl when they need steam again.
Abra is stricken to find a boy being killed and buried with the baseball glove. She decides not to do anything about it – at first. But when the boy’s picture turns up in a local newspaper as missing, and Abra sees it, she knows she needs to act.
She goes through the mental picture, even stopping and rewinding their trip with the boy until she knows precisely where they buried the boy. The glove was worn (when Brad thought that Barry was a good man and a friend) by Barry and she realizes that if she had the glove, she can reach into the minds of others just like she did Rose’s.
When Abra tries to enter Rose’s head while the latter is in a supermarket – she is simply seeking the guy Billy who the boy thought was a friend – but got sucked into the head of the powerful lady Rose – Rose is in a supermarket.
Abra sees what Rose sees and is then absolutely astounded to feel Rose trying to peek into her head. She violently shoves Rose, psychically of course, causing Rose to lose balance and crash into a supermarket shelf. In addition, she causes a very small earthquake in her street. Dave, who is downstairs working on his novel, is surprised at the earthquake.
Rose realizes that she needs to get the girl right away. Just then things start going bad for True Knot. Grandpa (‘Gramps’) gets measles – probably from the steam they had from xxx). This is supposed to be impossible as rube (that is common folk) diseases are not supposed to afflict True Knot.
Abra is now scared and appeals to Dan. He asks her to put a psychic alarm to know if Rose comes but Abra decides to put a trap.
In an exciting scene, Rose tries to get into Abra’s mind when she is asleep by using the connection forged earlier but gets her arm hurt badly and bruised before she escapes. She now knows that the kid (she still does not know the name of Abra) has to be eliminated and quickly. She wants to keep her alive and ‘milk’ her with torture and terror for repeated steam.
Rose could narrow the area of search based on what she saw through Abra’s eyes – a mountain range, and guessing correctly that the mini earthquake reported on a particular street was caused by their encounter. They have narrowed the target to one of the three girls, based on Rose’s description – what she saw during the mental raid – and looking into the school records of the nearby public school. Illegally of course. One of them is Abra.
Rose sends the team to find the girl and get her. On the way, they find that their best locator, Barry, also caught measles and is suffering.
Meanwhile, Dan enlists the help of Dr John and another friend Frank Bannerman and goes to the girl’s house. Dan convinces Abra that she has to come clean with Abra’s parents, in case the baddies harm them in their pursuit to reach Abra. Abra agrees. They take the glove (after digging the boy’s body out and then, after retrieving the glove, reburying him) to Abra. Wearing it, Abra realizes that four of the ‘vampires’ are coming right then towards her house.
She also describes the group’s location for Dan to realize that they are exactly at the place where once Overlook stood – tie into the previous book, The Shining )
He has a nebulous plan in his mind. What follows is pure brilliance. Dan, Dave and Dr John go in a van to Camp Gap – Dan carrying Abra’s favourite bunny with him. They leave Billy Freeman to watch over Abra in a van while Abra is with a friend. Abra stays in the mind of Dan while also focusing on her friend’s games. The tracker, Barry, feels Abra on the Camp Gap. Abra watches the van through Barry’s eyes. When momentarily she sees the porno video that the True Knot is watching, she gets rattled. This briefly gives Barry a pause because he seems to sense Abra in two places at once! One in a van going towards Camp Gap and the other at Anniston, where they know that ‘the girl’ lives. He is suspicious and asks Crow to drop off at Anniston and investigate. Soon after Barry dies – rube diseases prove deadly to True Knot.
Right at that moment, Abra decides to go from her friend’s house to her home, much to the unease of the watching guard Frank Bannerman.
Meanwhile there is a spectacular scene where the four of them – Andi Snakebite, Walnut, and Jimmy Numbers all come to the Camp ground and are confronted by a prepared team of Dan, eee and Dave! Andi almost makes Dan sleep – with the needle in hand to administer – but Abra makes him aware.
In a spectacular shootout, the team manages to kill all of them!
Crow goes to meet Frank and pretending to ask for directions, and being a man with the nicest manners and the most charming smile, makes him hesitate and reach for the map to show him. This was enough to inject him and make him unconscious. He then goes to get Abra – to her house.
At this very moment, Rose, far away, feels the death of each member every bit and screams into the mind of Abra. Abra is unprepared this time and is disoriented. By the time she manages to push (yes, push!) Rose out and gain clarity, it is too late. She is syringed and in a dopey state is abducted in Frank’s van with both of them strapped to the backseat. With the threat over Frank, he makes Abra compliant.
And in another spectacular section, Abra and Dan manage to switch bodies and Dan and a newly awakened Frank manage to (mentally) overpower Crow and use the gun in Crow’s own hand to turn towards Crow himself and shoot him dead!
Abra gets into Rose’s head and says ‘Don’t bother coming for me, I am coming for you!’
When Stephen King gets into the groove, the pages fly!
After this, they execute a plan for a nail biting climax; Rose has a lot of strategies to ensure that the girl, who foolishly promised to come alone, never leaves with her life. She has all the other True Knots in the main hall – but the girl does not know that she can still stay connected; she also has one of the True Knot members, who has the gift of being almost invisible wait in a shed with its door open – so that if the girl peeks in, she cannot see her and will think Rose is alone.
Dan and Frank leave to meet her there and Abra uses her considerable powers to deceive Rose. They have a really brilliant plan to outwit and Rose, being extremely sharp realizes too early that there is something fishy about “Abra” in the van – which Frank her ‘uncle’ is driving while Dan sneaks back through the rear of the campgrounds.
What follows is a cat and mouse game (with Dan getting a premonition that he will not get out of it alive but still bravely going to help Abra) and a lot of action and surprises.
I will not give away the end, but this book is truly brilliant if you are comfortable with all the supernatural (‘Shining’) stuff in the story.
This too is one of King’s great books. We have reviewed many Stephen King novels here. For just two examples, consult Under The Dome or Gerald’s Game.
The book starts normally, even lazily before it picks up speed, like some other of Stephen King’s novels. Once it accelerates, there is no stopping it!
Jack Torrence is being interviewed by Ullman for a post in a hotel. Ullman admits that he does not think Jack up to the job but will hire him because of a recommendation from a big benefactor. He also admits that many in the hotel do not like him, Ullman. Jack wants and needs the job of the Winter housekeeper in the hotel.
The janitor Watson seems to hate Ullman but shows the ropes to Jack. Jack learnt that the family who stayed before him died gruesomely one winter. The man killed his whole family and committed suicide.
Meanwhile Danny seems to have flashes of blackouts where he sees things – with the help of Tony, his imaginary friend. For instance he knew where the movers put his dad’s suitcase, even thought it was locked and he never visited the place. He also sees visions of his dad having a bloodied mallet with him – thus the story leaps into the supernatural.
During one of their bouts of drunk driving, he and Al (a drinking buddy but the son of a very rich man) knock a bike that was parked in the middle of the road. Even though they did not find the body in the dark, they are shocked enough to give up drinking and this incidentally saves Jack’s marriage as well – at least temporarily.
David, meanwhile can see into the minds of his parents and knows when his Daddy is thinking of The Bad Thing. (The accident, and Jack’s firm belief that he and Al may have murdered someone that night)
They go to the hotel and Wendy realizes that they will be snowed in for pretty much six months with no exit and no way for anyone from outside to reach them!
The fall is gorgeous and the family is alone in the hotel. And Jack’s play seems to be coming along fine, much to the satisfaction of him and Wendy’s. While fixing the roof, he is stung by a wasp and has his fingers swollen.
Meanwhile Danny is being told by Toby that there will be two major horrors awaiting him in the hotel : a boiler explosion and a croquet mallet being swung in extreme anger that causes bleeding – or more. He is not aware of what it is.
Danny is taken to a doctor (when he is stung by multiple wasps in a nest that Jack, wrongly believing it to be free of wasps, gave him). He tells the doctor about Tony as well as what his mother, sitting outside in the waiting room, is really thinking at that very moment.
Later, when they are snowed in, Danny goes to the forbidden room and sees a dead woman come to live. Contrary to what Holloran, the janitor, said to him, she seems to be more than ‘just a picture; they can’t hurt you’ message he got. He goes catatonic in shock and when his parents (after a vicious quarrel and mutual suspicions laid aside) find him, he decides to tell them everything.
He shocks Jack by saying what he saw in the grand suite when Ullman took him on a tour – it exactly matches the picture in the old newspaper cutting in a scrap book that Jack saw earlier. He also mentions the hedge animals and Jack had had a very real looking experience – which he put down to a hallucination – earlier of all those animals creeping up towards him!
Jack also does a stupid thing by calling Ullman and telling him he knows the hotel’s history and threatening to write a tell all book. Which invites a call from Al, his old friend saying that if he did, it would be the worst. Jack has to grovel to Al promising he will NOT write that book. This increases his determination to write it in revenge of all, when he is finally out of this post.
When he learns that Wendy heard it from Danny, when both were nowhere near the phone where the phone call was made, he is stunned. Both his parents how believe that their son is gifted with extrasensory perception, which Danny calls ‘the shining’ after Halloran named it thus when he was earlier talking to Danny.
Slowly, the house seems to control Jack. When Wendy pleads with him to take them away, Jack actively sabotages the ski machine by throwing away the battery.
Danny has another huge scare when the hedge animals come after him one day and he even guesses that Jack had experienced it too.
In addition, one night, the elevator seems to simulate party goers by automatically going up and down and, as Wendy discovers, confetti is found in the elevator – it was clean the very previous day. Jack also starts getting weird signals. He sees that the fire extinguisher (hose) seems to change position, and when he goes into room 317 after Danny’s experience to investigate, he seems to sense the old lady in the tub.
He is extremely reluctant to leave. It is not just the rational fear that he would not get a job if he left this one, but also some inner reluctance to part with the hotel.
Things really reach fever pitch. The hotel supplies Jack with virtual drink and he converses with the dead ghosts, even the man who was his predecessor and who died earlier, after killing his whole family. He is irritated and puzzled to learn that the ‘manager’ of the hotel (not Ullman) is interested more in Danny and his powers than his own.
Meanwhile, Danny’s mental ‘shining’ pleas for help reach Halloran and he hurries to Denver and then, by car, to Overlook. This, Jack is told, alarms the manager and Jack is advised to get rid of both his wife and son who are unruly and not obedient at all and it is a man’s duty to discipline them.
Meanwhile, Wendy tries to reach the kitchen to get some food but goes around looking for Jack. She finds him in a drunken stupor on the ground but he gets up and very nearly chokes her to death. She manages to escape – barely – by hitting him on the head with a bottle. After an initial reluctance, Danny helps her pull Jack into the pantry and bolt the door lock – realizing that the ‘hotel has taken over daddy’ and the hotel does not want them to leave alive.
The previous (dead) butler seems to open the door and let Jack out – which is one of the weird scenes here and so out of character from other stuff – moving animals, bar filled with guests and inexplicable appearance of drinks that Jack can actually drink – that it surprises you. All the others can be dismissed as mind games or self deception but actually having a door opened that you can get out?
Anyway, what follows is a crazy and brutal attack by Jack on Wendy (cracking her ribs and more) before she somehow manages to bury a knife into him. But when he still gets up and comes after her, you are transported into pure Stephen King land. (You can question how you buy the dead man walking when you protest against another dead man opening the door and I’d say ‘you do have a point’ but this one is pure Stephen King territory, in my mind).
Halloran scrambles with trouble after trouble and moves inexorably in the middle of a crazy snowstorm and whiteout conditions – almost as if Overlook does not want him to come – and reaches the hotel.
The ending is spectacular and I will leave it at that. This is another fully enjoyable Stephen King book.
Many of Stephen King’s books have been reviewed here. He is another one of our frequently reviewed authors. For a sample, check out our previous review of Christine or Carrie.
It is one of Stephen’s typical horror stories. Let us get into the story right away.
Jessie and husband Gerald are at the cottage. Gerald is a lawyer and has kinky sexual tastes. He has chained her to the bed and is into BDSM – albeit without affliction of the pain. Jessie never cared much for this but does not want to say ‘No’. Gerald puts the keys to the handcuffs on the side drawer in preparation for a night of sex in their secluded cottage. She tries to talk him out of it, as this has become ridiculous after several repetitions but he is no mood to listen. We learn that they are in a cottage far away and out of season and that he is a hotshot lawyer who had hitherto been totally easygoing in their married life.
When he refuses to listen to her ‘Release me from this shackles, Gerald!’ and threatens to go ahead with what she considers statutory rape, her rage boils over and she kicks him in the stomach and the nuts and he just keels over. She realizes that he is not responding or even moving so she realizes that he is either unconscious or, judging from the agonized breath and the colour that he turned before falling, could even be dead.
Now, Stephen King takes over and writes as only he can write, about just a woman stuck on a bed. She reminisces, panics, tries to control it with relaxation exercises that her psychologist had taught her.
In order to calm down, she looks at the familiar objects around her, thinking about their history in her life and tries other things. You just gently flow along in the prose that always is interesting. She also realizes her predicament – no one to help, no one to hear her cries, and the sun is westering and it will be dark soon. Enough of a tension in the background as she reminisces.
She tries all the usual things to release herself and fails.
In the meanwhile the dog that was barking was a feral dog which was ‘formerly known as Prince’ – it is impossible not to savour the allusion, though it does not mean anything in this book. Anyway, there is a really heartrending discussion of how its previous owner heartlessly abandoned it because of a new dog tax of seventy dollars a year – and this when he is a rich lawyer who had just bought a yacht. The dog is starving and comes in through a backdoor and smells blood – from George of course. There is a sequence of tense events where it fears humans and yet is inexorably drawn towards blood by its hunger. Fascinating, and pure adrenalin filled King story.
What happens next is gruesome, with Leslie fighting to keep it away from the tasty meal that is Gerald (for the dog) and failing.
After that gruesome noise of a meal being eaten by the hungry dog she goes for water that is just out of reach and tries to snag it through her wits alone – I mean not by wishing it to come to her but working out how she can get it to come to her.
In the meanwhile, this feral dog has a backstory. He was called Prince and looked after by a girl whose father bought him for the girl and she named him Prince. He was an adorable, happy friendly pup until the girl moved away and the father, trying to save a measly new dog tax, took Prince to the woods and left him there, bewildered, frightened and not knowing what to do.
Meanwhile, after a lot of frustration, Jessie manages to use her wits not only to get a glass of water that was out of reach on the side table but also manage to drink it, even though the glass was out of reach of her mouth when she did manage to get it.
King is back at what he does best. Imagine this story. A house with a single woman chained to the bed – no other person there – no one to converse with. A feral dog in the picture. But nothing else. Yet the story moves on fluidly with you getting a glimpse into the mind of this desperate woman.
She dreams of her childhood and a molestation – just hinted at slowly and then expanded on. There is the usual surreal moment where she sees a shadowy, otherworldly figure standing in a dark corner and staring at her.
When Stephen King finally meets that terrible evening head on when the father was inappropriate with Jesse, it is really painful to read. Very ugly and very disturbing. Chalk another one up for the narrative powers of Stephen King.
This is one of the better known books of the author, and the transition from the past to present keeps the story going. The struggles of a woman who is caught in a desperate situation and refuses to accept what seems to be her inevitable fate – starvation and death, are inspiring.
It also veers into the surreal, as many of Stephen King’s novels do – remember Duma Key? For instance, the stranger who stares at her and who has improbably long limbs is at once a distorted image of her dead father and, later, of Death itself, waiting for her to succumb.
But mostly it is about a girl, caught in a bed, unable to free herself and knowing that certain death stares her in the face, reminiscing. While Stephen King has used this ruse of a single person to devastating effect in other books (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, for instance) or a full book as a single conversation (Dolores Clairborne as an example) to equally great effect, this story seems a wee bit contrived to me. Interesting? Yes. Very. But looks like the story was bent to fit, and the story does not move much at times.
This situation of being trapped is also the theme of Cujo – though in a very different set of circumstances – and so this book feels like a rehashed mix of his other stories. Yes, I do recognize that this may have been written mostly before most of the other books, but if you read it in the order that I did, you cannot but feel the drag of repetition.
Finally, through a very ingenious device – let me not give the ‘how’ away – she manages to free one hand, with considerable injury to the hand.
The rest of the story is her struggle to free herself, which to our surprise is achieved in just a few pages – and then try to get help before she bleeds to death.
A good book but the tactics of a single woman alone in almost the full story has been followed in other books – come of this written later – like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, for instance.
As is the case in many of Stephen King’s books, there is this supernatural mixed with surreal events in this book too. The stranger who was staring at her comes back and terrifies her. Also, when she at last was sure that she had escaped with the car and escaped from him too, she sees him in the back seat. It is left to us to determine – kind of – whether it is a product of Jessie’s fevered imagination or whether it is a thing beyond death.
Interesting, nevertheless.
The ending of the book is told in terms of a journal that Jessie writes to Ruth, one of her old friends and also a voice in her head that advised her throughout the ordeal she went through.
The only thing you wonder about is why she is putting all this in writing when the police have helped her fully cover up how her husband died and what really happened to her.
The ending is all about her notes to ‘Ruth’. She talks about a crazy (and very creepy) criminal who vandalizes graves, not just for what valuables he can extract from the corpses. How he looks and how he acts are the typical King special creepshow.
The surprise is that she gets to find out whether it was really he or a supernatural being that visited her when she was locked into bed.
It is sheer coincidence that we got to review two of the same author’s work back to back. As we just said, we have reviewed several books by this gifted author earlier. Please refer to Christine, Carrie or Desperation.
Unlike the last book reviewed, this is one of the best known works of Stephen King. I would have said that this is up there with the best, mentioned above in the list, but for a few caveats. Read on.
In addition, this book also has other links to Stephen King’s other books as well.
The book mentions the characters from The Dead Zone, and mentions the monstrous cop Frank Dodd, who killed himself as he was about to be caught. Did his spirit die too?
In 1980, a small boy Tad Trenton, four years old, sees a monster in his closet.
When Tad’s dad’s car had trouble, they had gone to a garage on the way where Tad met the friendly but huge St Barnard called Cujo and they both struck up an instant friendship. Cujo is large but is the gentlest of the creatures.
When Cujo goes chasing a rabbit into a hole full of bats, he upsets them and then gets bitten by one – it bites him on the head and thereby transfers rabies into his bloodstream.
The book is populated by Vic Tranton, Tad’s dad who created an ad agency with his partner Roget Breakstone and trying to save a client account after a fiasco involving a red coloured cereal for which they wrote the ads. Vic’s wife Donna had an affair with another friend of Vic’s called Steve Kemp who had an unpredictable temper and is now trying to extricate herself before it is too late.
Gary Pervier, an old man who lives alone not caring about the seedy house and his seedy yard, likes Cujo but is mildly surprised when unexpectedly it growled at him. Cujo was not feeling very well but in a flash, he became his old self, so Gary decided to ignore the single bout of unnatural behaviour.
Steve Kemp rats her out in an anonymous letter to Vic in anger when Donna throws him out of the house.
Meanwhile Vic is thinking of how to save the main account. The story wanders over in multiple strands before the main theme takes over. So far Cujo has been behaving – with the disease not yet showing signs of taking over except for the brief spell with Gary.
There is a sinister scene where Cujo growls at two men who came to deliver an equipment and they barely escaped. Cujo finds that sunlight and noise start to annoy him.
Meanwhile, Charity stands up to her bullying husband Joe Camper and forces him to allow her to take her son Brett with her to see her sisters; previously Joe never allowed her to go, nor did he want to go himself.
He says yes and they are about to leave. Brett sees Cujo being sick but does not warn his dad since Joe with any excuse will demand that Brett and his mom cancel the trip.
Gary is peeing in the garden when he is ambushed by Cujo who is now fully feral and beyond anyone’s reach to bring him back to sanity. Cujo manages to pounce and kill Gary when he had almost escaped into his house, in a brutal and chilling scene.
When Joe Comber sees a big pile of shit in his garage, he is puzzled because Cujo was always a well behaved dog. Cujo was bought as a present to Brett by Joe. When Joe goes over to Gary’s house, he is shocked to see Gary killed by what he assumes are assailants. But when he sees another line of big doo in the kitchen he suddenly intuits that Cujo has gone rabid and locks himself in the kitchen and wants to dial the emergency services. Unfortunately for him, Cujo was there too, sleeping inside a cupboard and when he is woken by the noise Joe made, the brutality continues – Cujo’s brain is now so far gone that he does not resemble the old, friendly, puppylike dog at all.
Meanwhile Vic and Roger go off to their conference, leaving Donna in despair. Both of them struggle to put the past behind them and Vic is torn by the disloyalty of Donna and cannot forget her betrayal.
When Pinto – the car – gives trouble again, Donna decides to take the car to Joe’s garage and Tad manages to persuade her to take him. The iconic scene comes now, where the car fully fails right in the driveway of Joe’s house and they come face to face with a fully rabid Cujo. They are (for the moment) safe in the car and have no way of escaping with Cujo wandering all around the car and they cannot move because the car has stalled completely. She tries various stratagems (run into the house to get to the telephone or the gun) and discards each as unviable or too risky.
Kemp comes back to the house of Donna and not finding anyone, trashes the house. Vic, not getting through to Donna, is getting increasingly worried and hurries back, leaving Rogers to fight the good fight to save the company from losing the biggest client.
When she finally makes a move, Cujo is cunningly lying in wait and there is a horribly fascinating battle between an unarmed woman and a two hundred pound, murderously mad St Barnard. Even though she manages to foil him, she realizes with horror that he has managed to bite her multiple times – and he is rabid!
She regains her car just in time but then faces Tad choking and removes his tongue from where it was choking him.
Andy, who is pompous and self centred, asks Bannerman, the police chief to check Joe Camber’s house – ‘knowing’ that it is a red herring and wanting Bannerman out of the way so that he would not steal the limelight from himself – ‘where it rightfully belongs’. Bannerman reaches the house and is completely surprised and overwhelmed by a sudden attack from Cujo.
The rest of the book ratchets up the tension even more until almost the final few pages and the ending of the book is both heartrending and memorable.
A great read mostly, with only the multiple threads that seem to exist independently, and the slow build to the central climax as the only drawbacks.
We have reviewed several books by this gifted author earlier. Please refer to Christine, Carrie or Desperation.
To be fair this was not written in his name, and was originally published under the pseudonym he had adopted for some early works and so the author of this book is Richard Bachman. But when Stephen King’s name became very big, commercial instincts prompted the publishers to republish all those books again in the name of Stephen King to drive up sales.
Also, the three examples given are among the best from the author, and so it is not a huge surprise that this lesser known work does not measure quite up to those standards.
Dave Albert, a reporter, meets a cynical man at a political meeting where a governor was to speak. He meets him again seventeen years later. (They do not recognize each other at the later event). The second meeting proves to be pivotal.
Now Bart goes and buys a small gun and a big rifle “as a present for his brother Fred” from a gun shop and pays with his Amex card. His wife is Mary. He is very upset about having been forced to vacate his house for a ‘public goods’ seizure by the government for building a new road.
Bart owns a laundry and goes about his task, watching the highway taking shape in front of his shop. When his boss asks him why he is not closing the deal to move to an alternate building, he gives a series of reasons that shocks the man. His mind creates two personalities, George and Fred who counsel him constantly.
He is pigheaded enough to lie about the deal he should have made to move his workplace and knows he will lose his job if he does not correct it. His wife thinks he is actively scouting for an alternate accommodation when he is doing nothing of the sort. You feel a growing foreboding on how he blithely carries on believing that, since he does not want to move, the crisis will somehow be averted.
When a delivery driver is killed in an accident, Bart knows his time is up, especially since he let the deal to move his office lapse deliberately and would be found out. He decides to resign. He is also deceiving his loving wife who believes he is actively looking for an alternate place to live.
She finds out about his job loss and leaves him. He goes to seed, drinking and pleading often for her to come back – but in vain.
One day he picks up a hitchhiker and offers her his house to stay – no sex needed, when he discovers that she is stuck for a place for the night. She makes him think about the suicidal course he is taking with his life and then leaves in the morning to go to Los Vegas, as was her plan anyways.
He meets Vince at a fair close to Christmas and has a fight with him – gets punched in the face for his efforts to make Vince see how they are using him.
He also watches the laundry being torn down and manages to shout at Mary at a ‘reconciliation lunch’. His life seems to be rapidly heading downhill.
He blows up the machinery one snowy night and is shocked to hear that the highway would be delayed by a month in spite of all the losses.
This story is about a man railing against the government and it keeps moving in a bleak direction. It is not taut, and even though you sympathize with a man who self destructs almost wilfully, you cannot bring yourself to like him or sympathize with him.
He keeps doing stupid things. His wife persuades him to go to a party but just before entering the hall he takes a potent hallucinatory drug and makes an idiot of himself. He is totally livid when he finds out that the highway will resume even faster with other equipment being moved in!
Just goes on and on in this vein. He totally insults the lawyer who has come to remind him that the deadline for him to vacate is nearing.
He finally seems to snap. He collects money by giving away the house and clearing his bank account. He buys an explosive that is far more potent than dynamite and he tries to give much of his cash to a good natured priest who is helping the poor. Sensing that he is about to do something drastic, the priest advises him to stop.
But Bart thinks it is now too late to repent and he wants to do out in a blaze of glory.
The last, say, twenty pages are very tight and gripping.
All in all a moderate read, not without its interesting moments, but does not have the artistry of the author’s later works, in my opinion.
Johnny and Nancy stumble across a dead man in Hammock Beach.
Vince Teague and another man are interviewed by the reporter from the Boston Globe and when Vince tries to take the money left on the table, Vince grabs it. Stephanie McCann, the girl sitting with them is horrified. Dave Bowie is the other man.
They both are nice and Stephanie works with them in the local newspaper. The reporter from the Globe was looking for odd stories and was disappointed when he got only well known stories rehashed. But when Stephanie asks, they decide to tell her the one they had kept to themselves. This is about Johnny and Nancy – or more precisely Johnny Galvin and Nancy Arnault. They were going steady those days.
Stephenie is interested because that young Johnny is now the mayor of the city. Nancy was a stunning beauty and John was ordinary, with a buck tooth to boot – which he fixed later. But he was bright. They stumble on the dead man, as in the preface, but oddly at near zero degrees (centigrade and thirty two in Farenheit) he was found wearing slacks and pants, not anything warmer.
When the local doctor and the inspector arrive, they find the man had died hours earlier. He seems to have choked on something he was eating.
Finally, an intern detective, Paul Devine, who was so harassed by his ‘mentors’ the two senior state detectives that he quit to study law came up with a brilliant way to track the man (John Doe) through the stamp at the bottom of the cigarette case that was found with him and eventually they learn that he is a forty two year old illustrator in a magazine. His name was John Cogan, and he left behind a wife Arla and a small kid in Colorodo when he disappeared from their lives.
The mystery is that on the day he disappeared he was in the office and left to get a sandwich for lunch and never came back. It was in another city and surprisingly in just three hours, he was seen in Maine. He did not let anyone know that he was leaving so no one knew why he ended up where he ended up finally – dead on the beach.
The story is interesting so far, but it goes nowhere. What is more irritating is the ‘quiz questions’ the two old men give Stephanie and how they delight in having her match her wits against theirs. The problem is that most of the ‘quiz’ answers are just impossible to guess correctly and Stephanie instinctively comes to the right answer. No Shelockian explanations either.
If that was not irritating enough, the book seems to have no ending at all. The author in his afterword says that you either love it or hate it and I totally agree with me in the latter camp. You feel cheated after spending all that effort. Thankfully it is one of the smallest book from the author so your effort is not gargantuan.
Another classic from Stephen King, in the level of, but quite different from, Carrieor Christine.
A lot of characters in the intro itself that feels like the one in Under the Dome by the same author or A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth that you have your head spinning to keep it all straight. But it settles down after a bit.
For the intro, here is a sample :
Don Hemphil runs a grocery store and his wife Wanda. Rev Willie of Protestant Church and Father Brigham of Catholic Church don’t see eye to eye already. When Brigham calls for a little gambling to raise money for church repairs Willie aka William Rose flips his lid. Nan Roberts and Al Gendron belong to different churches and are not on speaking teams. Sheriff John Lapointe whose girlfriend Sally broke up with him. Eddie Warburton who is black and his feud with Sonny over a car repair.
Slopey Dodd a kid with a stutter. Now the story starts because as the author himself says…
Never mind all of them you should watch Brian Rusk, who heard about the opening of the new store. Cora Rusk, his mother, was discussing this with her friend Myra Evans. Cora eats all the time and watches those everlasting Soap Operas.
On a day when he is coming home, he sees that Needful Things is open and he goes in – the first person ever to go in – and meets the proprietor. When he holds a petrified wood, he gets a real feeling of a boat and an irrepressible eagerness to hold it again when it was separated and locked away. When he says he needs one particular baseball card from one particular year, Mr Gaunt goes in and finds the exact card for him. When Mr Gaunt shakes his hand, Brian recoils involuntarily.
In the meanwhile, a lady who defies custom (Polly) goes and sees Gaunt, carrying a cake. When she leaves, he watches her and decides that she will do nicely. Everyone finds that they can get what they want in the shop for a price that they can afford.
He also catches on with how Polly’s cook Netty (nervous and low self confidence) as well as her friend Rosalie hate the large lady Wilma. It has something to do with Netty’s dog which made noise when it was a pup and pissed off the neighbour Wilma, who was crotchety to begin with.
Alan Panghorn is the Police chief but is guilt ridden about the death of his wife and his son. He hates Danforth Keeton, aka Buster who disobeys him. Polly, his sweetheart, mentions the new shop and asks him to pay a visit there.
Hugh Priest is a slave to a drink and covets a fox tail on the window and he gets it – his chance to reform. But you realize that each person, Brian included, have been given a task (in addition to the payment) as the price of the item they got.
Alan has a lot of problems with Keeton and faces a near rebellion when Keeton is ticketed because he parked in a reserved slot in violation of the police station rules. He also refuses to interfere with the ‘perverted gambling’ (a game of bingo) arranged by the Protestant Church and makes Father furious.
Mary now wants the Elvis so badly but you see a hard face of Gaunt, where he drives her to desperation before he asks her to do something for him.
Myra meanwhile finds out about the dirt on the blankets put out for drying and goes completely bananas. She suspects Nettie and totally tortures her to the point of Netty going completely paranoid about that ‘crazy Polish woman’.
Meanwhile Alan is overcome by guilt about not noticing warning signs prior to his wife’s death and also for hooking up with Polly so soon after her death.
Dan Keeton is sinking in gambling debt caused by addiction and ruin is staring him in the face. Even his wife is not aware of the extent of his debt (with ‘borrowed’ money from the police department). Then Gaunt gives him a racehorse set that can predict the winner of the races.
Hugh is ‘driven’ to kill Nellie’s dog and Nellie is forced (before she discovers her dog’s plight) to post some warning signs in Keeton’s house.
Things escalate quickly.
Brian Rusk, in the meanwhile, realizes that once you have done a ‘favour’ and played a trick, there is no respite from Leyland. He throws stones with messages in Wilma’s house. Wilma gets mad at Nettie and Nettie at Wilma (for the dog’s death) and they slash at each other in open daylight on the street. But not before Nettie has plastered signs in Keeton’s house, scaring him badly. He thinks Norris has done it. Norris gets a ‘present’ of a rat trap as a warning and is sure that Keeton is behind it, even though it was a local lawyer’s wife who did it – presumably following the instructions of the now familiar puppet master.
There is a crazy scene where Wilma and Netty face off in the middle of the street with fatal consequences. There is a creepy scene where Leland gives Polly a necklace to cure her arthritis but Polly is very iffy about it. He seems to have hypnotized her into accepting it.
Alan, investigating the twin murders has the uneasy feeling that he is not seeing something.
A crooked man Ace Merrill, who is in debt to criminals and has a threat on his life, comes to town to escape from his debts and is hired as an assistant by the mysterious Mr Gaunt – who promises that he will be free of his troubles. He says something curious ‘Maybe there is really nothing in the whole shop. The things that people want or need will appear as they see it’.
Sue, the bible thumping but sexy looking teacher, is shocked to find an envelope in the car she has borrowed from Lester, her rich boyfriend. She has bought a Biblical fragment of wood that gives us exultation whenever she touches it.
Ace is asked to take his car to another city and bring back ‘merchandise’ which turns out to be guns and drugs. However, the car he is given seems to be very special. It can go fast and is invisible to the police. He is also given a map marking treasures to be dug which will take him out of his present troubles and make him rich too.
Meanwhile Allan realizes that Brian Rusk may have witnessed the vandalism that was part of the cause of the death of Nettie and Wilma.
Meanwhile the mysterious Leland Gaunt escalates his mischief. He has only three or four days to achieve total destruction of the city. He even has a pendant always hanging around the neck of Polly, so as to keep an eye on that pernicious Allan Ponghorn, who seems to be the only man Leland fears in the town.
Alan interrogates Rusk but does not get far. Meanwhile, Polly seems to be hypnotized and agrees to run one ‘errand’ from Mr Gaunt. He also sows seeds of doubt and distrust in her mind regarding Alan himself. She is furious with Alan and Alan is completely puzzled.
He finds Brian Rusk and finds him too evasive and scared. Also the police identify Hugh Priest as the one who had killed Nettie’s dog but before they can capture him, he is off on a rage to take revenge on the pastor for having vandalized his car. (Which was actually done by Brian’s mother as a trick requested by Gaunt)
Gaunt gives him an automatic gun to help him along.
A whole lot of things go wrong at once. The coach is trying to kill a deputy and is himself killed by Sheila who hit him with the barrel of the gun but too hard; Hugh is killed in the pub by the pub owner who himself is close to death before being found by a customer; and a whole pile more. Alan is completely befuddled and puts away his private sorrow with Pauline to deal with the mess with increasing incredulity.
Meanwhile, Brian blows his brains out in front of his horrified brother Sean – after making Sean promise that he will never go into the new shop. The police officer Buster Keeton, after attacking an officer, is chained to the door of the cruise car. He manages to drive it home and releases his shackles with the tools from the garage.
Alan is perplexed and, after handing the case over to the Federal authorities, goes to the hospital where Sean Rusk is recovering from the shock of seeing Brian blow himself up to get to the bottom of this.
In the meanwhile the murder and mayhem reaches its peak with Leyland helping along with trades of arms to the pissed off citizens of Castle Rock. It is amazing how each one’s precious item is really crap – the fox tail looks like an old stringy garbage to everyone except Hugh, the baseball card is of an unknown player to everyone except Brian, Brian’s mother’s ‘Glasses worn by Elvis is an old, even cracked pair of sunglasses with tapes around the broken parts – you get the idea. Ingenious twist, that.
When Brian’s mom is thwarted by the unfaithful Elvis who spurns her for Myra, and what is more, breaks the sun glasses, Brian’s mom gets mad and Leland is right there to help her with a gun to take revenge on Myra.
Meanwhile, Brian’s brother in the hospital is met surreptitiously by Alan who learns that all the trouble originated from the shop and that Mr Leland ‘is not human’ as revealed by Brian after he decided to take his own life for his little brother.
Both the Protestant and the Catholic groups are ambushed by mischief makers and in the pandemonium that ensues, lives end through stampede.
Meanwhile, things start turning around. Alan goes to see Gaunt and at the same time, Polly finally plucks up courage to see things for what they are and throws away her talisman, out of which a spider comes out and starts growing incredibly fast.
Alan is told how his wife and kid really died by Gaunt (invisible Gaunt) and gets rattled in spite of his resolve not to pay any attention. Meanwhile Penny is desperate to find him, having come to her senses and defeated a giant spider which was in miniature released from the pendant she was wearing all along.
The ending is tense, with mass destruction of what feels like the whole city. Alan is brought to his senses by Polly only to be captured as a hostage by Ace as a bargaining chip for the money ‘Alan stole’ that was rightfully his. When Norris, who is wounded by Ace steals up behind Ace now, Alan also notices Mr Gaunt preparing to leave with a ‘breathing, pulsing, bag’ as his sole luggage.
The confrontation at the end between Alan and Mr Gaunt is, of course, absolutely spellbinding. The ending and, especially, the prolog, is classic King in style.
Another classic from Stephen King, in the level of, but quite different from, 
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