Day 32: Rage

I actually finished this one about a week ago, but very mixed feelings meant that I haven't gotten around to writing about it until now.

Rage is about a high schooler who (after he learns he is to be transfered to a reform school after attacking a teacher) takes a classroom hostage, killing the teacher when he enters, but leaving the students alive. The book, told from Charlie's prosepctive, chronicales the hostage situation over a few hours, as he variously tells stories of how he got to where he is now and listens to other students spilling their own secrets.  All except for one student, who the other teens eventually turn on and beat savagely.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. It's the first of the books that King wrote as Richard Bachman, and is one of his only novels to not have any supernatural elements.  It's an interesting idea for a novel, and starts out well.  Seeing the whole situation from Charlie's prospective is interesting in the beginning.  His hostages sympathizing with him and telling their own stories is compelling. But the timing doesn't seem right.  They seem to turn almost instantly, showing little fear or really any emotion, even after a teacher is shot and killed right in front of them.

Because the story only takes place over a few hours, everyone turning agains the one teen who doesn't take Charlie's side and doesn't make his own confessions doesn't ring true.  The mob mentality seems to happen way too quickly, considering the book ends with them beating him so badly that he is later in a catatonic state.

This is a book that wouldn't get published today, and is the only book of King's that he has allowed to go out of print. This isn't that surprising given the subject matter, and, given the quality, isn't actually that much of a loss.

Rage Overview

Connections: None that I know of. 

Lameness of Ending: High. Shocking for the purpose of being shocking, without making much sense.

King Digs Dylan: Charlie paraphrases from It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding): "The need to see everyone at the same leve, gargling in the same rat-race choir, to paraphrase Dylan"

Fear Level: 1 out of 10 - Some suspenseful moments, but that's not the point of the book. 

Overall Rating: 5 out of 10. Interesting idea, but it goes off the rails quickly. It's an unpleasant read, which just isn't worth it in the end. 

Next Book: Night Shift (the first of the short story collections)

Day 22: The Shining

There is a lot of unsettling stuff going on in The Shining even before the ghosts come out to play. A strained marriage, an odd child with a powerful gift, a recovering alcoholic who has flare ups of violent rage.  The thought of being alone in a closed hotel in the mountains, snowed in for months...it'd be hard to deal with even if the place wasn't haunted. 


Jack Torrance is a bottled-up pit of rage even before the hotel starts to get into his mind.  In fact, some of the most frightening parts of the book are quite early on in the novel, when we are witness to his thoughts about his wife and his son. Jack isn't evil. He certainly loves Danny, and he probably really loves Wendy, but he is a man who is about to snap. If it hadn't been the hotel, it would have been something else. 


As the snow begins to fall and the hotel beings to exert its influence more and more, the tension is pretty much non-stop.  At one point, even a fire hose seems menacing, as Danny imagines(??) that it is following him down the hallway.  


There's an interesting take on haunting here. It really is a story of a haunted hotel, and not ghost story.  There are individual figures that we see, and that Jack especially interacts with, but all of them seem to be the hotel made manifest, rather than particular spirits. Hallorann even comments near the end that even with the hotel gone, he'd never come within 100 miles of the place again.  The place, the very land, is empowered by all the evils (both large and mundane) that happened over the years of the hotel's existence.


It's well-known that King was unhappy with the film version. It's not that hard to understand why. Kubrick's The Shining is just that. Kubrick's. The move doesn't just take a few liberties with the story. It changes it a great deal. I actually love both, and it'd be hard for me to pick which I like more. They work in very different ways.


One thing that stuck me is that some of the scariest moments (Wendy discovering Jack's manuscript, the elevator of blood, "Come play with us") of the film don't take place in the novel, and vice versa.  But while I think Wendy discovering the reams of paper Jack has been working on for weeks just say "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" is one of the scariest moments in ANY horror movie, I don't think it would have quite the same impact on film. And the elevator of blood certainly wouldn't, since so much of that's efffectiveness was in the way Kubrick shoot's things.  On the other hand, on of the scariest things in the book is the hedge animals that Jack sees move, then chase Danny and eventually attack Dick.  I don't think there's anyway that could have looked anything other than stupid on film.


I think this is one of King's strongest works. The tension builds nicely. There's more to the story than just gross violence. The characters are well-fleshed out and you care about them. I really want to re-watch the movie, and also watch the later mini-series which is supposed to adhere more closely with the original text.

The Shining Overview

Connections: The "shine" appears in The Stand. Dick Hallorann is in It, The novel and film are both referenced in other books. A poem read by Jack also appears in Lisey's Story. A sequel, featuring a grown-up Danny is being published in 2013.

Car Talk: The old VW is mentioned a lot, but no slavish car descriptions.

Writing on Writers: The second novel in a row to feature a writer as the primary character. King's writing and his own struggle with drinking problems influenced a lot of Jack's character.

Lameness of Ending: I'm going to say not at all lame. 

Fear Level: 7 out of 10 - The hedge maze animals, the first description of the lady in the tub. He even makes a fire hose scary. 

Overall Rating: 8 out of 10. Interesting characters and a good creepy story. One of his best.

Next Book: Rage (the first of the Bachman books)

Day Eleven: 'Salem's Lot

'Salem's Lot is a vampire novel that fails to bring anything new to vampire novels. This isn't in-and-of-itself a problem. It mostly follows the Dracula rules, and it's hit-or-miss in how effective it is in playing those rules for scares.  Little kid vampires are inherently creepy. But it never quite makes the leap to scary in King's hands here. 

'Salem's Lot is about 100 pages too long.  That, I think, is the main problem with this novel.  The pacing is all over the place.  Somethings seem rushed, and others seem to drag out forever. We spend a lot of time getting to know characters only so that we'll recognize who they are when they later get killed by vampires. 

The vampire thing is sort of, but not really connected to the horrors of an old house that sits on the hill over looking the town.  Supposedly the satanic rituals that were done in the house decades before helped to pave the way for the vampire to make his home there. But it never really connects. It could have been left out of the book with almost no difference.  

A lot of the characterization is weak.  The relationship between Ben and Susan is not given no time to actually develop, but we are supposed to believe that that fall in love. But since most of this is rushed, and told to us rather than shown, the emotional impact of later evens falls apart. 

The story is framed by two of the characters after the horror that occurs in the town, and then the novel is a flashback of sorts.  The problem is...I don't understand why. There's basically no reason for it.  It makes for a little bit of drama when you are wondering what, exactly got them to where they are, but in the end, it doesn't really add anything substantial. 

The vampires...they are cheesy.  Really, really cheesy.  There is so much overblown melodrama.  One point in a paticular where a character is talking about how majestic wolves are...it's total "my children of the night" shit.  The stuff leading up the the vampires is pretty creepy. The idea of a town just sort of dying is interesting and could be scary. But basically once the fangs come out, the fear turns to scoffing. 

'Salem's Lot Overview

Connections: Prequel and sequel short stories. The town is mentioned in several other novels, including the Dark Tower series. 

Car Talk: Not much, actually. 

King Digs Dylan: 1 Dylan references here in an chapter epigraph: "Tell you now that the whole town is empty" from North County Blues

Root Beer Sightings: Yep. Like in Carrie, small towns=5 cent root beer.

Lameness of Ending: Low. The end is fairly satisfying, and less cheesy than I feared, considering the rest of the book. 

Fear Level: 5 out of 10 - When it works, the creep level is high, when it doesn't, it's eye-rolling.

Overal Rating: 5 out of 10. There's some good stuff here, but it's overwhelmed by the bad.

Next Book: The Shining

Day Three: Carrie

Well, last night I finished the first book.

Carrie is the novel of Carrie White, a high school age girl, raised by a extremely religious single mother.  Bullied by her peers, Carrie's latent telekinetic abilities  come to the fore, eventually coming to ahead at the Spring Ball.  

While this was the first of King's books to be published, it was apparently the fourth that he wrote (according to wikipedia). It feels, in many ways like a first novel, albeit a  rather skilled one.  There are some flaws, some awkward phrasings, but all of them forgivable.   There are things here (the attention to  music, the descriptions of cars) that will crop up in a lot of King's later works. King himself has described this as a "raw" work, and I think that fits the writing style as well as the story. 

One of the more interesting parts of the novel are the newspaper clippings, journal articles and interview transcripts that are interspaced throughout the text. It is through these that the bigger picture of the story begins to become clear, and it also adds a separate perspective for the text. There are also articles talking about a TK gene and the implications of that on a global scale. 

I like the idea of TK being a hereditary power.  A recessive gene that manifests power only in women. Sexuality and gender are important themes.  While we know that there were other incidents in Carrie's past, her powers trigger again when she gets her period at age 16.  With a mother that taught her that her body was an evil, sinful thing, Carrie is not prepared for this and at first thinks she is bleeding to death.  

The real horror of Carrie isn't just when Carrie eventually loses her mind at the prom and destroys the school and a good portion of the town.  Kings descriptions of those events are frightening and occasionally quite gruesome. But what sticks with me as a reader is the descriptions of the bullying that Carrie endures.  Not even the events themselves, so much as the moments when we get inside the head of the characters perpetrating them.  There is a stark realness to it that is hard to ignore. 

I like Carrie quite a bit.  I realized when reading the book, which I first read at least 10 years ago, that most of memories of Carrie are actually of the movie.  I had forgotten that there were some many differences between the movie and the text. 

Carrie Overview

Fear Level: 4 out of 10

Connections: Carrie (the prom night fire) is mentioned in The Dead Zone

Car Talk: A rather long description of bad guy Billy's car, and Chris's attraction to it.

King Digs Dylan: 3 Dylan references here.  1. A mention of a notebook of Carries were she wrote down "Everybody's guessed/That baby can't be blessed/'Til she finally sees that she's like all the rest" a slightly misquoted passage from Just Like A Woman. 2. Mr. Tambourine Man is listed as part of the prom entertainment. 3. One of the excerpts from a book on about the affair quotes from Tombstone Blues. 

Lameness of Ending: Low, but there is a bit of DUNDUNDUN! as the very last thing is a letter written by a woman to her sister, talking about an incident where her little girl is showing signs of TK powers. 

Overal Rating: 7 out of 10

Next Book: 'Salems Lot

Day Zero

Tonight I will start Carrie.  I've read it before, but it was probably 10-15 years ago. I liked it at the time, and think I'll still enjoy it.  The books I'm most looking forward to re-reading are The Long Walk and Eyes of The Dragon. The books I'm most looking forward to reading for the first time, are the last 3-4 books of The Dark Tower series (though I'll have a long wait there.)  I'm probably least looking forward to Dreamcatcher and Cell, two books I started, and gave up on pretty early. 

Books read: 0

Days reading: 0

Next book: Carrie

What I'm reading (and what I'm not)

A quick run-down of the Stephen King (Re-)Read Project:

1. I'm not reading everything.  I'm doing the novels and the fiction collections in publication order. I'm not reading the non-fiction (yet).

2. I'm not reading every edition.  In the cases of books like The Stand that have a revised edition, I'm reading that in place of the originally published edition. So, I'll be reading The Stand after Night Shift, but it'll be the 1990 revised & uncut version.

3. In the case of short stories, there was at least one collection where every story is also in another book. That one has been cut from my list. 

4.  I have to be able to get my hand's on it. I know of one story that I believe was only released as a chapbook, so that's out. 

5. I'm not just going to be reading King, so this might take awhile. I'm usually reading two books at once, so for the foreseeable future, one of those books will always be King, but I'm not going to put off reading -say- the new Terry Pratchett until this project is over. I think I'd go insane. 

My reading list on google docs