Thinking about Insomnia

You know a book is good when you have it on your brain. In those slow moments during the day, my mind shifts towards how much I cannot wait to get home and crack open the book. I enjoy reading most books; it is something that I do every day for at least 10 pages. But not every book has me wanting to sneak off to a well lit corner to dive in. I started on Saturday and I am already 250 pages in, with 527 left to go.

The Sun Dog

No, this is not about the weather phenomenon. Rather it is about another crazy dog, but this time, the dog is trapped in a Polaroid camera. 

A boy gets a Polaroid as a gift and no matter what he points the camera at, it takes pictures of a strange place. So, of course, he has to keep taking pictures to see what is wrong with it - not out of stupidity, out of curiosity. But, each picture is a little different than the last. Soon a dog begins to appear. The boy takes the camera to Pop Merrill (Ace Merrill's uncle - Ace, from The Body/Stand By Me) and greed takes hold.

It is a good story and Pop gets his comeuppance, the aftermath is seen again in Needful Things.

Every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and "The Sun Dog" is a story about cameras and photographs. My wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time . . . and there is something so peculiar about them.

This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for almost a year.

Insomnia and Pancakes

Insomnia came out in 1994 and I was a sophomore in high school. This book was my first hardback, just released purchase, kind of a milestone for me. I would pack this 700+ page hardback into my school bag and lug it around all day in the hopes that there would be a break and I could read for a bit. Insomnia is a huge and heavy book.

It must have been spring, or maybe fall, all I remember is that it was a chilly and I had long sleeves on. I decided that I was going to ditch school that day, probably because I just needed/wanted a break. School was just tedious. I got up in the morning like I was going to school, got off the bus at the appropriate stop, but instead of walking to school I went to the Whataburger just down the road. I ordered pancakes and sat there reading for an hour or more. After I was assured that my parents were entrenched in work, I left and got up to whatever mischief I was into at the time. Or, maybe I just went home and read some more. That is just the kind of teen I was.

As for the story, I LOVED it. King does not often write from the perspective of the aging and Insomnia deals with being old and dying. As you might have guess, I am a bit obsessed with death and dying. It is a subject that we don't talk about in our society very much, but we do deal with it (sort of) through the horror genre. All I remember from this story, is that the main character could see cords or columns of light coming from the tops of peoples' heads and things that could sever them, thus killing the individual. Plus, he had insomnia.

Happy reading!

The Library Policeman

Oh, such a good one! Ghosts, alcoholism to try and bury the past, and a lost library book.
Shorten this story a little bit and it would be an amazing scary story to tell around the camp fire. But then, I wonder, how many kids have an experience of the library anymore? These days you can check out books on your kindle, no need to ever set foot in an actual library. I remember walking to the park down the street and going to the library. In the summer it was so cool and the smell of so many books was enveloping. I still LOVE to bury my nose in the binding of an older book. It is the smell of knowledge.

But then, there was the terror of returning a book late! Ick, if I was late with a book, it churned me stomach and made me feel guilty.

On the morning when this story started to happen, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my son Owen. Owen tore himself away from the sports section just long enough to ask me if I'd be going by the mall that day--there was a book he wanted me to pick up for a school report. I suggested that Owen try the local library. He muttered some reply. I only caught two words of it, but, given my interests, those two words were moe than enough to pique my interest. They were "library police."I put my half of the newspaper aside, used the MUTE button on the remote control, and asked Owen to kindly repeat himself.

He was reluctant to do so, but I pressed him. Finally he told me that he didn't like to use the library because he worried about the Library Police. He knew there were no Library Police, he hastened to add, but it was one of those stories that burrowed down into our subconscious and just sort of lurked there. He had heard it from his Aunt Stephanie when he was seven or eight and much more gullible, and it had been lurking ever since.

I, of course, was delighted, because I had been afraid of the Library Police myself as a kid--the faceless enforcers who would actually come to your house if you didn't bring your overdue books back. I found myself musing on the Library Police over the next three or four days, and as I mused, I began to glimpse the outlines of this story. I thought it would probably be a funny story. What I realized, however, was something I knew already: the fears of childhood have a hideous persistence.

 

Secret Window, Secret Garden

Having seen the movie again recently, I felt it captured the essence of this story, Mort Rainey's insanity. Here again we see King dealing with his own question of where he goes when he is writing the story. It is a valid question, because King is not a psychopath, or insane, and has not hacked his wife up. He is just exploring the frightening pathways that the mind wanders in the night.

I think that the exploration is valid and important. We all have those darker sides, Jung called it the shadow. What would happen if your shadow came to you as a completely externalized individual seeking its own life? It would want what you have because it did at least half the work in creating it. I could get repetitious here, because we have already delved into this theme with The Dark Half.

Inspiration:

One day in the late fall of 1987, while these things were tumbling around in my head, I stopped in the laundry room of our house to drop a dirty shirt in the washing machine. Our laundry room is a small, narrow alcove on the second floor. I disposed of the shirt and then stepped over to one of the room's two windows. It was casual curiosity, no more. We'd been living in the same house for eleven or twelve years, but I had never taken a good hard look out this particular window before. The reason is perfectly simple; set at floor level, mostly hidden behind the drier, half blocked by baskets of mending, it's a hard window to look out of.

I squeezed in, nevertheless, and looked out. That window looks down on a little brick-paved alcove between the house and the attached sunporch. It's an area I see just about every day . . . but the angle was new. My wife had set half a dozen pots out there, so the plants could take a little of the early-November sun, I suppose, and the result was a charming little garden which only I could see. The phrase which occurred to me was, of course, the title of this story. It seemed to me as good a metaphor as any for what writers--especially writers of fantasy--do with their days and nights. Sitting down at the typewriter or picking up a pencil is a physical act; the spiritual analogue is looking out of an almost forgotten window, a window which offers a common view from an entirely different angle . . . an angle which renders the common extraordinary. The writer's job is to gaze through that window and report on what he sees.

But sometimes windows break. I think that, more than anything else, is the concern of this story: what happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

The Dark Half

When I was young I used to have this armchair in my room. It was where I read all my books. I must have spent weeks, maybe even months of my life curled up in that armchair reading. This is my most vivid memory of reading The Dark Half. 

My second most vivid memory was of Thad, the main character, having really bad headaches as a child (if you read my Firestarter post, you will know that I too have really bad headaches). In the story, doctors determine that they have to operate on Thad's head, because there is something in there. When they do, they find a clouded eye, some fingernails and some teeth. Oh, ick!! I remember being so grossed out that I had to read it to my best friend at the time. I knew that twins could be absorbed in the womb, but this was just so yucky.

“In The Dark Half I tried to answer the question ‘Where do you get your ideas?’  It seems to me that for most writers there really is another person hiding inside, although it isn’t always dark and it’s hardly ever as much as a half.  I thought it would be fun to write a story about a novelist whose muse gets totally out of control. There was one problem: I didn’t how how to end it. Then, one day while I was on the way to my office, I saw a huge flock of crows—huge enough to darken an appreciable part of the sky—all take wing at once. They made me think of a poem by H.P. Lovecraft called “The Psychopomp,” about a bird who is an emissary of death, and a winged messenger between the land inhabited by mortals and that of the afterlife. In that instant, I knew exactly how to dispose of George Stark; all I had to do was go home and write it.”

First Image from The Cell

I gotta say, The Cell ranks in my top 5 of Stephen King books. Depending on the day, I might even tell you that it is my all time favorite. Zombie, terrorism, society collapses and rebuilds in an interesting way. I wont say more.

It will be a long time before I get around to reading this a second time, but that does not stop me from enjoying information about the movie release, set for 2015. It stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Not exactly who I would have picked for those roles, but I think that I can deal.

Read more

4 Past Midnight & The Langoliers

This book is a collection of 4 short stories. His previous collection, Different Seasons, included short stories that were not horror novels and King says that this is his return to horror. 

The only thing that I remember about this book is the first story, The Langoliers. It is not unreasonable to think that this story sticks in my head because I am reminded of it every time that I get on a plane. It just kind of floats around in the back of my head. There was a TV movie made out of this story. All I remember about the movie is that it sucked. There are many things that creep you out at a very deep level when you read it in a book and see it in your imagination. Then someone makes a movie out of it and you wonder why you were so afraid of the dopey monster. 

My other example of this is Twilight. I devoured the books [I am a girl, what can I say? The fact that I am admitting that I read the series more than once and enjoyed it while simultaneously loathing myself for being drawn into such nonsense should demonstrate my integrity]. Then I went to see the movie with my girlfriend. I was so embarrassed at the dialogue and when the movie finally ended I leaned over and said, "Did that sound as STUPID out loud to you as it did to me?" Her answer was yes. All of this is to say, that somethings make sense in your imagination, but are terrible when they take life outside of the imagination.

So, the movie of The Langoliers was terrible. Don't watch it. But the story was interesting. A plane flies through a rip in time to yesterday where everything is dead except what is on the plane. Then come the things that eat up yesterday and threaten to eat you along with it. 

Also in this collection:

• Secret Window, Secret Garden (also made into a movie, starring Johnny Depp, who does a great job)
• The Library Policeman (of which I have no memory, but I am strangely reminded of the Library Cop from "Seinfeld")
• The Sun Dog (I also have no memory of this story)

Inspiration for The Langoliers from www.stephenking.com

"Stories come at different times and places for me--in the car, in the shower, while walking, even while standing around at parties. On a couple of occasions, stories have come to me in dreams. But it's very rare for me to write one as soon as the idea comes, and I don't keep an "idea notebook." Not writing ideas down is an exercise in self-preservation. I get a lot of them, but only a small percentage are any good, so I tuck them all into a kind of mental file. The bad ones eventually self-destruct in there, like the tape from Control at the beginning of every Mission Impossible episode. The good ones don't do that. Every now and then, when I open the file drawer to peek at what's left inside, this small handful of ideas looks up at me, each with its own bright central image.

With "The Langoliers," that image was of a woman pressing her hand over a crack in the wall of a commercial jetliner.

It did no good to tell myself I knew very little about commercial aircraft; I did exactly that, but the image was there every time I opened the file cabinet to dump in another idea, nevertheless. It got so I could even smell that woman's perfume (it was L'Envoi), see her green eyes, and hear her rapid, frightened breathing.

One night, while I was lying in bed, on the edge of sleep, I realized this woman was a ghost.

I remember sitting up, swinging my feet out onto the floor, and turning on the light. I sat that way for a little while, not thinking about much of anything . . . at least on top. Underneath, however, the guy who really runs this job for me was busy clearing his workspace and getting ready to start up all his machines again. The next day, I--or he--began writing this story."

To blog or not to blog...

I have not forgotten my duties. In fact I am still reading, perhaps more voraciously than ever before. I just made it through the unabridged version of The Stand, all 1,152 pages in a little less than 3 weeks. Although 5 hours on a plane affords one a lot of reading time. So now I am left with the question of whether or not to go back in time and blog about the books that I have read. I may do that for some, like The Tommyknockers, or Misery, or Skeleton Crew. While others will fall away, like The Talisman - a great story, but one that grows foggy in my memory almost immediately. In fact, the one thing that stuck out so strongly in my mind about The Talisman was something from the last 10 pages of the book. In my mind "Run Through the Jungle" (from CCR) played an important role in the book - but not so much.

The Stand

Beloved and well-read

Including the abridged version, I have read this story 5 times. [Given my capacity for rereading books that I love, it is a bit of a wonder that I have read anything other than Stephen King and Tolkein]. In the process of reading, I lost the front cover and the back cover, taped them both on and lost the back cover again because I got sand in the tape, I got chocolate on a couple of the pages and a grease stain in the middle of the book. Poor thing has been through the wringer. 

I would love to give you impressions, but I feel that they would be fairly similar to my other posts on the abridged version: post 1, post 2, and post 3. The big question that I posed to myself was whether or not I would be able to notice the discrepancies. The answer is yes, all 500 pages of them. Characters were left out, intense scenes were left out, there are many more allusions to Lord of the Rings (many of them outright references to Mordor and the Eye of Sauron), but the thing that sticks out the most is how much more cohesive the story is. I cannot imagine that his publishers thought the edited version was better. Sometimes there is just no accounting for taste.

If you read Danse Macabre, King's thesis is that the works of fiction published represent the collective fears of the country/world. You can look to current works of fiction to know what it is that we are all terrified of. Generalizing of course: in the 1950's it was big bugs and nuclear war; in the 80's we were faced with rape (vampires) and aliens; in the 90's it was technology taking over (Terminator) and society breaking down (The Stand). Right now, we are faced with fears of viruses that will turn us into zombies and cause our society to break down. The Stand is a great study of society breaking down and rebuilding itself - as well as the classic struggle between good and evil.

Part of me is a little sad that I will not be reading this book again during the project. But, not to worry, the Dark Man comes back in The Dark Tower series. But 763 pages of 4 Past Midnight stand between me and Randall Flagg.

For those keeping track, I have now read 12,370 pages!