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?