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.

Different Seasons

One thing that most people do not know about Stephen King is that he is an amazing fiction (non-horror) author. People will say to me, "Oh I can't read King, he is just to scary for me." But when I point out some of his works that they have seen, they are blown away, because they love them. A couple of the stories from this collection were turned into movies that people LOVE.

I know that I read this collection when I was a teenager, because I saw the

"Shawshank Redemption" at 17 and I kept feeling like I knew the story. Sure enough I had read it several years before as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Even though it takes place in a prison, this story is all about hope. The movie really captures the essence of the story so I do not think that I need to say more.

The Apt Pupil. This one was also made into a movie, but I think it did not get much attention because the subject matter was a bit disturbing. A suburban boy figures out that an old man in his neighborhood is a Nazi war criminal and becomes obsessed with the old man and reenacting his crimes. Yes, it is disturbing and yes, the Nazi gets the upper hand when it comes to the boy's psyche. As for how it ends, well you will just have to discover that on your own.

The Body which we all know as the movie "Stand By Me." According to SK, Rob Reiner, the director, loved the name Castle Rock so much that he used the name for his production company. I believe that this story is the non-horror version of IT. The Body is a coming of age story of 4 boys on a journey to see a dead body in the 50's. It is beautiful, it is poetic and it makes me wish that I was a young boy growing up in the 50's when life was a little more carefree.

Finally, The Breathing Method, a rambling story about men telling stories in which the butler holds the most fascination for me, rather than the story within the story. I like to fancy that the ageless butler is a demon that feeds on the interesting stories of the men that come to the Club to tell them. Or perhaps this demon resurrects characters from the story and they lurk in the large brownstone that houses the Club. In many ways, the butler also seems like he could be Walter from The Gunslinger.

But the main story of The Breathing Method, is about a doctor that works with a woman to teacher a breathing method for labor. 
Here comes the SPOILER...


... 

The woman practices the method so much that when she is decapitated in an accident on her way to the hospital to deliver, her body keeps doing the breathing method. In all of its detail, the doctor tells how he delivered the baby on the steps of the hospital while the corpse continued the method through the wound in the neck. Blech, I LOVE it! What a great visual and what a crazy story. 


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In the Dead Zone

is apparently where I put all my memories of this book. Not a slow read at all! Perhaps I got the book confused with the movie - which was very slow (and what were they thinking when they cast Christopher Walken?!?).

My general rule, when starting any new book, is to read the first 30-40 pages without interruption. To me, this insures that I will continue with the book, because I am invested in reading it. Whereas, in the rare cases that I have sat down and started a book and only read 10 pages, I ended up not finishing it. This is all to illustrate the fact that I found The Dead Zone so engaging that I read 65 pages the first night.

The other thing that has struck me about this book is that The Dead Zone is a Richard Bachman book - or Stephen King trying to unite the halves of himself as an author. King's first three books, Carrie, 'Salems's Lot, and The Shining, were horror novels, no doubt about it. Carrie, is not really that scary, but it is disturbing. Then he publishes Rage under the name Richard Bachman - a purely fiction work, with no terrifying elements, at all. TDZ, seems to be a work that encorporates his love of the supernatural with fiction.

When people talk to me about Stephen King and how they do not read his work because they do not like horror novels, I often point out that King is an author that is interested in the exploration of the supernatural, not horror. Sometimes horror and the supernatural dovetail nicely, but I do not think it is his intent to frighten. I then go on to point out how the person talking to me already enjoys Stephen King, they just don't know it. I list off The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand by Me, and they nod about how they really enjoyed those movies. To that list, I will now add The Dead Zone, as a novel they should read.