I’m possessed by Joe Hill

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill has been republished in a 10th anniversary edition.

You’d expect someone who grew up inhaling Stephen King stories to emulate him. Millions of us grew up reading King and elements of his stories are part of the soundtracks of our lives.

The same can be said of Joe Hill, aka Joseph King (son of Stephen). While very much writing in his own voice, you can tell some of those stories have rubbed off on him, too.

The character of Craddock, the man haunting the Dead Man’s Suit, reminds me of the terrifying Gypsy from Thinner, or the unearthly proprietor from Needful Things. Somehow Hill read my mind and his character fits my imagined embodiment of these two haunting characters.

Judas Coyne is the epitome of a gothic rock star. Some would think of Marilyn Manson, but I can see Alice Cooper in him. His journey along the ‘night road’ is one of self-realisation, his sexploitation of female fans redeemed by his love of dogs.

Hill shares his father’s feel for music – slipping lyrics into the text of this story, just like in IT and The Body (filmed as Stand by me), as a couple of examples.

Vehicles are prominent in Hill’s stories too – this one features a Mustang and a scary old pick-up with glaring headlights. Anyone remember Christine?

Hill’s stories carry his own strong sense of humour, suspense and irony, while gripping you in the headlights of his very chilling tales.

“…acid. I had a good memory once. I was in the chess club at junior high.”

“You were? That’s a hell of a thought.”

“What? The idea that I was in the chess club?”

“I guess. It seems so…geeky.”

“Yeah. But I used severed fingers for pieces.”

I read Heart Shaped Box in four days. That’s the best praise I can ever give. Hill’s writing style wasn’t ‘easy’ – it was gripping and exciting. This book possessed me until I had found out what would happen to Judas Coyne and Georgia/Marybeth.

Let this story haunt you. And yes the title was influenced by Nirvana.

“Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ is, it seems to me, a song by a man who felt trapped by his own fame, increasingly frantic to escape the prison cell of being loved.”

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The Fireman

If you’re a Twin Peaks fan, you’ll pronounce this “fear man”, lol.

The Fireman is a good example of Hill’s versatility – it’s very different from the ghost story above.

This is an apocalypse story, along the lines of The Stand. In this book the spore, ‘dragonscale’, is the main protagonist.

Dragonscale presents as a black tattoo with highlights of fire, the victim eventually combusting, taking all that surrounds with them.

Disease was a favourite theme of one of the masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe.

I’m not sure which is more disturbing; the spontaneous combustion, or Hill’s obsession with Mary Poppins. The character of Harper plays Mary to the Fireman’s Dick Van Dyke.

The plot of The Fireman becomes a compelling race for survival: will Harper live to give birth to her baby? Will she be terminated by the Combustion Squads, bent on cleansing the population from the scourge? Or will her husband get to her first, to make her fulfill their suicide pact?

Locke & Key

Hill is perhaps best known for his early graphic novels, the Locke and Key series.

Set in New England, these stories focus on the Locke family, who can open doors between worlds. Locke and Key are great stories, beautifully rendered by artist Gabriel Rodriguez.

I’m hooked. I’m going to read NOS4R2 next.

NOS-4R2

NOS-4R2, a clever title, crosses between worlds in a classic car (this time a Silver Wraith); it’s driver, Charles Manx, a serial killer full of evil intent to abduct and corrupt children. One child, Victoria McQueen, survives, gaining supernormal powers from her encounter. Charles has never forgotten the one that got away…

It’s such a relief to know that when Stephen King passes through the door to the next world, this one is in Joe Hills’ hands.

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Stephen King’s Sleeping Beauties

Stephen and Owen King have gender issues.

Dooling is a place where people live on a knife edge; work hard, drink hard. Women around the world bear the brunt of this in their daily lives. Some have gone to prison for fighting back.

Tiffany lives in a trailer at the edge of a forest. She’s regularly beaten by the man who has enslaved her to drugs.

Superhumanly beautiful, a naked woman comes down from the forest and changes everything.

All over the world women succumb to an enchantment. (Or sickness depending on which books you read.) Falling asleep, they form moth-like cocoons around themselves. The women are not dead, merely sleeping.

Where has their consciousness gone? Wake them and you’ll find out – in a terrible bloody way. They turn into very angry zombies.

Lila is the local Police Chief. She loves her husband. Or does she? Suspicious of his love, resentful over the pool he made her agree to (first world problems, LOL), Lila has a choice to make.

Fighting the curse valiantly, (and not without the aid of some confiscated contraband), Lila eventually closes her eyes and crosses over… to the world beyond the huge tree in the forest; a world without men. The idea appeals to many – inmates like Jeannette, wives like Elaine.

Without their women, the men left behind get depressed, go nuts, drink and burn things. Some prepare for battle.

If Evie, the woman who began this series of events, is killed in the inevitable battle between good and evil, the women stay in the place beyond the Tree forever.

If she lives, they get to choose if they want to stay in what they have come to call “Our Place”, or come back to the world of men. It’s a difficult choice for some. (The honeymoon period only lasts about eight weeks according to S.K.)

There is a suggestion here that the characters are at war with Nature and God. Has Evie come from the Garden of Eden?

“Once I’m dead, the portal between this world and the land of sleep will close. Every woman will eventually nighty-night, every man will eventually die, and this tortured world will breathe an enormous sigh of lasting relief.” Evie, p.362

The tree motif is a great link to the world of faerie. Trees have been doors to other worlds (than this) in many stories. The Kings enchant the normal world with ‘fairy handkerchiefs’ (spider webs in the grass), clouds of moths, a snake, and a tiger…

Always an advocate for women (see Big Driver) this latest offering is well written, topical (the senior King jokes about Trump), and thrilling without being too brutal.

Stephen and Owen have crafted a riveting read with the characterisation that fans love him for. He even throws in a book group or two.

Suggested reading

• Read our post All about women: Satellite Event at Christchurch Art Gallery, Sunday 4 March 2018
• Visit our page on International Women’s Day – 8 March 2018
• Titles by Stephen King
• Titles by Owen King
• Men without women by Ernest Hemingway
• Men without women by Haruki Murakami
• The claiming of sleeping beauty
• Big driver 2015 movie based on a novella by Stephen King published in Full dark, no stars
• Singled out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
• Woman in the wilderness: A Story of Survival, Love & Self-discovery in New Zealand

Sleeping beauties
by Stephen and Owen King
Published by Hachette New Zealand
ISBN: 9781473665200

The Dark Tower: A Constant Reader worries

Last week’s release of the trailer for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower movie just about broke the internet, with fevered and passionate discussion about just how right or wrong the director had got things. Widely recognised as the most important of King’s works, The Dark Tower series is a ridiculously huge tale, with nearly 4300 words in eight novels, written over the course of 30 years. Simply put, it’s the story of Roland, the last gunslinger, who is working his way to the Dark Tower to take down the Crimson King. He is pursued by the man in black.

As a longtime Constant Reader, I have spent much of my grown-up life reading and rereading Stephen King novels.  My bookshelves are full of scary clowns, weird alien invasions, alcoholic hotel caretakers and needful things. I own all the books, have seen all the movies, and have definite thoughts on best and worst novels. I’ve downloaded the reading maps, sought out the editorials, and even fallen in love with the works of his son Joe.

Every reader who has a favourite author can feel nervous when books are turned into movies.  And it must be said that King’s movie adaptations can vary wildly in success, from the heady heights of The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, through the disturbing Misery, to the adorable but kind of dorky 1408, and the downright embarrassing Langoliers.

So you will understand when I say that I am not alone right now in feeling VERY nervous about the upcoming release of two of King’s most well-loved works. The trailer for It was released a few weeks ago, and in less than 3 minutes managed to scare the pants off most of the western world.  I have yet to watch it without covering my eyes every few seconds. And the Dark Tower trailer is mesmerising for different reasons. How can one movie even begin to show us a world that is described not only in the eight Tower books, but also appears in countless other of his tales, from The Talisman, to Insomnia, to Black House, The Stand and The Shining and more.

 

There’s totally no time to go back and reread the whole series before the movie is out, and King has already told us that this particular story is not one of the original ones from the novels, but another of Roland’s journeys. So all I have to do now is sit, and wait, and like countless other Constant Readers, hope that this movie is at least good, and hopefully great, that Roland Deschain is a true gunslinger and that the man in black is every bit as dreadful and mesmerising as he is in the books.

And try to figure out if I will EVER be brave enough to watch IT.

Further reading

• It
• The Dark Tower series of novels
• The Dark Tower graphic novel series
• Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance
• Other titles by Stephen King

Carey sure knows a lot about Golding

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of those books that has always filled me with a deep disquiet.  If I tell you I don’t like it, you will assume I think it isn’t any good.  But that’s not true – I think it’s brilliant.  It’s just not very nice.

It is, however, pivotal in the work of many of today’s most famous pop culture writers and creative artists:  with everything from Stephen King, to Lost, to Terminator, Mad Max and Zombieland being descendents of Lord of the Flies, it can be argued that in some ways all modern post-apocalyptic writing and cinema has derived from Golding’s dark view of humanity. 

John Carey, author of  the recently published William Golding: the man who wrote Lord of the Flies: a life, is an accomplished speaker, and despite the fact that he began quietly, in an auditorium overflowing with rambunctious teens, he had them mesmerised within minutes.  Much of the information should be familiar to those who have even a passing acquaintance with the book and the author, but there were a few surprises even for Carey, he said, as he began to research using Golding’s extensive collection of diaries and papers.  Marion got to have a chat with him this afternoon, and no doubt she will shed much light on both Carey and Golding, but there were one or two things that stood out for me from this morning’s session.

Firstly, that as a teacher, Golding would use what he described as a “measure of experimental science” in his teaching, in essence using the students as illustrations of his own theories about the nature of humanity and the darkness within.  Carey described a particular incident where Golding packed up all the boys and carted them all out to a local landmark, and basically set them against each other in a war-strategy type of situation, only intervening eventually when it became clear that someone was going to be killed.  He also apparently would frequently stir up his classes and deliberately antagonise them so as to observe their behaviour.

The other point I hadn’t heard before was that Golding’s final published work differs significantly from his initial submitted manuscript; this due to his fiercely agnostic editor, who insisted on removing all obvious traces of religious symbolism and deeper spiritual meaning.  From being a quite clear tale of hope and spiritual strength in the face of adversity, it was transformed into a book whose message was that ignorance and terror invent religion, and that only bad can come of anything spiritual.  Later in his life, Golding very much regretted ‘giving in’ to Monteith’s demands, but Carey makes the argument that without this interference, Lord of the Flies would not have become the enduring piece of literary success that it is today.

A fascinating session, and I am very much looking forward both to reading Marion’s interview, and to the Michael King Memorial Lecture on Sunday, which promises an adult slant on Golding’s life and work.