Anyway, back to Stephen King:
Gerald’s Game (1992)
This one routinely scores pretty low on King fans’ rankings of
his books, but it’s not as bad as you would think. The premise is pretty
notorious: Jessie, a middle-aged, wife accedes to her husband Gerald’s requests
for an afternoon of bondage, and she is handcuffed mostly naked to the bed—and after
a kick in the chest, Gerlad dies of a heart attack. They are of course in a
remote cabin on a Maine lake, and it is early autumn, so there is no one around to hear her screams. How will Jessie get out
of her situation? There are some pretty harrowing (i.e., gross) scenes, one
involving a starving stray dog and a large all-you-can-eat buffet lying on the
floor (’nuff said). There is also another character who plays a pivotal
role—although as the book’s “Mr. Evil” he is a bit over the top, even by
Stephen King’s standards. (One gets the sense that King read about Jeffrey
Dahmer—who would have been in the news just before he was writing this—and
thought “Heck, I can do better than that.”) Most of the book, though, is a
stylistic experimentation with internal monologue, as Jessie flashes back to an
unpleasant incident with her father during a solar eclipse in 1963. Maybe the pop
psychology is a bit cheesy, but it largely works. The ending isn’t entirely
satisfying—a common gripe in King novels, especially starting around this
period. There is a tenuous connection to the next book, Dolores Claiborne,
involving the same eclipse.
Grade: C+
Dolores Claiborne (1992)
I recall reading Dolores Claiborne back in the 90s and liking
it (I can’t remember if I saw the movie starring Kathy Bates), and while I didn’t dislike it this time around, getting through it was more
of a chore than I recall. Part of the problem is that it is a single, long, unbroken
narrative as the titular Dolores tells the police about the events that led up
to her killing her husband many years earlier, and not killing the elderly dowager she had been working
for. And it’s all in her rural Maine dialect, which gets irritating after a
very short while. There’s nothing supernatural about the book, which isn’t a bad thing, and it makes a good revenge tale. Dolores is also a pretty sharply drawn character. As indicated above, it’s sort of a companion to Gerald’s Game,
as both books flash back to events that happened during the solar eclipse of
1963. It’s another stylistic experiment, which you have to give him credit for.
Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne mark the beginning of King’s “women’s
novels,” which would include Rose Madder, which is coming up shortly.
Grade: C+
Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
King’s third short story collection, after Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and like those earlier
collections, it’s a mix of the compelling, the silly, and random
experiments, some of which work and some of which don’t. Among the better
stories are “Dolan’s Cadillac” (a little on the unbelievable side but it kind
of works), “The Night Flier” (a vampire with a pilot’s license?), “Chattery
Teeth” (supernaturally possessed joke teeth? a bit silly, but I liked it), “The Moving Finger” (a giant finger pokes out of a bathroom sink for no apparent reason), “The House on Maple Street” (an abusive stepfather gets a bizarre comeuppance), “The Ten O’Clock People” (only people who moderately smoke are able to see horrible creatures around them—another silly premise that kind of works), and “Sorry Right
Number,” a screenplay for an episode of Tales from the Dark Side. There is an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes story
(“The Doctor’s Case”) which is not bad, and a meta Twilight Zone-y Raymond Chandler piece (“Umney’s Last Case”) in
which a character meets his author, which takes a bizarre twist. He channels Shirley Jackson in “Rainy Season” (a torrential rain of killer frogs is a small town ritual). Some of the sillier stories include “Sneakers,”
“You Know They’ve Got Hell of a
Band” (all the dead rock stars are still alive in a secluded Oregon village—and they’re evil zombies), and a few others. He also should not try to write British characters
(“Crouch End”). A hit or miss, but largely hit, collection, as usual.
Grade: B-
Interestingly, Insomnia,
which is up next, is out of print, and even an attempt at getting a used copy
has thus far been fruitless. I had to get the e-book version which, curiously enough, is more expensive than the paperback versions I had been picking up.
