We did it, Blog-o-weeners! We made it! Today is the day! October 31st. Halloween...or Hallowe’en if you’re into apostrophes...and if you’re into apostrophes, may I recommend a Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 132-134? Or maybe a Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, line 5? They’re quite fresh today. Okay, I see you’re a discerning customer. For you, a special — two MacBeths for the price of one — I’ll give ya an Act 1, Scene 5, lines 30-31 and toss in an Act 2, Scene 1, lines 33-35 for nothing! I’m losing out on this deal! My kids are the ones going hungry, but anything to make you happy!
No matter what you call it — Allhalloween, All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Eve, or the Festival of Samhain (I see ya back there, Mr. Cochran) — it’s a special day, and you’ve probably got a lot going on. If you have kids, you’re getting them into their costumes and then taking them out trick-or-treating. And, please, keep a close eye on them, so they don’t go running out into traffic. We don’t want another Ben Tramer incident, do we? Not on my watch!
If you don’t have kids...well, then, you’re dressing yourself up and taking yourself out trick-or-treating and hoping to pass as an eight-year-old.
And you will have deserved that rock! Honestly, trying to take Charleston Chews and Mounds bars out of the mouths of needy children. You oughta be ashamed!
You’re busy. We here at LARPCo understand. So in the interest of time, let’s just jump right into today’s post. Now, after spending the previous thirty days reading all sorts of horror-flavored stories, how could the ultimate Blog-o-ween 2023 post top all that’s come before it? Well, it’s simple really. We gotta go with the King—
No, not Jack Skellington the Pumpkin King. The other King...
As welcome as King Paimon would be to today’s festivities, I’m actually thinking of Steph—
GAH! NO! Talk about your horrible monsters!
No, kiddies. We’re talking the reigning champeen of all things horror, the undisputed king of calamity, the prince of putrescence, the prime minister of all things sinister, the duke of oil (slicks that eat people while they try to go for a nice swim in a peaceful lake). Today, we’re talking about Maine’s favorite son, Stephen King.
Now, when an author has been as prolific as King has, how do you choose just one or two stories to discuss? I mean, the guy has published over eighty books of fiction and non-fiction, novels and short stories. Add to that nearly twenty screenplays and teleplays. Add to all THAT a yarn called "The Plant," an epistolary story that King wrote in lieu of Christmas cards in the early- to mid-Eighties. In short, the man has a mighty stack of stories to choose from. No matter what stories we here at LARPing Real Life pick, I’m sure that we will disappoint someone.
C’est la guerre!
For this last entry of Blog-o-ween 2023, I thought we would stick to a single collection of Stephen King short stories. It’s a book whose cover has haunted me nearly my entire life. Back in the 1970s and 80s, whenever I’d accompany my mother to the Northern Lights Shopping Center in Baden, Pennsylvania, I would always search out the newsstand in whatever store we happened to be in — Hills department store, Thrift Drug, Kroger’s, and my personal favorite, The Book End. I'd plant myself in front of the shelves and pore through all the issues of Mad, Cracked, and Crazy I could find. I think ol' Stevie would back me up on my reading choices.
Standing like sentinals next to the woodem magazine shelves were wire racks filled with mass market paperbacks of all genres — westerns, romance, sci-fi. However, anyone familiar with Grady Hendrix’s fond overview of that era, Paperbacks from Hell, knows that it was the covers to the horror books that always captured the eye. In more ways than one.
This is my copy of Stephen King’s 1978 short story collection Night Shift. Looks rather staid, no? Sure, that’s how it gets you! It looks all safe and nondescript until you pick it up and turn over the cover to reveal what’s hidden underneath.
It was covers like this that charmed readers back then...charmed ‘em like a cobra extending its hood and beginning to sway back and forth, back and forth. Those eyes in the folds of that hand...man, talk about nightmare fuel. I honestly feel bad for people whose first introduction to Night Shift was this cover:
C’mon, man...that’s just weak. I wouldn’t give that book another look on the wire rack. When it comes to horror, you gotta judge a book by its cover. I think publishing has forgotten that maxim.
Ah! Stop looking at me!
So now that we have that book in our grubby little hands, which of the twenty stories are we going to talk about today? We are spoiled for choice, I must admit. There’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the sorta related/not really related precursor to King’s 1975 vampires-in-America novel, ‘Salem’s Lot. (Which, if you know anything about me, you know that I read every year in October. I'll be finishing my umpteenth read of ‘Salem’s Lot tonight. I've paced myself well and have saved the Fearless Vampire Killers' final battle with Barlow just for Halloween.) Or how about “Night Surf,” that creepy story that takes place in the same universe as The Stand? Maybe “Sometimes They Come Back” King’s tale of undead greasers from the Fifties come back for vengeance?
All winners, in my opinion. You couldn’t go wrong by reading any of them, but my picks for Halloween are on, shall we say, the gooier side of things. Oh, we shall, we shall! Put your hip waders on, kiddies, cuz we’re goin’ in!
“I Am the Doorway” was first published in the March 1971 issue of Cavalier, a magazine that was started in the early 1950s by Fawcett Publications to be a showcase for its Gold Medal authors like Henry Kuttner and Mickey Spillane. By the time King’s story showed up in its pages, Cavalier was a “gentlemen’s magazine” in the vein (pun intended...heh-heh-heh!) of Playboy. And like Playboy, the men who bought Cavalier did so solely for the articles and stories like the following...
“‘You are the doorway,’ Richard repeated thoughtfully. ‘You are sure you killed the boy — you didn’t just dream it?’
“‘I didn’t dream it. And I didn’t kill him, either — I told you that. They did. I am the doorway.’”
Our narrator, Arthur, and his buddy Richard are sitting on Arthur’s porch looking out at the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Arthur, a former astronaut, is telling his good friend a horrible story that began with his flight to Venus. While orbiting that planet, Arthur was exposed to an alien force. His ship crash lands back on earth, and his co-pilot is killed. Arthur is hospitalized, and his recuperation takes years. After his release, he begins to complain of horrible itching in his hands. Soon thereafter, the first eyes begin to sprout on his fingers...
What happened to the boy when he saw the eyes? What's gonna happen to Richard when he sees them? Whose eyes are they? Who sees through them, and what does Earth look like to them? And how are they using Arthur as a doorway?
Our next story, “Gray Matter,” was also published in the pages of Cavalier, fittingly back in October of 1973. Maybe you want to run to the kitchen and grab a cold one before we start in on this one? I’d hate for you to get a monstrous thirst you couldn’t quench in the middle of it...
“Now the door opened again, letting in a blast of the cold gray air outside, and a young kid came in, stamping snow off his boots. I placed him after a second. He as Richie Grenadine’s kid, and he looked like he’d just kissed the wrong end of the baby. His Adam’s apple was going up and down and his face was the color of an old oilcloth.
“‘Mr. Parmalee,” he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling around in his head like ball bearings, ‘you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can’t stand to go back there. I’m scared.’
“‘Now slow down,’ Henry says, taking off his white butcher’s apron and coming around the counter. ‘What’s the matter? Your dad been on a drunk?’
“...‘He’s been on a drunk,’ the boy was saying now, ‘but that ain’t the trouble. It’s...it’s...oh, Lord, it’s awful!’”
At a local convenience store in Bangor, Maine, during a heavy snowfall, a young boy enters looking scared for his life. The boy has been sent to pick up a case of beer for his dad. Only, he refuses to take the beer back with him. He tells one of the men in the store, Henry, his story. Henry comes out and picks up the beer and tells a few of the other men to follow him. He’s going back to the Grenadine’s home, and if what the boy told him is even partial true, then the gun he’s packing will come in handy.
On the way there, Henry tells the others what the boy told him.
“The kid said it must have been the beer — you know how you can get a bad can every now and again. Flat or smelly or green as the peestains in an Irishman’s underwear. A fella once told me that all it takes is a tiny hole to let in bacteria that’ll do some damn strange things. The hole can be so small that the beer won’t hardly dribble out, but the bacteria can get in. And beer’s good food for some of those bugs.”
Yes, beer is good food, but what if some of those little bugs grow up to be big bugs? Will beer be enough to satisfy it then? What was it that was in that can that Richie Grenadine drank? And what has become of Richie that is so bad that his own son won’t return to his house? Does it have to do with the dead, decaying cat that the son saw his father eat? Maybe...maybe...
Anyway, drink up! We’ve got one more story. Our final story for Blog-o-ween 2023. This one takes place not in the autumn of the year like a proper Halloween story should but in the spring. It’s a special spring, however, one that comes around every so often. It brings a thick fog when it returns...a real killer fog. Heh-heh-heh!
“Strawberry Spring” was first published in the Fall 1968 edition of the University of Maine’s literary journal, Ubris. Later, like so many of the other tales in Night Shift, it made its way to the pages of Cavalier in 1975.
It’s March 1976 and a ‘Strawberry Spring’ has moved into New England, covering the campus of New Sharon College in a thick, impenetrable fog. Much like an “Indian Summer” is a period of unseasonably warm weather in the fall, a strawberry spring is a cold snap at the beginning of spring, a brief return of winter. The weather outside, and the words “Springheel Jack” in the newspapers sends the memories of our unnamed narrator back eight years before. A time when another strawberry spring held sway and when the horrific killings of a murderer the media dubbed “Springheel Jack” held the college in the grips of a panic. The narrator recounts the sheer terror of those days as campus officials, police officers, and students were unable to stop the murders from happening. Springheel Jack was never caught, and now, eight years later, he’s returned with the fog.
Why is the narrator so unnerved by the news that the killer is back? What do his headaches and the gaps in his memory have to do with Springhell Jack?
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, in September of 1947. His father, Donald King, left the family, leaving King’s mother, Nellie, to raise Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself. They moved many times during King’s childhood: Illinois, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Connecticut. When King was eleven, the family settled in Maine.
One day, King and his brother were playing when Stephen found an old box of paperback books in the attic. They were the remnants of his father’s belongings. The box was filled with old Avon paperbacks, one of which was a collection of H.P. Lovecraft tales called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. King would always say that it wa that book that started him on the road of horror.
As a school boy, King wrote stories based on movies he’s seen and sold them to fellow students. In 1966, King started classes at the University of Maine at Orono. There he met his future wife, Tabitha Spruce. He graduated in 1970; his daughter was born later that year; he and Tabitha wed in 1971.
The story of King’s rise to become America’s (if not the world’s) premier horror writer is well documented. As was mentioned above, his list of credits is too long to go into here. Suffice it to say that if you want to read or listen to the stories that we’ve talked about today, then you can find them at your local library. If your local library doesn’t have any King on its shelves...RUN! Honestly, I think that is a sign from the universe that you have entered into The Twilight Zone or something.
“Strawberry Spring” was turned into an audio drama podcast back in 2021. Its eight episodes take place at the time of the story — 1960s and 1970s — but it greatly expands on the story’s action. It is very well acted by Syndey Sweeney, Garrett Hedlund, Milo Ventimiglia, Ken Marino, and Herizen F. Guardiola, and its sound design is exquisite. Check it out here!
Well...that’s it. That’s all she wrote. We’ve made it through another Blog-o-ween. This is our fourth annual month-long blogging slog through October, if you can believe it. (I can’t!) I think this year’s Blog-o-ween was the best one yet! Thank you to everyone who dropped by and read what I had to say. I hope it entertained you. I also hope that you found books and writers that could become new favorites. That’s really what all this is about for me: sharing my love of storytelling with folks. So, I hope you pick up a few of the books mentioned this month and read them and share them with others. That way it’s not just me...and it’s not just you...but it’s EVERYONE having...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!
Oh, one more thing...
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