Stephen King, page 5 of 6

I remember being terrified by this when I was a kid. Not the mini-series itself — I never saw it at the time — but the trailer. The trailer was all I needed. The thing that scared me most was a very brief glimpse of this ugly chap, Nosferatu in a blue mood:

He continued to scare me whenever I was home alone. I’d be about to move from one room to another when I’d suddenly think, “What if I opened the door and saw that standing there?” and instantly found myself making excuses to stay where I was till someone else came home. As a result, the first horror novel I read was King’s Salem’s Lot, perhaps in a (forlorn) attempt to quell the fear — forlorn because it immediately proceeded to scare me even more with its opening tale of Ben Mears’ childhood visit to the Marsten House, and what he saw there.

So, recently I decided to try and lay this particular ghost by getting the Salem’s Lot mini-series out on rental from LoveFILM. I expected to be disappointed, but wasn’t. The basic story (Dracula in small-town America) was handled well, the acting was good (a lot of competent character actors, including Kenneth McMillan as the town constable — who I mostly know as the pustulant Vladimir Harkonnen from David Lynch’s Dune — and of course David Soul and James Mason in the lead roles), but best of all it managed some nicely suspenseful, even spooky, moments. Perhaps because of the limitations of what was then allowed on TV, the gore count is low (to be measured in drops rather than modern-day bucketfuls), and there are very few of those tiresome false jumps every horror film or TV series feels duty bound to serve up at regular intervals (something which lost its appeal for me after a totally silly and irrelevant jump from an aggravated squirrel in Species, back in 1995). The Marsten House interior is an effective set (though it has its silly/surreal moment, when young Mark Petrie opens a drawer to find it full of glass eyes and a couple of live rats — why does he open the drawer in the first place? he’s looking for a vampire, not a pair of socks), and the ending has enough references to Psycho to assure you there’s someone who knows his horror films at the helm (Tobe Hooper, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist). A particularly good moment of the subtler sort of scare is when old schoolteacher Jason Burke hears an odd sound from upstairs, goes to investigate, and finds the corpse of recently-deceased Mike Ryerson gently rocking in a rocking chair. He stays like that for what seems an age before finally looking up with his scarily gleaming vampires eyes.

I wrote in an earlier post (“What’s the point of Renfield?”) that Renfield, in Dracula, is perhaps a necessary counterpart to the suave count. Where Count Dracula is cool, elegant, eloquent and scary, Renfield is disgusting, mad, pathetic and drivelling, and together the pair complete a portrait of a real vampire as both coldly reasoning and psychotic, cool on the exterior but wallowing in blood and filth in his mad moments. The TV mini-series of Salem’s Lot reverses the relationship. The mortal half of its villainous duo, Mr Straker (James Mason), is ultra-calm, drily witty, cultured, neatly dressed and surrounded by beautiful antiques; the vampire, Kurt Barlow, looks like a dead rat gone blue-skinned and hairless with rot, can’t speak, and is 100% monster.

But there are, as in Dracula, other vampires. In Stoker’s novel, these are women; in the mini-series of King’s novel, (at first, anyway, till the whole town goes vampirous) these are children. And this was the second most scary thing about the mini-series: those kids floating up to your bedroom window at night to scratch at the pane and ask to be let in, surrounded by reverse-motion smoke. Which is another way I used to spook myself when I was younger. If I woke up late at night, I’d find myself wondering what I’d do if I heard someone scratching at the window. Well, obviously not open it like these kids do. But simply seeing such a thing would have been bad enough.

It’s been a long time since I read King’s novel, so I can’t say how faithful to the book the mini-series is, but it was certainly faithful enough to remind me of reading the book a good 25-or-so years ago. Granted, it looks like a 70s TV mini-series, but I think that adds to its charm when seen nowadays — just like the HPLHS‘s old-style renderings of H P Lovecraft in their Call of Cthulhu and Whisperer in Darkness films, this is an authentically 70s-styled rendering of a 70s novel, and I’m glad I finally got to see it.

And, I have to admit, that though I started watching the first part (it’s in two hour-and-a-half parts) just before 9 o’clock at night, I had to watch an hour of normal TV afterwards before I felt unspooked enough for bed. And I watched the second part at 11 o’clock the next morning.

Weaveworld, published in 1987, was Clive Barker’s breakthrough novel. It was also his breakout novel, as it saw him transform himself from being the hottest new horror writer in town (with The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game), to being a hot new fantasy writer, or perhaps just a hot new writer full-stop. And of course, with the movie Hellraiser out the same year, Barker seemed to be announcing himself as an impressive creative force whatever the medium. He painted and illustrated, he wrote and produced plays; what was more, he was eloquent and outspoken in his views on the importance of imagination and the fantastic in art. I’d read some of his Books of Blood stories, but Weaveworld was much more my thing. After it, I read pretty much every novel he wrote as they came out (in paperback, anyway), faltering briefly at The Thief of Always, perhaps out of post-Imajica exhaustion (825 pages!). That ended with 2001’s Coldheart Canyon. I bought Coldheart Canyon, and it sat on my to-read shelf for about a year before I admitted to myself I wasn’t going to read it. I’ve never even looked at his Abarat books (perhaps feeling a bit cheated that he never got round to finishing his Books of the Art series). I read (and reviewed) Mister B Gone when it came out, as a toe-dip back in Barker’s world, but aside from the angels at the end, I mostly wished I hadn’t. I’m not sure, really, what happened. Perhaps it was simply Barker exhaustion (he does write long novels, and perhaps even marvels and wonders can wear you out). Whatever it was, I recently re-read Weaveworld, to see if I could sample a little of what it was that made him so exciting back then. Would it still be there?

It was. It is.

Weaveworld is about a magical land hidden in a carpet. But really, this magical land is made up of fragments of our world — nooks of wonder and beauty we came to ignore, or never discovered, and which the Seerkind (the people of the Weaveworld — or the Fugue as they call it when not in its woven state) took as their own. The Seerkind are mostly human in appearance, but have “raptures” — crafts such as weaving, singing & dancing, that work like magic spells. To the Seerkind, we ordinary humans are Cuckoos, and our non-magical world is the Kingdom of the Cuckoo. And although we Cuckoos have, in the past, pursued and persecuted the Seerkind, it was a far worse enemy that forced them into hiding, an awful power known as the Scourge, which of course threatens them again as soon as they wake. The novel follows two ordinary-ish people from our world, Cal Mooney and Suzanna Parish, who come into contact with the Weaveworld, only to find themselves inextricable parts of the struggle of the Seerkind to wake, find a safe place to unpack the wonders of the Fugue, and survive the onslaughts of their many enemies.

Two things make Barker an outstanding writer of the fantastic. The first is the wildness and freedom of his imagination. Before him, the defining style of supernatural horror was that of Stephen King, who made his horrors all the more believable by placing them in settings designed to feel as familiar as possible, and written in a voice that assured you the writer was an average Joe like you, speaking down-to-earth, yeah, you-know-the-kind-of-thing speak. Barker blew that approach away by writing horror and fantasy like an Old Testament prophet. Where, with King, one subtly-built up supernatural element was enough to fuel a blockbuster novel, Barker has monsters and magical beings by the dozen before we’re a quarter of the way through. If King is the fireside storyteller, making you gather round while he whispers his tales towards their slow climax, Barker takes the Barnum and Bailey approach, full of fireworks, cymbal crashes, dancing girls and lion tamers. (And there’s a lot of the performer in his works — his Seerkind are, mostly, performers, Bohemians; perhaps naturally, considering Barker’s first career as a playwright & actor.)

That comparison to the Bible links to the other thing that made Barker such a notable new voice — the conviction with which he wrote, his belief in the transforming power of the imagination. In Weaveworld, when humans encounter the magic of the Fugue, it often has a near-religious effect on them. It changes their world, it opens them up to new possibilities, new beliefs. (Of Suzanna: “All she knew was that she was suddenly alive to a space inside herself where the haste and habit of her adult life had no dominion.”) Because, ultimately, Weaveworld isn’t about a magical world and a real one, it’s about one world which is both magical and real, it’s about the healing, the weaving together, of what can be imagined and what is accepted as real, between the mundane and the magical. The Seerkind aren’t ethereal beings, they’re “flesh and blood like you”; the Fugue is a place in which you can meet with wondrous experiences, but that is true of the real world, too, because the true place those wondrous experiences occur is in the mind:

“Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest;… all mind.”

“Imagination,” Barker writes, “was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.”

Two of the most interesting characters in Weaveworld are the villains, Shadwell the Salesman (whose name unfortunately reminded me of Siadwell, the comic Welsh poet from Naked Video in the 80s) and Immacolata the Incantatrix, who has a cold hatred for her fellow Seerkind. These, like so many Barker villains, aren’t merely evil; they are led to evil ends by understandable (if unordinary) motivations. Something to note about Barker’s monsters — they’re not just killers and beasts, they’re philosophers. They like to explain themselves. They have an aesthetic. (Just not the sort you’d expect to be expounded by the local art society.) In a sense, like the Seerkind, they’re performers, too, artists of a brutal kind, Bohemians gone bad. One of the things Barker seems to be saying is that all experience, potentially, can be transcendent experience, and that includes the painful experiences, the dark experiences, and the dark drives and motivations, too. At the end, the Scourge is not defeated, it is healed. The “Old Science” of the Seerkind (which perhaps could better be called Art) is used to “seduce it into confessing its profoundest desire: simply to see its own true face, and seeing it know how it had been before loneliness had corrupted it.”

Which reminds me of Barker’s own words about himself in the 1994 South Bank Show episode about him:

“My life has absolutely been transformed by the imaginative possibilities offered to me by artists. Isn’t that one of the reasons we go to books and paintings and theatre and movies? We go because we want our lives enriched. And that enrichment is a kind of change. We want our pain illuminated, and if it’s illuminated, maybe it isn’t quite so terrible… I think my kind of fiction, and I get this in conversations with people and in letters, is to some extent about saying these journeys are journeys which we’re all taking. And it’s okay to take them. And it doesn’t mean you’re crazy. It doesn’t mean you’re marginalised. Just because you’re bringing your dreamscape into your daily life, into your conscious life, doesn’t make you fit for the madhouse. It makes you very healthy.”

Barker’s art is working the Seerkind’s sort of magic. He’s not merely peddling wonders to make a sale, to get a wow and a round of applause. He very much has a belief in what he’s doing, in its power to affect people, and for their ultimate good. Even if it takes them into some pretty dark places on the way.

A short while ago, I realised I hadn’t read a really immersive book in what seemed like ages — I’d read good books, and interesting books, but not one of those really moreish ones that keep calling you back, and once you are back, keep making you want to read one more chapter, or just one more page, one more page, one more page.

Two books I read recently I chose specifically because I thought they’d fit this ideal. One did, one almost did. So I thought I’d try and work out what makes a damned good read from that result.

The first book was Richard Adams’ Watership Down. I hadn’t read this before, or anything else by Adams, so I don’t know why I thought it would make a really good read. There was, of course, part of my mind saying “No, no, no, it’s a cutesy book about rabbits!” But I also knew that it had been popular in its time, and continues to be, which is a good indication that it was doing something right. (Not that being popular is a good indication — books, like anything else, can just be fashionable. But staying popular, staying in print, is a good indication, I think.)

The other book, which I finished last week, was Stephen King’s Duma Key, chosen largely because some of my earliest memories of really immersive, getting-into-it reading came from Salem’s Lot, IT and The Stand. I’d pretty much given up reading King after some disappointments (The Dark Half and Bag of Bones), but some Amazon reviews implied that Duma Key (despite its bad title) might be something of a return to form.

So, what worked in these books, and what didn’t?

There are two essential aspects to a damned good read, I think. The first is getting into it, the second is staying with it. By “getting into it” I mean how well the author gets you into their world. There are a few ways they can do this. It can be through character, it can be through world-building (particularly in SF or fantasy), or it can be simply through style. All of these make up the “world of words” a writer creates, and the writer can use one or all of them to make that world inviting enough to lure you in. Obviously, the ideal is that they use all of them, but I think very few authors really do well on all three counts, and I’m happy to live with just one done well, if it’s done sufficiently well. The other point, “staying with it”, has fewer options. In fact, I think there’s really only one, for me, and that’s story. A damned good read has to have a story that keeps drawing you back. In my opinion there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, as satisfying as a well-told story.

In terms of “getting into it”, even though there aren’t really any fantastic elements in Watership Down (apart from attributing human-level intelligence, self-awareness, and communication ability to rabbits), the book has a lot in common with fantasy. In fact, it owes a lot to The Lord of the Rings specifically, not only because it’s a quest story told from the point of view of lowly (hobbit/rabbit) characters who find themselves forced into heroic roles, but because Richard Adams uses some of Tolkien’s methods for “thickening” or “deepening” the world he creates, by for instance providing his rabbits with an invented language (though his “Lapine” is limited to only a few words, and doesn’t quite have that living feel of Tolkien’s Elvish languages) and with their own culture of stories and myths. In a way, Watership Down has an advantage over truly otherworld fantasy, in that the reader knows that the world is their world, so it feels familiar, but they are experiencing it from a different point of view (that of the rabbits). Adams does a good job of re-visioning our world from this alternative perspective, not just in the way that rabbits don’t understand the human things they come across, but also because they have their own concerns, and so their own way of evaluating things. So, to Watership Down‘s rabbits, a road is at first a confusing, frightening thing, but when they realise the cars that zoom along it aren’t interested in eating them, they just cross it at full speed then forget about it. One thing Adams does well is to introduce a few concepts that relate only to rabbits, which he gives names in his invented rabbit language, making these ideas seem at once alien to us as readers but familiar to the rabbits. So, for instance, there’s a Lapine word (tharn) for that particular state of glazed, frozen panic that hits a rabbit when it is overwhelmed or exhausted, which is a danger the questing rabbits have to be constantly aware of. As Adams uses such new words sparingly, this method of getting you into his world works without seeming overly technical or geeky. In essence, he’s created a story-world which is the world we know, but skewed with a few rabbit-specific rules and ways of seeing things. Once you’ve got these in mind, you’re into his book’s world.

King, on the other hand, is writing about our world, though with the addition of some supernatural goings on. But as he introduces the supernatural slowly, that’s not the thing that gets you into his book’s world. Instead, it’s the other two things: character and style. And as Duma Key is written in the first person, with the main character narrating his own story, the two could be said to be sides of the same coin. King’s narrator, Edgar Freemantle, is a successful construction entrepreneur who, just before the start of the book, is involved in a near-fatal accident which changes his life forever. As a result, he loses an arm, and for a while has his speech impaired, so that he can’t recall some words properly. He also has angry rages that he has to learn to control, and which cost him his marriage. In a way, this sets up a few rules of character rather like those of Watership Down‘s rabbits: Edgar Freemantle’s world is one in which he finds himself with only one arm, where before he had two. This means he has to think about his life, and the world he lives in, in a different way; as do we, as readers. This might seem a crude way of creating a character, but in terms of getting you into the world of a book, it’s remarkably effective. Unless you, as reader, have just the one arm yourself, learning to think about things as a one-armed rather than a two-armed person takes some effort, and that effort is the essential magic required to get you into the book’s world. King’s writing style is, I think, one of the things that really makes his books successful. He’s managed to find a way of writing that is not only accessible, but which is downright friendly, and even chummy, while still being interesting. So, while “accessible” writing might just be clear, uncluttered, and unpretentious prose, King writes with a folksiness that doesn’t sound dry and literary, but which still has room for his use of language to be interesting. He likes, for instance, using “homely” words and phrases, like “vicey-versey”, “lookie-loos”, “boot-scootin”, and “swee’pea”. His characters “duck into the mall”, and talk of something being “bad, powerful medicine”. This suppleness of style lets King get away with blatantly literary devices, like metaphors, through sheer liveliness of delivery: “as if she had whistled for a dog and gotten a wolf”, is one example.

So both books, I think, score well on the first ingredient of being a damned good read, though in different ways.

What about “staying with it”?

Watership Down had a clearly mapped-out story. (It also has a map! Some people groan when a book has a map. I love ’em.) At the start of the book, one of the rabbits, Fiver, who is a sort of natural rabbit-shaman, has a vision of the burrow they live in being destroyed, so he and a few others set off to found a new one. So, the first story goal is clear: find a new home. The first half of the book is all about that journey, with the young rabbits having to face various dangers on the way. Once they’ve found a suitable place, the story gains a new direction: to make it a proper home, the troop of male rabbits need some doe-rabbits to share it with. (At this point, Watership Down teeters on the borders of political incorrectness. Adams gets round it by having some doe-rabbits living oppressed and unhappy in a nearby overcrowded, tyrannically-ruled burrow. If he hadn’t pushed the situation to such melodramatic heights, it’s doubtful whether the second part of the story would have seemed anywhere near as heroic as the first, with the acquisition of doe-rabbits seeming more like kidnapping.) Having acquired (liberated, not kidnapped) some does, there’s a final against-the-odds battle with the big-baddie rabbit of the piece, General Woundwort. For me, the book’s story just got more and more gripping as it went along. One of the reasons for this was that the rabbits were put into situations, or faced with problems, where I couldn’t see how they could win, but they did — and not through luck, but through wits. (The rabbits’ physical weaknesses are constantly emphasised throughout the book, making their efforts seem all the more heroic.) The thing that really made it work, for me, was how clearly the goals of the story were laid out, while the outcome never was. I knew what had to happen next, but never how it was going to be achieved. That was the thing that kept bringing me back.

Duma Key, though, didn’t have as strong a story. Rather than Watership Down‘s quest, it was a mystery. Mysteries are, in a sense, even simpler, and so potentially more powerful, story types than quests. Mysteries boil down to a single question. They’re “who killed Professor X”-type stories. With Duma Key, we have a supernatural mystery, so this means it’s a “what the Hell is going on?” type story, with the emphasis on the “Hell”. I’ve always felt that supernatural mysteries need to be very precise and finely-honed. There needs to be one, single source of mystery, one type of supernatural occurrence, and it needs to be worked with a great deal of subtlety and power. The great temptation for writers, though, is to dab on great dollops of supernatural happenings for sheer effect, and then mop up the difficulties and contradictions afterwards. And this, I think, is where Duma Key starts to fail. There are loads of different supernatural events. The narrator finds he has special insight into situations when he touches pictures with his “ghost” limb (the one he lost in the accident); meanwhile, he hears strange voices in the night sea sounds beneath the house he’s staying in; meanwhile, the overgrown south end of the island has a nasty effect on him and his daughter when they visit it; meanwhile, he sees a couple of ghosts; meanwhile, he paints pictures that allow him to see the future; meanwhile, there’s a mystery associated with an old rich lady living nearby; meanwhile, the man looking after the old rich lady has minor telepathic powers; meanwhile… And so on. Too many mysteries, too diffuse. By the time I was getting near the end of Duma Key I realised it wasn’t going to be the really satisfying solution I wanted. I’m not saying all books should tie themselves up neatly — there’s that tired old argument, “life’s not like that”, but I think that’s way beside the point — but I am saying that when an author starts to tell a story, you as reader can’t help but have certain expectations raised. Whenever an author asks a question, explicitly or implicitly, you as reader speculate on what the answer might be, then keep reading to see if you’re right. (And in part, you keep reading because you want to be given a better answer that you thought up. That’s what makes a book really satisfying.)

All this, you might argue, is a bit simplistic. And, yes it is, but I do think that the really deep pleasures of reading boil down to quite simple things.

Anyway, this blog post has gone on a bit, but I’ll add just one more thing. I think there may be a third thing that’s involved in a damned good read, and that’s what you’re left with once a book’s finished. It’s not about the world-building or the story, but something else. It’s the thing that calls you back to re-read a book, even though you know what happens. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect it is to be found in the things a book leaves unresolved. I know I said I like a neatly tied-up ending, but I mean that in story terms. Behind the story, there’s got to be a sort of magic or poetry, a deep tension, a final unresolvedness, that is the thing that is “just like life”, and which is the thing that really makes a book live. But I don’t think it’s something that is easy to spot while you’re reading. It’s the thing that makes a book keep popping up in your thinking months and years after you’ve read it. (A Wizard of Earthsea, which I must have first read before I was ten, still pops up in my head when I’m thinking about life in general, often in surprising ways.) So, at the moment, I can’t say if either Watership Down or Duma Key will have this — I very much doubt Duma Key will, though I enjoyed reading it well enough. It’s a very rare thing, and perhaps I’ll do some thinking on it and write about it in a future Mewsings.

Till then, or till something else crops up…