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Author: Justin Page 3 of 64

Revisiting King: The Shining

(March 3 – 16)

Another awesome “Halloween edition” cover here. I love the nod to the movie with the carpet pattern …

If Salem’s Lot was the prototypical Stephen King novel (as I definitively claimed in my last blog post) then The Shining is surely the first undisputed King Classic. It shares a lot of common ground with one or both of its two predecessors (a slow descent into supernatural-fuelled catastrophe; a main character who’s an author; the spectre of alcoholism; the additional spectres of a tortured past bearing down on a troubled present).

Still, there are also some new things going on here, the biggest of which is that we move away from the classic small town setting which, in turn, gives us a rather more limited cast. Sure we get visits from various other characters, but the majority of this tale is told from the perspective of the three members of the Torrance family.

This nudges us into the main narrative evolution this novel represents. In his introduction (as written in 2001) King talks about finding himself presented with a choice when developing this story: the choice was whether to make one of the characters a straight out bad guy, or to make them a bit less black and white than that (and, no, it’s not the character you’re thinking of). The decision to take the more complex route is, I think, what transforms The Shining. There is horror afoot, but it is made all the more horrific because we really get to live inside the heads of these characters along the way. It is here that King steps away from backstory and surface motivation and delves into something much deeper. He may not have kept up to this level for every one of his future novels, but I suspect we wouldn’t have classics like Misery and It without the ground that King broke here.

The Adaptations

There have been three adaptations of The Shining. Foremost is, of course, the iconic Kubrick movie—which has injected itself into popular culture even more deeply than the novel (when you think of ‘The Shining’ do you not picture Jack Nicholson first? The snowbound maze? That carpet?). Despite King’s misgivings, the movie is a a horror classic and stands as a perfectly sound version of the story.

There is also a 1997 TV adaptation, made with King’s direct involvement. I have not not seen this and am honestly not hugely motivated to do so. No offence to those involved.

But what’s the third adaptation, you ask. Well, I’m cheating a bit here but I’m referring to the beautifully designed board game that came out last year (and is, strictly speaking, based on the film rather than the book). It’s a co-op game where all players have to survive a winter at The Overlook, a challenge made all the harder by regular bouts of possession and murder. There is, appropriately, a variant where one person (secretly) plays as a Jack Torrance type character whose goal is to ensure that none of the other players ever get to leave …it’s a great game, and highly recommended for fans of either book or film.

The Reading Experience

This is my third book in this reading project, and I returned to The Overlook with a small amount of trepidation. I’d attempted a reread last year and had bottled out at about 80 percent through. I remember reading it effortlessly during my teen years and thinking it probably the scariest book I had ever read (at the time, a friend had found The Exorcist similarly terrifying, so we swapped books; neither of us found the other’s novel quite as scary). I do wonder how much my shift in perspective might impact my reading—I come to the novel now as a father and an esrtwhile writer (though not, fortunately, an alcoholic); no longer the hormonal teenage schoolboy who first tackled The Shining.

I did wonder, given my relative familiarity with its pages, if I would struggle to make it through this book. It demands more of the reader than Salem’s Lot. Far from a whistle-stop tour of an American town, The Shining is a claustrophobic, constricting read that forces you to dwell in some very dark places.

But it’s also a more rewarding read in many ways. King’s choice (as elaborated above) results in the richest characters he’s crafted so far. Jack’s descent into insanity is entirely convincing, and there is a steady, inevitable, tragic build towards it. It also, of course, has some real scares in it. 

In the end I tore through the book, especially towards the end. Whatever stumbling block I encountered in my last reread did not manifest here. Somehow, once again, reading this as a physical book rather than an ebook has transformed my reading experience.

Up next … it’s time to make a Stand!

Revisiting King: ’Salem’s Lot

(February 21 – March 1)

cover for Salem's Lot by Stephen King
I wasn’t terribly keen on this cover at first, but I warmed to it after finding that there’s a short series of similarly themed covers (including Pet Sematary and Cujo)

There’s a well-informed school of musical thought which claims that the first real David Bowie album is The Man Who Sold The World. There are those who might then point out that Bowie actually had a couple of self-titled albums out before then, but people who know what they’re talking about typically feel that The Man Who Sold The World is where “it started to happen” for Bowie.

It’s in similar fashion that Stephen King may have published Carrie first, but it’s Salem’s Lot that better serves as the prototypical Stephen King novel. Both may deal in supernatural forces and tell stories that that end with the destruction of an otherwise innocuous American township, but Salem’s Lot is where the some key tentpoles of the Stephen King Novel truly get driven into the ground.

For starters, it’s a relative chonkster (at 600 pages). It’s filled with characters who come into the tale with an entire life history behind them—and who all get their moments. It’s got a main character who’s an author and, in a slightly darker reflection of King’s real life struggles, this is the first (and far from the last) to feature characters who conspicuously struggle with alcohol.

In the foreword to the edition I read (written in 2005–the foreword that is; not the novel) King ponders his own youthful ambition in trying to combine the classic vampire novel (i.e. Dracula) with the schlock sensibilities of the E.C.Warren comics he grew up reading. It’s somewhat ironic that this was an aspect that I was, in fact, too young too young to pick up on when I first read Salem’s Lot (which may well be the first King novel I ever read … or it may not). There’s a sense that he remains slightly shocked that he had the audacity to attempt such a thing.

While this novel is still better than anything I’m likely to ever write, there are certainly signs of the fledgling novelist at work. The plot is relatively pedestrian (in the sense that it ambles along in uncomplicated fashion towards its conclusion). There are a few too many scenes which revolve around little more than people sitting around and explaining events to one another. There are also adverbs and other literary flourishes which would doubtless get excised from later King novels.

That said, there is plenty to admire here. The creeping, fatalistic sense of menace for one thing; and the vivid characterisation. There is a standout chapter chronicling a day in the life of Salem’s Lot, from sunrise to sundown, which flits from character to character and truly makes you feel like a guest in a rich tapestry. I also appreciate that King has never shied away from treading the darkest possible path for many of his characters. There’s never a guaranteed happy ending when you’re in a Stephen King story.

It’s a solid tale and, accordingly, there have been two adaptations of Salem’s Lot starting with the 1979 miniseries starring David Soul, which I remember being fairly decent for it’s time, and may well check out again sometime soon. There was also a 2004 TV adaptation starring Rob Lowe, which until last week I had quite honestly forgotten even existed, and am happy for it to return to that status. I feel there’s definitely potential in here for a good, modern adaption akin to the recent version of The Stand. However, I’m not holding my breath.

One of the goals of this ridiculous project was for me to rediscover the joy of settling down in bed with a good old-fashioned paperback. Reading this one has certainly achieved that, to the point where I was keenly looking forward to each night’s reading session and quite probably staying up later than I should. I certainly enjoyed my visit to Salem’s Lot, even if it didn’t end well for most of its residents.

Next up: who fancies a winter vacation …?

Post-script: the edition of the book that I purchased (the 2011 ‘Iconic Terror’ Hodder edition, to be precise) comes with a few nifty bonus features. First of these is the short story One For The Road, which is also featured in Night Shift, and tells a creepy little tale set three years after the events of Salem’s Lot.

Next comes a more ambitious short story entitled Jerusalem’s Lot (which also appears in Night Shift). In the afterword to the novel, Stephen King writes about how taken he was with the epistolary format when he first read Dracula. It’s fitting, then, that he uses exactly that style for a tale delving into the past of our favourite little undead township. (Intriguingly, this short story is being adapted into a 10 part series starring Adrien Brody, and entitled Chapelwaite, which probably would have been with us by now if not for certain real-world pandemics).

Finally, about 70 pages worth of deleted scenes are included which, while not essential (deleted scenes get deleted for a reason, after all) are an interesting glimpse into different routes and sideroads that the novel could have taken.

Revisiting King: Carrie

(February 16 – 20)

Cover for the paperback Halloween edition of Carrie by Stephen Kind
I love these “Halloween edition” covers for select Stephen King novels – possibly because the typography for Stephen King’s name mimicks the covers for the editions that I read when I was growing up.

One of the best things about starting a reread of every Stephen King novel from the start, is that Carrie is little more than a pamphlet on the King Scale. At somewhere around 250 pages it would be hard for it to intimidate even a poorly disciplined reader like myself.

As such it’s something of an outlier (in my opinion) in the King canon. Initially conceived as a short story, and written at a time when King had no idea if he’d be able to carve a career as a novelist (despite his short stories proving to be a steady source of income) it’s far more restrained and disciplined that most of his works. There is still extensive background detail provided for many characters, but it comes as exactly that: background, as opposed to the veritable biographies that we will eventually get for characters that often survive no further than that very same chapter.

The inner voice motif is also very much present (through which mechanism King’s third-person narration frequently gives us direct glimpses into a character’s immediate train of thought).

This is only the second time I’ve read Carrie; the first being some decades ago when I was most likely in my late teens. Consequently, most of my memories of the story come from the excellent Brian de Palma film adaptation, so there was some extra fun to be had here in picking out where the film and novel differ. While there are numerous divergences, I’d say the main thing I noticed was the character of Carrie herself. The film, quite naturally, wants to play up the horror aspect so we eventually get to Carrie as a scorned and vengeful spirit. The book, of course, ends up in the same place but there’s far more tragedy to it. We get a far better picture of a young girl just starting to understand her place in the world, and in the earliest stages of assert her own identity—before being irrevocably swept down a different path.

I read this one over five nights (which, despite its brevity, is good progress for me). One of my goals in returning to paperback books was the hope of rediscovering that very physical impulse of not wanting to put a book down (while obviously not wanting to succumb to that impulse for risk if inviting a night of insomnia). Carrie makes this fairly easy by not being broken down into chapters, though its semi-epistolary structure does offer frequent breaking-off points. The biggest joy was getting to bed and actively wanting to put my screen away so I could pick up my book instead and start reading.

Next up: Salem’s Lot.

Revisiting King

A recent bout of insomnia (fortunately now on the wane, dear reader) has prompted me to reconsider my bedtime routine. For the last few years that routine has more or less involved going to bed at a reasonable hour, grabbing my iPad, catching up on a few blogs—and then sometimes, or sometimes not, switching to whichever app my current book format demanded, and reading a book.

Now, any guide to good sleep hygiene will be pretty consistent in telling us that screens at bedtime are a big no-no. Given that I am now mortally afraid of a repeat visit from the insomnia demon, I have inevitably been giving some thought to giving myself the best chance of a good night’s sleep. And so I’ve decided that it’s time to put the screen away and start reading real books once again.

Something else I’ve struggled with over the best part of the last decade is my reading discipline. We are all so easily distracted these days (and taking my iPad to bed makes it all too easy to dip into that primary source of distraction: the internet). Removing the screen will solve some of the problem, but part of my discipline issue stems from rarely jumping straight into a new book once I’ve finished my current one (mostly because I don’t always have my next read picked out). This gives me ample chance to slip back into bad habits and, before you know it, it’s been another month since I’ve ready anything that wasn’t published on a website.

The solution to a lot of these woes came as I was considering a reread of Stephen King’s The Stand (obviously, in the wake of having watched the fairly decent recent TV adaptation). I’ve read The Stand at least three times already, but I found myself a bit hesitant as some of my recent attempts to reread King favourites have stalled: I got about halfway through It on the last attempt, and abandoned The Shining at about 80 per cent through (both being books that I have read, enjoyed, and completed in the past).

So I thought to myself: why not build up to it? Why not start at the beginning? And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: read every Stephen King novel (and probably the short story and novella collections too) in order starting from Carrie. A lot of his earlier books proved to be favourites when I was growing up, and have had a huge influence on my own writing, so I find myself quite excited about revisiting them with my adult eyes, and also seeing how his writing style evolves over the many decades of his career. I’m also excited to visit several of his books for the first time.

I’m not setting a timeframe for this, and I’m not planning to exclusively read King novels, but let’s see how I go. 

Wish me luck.

Every Stephen King novel
Probably not every single novel .. but maybe …?

The Books

In the interests of keeping up momentum, I have decided to skip: the short story collections (although I do love me a King short story); the Dark Tower books (which I expect I will want to go back and discover once this project is done); and the Bachman Books. I will probably still include the novella collections (mostly cos I can’t go past the chance of giving Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption or The Body another read).

#interesting – Saxophone

Today I discovered that the saxophone is banned by the Vatican, which is a delightfully random and utterly useless piece of knowledge. Strictly speaking, the saxophone was banned by Pope Pius X in 1903 (to avoid the temptation of churchgoers indulging in sexydancing, or something or other) and the ban has never formally been repealed. What might happen if you were to turn up in Vatican City with a saxophone I do not know.

The saxophone was also banned by the Nazis as a tool of ‘degenerate’ art due to its popularity with black jazz musicians (but mainly due to the Nazis being irredeemable walking piles of crap). Not to be outdone, Stalin also banned the saxophone due to its links with jazz, but in this instance it was because he viewed jazz as “the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture” (i.e. he hated all americans, not just the black ones … though I expect Hitler wasn’t too fond of americans either after they beat him).

Knowing all this gives me newfound respect for the sax.

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

#interesting – Contact

If you’re a fan of science fiction movies then you’ve hopefully seen Contact. And, if you’ve seen Contact you’ll remember The Machine, which has one of the more striking designs seen in the film (unsurprising, since the film generally relies on existing real-life locations and technology to preserve its sense of realism).

Turns out The Machine was not an original design for Contact, but is based on an unused concept (by Steve Burg) for Terminator 2, in which we would have finally seen the time displacement machine that sends our heroes and villains back in time.

Once you note the way time travellers in the Terminator movies tend to arrive in spheres of lightning; and travellers in The Machine sit inside a spherical pod it all seems rather obvious …

Why waste a good design, eh?

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

#interesting – Chaka Khan

Chaka Khan, arguably best known for her Prince-penned hit single I Feel For You (but who has a celebrated career spanning half a century) is the voice you can hear in the chorus of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love (arguably giving us a glimpse of how compelling this very whitest of MOR hits could potentially sound). Once you hear her, you can’t imagine how you never recognised her voice in the first place.

More interesting that that, however, is the fact that another iconic MOR hit—Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love—was originally intended to be a duet with Chaka Khan. It’s hard to imagine how Addicted To Love could be improved, mostly because it’s so indelibly etched in commercial music history, but I suspect we’ve been deprived of something even more remarkable here.

(I’ve picked up a lot of really interesting factoids reading through Tom Breihan’s very excellent Number Ones series, in which he has pledged to write a post on every single song that has reached number one on the Billboard chart. I highly recommend bookmarking it for a rainy day (or several.)

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

2020: Week 52

(December 28 – 2021)

The end of the year. The start of 2021. We actually made it! It would take a whole website to adequately sum up 2020, and all the thoughts and feelings within, but I’m at least grateful that things in my neck of the woods are far better than I could have ever expected them to be when everything started changing back in Feb/March.

This is usually the time of year when I think about how the format of my blog is going to work for the following year. While I enjoy these weekly posts, I’m less and less driven to do them as the year goes on—I certainly don’t schedule time to write them, they just happen when I feel like it. Consequently, I think it’s time to move away from the weekly post. I still want this blog to focus on my writing, however, so maybe what I’ll try is writing a post whenever I wrap up a writing project—either a new story, or a chapter in the novel.

There’s also something else I want to do. Something that’s bugged me is that I have a terrible memory for trivia (I have a terrible memory for many things, but tiny nuggets of random info have a particular habit of falling through the sieve). So, in a bid to improve that I’m going to take a note every time I find myself thinking ‘ooh, that’s interesting’ and I will then share those random snippets with you as we go. I may just do them as separate tiny blog posts, or I may append them to the main posts. Let’s see …

2020: Week 51

(December 21 – 27)

It is the week of Christmas which means a few things. It means no work for starters. I always enjoy this period of the year: a chance to zone out and mentally reset … and also to catch up with various odd jobs around the house (mostly tidying and sorting).

In theory there should be plenty of time for writing, but in practice the lack of routine, the need to prepare for christmas, and the drive to strike things off my household to-do list means that writing takes a back seat.

I have committed myself to focusing on the novel as my main writing project. While I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore, I do intend to finish this one off in 2021. I’m currently working on the opening to chapter two and, in a familiar refrain, it’s needing a lot of surgery. At this point the characters are better defined than they were in chapter one, but there’s huge icebergs of exposition that I need to carve up and rearrange a bit more elegantly. This has required going back and forth over the first quarter of chapter two several times … but I think it’s been worth it, and I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can move onto the rest of chapter two.

2020: Week 50

(December 14 – 20)

I managed to finish my Christmas story and I’m pretty darned pleased with it too. It may be just a slight trifle of a tale, but I got a bit more substance in there than simply a monster hiding in a child’s room. The plan now is to promote my previous christmas tales and then publish this new one on or before Christmas Eve.

I’ve decided to continue using Medium for now. It has a nice, easy to use interface, I get stats telling me how many people have looked at vs read my stories, and I’m able to publish my stories under my ‘Slightly Odd Tales’ strand.

I still have one of my christmas stories on Vocal (dot media) and I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ve already deleted the other one (which had barely any views). This was the story I recently did an edit on, but it turns out Vocal does not let you edit stories once they’re published, which is a big no-no given my propensity for leaving typos (aka easter eggs) in stories for my readers to find. Furthermore, I couldn’t even delete the damn thing without having to email the folk at Vocal first and waiting several hours for them to come back to me. It’s a nice enough platform, but I need full control over my content.

I have also been continuing to revisit the novel. I’m up to chapter 2 now, which is needing even more invasive surgery than the first chapter. The latest section in particular has taken on the semblance of a jigsaw: I’ve separated out the various scenes (and by scenes I mostly mean dialogue exchanges which convey a distinct aspect of plot or character) and am currently working out how to make them fit together, and which pieces belong in a completely different part of the story altogether.

Most people, of course, would do this sort of thing before actually writing the novel. However, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough you’ll recall that I took a hybrid approach to this one: I went in with an overall plot for each chapter, but left enough room in for the story and characters to find their own way. I think it’s paid off in the wild and crazy tangents this tale has taken, and tidying up these inconsistencies was always going to be part of the deal.

Who knows: maybe I’ll finish the damn thing next year!

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