Regarding Secret Window

[cleolinda]

I just posted this on my weblog, but I figure I'll actually get more discussion out of it by posting it here.

All right. I've always liked Stephen King's short story collections better than his novels, for some reason. And I know I've read Four Past Midnight, because I read "The Sun Dog" first--the one about the Polaroid camera, right? With the dog that got closer in each picture? And I remember "The Library Policeman" pretty vividly because it freaked my shit out. Bad. And everyone knows "The Langoliers" because of that awful TV movie. But "Secret Window, Secret Garden"? I don't remember that story at all. At. All. I don't own the book--I borrowed it from my aunt--so I only read the book once, which may have something to do with it. But I even went and read the movie spoiler and I still don't remember it. Which is so weird.

But as I was writing this on my blog, I got sidetracked thinking about all the things in the King oeuvre that freak me out. And you know what? Generally speaking, it's not the gore. It's the completely weird bizarro shit that gets me. Like the thing in "The Library Policeman." That's up there with that really weird dream sequence in "Apt Pupil," which was one of my favorite King stories. The story that freaks me out the worst, though, is "It Grows on You," mostly because I have no idea what the hell that story is about. King keeps talking about this freaky couple that lives in this monstrous house--and you know, now that I've read some Lovecraft, I think there's something very Lovecraftian about that house, the way the angles seem wrong, and the alleged occupants of that house. And he talks about the normal people who live in the town. And he keeps skirting around--something. I don't know what. Most of his stories have such a sense of poetic justice that, even when he won't say exactly what happened, you're like, "Oh, the truck the guy killed his brother with totally came and drowned him in motor oil during the night decades later. No, I don't know how either. But that's totally what happened." So it's weird to just have one of the normal characters die in his sleep at the end of the story and that just be it. I keep thinking--he's trying to tell me something, he's trying to express something more profound than "What the fuck?," but I can't figure out what it is. And the weird thing is, he has stories in, say, Night Shift that are probably equally cryptic, like "Night Surf," but I feel like I "get" those.

Oh, and he wrote a story about a psycho milkman. Maybe two stories. I don't get the psycho milkman, either, or if there's anything to "get" at all.

Comments

[brassyn.livejournal.com]

The Library Policeman is terrifying! Remember reading that on a train (I used to commute) and being utterly engrossed and freaked out.
I completely agree about the non-gorey aspects being the most exciting: it's the unexplainable and the downright weirdness. I don't find it in his later works but his earlier stuff always entranced me because I could just never guess what was coming. His short stories/novellas especially are something to behold. I'm poor at explaining why but it's just that feeling, not of wrongness but of something, something un-natural that just made me unable to stop reading. I single out the short stories because there's (deliberately) less room for explanation, things just are.

I had to check the imdb description for Secret Window because I didn't remember it either. Having read that it is familiar but I can't remember how it ends - I just know that I've read it. I have the book somewhere I'm sure so I might have a re-read. I didn't realise the film was based on a Stephen King story which I feel rather foolish about now.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I think I knew it was based on King if only because of the Digest, and every single article I saw would mention King somewhere near the bottom, at least. But even I was shocked when I was at Barnes & Noble earlier this week and saw Four Past Midnight with the Johnny Depp cover. "Holy shit, I've READ THAT BOOK! Why don't I remember that story?"

I don't own it, though. Which means I may be in the market for something with a nice cover...

Seriously, though. I want someone to explain to me what the fuck is going on in "It Grows on You," because that story freaks my shit out. Like, I really like the not-telling-of-things in stories like "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" or "Mirror Image," but... (shudder).

[malenky-devil.livejournal.com]

The only Stephen King book I've read is Carrie and even then I didn't finish it because I lost it and then somebody turned it into the library. Though I do understand that much of what he writes is creepy (we've talked about the book version of It in the "TV moments that have scarred you for life thread). I have, however, been wanting to read Lovecraft for a while. I've been eyeing his books each time I pass them in the store.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft is awesome, if a bit repetitive. I mean, it's always some youngish wannabe scientist who stumbles across something freakish and just won't leave well enough alone, and then something Unspeakably Monstrous from the Eldritch Dimension of Geometrically Incorrect Shapes comes and possesses his body and/or wreaks havoc on everything he holds dear IA IA PHTAGN!

But you can't beat him for freaky atmosphere, I tell you what. In fact, he reads a lot like a precursor to King's short stories, particularly since they both tend to set their stories in New England.

Also, this cracks my shit up: "Cthulhu for President! Why Vote for a Lesser Evil?" (http://www.cthulhu.org/)