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Six Stories |
...luckey you!...
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Six Stories |
In an essay entitled "The Politics of Limited Editions," King stated he believed the only true limiteds are those which are unavailable anywhere else. With the advent of The Dark Tower books being released by Plume and thus mass-marketed, no "true" Stephen King limiteds existed. That all changed April 20th, 1997. That was when King published Six Stories a collection, aptly, of six stories, all recent and all uncollected in a King collection. Two -- "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" and "The Man in the Black Suit" -- had won prestigious awards (the former won The Bram Stoker award, the latter, The O. Henry award). But what else holds these tales together?
All six are very bizarre. Half of them have no concrete endings, similar to the earlier uncollected tale "The Reploids." Events in all these stories happen seemingly at random, and usually without reason. Sometimes this is frustrating, but more often it's intriguing. The questions of what these characters do after the stories stop are open to debate, which makes them even more thought-provoking.
On a personal note: I recieved Six Stories one day before work, and I didn't want to take it with me. I got home at 9:30 PM and picked up the book. At about 12:30, I looked up and I was 174 pages through it, my eyes pulsing. The book is only 197 pages long. I left the rest until the next morning -- this morning.
Why don't we go on with individual critiques?
A surreal, insane little story, "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" is an excercise in lunacy. It starts off sadly, yet normally. A man named Steve Davis comes home to find his wife gone and a Dear John note on the table. He goes through a stage of depression, and abruptly decides to quit smoking. Her lawyer contacts him and sets up a lunch date -- one, which it turns out, his lawyer won't be able to attend. Waiting to go into the Gotham Cafe, he buys an umbrella he doesn't need. Then, he enters.
That's when the fun begins.
The maitre d' appears disheveled, his tie askew and a strange dried-blood stain on his shirt. After he brings Davis to his table to meet Diane and her lawyer Humboldt, he goes insane. Shouting at the top of his lungs ("YOU CAN'T BRING THAT DOG IN HERE! EEEEEEEE!"), he proceeds to hack up Humboldt. Davis takes his ex-wife and runs. The maitre d' continues screaming about a dog and its incessant barking as he chases Steve and Diane into the kitchen, wounding a chef nearly mortally. The two barely escape, but Steve gets the idea that Diane wanted him to die at the hands of Guy the maitre d'. He says incredulously "I saved your life!" She replies, "No, you didn't."
In the face of such behavior after the preceeding insanity, Steve begins to wonder how the maire d' went insane. He imagines a dog across from Guy's apartment, barking to no end. He compares it to his situation with Diane, and begins to say, softly: "Eeeeeee. Eeeeeeee. Eeeeeee."
This is how the story ends, Steve tumbling helplessly into associative insanity. It's a strange little peice of fiction, well written and well characterized. Still, the ending leaves one feeling empty, and Diane's bizarre behavior seems a little unreal. Other than these minor flaws, this is a good story, especially when coupled with the next, "L.T.'s Theory of Pets."
"If your dog and your cat are getting along better than you and your wife you better expect to come home some night and find a Dear John note on your refigerator door."
This is L.T.'s theory of pets, and it's a true one. L.T.'s wife leaves him one day in the described manner, not because she doesn't love him, but because she has to move on. L.T. is famous for telling the story of their unraveling marriage, likening them to their pets: Frank, a Jack Russel terrier who belongs to his wife, and Lucy, a Siamese cat who belongs to him. The pets become representative to what each spouse wants from one another. L.T.'s admittedly amusing story doesn't continue to the fact that Lulu disappeared after she left him. He tries to tell himself that she has become a singer in Vegas, or, worse, a prostitute. But that is better than what he (and the narrator, L.T.'s friend) really suspects: a serial killer known as the Axe Man has killed her. Her car was found with her dog Frank's blood and bones in it, but Lulu was missing.
One of the stories here with a nonconclusive ending, "L.T." is still a formative story. L.T. is a great narrator, funny and insightful, but we also see the side of him that cannot joke about his wife's disappearance. I'd like to see a conclusion to this, but maybe it's better left in our imagination.
LT's Theory of Pets
Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall in London
Released July 2001 on CD and cassette
$15.00 / Approximately 1 hr long
Listening to the live recording of LT’s Theory of Pets is, at first, a bit disconcerting. I’ve been listening to audiobooks read by King for nearly a decade now (my first – and arguably my favorite – was The Drawing of the Three), and never before has he had a live audience in the background, reacting to what he’s saying. The first time I heard the audience laughing at something King had said, I jumped a little. Aren’t these supposed to by my reactions, alone?
But as I listened, something strange happened. The laughing and clapping became less a distraction, and more a welcome surprise. As I trotted down the street to work or headed home from the train station one day, there was the full audience in my head, enjoying this reading as much as I was. The feeling became communal, in a way, as if I was somehow sitting in one of the seats at the Royal Festival Hall in London, watching Stephen King read from the podium.
When I first read this little tale in Six Stories lo those many years ago, it wasn’t one of my favorites. The humor in the story made me smile – King rarely fails to get a chuckle out of me – but this was at a time when I felt that King was trying to write in other genres and felt himself dragged helplessly back into horror. Yes, I know, I was like one of those mainstream critics who bemoan, “We know you can write quality work, Mr. King, so why do you keep slumming?” I forgot the old King adage: Why do I assume he has a choice?
Either I’ve risen above the jading (as I think I may have; I’m more into King right now than I have been in the last four years), or the audio of LT’s Theory of Pets simply made me appreciate the story more. This has happened twice in the past, with Needful Things and The Gunslinger – stories I didn’t much care for at first, but whose audio versions made me fall in love. With LT now a part of my audio collection, I can definitely see myself bringing it down off the shelf everytime I need a laugh … or a scare.
Darlene Pullen is down on her luck. She is a motel chambermaid who wants to get braces for her daughter and a Sega system for her son. The last straw in her day is finding a tip in her envelope in room #322. The tip is a single quarter, and a note that goes with it:
"This is a luckey quarter! It's true! Luckey you!"
Angry and a little hysterical, she takes the quarter to a slot machine in the lobby of the motel. Unbelievably, she hits the jackpot -- eighteen dollars. She takes these earnings and goes to a local casino. She keeps winning, but feels it's somehow wrong. The more she wins, the more the "luckey quarter" stays with her. As she is about to place her highest bet, she shakes out of her daydream. Her children Patsy and Paul stand there, waiting for Mom to get off of work. Paul is sick again. Darlene hands him the luckey quarter and he puts in the slot machine. She knows, with dull horror, that everything will happen to him just as she dreamed it. She will be rich, but she won't be free of the quarter.
Little is made of the reasons why losing the quarter is so important. Once again, King's characterization is astounding. Darlene Pullen is the only female main character in Six Stories, and she is reminiscant of both the maid (can't remember her name now) in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes story "Dedication" and of Dolores Claiborne herself. But the story, though fun and a little exciting, is ultimately confusing. And what's with the spelling?
The best story of the six, "Autopsy Room Four" is a terrifying trip through the mind of someone who may or may not be dead. The narrator, Howard Cottrell, is wheeled into Autopsy Room 4 in Derry, (!) Maine. He's been pronounced dead as result of a heart attack on the golf course by one of his doctor friends. Howard tries to breathe hard enough for someone to notice he's not dead, tries to hum so they will hear him, but the autopsy doctors have turned on The Rolling Stones full blast. Panicked, he begins to believe that he really may be dead. Then, he remembers the snake on the golf course. The snake in the rough.
Just as Doctor Kate Allen and her assistant Pete (who is inexperianced, making Howard his first clumsy autopsy) are about to cut into him, and intern named Rust bursts in with news that another doctor has been bitten by the same rare snake, and Cottrell is not really dead. It should be a cop-out ending, but is not, and the last scene sets up for the major joke of the afterward.
"Autopsy Room Four" really freaked me out. It is linked, thematically, to the last story "The Man in the Black Suit," about a fatal bee sting, and has the Viet Nam undertones of "Blind Willie," but this is really its own story. Tense, disturbing, and really, really FREAKY, probably King's best short story in five years.
At first, this seems to be a variation on Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but "Blind Willie" swiftly swerves from that comparison. It is the tale of a man named Bill Teale who pretends to be a businessman. He has an office with three heavy locks on the door. He crawls through a trapdoor in the cieling and enters another office, in which he dons a disguise, changing himself into who the people on this floor know as Willie Teal. After a brief foray into one of a half dozen hotel bathrooms around New York, he becomes Blind Willie, a homeless vet who stands by a streetcorner and begs money.
Willie pays off an officer named Jasper Wheelock to keep the corner, and brings in around three thousand dollars a day. The bills he keeps, the change he gives to local churches. But Wheelock has become suspicious, and threatens to follow Willie one night to find out "who he becomes." As he changes back to Bill, Willie/Bill thinks that he should maybe follow Wheelock some night. And fix his problem.
This is where the story ends, and that's not the only problem with it. Not only does the tale end as if it were the first chapter in a novel, but we are not really made aware of Bill's motivation. We are told he was in Viet Nam, but not how that lead him to standing on a streetcorner daily, panhandling. Maybe that doesn't really matter much, but the end also has us wondering: Does he really want to kill Wheelock for wanting to expose him? What's his motivation for that?
It's a great story, don't get me wrong. The changes from high-powered executive to heating/cooling repairman to homeless veteran is astounding, and King's insight into the homeless mind are intriguing. What is lacking here is a sense of purpose. With a few sentances, perhaps we could understand Willie/Bill's character better, even with the open ending.
Note: This story was later included and heavily revised in King's longer work, Hearts in Atlantis. All the changes King made to the story work in its favor; "Blind Willie" fits in much better in that volume than it does here, providing needed motivation and, thankfully, closure.
This is the story which won the prestigious O. Henry Award, the award for the best magazine-published short story of the year. It deserves it, although I feel a little sad for some earlier stories that also deserved it, but didn't get it.
Of the six stories, this seems the most like a "typical King" story. Most of it takes place in Castle Rock and the Kashwakamack township is mentioned often. It's a story of a boy in the nineteen-twenties who, the previous year, lost his brother to a fatal bee sting. At the time of the story, the boy (named Gary) goes up to Castle Stream to fish, and comes across a man with blazing orange eyes wearing a black suit. Gary comes to the conclusion that this is devil, and is so terrified that he wets his pants. The man in the black suit tells him that a bee has gotten his mother, too, and that he will take Gary away from that sorrow by eating him.
This horror show is too much for Gary, and he throws a gigantic fish he caught at the man, who gobbles it down. This distraction frees Gary enough to run away.
Gary wins the short but scary chase, and when he returns home he discovers that his mother isn't dead. The devil is a Master of Lies.
Years later, at eighty years of age, Gary is looking back on this memory, still scared. In "Sun Dog"-like style, he wonders if the Man in the Black Suit is still hungry.
It is a fast and scary way to end the book, a slam-bang finish with enough resolution to make the collection entirely satisfying. Its protagonist recalls Paul Edgecombe of The Green Mile in both his age and his slow, cautious speech.
One of the best stories here, "The Man in the Black Suit" is well worth the award it recieved, and reccomended.
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I got to the library (where I check my e?mail when I have to work that day; the trip to VW is a long one) at about 12:05. Sat down to read the newest SKEMER letter. AT the very beginning was a note from Dave Hinchberger, saying
A new Philtrum Press book is in the works, to be shipped in April. It contains (aptly) six stories by Stephen King (!), two of which are previously unpublished and three of which I've never seen before. The titles (as I remember them) are: "Autopsty?4," "P.L.'s Theory of Pets," "Blind Willie," "The Man in the Black Suit," "Luckey Quarter," and "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe". It's being done by Philtrum Press, King's own publishing company, which hasn't done one of King's books since the limited Eyes of the Dragon. There are going to be 1, 000 copies printed, 900 available for sale. Each copy is signed by Stephen King, and because it's Philtrum, I'm sure it will be nicely designed.
It's being put out for the low low low price of $80, plus $10 shipping and handling.
Now, as I was reading Dave wax melodic about the book, I was thinking, "Well I suppose I could afford maybe $200, if I'm very careful to put money back in the bank for my trips." Then, I saw the staggeringly low price. $90! I thought, and leapt from my chair at the library. I ran across the lawn, through the drizzling February rain, to the gigantic Citizen's Bank across the street from the bus depot. I walked in, and remembered I left my passbook at home. Hoping against hope, I approached the teller, and asked if I could possibly maybe get $90 from my account put into a money order. After some consulting, she was able to do it (!). Yey!
So (this is where Kevin gets pathetic), I'm filling out the envelope, and I realize I don't have a stamp. I go back to the teller and ask her (sheepishly) if I could possibly take 50¢ more out to buy a stamp. (This is probably my most embarrassing social moment.) She says, "Oh, for heaven's sake! I'll just give you a stamp." And she does. And I mail it.
I'M GETTING A NEW STEPHEN KING BOOK IN 2 MONTHS!!!
Okay, I'm so excited. So, I get to work, and I call my friend Rich in Minnesota to chat about it with him. He knows about it, and is trying to get it through his favorite publisher, Mark Ziesing, who did Insomnia in limited. Rich collects all the Ziesing stuff.