I’ve grown up on Stephen King’s writing. It all started with a book report. As a lonely kid with no real friends at first, I felt pretty lost in life. I didn’t have a favorite band, never read a single issue of Tiger Beat, and fashion was a foreign language to me (I wore sweatshirts with kittens in hot air balloons on them until middle school). I can’t remember how old I was when my teacher assigned me my first book report, but I know I was young. Young enough that when I went to my mother’s bookshelf and grabbed a book at random, I didn’t know what I was in for. My mother loved to read horror and I distinctly remember her paperbacks from Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft. The book I had chosen to read and write up was Stephen King’s Thinner.
I got some interesting looks from my teacher that year.
The thing that strikes me about King’s work is that his horror is so familiar. Not in the sense that I’ve read everything he’s ever published, but in the way that your imagination ruminates on certain things in spite of your desire not to. King’s style is that creeping dread you feel as you pick up the knife to chop carrots. You try to be careful, holding the carrots the way you see the chefs on TV do, keeping your fingertips tucked, but your mind fills in the blanks. You know how it will feel. That moment the blade will sink into the meat of your finger, you can see it in your mind. Your treasonous brain takes you through the agonizing details that it has conjured up to show you just how awful it could be if your control slipped for just one moment. By the time you are done, the carrots are cut and your heart is racing a little and you are chiding yourself for that momentary fear. That fear that is ingrained in your heart, so commonplace as to be almost dismissable, is what King weaves through his narratives.
Full Dark, No Stars cut me down to the bone. The four short novellas contained within don’t really dip too far into the supernatural. Instead King focuses on the human element. What we do when the shadows grow long and we think no one could possibly be watching. King holds up a mirror to the dark feelings within you and the horror comes from how relatable some of these characters are despite the abominable things they do.
Take Wilfred James of “1922” (the first story in the book). Wilfred’s story is a tragedy born of a desire to preserve his way of life. His wife owns 100 acres of their farm and wants to sell it for a large sum of money to an interested company. She dreams of a better life for herself and her son and is damned if her stubborn husband is going to stop her. As they fight over the impending sale, Wilfred becomes convinced that he must murder his wife to save that farm. Convincing his son to help him, Wilfred enacts his terrible plan and things go a bit Edgar Allan Poe from there, but where many authors might be content to plague their murderous characters with ghosts of their victims, much of what Wilfred deals with are the consequences of his actions. King guides us through the very logical steps that Wilfred takes trying to cover up the murder; holding our hands and pointing as if to say “That’s what you would do if you’d killed her, right?”.
While Wilfred does reprehensible things to the people around him, because we are trapped in his head, we feel his misery and pain. Something within me felt pity for the man at times and I had to remind myself that this was a killer who deserved some justice, but it didn’t make the story any easier to read.
That is the path that all of the stories in Full Dark, No Stars take. Big Driver is a brutal story of a rape victim’s path to vengence. Fair Extension faces us with pure, unadulterated jealousy at its’ worst. The last story, A Good Marriage puts us in the shoes of a woman who suddenly learns her husband of 27 years is a serial killer.
Each story was a gut punch and at times I questioned if I wanted to stop, but King’s talent is the ability to keep you reading on; trudging down the the loneliest roads in the starless night knowing that something bad, really bad, is keeping pace with you just out of sight. Full Dark, No Stars is hard to read and even harder to put down.
Comments are closed.