A No-Spoilers Take on The Life of Chuck

By

Scott D. Parker

I work in marketing. Glad I wasn’t on the marketing team for The Life of Chuck. I mean how do you market a film arguably best viewed knowing nothing going in?

A week or so ago, Mark Hamill, who stars in the movie, was on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They chatted up his role in the film, but then Hamill did the thing that must have frustrated the marketing team. He encouraged movie goers not to watch the trailer. Don’t read reviews. Just go in cold and experience the movie.

That’s what my wife and I did on opening night. All I really knew about the movie was that Stephen King wrote the novella (good), Mike Flanagan wrote and directed the movie (also good), and, based on the poster of Tom Hiddleston on the theater wall, there would be dancing.

I’m here to tell you that’s really all you need to know. Stephen King’s pedigree is gold at my house. If he’s involved, I give it a watch. When I found out that Mike Flanagan was the director and screenwriter, I was sure this was something special. Flanagan gave us The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, so he’s also become one of those filmmakers who always gets a look just because his name is attached.

What the pair have created with The Life of Chuck is nothing short of surprising. It is a story that delivers the warm fuzzies, but it also doesn’t shy away on the topic of death. It is an uplifting film that is sure to be drowned out by the summer blockbusters. To be honest, this should have been released in September because some of the film’s vibe is autumnal. The ending is quiet, with the credits just slowly fading on screen. The theater’s patrons were silent and unmoving for about a minute after the credits rolled. We just sat with our feelings, thinking.

I’ve told folks that, perhaps like The Shawshank Redemption, The Life of Chuck will become more popular as the years go on. I sure hope so because this is definitely a special film that you should take all opportunities to see, even if it’s later this year on streaming. 

Loose Thoughts on The Shining and Pet Sematary

 By Jay Stringer

I type this as I watch the director's cut of Doctor Sleep. I've never seen the theatrical cut, so I have no previous version to compare it to. But the film is wrapping itself around some thoughts I've had for a while. 

Based on the novel of the same name, it acts as both an adaptation of the book, and a sequel to the film version of The Shining. No mean feat, considering the Stanley Kubrick film diverted so far from the novel that Stephen King disowned it. 

I have my own complicated relationship to The Shining. I've long been drawn to stories of addiction, or seem to end up loving works by people who've struggled with it, including my great touchstones of the Replacements, Elmore Leonard, and Tom Waits. In High Fidelity we are asked the question, "did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?" And so King's book, and Kubrick's adaptation, are both things I've circled back to and tried to engage with.

But I always fail. 

I'm going to say something mean about a master here. Forgive me, I'll make up for it soon. (And hell, what's my opinion mean, in relation to him getting out of bed?) I find The Shining hammy. Silly. The moves are obvious. The subtext is text. It's just all a bit cartoony for my tastes. I'm in no place -as nobody else is, either- to judge how King battled his own demons, and he's been very vocal about the dark places he went to. But the book feels too shallow for my tastes, someone not yet really engaging with the problem. 

But -and here's where I start to make up for it- I think King told exactly the same story later, in a much better form. In one of the best forms ever set to page. 

Pet Sematary is a dark book. Nothing, not even hope, makes it out alive. I think it's possibly the best horror novel ever written, and a perfect distillation of the darkest moments of addiction. But more than that, I also read it as a reboot of The Shining. The Overlook Hotel was the practice ground, Danny's bike the training wheels. When King circled back and tackled the dark soil beyond the deadfall, he really told the truth. The sugar coating was ripped away. 

Both stories have main characters who are lying to themselves, their darker impulses spurred on by a pull to a literal bad place, a place that feeds on your mistakes, your fears, and your death. Jack Torrance is very much an alcoholic in The Shining, it's the text, the surface level that we're presented with on every page. Louis Creed doesn't have any great battle with the bottle. His darker self pulls at him from a different direction. And the lies he tells himself are masked in good intentions. He knows he's lying, when he promises not to take that little bundle to that place, and we know he's lying, and the dread comes in waiting for the truth to hit. He just keeps 'drinking.' 

Both books have a child who seems to have some form of second sight, some insight into the darker things, with Danny's shine and Ellie sensing the harm that comes to Church, and the harm about to befall Louis, Jud and Rachel. Both stories have someone racing to try and stop the inevitable - Halloran's race against the weather in The Shining and Rachel's race across country in Pet Sematary- being held back by the dark force throwing obstacles in their way. 

The most terrifying element of Pet Sematary is the way everyone is taken down when things fall apart. From the enabler, Jud, who realises too late that his own good intentions have have helped create a monster, to a family who are ripped apart. There's more hope to The Shining. The hotel burns. Three people make it out alive, and only the addict himself dies. King would return to that world later, of course, in Doctor Sleep, to play around with the legacy and trauma of Jack's fall, but in the book itself there is hope if you want to find it. You can choose to believe the cycle ends. Danny's powers -and his connection to Halloran- help him to survive. Pet Sematary gives you no such room. In fact, it takes a step back at the end, switching perspective to an outsider, a witness to everything that's happening, who almost feels himself pulled into the tragedy simply by being present. In the epilogue we see the cycle continues. The questions remain unanswered. And Ellie's own second sight contributes to the downfall, spurring her mother to head home to stop whatever is happening. 

Do we want hope? Of course we do. I lean towards thinking that's what art is. Moments of hope. Moments of connection. Moments of meaning. But every now and then, we stop to observe a simple truth. And we have to be honest with ourselves -just as the addictive voice tries to lie- about how far down you can fall. The simple, stripped-back, honesty of Pet Sematary is what makes it so chilling. It's also what elevates it, for my money, above The Shining. 

Two Observations on Storytelling: Stephen King and “Unforgotten”

By

Scott D. Parker

 

Two things struck me this week about the power of storytelling and the ability to weave a good tale. The first is not spoilerific—I haven’t finished the novel yet—while the second is very spoiler-heavy. Be warned.

Stephen King’s Billy Summers

I started King’s new novel this week. I’m listening to the audiobook from my local library via the awesome Libby app (y’all’ve got that app, right?). I was an avid reader of King’s novels from about 1987 (when I graduated from high school and entered college) all the way through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. If he wrote a book, I read it or listened to it.

Somewhen over the 2010s, however, I started slowing. He didn’t, but I did. Don’t really have a reason. It just happened. In fact, the last King book I can remember listening to was Joyland. 

When Billy Summers was published, I decided to give it a try. In the story, Billy Summers is a former sniper now hired killer. He poses as a writer and, knowing those folks who hired him are monitoring his activity on the MacBook they supplied him, Billy begins to write his memoirs.

As soon as I heard that, I rolled my eyes. “Yet another story within a story thing from Stephen King? Really?”

Really.

It’s a thing King has done more than once. It’s particularly effective in Misery, but there are other examples. In that book, the font changed to indicate the story-within-the-story. In the audio of Billy Summers, narrator Paul Sparks slightly changes his voice so you can tell what part of the novel you are listening to.

Being an audiobook, yes, I can fast-forward but I would have no way of knowing when the ‘autobiography’ part stopped and the ‘Billy Summers’ part began. So, I did what the author wanted me to do: I listened.

And dang if the story-within-the-story part became almost as compelling as the main novel. There are whole sections of the story-within-the-story and I found myself really getting into that part. Then it would stop and I’d be reminded about the main story.

As if anyone ever needed any more examples of how good a storyteller Stephen King is, I’ll go ahead and submit this one into evidence. Like his stories or not, think they might be too long or not, you cannot dispute Stephen King is a modern master of the writing craft. I have known that ever since I read my first King novel—Pet Semetary—but I just needed a reminder. I got one this week.

The Ending of Unforgotten, Season 4

[Spoilers, folks]

Here in American, Masterpiece aired episode 6, the finale of Unforgotten, season 4, last Sunday. I’ve written about this BBC series before (how season 4’s opening episode instantly grabbed me) but season 4 did a couple of remarkable things for me.

One involved actor Andy Nyman. Before Unforgotten, I only knew Nyman as the comedic actor he is in Death at a Funeral. He is hilarious in that 2007 Frank Oz film and it took a little bit of time in episode 1 not to think of that funny character every time he appeared on screen. 

But by the finale, I earned a whole new respect for his acting prowess. He was wonderful, nuanced, and my favorite actor outside of the core group.

Speaking of the core group, Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaska play partner who solve cold cases. I’ve written about how much they are a breath of fresh air in detective shows. They’re not raging alcoholics or any of the usual tropes we see in TV cop shows. They are just normal people doing a dirty job the best that they can. They respect each other, but there’s not a hint of “will they or won’t they?’ in their relationship. They are friends and partners who deeply care for a love one another.

So it came as quite a shock to my wife and I as we watched the final moments of episode 5 when Walker’s character, Cassie Stuart, was driving and someone broadsided her car. In the previews of episode 6, we saw her in a hospital bed and all the other characters reacting to the news. We looked at each other and, other than wondering which of the suspects did the deed, wondered how Cassie was going to recover.

Spoiler alert: she didn’t. The character died. 

For older shows (Unforgotten aired on the BBC earlier this year), I do not do any research while I’m watching for the first time. News items can ruin big things that way. So I had no way of knowing what was coming.

It’s not every day when a main character is killed off on a popular TV show. I don’t know the ins and outs of Walker’s contract or any behind-the-scenes stuff so I don’t know why she left. But her leaving enabled a show that features normal people doing a troubling job the opportunity to show how those same normal character deal with the death of a friend and partner and commanding officer. It was stellar. 

The director also made a nice storytelling technique as well: for almost the entire last episode, Walker only appeared in the hospital bed. Only toward the end did we get to see Cassie leave the voice mail her father listens to over and over again, giving us viewers one last look at a beloved character.

And we also got a moving soliloquy from Bhaska’s Sunny. Just as the shock of Cassie’s passing took my breath away, Sunny’s little speech opened the waterworks.

Great storytelling.

At the Starting Line

By Claire Booth

I’m beginning a new novel, which means that in addition to brainstorming plot ideas, I’m pulling out my starting-line resources.

These are a few things that I’ve found over the years that help me get fired up about the long writing road ahead. One is On Writing, by Stephen King. It’s one of my favorite books of all time, but now I limit myself to opening it only when I’m about to start a new project. It’s useful for many reasons. You hear from a master how he does it. And you hear that a writing career is hard and long. Which is a big boost psychologically as I confront a blank page. And then there are the little jewels throughout. One I came to as I was preparing to write this blog post:

King stopped for gas at a station with an attendant. While the guy was filling up his car, he wandered around the building and found a fast-moving stream. There were still patches of snow on the ground and he slipped, barely catching himself before sliding into the water and getting swept away. He thought about how long it would’ve taken anybody to notice he was missing and then how long before rescue personnel would find him. That morphed into an idea about a mysterious man who parks an old Buick in front of a rural gas station. That eventually became From a Buick 8. And that tells me that falling on your ass isn’t necessary a bad thing.

My other favorite reference is a list of points from a former Pixar storyboard artist. Emma Coats wrote a column about it for The Wall Street Journal a long time ago, and I cut it out immediately. A few of my favorites:

- “Give your characters opinions. Discount the first thing that comes to mind. And the second, third and fourth—get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

- “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.”

- And the one I always strive for and never manage to accomplish: “Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.”

Maybe I’ll be able to do it for this book—but don’t hold me to it.

The 3 Essential Principles of Storytelling

I’ve been actively pursuing a career in writing for more than a decade and have read countless books on writing. I’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules, and was a devotee of Lawrence Block’s column on fiction writing in Writer’s Digest.

Photo credit: Shelby Miller on Unsplash

In all that time, I’ve boiled down what I’ve learned into three general principles. The overarching idea is to keep the reader reading.

The reader wants to be entertained. If your story does that (and your reader is hoping it does), then you will reap the rewards.

But all too often, a writer will violate one of these three principles, and the reader gets pulled out of the story. They stop reading.

When that happens, they don’t leave glowing reviews. They don’t recommend it to their friends. And they don’t buy your next book.

So before you submit your book to your publisher, or hit publish on KDP, take time to ask whether your story passes muster on these three points.

Principle #1: Don’t bore the reader.

Life is short. There are too many great books out there for your reader to waste time on a boring story. So you better make damn sure your story isn’t boring.

Photo by Julian Howard on Unsplash

Elmore Leonard said he left out the parts that readers skipped over. He didn’t want to bore his readers. Which is why he would sometimes sum up bits of dialogue with a line of narration. Because maybe we already know what the characters would say.

If Raylan Givens tells a cop who just showed up on the scene what just happened, we don’t necessarily need to hear three pages of Raylan recounting what we already witnessed as readers.

So Elmore Leonard might instead just say, Raylan told Officer Jones what just happened, leaving out all the boring parts.

Info dumps also tend to be boring, especially in the middle of a scene. It’s like racing down the street and suddenly killing the engine for no reason. The action abruptly stops. The thrill is gone, baby. The reader tosses the book aside. Next!

Without giving the readers a full accounting of our character’s histories at the beginning of the book, we’re afraid we will pull the readers out of the story. But doing so can put readers in a coma.

The best way to fix this is by identifying the absolutely critical elements in the info dump, intersperse those bits into action and/or dialogue, then toss the rest. Because readers are smarter than you think. They are used to figuring things out from context. And what they don’t figure out right away can introduce a sense of intrigue that will keep them reading.

Also, look at how you describe characters. Does the reader need to know that the receptionist in the office has blond hair? Or is it more revealing that his clothes are rumpled? See what I just did there? You were assuming the receptionist was a woman, huh?

Describe characters in ways that reveal who they are, not just what they look like. Jim Butcher is especially good at this. He can tell you three things about a character, and you know as much about their personality or history as what they look like.

Okay, enough on this principle. You get the point. I don’t want to bore you.

Principle #2: Don’t insult the reader or their intelligence.

That whole thing about writing what you know? It's bull hockey! Well, to an extent.

It's okay to write about things you don't have personal experience with, provided you do the proper research. This applies to writing about space exploration, police procedures, and locations you've never visited.

One of my pet peeves are scenes where someone’s house has been broken into and the cop says, “The lock doesn’t appear to be picked. There are no scratches on the lock.”

Granted most people aren’t as familiar with lockpicking as I am (long story for another time). Thing is, unless a burglar is a complete klutz, they won't be scratching up the outside of the lock. The picks go INSIDE the cylinder.

If you don't want to look like a fool, do your research and have an expert in the field beta-read your story to check for glaring errors. Because readers will tell you when you screw up and ding you in reviews. Better to learn about it before it goes out to the world.

Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

The same goes for writing about marginalized communities of which you are not a member. As an outsider to that community, you are missing a lot of context—lingo, cultural references, and social taboos, just as an example.

So if you are writing about a transgender woman, do your freakin’ research on what it’s like to be transgender in this day and age. There are lots of YouTube channels from trans people who share what they face on a day-to-day basis.

I can’t count the number of poor representations of trans characters I’ve read or seen on the screen. Trans women stumbling around in heels or the trans hooker trope, that kind of crap. It just turns me off.

Once you’ve done your research and have written as authentic a character as you can, have a sensitivity reader take a look at it. Not only will they help you avoid alienating readers, but they will help you create a more nuanced, authentic character.

Principle #3: Don’t confuse your readers (at least not for too long)

It took me three or four episodes before I had any clue what was going on in the Netflix series Stranger Things. A lot of people quit watching after one episode because it was too confusing. Eventually, I caught on and fell madly in love with the show.

I also struggled quite a bit reading the first book in Jim Butcher’s Cinderspire series because the world was so different than what I could relate to. And I’m a big fan of his Dresden Files novels.

If you throw so much at your readers at once that they get completely confused, they will stop reading.

A little confusion is okay and can generate intriguing questions in the reader’s mind, propelling them through the story. But if you push it too far, they will toss the book aside. Readers don’t mind figuring things out from context, but don't make them do advanced calculus along the way.

I struggled with this a little bit with my outlaw biker series. There is a lot of lingo that is foreign and confusing to non-bikers. What’s a bitch seat? What does it mean to ride sweep? What’s a cut? What are twisties? What does it mean to scrape the pegs? I knew what they were because I'm a biker. But most of my readers are not.

So much of this is a balancing act. You don’t want to bore the readers or insult their intelligence by overexplaining things. At the same time, you don’t want them so confused that they throw your book at the wall in frustration. So how do you know where the happy medium is?

Get feedback from critique partners or beta-readers, especially people who may not be as versed as you are on the topic.

Final Thoughts and Parting Shots

Your book is a partnership between you, as the author, and the reader. Your goal is not only to tell a story, but to tell it in a way that keeps the reader reading. Because if they stop reading, they probably won't leave a review. They won't recommend it to their friends. And they won't buy or read your next book. So keep the readers reading. Follow these three principles.

---

As one of the few transgender authors in crime fiction, Dharma Kelleher writes gritty stories for misfits, oddballs, and eccentrics. 

She is the author of the Jinx Ballou bounty hunter series and the Shea Stevens outlaw biker series. You can learn more about Dharma and her work at https://dharmakelleher.com.

An Ode to the TBR

By Renee Asher Pickup

Ah, the TBR pile.

The digital age hasn't made it easier to get through that long list of "To Be Read" but it's made it a hell of a lot easier to grow it. My relationship with the TBR is a mix of excitement and horror - every time I open a new book I think of all the others left behind, waiting, collecting dust.

Here are some of the books that have been on my TBR list for too long.

It's been over ten years since I worked at Borders book store in Columbia, Maryland, which is where I first encountered STIFF, shelving books. I'd worked in the schoolhouse where the USMC and Army trained service members to retrieve casualties and done a few morgue visits, and an interest in death, dying, and bodies remained. Mary Roach has gone on to pen several other books I really want to read, and haven't actually gotten around to. 

As soon as I added the photo for this book I felt like I had to duck - the readers of Do Some Damage are very likely throwing rotten vegetables at me for skipping this one. If not, wait for this - I've never read ANY Ellroy (if I'm not here next week it's because I've been asked politely to leave). I don't know how something like this happens. I know I should read Ellroy. I actually really want to read Ellroy. My growing interest in true crime says - for chrissakes, woman, read Black Dahlia! Yet, here it sits in the TBR, under a book I borrowed so I really, really need to read it before I get to anything else.

I look at this book every day. It is on a shelf in the living room and I can't walk into that room without looking at this book and yet... Ed Brubaker doing a mix of crime noir and Lovecraftian horror, somehow isn't the first thing on the TBR. I went back and read Deadpool vs. The Marvel Universe but didn't read Fatale. This blog entry is starting to make me feel bad about my life choices.

In addition to never reading Ellroy, I also never watched Justified. Not on purpose, really, I just didn't. I'm a big Elmore Leonard fan, though, and according to Goodreads I'm "currently reading" Pronto. Except, I'm not. A few years ago I downloaded the Raylan novels to see what the fuss was about, and apparently had really high hopes for tearing through them without delay. I also seriously intended to watch Justified. The intricacies of Raylan Givens remain unknown to me.

I've been a huge Stephen King fan since I was ten years old, sneaking books off the shelf. I have a huge collection of first editions, promotional items, and other random book-nerd junk I'm really proud of. Somewhere along the way though, King stopped being an author I bought and read overnight and became an author with a spot saved on the TBR. 11/22/63 was the first King novel to go TBR, and each subsequent release has followed. It's like I don't even know who I am anymore.

This is just a small selection from my ever-growing TBR. If I were to combine the actual pile with the digital list, and look at it long enough - I'm sure the length of the resulting list would make me feel my mortality in a very real way. The "To-Be-Read" is like a pile of hopes for the future and failures yet-acknowledged. 

What's been in your TBR for too long?

Horripilation

By
John McFetridge

It means, “the erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear or excitement,” according to the dictionary feature of my iPad. I had to look it up as I was reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome . At first it seemed odd that I’d have to look up a fancy word for goosebumps in a Stephen King novel, usually he’s a master at getting across so much with the use of simple, everyday words, but after reading forty or fifty novels of his I don’t mind interrupting one for a trip to the dictionary. I know I’ll be right back to the book.

Most people I know have a Stephen King story about how they were affected by his books. Here’s mine.

It was the late 70’s and I was working as a night shift security guard in an office building in downtown Calgary. There were so many construction cranes in Calgary then people called them the official city bird. Almost everyday someone said, “This will be a great city when it’s finished.” The place was in such a hurry that the office building I worked in wasn’t even finished, half of the fourteen stories were still under construction, but the other half were already in use.


All I had to do was sit in the lobby from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am. I had a little desk, a chair and a phone. I guess if someone smashed the windows looking out onto 4th Street S.W. I was supposed to phone someone. And once a night I had to do my rounds; ride the elevator to the top floor, look around and then walk down the stairs, stopping to take a look around on each floor. Simple enough, and even kind of fun. The top couple of floors were finished and I could sit behind the big desk of what I figured must have been the president of the company and look out to the great view of the city and the Rocky Mountains to the west. I really liked the view of the city because there were so many buildings under construction that looked like giant skeletons of buildings. You could see right through one to another.

And the floors that were still under construction were just huge empty rooms with wires coming out of the ceiling and tools and equipment strewn on the floor wherever the workers seemed to drop them at the end of their shifts.

So, of course, for most of the night I just sat at my little desk in the lobby and read books.

One night I started to read The Stand.

A car crashes at a gas station in rural Texas and before I knew it there I was with Larry Underwood crawling over dead bodies and crashed cars trying to make it through the Lincoln Tunnel in the dark.

By the time I took my first look up out of the book it was a couple hours past the time I was supposed to do my rounds so I rushed to the elevator, rode to the top floor, walked down the hall, saw my reflection in the window, freaked out, ran back to the elevator in a panic and got in. But I didn’t push a button so the elevator didn’t move. Then, you know, I laughed at how silly I was for being so scared and pushed the button to open the door and walked back out onto the empty fourteenth floor.

But then I decided the fourteenth floor was probably just fine, and certainly the thirteenth was, too, so I went to the elevator and rode down to the twelfth floor where the elevator doors opened and I stepped out into the shadows of the dark unfinished room – wires hanging form the ceiling, tools scattered on the floor, some kind of scaffolding – and all around the outside walls the windows looked out on a city that had clearly been destroyed. The buildings all looked bombed out, skeletons of buildings, the streets were empty, no cars, no people, nothing.

And there were no sounds, the whole place was silent; the twelfth floor, the building, the city – for all I knew the whole world. I was in the middle of The Stand.

Holy crap, talk about horripiliation – all over my goddam body.

Then behind me the elevator door closed.

And let’s just say I took the stairs back to the lobby. In a bit of a hurry.

I grabbed The Stand and slammed it into the desk drawer and swore I’d never to look at it again.

Of course, a few minutes later I just had to get the book out and start reading it again. I had to know what happened next.


But I never did do rounds of the building again. I got fired a few months later for letting a homeless guy sleep on the couch of the company on the third floor and forgetting about him when I left in the morning, but that’s a different story.

What’s your Stephen King story?

Stephen King

by
John McFetridge

This week I'm on a family vacation and tonight we're stopping in Maine so that makes me think of Stephen King -- and Patrick Shawn Bagley, but mostly Stephen King.

I haven't read every Stephen King novel but I've read a lot of them and I really like them. When we talk about writing we always say it's really about the characters and Stephen King gets into the hearts and souls of more characters than any other writer. And these are characters I can relate to, characters we might call, "everday." When the world ends in a Stephen King novel the survivors are never black belt, super secret assasins who've been in deep cover, they're a nerdy kid with pimples and a truck driver and a waitress.

As we drove through Maine today my wife and I were telling our two sons the story of The Stand but then I told them the story of when I first read The Stand.

It was the late 70's and I was working as a night shift security guard in an office building in Calgary (I was very young, like a six year old secuirty guard, really, someone should have called a social worker). I clocked in at 11pm and was the only person in the building until 7am. So one night I arrived and sat at my desk in the quiet lobby and started reading The Stand. On the first page the car crashes at the garage and the virus is let loose. By three o'clock in the morning when I was supposed to do my rounds of the empty building most of the people in the world had died and the survivors were moving west.

I put the book down and walked through the lobby, my footsteps echoing like they nevr had before and I pressed the button for the elevator. Of course the damned thing was already on the main floor so the bell rang right away and I just about dropped a load. The doors opened and I got on the elevator. I rode up to the top floor. I was supposed to get off the elevator and check every floor but the top couple floors of the building were still being finished and looked like the constuction site they were. Or, they looked as if they'd been trashed.

And from the elevator I could see all the way out the windows and at that time Calgary was going through one of its boom periods and was very much a work in progress. There were a dozen half-built highrises and a dozen more like the one I was working in that were half-filled. So the whole city looked half-built.

Or half destroyed.

I decided the the whole building was fine and rode the elevator straight down to the lobby.

In fact, for the next month I decided the building was fine and never left the lobby.

Right up until the day I left at 7am and got called by my boss a couple hours later wanting to know why I didn't know a homeless guy was sleeping on the couch in the lobby of a law firm. Apparently he'd been in the bathroom when the building closed and he made himself at home.

It was time I looked for another job anyway.

That effect Stephen King has on readers is why he's a great writer.

So, anyone else care to share a story about reading Stephen King?

The Horror of it all

I love Stephen King.

During about a six month stretch in late '01, early '02, I read IT, MISERY, THE SHINING, THE DARK HALF, THE GREEN MILE, ON WRITING, BAG OF BONES and probably a few others. And all of them were great. Each had moments that really struck me, whether it's his comments on writing in MISERY and THE DARK HALF or his utmost creepy moments in IT and THE SHINING.

Very rarely am I freaked out reading a book. King has been able to do that to me several times.

In the last month, I tried to read THE STAND.

And I couldn't finish it.

And it made me think about what freaks me out in a book. And for the most part, it's the little things. Whether it's Pennywise in the sewer in IT or a father turned bad in THE SHINING, the small horrors scare me the most.

I think it's because the little things seem plausible. I can imagine someone snapping at a moments notice and trying to kill a family. I can actually imagine someone grabbing a person's leg through a sewer grate. Those details stick with me.

In fact, I was compelled by the first 300 pages of the THE STAND. I believed in the Captain Trips' superflu. But beyond that the book started to get too big for me. I couldn't find a way to ground myself in the book. There weren't many characters I could believe in.

If characters are scared of real things, if the characters believe in these things, so can I. But in THE STAND it was all beyond me. I'm not much into fantasy.

I want to feel the fear of the characters. I want to feel my own fear. When it's something completely made up, I lose interest.

So, what about you? What scares you in books?

Sequels, Series and Neccesity

By Russel D McLean

Stephen King the other day mentioned that he had an idea for a sequel to “The Shining” which would deal with a grown up Danny Torrance, in his forties, helping old folks cross over and betting on the horses. Now, in some ways it might make for an interesting book, but I for one ain’t so sure.*

Sometimes you just need to let an idea go. Sometimes you don’t need to know “what happened next”. You know everything that you need to know.

I get it, I do, and I know it’s what fuels the “series” market, this need to know what happened next to beloved characters, but honestly I don’t think we always need to know. I think sometimes we’re better off not knowing. Or just figuring it out in our own heads.

Now, I loved The Shining, but I don’t give a toss what happened to Danny forty years later. For a start, forty years later he ain’t gonna be that same wee lad whose dad went mental and who had to face shape-shifting bushes, killer wasps and some bloody weird spooks hanging around the Overlook Hotel. He’s going to be an entirely different person and not one that I’m sure I want to know, particularly, at least in the sense that I’d know he was also that terrified wee kid. Now, maybe I could take a return to the Overlook, but honestly I just don’t want to know what happened to any of the folks we met there first time around. Far as I’m concerned, their story was done and dusted, and in the way that King tells his germ for the story, I don’t see why it couldn’t just be some other guy with some cool psychic powers he was writing about.

Here’s the thing; some characters just need to be around for one story. Or maybe a few more if they cry out for it. I’m not against sequels. Just against ones that feel redundant (and boy, there are a lot of those around). I’m not even against series (Technically I’m writing one), but I am against those that outstay their welcome and their relevance.

I always admired the chutzpah of British writer Ray Banks who created a character that lasted over four books. And then he put him away. No fooling. And that’s cool, because he told the stories that needed to be told with that character. I’m a fan of sequences in fiction, but not necessarily of series, which I think can often play themselves into the ground or, even worse, start repeating after a while. There is at least one top-selling writer I can think of whose more recent books I have started skipping over because, while I have fun with them, I know exactly what’s going to happen and have no fear that everything will turn out right in the end. I mean this guy is now writing the same damn novel every time and while that’s cool and a bit of “fast food for the brain”, it is beginning to really irk me because I’m a reader who doesn’t want to know what happens next, who wants the unexpected and occasionally the unwanted if it makes for a good and unpredictable reading experience.

I couldn’t go this far without mentioning George Pelecanos, of course, who tends to drop series after three or four books, ultimately creating some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever read. Despite a cameo in a later novel, I’m glad he left Nick Stefanos behind and I think he was right to drop off the Strange Investigations books where he did because, man, those stories said what they needed to say and said it well. Just because some characters were still living does not mean that I want to follow them to death.

Maybe its because I have some kind of literary commitment issues. Or maybe its an extension of my need for brevity and clarity in writing which has previously been applied to the length of novels. I don’t know, but I don’t always see the need for sequels unless they advance the themes and/or characters in some way that feels natural and pertinent. Its one of the reasons I talk about McNee only lasting a certain number of books, because I wonder just how long I can evolve the character before he starts repeating himself. I still remember the crushing disappointment of the day I realised one of my favourite series characters had quit evolving, had started standing still, had resorted to cheap tricks to keep me interested.

And I wished that his story had ended one book earlier. Knew that if it had, the sequence of books as stood would have been perfect.

*it should also be noted that King hasn’t fully “committed” to writing “Doctor Sleep” as he tentatively titled the novel. But it serves as a nice jumping off point for me here.

Learning from the Past...and the Pulps

How can you move forward when you don't know where you've been? How can you avoid the mistakes of the past when you don't even know what the mistakes were?

These are two fundamental questions one has to ask when you study history, a discipline in which I hold two degrees. For me, history, both past and present, is a living thing and it is something for which I have a lot of passion. Writing is something else for which I have a lot of passion and, you know what? The questions are relevant to writing as well.

This past summer, I read a lot of old adventure and pulp fiction, things most boys read when they're ten or twelve. I'm a boy of forty. Guess it ain't too late. I cataloged them in a week of themed reviews (Adventure Week) on my blog. You can read them if you want. Here's where I get to list a few things I learned from reading these old stories. Here's the list:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1873)

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1875)

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1913)

Coincidences are like garlic: a little goes a long way

Coincidences. The things that make you go "No way!" could that happen...and they do. You'll roll your eyes and accuse the writer of taking a short cut. In modern stories, coincidences have almost no place. The "Back to the Future" movies are among my favorite example of "everything is explained." The writers may have started with a shortcut ("Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Marty dressed up like Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful of Dollars?") but they found a way to make it believable (I'll leave it up to you to remember the clue). Same with novels. For as fun as the Miss Marple stories are, seriously, how many murders can one old lady stumble upon?

In these adventure stories, there are a few eye-rollers and one big whopper. The Return of Tarzan is riff with them. Tarzan is thrown off a boat and swims to shore and lands *exactly* where he parents were marooned twentysomething years ago. Whatever! I could do that as a writer...and have a bunch of manuscript pages yellowing in a drawer. Now, in our hyper-keep-it-real-explain-everything world, there's no place for coincidences. The best thing about ERB , as more than one commenter wrote on my blog yesterday, is that the stories are so much fun, you can let the "serendipity" slide. Not so with King Solomon's Mines. Our brave European explorers have with them an African guide Who Just Happens To Be The Long Lost King of the Lost Tribe They Discover. Sure, the African could've guessed where Quatermain was headed and hitched a ride but it could've been better explained. It just landed with a solid thud in the story that had already lost its steam.

Exotica can only get your so far.

All of these stories involve some sort of exotic location. Verne has the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's ship, and all the ports Nemo chooses, like Atlantis or underwater graveyards. Treasure Island features the Caribbean and tropical environs while Haggard and ERB set their stories in Africa. You'd think that having an exotic setting would be enough to drive a story. You'd be wrong. The Verne and Haggard books both have one simple fault: they rely too heavily on the environment. Whether you're reading about Quatermain's trek across Africa or Nemo's journey's under water, the stories have to go somewhere. I think these authors were too content to just let the setting play too big a role in their respective books. I give Verne a bit of a pass since he invented a working submarine in his novel. Haggard just tried too hard to make an exciting story and failed.

Character Counts. Big Time.

This is not an earth-shattering revelation. There's a reason Agatha Christie wrote as many Miss Marple stores as she did: people liked the character. In their books, Stevenson and ERB use their respective exotic settings as a means to tell a better story with compelling characters. I was much more invested in the stories of young Lord Greystoke and young Jim Hawkins...and I couldn't care less where the story took place. Now, the setting helped but I liked the characters. Who hasn't dreamed of finding a pirate treasure map and set off to find it? I won't say who hasn't dreamed of growing up with apes in the jungle but the situation is compelling enough that you want to know what happens with Tarzan. It was fun watching him grow up in the jungle and Hawkins battle pirates in the Caribbean. In these books, the environment was gravy. The meat was in the story and the characters.

Fun is Important

We're now entering the fall season, the time when the Important Books and the Important Movies are released. It's awards season now. We must put away our paperbacks and pick up hard back books that challenge our intellect and make us think. When I started work on my second book, my modern crime novel, I wanted to make it real. I wanted it gritty and urban. I wanted no coincidences. Everything had to be explained. I got so fixated on Keeping It Real that it died in my laptop. It suffocated. I didn't keep it fun.

Fiction, by definition, isn't real. It can be realistic but you've still got to enjoy yourself. Right? HBO's "The Wire" is real and gritty and utterly engrossing but it's the characters that matter. The real-life cop procedures are nice but if we didn't care if McNulty screwed around or if Omar's lover got himself killed, we'd stop watching. We'd also stop reading, were it a book. That's the Keeping It Real part. But how hard did you laugh when various groups of characters got drunk and just mouthed off? Those moments of levity helped me love those characters, even the criminals. Have a little fun. That's probably the biggest lesson I learned.

Everyone who writes columns (like this one?) on writing tends to boil the entire process down to the couplet Stephen King captured best: Read a lot and write a lot. I wouldn't be a writer if I didn't enjoy reading. And I'm a better writer every time I sit down to compose because of the variety of books I read. Classic adventure tales and early pulp fiction continue to grab our imaginations and rarely let go. They also can show us writers how they used to do it back in the day and allow us to question their choices and learn from them. I learned a lot from the adventure tales I read this summer (including a modern descendant, Gabriel Hunt) and I can't wait to get back to Africa with Tarzan or solve crimes with The Shadow or travel the world with Gabriel Hunt. I want to learn some more. And be entertained.