R'lyeh Review 009

R'LYEH REVIEW

Issue 009

Different Seasons
Stephen King
Viking, $16.95

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

That's right, more (much more) from Stephen King. And though he's still more or less trying to scare the pants off you, King's certainly showing more versatility these days. In the first title, Different Seasons, we are presented with four very different scary stories, i.e., scary for different reasons. The title of the book, incidentally, has virtually nothing to do with the stories themselves, but who cares? The first tale, "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption", is King's version of The Great Escape, a totally non-supernatural but satisfying suspense story about a resourceful and innocent man unjustly convicted of murder and sentenced to life. The horror element is at a minimum here, but the story sustains your interest quite nicely, just like the non-horrific tale "The Ledge" (in Nightshift) did.

"Apt Pupil", on the other hand,is pretty chilling, though again not supernatural (or "spectral" as HPL used to say). It is an interesting trip through the maze threaded slowly by a mind going morbidly and criminally insane. This ground, too, has already been touched upon by King in his earlier "The Man Who Loved Flowers", but "Apt Pupil" is much wider in scope.

"The Body" is an unpleasant bit of reminiscing by a narrator who is sort of supposed to be King himself --- a rural Maine boy who grows up to be a famous pop writer. In his childhood, the story's King-counterpart joins a Saturday afternoon expedition to take a look at a corpse discovered by someone's big brother in the woods. Here the creepiness depends on the kind of dark childhood experiences which made our skin crawl --- like coming out from swimming to find yourself covered with leeches. Whereas King usually magnifies such mundane shivers into cosmic frights, in this story he lets the "subtext" stand unvarnished to frighten all by itself.

The last tale in this collection is "The Breathing Method", which is really a story-within-a-story. The title refers to the inner story, a pretty standard One Step Beyond-type tale of a "birth-after-death". It is handled passably well, but the "frame" story, about a mysterious men's club where eerie tales are told, is really the most evocative (and supernatural) piece in the book. It has the classical Twilight Zone-ish sense of something being cosmlcally wrong, and this being evident only in disquieting little hints. By the end of the story, you empathize with the narrator that if one were to ask too many questions one's sanity would lose its last finger-hold. But let our description of "The Breathing Method" remain vague, since we don't want to spoil it. Fortunately, King seems to be planning more stories in a series with this one.

Creepshow
text by Stephen King
art by Berni Wrightson
New American Library, $6.95

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

Creepshow is a beautifully illustrated comic book, an adaptation of the forthcoming film of the same title. It, too, is a collection of stories (five of them this time), only one of which had previously appeared in literary form ("The Crate"). The whole enterprise is an attempt to reincarnate the old "EC" horror comics, like Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, etc. You know, the kind that prompted the creation of the Comics Code Authority? Rest assured, the little postage-stamp seal of approval will not be found on the cover of this one. Now the revival of the gross old EC's isn't a bad idea, though it isn't a new one either; witness Creepy and Eerie magazines. But King hasn't executed the job (no pun intended!) as well as he might have. "The Crate" is the only one with any real story to it, no doubt because it had actually been written as a story in Gallery a couple of years ago. The basic idea is that a harried and henpecked husband gets revenge on his bitch of a wife by feeding her to a newly-discovered monster.

The grisly revenge theme is the big debt to EC, but King pays it over and over again. It recurs in fully three of the four remaining stories. The most picturesque of these is "Father's Day", wherein a murdered family patriarch gets his postmortem revenge in an imaginatively gruesome manner. But "Something to Tide you Over" and "They're Creeping Up On You" are practically the same thing. Only "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" (whose role King himself plays in the film version) is a bit different. And it is a quickie version of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space": boy-meets-meteorite, etc. All in all, Creepshow is a bit disappointing, but not bad. Maybe the movie will be better.

"It Grows on You"
Stephen King
Death, Stuart David Sciff (ed.)
Playboy Press, $2.50

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

"It Grows on You" is King's latest isolated short story to appear in an anthology. This is a well-crafted little tale, enjoyable for its atmosphere as much as for its hints of horror. In its subtlety and its reliance on implication, this story is liable to remind you of Ramsey Campbell's stories in Demons By Daylight. Of course the drawback in such stories is that you are left being not quite sure of what was supposed to be going on. In fact only this minute, writing this review, did I finally "get it"! The story concerns a shunned house in a small Maine town, and the gossip surrounding it over the years. One of King's best gifts is his ability to invoke the feeling of a sleepy, musty little backwater whose mood lies on the border between tranquility and stagnation. And he pulls this off well in "It Grows on You". We meet a clotch of old men shooting the breeze at a rundown general store, and this afternoon the breeze is wafting from the grotesque old Newall House (which bears some obvious similarities to 'Salem's Lot's Marsden House).

(Now let me warn you, I myself get very annoyed when reviewers spill the beans about an ending. So if you haven't read "It Grows on You", and intend to, skip the rest of this paragraph.) Anyway, the observant reader will note that throughout the house's history, new rooms and wings have been added coincident with deaths in the family or community, including twice in the course of the story itself. The resulting asymmetrical sprawl of the building jolts one's aesthetic sensibilities at first, but as the old men admit, after a time "it grows on you". In more ways than one, it seems! Get it? The house itself "grows on you", i.e., "on your energy", expanding as it absorbs the souls of the dead!

The Running Man
"Richard Bachman" (Stephen King)
Signet, $2.50

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

Finally, the secret is out that "Richard Bachman", author of three previous novels, is actually Stephen King. And you only need to read his latest, The Running Man, to see it. The style is pure King, down to the scatological particulars. About forty years from now, America is a real hell-hole. The gap between owners and workers has widened greatly, and working conditions are hideous, what with air pollution and radioactivity causing lung cancer and sterility left and right. But the masses are mollified with "Free-Vee", a bread-and-circuses ploy with a vengeance. Sadistic stunt shows like "That's Incredible" have evolved into things like "Swim With the Crocodiles", "Treadmill to Bucks" (for tubercular cases), and "The Running Man" (which is sort of like "The Fugitive" for real). People become contestants on these suicidal gladiator-fests to get money for their impoverished families, and that's why hero Ben Richards signs up for "The Running Man". The book is about his nationwide sprint to avoid a whole countryful of baying viewers who've scented his blood and will get a cash prize for a kill. As social commentary, The Running Man is not exactly new. As science-fiction, it relies on that cheapest of atmospheric cop-outs --- the heavy use of futuristic jargon, plausible but unfamiliar brand-names, and technological gimmicks like "Free-Vee", "perverto-shows", "New Dollars", etc. But as a suspenseful adventure story, this book is quite good.

So King can write something besides horror. But watch out, he warns at the end of Different Seasons that the next one's about a haunted car! Uh oh.