#struggling reading

[strugglequill]

At night, when I go to bed I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I'm not a child anymore but ... I don't like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. Yes, I might scream to wake the dead. That sort of thing doesn't happen, of course, and we all know that. In the stories that follow you will encounter all manner of night creatures; vampires, demon lovers, a thing that lives in the closet, all sorts of other terrors. None of them are real. The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

- Stephen King, in the foreword to Night Shift (p. xii)

[Afternoon story time with Grampa Steve. The format of this anthology is fascinating - and it has ‘Trucks’, the canon short for my beloved crack film, Maximum Overdrive. But small warning for folks collecting his books: the glow-in-the-dark covers of his anniversary reissues look beautiful and are much cheaper but are undersized and also feel like the covers are made of rubber. Nitpicky but just thought you ought to know.]

[strugglequill]

Elvid was also grinning, as if they were sharing an excellent joke.

"And once," he said, "I swung a reality extension for a painter - very talented man - who was slipping into paranoid schizophrenia. That was expensive."

"How much? Dare I ask?"

"One of the fellow's paintings, which now graces my home. You'd Know the name; famous in the Italian Renaissance. You probably studied him if you took an art appreciation course in college."

Streeter continued to grin, but he took a step back, just to be on the safe side. He had accepted the fact that he was going to die, but that didn't mean he wanted to do so today, at the hands of a possible escapee from the Juniper Hill asylum for the criminally insane in Augusta. "So what are we saying? That you're kind of ... I don't know … immortal?"

"Very long-lived, certainly," Elvid said. "Which brings us to what I can do for you, I believe. You'd probably like a life extension."

"Can't be done, I suppose?" Streeter asked. Mentally he was calculating the distance back to his car, and how long it would take him to get there.

"Of course it can ... for a price."

- Streeter and George Elvid in ‘Fair Extension’ from Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars (p. 253-4) 🌟

[Similar premise (and similar character, maybe even the same entity) as the cryptid man from ‘The Answer Man’. We’re back in Derry for ‘Fair Extension’, near the airport which seems relevant to the plot of this short, and I don’t have a canon map of Derry handy. But I wonder if this is the same entity as that other short, and what exactly he is/they are - King’s recurring aliens, less malignant eldritch horrors, psychic vampires with an unusual version of the shining, maybe something I haven’t encountered yet? It’s all set in the same universe and I haven’t really tackled the Dark Tower series yet, so… Who knows? Fascinating little guy.]

[Absolute tangent, but I wonder if the appearance of these entities at their little roadside stands are both conditional and individuated - like in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards universe where only intended characters can see the spell effects, or how she writes The Lone One taking on a different appearance for each being in line with what attracts/appeals to them. This entity’s name is an anagram of ‘lived’ and ‘devil’ and he might just shapeshift to look non-threatening to the vulnerable humans he seeks out.]

[strugglequill]

"I bet you were a long-haul trucker in your last incarnation," Patsy McClain told her once.

Tess didn't believe in past lifetimes, or future ones for that matter - in metaphysical terms, she thought what you saw was pretty much what you got - but she liked the idea of a life where she was not a small woman with an elfin face, a shy smile, and a job writing cozy mysteries, but a big guy with a big hat shading his sunburned brow and grizzled cheeks, letting a bulldog hood ornament lead him along the million roads that crisscrossed the country. No need to carefully match her clothes before public appearances in that life; faded jeans and boots with side-buckles would do. She liked to write, and she didn't mind public speaking, but what she really liked to do was drive. After her Chicopee appearance, this struck her as funny… but not funny in a way that made you laugh. No, not that kind of funny at all.

- Tessa in ‘Big Driver’ from Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars (p. 136-7) 🚚

[Fascinating genders in this short. King sure has thoughts on genders.]

[strugglequill]

"If you're going to stay, you need to get out of sight," Tom said… and no, that didn't sound like her voice. Or not exactly like her voice. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to her deepest self, the survivor. And the killer - her, too. How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was beginning to think the number might be infinite.

- Tessa in ‘Big Driver’ from Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars (p. 216) 🚚

[Just reflecting on King’s relationships with his recurring characters and the conceptualization of the multitudes in one’s inner universe from ‘The Life of Chuck’.]

[strugglequill]

I’m sitting with From a Buick 8 for a few minutes, like I do with every book. (And it turns out that there are only two fics for this book on AO3 and at least three unsurprisingly failed film adaptation deals. This would be hard as hell to turn into a compelling film without changing the entire storytelling structure and pacing.)

I salvaged a copy with a release day promo poster from a resale website for a great deal ($6 plus partial shipping). And my copy has this fascinating thing going on where two sections of the block are bright white paper in between sections of the normal mid-white cream paper typical of King hardcovers. I usually replace battered used books by uptrading if I come across one in better condition… but I think I have to keep this friend for curiosity’s sake? I own a few misprint editions and this is fascinating.

Do y’all own any weird books with misprints/substantial variations from others of the same edition?

[strugglequill]

This story became - I suppose - a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them. The first draft was written in two months. By then I realized I had made myself a whole host of problems by writing of two things I knew nothing about: western Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Police. Before I could address either of these concerns, I suffered my own road-accident and my life changed radically. I came out of the summer of ‘99 lucky to have any life at all, in fact. It was over a year before I even thought of this story again, let alone worked on it.

The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I've tried not to make too much of it. Certainly I don't think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in Buick 8 and what happened to me in real life (for one thing, I lived). I can testify at first hand, however, that I got most of it right from imagination: as with Curtis, the coins were stripped from my pockets and the watch from my wrist. The cap I was wearing was later found in the woods, at least twenty yards from the point of impact. But I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed first draft. The imagination is a powerful tool.

Bangor, Maine

Boston, Massachusetts

Naples, Florida

Lovell, Maine

Osprey, Florida

April 3, 1999—March 20, 2002

- Stephen King’s author’s note at the end of From a Buick 8 (p. 351-4) 🚙

[strugglequill]

What was the kid learning, though? After spending a month of officially sanctioned time in the cubicle with the radio and the computers and the modems, what did he really know? The calls and codes, yes, he was a quick study and he sounded as professional as hell when he answered the red phone with State Police Statler, Troop D, this is PCO Wilcox, how can I help?, but did he know that each call and each code is a link in a chain? That there are chains everywhere, each link in each one a little bit stronger or weaker than the last? How could you expect a kid, even a smart one, to know that? These are the chains we forge in life, to misquote Jacob Marley. We make them, we wear them, and sometimes we share them. George Morgan didn't really shoot himself in his garage; he just got tangled in one of those chains and hanged himself.

- Sergeant Sandy Dearborn about Ned Wilcox, in Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 (p. 212-3) 🚙

[strugglequill]

If he'd gone directly to where the driver was leaning out and looking back at him, he might still be on Planet Earth today. But he stopped to examine the flapper on the rear outside tire, even gave it a good yank to see if he could pull it off. The trucker saw all of it, and testified to it in court. Curt stopping to do that was the last link save one in the chain that brought his boy to Troop D and eventually made him a part of what we are. The very last link, I'd say, was Bradley Roach leaning over to get another brewski out of the six-pack sitting on the floor in the passenger footwell of his old Buick Regal (not the Buick, but another Buick, yes - it's funny how, when you look back on disasters and love affairs, things seem to line up like planets on an astrologer's chart). Less than a minute later, Ned Wilcox and his sisters were short a daddy and Michelle Wilcox was short a husband.

- About Curtis Wilcox, in Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 (p. 2-3) 🚙

[This book went to print in 2002, only a couple of years after King’s van accident, which bears a striking resemblance to this scenario. There are plenty of jokes about seeing authors’ thinly veiled kinks in fan fiction but so much of our lives and values and memories and personalities all shines through in our writing. The Shining and Duma Key will always have a special place in my heart because of how they relate to the issues King was dealing with during that time (alcoholism and pain management+disability, in these cases). I’m excited to see if he explores this issue of loss or near-loss in depth in this book.]