Off Topic---All Hallows' Eve and All Saints Day and Stories That Go Bump In The Night

Carrie (1974), Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), Stephen King; In The Tall Grass, Stephen King and Joe Hill (2012), A Face In The Crowd, Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan (2012).

Well, the leaves and turning and a fresh crop of zombies are rising from their graves. In the twilight, atop ivory candles are small white flames with amber and honey colored edges that honor and remember the saints who continue to intercede in behalf of humanity. All Hallows Eve and All Saints' Day are upon us.

Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows' Evening (October 31), a day in the liturgical annual calendar dedicated to remembering dead saints and martyrs, and all departed, faithful believers in the resurrection of the dead.  All Saints' Day [also known as All Hallows, Solemnity of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints] is celebrated on 1 November.  As for myself, I use the liturgical calendar and the Hagerstown Farmers' Almanac. My first 18 years included planting and harvesting crops, birthing and slaughtering cattle, and even, after one heavy but brief July rain storm, listening to two acres of corn grow. I respect the saints, mother nature, and those who have been committed to the earth and continue to await their resurrection.

Carrie is  Stephen King's first published novel; it was released on April 5, 1974   Set future year of 1979, the novel's focus is on Carietta White, a much bullied female who lives with her mother, a sociopath who uses small portions of The Bible to justify her abuse of Carrie. During a incident in high school, Carrie becomes aware of her latent telekinetic powers. By the end of the novel, the body count is above 500 and most of Chamberlain, Maine is ashes.

Carrie is an epistolary novel that offers a limited omniscient narrator and portions of documents that include fictional letters, commission reports, and imaginary non-fiction books. The novel's several main and secondary characters are compelling; the pace of the novel is neither too slow nor too fast.
If there is a problem, it is in the denouement. Carrie's path of destruction is too wide and the body count too large. It appears that King may wanted to use fictive documents to help him plot his first published novel and needed a castrophe to be investigated in order to justify their use.  Carrie appeared after the novels Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971) and the films (1968, 1973) respectively. Both novels and films broaded the territory which King could explore, such as a bullied child with delayed menstruation.

Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), In The Tall Grass, (2012), A Face In The Crowd, (2012) are better paced, more subdued and more creepy than Carrie.  The novella Mile 81 offers a malevolent, supernatural, shape shifting force stymied by a vulgar but clever adolescent. The short story The Dune is set, for the most part in a single with an older gentlemen reporting a prophecy of eminent death to his listener. Joyland is a short (for King) novel set in the early 1970s set in a North Carolina amusement park where a ghost prompts an investigation into the possibility of a serial killer travelling between amusement parks. In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are longer short stories which are reminiscent of Peter Mathieson's work and the television series The Twilight Zone. Mile 81, In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are offered only as audio and Kindle products.

With a twice a day 45 minute commute, audio books are nearly always sliding around my passenger seat. In autumn, on purpose I avoid the interstates and take two lane highways.  I pass small churches and their neighboring cemeteries, forests preparing for winter, pumpkin vendors and harvested fields. I slow down. I listen to stories and ponder mother nature, the departed, and the liturgy .

Off Topic---Stephen King 'Creeps Me Out'

Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King, Scribner's Publishing, Pocket Books paperback edition, 576 pp., $9.95.

Once a decade CWL reads a book by Stephen King. During the previous decade it was On Writing which is in part a memoir and in part a writer's workshop lecture. It reveals a practical view of his craft and the contents of his toolkit. While looking for something that would 'creep him out' during autumn's dying of the light, CWL turned to King's 2010 Full Dark, No Stars.

The work Richard Matheson, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe is echoed and enhanced by King. In Full Dark, No Stars's first story '1922' is reminiscent of Poe's A Tell-Tale Heart. A farmer, making his son an accomplice, kills his wife; the motivation is that the wife has inherited land that she wants to sell to a pork rendering plant. The story meets King's checklist of being propelling and assaulting. But the characters' marionette strings are pulled conspicuously by King. The wife could have sold the land in a heart beat, taken the money and moved to Omaha; the author stops her. Even before the murder the farmer, who is not worth a pinch of owl's dung, lets rats overrun his barn. That is especially bad when the wife's ghoul sends them to do her bidding. CWL lived 20 years on a dairy and beef farm. No rats, just cats. Though the story meets King's criteria, set forth in an essay at the end of the book, of running at full speed on an open highway, 1922 has a few large and obvious potholes.

On the other hand, the next three stories, Big Driver, Fair Extension and A Good Marriage are are nearly irristable. Well plotted, with characters that are obnoxiously attractive and climaxes these stories are subtle, and satifying. The stories have a quick pace. Mundane details and slight metaphors fix images in the mind of the careful reader. The romance author in Big Driver can be a bit cloying; but her cat and her GPS hold to the Socratic Method and ask questions that keep the author and the reader on task. In Fair Extension, a devil appears with an offer that should have been refused by a loan officer with terminal cancer. This story is a long list of painful circumstances imposed on the banker's best friend and his family. The ending is both striking and disappointing. The protagonist is left staring at the planet Venus, thinking that life is good. The scene is reminescent of work by playwright Henrik Ibsen and the novelist Norman Mailer.

A Good Marriage offers a question and an answer. How would a wife who has a good marriage respond when she learns that her husband is a serial killer? This is King's most successful short story among the four in Full Dark, No Stars. The main character's narrative voice is clear and relates her utterly boring, normal life in a marriage with two children. Like the other main characters in these stories, the wife discovers a double life witin her marriage partner, and then she discovers her own double life. In each of these stories these characters talk to themselves in slang and baby talk. It is annoying. Yet for CWL the overall effect of these four stories is that they do indeed 'creep him out.'

After the four short stories, King offers a further look at his motivation. He has been writing for the market place since he was 18 and has been in the trade for over 40 years. It's not about the money reports the fiction writer who is a multi-millionaire. King can not stop writing fiction; he has his own criteria and standards. You might like some of his stories; you might not like some of his stories. He might judge himself as more successful in some stories and less so in others. There will be more to come. CWL expects to continue to read King's work, sometime in the next decade, just like the past four decades.

Off Topic Classic---Henry James: The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw has a history. Over twenty films, operas, theatre productions, ballets, and televsion dramas have bee produced since the short story/novella made its first appearance in 1898. It has been a subtext for HBO's Deadwood and ABC's Lost. There are probably ten schools of thought about Henry James' intentions the meanings of the work. Literary critics, philosophers, psychologists and fiction writers have put forth a myriad of implications for an understanding the mind, evil and the supernatural.

A narrator listens to friend read a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend has known but who is now dead. The young governess cares for two orphans at the request of a friend of their dead parents. He is an abstentee gaurdian living in London. Miles, the male orphan, is attends a boarding school. Flora, the female orphan, lives at country house that is kept and managed by Mrs. Grose. The gaurdian gives the governess charge of the children and states that she is not to bother him under any circumstances with details of her work or of the children's lives.

A letter from Miles' headmaster stating that he has been expelled and immediately Miles returns from school for the summer. The governess is hesitant to raise the issue and worries that there is some secret behind the expulsion. Yet Miles is compliant and charming toward the governess. Then the ghosts, a man and a woman, appear to the governess but not, it seems, to Miles, Flora, Mrs. Grose or a groundsman.

The governess discovers from Mrs. Grose that the previous governess, Miss Jessel and her lover, Peter Quint, suffered unexplainable deaths. Prior to their deaths they spent countless hours with Flora and Miles. The governess becomes convinced that the two orhans are secretly aware of the ghosts.

Flora becomes lost from the governess who, with Mrs. Grose, find her in the property's woods. Has she has been talking to Miss Jessel? Flora admits this and demands to have the governess sent away. Mrs. Grose takes Flora to her uncle. The governess and Miles are left on the estate. In the evening, the governess and Miles' converse about his expulsion. The ghost of Peter Quint appears outside the window. The governess grasps Miles in a protective embrace. Miles screams and struggles to see the ghost. The governess tells him that he is no longer under the control of the ghost, and finds that Miles has died in her arms.

The Turn of the Screw's ghosts are not demented, not returning from hell, and are not predators. Are the ghosts sinister or is the mind of the governess unhinged from preceptible reality? Is the rational mind able to grasp supernatural (above nature) or supranatural (within nature) spirit events? That is the crux of the story.

Many writers have examined James's narrative technique of framing the introduction as an reader-audience event with a first-person narrative written by one, who at the time of the reading, is deceased. The Turn of the Screw appears to be a gothic tale set on a rural estate with immense old buildings, distrubing bodies of water, and dense woods with spiritual glades. James' descriptions of the varieties of light and the governess' preceptions of it enhance the readers' preception of spirit forces.

Real ghosts? Insane governess? She accurately describes Quint the ghost but was there a picture of Quint among Jessel's things in the house? James, in his various notes on The Turn of the Screw gives no indication that the governess hallucinates the ghost. James returned to the story frequently to edit it, even after it was published on several occassions.

What CWL favorite films and novels offer the same degree and type of suspense as The Turn of the Screw? The Others [2001] starring Nicole Kidman and Peter Straub's novel [1981] Ghost Story.

Off Topic Fiction---Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams Stories

The Nick Adams Stories, Ernest Hemingway, Paperback, 272 pages, $14.00, and Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition $29.95.

The Nick Adams Stories collection was published in 1972, eleven years after Hemingways' suicide. I encountered them a year later as an undergraduate enrolled in a Hemingway/Faulkner seminar. The simple, newspaper-like sentences were crisp, clear, declarative. In 1973, if queried about my future I would have said 'newspaper writer'.

The stories were collected from previous anthologies: In Our Time and Men Without Women and literary journals. Arranged in the chronological sequence of Nick Adams life, these stories show the character from early childhood, through the Great War, and into parenthood. The first section, The Northern Woods, describes a child's experience of fear (Three Shots), birth and suicide (Indian Camp) and disappearance of the Native Americans (three stories).

Currently anthologized stories come from Part II: Light of the World, The Battler, and The Killers. In Parts III, IV, and VI, short story writers' models appear: Now I Lay Me, Big Two Hearted River, The Three Day Blow, and Fathers and Sons. Also, The Nick Adams Stories have been made into a film, Adventures of a Young Man in 1962. Paul Newman can be recognized under a boxer's ravaged face from the segment, The Battler.

In this audiobook, Stacey Keach does a fine job of carrying Nick's and all the other voices. A quibble: the bass viola interludes between the stories drains, deadens and distracts from Keach's work.