‘Hold on tight . . . and believe’

As I walked through the quiet twilight streets of the little Scottish fishing town in which I live, I unexpectedly came across two figures lounging on a pair of deckchairs. One was dressed in dark trousers, a red tartan jacket and matching tam-o’-shanter, while the other wore a silver sequined dress and an elaborate blonde wig. Although they were both strangely motionless, it was only when I got much closer that I realized these were not actually living people. They were dressed-up plastic skeletons, their gaping mouths laughing, their bony fingers pointing at me. How macabre, I thought, how grue­some. How very Stephen King.

Here I must confess that I’d never read any of King’s fiction. Although more than 350 million copies of his novels have been sold, something about the way in which they were marketed had always put me off and I’d dismissed him as a writer of sensationalist horror. I’d forgotten that horror was a genre I’d happily devoured as a teen­ager, mostly in bed, under the blankets, by torchlight. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and ghouls, in all the classic novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Thing Without a Name. Perhaps now, I thought, over half a century later, it was time to abandon my preconceptions and give Stephen King a try. My local bookshop offered a wide range of his work and I soon discovered that King didn’t just write horror. He also wrote thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, as well as books about the supernatural. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, he began writing while he was still at school and sold the stories to friends. His first officially published story, ‘I Was a Teenage Grave Robber’, was serialized in four issues of Comics Review in 1965. Now, in addition to his fifty-eight novels, there are five books of non-fiction, seven novellas and over two hundred stories published in eleven collections. Intrigued, I chose his third collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, which contains twenty stories and was published in 1993. In his Introduction, King explains that it was a compilation of amazing facts and curiosities, called Ripley’s Believe It or Not, that first got his imagination going and allowed him to see ‘how fine the line between the fabulous and the humdrum could sometimes be’. As a child, when it was raining or he had no homework, he liked to curl up with Ripley’s and read its extraordinary claims: for example, that there were actual giants (one man over eight feet tall) and actual elves (a woman barely eleven inches). Apparently, Ripley’s also claimed that there were MONSTERS TOO HORRIBLE TO DESCRIBE but then went on to do so. Describing his own stories, King says:

Each contains something I believed for a while and I know that some of these things – the finger pointing out of the drain, the man-eating toads, the hungry teeth – are a little frightening, but I think we’ll be all right if we go together . . . All you have to do is hold on tight . . . and believe.

Although he is an exceptionally inventive writer, his lucid story­telling makes belief surprisingly easy. The first story I read was ‘The Night Flier’ in which Richard Dees, a reporter who writes for the tabloid Inside View, has been asked by his editor to track down a man believed by their readers to be a vampire. There have already been two murders at a small local airport in Maryland and, knowing that the right picture on the front page could produce a much-needed circulation boost, Dees flies off to the airport, armed only with his camera and a large degree of scepticism. It’s the details and descriptions that help to make this story so realistic and plausible. Using familiar brands and model numbers, King sets up the humdrum normality that fills his characters’ lives. He describes the General Aviation Terminal with its two criss-cross­ing runways, one tarred and one dirt, and tells us that Dees, who uses an old Nikon camera bought in a Toledo hockshop when he was 17, was given landing clearance at 7.45 p.m., less than forty minutes before official sundown. Vampires, of course, only come out at night, but this one has a private pilot’s licence and flies a Cessna Skymaster 337 with red piping and the number N101EL on the tail.

Dees believed the Night Flier was a real vampire about as much as he believed it was the Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters under his pillow when he was a kid, but if the guy thought he was a vampire – and this guy, Dees was convinced, really did – that would probably be enough to make him con­form to the rules.

Dees is hoping for a photograph of the man dressed to kill, the rules in this case being black tuxedo pants and a bat-wing cloak. But King, who also understands the importance of conforming to the rules, knows that if you give your readers a fake vampire you will only disappoint. So, in the climax at the airport, as Dees is washing his hands in the basement men’s room, he senses somebody close by and looks in the mirror, but there’s nobody there. Too late, he remembers that real vampires have no reflection. ‘Open your camera,’ demands an ageless voice. A master of his craft, King never tries to explain the situation in which his characters find themselves; he simply records the actions that arise from it. Although his descriptions are always apt and evocative, he largely avoids distracting metaphors or poetic imagery. His plain, down-to-earth voice appears to tell it as it is, leading the reader on, from the urgent normality of the set-up to the surprising climax. Most of the stories are set in the USA – several in Maine, where King grew up, another in Nevada, one in front of the First Mercantile Bank of Boston, and one in a grand old hotel in New York. There is even a little town in Oregon, inhabited by ghosts from the pop world: Janis Joplin, Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. However, two stories are set in London, one close to where I used to live. In ‘Crouch End’, King describes the area around Tottenham Lane police station as a place where ‘more strange things happen than anywhere else in London’. Not quite as I remember it. The other, ‘The Doctor’s Case’, begins at 221b Baker Street and is a ‘new’ Sherlock Holmes mystery. At first, I wasn’t sure if King with his distinctly American voice would be able to pull this off, but he succeeds triumphantly. His familiar narrator, Dr Watson, now in his ninth decade, has a distinctly British voice, very Arthur Conan Doyle. Also, for the first time – and rather delightfully, I thought – it’s Dr Watson who actually solves the case. While most of the stories in this collection could be categorized as horror, fantasy or suspense, ‘My Pretty Pony’ is a touching and beau­tifully written ‘instruction’ about the passage of time. Here we have a grandfather engaged in a serious conversation with his grandson. The old man, who seemed to the boy ‘older than God, which prob­ably meant about seventy-two’, takes a tarnished silver watch out of his pocket, gives it to the boy and tells him he may keep it. ‘You ain’t gonna drop it, and if you did you probably wouldn’t stop it,’ his grandfather said, but the boy is old enough to know that, one day, both watches and people do stop. However, it’s only much later that he realizes, when his grandfather was talking about his ‘ticka’, he was actually talking about his heart. Time is the pretty pony, a wicked beast, always speeding up as we get older. In the Notes to the collection, King explains that this story was originally a flashback in a novel which his alter-ego, Richard Bachman, was struggling to complete. ‘A bad piece of work born in an unhappy time,’ he writes. Although King scrapped the novel, for­tunately he saved the flashback. It was, he says, ‘like finding a rose growing in a junkheap’. Also in the Notes, King describes an encounter with a reader who told him that she preferred to skip Notes. ‘I’m one of those people who don’t want to know how the magician does his tricks,’ she said. King explains that he is not a magician and these are not tricks. However, he does believe there is a certain magic involved in writing fiction, not in the text, but at that moment when a story pops into a writer’s head, often just a fragment but sometimes a whole story. When King was invited to take part in a panel discussion, held in a bookshop in Manhattan, he was asked if he could recall anything in his childhood that was particularly terrible. In response he repeated an anecdote his mother had told him. Apparently, when he was only 4, he’d gone off to play at a friend’s house – a house close to a railway line – and when he came back, he was as pale as a ghost and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the day. ‘It turned out that the kid I’d been play­ing with had been run over by a freight train.’ King claimed to have no actual memory of the event, but then another member of the panel, a psychiatrist, chipped in. ‘You’ve been writing about it ever since,’ she said. I believe it’s true that writing about difficult events or turning them into stories may often help a writer cope. Perhaps reading hor­ror stories may also help the reader to re-evaluate their worst fears. I hope King’s readers will not just be gripped and scared but will also experience a little cathartic comfort.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2021