Reading, Revisiting - Preoccupations - "Desperation"
Finding a way back, strange diptychs
Deryk Thomas artwork for an Angels of Light album, 20??
I have been trying to read more fiction, lately, as a function of writing fiction and as a means to fall deeper into love with language. When I was young I read novels for pleasure quite often. I don't know when that changed - it could have been my brush with beginner's miserablism via My Brother Sam Is Dead in 4th grade, or it could have been the subduction of reading under schoolwork, which I detested. It could have been some development in my ADHD, it could have simply been that I began to feel self-conscious about reading mass market paperbacks, or realizing that a lot of MMP authors didn't stand to my burgeoning critical faculties. My early favorites from those days were A Wrinkle In Time and Stranger In A Strange Land. I don't know if they hold up. I imagine the former does. It may well be the seed of the bizarre that drives me today.
In any event, my fiction reading habits now are temperamental, erratic, subject to my strange neuroses. I read non-fiction incessantly for pleasure, but have largely turned away from novels - I have consumed far more anthologies and collections than novels over the last few years, which I suppose makes me an outlier. Rarely do I finish anything; if it's not because I don't like something enough to continue, it's because I don't want to see it end. My affinity for collections comes in part from the ability to leave the last story alone and still feel satisfied, whereas dropping the very last chapter of a novel leaves it incomplete. My Goodreads page is an ungovernable mess.
One more lamentable neurosis of my reading is that I cannot revisit anything. My attention span does not allow it, with such infinite possibilities of newness beyond the current object. When I need to deep read something I do it once, with the same lacquering pendulum motion of my writing - move forward two paragraphs, go back three, two, three, two, three. It's the best I can do.
But I figured that if I were to resume reading for pleasure, and indulging in the mysterious (to me) ways that it spurs on totally unrelated writing (see again, the love of language), I should start with the seminal literature of my life. And for many reasons, foremost of which is my continuing interest in the mechanics of horror, I went back to the man of popular American letters par eminence.
Stephen King, alongside Michael Crichton, formed the backbone of my summer reading habits as a child. I don't want to extensively litigate his relevance or skill here. Some of the elements that once captivated me about his writing have less potency now, whereas his many tics (particularly when it comes to idiom and dialogue) can approach the intolerable. The man, like any author worthy of the title, has preoccupations that recur in his work, and when he focuses on them, he can be quite good, even excellent. Really, if there's anything you can say about the man, it's that he writes, and he reads. I do such things far less than I'd like.
It happened that my precocious childhood converged in time with a controversial period in his bibliography. His post-sobriety novels are, far as I can tell, seen with some ambivalence. He was really writing through something, you could say, and it showed. There is a lot of dross and bloat in many of those novels, and a lack of surety. Many of them are, in a word, unhinged.
I like an unhinged element in my art, I always have. I have a Deryk Thomas sun over my heart because when I saw the original sketch it had, in its strange visage, some feeling of both containing and careening that was central to my experience of life. I listened to a lot of Iggy Pop as a kid. Volatility and uncertainty and the unexpected, the sense of being on the threshold of some stark turn or new and strange understanding, those things in me respond to what I read.
As a result of that, I tend to appreciate when a writer just goes for something I can't quite grasp, the harder the better. I don't think of anything I read as truly random, especially now, having had experience writing. The pen, like the tongue, is a bottleneck. As a tool for replicating vision outside the mind's eye it is imperfect, and as much as I admire and am in awe of writers who can create a whole thing on the page, I am just as admiring of those who can't seem to articulate it, or who cast out to find what it is their work is trying to express. If every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it, I often find that I more enjoy a figure emerging from the block than I do the figure discrete and clean.
I remember that my favorite King novels as a child were his 1996 diptych, The Regulators (under his "posthumous" alias Richard Bachman), and Desperation. I don't remember anything about them, aside from vague images - a conical bullet, scorpions, a moon with a leering face not unlike my Deryk Thomas sun. From the very premise there were elements that fired my imagination immediately - they are, for all intents and purposes, parallel universe novels* featuring the same characters in often wildly different contexts, some in different configurations and some in rhyming sets. A protagonist of one might be an off-screen casualty of the other before its beginning. The same weird not-quite-demonic-possession horror magic is at the center of both. I decided that I should revisit them as part of my foray back into independent reading.
I finished my reread of The Regulators first, a few months ago, and did not love it nearly as much as I remembered. You could reasonably make an argument that Bachman books see King playing a little looser and abandoning the core of sentimentality that, like it or not, is the lodestar of his sensibility. As a result they tend to feel a little empty. While The Regulators did have that unhinged quality** I respond to, being as it was about a spirit-possessed autistic boy imagining knockoff Power Rangers into psychopathic existence and laying waste to a suburban subdivision, its large cast seemed primed for death in an anticlimactic way. And the ending is, rather than mysterious or bizarre in an invigorating way, cloying and absurd.
I've only recently started on Desperation, and am now roughly at its center. I am enjoying it more than its sister novel. I get why people love King, and why I did, why I do. His prose is easy but not entirely rote, and when his preoccupations surface, it breathes life into a book. As always, King seems most engaged and clear-eyed when writing anything even tangentially related to the experience of addiction or recovery (in the case of Desperation, submission to a higher power). There is also a stronger sense of plot, and far more body horror. But his weaknesses likewise persist. King is seemingly incapable of introducing a woman teen or older and not casually ogling her through the prose. Swaths of clear and convincing meditation on faith are chased by unconvincing, incongruous arguments about God's existence. And what I remember as my favorite pair of characters for their seeming closeness turn out to mostly spout folksy sayings at one another.
Both novels in the diptych lean hard on one of King's facility for horror derived from entrapment, a strength most evident in his short fiction and some of his novels as well. Rather than echoing the physical confinements of those stories, King uses a surrealist sensibility, taking a small desert town or a strip of suburban Ohio and trapping it in a kind of unreal metaphysical bottle, in which time and place have a kind of nightmarish off-physics. There is always the sense of the sun going down.
They're works that evoke a feeling of sleepy dread, akin to the contemporary weird in indie fiction. I often find myself going for the same thing in my own work. There is some minor, darker cousin to sublimity in weird fiction, the sense of greater mechanisms that are imperceptible or inconceivable but still real, and still exerting influence. As an autist I feel naturally attuned to that sense of the unnatural. And besides, there is something to be said for the pleasure of being jarred, bewildered, by things that have their own echoing, associative logic. Take for example the following excerpt from "Desperation":
He looked at her and grinned. The expression felt ghastly on his face. It also felt wonderful. “We’ll get it together, of course. Okay by you?”
His mind was the storm now, filled with roaring wind from side to side and top to bottom, driving before it the images of what he would do to her, what she would do to him, and what they would do to anyone who got in their way. She grinned back, her thin cheeks stretching upward until it was like looking at a skull grin. Greenish-white light from the dashboard painted her brow and lips, filled in her eyesockets. She stuck her tongue out through that grin and flicked it at him, like the snake-tongue of the statue. He stuck his own tongue out and wriggled it back at her.
Then he groped for the doorhandle. He would race her to the fragment, and they would make love among the scorpions with it held in their mouths between them, and whatever happened after that wouldn’t matter.
If I had greater standing, were I a credible analyst or academic, I might make a case for this period of wandering in King's ouevre as an underestimated entry in the canon of weird and experimental horror fiction. I think it fits fairly cleanly alongside contemporary horror-weird writing from the likes of Laird Barron or Stephen Graham Jones. It is certainly a far sight stranger than most of King's more recent fiction that I've read. I reckon that if it continues at its current clip it will still be my favorite from among his novels, and the work of his that, in an ideal world, my own work would most resemble.
* I had bounced pretty hard off of "The Dark Tower" series (and its antecedent, "The Lord of the Rings") so the unifying elements of mythology at play in the novels were lost to me. I ultimately enjoyed them more out of their full context, as well as those parts of it that echoed in images from other King works like "The Shining" and "Needful Things", eg evil spirits appearing as animal-shaped clouds.
** Perhaps "unhinged" is just a way of expressing that these are not what you would call high concept books. I have a secret love of excess, of prog, and King delivers when he's throwing shit at a wall.