Below concludes the lecture script...
The other major legacy of King in his written works is that of his short prose, with over 200 short stories compiled over a series of collections beginning with 1978’s Night Shift, featuring 20 stories written across a period of ten years, with some being published in 1969, when King was but 22. Not only is this my favourite of King’s short story collections, but it’s also perhaps his most consistent, it’s not that every story’s a gem, however it’s a far cry from the likes of Skeleton Crew which features some of King’s absolute best short stories right next to some of his absolute worst, some incomprehensibly bad pieces. The collection features stories that the names are easy to recall, that of Children of the Corn, The Lawnmower Man, however the true gems of the collection are that of the two dramatic works contained within, The Woman in the Room and The Last Rung on the Ladder. Both stories feature nothing of the supernatural and highlight the horrors of the real world, with James Smythe commenting on the cancer of Woman in the Room, “Night Shift is full of good horror stories. But one – the one that feels real, that deals with cancer and pain and the frailty of life that we understand as little as we understand haunted house and vampires”. The power of the piece all the more cemented by the King admission that the tale is close to auto-biographical, with himself referring to it as “healing fiction”. Within four years King would release a series of novellas all four in the world of drama, as opposed to horror, with 1982’s Different Seasons, which would feature the stories Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and The Body, which would of course respectively later be adapted into the masterpiece films, The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me. For anybody who thinks King can only write horror, then the 30 pages of The Woman in the Room can dispel that pretty quickly.
Then there comes the epic novels of biblical proportions, we’re talking now about works such as 1986’s It or even 2009’s Under the Dome, where things quite literally come down to epic battles versus good and evil, nowhere has that ever been prominent than in what many see as perhaps King’s greatest work, his 1978 novel The Stand. Released originally at around 800 pages, however from 1990 onwards released as the Full and Uncut Edition that brings back the originally excised 400 pages and shifts the novel 10 years forward to 1990, a pointless change in my eyes, but King’s vision is King’s vision, aswell re-arranging a few of the chapters. From the flap; “The old Chevy came out of the Texas dusk at near walking speed, a Pandora’s box of nightmare and death. Up ahead the lights of Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco station glimmered... the box was about to be opened... the dance of death about to begin”. The dance the flap is referring to that of Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu virus that wipes of out over 95% of the world’s population. One needn’t mention the eerie prescience of certain qualities of the book and can only spend time hoping the novel to only be the extreme conclusion of an alternate reality to ours, for there are other worlds than these. The flap continues “but the survivors of the dance have learned to fear something much worse than death because the dark man is on his way. He is known as Randy Flagg, the Walkin’ Dude, the man who no face. He is a drifter with a hundred different names, he is the magic man, he is the living image of Satan, his hour come round again”. The greatest influence for King here was indeed to make the exact sort of huge fantasy epic that I am referring to The Stand as, chiefly he wished to make his own version of The Lord of the Rings, he paired this with a series of growing environmental fears of the time and found the wasteland aftermath of a world decimated by a disease and populated with those on the good side and those on the bad side of things, those final people left.
When The Stand is as long and epic as it is there’s bound to be peaks and troughs and although there are many who claim it to be King’s ultimate masterpiece, I would unfortunately have to disagree. For with a novel that is over 1000 pages long, even if the first 500 are some of the best of your career, which I feel for King with The Stand they are, you then have another 700 pages or so that personally just never hit the mark for me. This is basically me coming up front and saying in my life with King, The Stand has never been my favourite book of his, nor of course my favourite adaptation. But like with anything of an epic nature there is a lot to love and a lot to hate, of course my own personal grievances with the novel, part of the immense joy and quality of the piece itself is in that epicness. There’s something wonderfully free-wheeling and loose about its nature and adds a realism to the affair that thusly makes the more futuristic and horror elements of the novel all the more grounded. Now for as much as the tale begins as a story of many characters and a sprawling America, by distillation, it eventually becomes about two factions. That of Boulder, Colarado and Las Vegas. Colarado is a place for the good folks under the watching eye of Mother Abigail, a mystical African-American woman who has lived for 108 years and still bakes her own bread, with Vegas a hell-scape ran by Randall Flag, the all-knowing and all-powerful ruler of his land. The novel is so unwieldy in-fact that King was experiencing severe writer’s block during a certain section of the writing and needed something to jolt his interest in the project again, hence he placed a bomb in the Boulder Free-Zone and killed off numerous characters, that got the ball rolling. With Randall Flagg, King creates here the villain that will haunt his worlds forever more, for better and for worse. With Flagg in The Stand we find that he as multiple aliases, has all manner of powers and is effectively evil itself. All this leads many to find Flagg to be King’s ultimate villain, this led of course to Flagg eventually being introduced into King’s Dark Tower saga of books. A series of novels spanning worlds and multiple fantasies with Flagg as the core villain. For me the mythicization of Flagg in the rest of King’s work sort of undermines parts of the original Stand, and leads to anytime a villain is spoken off, they could be Flagg in another guise, for there is a complexity of character in Flagg in The Stand that somewhat disappears over the course of King’s other works in favour of absolute villainy and pure evil.
The mini-series directed by Mick Garris and written by King himself of The Stand is a beast where the effects of course aren’t there, with many of the effects in the finale being so lame and on the nose that it makes an ending that didn’t work for me in the book either, absolutely ten times worse. Overall it works, this is down to one thing and one thing only – absolutely everybody involved is giving it their absolute al, despite the limitations. King with his screenplay adaptation of his book, truncates and paints in broad strokes, but also finds time for his arcs and some wonderful dialogues that at times better and at times naturally lessen what he wrote thirty of so years prior to this. Mick Garris, who will be a frequent King collaborator moving forward, throughout manages to have some truly excellent sequences of terror, now of course these are largely padded amongst Hallmark channel style typical 90’s fare, but then and again Garris will still throw in a few great scares and an effecting moment of drama. Overall there really is a sublime ensemble that pull off the material that they are given that rides the line between sometimes very inspired to sometimes really awful. The Stand in 2019 had another series ordered, this time 10 episodes long and even featuring a new epilogue written by King. The irony of course being, dare we even mention the prophetic nature of it, that production was shut down for a period by that of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is of course too where the legacy of the King mini-series begins, where a chance on 90’s television was made to bring many of the so called un-adaptable books of his oeuvre onto the screen, via the small one. For as much as The Stand is Garris at his best, we also have with his Shining adaptation, not just Garris at his worst, but perhaps King’s work on screen at its worst. Now here we have a truly intriguing piece, that also fundamentally isn't that interesting at all. The 90's mini-series version of The Shining feels in many ways like a rebuttal. This time for the most part King had exactly the amount of control that he so wished, with himself writing the teleplay for the 4 and a half hour limited series, with Garris at the helm behind the camera. The mini-series is almost stringently and painfully faithful to the novel choosing to adapt things into the show that the budget of a tv mini-series in the 90's and at times even the CGI of the time just had no possible way of conveying without coming off as wholly ridiculous. Perhaps there is a glaring reason why croquet mallets were swapped for axes, or why the deep and cinematic horrors of a maze were chosen over terribly animated 90's CGI hedge topiary monsters. Rebecca De Mornay is undeniably the standout of the whole affair, not just performance wise, but probably the standout of the whole mini-series. It is her performance as Wendy that is the only example of King achieving what he clearly set out to do; return people to the book and the many strengths of the world he created there, and remind people of the many excellences of that original novel. Kubrick's shadow is a terribly large one, who could ever not be swallowed whole by it, even in this case King? The thing about King is just that sheer level of breadth when it comes to the disparate and always surprising amount of work he gives us. If nothing else a person that sits down to watch a King film, or rather read a King novel, knows that the world that they will soon inhabit will be one horribly strange, frightenly stark and often deeply human. No book being more deeply human that is than his 1979 dramatic tragedy The Dead Zone. Certainly my favourite King book of the 1970’s and sharing with 2011’s 11.22.63 as one of my favourite novels of all time.
The hook that was so present in many of King’s earliest novels is here of course under the veil of a far headier theme, here King gives his characters the ability to answer one of the most discussed questions of all time; “if you could, would you kill Hitler before WW2?” From the flap; “Waking up from a five year coma after a car accident, former schoolteacher Johnny Smith discovers he can see people’s futures and pasts when he touches them. Many consider his talent a gift, Johnny feels cursed”. Whether it be in some cases, the extraordinary that touch him, or in this case how he, the extraordinary one, touches others. Of course one way in which Zone has been brought back into public attention is of course with the character of Greg Stilson, a character of wonderful truth and simultaneous great villainy , a presidential candidate of nefarious deeds and criminal persuasion, bolstered by a campaign based around his life as a businessman and a focus on returning the wealth and power of the U.S back to the working class people. Some might say trying to make America great again... Ok, you get it. The similarities are certainly there, but as a singular horror creation from King, Stillson riles something even scarier than the most frightening of psychic visions; the genuine possibility of absolute power being in the wrong hands. There is something about the earlier sections of the book with Johnny helping out tracking down a local serial killer, before having to come to terms with possible world war that makes the slow building of circumstances all the more effecting. Though other earlier King books were successes, The Dead Zone was the first to rank amongst the ten best selling novels of the year in the U.S. The end of the 70’s for King was one of immense critical and commercial success. There is a great pull with this novel, it contains multitudes; romance, tragedy, political conspiracy, drama, murder, horror... it really does have it all and King pulls it off beautifully. James Smythe surmises the book as “a detective story with an unconventional detective, pursuing a case with elements of horror, but which delves deeper into the detective’s psyche than most”. Again, we return to the notion of tragedy, above all else Johnny Smith is man who has had most everything taken away from him and has now been plagued by the task from above to stop an evil politician from destroying the world. At times we forget, that this was a simple high school teacher in love. With its episodic structure and underlying tale of lost love Zone certainly works like the best of King’s character studies, positioning us in the eyes of our lead and all those who come in and out of their lives. It is the tragedy and romance that make The Dead Zone my favourite of his 70’s works and it will always be the tragedy and drama that make me return to the majority of his books, not exactly, dare I say it, the actual horror.
As the years go by it seems that among the many terrific things that it is, David Cronenberg’s stellar adaptation of The Dead Zone may very well be one of the more underrated film adaptations of King we have. Zone is a quiet film with bursts of both intensity and violence, all underscored by immense political panic and led by perhaps Christopher Walken’s best performance. Cronenberg has certainly created one of the more human and realistic adaptations of a King work, which does surprise many after the years and years of absurdly graphic and creative body horror that has sculpted Cronenberg’s career up until that point and after, however Zone is a far more nuanced production. With Dead Zone we get the perfect signpost for King’s more dramatic works to come, chiefly with his eclipse trilogy with 1992’s Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, and then 1995’s Rose Madder. Aswell as of course 11.22.63 and even one of his most recent and best books, 2021’s Billy Summers. Over forty years later (and change) King is still delivering some of the best writing of his career. That is the ultimate legacy of King and it all began in the 1970’s with a series of novels that introduced the world to a world of horror they would come to love and long for. So what does King think of all this supernaturalism in real life? When asked by Phil Konstantin “in your expiericne have you ever come across any ghosts, ghoulies or anything that goes bump in the night?”. King simply answered, “no”. King will always be a legend and although some works and adaptations don’t cut it, and although some are better films in themselves than they actually are adaptations of the original novel, there is always something to be said for a King work. The level of creativity and boundless dark invention always leads to a interesting read, whether they be horrible failures or genuine masterpieces, King will always deliver and many of the adaptations live up to and help continue that legacy. And of course it all started in the 1970’s on a portable type-writer where a man in his trailer thought up a few ideas; what if the school outsider had powers to fight back? What if the hotel was haunted? What if a writer got trapped by their number 1 fan? What if the car I drove was haunted? What if I could kill Hitler? What if I could stop the J.F.K assassination? What if...? What if...? What if? Well what if a writer built such a legacy that his work will last forever, well for that one, we know the answer ourselves. Don’t we constant readers? And the circle closes. Long days and pleasant nights.
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Thomas Carruthers
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