Stephen King the Skeleton That Stood on Top of a Van Review

It's hard to imagine how huge Stephen King was in 1985. Featured on the cover of Fourth dimension magazine, with four books simultaneously hitting the New York Times bestseller list, two new books on the stands in hardcover, one new paperback, and 2 movies (one of them considered his all-time, one of them considered his worst) going into production, this was a Godzilla-sized career in motion.

The author at the center of information technology all was, past his own accounts, a Godzilla-sized addict, too, hoovering up monstrous amounts of cocaine and sucking down gallons of beer every nighttime. In the middle of this mega-mayhem, Stephen King published Skeleton Crew, a volume of short stories. The one bit of wisdom everyone in publishing agrees on is that short story collections don't sell, only Skeleton Crew sold a monster-sized 600,000 copies in its first year, which is only appropriate because this is a book all about monsters.

When 1985 began, Stephen King had just become a pop cultural phenomena, and the only bummer was that his fame arrived just when his unbelievable series of home run novels were tapering off into a series of doubles and triples. But King wasn't sitting back on his honour and counting his cash. That was for drunken nights lonely in his report. His piece of work ethic wouldn't let him relax during the day, and he burned up his word processor turning out story subsequently story, even though they earned him chump alter compared to his novels.

An indie writer at a fourth dimension when virtually authors were totally corporate, in Dec of 1984 King self-published a limited edition novel, The Eyes of the Dragon, with 250 copies distributed himself and m auctioned off for sale at $120 each. In January, he began publishing his own fan newsletter, Castle Stone, which lasted until 1989 (a complete set will run you about $400 on Ebay). A previously limited edition book, Bicycle of the Werewolf, was released as an illustrated mass market paperback in April, the aforementioned month his identity as "Richard Bachman" was exposed in the printing. In June, Skeleton Coiffure (originally called Dark Moves) was released with a first printing of 500,000 copies. By the cease of the year it had sold 120,000 more (it would sell another 100,000 copies by 1990). Also in June, product began on the picture version of his novella, "The Trunk," at present chosen Stand By Me. And in July, Rex began shooting his directorial debut, a flick based on his curt story "Trucks" from Night Shift, now called Maximum Overdrive (and considered one of the worst movies ever made).

At night he was working on revisions of his mega-novel, Information technology, due the post-obit year. In October, he would announced on the cover of Time magazine and Cycle of the Werewolf would be released as a movement motion picture chosen Silverish Bullet. In the midst of all this, King was striking a blow for authors everywhere (and for himself) when his agent, Kirby McCauley, negotiated an unprecedented deal with his publisher, New American Library: $ten million for Misery and The Tommyknockers. Information technology wasn't the money that mattered, still, simply the fact that he wasn't selling the rights, but rather offering NAL a 15-year license. Information technology was the showtime time someone had defied the rules of corporate publishing past but licensing his books for a limited term to a publisher, rather than selling them outright.

And, as all this was going on, Skeleton Crew striking the stands. The abstraction of King's first editor at Viking, Pecker Thompson, by the fourth dimension the book was set up to get it was a hodgepodge catchall of King's uncollected short fiction ranging from poetry, odds and bobs he'd published in college, stories he'd run in the men's magazines before he was famous, and several pieces he'd published as Stephen King, Master of Horror, mostly for fun or to back up editors and magazines that he loved. For King, brusque stories were a hobby and they were charity work, something he did that could immediately elevate the sales of an album collection edited by one of his friends, or that could bump subscription numbers on a genre magazine he particularly liked.

Everyone had an opinion about Rex by this bespeak, and there were enough of people trying to say that the emperor had no apparel and was a crappy author to boot. Well-nigh to spite them, Skeleton Crew embraced King's love of pulp. The meliorate stories in this drove read like 1950's B-movies featuring condom monsters with an added layer of goopy grue, the middle-of-the-road stories read like the work of a pulp hack getting paid by the discussion, and the least consequential stories experience similar shapeless noodlings torn from his notebooks to pad out the word count. It'due south every bit if, at the height of his fame, Stephen King decided to issue a deliberate provocation. Have your choice, this drove says, I'm either the gross-out king of horror island, a piece of work-for-hire hack, or I can publish my grocery list and get paid for it.

"The Mist" 1980, Nighttime Forces anthology
Without a doubt the crown precious stone of the collection, "The Mist" kicks off Skeleton Crew in high style. Male monarch describes information technology equally cheery and cheesy, a story you're supposed to see "in black-and-white" like a l's creature feature. Written in the summertime of 1976 at the behest of his agent, Kirby McCauley, for his Dark Forces album, it'southward 1 of Rex's near popular stories, spawning a popular 1985 text-based calculator game by Angelsoft and a well-received simply only moderately successful 2007 film directed by Frank Darabont. Male monarch likes to write stories about people trapped in places (The Shining, Cujo, Misery) but "The Mist" is conspicuously a precursor of Under the Dome, focusing on a cantankerous-department of lodge in a pocket-size Maine town who are suddenly cut off from the world and turn on one some other cheers to the meddling of a religious obsessive. Two years later he'd try this again with his abandoned novel, The Cannibals, about a group of people trapped within their swank apartment complex. He ditched that effort at page 400, merely information technology later mutated into Under the Dome (2009).

Male monarch describes "The Mist" as being hard to write and complains that information technology got abroad from him and became too unwieldy and too long, just that he finally managed to pare information technology down to what he felt was a manageable length. The dent downwardly is function of what makes it so good. It's packed with incident, label is revealed through action rather than via King's usual habit of writing pages of backstory. If there was a literary airplane that was going down, I think well-nigh readers would go on "The Mist" but toss Under the Dome out the door in order to lighten the load. Both books basically do the same job, only one does it in about 50,000 words, and the other takes 375,000.

"Here At that place Be Tygers" 1968, 1985, Ubris
First published in the University of Maine'southward literary periodical and revised for Skeleton Crew, King follows the longest story in the book with one of the shortest, a quick sketch about a piddling boy who is scared to go to the bathroom at schoolhouse. It ends with a tiger eating his mean teacher, and it's one of several surreal brusk stories that King publishes in Skeleton Crew and his earlier Night Shift. It'due south also one of the about successful, as it but drops one out-of-place item (the tiger) into a convincingly realistic setting, rather than going completely over the peak surreal with foam coming out of its mouth similar "The Lawnmower Man" or "Forenoon Deliveries."

"The Monkey" 1980, Gallery
King likes to wring horror out of mundane objects—a lawnmower, a burn down hose, a automobile—only "The Monkey" shows what a double-edged sword that it. A frustrated father is terrorized past a stuffed, wind-up monkey from his childhood whose clanging cymbals herald the expiry of someone he loves. He saves his fragmenting family from its wrath past bundling information technology into a duffel purse and dropping it in a lake. The descriptions of the rotting, terrifying sinister simian doll are effective merely by the time it's generated a giant cloud face to loom over the lake it'southward more lightheaded than annihilation. This is one of those times when the reaction of the terrorized person accounts for most of the horror, a scrap like that scene in Ed Forest when Martin Landau lies on elevation of an immobile prophylactic octopus, wraps its tentacles around himself, and thrashes well-nigh screaming.

Cain Rose Upward 1968, 1985, Ubris
Another from King'southward college literary mag, this is a quick character sketch of a college pupil who inexplicably unpacks a rifle and begins to shoot people from his dorm room window. The less said well-nigh it the better. In that location's cypher wrong with information technology, just it's got no reason to exist either. The writing is fine, but information technology feels similar it was included not considering information technology was practiced but because it helped pump up the page count to appropriately "Stephen Rex" numbers.

"Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" 1984, Redbook
Three of the large women'south magazines rejected this story before information technology found a abode at Redbook. The showtime two rejected it considering King mentions that the main character'southward urine volition run down her leg if she urinates standing up. The third, Cosmopolitan, rejected information technology because they thought the main character was too sometime. It'southward a fun piece, telling the story of a adult female whose obsession with shortcuts eventually steers her into other dimensions where disgusting flappy monsters get stuck to the grille of her car. At that place's not much to take abroad from it except that King reports he enjoyed writing it, and his pleasure shows.

"The Jaunt" 1981, Twilight Zone mag
A sci-fi story about a teleportation device that sends people across the solar organization, but drives them insane if they open their eyes. It's one of King's B-movie exercises in imitating other styles (see too: "The Wedding Gig") and it feels very much similar a copy of a Twilight Zone story. It doesn't become as memorable as Night Shift's sci-fi stories like "I Am the Doorway" or "Night Surf" and was (rightly, every bit Rex admits) rejected by Omni magazine considering the science was wonky.

"The Hymeneals Gig" 1980, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
This is an interesting piece, the story of a jazz combo playing a mobster's wedding. Except for the grotesque descriptions of the enormously obese helpmate there isn't a lick of horror anywhere to be found and instead it reads like hardboiled crime fiction, a genre Rex would render to with The Colorado Kid (2005) and Joyland (2013). The story is no smashing shakes, but it's likewise not embarrassing and if this is a pastiche, it's a good i. If "The Jaunt" felt similar King watched a lot of Twilight Zone episodes and and so imitated them, "The Wedding Gig" feels really accurate.

"Paranoid: A Chant" 1985
I will defend King as a author until I'grand bluish in the face up, just he makes my job hard when he insists on publishing his verse. Featuring the immortal lines, "They are making addictive laxatives," and "Information technology obviates their infrascopes," this poem is amend passed over in silence. It was made into a Dollar Baby short film that you can picket on YouTube. Please don't.

"The Raft" 1969, Adam
Well-nigh horror doesn't scare me, I read it because I similar the aesthetic. But when I was 13 and got my re-create of Skeleton Crew for Christmas this was the 1 story that stuck an ice common cold poker made of fear right upwards my behind. I read information technology over and over once again, completely intoxicated past its hopelessness. A bunch of teenagers swim out to a raft in the middle of the lake. A tiny black oil spill surrounds them and eats any of them who fall in the h2o. Even worse, at i point it oozes up betwixt the boards and drags ane of them downwardly through the one-inch gap, neat his bones all the way. The story ends, as too many of King'south stories do, with the main character cracking under force per unit area and babbling song lyrics to himself (see also, "Beachworld," "Survivor Type") but the complete hopelessness of their situation, made worse past the fact that they could have escaped before if they'd taken the threat seriously, turns this into one of the best stories in the book.

King wrote this story in 1968, and sold information technology to the men's magazine, Adam, in 1969 for $250. When the check arrived information technology was exactly the amount he needed to pay a courtroom fine for getting boozer and stealing traffic cones in Orono, Maine. The mag paid on publication simply information technology didn't send him a re-create, and he's never been able to find one. In 1981, bored and shooting Creepshow, he rewrote the story from retentiveness, adding more than gore, and that'south the version published here.

"Word Processor of the Gods" 1983, Playboy
Another sci-fi story in the style of "The Jaunt." It's fine, but brings null new to the table. In On Writing King discusses getting the idea for this story one nighttime while huddled under a blanket sweating out a fever and that sounds almost right. It's a elementary exploration of an interesting concept (a author gets a discussion processor that alters reality) and it'south but notable for its general misanthropy (the author's married woman and son are both ingrates) and for reminding u.s. that give-and-take processors used to be defended machines that took upward entire desks and cost effectually $6000.

"The Human Who Would Not Milk shake Hands" 1982, Shadows 4 anthology
The second of Male monarch'southward stories taking place in his weird men's club at 249B East 35th Street (the other was Different Seasons's "The Breathing Method") this is a brusk winter'due south tale virtually a man with a curse: all who milkshake his hands will die! And then he dies past shaking his own hands! At that place's not much to it besides that, just King brings a certain level of smooth to all his short stories. This was i of 3 stories fromSkeleton Crew originally published in an album edited by horror novelist Charles L. Grant.

"Beachworld" 1985, Weird Tales
Another sci-fi story that joins the serviceable ranks of "The Jaunt" and "Word Processor of the Gods" this ane lies somewhere between the sci-fi blandness of "The Jaunt" and the weirder, more than unique sci-fi horror of "I Am the Doorway." Basically, a spaceship crash lands on a sandy planet and the sentient sand possesses the crew. It uses a lot of the same imagery of consumption and enveloping as "The Raft," linking the two stories every bit King'southward literary versions of The Hulk. And information technology ends, like "The Raft," with a man chanting song lyrics to himself inanely every bit he waits to dice.

"The Reaper's Image" 1969, Startling Mystery Stories
Rex'southward get-go professional sale, this is a story by someone who has read besides much Edgar Allan Poe. Ii men are negotiating the sale of a mirror that shows an paradigm of the grim reaper, and if you lot come across it you disappear. The story ends with one man waiting for the other, at present disappeared, to come back to the room and it's one of many Rex tales that end with a character placidly pending their fate, as in "Beachworld," "The Raft," Night Shift'southward "Grayness Matter," and "Trucks." It's true that there are simply so many ways yous can cease a short story, but King seems to rely on this ending quite a flake. Maybe it's the horror of having to stand by helplessly while the inevitable approaches?

"Nona" 1978, Shadows album
Like "Caine Rose Upward" or "Apt Pupil" this is one of King's stories about a good child who goes bad, more of a offense story with a twist than direct horror. Also, like Nether the Dome and The Stand up, information technology starts with a bunch of local bullies inviting an outsider to duke it out in a parking lot (or on the side of the road) and unexpectedly getting their asses handed to them past the child who doesn't want to fight.

"For Owen" 1985, previously unpublished
A short verse form most Rex walking his youngest son to schoolhouse. Again, there's zip to meet hither, folks. Movement along.

"Survivor Type" 1982, Terrors anthology
One of Male monarch's more notorious brusk stories, it'south also ane of the grosser stories in this collection. A surgeon, fallen on hard times and dealing drugs, is shipwrecked on a rocky island with nothing to eat but himself and just heroin to numb the hurting. It's gruesome, it's short, and it sticks with y'all, for meliorate or for worse.

"Uncle Otto's Truck" 1983, Yankee
Like "The Monkey," this is one of those stories in which the object of terror is then mundane that it passes through the other side and becomes silly. In this case, it's about an old man who plotted a specially overly-complicated murder and is dragged to hell by a rusty pick-upwards truck propped up on cinder blocks. Think about information technology too hard (how does the pick-up truck hold the former human being down and make him beverage oil until he dies? And stuff him with spark plugs? Does information technology have fingers?) and all of King's carefully-wrought atmospherics deliquesce into giggles.

"Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)" 1985, previously unpublished and "Large Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #two)" 1982, Nightmares anthology
2 connected fragments that were parts of an aborted novel, you tin see here the remains of an alternate universe Stephen Rex who wrote literary fiction that was mostly grotesque surrealism about blue collar life in Maine (run across likewise: "The Lawnmower Man"). If he had kept on in this management, he would have published 3 novels, some short stories in literary journals, and be pedagogy high schoolhouse and coaching the debate team at Hampden Academy. It'southward a sort of what-might-have-been and while interesting, it's also a dead end for him. And the story shows it.

"Gramma" 1984, Weird Book
One of the more memorable stories in the collection, and one of King's rare stories that cease on such a hopeless notation, it's almost a niggling boy left home alone to have intendance of his ailing grandmother during a storm. She turns out to exist a witch and is using her death as a way to switch bodies with him. Since Rex'due south mother took in his dying grandmother when King was a kid, we have to assume that part of the power of this story comes from the way he draws on his own memories for details. It also contains a shout-out to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, like Nighttime Shift's "Jerusalem's Lot."

"The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" 1984, Magazine of Fantasy & Scientific discipline Fiction
More of a novella than a brusque story, "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" is one of those stories that may take hatched too early on. Very long, and featuring a lot of what feels similar padding, since it'southward the newest story included in Skeleton Crew the assumption is that King raced to stop information technology to get it in the book. Information technology's another of his stories about writers, this fourth dimension a scribbler who believes that little Gremlin-esque creatures called Fornits live in his typewriter. It's a perfectly nice story that builds to a satisfying ending that, while somewhat predictable, carries some emotional oomph, but you go the feeling that ane of Mrs. Todd's shortcuts would take gotten the reader to the aforementioned destination with half the mileage.

"The Achieve" 1981, Yankee mag
Originally published under the title "Do the Dead Sing?" this ends the collection on a high note. A well-observed, sorry, generous story about a woman who lives on an island off the coast of Maine all her life deciding to finally die by walking across the frozen ocean to the mainland, it brings Skeleton Crew to a close the same style "The Woman in the Room" brought Nighttime Shift to a close. Information technology's one of King's best stories nigh small town life, and it's got a quiet dignity all its own.

This brusk story collection was a monster-sized success at a time when King'south career was going all kaiju-gigantic, but it was nothing compared to the monster that would come up adjacent. King'due south biggest book, in every sense of the word, would also be one of his nearly divisive. It was called… It.

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Grady Hendrix is the writer of Satan Loves You, Occupy Space, and he's the co-author of Dirt Processed: A Cookbook, the outset graphic novel cookbook. He's written for publications ranging from Playboy to Earth Literature Today and his story, "Mofongo Knows" appears in the album, The Mad Scientist'due south Guide to World Domination.

citation

wolfebusequithe.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.tor.com/2013/09/18/the-great-stephen-king-reread-skeleton-crew/

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