"The Mist" Controversy

 

This first: I have not seen the ending to Frank Darabont's The Mist. 

Nor do I plan to. 

I do, however, know what happens, and haven't escaped being scarred by it, not completely, given some Internet stills and clips.

I have tried to avoid disturbing endings ever since Cujo (the novel).

 And I received fair warning about The Mist infamous ending in the form of an interview with Frank Darabont by Hans-Ake Lija, Swedish King scholar in his book Lija's Library. 

Though I don't recall much about King's original novella, it was open ended, and there was reportedly a slight glimmer of hope at the end, something I'll get back to later. 

Not surprisingly though, SK absolutely loved the ending Darabont gave it, reportedly expressing the opinion that he'd thought of it first (Darabont had managed to beat SK at his own game, you see), and SK is quoted as having said there should be a new law that condemns anyone "to be hung by the neck until dead" for giving away the ending. 

He's kidding (I hope), because Darabont essentially did just that during his interview with Lija! What he said was that he took some elements present in the story, and took them to their logical conclusion. Protagonist David Drayton, his young son Billy and three other people are driving through the Mist, thinking it's the end of all humanity, and David sees no way out, other than being eaten by the monsters. He also has four bullets in his gun, but there's five of them. In the end, the mist clears, and the military does arrive. But it's a terribly black and tragic ending anyway. 

Now really...how much more do you really need to fill in to see just EXACTLY what happens?

I have rented and watched The Mist more than once, always stopping right before the end. I do not own it. I do not own the novel Cujo either, nor the film of, nor the novelization of Warlock. All of these things are too disturbing to even own.

The ending of The Mist reminds of the end to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo drinks poison, thinking Juliet is dead, and if he'd only waiting a few more seconds the ending would have been totally different. I used to compare SK and Shakespeare a lot, because they both wrote tragedies, and both killed kids very frequently. 

It's a known fact that King writes to exorcise his personal demons. I'm not that sure about Darabont, though. Like King himself, he's wanting us to think about the human conditions, and the personal choices we make by identifying with the protagonist. But he also seems a bit sadistic with his audience, wanting to spring this pessimistic ending upon them, after getting them rooting for David and Billy to survive. I'd basically say that differentiates him from King, and makes him a bit more like Robert Cormier. But with this film, King basically says he wanted for audience to see this film cold, with no hint of what the ending will be! One thing I kind of which after I first read Cujo, was a warning was given for those like myself at the time, who were not yet familiar with King.

There is another thing about the film that I've initially wondered about, and others have as well, and that is that it conveys a possibility that (I'm assuming) Darabont and King never intended. Mrs. Carmody, the religious fanatic character that everyone hates, tries to sacrifice Billy to God, believing that shedding a young child's blood will put an end to the mist. Carmody dies, to relief and satisfaction of the audience. Then after Billy does die later on, the Mist parts and the military arrives. Coincidence?

Again, Darabont probably didn't want to suggest that Carmody was right all along, but it's certainly  a possibility one can draw. 

Here is a quote from Darabont during his interview, that is so opposite the general tendency for the audience to root for the protagonist, that it is virtually Addamsian:

"I think it would have been lame to tack on a conclusion that let the main character and the audience off the hook. What would even be? Suddenly the mist parts, and the National Guard is handing them coffee and donuts and putting blankets on their shoulders? How obvious and not real. It makes me cringe."

But Frank! The mist did part, didn't it? And isn't that pretty much the way it turned out for THESE people, below? I don't think it's too much of a stretch that they got coffee and donuts, do you? Is it unrealistic that it could have happened to Billy?

If you don't know what's going on above, the woman the camera is focusing on is the the one who ran off from the grocery into the mist because she was terrified for her two children, who are now with her, the three of them safe and sound. Part of my point is that it's not realism that Darabont chose to end it the way he did for David and Billy. 

But the hitch is that Darabont obviously did NOT intend the above clip to be any kind of silver lining. His purpose here is to make the tragic ending sting even more tragic. It is turpentine soaked into the whip to make the sting all the more fierce. 

And that really got me thinking hard: why should this be? 

Here we have a mother two children who have survived perhaps deadly encounters with other-dimensional horrors. She behaved in a way that often gets horror movie victims killed. Yet here she is. 

Here's the rub: Suppose instead of sticking with David, the movie had been her story. Suppose we'd followed her into the perils of the mist, saw her battling to find and save her youngsters.

The ending would no longer be bleak, not even if we acknowledged that something dreadful had befallen the Draytons. Why?

It would not have been their story. 

So why is supposed to bleak? They're not the protagonists. We haven't been led to care about them.

What Darabont is doing above is rubbing it in faces of the audience that three characters they didn't give a flying flip about survived.

So how could you give The Mist a better ending? Just don't think about David or Billy, and imagine what this woman and her kids might have gone through--a story of survival and triumph!

I've wondered about characters that I've often wanted to survive (some of them kids), and didn't, but very few other viewers or readers or cared about at all, and I've often wondered why. Once such infamous example of is Kevin Donaldson or the movie Warlock. Sure, Kev is made a bit intentionally annoying, but mostly it's because he's anything but a protagonist. He's just thrown in as a victim, and nothing else. The audience generally doesn't care, and the movie doesn't encourage them to care. And it doesn't matter in the slightest that Kevin is a young kid. So don't believe that nonsense about killing off kids being taboo, as I've explained here:

https://atheismvsfaith.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-problem-of-kevin.html

Now I'm very often as "guilty" of this noncaring attitude as anyone else. Particularly in the novel Cujo. I just really didn't care much about the Cambers. I wouldn't have liked it if Bret died, but the character I really cared about was Tad. 

I did care about Kevin, certainly, and I'd call his death almost as disturbing as Tad's, but that's because, in part, the movie seemed trying to take the side of evil over innocence, and there was the whole religious thing that Kevin was "tainted" because he wasn't a believing Christian, and all of that. 

But aside from that, in short, it's the protagonists we tend to care about. Billy and Theodore are the central children in these stories.  

And for that reason, you've just got to hand it to Darabont. It doesn't really take guts to kill off kids per se.

But this kind of ending, well, love or hate it, that takes guts. 

POSTSCRIPT: There is also the fact that this woman pleads with the others to go with her to rescue her children. No one does, not even David. This opens the possibility that David is perhaps being punished, which does add a moral layer to this, one that might be in keeping with other horror films, but that's topic for another time. 

POST POST SCRIPT: I stated above that I'd get back to the part about the SK story being open-ended. What happens is that David hears something on the radio suggesting a town called Harmon might have survivors. They aren't out of gas in the book, and they head in that direction. That's a clear sign that David has not given up at this point. It's totally different than the movie. Now, going by what SK once said regarding the move version of Cujo's ending, wouldn't the film version of the Mist be "make-believe," as well? It would be no more or less canonical than any film version that deviated from its source. The problem is that SK's original is open ended. Still, what's hinted at here is markedly different from the movie. It looks to me more like the start of an entire novel, where there will indeed be other survivors, and the closure, bleak or otherwise won't happen for a while. This is enough to either regard the movie ending is simply false, or that it exists on a separate timeline than the short story. 

Another thing: Regarding the possibility that Mrs. Carmody might have been right, it seems that there are two basic possibilities. On one hand, the mist parted a little too soon. The millitary had to have already taken care of the basic problem, sealed the dimensional doorway, or whatever, before David killed everyone but himself. The survivors in the truck had to have already been rescued before they got to him. On the other hand though, God is thought to exist outside of time. He can cause both past and present to come into being at once. So once David committed the act, the story could have opened a whole other timeline so to speak. So which one is real? 

The Dickens Connection?

 

Stephen King has often claimed that he intended for Theodore "Tad" Trenton to survive in the novel Cujo, but when he came to the end, he "discovered" that the child did die after all. 

Now back as a teen not long, after I read the book, I just supposed that to be rot. I mean, perhaps he met that metaphorically, or he thought it was the ending that "worked." But in fiction the author is tottally in control. he is what ultimately determines the fate the characters. SK wasn't always consistent when he  said "I had to kill him off" or "I did it. I'm not totally glad I did it but..", versus "He died on his own."

The author is in control in fiction.

Or is he?

But if King didn't ultimately determine the Tadder's fate, then who or what did?

If you take it literally that it wasn't King who did, then we're talking in the realm of God or Fate. Something like that.

And God of Fate, in other words mysterious forces that control what happens, and are at least sometimes beyond human control is something I've grown to believe in. How much control do we really have? The same certainly would apply to authors, what books get written, or finished, and what fictional characters survive and which do not. 

Another perhaps equally infamous child death was that of "Little Nell" Trent of Dickens' The Old Curiousity Shop. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were on the edge of the seats waiting to see if thirteen-year-old Nell would survive. Dickens disappointed the majority of them, of course. Was it for the best, artistically speaking? Dickens, had his reasons, of course just as King did. In this case, its said that he didn't want his child characters to grow up and be corrupted. But of course, many of them did survive, while others did not. He very nearly kills off Oliver's aunt seventeen-year-old Rose as well. I'm not sure what made him decide to spare her life in the end, but he seemed to be disturbed by the deaths of fragile young girls and women, yet was impelled to include it in fiction, something like his friend and contemporary, Edgar Allen Poe, influenced by the death of his young mother, and one of his girlfriends. 

The fact Nell is a girl-child undoubtedly had something to do with it. Purity and innocence was and is even today, valued more highly in the "fairer sex." Then again today that might be considered a bit sexist, which wouldn't make Dickens motivations for killing her very reputable. But just how much control did Dickens(or King) have anyway, even though they personal motives? 

The fact that both Little Nell and Theodore have almost the same last name is strikingly odd. King is today's nearest analogue to Dickens, in terms of popularity, output, depth of character and intricacy of plot. Dickens confined his weird elements almost entirely to his ghost tales (there's more of those than just Scrooge, in case you didn't know), and King does not, but in sheer scope, the two authors clearly rival each other. the descions such influential authors make concerning the lives and deaths of their characters is enough to influence popular culture, and culture as a whole. 

The authors had their own personal demons. But why did they have those personal demons in the first place?

The deaths of Nell and Tad seem to parallel on another. Does this in fact mean they were also predetermined? 

Perhaps King little less control in killing off the Tadder than he even guessed.

Four Stephen King Mysteries

 There are numerous mysterious scattered throughout Stephen King's fiction. Here are four of the most perplexing. 

John Norman

In the short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria." set in Mid-World before the opening of the first Dark Tower novel, Roland of Gilead happens upon a mysterious ghost town, where he encounters a deceased young cowboy named James Norman, and later his brother John, a captive of the "Little Sisters" of the title, alleged Red-Cross nuns/nurses, who are in reality a coven of female vampires who've taken over the town and drained its inhabitants. 

The strange thing--and the name stood out to me just glancing over the tale before reading it--is the name of James's brother. Stephen J. Spegnisi, author of the SK Encyclopedia and the SK Quiz Book, noticed it too, and acknowledged in (I think) his Stephen King: an American Master that John Norman is also the name of the author of the Gor books, and opined that perhaps King is a fan. "John Norman" is the pseudonym of John Lange, a philosophy professor, and author of the once widely popular series of sword-and-planet novels set on the planet Gor, a twin of Earth that is always on the other side of the sun. The thing is, while the first five-six Gor books are a decent homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, wherein he chronicles the adventures of earthman Tarl Cabot. But throughout the rest of the series Norman (Lange) infamously promotes literal female slavery as an ideal. And he repeats and repeats himself regarding this ad infinitum. The entire controversy surrounding the Gor series is too deep and layered to go into here, but suffice to say that it seems almost ludicrous to suggest SK would ever count himself a Gor fan (save perhaps the first very few books, and Norman's general attitude toward women remains present even there), King being a committed feminist, as evidenced by stance of the books like Rose Madder and Delores Clayborne, and the strong pro-choice stance to be found in Insomnia (whatever one's opinion of abortion, the pro-choice position is intended as women's empowerment). 

It only occurred to me upon reflection, having read it, the irony that in "Eluria," the character of John Norman is a male completely under the thrall of women! Coincidence, or something more?

Charlie the Choo-Choo

Charlie the Choo-Choo is a bizarre, and seemingly sinister, picture book that young Jake Chambers purchases at a used book store run by Calvin Tower (himself a bit of a controversial character) in The Dark Tower 3: The Wastelands. It tells the story of Engineer Bob and his steam train Charlie, who grow too old for the modern world, until they make one more run that makes them heroes. Then Bob and Charlie get a job giving kids rides at an amusement park. Only Jake seems to sense something sinister about the story and Charlie himself, and in the last picture, the kids on the train look like they're screaming to be let off (Ned Dameron's illustration certainly makes them look that way!), "Char" being the mid-world term for death.. The book was written by someone named Beryl Evans (only they later discover ,on another timeline, that the author is Claudia Inez Bachman, the fictional wife of King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman!). Charlie is apparently revealed to be an analogue to Blaine the Mono, a monorail super-train run by a sentient computer, built --and still running!--back in Mid-World's age of technology. Blaine transport's Roland's Ka-tet, only he also plans to destroy himself and them with it. Eddie defeats Blaine by having him answer "silly questions", taking his cue from a passage in the Charlie book. So it all seems to make sense. 

Except that there seems to be more to it than that. When journeying through an abandoned amusement park in an Earth ravaged by the plague of The Stand, they come upon a train that appears to be the real Charlie the Choo Choo, the name on it and everything. And when Jake glances back, thinking "I'm not afraid of you," the train blinks its headlights at him, as if to say I know better, little squint. (Note: "squint" is Mid-World slang, meaning something like "whelp," a contemptuous term for a young boy, which an ultra-repulsive villain named Gasher repeatedly called Jake).

Who was Beryl Evens, and what is the real story of Charlie the Choo-Choo, since it certainly seems to have had a real story that inspired the book? 

The Other Jack Sawyer

In The Talisman, a collabrative fantasy jointly authored by Stephen King and Peter Straub (with definite Dark Tower connections), young protagonist Jack Sawyer embarks on a cross-country quest to find a magic talisman to save his mother, who is dying of cancer. Jack possesses the ability to jump and forth to a magical realm called the Territories, which is somehow connected to Roland's Mid-World. Most of the adventures and perils Jack encounters, however, take place in our world. 

Though Jack completes his quest and saves his mother, there was, for a time, an odd bit of controversy following the publication of King's The Tommyknockers. One of the characters meets a young boy on an East Coast beach, who relates that his mother has recently died in a car accident. Some readers identified this as Jack Sawyer, and Heidi Strengell, author of Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism, refers to Jack's supposed cameo appearance, asserting that all of the perils and hardships came to virtually nothing. There was at least one other book which identified the young unnamed kid as Jack Sawyer. 

However, this identification since has been proven false. Straub related that he never made the connection with the unknown kid and Jack, and when he and SK collaberated once again for Black House, the sequel to Talisman, we learn that Jack's mother did NOT die in an accident, and lived for many years afterward.

Except....giving King's pessimism around the time The Talisman was written, could it not have been possible that King had at first intended the boy to have been Sawyer after all? It was not long after he'd penned such brutally heart-breaking tragedies as Cujo and Pet Semetary. The Talisman certainly had its own brutal episodes, and since he was collaberating with Straub on a fantasy, they both may have wanted to keep things fairly upbeat, with the rousing triumph of Good over Evil at the end (Jack's recovery of the talisman caused a chain reaction of defeat for evil characters throughout the multiverse). But left to his own devices, could King have intended for Jack's quest to have ended in heartbreak after all, but then changed his tune, once he found it just didn't work for that story, and that Jack's story was to pick up later?

The Eyes of the Dragon 

The Eyes of the Dragon, SK's one foray into straight fantasy, takes place in the Kingdom of Garlan in a magical land ruled by good king Roland. and concerns two young princes, Peter and Thomas. At the conclusion, Prince Peter, who has been wrongfully imprisoned, escapes the tower by means of a rope woven of the threads of napkins ("The Napkins" being King's proposed original title). Peter and Thomas expose and defeat the villain who framed him, court magician Randal Flagg, and all ends well, so uncharacteristic for an SK story. At the end, the brothers strike out for unknown lands, and the author tells us they had many adventures that are to be told "another time."

Only those stories never got told. King wrote Eyes of the Dragon for his teenage daughter, who did not care for the pessimism so characteristic of her father's stories. It was an intentional departure for SK, and though he stated that he enjoyed the experience, he apparently had no desire to return to the kingdom of Garlan. When asked once about a sequel to the tale, he reportedly just said "keep reading the Dark Tower books."

Now this might seem to suggest--as I supposed at the time--that Roland's Ka-Tet would at some point cross paths with Peter and Thomas, or at least there would be an explanation for what happened to them. The world of Eyes of the Dragon certainly has connections with Roland's. For one thing, dragons roamed Mid-World during the time of Arthur Eld, and a fabulous bird called the Featherex, a relative of phoenix, is known both to Roland and Peter. It is often supposed that Garlan is in fact part of Mid-World, though there is some discrepancy with this, and some have argued that Gilead and Garlan don't exist on the same world, despite the similarities. For one thing, I've found it striking that there is no mention in Eyes of the Dragon of an age of high technology, no remnants of past civilization resembling our own, and most telling,  no firearms. 

But the main controversy I'm talking about here is why SK never picked up the story again, or even intersected with it. Roland's Ka-Tet, after all, could jump to multiple time lines, and often did druing their quest, so it wouldn't matter whether Garlan was part of Mid-World or not. As for Flagg, he had a habit of  showing up in multiple timelines anyway.  It is therefore possible that what King meant was really, "I'm not writing more about Peter and Thomas. So if you want fantasy, just keep reading the Dark Tower books."

And that's just four of the most perplexing mysteries in King's fiction. There's much more of course, but I'll save that for later. If any answers arise to these or other questions, for now, we'll just have to wait. 

The Problem of Theodore

 

I haven't posted yet about the most famous deceased youngster in King's fiction (perhaps in all modern literature) before, but I made the following post on the official Stephen King forum in the wake of reading The Institute. The post pretty much says it all: 

I've been thinking lately: maybe I should just regard Cujo like it never existed. And maybe some other King works like Pet Semetary, even though they're canon of course. I think it really might be time.

Let me just tell you:

Cujo was my first real intro to Stephen King all those years ago. I'd heard about and read a little, about the kid's vivid terror of a monster in his closet. It's really gripping. But when I forced myself to read the end, it put me off reading SK for years.

Yes, I'm talking about Tad's death. I couldn't understand why an author would want to do that, so I read much of what was then written about SK, including Douglas Winter's Art of Darkness. I found out why in an interview with King in a book called Masters of Fear, or something like that.

Back then, I sort of a King anti-fan, while other kids were talking about how great he was. But just as others discovered reading SK, one thing was for certain: I'd never encountered any writer who wrote more compellingly, who brought his character to three dimensional life. He profoundly affected me. And of course, I'd never read anyone who could write so heart-wrenchingly gut-wrenchingly realistic about a child's death, and his grieving parents. Like so my others, I was blown away with King's writing, but in a negative sense. I actually believed King was given mostly false advertising, because it wasn't fear that he was best at. It was heart break. If King doesn't understand why he received angry letters regarding Tad's death, well, some people just don't like having their hearts broken while reading a novel. I'll also say that king sacrificed one of --heck THE--most absolutely adorable and utterly realistic child characters I've ever read. And I've read a lot. He sacrificed him on the alter of Literary Naturalism because he considers that more important.

Now, let me tell you, I never wrote SK an angry letter. I believe then, and I believe now, that a character's fate is ultimately the author's business. As much as I might not like it, Tad is King's character, not mine. End of story. I know I wouldn't anyone else telling me whether to have a character live or die. It surprises me a bit, that I've never heard King offer this as a defense. He doesn't write to please his audience; he ultimately writes as he sees fit. Those who wrote letters only made things worse, it seems to me; King never re-vamped Cujo, and I suspect those letters are what inspired his creation of Annie Wilkes.

It was years later that a birthday gift of The Dark Tower: the Wastelands turned me into a bona fide King fan. I've all of the DT tower books of course, and the Talisman and Eyes of the Dragon. And some of the non-fantasy ones of course, though still not all of them.

Recently I've read the Outsider, Doctor Sleep and Revival, which was depressing and heartbreaking again, but very thought-provoking.

But it is always Cujo that I associate King with the most. Back then when Pet Semetary was being promoted as King's scariest novel ever, KIng was, to me, the author of deceased kids and parental grief, made all the worse because he wrote it so uncannily realistic. Tad is THE character that comes to mind first whenever I thing of King's work. He, and his demise, made a stamp on me that never quite washed away.

But I think maybe now it's time to just get over it; Tad's finished, he's dead, his folks knew it, King knows it, and it's time to move on, just as King often observes regarding real life.

Unlike King, I'd rather keep real-life tragedies out of fiction.

But why now?

It's pretty much because of The Institute. I could even more about how The Institute has blown me away more than any other King book, even the DT series. As to why, I did write a post explaining part of why that is in the Institute section. I thought of posting that thread over there, but, as you can see it's mostly about the Tadder. It's not that I think that Luke, is in any way an expy of Tad; he's more like Jake, although the situation he's in , and everything about it just grabs me even more. It's possibly the best novel about a kid facing off against Evil I've ever read. One reason is that the whole "killing the few for the sake of the many" is at the heart of the story, and also the theme of evil people virtually always rationalize their actions as good.

Anyway, The Institute is head and shoulders above even other SK works, in my opinion.

I have been an SK fan for years now, but I am now becoming far more of an SK fan than ever before. I owe it all to King's crafting of The Institute.

So maybe I should stop associating SK with the painful memories of Tad's death at all. Do they really matter, especially in light of the Luke Ellis story? The author who wrote THAT shouldn't be associated with characters he killed off decades ago. In short, I should just let go of the past. If Victor and Donna Trenton can do it, why can't I? When it comes to Cujo, I should just look the other way from now on.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

 

There were a few answers to this, and most seemed to agree. But since I wrote that, I've found that I still never could QUITE just forget about the Tadder. He is, after all, the first King character I ever encountered, and would surely have gotten me hooked on SK at an early age were it not for his death. From the very start, Tad grabs the audience's sympathy like few other characters could and doesn't let go. once we first encounter him starring "with drugged fascinated horror" at his black closet door. We're they're will Tad experiencing his terror. He's rendered unbelievably realistic for a four-year-old, especially one who's almost UNrealistically abdorable. We get to know the Tadder as a full-fleshed out character over the course, something few authors could accomplish for such a young child, until, well, you know what happens at the end. James Van Hise, author of The Illustrated Stephen King observes that Victor and Donna Trenton have a four year old son that "we come to know quite well." In James Van Hise's review of Cujo, he writes that King had previously written that you couldn't "build up the reader's interest in a character, only to kill him off", but that's exactly what he does when he kills Tad.

  And so it is.  The ending is not really about Tad, the character we've empathized with from the start, because Tad is no longer there. It's about Victor and Donna coping with parental grief. I recall reading a King intro back in the eighties by author and religious man Andrew Greely, who speaking for King fan's in general sating that "we adore King" in spite of endings like this (I didn't, at the time), and noted the "silver lining" in Cujo, namely that Vic and Donna have "lost their four-year-old" but have "found each other" at the end. Not to trivialize Vic and Donna's marriage, but I noted that silver lining myself at the time, and saw the possible implication that their getting back together was more important than Tad's life being taken from him a little disturbing. 

As for King himself, his comments regarding Tad's death have sometimes contradicted themselves over the years. Here is a quote that I recall reading possibly in  a magazine in the 80s, that I found posted in a comments section. The poster aid the interview was in 1984:

 "I was asked if I could revive him for the re-draft; at the publishing company they didn't want him to die. And I said no, that it would be a lie to say that he was alive. The movie people came along and said, 'What do you think about if the kid lived?' And I said fine, because movies are not books, and what they do doesn't bother me. I thought it would be real fun to see what happened if he did live. Even though I knew that it wasn't real. That would be make-believe. The kid really died."

And I was inclined to agree with that. The word, though, would be "canonical" rather than "real." It's all fiction of course, but in the canonical version Tad died. Even after I did finally see the movie (which didn't explore what really happened after Tad was saved, the way King did with Tad's death), I still only considered Tad a deceased child. The movie didn't do it for me anyway. But I have a book about Stephen King movies, where it says that the directors and SK both agreed to have Tad live in the movie, and one reason being that viewers/readers would have the luxury of choosing which ending the liked the most. But in the above interview King is essentially saying that viewers have no such luxury!

Tad's death came up again in a different book, I believe 80s edition of The Stephen King Companion, in which he opined that after the movie that "he was sure" Tad had probably an "even worse death" from  rabies, because he thought saliva had gotten on him or something. Now this is where I'd have to disagree. There's an even bigger contradiction going on, for one thing. He'd said previously that the movie version is make-believe anyway, so who really cares? But since King did not write the movie screenplay, he has no say in it. What happened to Tad following the end of the movie would be at the screenwriter's discretion, not King's, and it seems unlikely they would wanted him dead after he was saved. 

King did, however, write a screenplay for the film himself, just not the one that got used. And in his version, as might be expected, we do learn a little more about what happened following Tad and Donna's rescue. Tad is is found to have been suffering from childhood leukemia, explaining that he was already in a weakened state before the ordeal, though it is now in remission. It is indeed better and more fleshed out than the movie ending we got, but it seemed to me that SK was wanting to write a tragedy, but was restraining himself from doing so at the time. This was still when he was dealing with fears of something happening to his own young children at the time, and those fears kept wanting to express themselves! 

Knowing as we do now, that King would eventually incorporate all of his fiction into a single vast "multiverse", it's still possible that version of Tad did survive, and still exists somewhere out there. This screenplay, as it was written by King himself, IS canonical! 

Remember, there was a boy who looked like a somewhat older version of Tad walking down a New York street, accompanied by a woman who looked like Donna, and a dog who looked like Cujo in the film version of The Dark Tower. Yes, that was totally unlike the multi-volume series, and may not connect at all with King's multi-verse, but still...

Finally, there's a quite recent development, of King mentioning a novella, apparently a ways off from being published, entitled "Rattlesnakes", which he said was a sequel to Cujo. It involved two or three small girls falling into a snake pit and NOT surviving. SK, it seems, is back to his old, pessimistic self here, much as he was when he wrote Revival. From this, it's not clear how this ties in with Cujo. Is the spirit of Frank Dodd involved in any way? I have a theory that the entity that possessed Frank Dodd and later Cujo may have been in the service of the Crimson King, and one of his missions--apart from the pure evil joy of terrorizing and later causing the death of an innocent child--was to destroy child who might a threat. it's been said that Tad might have been slightly psychic, the same as lots of kids in King's universe and that may have explained his connection to the entity, and why it sought him out. Of course, if Tad were a potential "breaker" the CK would have wanted him captured not killed, so maybe that's not the reason after all. Tad might have been something else. But since he died, we won't know if he harbored some kind of psychic ability or not. What kind of connection, if any, "Rattlesnakes" will have to the Tadder we don't know. Tad himself won't appear, save perhaps in a flashback, for obvious reasons. Or will he? Did he end up serving the Great Ones in the Null, or what, will we find out? Donna's quote at the end of Cujo, "I keeping sensing him...feeling him, around every corner" might hint at a spiritual presence, though it probably refers only to memories. When and if any other info that we never found out when the Tadder's life was cut short is revealed, we may not have too long to wait. 

Revival

 

NOTE: I made this post on Spirituality Issues shortly after its publication. I copied it to here for obvious reasons. But its still on that other blog. I mean to make more posts for this one, though I don't know when it will be. It's looking like a sad situation from one of King's books right now--a sign says Coming soon! but it never arrives. Let's hope that changes. 

I just finished Stephen King's Revival in record time (in three days). I have some observations to make an questions to ask. There are spoilers below.

I had read a review which suggested that the ending of Revival was very disturbing, but the book was very thought-provoking. I actually took a chance and read it. The reviewer did not exaggerate about the ending. But it was so thought provoking the experience was worth the read--especially since this particular King novel dealt with the topic of religion.

           Revival tells the story of Jamie Morton, beginning with his early childhood in the early 1960s. Jamie is six when he meets the new Methodist minister, 25-year-old Charlie Jacobs. Jacobs is joyful, flamboyant young pastor with a beautiful wife Patsy, and adorable four-year-old son Morrie. The latter becomes a sort of mascot for Jamie and the other children when they go on adventures, which earns him the name Tag-Along Morrie. Jacobs also has an obsessive fascination with electricity, and conducts experiements that delve into tis mysteries. He has constructed a mechanical figure Jesus, and runs on electricty. He demonstrates how it works when he shows young Jamie how electrial power makes the Jesus toy walk across water, thus inspiring both faith and an interest in science for the boy.

All seems right with the world until (wouldn't you know, since this is a King story) a terrible tragedy strikes the Jacobs family: Patsy and Morrie are killed in a accident, and the man who caused it (an older gent who's lived most of his life) manages to live until up in his eighties. Little Morrie has his face torn off, and we're "treated" to PastOr Jacobs howling in anguish about what happened to his son's face.

After the funeral, Jacobs seems to recover somewhat, and gives a soon-to-become infamous sermon, in which he begins by thinking his congregation for their support, and build by reciting tragic incidents he's spent the last week looking up in the newspapers (in one of them two boys and their father jump in to save their dog from drowning in a lake; the dog survives but the man his two children drown). Jacobs ends by essentially renouncing God, and saying of the afterlife:"maybe there's something there, but I'm betting it's not God as any church knows". Jacobs walks out the church, quits his ministry and leaves town. There is a following scene in which Jamies hurtles the electirc-powered Jesus across a room, wailing and cursing Jesus for not being real.

That's just the setup.

The next several chapters follow Jamie as he gorws into a teen and young adult in a guitar band. There is a literally electrfying scene in which jamie and his girlfriend visit a hilltop (which jacobs has referred him to), where an iron rod drawa bolts of lightening during an electric storm and turns vivdly blue, crimson and purple as it absorbs its power. It's an incredible experience the King describes it.

Later on, Jamie finds himself addicted to heroin, but he runs into Jacobs, now a carny showman. Jacobs draws crowds with incredible picture shows generated by electricity. Jacobs manages to cure Jamie, which makes the younger man indebted to him. Years later, he runs into Jacobs again, only know the former paster has ditched his carny act, and is now a flamboyant revival preacher. He soon learns that Jacobs has hardly rediscovered his Christian faith--if anything, he's grown even more bitter, and is willfully taking advantage of his gullible patrons, the way some many televangelists are infamous for. But Jacobs is snake-oil salesman: his miricles actually seem to work! The thing is, a relatively small portion of the people he "cures" eventually go insane in a variety of bizarre ways. It all has to do with Jacobs' strange experiments with lightening, which enables him to tap into what he calls "the deep electricity, " a vast power hiterto unknown to science. It is suggested that Jacobs' insane patrons may have gotten a glimpse of something "beyond" during their treatments, which has blasted the reason from their brains.

It all culminates in a grand experiement which Jacobs theorizes will allow him and Jamie to "peak through the keyhole' and catch a glimpse of the afterlife.

SK has written tragic, downbeat endings many times before, and back in the eighties especially. His worldview seems to have brightened just a bit around the time he wrote Desperation, how at the end David Carver reflects that the human condition is maybe "not so bad" as I recall.

But now, its obviously taken a turn backwards.

           As one of the advertisments for Pet Semetary claimed back in the mid-eighties, you might say that SK has "really done it" this time, not just "done it again."

SK has killed off many sympathetic, likeable, even heroic characters in sometimes pointless ways, in order to illustrate the sometimes pointless nature of life. But here he takes a leap forward. (spoilers below)

In other stories what lies beyond death is left unrevealed, the great mystery that it actually is. But in Revival, he does not merely kill of Patsy and Morrie in a sickening, pointless manner---he actually sends to hell. And, not merely them, but by implication, countless others as well.

This is not a traditional hell, nor a judgmental hell. But it is effectively hell nonetheless. It is obvious these people are suffering. It seems likely also that they will continue to suffer, at least for a very long while.

This book was obviously written by someone who has great fear of what comes after death. I think a great many of us do, and that is why the book strikes so strong a chord. SK may be imagining as horrifying an afterlife as he can, so that maybe, just maybe, when he arrives there himself, it may not be so bad after all. Jesus might even turn out to be real.

The question I have (one of them anyway) is what this hellish afterlife implies for everyone in the SK multiverse. Castle Rock is referenced in the story, as is Jerusalems' Lot. So this obviously is taking place within the SK universe. Therefore, it seems that anyone who has died in an SK story has wound up there. Lovable tykes like Tadder, Gage, and Pie Carver, heroes like John Coffee, Wolf from the Talisman--they're all being herded by giant ant-things--that's what this story tells me. Is there anything that suggests differently? I don't think so. There is some suggestion that Jamie's vision might have been false, but it's strongly implied otherwise.

Okay, there are exceptions to this. Jake Chambers wound up somehow in Midworld, and the spirits ALL of Roland's Ka-tet somehow merged with their counterparts in some alternate version of New York. But what about the rest?

     Now it has come to my attention that there indeed other King novels that deal with the topic of the afterlife in which it appears to be unlike that described in Revival. Someone on King's site has brought to my attention Bag of Bones. What about the spirits in Overlook Hotel, for example? Or, for that matter, the shade of Jack Torrence visiting Danny on his graduation (this happened in the Shining TV miniseries, BTW, not the book, though I beleive King wrote the screenplay, and that was the version he approved of). I didn't get the idea he'd been to the hell Jamie saw. Perhaps the world of Revival takes places in aseparate but connected alternate realit, like those in the original Bachman Books. But if that's the case, why those place names still there?

     Another thing: Revival is ultimately a nihialistic novle, in which the very concepts of good and evil are rendered meaningless. The theme of the hubris of science is a strong one, but in a universe devoid of meaning or purpose, who's to say that Jacobs' experiements, and his desire to peak bhind the veil, are actually wrong in any moral sense. King even cites Arthur Machen, adn H.P. Lovecraft as inspriational to this novel, and for good reason. The problem is, it classes with his own mutliverse. Consider the Dark Tower novels, which are built aroudn the classic conflict between the forces of good and evil. But in light of Revival, Ka is rendered nil. Is the Crimson King really wrong in seeking to destory themlicnhpin of the multiverse, causing all the realities to unravel? It would not seem so.

    I have not read Bag of Bones so I can't comment on that story directly, but King has, indeed, been notoriously inconsistent over the years in regard to his own worldview. That's not surprising, since his worldview fits the very defintion of agnosticism. Now, I'm sure King would want to describe himself thusly, and the way the term "agnostic" tends to be used these days is very close to the word "atheist," even though that's technically incorrect. In an eithies interview with Douglas E. Winter, then the most famous King expert, King is quoted as saying,

...it has to put into the equation: the possibility that there is no God and nothing works for the best. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that view, but I don’t know what I do subscribe to. Why do I have to have a world view? I mean, when I wrote Cujo, I wasn’t even old enough to be president. Maybe when I’m forty or forty-five, but I don’t now. I’m just trying on all these hats.

  That's pretty much the very essence of agnosticism. I also recall King as saying, and do forgive me if I've got it wrong that "Jesus Christ might have been divine" and that ultimately, "wer'e living in the center of a great mystery." I think that really echoes Jacobs' observation near the end of his infamous sermon that "we come from a mystery, and to a mystery we go." You can't get much more agnostic than that.

    But the very concept of an agnostic hell seems a contradiction in terms. Hell is almost always associated with religion, most specifcally with scaring potential converts into the faith--at least it works that way with Christianity and Islam. This brings something else that I don't really mean to go into in this article, partly due to its deeply disturbing nature. This is the concept of innocent human beings, such as certain of the the unevangelized and (most specifically in relation to King's novel) certain children, in hell. King, in fact, seems to wish fervently that the whole story of Jesus and heaven were real, but fears it's all just foolish pipe-dream.

   But he seems to have entirely overlooked the fact that conservative Christianity sometimes presents a version of hell even more disturbing, in a sense, than his own. Christians are, in fact, somewhat divided as to the fate of unevangelized. C. S. Lewis argued that it was possible for an unevangelized person to enter heaven. David Platt argues, among many others, argues that it is not. When it comes to children, most, it seems, do not believe that hell awaits them, and tend to accept some form of the "age of accountability." For the record, I don't think that the age of accountibility is a Biblical doctrine, and in fact no strict age may exist. But God's promise to David and Bathseba appears to rule out the possibilty of infants in eternal torment.nI also believe that the simplistic concept of eternal bliss on one hand and eternal torment on the other is a far, far too simple picture of the fate of spirits on the Other Side. Jesus addressed only adult men and women with normal brain function as to salvation, and when he discussed hell, it was always in regard to behavior, not worldview or factual information. Yes, it's one's spiritual state, not behavior per se that determines that determines one fate to the Christian, but that's a different story.

   But it is nontheless true that there are  Christians do beleive and defend the concept of innocents such as children in hell. I even once had a minster he who beleived this. What makes this more disturbing than King's agnostic version? Well, in the story, Jamie observes that his deceased sister "deserved heaven," but got this instead. It's very very clear that many of these deceased are indeed "innocent." But show me a Christian who defends children or the unconverted in hell, and he or she will insist that even children are not truly "innocent," that all humans, even small children, as so bestial and depraved that they somehow "deserve" it. The main thing that makes such a concept so dreadfully unjust is the very fact that it purports to represent justice.
   At least SK is suggesting no such thing.
   

Stephen King's The Institute

Welcome to my new blog about Stephen King!

I've wanted to write new posts and new blogs for a long time now, but I've been a bit dispirited about them.

But now that Stephen King's brand-new book, The Institute is out, I knew I had to start. It's as good a place as any.

I've read a few reviews, so far, avoiding spoilers for the most part.

At this point of writing, I am just over half-way through the book itself.

There's stuff I don't know yet. Important stuff. For that reason I'll speculate some, and make a follow-up post later.

Let's start by my saying Stephen King is a fantastic writer. Always has been. The first time I read him, ages ago, I actually hated it, but found it brilliant. I read almost anything I could about SK, but avoided reading him for the most part. That is, until the third Dark Tower, book then everything changed. Or almost everything. I haven't read everything by SK, but I was hooked on DT, that's for sure.

The above could be expounded upon for pages, but let's get to the immediate point as soon as possible. But there's one thing to keep in mind first of all.

Stephen King is a lot of things as an author, but first and foremost, for the purposes of this review, SK works are above all, a thinking person's horror. The same term has been applied to the works of satiric horror author Bentley Little, and I can't argue with that (though Little's works seem to be in a slump currently in my opinion). But it applies even more so to Stephen King himself (who also happens to be a Bentley Little fan, BTW).

As an example of this, King's fairly recent book Revival, may be the most thought-provoking book I've yet to read regarding the nature of the human condition, along with the fact that it's possibly the most disturbing book about the same thing.

But his current release may well be equally thought-provoking in regard to the nature of good and evil. It's very profound, especially since it has arrived smack in the middle of our current political climate. Did you ever notice that each side of any political issue claims the moral high ground?

In any case, here is the summary from the blurb from Amazon.com, since I don't care to reiterate the plot:

In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

Note that very last line: the good guys don't always win.

The question here, posed by what I've read so far, is just who the 'good guys' are.

As for the story, I was somewhat thrown by the very first chapter (as have been more than a few others), which was all about a semi-retired policeman taking a part-time job in a hick town.

The next chapter plunges right into the story proper, which is precisely as the blurb describes. Luke is a freakishly bright twelve-year-old, and a minor telekinetic or TK (he has the ability to move things with his mind). From the book we know that Luke's parents are murdered in the deal, though the Miss Trunchbull-like Mrs. Sigsby tells Luke otherwise, assuring him that he and the other kids will be safely returned home once it's all over. In other words, blatantly lying. It soon becomes obvious that the kids never leave the Institute alive; they are killed somehow after suffering the horrors of the infamous Back Half, their corpses apparently disposed of in a Auswitz-like crematorium. In the Institute's Front Half, the captives are treated rather "pleasantly" in the Front Half, and are allowed treats from the vending machines, including even cigarettes and alchohol. This right here is a big signal that they will never leave the institute alive: the adults running the place aren't concerned with the futures of these children because they know very well they won't have any.

Those who "cooperate" receive tokens, as the blurb says; those who are rebellious or who dare to sass the workers are tazered and flogged. The kids are forced to endure a barrage of unethical tests and experiments, including being repeatedly submerged in a tank of freezing water (which also doubles as a punishment for rebels). The kids are divided into two main categories, TP (telepathic) and TK (telekinesis). Then there are those with low vs. high paranormal abilities. Luke is a low level or "pink", according to Institute jargon, but one who shows high-level potential, making him of special value, and subject to particularly horrendous treatment to activate in slumbering powers he may harbor. In the dreaded Back Half, our hapless lab subjects are made to watch cartoons and old movies which makes them see spots and suffer crushing headaches. That's just the setup for some unknown greater Horror waiting them in the back half of Back Half.

In any case, Luke isn't fooled one whit by their lies. Though the Trunchbull-like "headmistress" assures him they undergo a sci-fi mind wipe and sent home, he doesn't buy it for a second.

Naturally, Luke determines to escape, which he actually manages to do with the help of a guilt-stricken caretaker (who afterward hangs herself as a sort of atonement), and another kid named Avery.

I'll stop here to comment on the incredible power found in King's writing. Reading King, as opposed to other author, is like actually experiencing a fictional tale in the written equvilalent of intense 3D. The characters are simply writ deeper in his stories, and the situations hold a realism to a degree that exceeds pretty much every other writer.

For example, the scene in which the young hero mutilates his own ear with a pen knife to rip loose the electronic bug, afterward flinging it back over the wire fence as a distraction, is incredible. This actually fools them BTW, and enables Luke to be long gone before they are even aware (partially because of the distraction caused the said caretaker's guilt-suicide). The hunger and (especially) thirst pangs which torment Luke while on the run are so vividly conveyed they must be read to be believed. I've noted before that King characters commonly find themselves in situations where they suffering terribly from thirst and hunger, something I'll explore further in other posts. Just a couple of examples here.

I am, like I said, not finished with this. I've reached the point in which it looks like Luke's path just might cross with that of the cop we met in the first chapter.

According to one review there are a number of Dark Tower references in Institute, while another reviewer said there weren't. I didn't notice any. The first reviewer noticed a  'Salem's Lot reference, but I didn't see it (or haven't come to it yet).

The main thing about all this is, like I said, the nature Good and Evil, the main reason I decided to write about it.

A long time ago, when I first began to question to existence of objective evil, was when I took notice of the altogether obvious fact that real-life "villains", including history's vilest, most evil men, almost never considered themselves to be so. They all professed to being on the side of the angels, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, you name them (a possible exception being Ivan the Terrible). You just don't bad guys chortling about how eeeevil they are, or who are out to crush the "forces of good" other than comics, cartoons, and the less realistic brands of fiction.

The Institute workers are generally cold and callous to their young test subjects. Most have become inured to the suffering of children. One is smarmy and hypocritical and flashes a plastic smile. Some are very clearly sadists. Some are so cold they appear to downright hate the kids (though quite possibly, if asked, they'd say something like, "You can't allow yourself to think of themselves as children. You just can't. It can be really hard sometimes. But you just can't give in. You have to remember they're test subjects, you can't let yourself forget what's at stake here."

And that's just it. We soon learn that Mrs. Sigsby not only believes their work justifiable, but absolutely vital.

Why, knowing that they operate at Mengele-like levels depravity and cruelty?

It seems Sigsby and her workers are convinced in that some manner of cataclysmic horror will befall humanity and all life on earth if they don't do what are doing. Just what is this unseen world-destroying menace? I haven't been told yet.

But just to give an example or two from the SK multiverse, suppose that whatever they're doing to the kids to utilize their powers (and resulting in their deaths) is somehow averting a flood of Todash monsters from the cracks between the worlds. Or maybe a situation like in The Mist, only on a global scale. Suppose they are right, so far as the menace is concerned. And the only known way to keep it at bay involves the wasting of innocents. Does that make it right? To answer in the affirmative would seem to render the terms "good" and "evil" themselves useless. Are good and evil, right and wrong, really objective realities if a cataclysm must be avoided by such as the Institute?


Somehow, evil is so much more disturbing to me when its defenders attempt to justify it as good (which they nearly always do). But what's even more disturbing is the lurking possibility that such defenders might turn out to be right. Now consider: Suppose that Sigsby's fear is correct, and only the Institute and its monstrously inhumane practice is all that stands between humankind and obliberation. Could even this justify such monstrous crimes? Contrary to what the headmistress believes, some of us definitely don't agree that "the ends justify the means" (or to semi-quote Lenin, as opined by one reviewer, "to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs"). I don't really think King believes that either.

It would much more comfortable if it were revealed that Mrs. Sigsby's beliefs are totally false after all. Fortunately, I can't think of a single instance in which unethical acts on par with the institute, or mass killings or any inhumane treatment of children, etc. was actually proven justifiable or necessary. But I rather suspect King won't let the reader off that easily. He seldom does. The few slight semi-spoiler I've read in regard to this suggests that King might very well have ended this story with moral ambiguity. This suggests that there's at least something to Sigsby's fears concerning a impending cataclysm. Still, I think King ultimately considers the Institute works the bad guys; he once expressed the opinion that the "for the greater good argument" was wrong in regard to the end of Storm of the Century. Some reviewers have suggested that this work is fairly optimistic for King, an author notorious for tragic endings. The kids just might win in this one. But will the question linger over who the good guys really are? An unsettling one to say the least.

(as a postscript, I did heard a suggestion that (POSSIBLE SPOILER), that menace might have something to do with nuclear war. I didn't read far enough, and don't know. Now, its up for grabs whether there will ever be a nuclear war, and can't see how torturing and killing kids would be necessary. On the other hand, if you suppose that you had proof that such a cataclysm had really been averted by the Institute, it would put the situation in a different light! Still, the future would still be uncertain)