King Country: Revival

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• It

• 11/23/63

• From a Buick 8

I have a growing theory about Stephen King that I didn’t fully appreciate or understand until I encountered this novel.

I think we can best understand King’s place in the literary canon as one of rehabilitation. Perhaps the word revival will also do here. While King is through and through a horror writer and has been subject to the literary crowd spending most of his career telling him and his fans that actually he sucks ass and can’t write for shit, you shit for brained goon.

Longevity has a way of turning this around and those who were denigrated become celebrated. And so much of King is seen now in a new light and many literary types—maybe even those previous detractors and naysayers!—will now sing his praises.

I do think King owes much to a much older style of storytelling. He feels, in very specific ways, like a 19th Century writer. Perhaps it’s his unhurried manner. His novels don’t leap with tension from the first page or start sprinting pulpishly or projectorally towards some conflict. In fact, often his books take quite a while to wander before it’s even entirely clear what the conflict is.

This novel is the best example of that that I’ve yet read. In fact, I wasn’t so sold on the first half of this novel! Had I just picked this up on a whim and not because of this project, I likely would have dumped it around page 200 or thereabouts.

I’m happy that I didn’t.

This isn’t my favorite of King’s novels but it is a very interesting one.

You see, my theory is that King’s career of revitalization is knee deep in horror as a genre and literary tradition.

Salem’s Lot is a vampire novel. Not so strange now, but vampires in the late 70s were not exactly driving the literary world wild. Much of the revival of vampire fiction has everything to do with King, here, and Anne Rice, there.

In Rice, we saw the romantic sheen of immortality, of vampirism. But in King we saw the horror. Vampires as monsters. In both, though, we see the ancient folklore stories brought to our modern age of cars and stereos, of moving pictures and electricity.

In this they both pick up Stoker’s legacy. After all, Stoker took the folk horror out of superstition and juxtaposed it with cutting edge technology (at least of that time).

So here we have one act of revival and it built his career.

Then we have The Shining, which brought the haunted house back from memory of bygone days and old fashioned stories. He shoved it in a hotel, transposing what place as horror can mean.

In Cujo we see a tale of possession, but in an I Am Legend manner, where the supernatural is given biological and psychological explanation.

It is an entire universe and perhaps best thought of as a mix of Ulysses, a haunted house, and Lord of the Rings. Probably I should explain that in more detail—spend a thousand or ten words to make it clearer—but I’ll trust you, dear reader, to fill in the gap, to tie these into a pleasing knot.

11/23/63 takes the high tech of time machines and strips the tech out entirely. But we also have a sort of Ghosts of Christmas past to it, with the unutterable, unchangeable past forever at our fingertips yet displayed before us in all the magnificent horror of time and distance.

From a Buick 8 is an off-kilter alien invasion. Once again, stripped of technology and instead shoved into a brokedown car. A transdimensional hole made in Detroit when Detroit was the richest city in the nation.

If you follow me through this, you see that King is revitalizing old worn tropes and spitshining them new. We see this in Revival and its revival of the mad scientist.

But King’s in no hurry to get there. First we must dance his song of americana nostalgia as our doped out hero ruins his life until he encounters the faithless pastor of his childhood who seeks only to turn back time, to change the past, to bring the dead back.

We cannot help but see Mary Shelley in this novel, even as we must wrestle with one of King’s most annoying protagonists (sorry). A failed rockstar who is kind of sort of trying to put his life back together. His story is small and humble, and so of course we must watch him attempt something uncanny, unbelievable, unbearably important and grave.

But this is a novel dominated by such figures. There are no heroes. No people who rise above and succeed and find their life enriched by the horrors they experienced. Rather, you see a cast of people weighed down by life, by what has happened, by what they’ve done and who they’ve been.

Do you hear Joyce and Dickens in this? How about Dostoevsky?

Do you hear the yawning past opening wide to swallow us, to regurgitate King?

There were a thousand ways to revitalize and restore the mad scientist, but King chose this way. He chose a cast of losers and failures and weirdos. He chose a man of faith who has god stripped from him, who then wages a war against god himself.

Do you hear it?

Can you heart it?

Or is this my own delusion spilling out, seeing the ghosts of the 19th Century everywhere, hearing Joyce’s peculiar form of anarchomarxism and maximalism in all things?

Despite parts of this novel feeling the weakest to me, I do think the second half makes up for much. Sure, it’s no It, but no other book is like It either.

For a novel that begins so mundane and lackadaisical, it really does twist into one of the wildest visions I’ve seen from King. And that is no small thing to say.

Also, just a quick question for the class: is this novel connected to From a Buick 8?

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Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII