11 - Strawberry Spring

The narrator remembers back eight years ago when there was a strawberry spring (a false spring indicating more winter is still to come) at the same time as a series of murders of young women on a college campus. There were four murders over a few weeks, and the media called the killer Springheel Jack, because no footprints were found on the soggy ground around one of the bodies. One of the victims had her head removed. Grisly stuff, but King doesn't really go into many details about the murders themselves. This itty bitty story is mostly about how the students reacted, getting nervous and suspecting each other. At one point the narrator wanders through the fog, listening to people and walking in a bit of a haze, seeing no faces, wondering if the killer is out there. But nothing comes from that suspicion, eventually the strawberry spring ends, and the murders end too. At this point I guessed that the narrator might be the killer.

And I was right, but the narrator himself didn't know it at the time. Eight years later, back in the present, another strawberry spring has come and another murder took place, with body parts removed. And the narrator can't remember where he was the night before. But he thinks he knows.

Not much of a story, though. I feel like I should have more to say about it, but I don't really. There were some subtle hints pointing to the narrator being the killer, but it wasn't really arranged as a whodunnit or as a story about a killer or as a story about students freaking out about a killer. It was just kind of a story.

Grade: C



12 - The Ledge

Stan Norris is a man in a tough spot. He's fallen in love with the wife of a rich, evil man who is part of the Organization, which was the same group that employed the mercenary killer who was atomized by toy soldiers earlier in this book. The man's name is Cressner, and King does a good job of making him feel like a legitimate rich, unscrupulous slimeball who fancies himself refined and intelligent. Norris and Cressner's wife want to elope together and get away from him, so the wife has run away and Norris has gone to face Cressner and tell him the news and convince him to leave them alone.

Cressner doesn't even seem upset. Refined men don't get upset, after all. But he's going to get something out of this one way or another. He's planted drugs on Norris's car and his man will call the police about them unless Norris takes his wager. If Norris can walk around the 43rd story ledge of this building, all the way around, Cressner will give him $20,000, his freedom, and the lady. Norris feels he has no choice, so he accepts. Come on, Norris, there's always a choice. You could hold Cressner over the edge, Batman style, and force him to call off the drug frame, then you could throw him off the building anyway, then you could take the $20,000 and say something clever like "Thanks for the tip," and then realize that you're in a dead man's apartment talking to yourself and just leave and get on with your life. For example.

But the ledge it is! The trip around the five-inch ledge is very well done. It's nightmarish, even if King doesn't play up the fear of heights nearly as much as he could have. Norris fights wind and his own balance as he goes around, and at one point a pigeon pecks repeatedly at his ankle. But he makes it all the way, though it takes more than an hour. Holy God I would have died. I would have taken my chances on the 40 years in prison. Give me the prison any day, I would not walk around a little ledge over a 43-story drop for anything.

Cressner gives him the money and his freedom, but says that his men killed his wife, so all he can have of her is her corpse. Norris snaps and attacks Cressner's man, taking his gun and holding Cressner at gunpoint. Cressner offers him money, two million dollars of it, but Norris only wants one thing. He wants Cressner to walk the ledge. If he makes it around, he lives. But as Norris sits in the apartment waiting, he knows that even if Cressner makes it, he's only leaving the apartment one way, straight down through the air.

This was an effective, engaging story, even though the description of going around the building didn't go as far as it could have. Even so, what we got was enjoyable. Cressner is a great character who gets what's coming to him. Satisfying.

Grade: B+



13 - The Lawnmower Man

Harold Parkette's lawnmower accidentally chops up the neighbour's cat, and at first I'm thinking this is going to be The Mangler again, a machine gets a taste for blood and turns evil. But no, Harold does the responsible thing in the Stephen King universe and gets rid of his evil lawnmower before it can kill again. This leaves him with no lawnmower however, so his lawn grows into a meadow. He finally looks up someone to mow the lawn, calling up a number in the classifieds. Soon a lawnmower man arrives.

The strange, friendly man has the real evil lawnmower, a thing with a mind of its own that mows the lawn with no one operating it. The lawnmower man takes all his clothes off and follows the mower, eating all the grass it cuts. This is really weird, almost but not quite breaking my belief bubble, but shortly you realize that this guy is a satyr, doing his thing I guess. The mower kills a gopher and the satyr eats the gopher too. Harold faints.

The satyr wakes him up and then continues mowing. Harold calls the police on him, which is a mistake because the satyr doesn't like that. He and the automagical mower come into the house and mow up the carpet, coming to get him. Harold runs into the back yard but the mower runs him down and then the satyr performs a ritual sacrifice, leaving his entrails and maybe some other parts in the birdbath for the police to find. And the satyr lived happily ever after, having bravely defeated the nefarious Harold Parkette!

A strange, quick little story that's notable for just how weird it is. King doesn't work a lot with mythological themes or characters, at least not as far as I'm aware, and he's not very subtle about it here. It's an odd translation of a mythological idea to a modern setting.

Grade: C+



14 - Quitters, Inc.

A man named Morrison, a well and truly addicted smoker whose life isn't great, meets an old friend who has quit smoking, looks great, and has a great job now. Morrison feels a little jealous. His friend recommends Quitters, Inc., the company that helped him stop smoking, so Morrison goes to check it out.

He has to sign a nondisclosure agreement before he can start. His caseworker explains that they are pragmatists, so they take a very practical approach to the thing, reasoning that the addiction to cigarettes is so powerful that most people simply don't have the inner willpower to quit. They need a strong enough external stimulus. So Morrison will be watched at all times by the agency, and if he slips and smokes, they will bring his wife in and give her some electroshock therapy while Morrison is made to watch. Slip twice and they both get it. Further slips escalate to more electricity and beatings, and beating his son as well. Ten slips and they will kill him.

This is a powerful motivator, and Morrison does his very best not to smoke. His wife is skeptical at first, but increasingly happy and supportive. But then one day, months later, he slips while stuck in a traffic jam, finding some old cigarettes in the car, and he takes three foul-tasting drags before he realizes what he's doing. But it's too late. The agency takes his wife and bring Morrison in, then make him watch as they "gently" electrocute her for thirty seconds. Then Morrison has to explain to her what happened. She forgives him because she's glad that he has a real impetus to quit.

Then comes weight. People often gain weight when quitting smoking, so the agency weighs Morrison, sets an upper limit for him, and explains that if he goes over that limit they will cut his wife's little finger off.

This time Morrison makes it work. He doesn't smoke anymore. He gets in better shape. He keeps his weight down. He gets a promotion. His life is better. Where at first he hated the agency for what they were doing, how they were forcing him to do it, now he's thankful. And when he meets an old friend who can't quit smoking, he makes a recommendation.

This is a very interesting story. On the one hand, the agency is brutal and it smacks of fascist social control, forcing a man to be a certain way and threatening his family if he steps out of line. But Morrison signed up for it, and at the end of the day it's hard to argue that quitting smoking isn't good for a person in the long run. The addiction is a powerful and ugly one, the habit is unhealthy and smelly, but is there merit in actually going to such hard, pragmatic measures to make a person stop? Morrison at first wants out when he learns what the program entails, but they won't let him once he's started, and if he goes to the police they'll take his wife. That's pretty much criminal, and even though they arguably have his best interests at heart, are they justified in going so far? If so, are they still justified when they start beating your wife and son? When they murder you after ten slips, when they consider you incurable? When they cut your wife's finger off when you can't keep the weight off? At the end of the day, what they are doing is trying to make people better, trying to force people to be better, and in the words of the immortal Captain Malcolm Reynolds, I do not hold to that.

But all the same it is a fascinating examination of a social issue. King himself was a heavy smoker at this time and for many years afterward, at one point smoking two packs a day, so it's not as though he was trying to make a statement about the evils of smoking, and it's not as though he was advocating such harsh measures to make a person stop. It's just an interesting idea and an interesting story, and he can never resist those.

Grade: A



15 - I Know What You Need

A thin, geeky-looking kid named Ed shows up while a popular, pretty girl named Elizabeth is studying for an exam, and he knows what she needs. He knows that she wants a strawberry ice cream cone, and then he claims to have a photographic memory and knows all the answers to the big test she's studying for, because he took that class last year. Suspicious? Of course not! Don't be so paranoid. Geez.

She leaves for the summer to work somewhere in the same place as her serious boyfriend, who wants to marry her, but she has a dream about him burying her alive when she doesn't want to marry him, and the only thing that saves her is Ed, who then turns into a wolf. Symbolic? That's ridiculous. Dreams have no meaning in fiction, everyone knows that.

But then her boyfriend is killed in a freak accident, where a car's brakes fail and the driver can't stop, slamming right into him. Elizabeth is left grieving but strangely relieved that she won't have to marry him. Is that the sort of vehicular accident that could be arranged by a magical psychic geek who knows what you need? Not a chance, sometimes things just happen, okay?

Ed shows up while she's grieving, and makes her feel a lot better. He says he heard about the accident from her roommate. Elizabeth goes home to her parents for awhile, and then goes back to school. Ed shows up, and he tells her he loves her. She's fallen in love with him too, so they begin a fairytale romance. He always knows exactly what she needs. He sets the pace of the relationship at exactly what she's comfortable with, he likes the same movies as her, he can do the same dances she likes, he always gets her the right gifts, he always knows just what to say. Isn't that perfect? Of course it is. I bet they live happily ever after.

But Alice, Elizabeth's rich roommate, never told Ed about the accident back in the summer. So she's hired a private detective to research him. Turns out he has crazy powers of some sort. He knows how to win, he made his parents rich through casinos and the stock market, but his mother thought he was a demon and eventually she drove her and his father over a cliff, leaving Ed as heir to a million dollars. He went to school with Elizabeth in first grade, but she doesn't remember him. After his parents died he went straight off to the same school as her. He had rented an apartment near where she was staying in the summer when her boyfriend died. It's Alice's opinion that if someone is giving you everything you want because they can read your mind, that's the same of forcing you to love them, which is just the same as rape.

Elizabeth is upset, but doesn't want to believe there's anything actually bad going on. She runs off to Ed's apartment, but he's not there, so she finds the spare key and goes inside. Everything inside is perfect, just the way she likes thing. It's all just exactly right. Feeling more and more afraid, she searches around and finds a closet, inside which things are not the way she likes. And inside the closet is a box, and inside the box are makeshift dolls and figures. There are dolls of his parents, and there is a doll of her, with scraps of her clothing and some hair from when she was a little girl. And there's a toy car, painted up exactly the same as the car that hit Tony, with the brakes smashed underneath. Voodoo? Don't be silly, that's a crazy idea and I — oh wait, no, that's totally voodoo. Shit.

Ed shows up, angry at her, threatening her, but she smashes the doll of herself and suddenly he's just a geeky kid again, with no power over her. He tells her that she'll never find someone who can give her what she wants like he can, but she leaves. Her last thought as the story closes is that she hopes she's not really that easy to please.

This was a good story, it was well-told and throughout there was enough to let you figure out what was going on. I didn't really guess voodoo, but I guess he was working some mumbo jumbo on top of the fact that he can pick winning stocks and read your mind. There's an interesting idea at the core of the story. If someone can give you everything you want because they can read your mind and know exactly what to do, is it wrong that they do so? In a way, it's forcing you to love them, and in a way it's not real love at all, because they're just connecting the dots on your heart. But when people know each other very well, they can sort of do that anyway, reading the other person's mood or predicting their needs, and that's not evil or wrong. However, then we've got the voodoo and the murder of her boyfriend. That pushes Ed firmly into evil-dream-wolf territory.

Grade: A-