16 - Children of the Corn

This is probably the most well-known story in this collection, because of the legion of movies the idea spawned. Reading it, you can easily see why.

Burt and Vicky, a loving couple on the verge of bitter divorce, are driving cross-country to visit family on the opposite coast, and right now they're smack in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. They went off the interstate for a bit to sightsee, but now they're sort of lost and bickering with each other about it, as all loving couples lovingly tend to do. As they argue, their car runs over a child on the road.

Vicky freaks out, and Burt gets a feeling that they're being watched from the endless fields of corn around them. The boy they hit had already been dead, his throat slashed. Burt loads him in the trunk and sets out to find a police station, knowing that there's a murderer out there somewhere in the corn. Soon they come to the little, empty town of Batshit, I mean Bugfuck, I mean Gatlin, sorry. No vehicles. No electricity. Gas prices from a decade ago. No one in sight.

Vicky, realizing that she's in a Stephen King novel, begs her husband to just leave the town. She gets a very bad feeling about it, and yells at him about how everything is wrong here. Burt, used to ignoring his wife's advice, blows her off and drives into town, where it's empty and silent all the way through. They check a restaurant: empty. They go to a nearby church, and inside the organ is smashed and there's fundamentalist signs everywhere, crazy stuff, and some reference to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, which must be what they call God in Spooky, Nebraska. Burt finds a book that indicates the kids are dying on their 19th birthday, written in a kid's scrawl, and he puts it together. He realizes that the kids in this town went crazy with religion, killed their parents, and now sacrifice each other on their 19th birthdays to appease God so the corn will grow.

Then the story turns into a zombie movie, as Vicky outside begins laying on the horn. Burn rushes outside to find them surrounded by children, some quite young, shambling toward them and bearing knives and hammers and pitchforks and stuff, like something right out of Resident Evil 4, only they're all kids. One attacks Burt, and he kills the boy, while others drag Vicky screaming from the car and haul her away. The others gang up on Burt and he runs, with a pack of crazy, ravenous children on his heels. It's a fantastic series of images, and a delightfully creepy setup.

Burt escapes into the corn, of course, and manages to lose the kids. Then he realizes that there are no bugs in this corn, and no weeds growing in the soil. It's nothing but perfect corn in every direction. He tries to head for another highway he knows will be off somewhere in the distance, so he can hike to a real town and find some police, but instead he finds himself drawn to an open clearing in the corn. His wife is there waiting for him, crucified with barbed wire, her eyes ripped out and her mouth stuffed with corn husks. So, uh, that's nice.

And then the story takes a hard right turn from creepy and neat to ohfucksville, as something starts coming through the corn, something big and hungry and dark and green. He Who Walks Between the Rows is not just their pet name for what we think of as God. These children have a new god, and it's very real, and it's very hungry. This is an excellent twist in the story, where what was already creepy and evil just goes off the deep end into downright frightening. There is something in the corn. There is an evil godlike creature that rules the children and the fields, that made them kill their parents, and they give themselves up to it on their 19th birthdays. It comes out of the corn at Burt, and it kills him and strings him up beside his wife. It lets the kids know through their group seer that it is displeased with their efforts, and now they must come to him on their 18th birthdays instead. All the kids who are already 18 walk willingly into the corn to meet their end at the hands of their god.

Great story. What can I say? It started out good and it just got better at the end. This replaces Trucks as my new favourite in the collection so far.

Grade: A+



17 - The Last Rung on the Ladder

And now for something completely different. King doesn't really go for the scare at all in this one, and there's nothing at all supernatural, but it ended up being one of my favourites in the entire book.

It's a story about Larry and his sister Kitty. Larry is a high powered corporate lawyer with a busy life. He gets a letter from his sister, and it took a long time to reach him because it had to follow him through the forwarding addresses of the two moves he's made since the last time they wrote to each other, which was years ago. Larry doesn't tell us what was in the letter yet, but he tells us a story about when they were kids.

When they were kids, they used to climb up a long, rickety ladder in the barn when their parents weren't home, and then jump off the upper loft to land in a huge stack of hay, plummeting 70 feet through the air but always cushioned at the bottom. That particular day, Kitty swan-dived into the hay, and it was a beautiful thing, and so was she. But then the ladder breaks while Kitty is climbing it, and she's stuck dangling from the last remaining rung, unable to climb up. Larry frantically piles hay beneath her, and when he tells her to jump she lets go and lands in it, breaking her ankle but somehow surviving. It turns out she didn't even know he was piling hay. She just trusted him to make everything all right, so she let go when he told her to. It's touching and wistful and nostalgic and childlike and wonderful.

Then back to the present. Kitty married twice, and divorced twice, growing bitter and hurt. She would write to Larry and he would write back, but he could never visit her because law school and his first law firm and then his whole life were always too busy, couldn't spare him. Eventually they stopped writing, just let it fade. He hadn't seen her in years and years. Then one day she swan-dived off the top of a building and died, and suddenly at this point in the book the damn wind picked up and I got something in my eyes, just a little something in my eye that's all, dammit, can't a guy get something in his eye now and then?

And the letter that she sent, two weeks before she did it, took so long to arrive because he'd never remembered to tell her his new addresses when he moved. It's just one sentence long. It says that sometimes she thinks that it would have been better if the last rung had broken before he got the hay down. And this time it did. The last rung on the ladder of her life broke and her brother wasn't there to make everything all right, wasn't there to put the hay down. And he can see her in his mind, beautiful and swan diving into the hay, beautiful and swan diving off a building.

This story was slow and sweet and then touching and sad, and it hit me in just the right place. It punched all the buttons, carefully and one at a time. I feel confident saying that this little short story right here is the most mature thing King had written up to this point.

IT'S JUST SOMETHING IN MY EYE, OKAY?

Grade: A+



18 - The Man Who Loved Flowers

A quick little story about a young man bouncing happily down the streets of New York City on a beautiful spring evening, on his way to see the girl he loves. He touches something in his inner jacket pocket and it bothers him for a moment, but then he's on his way again. Right there you know this isn't going to end well. Right there you suspect that Norma isn't waiting for him.

The man chats amiably with an old man selling flowers, and buys a half-dozen roses, then goes on his way. There's bad news on the radio, about Vietnam and a hammer murderer, but it fades as he walks on. Everyone who sees him can recognize that he's in love. Soon he reaches his destination and finds Norma. Only it isn't her, it's some other young lady, Norma is gone, so he pulls the hammer out of his inner jacket pocket and hits her with it until long after she's already dead. Then he continues on his way, forgets about it, and gets that bounce in his step as he thinks about Norma again.

And I just knew as soon as there was that brief pause near the start of the story that King was just painting this nice picture so he could darken it up later, and darken it up he did. It's a bit of a shocking contrast, the ugliness of the murder at the end compared to the happiness of the rest of the story. So even though it's an awfully short story, it's effective.

Grade: B-



19 - One for the Road

This story is a short-story sequel to 'Salem's Lot, taking place two years after that book's epilogue, where Mark and Whatshisface burned the abandoned town to the ground. There's nothing left now. Well, nothing living. Real good job you did smoking them out of their holes, guys.

It's a frigid, blizzardy winter night in a nearby town, about six miles away from the Lot, at a bar where two old men are hanging out, the owner and a customer. A man stumbles in from the storm, half-frostbitten and raving that his wife and daughter are stuck out there in the storm. They were driving and their directions said to go through Jerusalem's Lot to get to the interstate, so they went even though the road was unplowed, and the vehicle got stuck. He walked six miles through the blizzard to get here.

The two men are freaked out, because everyone in the area knows deep down what's wrong with the Lot. They try to call the sheriff, but the phone is out. They work up their courage, get their crucifix and a Bible, and head out in a four-wheel drive vehicle with the man.

King describes the feeling of driving through a blizzard perfectly. I've done it, and I can attest to the accuracy. The way the driving snow sounds like sand against your car. The way you can barely see anything, and have to keep your headlights on low. The terrible howling sound of the wind through the cold dark. The frostbitten man, Lumley, sees something with red eyes on the side of the road, and convinces himself it was a deer.

They reach the vehicle and it's still running, but there's no one inside. The two men try to tell Lumley that there are vampires in the Lot, and he thinks they're crazy. There's a lot of shouting at this point, as they all shout at each other and Lumley heads out into the snow, shouting for his family, deranged with fear. The two men follow, hoping to make him see sense. But then his wife shows up. And either she's a vampire or he has a very unhappy marriage. She bites him and the two old men flee through the snow.

They make it back to the vehicle, but everyone forgot about the daughter. She's there, seven years old, floating on top of the snow. She mesmerizes one of the old men and wants to give him a kiss, but the other throws the Bible at her and scares her away so they can escape. The next day the car is found, but the family isn't. People are never found around the Lot. They just disappear.

Clearly we have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

This was a decent story, with some good descriptions of blizzards and cold and vampires. Setting it in a winter storm makes for a nice change from the Lot we got in the novel. In between the good descriptions is mostly a lot of shouting and procrastinating and talking around the fact that the old men are terrified. The dialogue kind of runs around in circles like a yappy dog. But on the plus side, one of the old men uses the phrase "since Hector was a pup," which is a phrase the wife in Quitters, Inc. used and which the main character thought was stupid.

Grade: C+



20 - The Woman in the Room

A slow, stately sort of story, again with nothing supernatural about it. A man is visiting his mother in the hospital, where she is dying from cancer and cannot be saved. They blow out her pain center so she won't hurt, and then they wait for her to die. The story is structured differently than anything King has done to this point in his career, skipping back and forth in time, blurring sections together, and trying to give you a literary sense of time passing in a haze, as it might for a person dying in the hospital. There's normal dialogue in the story, but the dialogue between mother and son is done with em-dashes and no quotation marks, like its own little world.

He visits her again and again as she wastes away, but she won't die. She wants to, but she isn't dying yet. She still feels imaginary pain, which at the end of the day is just like the real kind. So one day he comes in with a bunch of pills. He carefully offers them to her, and she looks at them, understanding, and accepts. He feeds them to her one at a time and she chews them up. She tells him he was always a good son, and she goes to sleep. He wipes his fingerprints off the case, puts her hands on it, and goes home.

In some aspects it's a sad story about assisted suicide, which was probably even more controversial in the 70s than it is now. I'm personally not against the idea, because some people are in positions where they should get to make that choice. Helping them do it is a hard thing, especially for a son with his elderly mother as in this story. But if they both think it's for the best ...

In other aspects it's a slow, fuzzy sort of story. That's on purpose. It's not a fun read, but it's not meant to be. But that doesn't change the fact that it's not a fun read. It's a sad note to end a short story collection on. Not a scary note, though perhaps there is something of fear in it, and King promised in his preface that he was going to talk about fear. This would be fear of death, or the point where things are bad enough that you stop being afraid.

Grade: B-