stephen king – Mark Bould

Reading The Great Writers, part one

The lrb; or long, redundant beginning

This spring and summer, I spent several months reading for and writing a chapter on ‘Class and Horror’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Horror. It was the first time I’ve dived deep into critical/theoretical work on class for probably the best part of twenty years. One key shift is the now general acceptance of the need to incorporate Bourdieu (or Bourdieu-like) work into models of class, which meant I found myself thinking a lot more about social and cultural capital. The other key trend was hardly new: marginalising/excluding Marxist traditions of work on economic class, often in favour of Weberian or neo-Weberian approaches, which is odd given how very little Weber actually said about class, but also for other very obvious reasons not remotely odd.

I also found myself baffled (i.e., not remotely baffled but fascinated) by social scientists who present social mobility as an absolutely incontrovertible good (even if the only argument they can muster is that it improves GDP) but are at the same time appalled by the notion of absolute social mobility. Even though it is the obvious end-point of their social mobility enthusiasm, they devote absolutely no words/time/energy to imagining what meaningful equality might look like. Instead, they just brandish terrifying (that is, hilariously clichéd) images of totalitarian states. Harrison Bergeron, eat your heart out! It’s almost as if their main interest is maintaining a slightly tweaked and marginally more palatable status quo (and securing future research income streams from similarly committed funding bodies).

Anyway, the point is, I found myself engaged in autobiographical ponderings about social capital, cultural capital and autodidactism.

I come from a dirt-poor West Midlands working-class family. I was born in Staffordshire but we moved to Devon when I was four years old, which further limited the already negligible social capital to be derived from my now attenuated extended kinship network.

My parents were Methodists (which is why I have absolutely no idea how to gamble although I did, after no struggle whatsoever, overcome teetotalism). And they were aspirational, at least to the extent of wanting a better life for me and my brother and of taking on a crippling mortgage to own a home rather than rent a house (they were so ripe, sadly, for Thatcher). Their new circle of church friends – middle class folks from the wealthier parts of the village – obviously lived in a different world to us and, despite many kindnesses, were defensive of their relative privilege. While my dad left school aged 15 and with no qualifications, they were mostly graduates from middle class families. Thus they had higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital, the latter of which was often deployed against my ‘uneducated’ dad. Especially when he did things like trying seriously to discuss with them that bit in Acts about the early church sharing all things in common. They were really not up for that! (In this mid-1970s context, my dad was quite radical in trying to square a Co-op/Labour upbringing with the evangelicalism into which he had fallen, which was only just then turning from a vaguely countercultural centrism to the pronounced right-wing attitudes that now define it – and which shifted my parents’ politics: they cried when Callaghan lost in 1979 but have voted Conservative ever since, albeit with growing disillusionment over the last decade of unignorable Tory corruption and incompetence.)

So I grew up with no economic capital to speak of, and very little social or cultural capital. But my parents’ aspirationalism bought into the post-war promise of social mobility (I am old enough to have benefitted from those limited openings, which have in real terms been whittled down to nothing since the 1980s) and thus they insisted on the importance of education and of reading. However, the latter, amply supported by school and especially public libraries, took place in something of a vacuum: limited cultural capital meant I had little idea of what to read.

Which I only really began to realise in my mid-teens, thanks to Rob. An extremely middle class friend met through church stuff, he was a couple of years older than me, went to a grammar school and was the most flamboyantly camp person I’d ever met: he ‘simply adored Dickens’ and, he declared, flaunting a Penguin paperback of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was ‘reading the Russians now’. How did he know about these things? They were simply part of the atmosphere in which he grew up, at home and in school. (He urged Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) on me, and something green-covered from Grove Press, but it only very slowly dawned on me that this was a kind of courtship: that he was using books – and cultural capital – to hit on me. Last I heard of him, he moved to South Africa at the turn of the 90s to become a croupier at – unforgivably – Sun City.)

In the absence of such social and institutional networks for inheriting the kinds of cultural capital Rob enjoyed, the only real alternative for me was autodidactism, with all its perils and pitfalls – and potentials for embarrassment: at some point in my mid-teens I asked Plymouth Central Library if they had a copy of ‘Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) – I’d read, rather than heard, about it somewhere so only knew how to pronounce one of those five words. (It took a couple of decades before I could start to enjoy mispronouncing ‘archipelago’ as if it were a kind of sausage.)

Plymouth Central Library, the location of my chipolata embarrassment

Autodidactism took many forms:

Discovering Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) and trying with the aid of the library to work through its list of titles. A quick google of the contents page shows there there are still forty-odd of them I’ve not read. Andrea remains constantly appalled at me for never having read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), as now does my mate Dan since she blabbed to him this summer. But I did finally read Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1952) last year in Brazil in the old densely-packed A-format paperback that had travelled tens of thousands of miles in my luggage over the years as my emergency back-up should I be ever stranded in an airport or train station with nothing to read.
Watching The Great Philosophers (1987) on TV and reading Brian Magee’s book version and then finally finishing that copy of Betrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I’d got bogged down in a couple of years earlier.
Randomly picking up second-hand Penguin classics (or the usually cheaper imported American paperbacks of the same titles).
Seeing a Vincent Price movie and setting out to read all of Poe.
Hearing Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness so starting to read Conrad.
Watching The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), reading Malcolm Bradbury’s book version and turning them into reading lists….

Lists. All the time lists. And following up those leads in libraries and second-hand bookstores. (New books were things you received as gifts.)

Just in case any of this makes me sound adorably (or agonisingly or absurdly) precocious (or dunderheaded), let me be clear: I had not exactly left childish things behind.

I still regularly re-read my full set of The Incredible Hulk Weekly and my stack of movie novelisations (though some passages in Arthur Byron Cover’s Flash Gordon (1980) were definitely not intended for the younger reader).

And although I stopped buying second-hand Doctor Who novelisations with number 68, Terrance Dicks’s An Unearthly Child (1981), I carried on rereading my until-then complete set. And reading the new ones until, I think, number 113, Terence Dudley’s Black Orchid (1986), even though that entailed humiliating returns to the kids’ section of the library I’d eagerly abandoned half a dozen years earlier (and even though I’d freakishly stumbled upon, read and had the veil of illusion torn away by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), the first proper academic book I’d encountered).

I was also, like every adolescent male I knew, although perhaps more assiduously, reading James Herbert and Richard Allen and Sven Hassel, and exercising an even less discerning penchant for Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (1981–82) novels and Guy N. Smith (probably more for the knee-tremblers in alleys and doorways than the slime beasts and giant crabs). I’d given up on Agatha Christie after reading all the Marples I could find (I never liked Poirot) but was starting to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett by about 1983. I discovered Mick Norman and Mick Farren, as well as Michael Moorcock (except Elric, could never get into Elric) and grumpy oddball Peter Van Greenaway. Curiously, although my mate Stewart was a huge fan, I never got into Stephen King, and I still find his fiction utterly unengaging. But I did get totally into JRR Tolkien in 1980. And out again completely by 1984 or thereabouts, after many re-reads, even of the appendices and The Silmarillion (1977). I gave up on David Eddings and Raymond Feist by 1985, the year I also ditched Frank Herbert: I was sufficiently loyal to slog through Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) but had been bored since at least God Emperor of Dune (1981). But the overlapping and intertwined story of my autodidactic route through sf and fantasy – similarly thrilling-yet-full-of-pathos – is something for another day.

Such omnivorous reading – more accurately described, in my case at least, as flailing around – is I think, characteristic of the autodidact. (By chance this morning, I read Michael Moorcock’s 2011 memoir-essay ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’ and recognised a little something of my own childhood in his ‘I learned from reading and not knowing what was respectable literature and what was not. I read everything.’) But it also resembles the ability to access both high and low culture now often attributed to middle class privilege, so perhaps this is not a story of autodidactism and cultural capital after all, but of ‘How I Became A Class Traitor’.

My local library was located just across the park on the top floor of Pounds House

The strange thing is, the sense of being an autodidact has never gone away, even though I’ve been in formal education, as student or teacher, every year since the age of five. Apart, that is, from 1987–88, when I took a year off between A-levels and university (because I was so disgusted by what I witnessed during my Oxford interview, but that too is another story). For about 14 months, I toiled as a motor insurance claims handler for the Co-op Insurance Service and the Cornish Mutual Association. I was less than mediocre. I never got beyond processing windscreen claims, and every day I hated that my job mostly consisted of getting claimants to use language that implied their broken windscreen was made of toughened rather than laminated glass, which meant they were liable for the cost of the replacement’s upgrade in quality, even if there hadn’t actually been one (not that this was how my role was described to me). As careers go, it was clearly not for me.

And all these years later, I still don’t drive. Which would have probably undermined my prospects for advancement.

Around that time, Marshall Cavendish published the Great Writers partwork. It was an image-heavy magazine, with broad brush historical context and biographical commentary on that issue’s author(s), accompanied by a hardback edition of a novel or collection or other book-length work. The books came, with no apparent rhyme or reason, in red, navy blue, bright blue, black, brown or green covers. Each bore a vaguely illustrative image and ever so slightly embossed fancy gold writing. They were cheaply produced in Spain. I can’t remember whether it was published weekly for a year or fortnightly for two (either way, there seems to have been 54, rather than 52, issues). I purchased it – but did not read it – diligently.

The magazines and later the books were discarded years ago, during the many moves between rented accommodation familiar to any student and early career academic. But by chance this year I read two of the books included in the series for the first time – Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) – which started me wondering how many of the 54 volumes I’d actually read during the intervening 35 years.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is the complete list of The Great Writers (not in order of publication). As you will see, ‘greatness’ is largely a function of having been dead long enough for your work to be in the public domain (although that does not explain the Bates, Forster, Greene, Hemingway, Huxley, Maugham, Steinbeck, Waugh, Wells or Woolf titles).

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1794)
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (probably just The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1)
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories (1920)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s/1840s)
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
William Shakespeare, Comedies (1590s–1600s)
William Shakespeare, Tragedies (1590s–1600s)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Anthology of Romantic Poets (early 1800s)
Anthology of the War Poets (1914–8)
Anthology of Fear (twenty ghost stories from 1824–1914)

I had, it turned out, already read 15 of them…

Reading The Great Writers, part two

Crimson Peak (del Toro 2015)

Pretty much all the commentary so far has been about one of two things.

Critics have been unanimous in their praise of how gorgeous the film looks, from its gothicky design to its fabulous frocks and sumptuous colour palette (it also has some nice irises and cunning wipes).

Or they have echoed del Toro’s own point that it is not really a horror movie so much as a gothic romance, full of echoes and allusions, including: Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; the several versions of Jane Eyre and Silence of the Lambs; Du Maurier’s Rebecca; Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Notorious; Medak’s The Changeling; The Haunting, and Wises’s; King’s The Shining, and Kubrick’s; the Coen’s Barton Fink; del Toro’s own Devil’s Backbone; and so on.

All of these critics are right, and yet without exception they overlook del Toro’s major accomplishment.

Somehow, he manages constantly to keep this astonishing overblown confection of evil aristocrats, ghosts, forbidden rooms, gramophone cylinders, automata, letters, keys, ghosts, murder, incest, idiosyncratic grim-up-north grimness, peculiarly hardy Cumberland moths, violent assaults and revolutionary mining technology just this side of hilariously funny. And somehow he makes it a constant delight, grand guignol at its most operatic, all logic subordinated to production design.

But it would take just one person in the auditorium to start laughing, and it could all go disastrously wrong.

It is not the first time del Toro has walked this particular line. Much as I enjoyed them, Hellboy II and Pacific Rim edge along a similar tightrope, and are rather less successful in keeping it together.

Early in the film, protagonist Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) explains of a story she has written that it is not so much a ghost story as a story with ghosts in it, and that her ghosts are actually metaphors for the past. With the kind of New Weird chutzpah that China Miéville once championed, del Toro’s film takes completely the opposite tack. His ghosts are ghosts, not metaphors.

However, the logic of Miéville’s argument meant that while one should be absolutely committed to treating monsters as monsters rather than as metaphors, this should nonetheless leave their metaphorical potential open and even make for more effective metaphoricity. But with del Toro’s pastiche late-Victorian setting lacking the historical resonances of Devil’s and Pan’s Labyrinth‘s (not unproblematic) Spanish Civil War settings, there is nothing really for his ghosts to gain metaphorical purchase, even if they were so inclined. There is some stuff about aristocrats as parasites, and a whole Blut und Boden thing lying around should anyone want to make something of it, but no one does. And del Toro seems utterly uninterested in the gendered restrictions and sexual repression that seem so fundamental to gothic romance.

It is a film of many layers, all of them on the surface.

On the other hand, I loved every deliriously silly minute of it, and you get the impression del Toro did, too.

Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (2013)

This is, I shit you not, the one about evil gypsies abducting children.

Admittedly, the gypsies are actually some kind of energy-vampires, who traverse the US in the guise of middle-aged people in RVs. And they don’t merely abduct the infants, but slowly torture them to death to release more of whatever kind of energy it is they chow down on. And one of the infants in their sights is a girl in her teens who can shine way more powerfully than anyone else. And she knows Danny Torrance, who has grown up to become, like his father, an alcoholic, but is in Alcoholics Anonymous and sober for most of the book.

But mainly it is about gypsies abducting children. I shit you not.

Despite being a sequel to The Shining, it mostly isn’t. It shares Danny and one location and some references to Hallorann and Wendy (in whom King still cannot muster any interest) and inserts them into a mildly and differently fantastical version of the contemporary US. It is smoothly competent – the riff on Jerome Bixby’s ‘It’s a Good Life’ (1953) is nicely done, but the allusion to The Silence of the Lambs sits there for no reason like a lump in your pablum – but it is hardly gripping, suspenseful or scary. It is like bathing in a cup of tea the way my mum makes it.

King’s semi-autobiographical account of Danny’s experience of AA, of its practices and processes, suggests a strong resonance with neoliberal culture’s emphasis on getting the individual to surveil and manage him/herself, to hope for little more than surviving daily, to self-scrutinise, to locate responsibility within the self – anything rather than fix the society that produces alcoholism. But this is thin stuff, too.

Not everyone agrees. For example, Margaret Atwood says that ‘by the end of this book your fingers will be mere stubs of their former selves’.

Presumably because gypsies stole the tops of them.

PS My other Shining-related posts can be found here, here, here and here. (And boy am I kicking myself for forgetting when writing about Room 237 that Yanis Varoufakis’ book is called The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy.)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980)

It is difficult to know what to say about The Shining, especially as so much has already been said, some of it of dubious merit.

Like Stephen King, I am baffled as to why people find it so scary; unlike him, I rate it way more highly than his original novel (and the miniseries does not even get a look in).

It is a film I never used to like much, although I always admired its soundtrack and steadicam (Kubrick is so very effective when tracking-in that you can forgive him for his lesser parallel tracking, but, to be fair, Jean-Luc Godard’s not as good at the former as he is at the latter). And I have always been a little taken by the simple tricks Kubrick deploys – an omission here, an ambiguity there, and what Michel Chion describes as his ‘commutative editing’ – to make his films seem enigmatic and profound.

This time round, the film grew on me. I have no idea if this is because I finally watched the 25 minute longer US cut (although some months ago Roger Luckhurst predicted such an outcome, and I learned a long time ago he is usually right about stuff). I was struck very forcefully this time round by the visual and aural resonances with 2001 – and partway through the job interview scene, I stopped hearing the dialogue as being badly-delivered and started hearing it as a development of the earlier film’s depiction of linguistic thinning and debasement. Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) channels the performance of sincerity and the platitudinous corporate drone of Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), and everyone sounds like they are delivering lines because that is what so much of human identity and interaction consists of – performativity.

When I recently read King’s novel, I posted about its proleptic depiction of precarious, disciplined neo-liberal labour. This is developed in Kubrick’s film. The Overlook itself, despite it age, resembles one of the non-places of hypermodernity described by Marc Augé: those spaces that are the opposite of utopia because they exist and do not contain any organic society. For all the historical markers we see on display – from those big cans of kosher dill pickles in a hotel that would once have been restricted, to the Native American designs and images on the walls, to the very 1970s purple penis carpet – it is oddly dehistoricised. It is a space that might even confound Steve Buscemi’s CHET! in its obscure blurring of ‘trans’ and ‘res’. The Torrance family, that signifier of a private realm outside the world of work and exchange, that gesture towards organic society, is destroyed by the relentless demands of the Overlook, which is only concerned with Jack as labour-power.

The Shining shows the coming proletarianisation of the American middle class, or perhaps merely charts the delusion of social mobility at the core of the American Dream. This is Jack – the terrorised and terrorising, self-surveilling, self-disciplining and other-discipling sadomasochistic subject of a monstrous power. Just the way capital likes it.

And management doesn’t care for one moment that he has produced the treatise on work-life balance. To the Overlook, it’s just a paper trail to prove the staff have been consulted at.

The Shining (Mick Garris 1997)

Stephen King just won’t let it go.

There is an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of Doctor Sleep (2013) that, under the guise of clarifying that it is a sequel-by-popular-demand to his 1977 novel rather than to Kubrick’s 1980 film of The Shining, says of the latter: ‘many seem to remember [it] – for reasons I have never quite understood – as one of the scariest movies they have ever seen’ (483). The next paragraph does not proclaim the TV miniseries King himself adapted as superior to the movie, but it does sing the praises of his more-or-less-reliable-hack director Mick Garris’s Psycho IV, as if to trump Kubrick with a Hitchcock.

It is coyly done, as if King knows it is not at all convincing.

But anyway, as part of my ongoing preparation for teaching Kubrick’s film as a cult movie, after reading the novel I watched the miniseries over several nights. I would have got through it sooner, but after episode one my ever-patient housemate cried no más, and scheduling became an issue – poor thing missed out completely on the slightly less terrible second and third episodes…

The main problems with the miniseries are its plodding adherence to the novel and the deadening literalness of its treatment of the supernatural elements. All it takes is that first glimpse of Danny’s (Courtland Mead) imaginary friend Tony (Wil Horneff) bobbing about in the air to realise quite how brilliant Kubrick was to have Danny (Danny Lloyd) talking to his finger instead. (Probably didn’t help that it immediately took me back to being thirteen and watching Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979) miniseries and bursting out laughing at the supposedly scary bit when the fat vampire kid taps on the window.)

These two intertwined problems began to fill me with dread when the first episode started obsessing about the topiary animals, trying to make them ominous. Will they be brought to life as badly as the cgi hosepipe? How could the bush-animal attack sequences – presumably originally inspired by Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt’ (1950) – possibly work?

I generally find Bradbury overrated, but even I must concede the novel’s reworking of this material makes make him seem subtle.

Garris very sensibly, if not very effectively, relies on camera movements, editing and switching-in props to bring the topiary lions to life. Until the ‘cliffhanger’ ending of episode two, the final shot of which shows Danny being stalked unaware by three cgi shrubs. (They do not appear again except fleetingly in the climax of episode three. Thankfully.) To be clear, this is not ragging on the special effects because they are bad, but because they are badly chosen.

Generally, the physical effects work best, but there is something so amiss about the individual episodes’ and the series’ pacing that they too become a problem. The first couple of times a door opens or closes or an object moves mysteriously is fine, but you pretty quickly find yourself wondering whether it is always the same bloke hidden just out of shot pushing the door, how much he gets paid, what he had for lunch… Not so much ‘how did they do that?’ as ‘why?’ And it does make you wonder what exactly they spent the $25 million budget on.

I guess, in part, the format is the problem. Economics dictate that a network TV miniseries made in the 1990s can’t be too scary or unnerving or disturbing, so the supernatural horror has to be blandly by-the-numbers and the domestic abuse material has to be displaced as far as possible.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the cast.

Winifred Torrance is a badly underwritten character in the novel – all I can really remember is King banging on about her breasts – and she is no better served by a script that slaps on a bunch of embarrassing clichés. Garris does not seem to have any idea what to do with her, and Rebecca De Mornay struggles. Indeed, in episode one, she even seems to struggle to walk across rooms, although she does do one brilliant bit of almost indiscernible crabstepping down a hotel corridor that is simply not wide enough to accommodate three or four actors walking abreast.

Steve Weber, as Jack, has the easier job – do what Jack Nicholson did but not the way he did it. Even so, it is only when the later episodes allow Weber to ham it up that he becomes even remotely effective, and in the second half of episode three, this is largely down to his make-up – which gives him the appearance of a beaten-up, tear-stained clown.

As Danny, basin-cut Courtland Mead clearly shares no genetic material with either of his parents. He looks like one of those profoundly unattractive children who used to get cast in Dallas or Dynasty for no reason other than that their dad was a producer on the show. His performance does get better in the later episodes, and his unexpected ‘I love snow’ song is a bizarre delight, but I kept finding myself wondering whether the alcoholic, physically abusive Jack ever used his son’s enormous teeth to open beer bottles.

Most of the time the three principals, especially De Mornay, have the air of people wondering how much longer they are going to have to keep this up for…

The decision to play Ullman (Elliot Gould) as a mincing lisper is a really poor choice, but not as badly judged as Stephen King’s cameo as bandleader Gage Creed – at least he didn’t black up for his terrible Cab Calloway impersonation. (There is a chummy array of horror-related cameos: Frank Darabont, Peter James, Richard Christian Matheson, David J. Schow – and Sam Raimi stealing the bread from his brother, Ted’s, mouth.)

Pat Hingle, as Pete Watson, is probably the only actor to escape with his dignity intact, professionally ploughing through this nonsense the same way he has done since the 1950s.

But it is Melvin Van Peebles, as Dick Halloran, who has the best line:

911 ain’t the answer, ma’am, only wish it was.

Good to know that baadasssss is still out there.

Stephen King, The Shining (1977)

First, the confession.

Until now, I have never read a Stephen King novel.

In my early teens, I just could not get into Christine (1983) or Carrie (1974) or, indeed, The Shining. Each time I gave up a few chapters in, and just figured he was not for me. Sure, I’ve read Danse Macabre (1981), his history of horror fiction, a couple of times, and have always cherished its description of Harold Robbins (he can’t tell the difference between a well-structured sentence and a shit-and-anchovy pizza). And I did read The Talisman (1984), King’s fat fantasy novel collaboration with Peter Straub, when it first came out – and since I enjoyed it, I attributed that to Straub (although not enough to actually read any of his solo novels).¹ I even bought a copy of Dreamcatcher (2001) a couple of years ago, just to see if it is as hilariously inept as the William Goldman/Lawrence Kasdan film version, but gave it to a friend in the hope she would do the research for me. (She didn’t.)

But I am teaching the US cut of Kubrick’s movie this semester, so I figured alongside also watching Mick Garris’s 1997 King-scripted Shining miniseries and the Room 237 documentary, I should really give the novel another ago.

And you know what?

It’s all right.

It isn’t scary or suspenseful in any way, which might be because I already know the story. The prose only rises above workmanlike for literally – and I do not mean figuratively – a couple of nicely-crafted short sentences (which I failed to mark in the text so I can’t tell you what they were and may never find them again). But it is interesting in the way it is such a seventies novel.

That ain't no monolith... — That ain’t no monolith…

First, and least significantly, the cook, Dick Hallorann, often talks and thinks as if blaxploitation movies were King’s only source for imagining an African-American man – a quality Kubrick suppressed by

...and neither is that — …and neither is that

casting Scatman Crothers in the role, but which returns in the paintings decorating Hallorann’s Florida apartment.

Second, The Shining has something of Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s post-counterculture misogynistic whininess that pins the dissatisfactions of lower middle class white masculinity on women.² Terri Garr’s performance in the margins of Spielberg’s movie can, if observed, prompt at least some sympathy for her character. But just as Spielberg is uninterested in Ronnie Neary, so King, despite giving Wendy Torrance some backstory, some viewpoint chapters and some noteworthy nipples, really could care less. Like Spielberg always, King here is obsessed with paternity and patrilineality, even using the word ‘patricide’ in the novel’s climax to describe Danny’s role in the destruction of the Overlook/Jack.

Third, and most intriguingly, The Shining anticipates neoliberalism’s particular intensification of demands on workers. Much as the novel is about the past – the ghosts of the Overlook hotel; the effect Jack and Wendy’s neglectful, manipulative and/or violent parents had on them; Jack’s alcoholism; Jack’s violence – haunting the present, it now also has an air of being haunted by the future. When one socio-economic structure subsumes another, it does not replace it completely but carries forward, mutatis mutandis, that which it needs, that which it can make use of, that which does not contradict its operation and expansion. Which is why early capitalism had its feudal robber barons, and why this social relation and the sociopaths it rewards are ever increasingly evident in the aftermath of 2008.

In the later stages of the novel, the Overlook is revealed as a kind of raging Old Testament god, cruelly demanding that Jack sacrifice his son. His reward will be acceptance into a great chain of being, presided over by this dark ancient power and populated by mobsters, killers, CEOs and other criminals. However, the contract underpinning his adoption by the hotel is repeatedly expressed in terms of climbing the corporate ladder, of Jack having to prove that he is management material. From caretaker to manager – the American Dream! – through subservience and self-abasement misdescribed as personal merit.³

But what is the nature of Jack’s actual job? It is not the mountain-top location that makes his employment so precarious. Unearned, it is within the gift of his millionaire ex-drinking-buddy, Al Shockley, who inherited his wealth; and, as Jack learns, if he steps out of line, Al will fire him without hesitation. It is a job that completely obliterates any line between work and not-work, between workplace and home. It relocates and dislocates his entire family, but will last only a few months, and if he is fired, they will all be homeless. It requires his constant presence, often in stand-by mode. It colonises his consciousness and creative human capacities, and subordinates him entirely to the extraction of his labour-power.

Jonathan Crary entitled his 2014 book on the ruinous human effects of contemporary capitalism and its attention economy 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep; I guess I will now have to read King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining to see whether it is just a coincidence that he called it Doctor Sleep.

PS Even after reading The Shining, I have still read more Guy N. Smith novels and seen more Lawnmower Man movies than I have read King novels.

¹ I got bogged down in the early pages of Koko (1988) years ago, and still have an unread Shadowland (1980) in a box somewhere. But I did once stay in a hotel room next to Peter Straub at a conference in Florida, and was (admittedly unintentionally) a considerate neighbour, which surely must count for something.
² You will be glad to hear this kind of silly whinging and contrafactual scapegoating is a thing of the past. Oh. No, wait. See this. And this excellent response.
³ As satirised in Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), and straightfacedly reiterated every day by all that bullshit about this being a meritocracy.