#807 Chattery Teeth- Stephen King

#807 Chattery Teeth- Stephen King

Bill Hogan is a traveling salesman. He stopped at Scooter’s Grocery and Roadside Zoo to get gas before heading home to Los Angeles. They are in the desert and a big wind storm is headed their way. While paying for gas he spots a pair of Jumbo Chattery Teeth in the novelty display booth. It’s one of those wind up toys that jump around. Normally they are smaller and made of plastic, but these are cast metal. Even though they seem broken he buys them for his son.

The wind has picked up as he leaves the store, and against his better judgment he picks up a hitchhiker who is about to get stuck in a sand storm. Just like his premonition, the hitchhiker tries to rob him at knifepoint. A car crash, a wind storm, a knife-fight later, he barely make sit out alive. He survives, this time with a new look on life and a new friend.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#769 The Whipping- Julia Elliott

#769 The Whipping- Julia Elliott

Kate is an adolescent girl who just got caught stealing a pack of her father’s cigarettes. She will be punished, whipped. This story is the countdown to that whipping. They won’t whip her right away because whipping a child while angry is akin to abuse. So she spends her time trying to keep her father angry to delay the inevitable; angry or drunk because he won’t whip her while he’s drunk either. Unfortunately for her, her father is very adept at whipping:

“My father, an elementary school principal who paddles kids for a living, has several lines on his resume devoted to his whipping expertise. He’s developed it into a high artform.”

There is definitely something off about the father. And like father, like children, they take cues from that oddness. The macabre killing and eating of the robin is another punishment, one that the whole family must suffer. 

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#723 The Night Flier- Stephen King

#723 The Night Flier- Stephen King

Richard Dees was a reporter, or at least he thought himself one. He wrote sensationalized tabloid stories for a print rag called the Inside View.

“There were many things the Inside View was not—literate, for one, overconcerned with such minor matters as accuracy and ethics for another—but one thing was undeniable: it was exquisitely attuned to horrors.”

To give you an idea about their level of credibility, their latest cover was about intelligent alien penguins poised to take over the planet! He and his editor however have been tracking what they believe to be a great “legitimate” story. One that would give him fame and respect.  He thinks there is a serial killer on the loose, someone only he knows about. He calls it the Night Flier because the murders all happened at small airports. The twist, what makes this fodder for both the tabloid press—and worthy of a Stephen King anthology—is that the killer may be a vampire.

He tracks the killer down, while himself flying his own plane through a thunderstorm, to a landing strip that has lost power and confronts the man/vampire. At first he wants the story, then all he needs is a photograph, now all he wants is to get out of there alive.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

This is a short, well-developed horror story. A child is at home in his family’s large, dark, dusty house. He is being watched by his sister’s new boyfriend. He wants to hear a story before he goes to bed, and asks for a story about Click-Clacks:

-Click-Clacks, said the boy, are the best monsters ever.

-Are they from Television?

-I don’t think so. I don’t thing any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.

-Good place for a monster to come from.

-Yes.

So the boy and the boyfriend watching him walk down the hallway to the boy’s bedroom while they talk about what makes a good Click-Clack horror story. “Click-Clacks are much scarier than vampires.” “They’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention…and they look like what you’re not expecting.”

While they discuss the anatomy of a good horror story, it turns into a horror story. Click-Clack!

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

Reading David Foster Wallace can be a commitment. The length and meticulous detail in his works don’t lend themselves to “light-reading.” However, if you are willing to put in the effort, and keep focus (something missing from a lot of internet-aged readers) the payoffs can be huge.

To some, this style of over-prose may seem to be a bit tiresome, but I assume these are the same people that would rather fast forward the first 2 ½ hours of Die Walkurie, a tough opera to get through for a novice, just to listen to the 3 minutes they know…The Ride of the Walkurie. For an opera fan, or an avid lover of the long-form in any of the arts, the adventure and ride of the exposition makes the payoff so much sweeter.

Speaking of focus and boredom, Terence Velen is a fourth grade student having a hard time concentrating at school. He spends his days staring through the classroom window, subdividing his attention through small, reticulated metal mesh squares and letting his imagination create his own reality. Meanwhile in class, his substitute Civics teacher, Mr. Richard Johnson (a nice name for a civics teacher in the 1960’s) “had just written KILL on the chalkboard.” Then KILL THEM, and finally KILL THEM ALL.

We learn that Mr. Johnson had an obvious nervous breakdown and while most of the class fled the scene in a panic, there were four unwitting hostages, including Terence. These four were among the perceived "slow" or "deficient" students. But its seems that they were neither slow, brave, unlucky, or unwilling to leave. And it seems they weren’t really hostages, as much as daydreamers confused about what exactly was going on around them.

“In testing many school children labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pat attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pat attention to.”

Many of DFW stories follow a style such as this, a frenetic accounting of an unfocussed mind. Some have used his writing (unfairly to both him and the mental health profession) as a peek inside the mind of such young people who have suffered misdiagnoses or misunderstandings or worse, mis-medications. Beyond the obvious technical skills of these works, and beyond the comedic or tragic circumstances of the plots, there is a deep truth here, a soul that calls out to be recognized.  At once, impressive, touching, heartbreaking, and hilarious...there is only one DFW.

Notable Passage: “There is something about someone throwing up anywhere within a child’s earshot that serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an utmost insane force…”

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, its my blog and my rating system.

#77 The Horla (1887)- Guy de Maupassant

#77 The Horla (1887)- Guy de Maupassant

In the lineage of Edgar Allen Poe and an influence on H.P Lovecraft already reviewed in this blog, Maupassant is a master of the eerie world of supernatural and horror. Just like Poe, this horror comes from the depths of the human psyche.

“One might say that man, ever since he has thought, has had a foreboding and a fear of a new being, stronger than himself, his successor in this world, and that, feeling him near, and not being able to foretell the nature of the unseen one, he has, in his terror, created the whole race of hidden beings, vague phantoms born of fear.”

The narrator spirals quickly into a maddening dementia. He believes his is being haunted while asleep. He searches for rational reasons behind his madness, like sleepwalking, hypnosis, etc. But he is aware of the fragility of the human mind:

“A small disturbance in the imperfect and delicate functions of our living machinery, can turn the most light-hearted of men into a melancholy one, and make a coward of the bravest”

As his rational mind is being lost with each dream-filled night, he wonders if within that world, he can believe in things unproven, unreal, unseen:

“Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature. It knocks down men, and blows down buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroys cliffs and casts great ships on to the breakers; it kills it whistles, it sighs, it roars. But have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists for all that.”

The language here is a rich, flowing, gothic style that makes you want to read aloud in a dark room lit only by candles. I enjoyed this one. It’s no wonder that Maupassant is considered a father of the modern short story. Although that title may aptly be given to a dozen other authors as well, it is well deserved here.

Notable Passage: “Whence come those mysterious influences which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence?”

Rating: 10-8-9-9 Total= 36

#44 The Dreams in the Witch House- Lovecraft

#44 The Dreams in the Witch House- Lovecraft

The size and pace of this one reads more like a Novella, and is likely one of the longer short stories I’ll tackle for this project.  However, in reading H.P Lovecraft’s Omnibus 1 in its entirety, I’ve also read through a few of his mid-sized, namely At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of John Dexter Ward.  So far, I’ve enjoyed his shorter works.   All his writing has been artful, talented story telling, but the longer works seem to be struggling to accomplish a certain mood or tension that I think could be accomplished in half the space.

In Dreams in the Witch House I think he’s found a good balance and the pacing was perfect.  Once again I immensely enjoyed his style of prose.  Its amazing that as I go through these collections, that someone like Lovecraft can exist at the same period as Hemingway, Faulkner, Jack London, etc.  I guess its always the same with writers of off-beat topics.  Genre writers, pulp authors have the freedom to break convention.

Lovecraft is the king of the macabre and hoary, the mysterious and the grotesque.  But in Dreams, he shows you exactly how ahead of his time he was. This thriller is as much a study in quantum physics as it is a gory horror tale.  Gilliam, our protagonist, tracks down a story of a 17^th century witch, Keziah, as well as a foul hybrid creature haunting this town. This “white fanged fury thing” that “nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn" is a local folk tale born of hyperbole and fear.  It is a cross between a rat, a dog, and a human.  They name it Brown Jenkins. 

As Gilliam increases his connection to these horrors through dreams, “sharpest dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep”, he finds himself straddling special dimensions, “perhaps one of infinite remoteness.”  He taps into knowledge heretofore only the likes of Plank and Einstein held.  Sudden understanding of Riemannian Equations and the connection of the fourth dimension.   I’m amazed that these thought experiments played out here nearly 100 years ago are still being discussed among quantum physicists today. 

Whether these dreams lead to actual space space-time bending or is just a mind-trick consequence of his known somnambulism, is left to us, the reader to decide. 

Lovecraft liberally references something called the Necronomicon, it’s a grimoire, a book of magic he invents himself that has since taken on a life of its own within the genre. 

Notable Passage:  “Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.”

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30