There’s no explaining the strange success of Stephen King’s Carrie. It’s a horror story in which just two things happen. In the beginning of the book a high school outcaste is heartlessly bullied in a locker room when she gets her first period, and about the end of the book she turns into a swan, goes to the prom, gets humiliated again, and burns down the school. But it creeped us out then, when we were teenagers and shocked to read a male author talking about such female things. And it creeps us out now, for very different reasons. Back then it was scary because it was so real, because we all knew a girl or boy who was the class target, for no good reason. Those of us who didn’t join in the bullying didn’t do anything to stop it, and the handful of us who made friends with that poor target had absolutely no social standing to lose by it. So we weren’t shivering over the idea of a telekinetic kid who might bring down a rain of fire on us all, the guilty and the bystanders. We shivered over King’s picture of the American high school itself, its ruthless popularity games, its codes of exclusion and inclusion, its senselessness.
We are all now older and more thick-skinned, but King’s tales still fascinate. His voice is plain and Salingeresque. He is a sarcastic, humorous insider when he paints the landscape of youth. At first he didn’t set out to write horror, he only told his stories. The horror just happened. Those early stories go beyond immediate shocks to implant an overall unease with the American way of life. Christine is King’s story of a haunted car. The car enslaves its owner, commits murder and, to beat it all, is indestructible. It is so improbable it doesn’t really scare me. What disturbs me is the tag of car-love music King puts at the head of every chapter. Music from the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Bo Diddley, Bob Seger and dozens more, singing odes to their Cadillacs and Chevys. Are men so far gone in their automotive love affairs that they will tick off their families and the whole world? All those love songs seem to say so.
But by the time he wrote Christine, by his own account, King was already branded as a horror writer. It is between Carrie and Christine that I find the stories I like, especially The Dead Zone and the four novellas he published as Different Seasons. Of those novellas, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was made into a spanking good film. The Apt Pupil, which was also made into a film, is a gruesome tale of a boy who hunts down a war criminal living under an alias in an American suburb. The boy torments the old man by forcing him, every day, to describe the crimes he committed as commandant in the Patin concentration camps. He wants to know about “the firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens... The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.” So the frightening boy and his quarry begin a long, tortuous dance. Sometimes the boy wins and sometimes the old man does. Neither of them can outrun the ghosts they have raised.
The best of the quartet is The Body. There is hardly any gore in this messy but touching story of four boys who set out to find a body lying on the railway tracks. They find the body, they come home. It is mostly full of the routine terrors that boys suffer in rural America. Fathers who beat them. Mothers who can’t be bothered. Big brothers and other tyrants who make them afraid to turn the corner. All the unthinking cruelty of adults. And the unshakeable loyalty of four friends. Now that gave me the shivers.
Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad
