It's still the ghost of September past speaking to you from the evening of the 28th. I write in somewhat of a half-assed time limit fit of desperation, in which I have about 3 hours to get all of my affairs in order before hitting the sack and then hitting the road. It's a tricky bit of timing, and as I said in yesterday's post it leaves us with a bit of... limiting in what we can cover. I admit a certain level of procrastination due to not knowing if this trip was happening or not, but hell. If Douglas Adams can work under a deadline, me too. Here, of course, is the difference born out of desperation. The Enigma Of Amigara Fault was always planned. The following is a spur of the moment thing based on a friend mentioning one of the two things here to me today. So, here earlier than I intended is Stephen King. I gave IT a nice big bit of coverage last year, and now that has a new remake (which I've not seen and won't be talking about this year, sorry) so his meganovels are no stranger to these marathons. Sometimes overlooked, though, are his short stories. What does Stephen King under brevity look like, his horror contained within a smaller liminal space? Not unlike my own situation, actually. Well, I'm going to find out with two especially spooky and effective short stories from his 1985 short story collection, Skeleton Crew. Zooming out a bit, Skeleton Crew is one of the better collections he's done. The stories in it are mostly from the early 80's, a... contentious period for the man (though not for his work); it'll make sense later in the month. Pretty much all of the stories in this book are good ones, but I chose two in which the endings still stick in my mind. Let's get to the good stuff with the first one. Away we go...
THE JAUNT
Ooh, sci-fi horror. That's definitely something we'll be getting more of as the month goes on, and a particular favorite flavor of mine. The Jaunt is the history of a world with an amazing invention, and how that invention can lead to terror unimaginable. The titular Jaunt was invented in the then-not-too-distant future of 1987, as a man tells his children before they prepare for their own Jaunt. King likes naming things funny or cute names, and the Jaunt is basically just teleportation... but of a particular type. The Jaunt brought a lot of good to the world and saved planet Earth on resource management and let it go to the stars... but there's a side effect of sorts. Jaunting doesn't harm inanimate objects, but anything sentient with any sort of brainpower to it? They die. Something inside there drives them mad and often kills them from shock... as the death row inmate offered to test Jaunting awake said, "it's eternity in there.". The story's interspersed well, with the father telling his children all about the invention of the Jaunt as we jump to the perspective of the inventor in 1987 testing and understanding just what the hell he's created. There's one pretty conceptually horrific moment where a man murders his wife by throwing her into a Jaunt portal and erasing all other connections to portals from his own, potentially leaving her conscious for eternity in the void. The real nasty bit comes with the ending, which... well, I'm gonna spoil so. If you're a fast reader. Slow down. And read. The story. Okay? Okay? So that guy was telling his kids the Jaunt story to explain to them all about the Jaunt they're going to take to Mars as part of a company move. You can survive the Jaunt just fine if you're unconscious when you do it, but it's being awake that's bad... as the guy's son finds out when his curiosity gets the better of him and a withered aged thing with white hair who's experienced an eternity of eternities without a physical form starts screaming that it's LONGER THAN YOU THINK, DAD! before clawing his own goddamn eyes out. King... has that happen a lot. Definitely a memorable ending, and a rare dip into the world of sci-fi horror for King. Who knows, maybe we'll see another but for now here's a second story from Skeleton Crew...
SURVIVOR TYPE
On the other hand, this one is pretty practical as far as stories go. One guy stuck on a desert island, and only his journal entries to get into the story. Richard Pine, shady doctor with a history of stealing pills and dealing drugs and other such criminal connections, stuck on a desert island and bitching about everything while detailing his efforts to survive. With no vegetation to speak of, he's forced to kill seagulls and eat them raw and not puke. Shit gets worse when he breaks his ankle and is stuck there for four days with it not getting any better... but he does have a shitload of heroin with him, and he's a surgeon. The will to survive is a running theme of this story, and it's here that Pine shows it by using the heroin to dull the pain before amputating his own goddamned foot and eating it. What follows is slow deterioration from Pine's POV as he writes, and good lord is it effective. There's a later King story which does this idea a little better and scarier for me personally, but it doesn't have a man eating himself out of grim determination to survive. He gets more and more high on his own supply, losing track of time as he does so and amputating and eating more of himself. The final entries are incoherent messes, save for the final few lines regarding the contemplation of eating his own hands. The Jaunt had that LONGER THAN YOU THINK line, and Survivor Type ends on the babbling nonsense of "ladyfingers they taste just like ladyfingers". No clue if Pine lived through his ordeal with no legs and one hand gone, but it's doubtful. The last raving rants of kind of a bad man who survived to the end at all costs. Pretty goddamn spooky. That'll do it for now, and hopefully the next time you hear from me I'm A) on time and B) writing in the present. Until then, the ghost of September past will leave you for now... but the spooky stuff is coming. Be patient.
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