What Stephen King sees

  • Read­ing dur­ing sick days is an hon­or­able tra­di­tion, but try­ing to make my way through the Stephen King book I got by mis­take has been any­thing but relax­ing. All the same, he’s an extremely good writer, and part of his suc­cess comes from being so attuned to address­ing one com­mon human expe­ri­ence that goes largely unspo­ken of in our enlight­ened times. He seems extremely good at telling what hap­pens to Nat­ural Man when he enters the spir­i­tual realm armed with only human fac­ul­ties like sen­sory evi­dence, imag­i­na­tion and rationality.

    This book — “Just After Sun­set” — is a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Stephen King that Greg sent to my Kin­dle by mis­take. I don’t like to ignore a book, even one that shows up erro­neously. And so it was that at the same time I was dos­ing cough syrup and bundling up against the chills, I was read­ing about crazy sadis­tic killers and dead people’s train sta­tions and other dis­turb­ing and bizarre stuff, all tinged with that super­nat­ural weird­ness that King does so well. The best of the sto­ries seem to fol­low a formula:

    1. We meet the main char­ac­ter (or cou­ple or group) who’s deeply flawed or is going through a deeply awful time of their life.
    2. Intro­duc­tion of the calm before the storm — “It was a per­fectly ordi­nary day …”
    3. Begin­ning of the weird­ness. Pro­tag­o­nist finds out that the usual rules that gov­ern real­ity are “bend­ing,” and although he’s hor­ri­fied, he begins to study the para­me­ters of the new par­a­digm. (“I found out that the blood-sucking blue jay couldn’t fly through wood, only through glass, brick and stone.”)
    4. Pro­tag­o­nist engages the new par­a­digm, usu­ally alone and often in secret, and begins to lose his grip. Rela­tion­ships suf­fer, jobs and for­tunes may be lost, and his life and san­ity begin to unravel. The par­a­digm begins to take over his real­ity, and he is in torment.
    5. He thinks he comes up with a way to defeat The Evil.
    6. Long con­flict with it, dur­ing which he thinks he has won at least once only to find that it has come back stronger. In the end, either The Evil has won (killed him or dri­ven him insane), or he has beat it back — for now, at least — but nobody believes him and no one will ever know what he did. His life may be ruined, or else it’s pos­si­ble that the encounter with The Evil has got­ten him over his par­tic­u­lar life-crisis.

    Or some­thing like that. As I said, the rea­son these sto­ries res­onate with so many peo­ple is that they are talk­ing about some­thing that is very real, but sel­dom talked about seri­ously these days. Devout Chris­tians believe that there is a spir­i­tual realm besides the phys­i­cal world of our senses (as do a lot of other reli­gious peo­ple). But we also believe that although it has beck­oned to men from our ear­li­est days scratch­ing out an exis­tence, the sim­ple truth of the Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tive is that there is only one accept­able rea­son to approach that realm, and that is in order to know God, the Father. There is only one way to do that, and that is through God, the Son. And that is only pos­si­ble through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

    Which sounds like us being exclu­sive or Chris­tianocen­tric or some­thing. But it’s sim­ply what we believe. ANYONE that tries to pull back the cur­tain between the phys­i­cal world and the spir­i­tual world for ANY other rea­son by ANY other method will either find noth­ing or they will be set upon by dark and con­fus­ing spir­its. If they approached the King­dom of God on their knees as a pen­i­tent, they would be saved and begin a life of blessed­ness. But for those whose knees won’t bend, they don’t encounter Good­ness per­son­i­fied but its absence per­son­i­fied. As for what it is that they see, … well, that’s some­thing that needs all the artistry of a Stephen King to try to give shape to. Per­haps the best expres­sion of it is some­thing I’ve heard attrib­uted to Nietsche: The prob­lem with look­ing into The Void is that even­tu­ally, It looks back.

    In the non-believing world, there are def­i­nitely the atheist/freethinker types that say that none of this exists. They have lit­tle more patience for the non-Christian spir­i­tu­al­ists in our cul­ture — the ones who believe in angels, good luck charms, tarot read­ings, astrol­ogy and feng shui with equal con­vic­tion — than they do with Christians.

    But they miss the point, and their rant­ing to their fel­low man that all of That Stuff is just super­sti­tion only serves to heighten the pro­found sense of curios­ity, fear, awe and con­vic­tion that the rest of us feel.

    That’s the expe­ri­ence that Stephen King exploits, I think. That’s the point in the human expe­ri­ence when all writ­ers of hor­ror and super­nat­ural fic­tion find us will­ing to lis­ten. Because no mat­ter how fan­ci­ful and bizarre the things are that they write, they don’t begin to ade­quately cap­ture what’s out there. Our entire imag­i­na­tion isn’t suf­fi­cient to hold it, which is why visions and dreams often seem so impos­si­ble to capture.

    This thought has been hard to cap­ture as well. I have spent too many words try­ing, and I’m still not sure if I’m mak­ing myself clear.

    .

    *****

    But since I’m dron­ing on and on any­way … Last thought from me before I leave off: I was intrigued with decon­struct­ing super­nat­ural tales this way, but one of the cliches of them that I found inter­est­ing was that the first time the pro­tag­o­nist really looks with under­stand­ing at The Evil (and never ques­tions what he thinks he under­stands), that’s when it threat­ens to force its way into the mind, to bloom into full flower.

    Here’s an excerpt from a story called “N.” about a char­ac­ter who has found an ancient evil that lurks in a cir­cle of stones in a field. This is how he describes the encounter with a psychiatrist:

    “… it’s how we see the world that keeps the dark­ness beyond the world at bay. Keeps it from pour­ing through and drown­ing us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep. So I turned to go, and I was most of the way back to my car — I might even have been touch­ing the doorhan­dle — when some­thing turned me around again. And that was when I saw….

    “There was some­thing in the mid­dle of the stones. In the mid­dle of the cir­cle they made, either by chance or design. It was black, like the sky in the east, and green like the hay. It was turn­ing very slowly, but it never took its eyes off me. It did have eyes. Sick, pink ones. I knew — my ratio­nal mind knew — that it was just light in the sky I was see­ing, but at the same time I knew it was some­thing more. That some­thing was using that light. Some­thing was using the sun­set to see with, and what it was see­ing was me.”

    I don’t think Stephen King describes what really hap­pens when the con­fus­ing spir­its take us. I don’t think we can describe that. But I think this way of telling about it to each other con­veys the real­ity of it as closely as we can. And doing that is a human need as old as any myth.


    Related posts:

    1. O Heav­enly King …
    2. Kong not king
    3. Twenty good min­utes out of “King Kong”
    4. Clean, but empty
    5. Spir­i­tual obedience …

    October 22nd, 2009 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Anam Cara 10.22.2009

    Your quote above is the first Stephen King I have ever read. I didn’t see any­thing there that would draw me to read more. (Although I think the Kin­dle sounds pretty neat)

    About 20 years ago I read the Peretti series about spir­i­tual war­fare: This Present Dark­ness, Pierc­ing the Dark­ness, etc. The thing I remem­ber most about those books is that I would be drawn into this dark, dark world. Then it would be time to take the kids to soc­cer prac­tice and I would look up from the pages and see a world filled with light, sun­shine, laugh­ter. The dif­fer­ence in the two worlds was amaz­ing — (you could say like light and dark or night and day) I was so drawn into the story, though, I had to go back and find the ending.

    I won’t read any of those books again. I won’t pick up another Peretti And Stephen King seems to be of the same ilk.

  • Mimi

    I had to gig­gle at “I’m not one to ignore a book, even one sent erroneously”.

    I really liked King when I was in my teens, because he tells such an amaz­ing story. But, after my kids were born, I really had to back off his books — I still read one now and then, but it can’t be too gory. But, I also will skim. Any­way, I can count on one hand the num­ber of his nov­els I’ve read as an adult.

    I’m glad you are felling better.

  • Grace

    I know what you mean. Stephen King is extremely good at doing this one thing, but it’s worth ask­ing whether that’s some­thing you can han­dle or not. Which in this case means, I think, can you learn some­thing from those worlds that actu­ally helps you with the world you really live in.

    The jury’s still out for me. As I said, I got this book by acci­dent, and I’m try­ing to make the best of it. But I cer­tainly don’t think this is the read­ing I would do to unwind. Might just sort of KEEP unwind­ing. :-o

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