No matter how much I read of Stephen King’s novels, stories or plain author’s notes, I can’t seem to ever get over the surprise and dark excitement that his writing awakes in me. Dark, because even in his non-horror texts, like the short-stories that were published in “Just After Sunset”, each and every phrase is loaded with a threatening edge, a nerve-cracking undertone, like the feeling that, no matter what comes next, it will be a bad thing… a DARK thing. And what is always amazing about King’s writing is that, even if, as a reader, YOU KNOW it will end badly, he’s perfectly capable of taking you on that road for five pages or fifty pages, as he chooses… and you are guaranteed not to stop reading until the tension is resolved, the end reached, the lesson learned.
Because, in the end, it’s all about the lesson in it. Even though there’s no question of moral lessons, the kind you’d learn from a fable or moralist story, there are still things that get imprinted on your conscience as you read and re-read Stephen King.
In the short-story collection “Just After Sunset”, no story resembles another, and yet I’ve picked three of them that account for the strange title of my post. For those who have read the book, these are obviously “The Things They Left Behind”, “The Cat from Hell”, and “Graduation Afternoon”. The underlying theme that these three stories have in common is how things we did or failed to do in our lifetime come back to haunt us when we least expect it… because we are always responsible for everything that touches us, one way or another.
“The Things They Left Behind” is enigmatic from one end to the other. The most important question, right from the start, is WHO ARE THEY? Untraditionally, the story does not begin by describing people and their belongings, but rather by describing objects that speak of a person’s death only to allow, a couple of pages further, an insight into his or her life. The things that survived the death of these people are left as a painful reminder, a guilt-inflicting token of shameful survival of the fittest… or, in this case, of the luckiest. And they refuse to follow their owners, choosing to stay among the living, and haunt their unworthily gained existence.
This sort of haunting could also be interpreted as a form of revenge, though that would imply a judgment from the part of the author against the surviving character, and that’s certainly not the case with this first story. It does apply, though, to “The Cat from Hell”. In this story, King literally plays with one of the most potent symbols of evil, a cat that seems determined to exterminate (kill would not begin to cover it!) a man who had made a fortune based on torturing thousands and thousands of cats. What is remarkable and shocking in this text is not the storyline itself, but the slow, deliberate, torturous means by which the cat works to its final aim. It’s not a sadistic story, as many might be tempted to say, but it is a very dark one. Because everything that the cat DOES do to inflict pain and suffering is merely a mirror of the acts that its target had accomplished during a life time. And thus, while in the first story, pain and (mental) torture is inflicted as a punishment for something that WASN’T DONE, the second illustrates a cold-blooded, and all the more terrifying approach on the classical “eye for an eye”.
Last but definitely not least, “Graduation Afternoon” deals with large-scale disasters and how we, as individuals, are also responsible for them, because it affects us both as masses and as individuals. Again, whether there is an implied judgment against Americans and their aggressiveness as a people is fairly debatable, and merely a matter of interpretation. But one cannot help not noticing that, in the midst of all the hysteria that followed 9/11, King resorts to a type of (presumably) terrorist attack that the media hasn’t much discussed. An A-bomb which, coincidentally or not (I am personally inclined to dismiss any coincidence), is the same weapon that the Americans (or shall we say “American troops”, to remain politically correct) used to turn to ashes two cities whose people had not wronged them much…
Of course, whole essays could be written on either of King’s stories, and it obviously takes a more advised and informed commentary to be able to draft a critical study. But that was definitely not my point. I merely wished to express my admiration on Stephen King’s façon d’écrire (writing style, if you’ll excuse my French) and describe, to the best of my powers, the thoughts and emotions such lectures have awaken in me. Dark, but utterly thrilling!
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