Bazaar of Bad Dreams. Stephen King. 2015.
I keep trying to give this dork a chance and I keep regretting that I did and to quote a noted, fake bad writer: I couldn’t help but wonder, is it just me?
Look, I get why he’s as famous as he is. He’s an ideas man, I get it. I promise I won’t quote Mad Men in every one of these, but you remember that episode where Peggy tells Don “you have everything. And so much of it.” Stephen King has had every idea. And so many of them. It would be hard to write original horror if only because whatever your scary idea is Stephen King has probably already thought of it and written it. He’s thought of all of it. There are two titans of 20th century American horror fiction, who couldn’t be less like each other: Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft. King managed to turn himself into the spiritual child of both of them, their unholy and grotesque synthesis. He can write, and has written, every kind of horror there is.
And it hardly ever works for me. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand his sentimentality, I can’t stand his smirky humor, I can’t stand his kids (and he won’t stop writing them) and more than anything I can’t stand his women. I hate every single one of his novels that I’ve read. Yes, including that one, whichever one you’re thinking of. I’m team Kubrick in The Shining war. The thing about King is, I think he's continually at war with himself over the kind of stuff he wants to write, and you can see the tension between what he wants to write and what he thinks he should be writing.
You see this in The Shining especially, and I think it's why he's so angry about Kubrick's adaptation. Kubrick saw all of the truest darkness that King himself couldn't acknowledge. He turned King's ultimately optimistic story about an alcoholic writer who finally defeats his demons by sacrificing himself to save his family into a story about a violently abusive drunk who terrifies and terrorizes his wife and son until they finally escape him for good. A story about a flawed man trying and failing to be his best self, but dying in the conviction that he saved his family and his family will always know that, becomes one about an abuser who may know how to pretend love and care but is empty underneath. Of course King hates it. He's afraid he really is that guy. The King of Horror, afraid of the fullest and nastiest implications of his own creation. And nearly all of his work, to me, feels like that - like the work of somebody afraid to go as far as he could.
I know! I’m a bad horror fan. It’s because I’m a horror fan that I keep trying. But I’d rather just go to Jackson or even Lovecraft, any day. Patrick McGrath. Thomas Ligotti. Tananarive Due. Stephen Graham Jones (who can tend towards the sentimental, certainly, but in a way that satisfies me). Kelly Link. Paul Tremblay (who also writes about kids a lot, but does it in a way I like, and who is never overly protective of his characters). Good old Grandpa Poe.
The one exception to all of this is King’s short fiction, which I’m maybe 50-50 on, and that’s why I keep giving him a chance, because every once in a while I’ll find a King short story that really does grab me. “Survivor Type” (not in this collection) and “The Jaunt” (ditto) are such sick, dark and funny stories, both perfect horror, not a drop of sentiment or nostalgia in either of them, and I keep going back to King wanting more of that. None of the stories in this collection are that good. Mostly, they are fine. I don’t think any of them really offended my taste apart from “Ur,” which I gather even King is a little embarrassed by. “Under the Weather” was strangely sweet in a way I liked. “Afterlife” was a really nifty idea (he tends to have those). “Morality” approached the kind of bleak nastiness that I like in the King stories I tend to like.
There was nothing here I loved. I wanted to! I always want to. But I think it’s time for me to give up on Stephen King.