Stephen King – Novel Niche

Happy New Year, Novel Nichers! May it bring you an abundance of good, thought-provoking, stay-up-all-nighting reads. I’m thrilled that my first post of 2014 isn’t actually *mine*: it’s a guest post from K. Jared Hosein, author of Littletown Secrets (Potbake Productions), in which he discusses the top twenty books that’ve influenced the vein, tone and weight of his own writing.

I recently named Littletown Secrets one of the best Caribbean books of 2013 in a Trinidad Guardian article, so it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of Hosein’s writing. I’m so intrigued by his picks that it’s motivating me to make a top 20 list of my own. More of that later — for now, here’s K. Jared!

You can’t write well if you don’t read.

And I would like to say that if there were ever some objective Euclidean list of axioms for literature, this would be at the top. But literature does not deal with absolutes, theorems or laws, but rather codes of conduct. Literature remains subjective and every person gravitates (or falls victim) to their own taste. I have never been the biggest fan of classical literature. There are some I enjoyed, but of my opinions: A Tale of Two Cities is egregiously over-written; The Scarlet Letter is barely readable; The Last of the Mohicans is dreadfully boring; and I’d prefer watch Kenneth Branagh do Shakespearean adaptations on the silver screen than actually read Shakespeare.

I grew up not liking to read, because these were the books presented to me as a child. I finished a book, like I would finish a plate of lentils. I didn’t enjoy it, but I knew it was probably good for me. It was actually the storytelling in 90’s role-playing fantasy videogames that first piqued my interest in the craft. It was from there that I wrote a story, which was published for the local Sunday Guardian. The “payment” I received was a book of my choice from a select store. I wasn’t too thrilled with this.

But when I went, the lady at the counter recommended what she had probably recommended for every little boy my age: Enid Blyton. I devoured it in one sitting. Pretty soon, I had a stack of Blyton books. As I got older, my preference changed. And it’s still rapidly changing. I think that must be a sign of maturation. Not an evolution of taste, I would say, but the hunger for different styles, tones and grooves marks the moment to further oneself. I stress, literature is anything but absolute, which is what makes it even more exciting to explore.

I’ve snapped a picture of twenty books that I believe have influenced my feelings and ideas about writing. They are not the best books I’ve ever read. But a book doesn’t have to be Pulitzer material for it to affect your belief in some way. I try not to idolize any work too much, as I fear finding myself craving to “live up to something else”. Though ambition and inspiration usually join hands and the craving is, thus, inevitable from time to time.

These books span from my childhood to just one year ago. I’m going to append each title with a mini-rationale for its placing.

The Pleasures of the Damned (Charles Bukowski) is a collection of poems by, well, Charles Bukowski. In my review for this book, I said that Bukowski is overbearingly honest in most of his poetry. He creates dystopia without apocalypse. The ordinary degenerate. There’s nothing else to it, since basically he was a degenerate. The collection, however, made me view poetry in a different light when I first discovered Bukowski at fifteen. Poetry didn’t have to be embellished or written with finely curled letters. It could be simple and ugly. Not even well-articulated hatred, like Sylvia Plath. Just raw, pithy imagery about toughness, like a one-eyed cat, a tough motherfucker, chasing blind mice.

Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) concerns Billy Pilgrim, who becomes “unstuck in time”. After being abducted by a strange group of aliens, Billy finds that he can see his entire life (and even past his death, until the end of the universe itself). I read this in university and it changed my perspective on how science fiction could be written. Vonnegut, to me, seems to write with an extraterrestrial readership in mind. There is a certain humour in the simplicity we take for granted. Vonnegut captured that here. It is something I hope to also.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie) concerns Arnold Spirit, as he grows up in the ‘rez’ (Indian reservation), surrounded by disillusioned, drunk and temperamental Native Americans. This is the quintessential young-adult book, yes, complete with bullying, falling in love and illustrations. And it is quite remarkable. Young-adult authors engineer their books to extract an emotional catharsis, I believe. Finding humour in degradation. And the great fear that settles when one is told of their own home, “This place will kill you.” Living in a crime-ridden country, I can relate. Also, who knew comic strip cartoons could go so well with prose?

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) is a book we all know, or should know. It is a polarizing book, not for its content so much, but because it has been read by some of the most irritating people. Holden Caulfield has been kicked out of Pencey Prep and wanders around New York City for a few days before returning home. He also wears a red hunting cap. That’s it. That’s the book. And I’ve read it, no exaggeration, about ten times. I read this when I was fourteen after I borrowed it from my school library. Didn’t know anything about it when I did, but damn, it was hard to do my homework the night I started it. I don’t love Holden. I don’t even like him. But I realise: I don’t have to. It helps, yes, to feel something for a narrator. But I realised that they don’t always have to be affable. Just intriguing, as character is the greatest tool we have to elevating plot.

Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo) is similar to another book I have on this list, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though they are both here for different reasons. Joe Bonham awakens in a hospital and eventually deduces that he is basically a living torso. Yes, his face is gone and his appendages have all been blown off by an artillery shell. He’s a prisoner in his own body. It is a poignant and extremely depressing novel. It is here because of its attention to sensory detail and use of flashback during the recall of Joe’s life and family. It also shows the influence the written word can have against a behemoth such as World War I.

The Gunslinger (Stephen King) is the first book of the Dark Tower series, the magnum opus of King’s career, and I’ve put it here to represent both itself and the series. Though I’ve only read up to its fourth installment, the series is a detailed and expansive work that treads through the wasteland of a world that can only be described as where “the rest of the world has moved on”. Characters from previous novels make appearances, affecting the plot and reinforcing the idea that all King’s work is set in one universe. A haunting western setting along with deliberate anachronisms showed me that there really is no boundary to the worlds you can conjure up. Everything is acceptable, once done calculatingly and professionally.

Everything’s Eventual (Stephen King) is a short story collection, of which I wish to discuss only the titular story. “Everything’s Eventual” concerns Dinky Earnshaw, who has the ability to construct symbols that elicit strong suicidal feelings for those who view them. Dinky doesn’t understand his ability, and doesn’t use it until he is convinced to do it to rid evildoers in his city. I was thirteen when I read this, and I had never even imagined that such a Jedi-like mind trick could be taken seriously out of a Star Wars setting. King made it work, however. From an early age, because of this story, I realised how limitless writing really was. Sorcery could exist in suburbia, and that was fine.

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) is an epistolary novel (and I actually didn’t know what that meant until I read it) about Charlie Gordon, a mentally challenged janitor whose rapidly increasing intellect affects his life and those around him. As it is an epistolary novel, the story takes place in entries from Charlie’s journal. The result is quite effective, as it shows both Charlie’s own changes in his thought processes, and clarity of events in hindsight. I came across this in a second hand book kiosk while I was in high school, and I actually had no idea at the time that books could be structured that way successfully.

The Chrysalids (John Wyndham) is a book that most high school students around my time might have done for their O’ Level Literature class. Though I didn’t study Literature, I read the book anyway. I was probably thirteen at the time. The story concerns David, one of a group of telepathic children whom live in Labrador. The people of Labrador believe that any deviation of the human anatomy (or ability) must be banished to the “Fringes”. It’s one of those classical allegory stories that youngsters are told to read, like Animal Farm. And while Animal Farm carried a strong message, it didn’t affect me as much as Chrysalids’. It carries one that is central to literature itself: never stop analysing everything.

The Call of the Wild (Jack London) concerns Buck, a domesticated dog that has been sold to become an Alaskan sled dog. The language is straightforward yet descriptive and the primal themes retain power in their simplicity, so when I read this at a very young age, it hit hard. It’s probably one of the most effective books I’ve read. It doesn’t miss a beat and the theme of “returning to nature” will always be relevant to literature, to society, to any persona one may hold. We all must be animals when the time comes.

Stay tuned — soon, we’ll be visiting the second half of K. Jared’s list — plus catching up on what’s new in his own writing world!

First published in 1977. This edition: 2012, Anchor Books)

Cradled in the majestic, foreboding arms of the Colorado Rockies, the Overlook Hotel seems like nothing so much as a salvation/sanctuary, a real boon for the Torrance trio. Jack Torrance, patriarch, middling writer of possible promise (he once had work published in Esquire, which is saying something) and forcefully-retired preparatory school English teacher, knows that managing the Overlook during its sealed-up winter months is an ace of a job. For reasons that make him sick to his stomach to contemplate, performing commendably here, for six sequestered months, is his last chance in a variety of ways. He’s determined not to muck it up, and with the emotional support of his cheerful wife Wendy and dutiful son Danny, Jack thinks his first tenure at the grand hotel could be just the chance he needs to solidify his autonomy and finish the first draft of his three-act play.

Soon before departing for Floridian warmth, empathetic Overlook cook Dick Hallorann assures Danny, “I don’t think there’s anything here that can hurt you.” Halloran also gives a name to the prescience Danny’s always had, calling it “the shining”. Though Dick shines on a lesser level, Danny’s psychic powers are starkly, eerily majestic, revealing both Jack’s ever-pressing compulsion to drink and Wendy’s crushing anxieties. Danny’s shining is the brightest spark the Overlook has encountered in an age, and the hotel wants him. The spectre-lined chambers know just which desperate, drink-deprived man they can use, to help draw little Danny deeper into their carpeted, chandeliered clutches.

No, this isn’t like the Hotel California, since, in addition to not being able to never leave, you really can’t check out any time you like, either. King situates the glacial furnace of the novel’s primary activity in a place where retreat is nigh-impossible, where the hope of external rescue hangs as precariously as a loose tooth from a bloody thread of gum. Further to this, the storyboard conflicts – Man vs Nature, Man vs Self – are so orderly, so cleanly hewn in their make that they might have popped straight from the pages of a “How to Storytell” primer. Therein lies the ghoulish, fantastic rub, though – this is aching, jealousy-makingly-good storytelling. King’s third novel sees him harness deceptively simple constructs and then stun us between the eyes with the consistent power of worldmaking that fires on all cylinders.

What works well for The Shining is a discernible dearth of heavy turns, though the narrative does occasionally pat itself on the back with unnecessary, sometimes corny insertions. (If I were as tremendous a third book as this one, I’d probably be stroking my own spine with inky compliments, too.) We feel, when we read Jack, that we *are* Jack, from the moment we’re fidgeting in Ullman’s office, hating the officious little prick’s guts, promising vindictive retributions that our new boss might not quite deserve, but by God, it’s the principle of the thing, it’s to do with being humiliated and just how unjustly one can turn the knife back on one’s oppressor matters, it does. When we’re reading Wendy, we’re Wendy, a woman who fiercely adores her son, a woman who’s timed the steady degradation of her marriage against the repetitive clink of scotch and gin bottles, a lady who’s startled by the surges of her own uncommon intelligence. She stifles her own better judgments with hausfrau-esque personal admonitions that resonate with a sickly thud of commingled girlish naiveté and calculated despair, measured out in mental hair twirls through restless, well-manicured fingers.

Perhaps most astonishing and gratifying is the fact that when we read Danny, we are Danny. We’re five, and not too far gone from nights of bedwetting. We regress to thumbsucking states when confronted by the ire-fuelled interactions of the Mummy we cherish and the Daddy we idolize. We want things to be right, knowing from the very beginning that the Overlook is wrong, and we learn far sooner than we should about all the slithering, Room 217-dwelling manifestations of just how wrong wrong can be. King’s embodiment of Danny’s precarious, nuanced mental journeys is stunningly navigated. We’re there with him, fumbling in the labyrinths of his exceptional mind, our hands held up to fend off bogeymen of corporal and ethereal formations. We’re there with him even when we most want not to be.

Certainly, this book is scary. It’s more than a scream-by-numbers investigation, though. At its best, The Shining pierces through to the telltale heart of psychological decay, of the most earnest of human intentions lain low by a roque mallet. It’s a portrait of personal devastation as convoluted as anything Dorian Gray could conjure, and then some. Jack’s progressive decline is the novel’s snarling beast, and it’s even more terror-inducing than encounters with topiary creatures in feet of fresh snowfall, because Jack is you, and me. Jack is anyone who’s fought tooth and nail against the siren call of the thing they most love and fear. In his hubris, his clever arrogance, his petulant protestations against situations his own shortcomings have engendered, you know that he’s you on the days you want to erase from the ledger. Jack is proof that we can’t outrun ourselves, and oh, how brutally and systematically this reminder thuds from the pages.

If you’re new to Stephen King, as I was (and still am, since one novel doesn’t an adept make), maybe you might not want to read this one in the dark. Maybe it’ll come for you in the dark regardless, like it did for me, demanding to be read in silence, with a light borne aloft, while the rest of the house slept. Read about how this inhuman place makes human monsters, of how imaginary friends can reveal the truth lingering in a chiaroscuro world running parallel to this one. You might dismiss the horror as not supernatural enough, maybe. Or, like me, you might find your body blistering with wintry fear when you learn that King’s paranormal horror beats (bleats?) with the dogged persistence of a very human heart.

Don’t be surprised if surviving The Shining catapults you into the dimly-lit corridors of King’s considerable oeuvre. At the very least, it’ll make you want to take your medicine.