Summer of Stephen
Title: “Survivor Type”
Publishing Date: 1981 Length: 16 pages Start Date: February 16, 2018 End Date: February 16, 2018 This is one of my favorite King short stories so far. It has several of the elements I love in fiction: written in epistolary form, an incredibly unreliable narrator, and a slow descent into madness. “Survivor Type” is told through the diary entries of Richard Pine, a surgeon who ended up marooned on a deserted island while trying to smuggle heroin on a cruise ship. All he has with him are his diary, the heroin, and an incredibly limited supply of food. The food, of course, quickly runs out and he’s forced to attempt to kill seagulls that land on the rocks near him. He is vastly unsuccessful in this endeavor. Shortly into the story, Richard breaks his ankle and decides that amputating his foot is the best course of action. He uses some of his heroin stash, hoping that will act as an anesthetic. After cutting off his own foot, he realizes that he can eat it to help him survive a bit longer. His diary entries become increasingly disjointed and rambling as he becomes addicted to the heroin, continuing to use it every time he amputates and eats another body part. By the end of the story, nothing below his waist is left nor are his ears. The story ends with his decision to cut off his left hand. As disgusting as it sounds, I love these kinds of stories. I’m pretty wimpy myself, which is probably why I enjoy reading about the lengths other people will go to survive. It also doesn’t hurt that Richard is absolutely awful, so it takes awhile for you to start to feel sorry for him. If you have a weak stomach, then I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this short story for you. But if you like to read survival stories that take a turn for the grotesque, then you’ll most likely enjoy “Survivor Type.”
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Title: Cujo
Publishing Date: 1981 Length: 319 pages Start Date: March 9, 2018 End Date: April 3, 2018 I have been terrified of dogs since I was little. I have no reason for this fear. I’ve never been bitten by a dog. I’ve never had a dog chase me. I’ve never been in a position in which I felt threatened by a dog taking up the same space I was currently in. Nevertheless, the fear persists. To this day, I’m scared of dogs. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell me your dog is the sweetest and wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less a person. It doesn’t matter if your dog wants nothing more than to curl up by my feet and snooze away the afternoon. It doesn’t matter if your dog is blind, has no teeth, and can barely walk. I am still afraid of your dog, and nothing you say can convince me otherwise. Why, you may ask, did I feel the need to share all of that with you? Well, because I want you to understand the mindset I had going into Cujo. For those of you who don’t know, Cujo is a super gentle St. Bernard who contracts rabies and becomes a killing machine. Kind of. Considering what I was expecting, there is surprisingly little bloodshed in a book that I assumed was about a giant dog ripping people to pieces. In fact, the most heartbreaking death (which I’ll spoil a bit later), involves absolutely no blood at all. Pretty much the first half of Cujo is King setting up way more backstory about the various characters than we actually need. Before Cujo even starts showing symptoms of rabies, we learn that Vic’s business is going downhill, his wife Donna is having an affair, their son Tad is haunted by something in his closet, Cujo’s owner Joe is a major asshole, his wife Charity is terrified of him, and their son Brett is equal parts afraid of and in awe of his father. And we learn about all of this in agonizingly slow detail. After about 100 pages, I turned to my roommate and said, “If this dog doesn’t rip out somebody’s throat pretty soon, I’m going to do it myself.” When Cujo does finally start to appear rabid, Brett tells his mother that Cujo is acting strangely and seems sick. But Charity wants to go on a vacation, so she makes Brett promise not to mention anything to his father, who would prevent them from going on vacation in order to take care of the dog. So, all in all, the events of this book are almost entirely Charity’s fault. Okay, we’re about to jump into the spoilers now, so proceed only if you already know what happens or you’re not going to read the book so it doesn’t matter anyway. While Charity and Brett are gone, Joe goes to visit a friend who lives down the road. When he arrives, he finds his friend dead, with his throat ripped out. There’s also a pile of dog crap on the floor, leading him to the realization that it was his own dog who did this. Before he can do anything about it, though, Cujo attacks and kills him. In the meantime, Vic has left town for a business trip, instructing Donna to take their car out to Joe’s auto shop (which is conveniently located in the middle of nowhere) while he’s gone because it’s been stalling lately and needs repaired. Of course, this leads her to Cujo the Murder Dog. I’m not going to go into great detail about what happens, because there’s a lot of jumping around from character to character, and I don’t want to give you a play-by-play of all of that. Instead, I’m going to focus on Donna and Tad. Donna and Tad end up stuck out at Joe’s auto shop because the car just happens to take its dying breath in his driveway. Because Joe is dead and his wife and son are on vacation, there’s no one to save them from Cujo. For a couple days, Donna and Tad are trapped in their car, which Cujo occasionally charges into the side of just to freak them out further. Oh, and did I mention that it’s the hottest part of summer? Because what better time to be stuck in your car, right? Eventually, Vic returns home, discovers his family is gone, and calls the police. The sheriff drives out to the auto shop, but is attacked and killed by Cujo. Donna finally decides to make a run for the house, hoping it will be unlocked and she’ll be able to call for help. Cujo gets to her first and attacks her, but she managed to grab a baseball bat from the yard and fends him off, finally beating him to death. Right about this time, Vic shows up, having given up on the sheriff and gone out looking himself. Vic pulls his wife away from the dead dog and goes to check on Tad, only to discover that the boy is dead, likely from a combination of dehydration and heat stroke. It’s unclear if he died shortly before Vic showed up, or if he’d been dead for a while and Donna was just hallucinating their conversations. So, overall, I enjoyed this book (though it definitely could’ve been bloodier). But reading this book has done nothing to assuage my fear of dogs, and in fact probably made them worse. (A final note: The characters in this book make several references to a minor character in The Dead Zone. I liked the connection between two of King’s novels, but I don’t think these references would have meant anything to me if I hadn’t read The Dead Zone first. Also, if you read Cujo first, then it kind of spoils what happens to that character in The Dead Zone.) Title: Roadwork
Publishing Date: 1980 Length: 207 pages Start Date: January 7, 2018 End Date: January 23, 2018 So far, this is my least favorite Stephen King book. Okay, technically, it’s a Richard Bachman book, but same difference. Either way, I didn’t enjoy it. Roadwork tells the story of Bart Dawes, who’s about to lose his house to make way for a new highway. The place he works is also in the path of the new highway, and part of his job is to secure a new location for the business. Instead of doing his job and also selling his house to the government and then buying a new one, he decides to stand up to the metaphorical man that dudes in the late 70s and early 80s are required to despise. But the problem is, Dawes doesn’t actually do anything. Instead of actively protesting, he just lets time run out on both the opportunity to move his business and sell his house. This results in a huge group of people losing their jobs, because the place they worked no longer exists. It also leads to Dawes’s wife leaving him after she finds out that he was lying when he said he’d been looking at houses for them to buy. Now that everything in Dawes’s life is falling apart, he decides that his best options are to make a deal with a mobster (who mostly just laughs at him and tells him he’s an idiot), have sex with a barely legal hitchhiker he picks up on one of his nightly drives through the city, and attempt to blow up the construction equipment to delay work on the new highway. As I’m sure you can predict, pretty much none of these actions work out particularly well for him. In the end, Dawes refuses his final eviction notice, choosing instead to go out in a blaze of glory after wiring his house to explode after he engages in a gunfight with the police. The main problem with this story is that it takes forever. The plot drags on unnecessarily and there are too many stretches with either nothing happening, or just repeated action from previous chapters. The main character is determined to keep his house, but his motivation for this is never explained. Yes, he’d had a son who died as a child, but it’s not like he’s being asked to move to another town. He can still live within easy driving distance of the cemetery where the boy is buried, although that probably isn’t really an issue, since he never visits his grave throughout the course of the novel. If anything, this should have been a short story. That would have allowed King to jump straight into the action and then get it over with. Instead, we’re left with a novel that moves at a painfully slow pace toward a disappointing conclusion. |
Jacinta M. CarterProfessional Book Nerd Archives
July 2019
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