Summer of Stephen
Title: “It Grows on You”
Publishing Date: 1981 Length: 18 pages Start Date: April 4, 2018 End Date: April 4, 2018 If you’ve been following my journey through Stephen King’s vast collection of work, then you probably know by now that I never shy away from sharing my true feelings about one of his stories/movies. Well, in the case of “It Grows on You,” I have something very important to say. I didn’t get it. Maybe I was really tired when I read it, or maybe I’m just not as smart as I think I am. I don’t know what the reason is, but the point of this story was pretty much lost on me. So I did what any self-respecting person with a Master’s degree in English would do. I looked up the Wikipedia summary of the story. The story takes place in Castle Rock (which is the setting for several King stories) and focuses on a house that seems to grow new additions without anyone actually putting any work into it. This part I understood. I assumed it was supposed to be like the Winchester mansion, filled with empty rooms and staircases that lead nowhere. Every time the house in the story accumulated a new wing, it was right after the death of a man from the town. Here’s the part that went over my head. According to the Wikipedia summary, these men had also visited the house as children and were molested by the house owner’s wife. How did I miss this huge detail, you may ask? Well, I have no idea. King isn’t exactly known for his subtlety, so I can’t imagine that this story was steeped heavily in symbolism and metaphor. But, because it takes me forever to get around to writing these, it’s been almost three months since I read the story, so I don’t really remember it. I vaguely remember a sentence or two at the end about someone driving past the house and seeing the wife out by the mailbox, holding her dress up to expose herself. But that one mention is all that I can think of in regards to anything sexual in the story. So, if you’ve read this story, let me know if I’m the only idiot who completely missed the point. It won’t hurt my feelings (much) to learn that my reading comprehension skills aren’t what they used to be.
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Title: The Running Man
Publishing Date: 1981 Length: 161 pages Start Date: February 19, 2018 End Date: March 9, 2018 This book was solidly okay. The beginning was good and set up the tension well. Then things got really boring and repetitive. And then ending ratcheted up the excitement until the very end, which kind of came out of nowhere. The Running Man is set in a futuristic dystopia where poor people can attempt to earn money by competing on reality competition shows. Like Survivor or The Amazing Race. Except if these people don’t win, they die. Ben Richards desperately needs money because his family’s only source of income at the moment is due to his wife prostituting herself out so they can afford food and medicine for their deathly ill daughter. Richards decides that his best chance to earn enough money to save his family is to compete on one of the shows. After an unnecessarily long, rigorously detailed process, he’s chosen for “The Running Man.” To win, Richards has to evade capture by a group of headhunters for 30 days. If he survives for a month, he’ll win $1 billion. No one has ever won this game, though, because regular citizens can earn money for providing information that leads to a capture. So literally the whole world is working against him on this. Richards doesn’t believe he can win, but his family will be paid $100 for every hour he stays alive and $100 for every cop or headhunter he kills. So his plan is to live long enough to help out his wife and daughter with however much money he can earn. For the first few days, Richards disguises himself and manages to avoid being caught. I’m not going to go through all of his various disguises or the towns he travels to, because that’s where the story started to get kind of boring. It’s kind of like on reality shows when they show people just sitting around, doing the same thing day in and day out. Beware! Spoilers ahead. After several close calls, Richards takes a hostage and forces her to drive him to an airport in Derry, Maine. (For those of you familiar with Stephen King, you probably recognize that fictional town from several other stories.) He takes his hostage and the lead headhunter onto a waiting plane and instructs the pilot to fly in a certain direction. While in the air, Richards learns that he has beat the previous record by surviving for just over eight days. As a prize, they offer to allow him to replace the current lead headhunter, a position he accepts after learning that his wife and daughter are dead. But Richards has no intention of taking the job. Instead, he allows his female hostage to jump out of the plane with the only parachute, then kills the flight crew and the lead headhunter. With no one to stop him, Richards flies the plane into the skyscraper where the creators of “The Running Man” have their headquarters. I get that this story isn’t set in the reality we know, but I still rolled my eyes a lot at the ending. Even if they thought Richards had a bomb (which was his claim that got him the plane), I seriously doubt that they would have let him get away like that. The headhunters would have picked some random person they didn’t care about and forced him to potentially sacrifice himself by getting close enough to Richards to take him out. The very end was also a bit disappointing, though I don’t know how many people would agree with me. For me personally, I think the ending would have been more effective if Richards had legitimately taken up the game makers on their offer to make him the lead headhunter. Think about it: What would be more chilling than a man who’d lost everything he’d fought to save choosing to become the thing he once hated? Overall, I don’t know that I’d recommend this one. It’s a decent enough story, but it just goes on and on. The same story could have been told in about half the number of pages and been just as (if not more) effective. |
Jacinta M. CarterProfessional Book Nerd Archives
July 2019
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