Dead Brothers

I think it was King who once said that every author has a button in him he likes to push.
I think he meant a kind of readily written plot-point for all purpose use, like the one we find prominently in his work: The death of a brother.
If you read through Kings body of work you will notice this recurring theme. It is plot essential in his short Sometimes they come back and his novel The Dark Half, makes the opener for It, and is one of the more memorable shock moments from Tommyknockers.

The list could be continued on, and I hazard to say that we could make a case in which we would find a variation of this in all of his writing, for all of his major characters. I’m not sure if King himself ever gave a definite answer to the question if this is just that to him, a plot vehicle, or if there is something personal to it.

On a side note.
The tag on Sometimes they come back reads:

With Pet Sematary and Misery Stephen King scared you to death.
Now he's going to scare you back to life.

Ladies and Gents we have a new member for the not so elusive Stupid Tag Club!

Skip the novel, go for the movie

The movie is loosely based on Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, a mostly sensationalist, gruesome story that imitates the style of popular ‘true crime’ novels. The movie did admittedly skew the best part of the book, the sadistic relationship Bertrand’s to Sophie through which he finds some peace of mind for a little time although the relation would ultimately have been destined to end with him murdering Sophie, and turned it into a bitter sweet love-story and a promise of redemption for Bertrand’s tortured soul. But the movie did also take the completely random intro from in the book and gave it sense.
Personally I can live without the topics of cannibalism, forced incest and sadism the likes of which could make a even a seventies Euro Trash movie envious, and therefore prefer the movie over the book.

Ghost Story was the first contemporary horror novel I bought and it almost put me off the genre for good. After a highly atmospheric (read: scary!) beginning the books starts to waffle around and after having fought my way through 100pages or more of pointless rambles I flipped to the end to see if there was any point at all to the story and put the book away never to pick it up again since. Years later I saw the movie and the topic of this old men’s story telling club and a drifter with a girl rang a bell.
The movie cuts away all the embroidery and goes straight for the story, although, that much I must grant author Peter Straub, it does water down the impacting original end of the book considerably.
Still, the movie has a flow that grabs you and keeps you ‘till the end, which is something the novel couldn’t do.

Neither the movie nor the book are that remarkable in my opinion, after a great opening sequence including a violent werewolf attack the movie quickly succumbs to a typical ‘American Family’ dynamic. But Thor, the book the movie was based on, is among the few werewolf novels I never managed to get into. Written from the perspective of the family’s German Shepherd I though the writing to be too attention grabbing in it’s own right, so that it didn’t aid the story in the least.
I guess seen as a YA novel it can work, it didn’t however for me. The fact that the movie is good for a distraction and has Mariel Hemingway starring puts it definitively above the novel in my book.

The Dark Half ain’t a bad novel, it just felt atypical at the time for King. It’s a simple slasher the younger King could have handled better, in a more straight forward manner, and exactly that is what the movie does.
It skips all the fancy stuff and makes the necessary connections early on thus straightening out the story and setting it at the needed quicker pace the book missed for me.

Oh that poster style looks familiar doesn’t it?
Premonition with Sandra Bullock is harkening back to this.
But what's really remarkable about this poster is that in a as Star Driven world as Hollywood is, Stephen King holds more importance than any of the actors or the fact that 'Zombie' father George A. Romero directed the movie. No, everybody has to take second place behind King, the man has managed long since to become a living trademark and he's holding that position longer than any other contemporary author.

I liked the movie better

From the get go Hollywood acquired the rights well known and best selling novels as well as some that flew under the radar to turn them into movies, and as old as that practice is the time honoured sport of criticizing them for their efforts, to rectify that here’s a second bunch of movies where I for one think that they got it right:




Stephen King’s It
The book is great, no question, I was scared as a kid by It.
But there’s a particular scene between the kids that always irked me which got for modesty reasons cut from the TV-Script and I happen to like that version just a wee bit more for this.





Howl’s Moving Castle
Another great book, the only thing I didn’t quite like was the part about Howl’s real origin.
That didn’t make it in the movie and I happen to think this to have been for the better. To say that I actually prefer the movie over the book wouldn’t be true though, it’s rather that both are excellent in their respective fields.





White Oleander
Loved the movie, despised the book. I never read that beyond the first quarter, the lead character of the book (played in the movie by Allison Lohman) is a highly unlikable, psychologically troubled brat that I couldn’t bring myself to care for one small bit.







Cabal
Same as with White Oleander I couldn’t relate to the character of the book, his a-hole factor is greater there, but that is my only gripe with it, the story itself is great and the book a pleasant read. There’s also the fact that Cronenberg made a surprisingly charming villain that works in favour of the movie, too bad we never saw a sequel to it.




Logan’s Run
The book is a jumbled mess at times, it reads like a old Flash Gordon serial. I do have to agree with the critics that still the vastly different message of the book makes more sense than that of the movie, but the movie has a structure that the book is missing, trying it’s best to make sense of parts that appeared completely random. It almost seems as if the book was written in a adventure of the day set of mind, one chapter a time.

Graveyard Shift

The past is a different place,
they do things differently there...



In my mind I tend to ascribe that phrase to Stephen King, which might be wrong but I'm most certain that I first encountered it in some of his writing. And King being King, it ever since holds for me a ominous meaning, threatening in a not quite tangible way.

The past is a different place, and it can be threatening too, but what's more important is that inevitably we all will arrive at a point when it will have become the place where we will have spend most of our live. That’s probably the reason some of us become obsessed with it, unable to let go of the memory of our Glory Days which passed us by, the reason we become nostalgic; the knowledge that more of our live lies behind us, irrevocably lost, than lies ahead.





Sorry if this post doesn't make much of a sense to you, I guess this is just one of those days when I like to look back and draw the past over my shoulder as a comforting blanket, my personal Graveyard Shift.