After Hours

Robinson. Together they make up a team that vehemently combats the real, gruesome, and increasingly paranormal serial killers they find along the way.

Holly Gibney, owner of the skip-tracing firm Finders Keepers, a de facto private investigator, appears in two more tales. Among the characters in my recent reads, she is one of the more fully realized and endearing. She appears also in the recent novel The Outsider. At the beginning of the Outsider, a man is arrested for murdering and sexually assaulting a boy. The police have found enough concrete forensic proof to convict him. Then they discover a perfect alibi corroborated by others, with the man even caught on camera at the time of the murder.

In reconciling the two, the element of the supernatural begins to creep in, making this a uniquely King type of mystery. Detective Ralph Andersen must find who is committing these murders and inducing suicides in roughly the same way as Brady Hartsfield, the murderer Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney had pitted themselves against earlier.

King’s most recent story collection, Let It Bleed, is a quick-reading collection of stories that features Holly Gibney in identifying another murderer with supernatural powers who feeds off violence and misery, along with other paranormally touched stories.

Perhaps my favorite recent Stephen King read is a fastpaced thriller, The Institute. A fired police detective, Tim Jamieson, hitches his way up the East Coast on a whim and decides to stop in the small town of Dupray, South Carolina, to become a night knocker, walking the street at night to check on its security. In another part of the country, a government agency kidnaps children with special telepathic or telekinetic abilities, killing their parents and bringing them to an institute in the Maine woods where the top-secret program can harness their paranormal powers for national security purposes. It remains for one very academically brilliant and socially skilled child, Luke Ellis, to make friends with the other kids, figure out how to escape the Institute, and make his way far enough away to gain allies, such as the former police detective in Dupray, as the chase after him ensues. I really enjoyed this book’s emphasis on kids: their resourcefulness and the way they form friendships. It is also a fast, fun read.

In taking this piecemeal tour of King’s writing, I notice his constant use of tangy, slangy phrases aimed at keeping his writing hyperbolic. That makes his books fun but often over-the-top. The attitudes of his characters towards each other sometimes do not show subtlety or nuance. Occasionally he can be hamhanded, although luckily never high-handed, and create dialogue that’s exaggeratedly creepy among characters who might not exist in real life.

Many would say, “Well, that’s the point.” I would rather have very convincing dialogue that makes it easier for me to suspend my disbelief for paranormal or horrific characters or plot points. For example, in the aforementioned Bill Hodges trilogy, there is some frankly clumsy dialogue written for Jerome Robinson, minstrel-style drivel meant to be done in fun but probably not something a young, intelligent, Black man would ever say to an older, white ex-cop whose lawn he mows.

King’s hyperdriven, cartoonish approach provides enjoyment, but it can make his writing erratic. Sometimes you can even see the welded seams of the machine, which creak when he emphasizes a minor plot point that you know will have to be crucial later. He also does not always keep in touch with the times. Kids in The Institute sometimes wisecrack like a Baby Boomer rather than a kid of today. Currentday characters have names that would have been more popular for people their ages in the Fifties, Sixties, or Seventies than now. King’s editors tread lightly. He writes fast, moves on, and does not apologize.

King sometimes touches on the provocative theme of literary obsession, with characters such as Annie Wilkes from Misery or Morris Bellamy from Finders Keepers valuing the books they love, the ones against which they define themselves, much more than the authors themselves. In that way he is writing a love letter to the power of literature and the mysteriousness of the creative imagination, albeit in some rather psychologically perverted settings.

Regardless of critiques, he grabs you with his propulsive plots and Everyman approach. He is bighearted, unsentimental, and never snobbish. Also, he shows a genuine sense of humor. You would want to know him as a person and probably as a friend.

King’s book On Writing, a nonfiction account of his time as a writer, is a wonderful book about the writing life and how best to tell a story, focusing on Stephen King’s personal story in particular. I read when it came out and then once more recently. If I had to pick one book of his above any other, this would be it. It recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary and has become a classic.

On Writing is equally fascinating for writers and non-writers alike who are interested in what makes this highly successful, down-toearth writer tick. It is also very well-written, as one would hope, and more literary than any other book of his that I have read. Here he shows how much he cares about language, and here he explains why and how he approaches his craft. It provides a wonderful introduction to any subsequent King books but is equally as good for long-time fans who want to see how the goresplattered sausage is made.

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