The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant

The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant: The late Charles L. Grant was a much-published anthologist, novelist, and short-story writer from the 1970's through the 1990's. He championed "quiet horror," a choice that set him vocally at odds with the rise of splatterpunk in the 1980's. He's probably most important now as an anthologist, especially as the editor of the long-running Shadows series of original horror anthologies.

The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's also meant that Grant published a lot of novels. More than I was aware of, frankly. While I was a major consumer of those anthologies back in the day and read a couple of his short-story collections, I hadn't read a Grant novel until I recently finished The Pet.

I'm of two minds about The Pet, though these minds are not mutually exclusive. Wait, does that make three minds? So confusing.

Anyway, The Pet may be a satire of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's.

Or The Pet may be an attempt to replicate the success of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's by putting their elements into a blender and pressing the 'On' button.

Or it may be both. It's certainly not of a piece with those Grant short stories and novellas I've read.

OK, that's really three, isn't it?

So we have a bullied, withdrawn protagonist of high-school age. That's Donald 'Duck' Boyd. His parents are both over-controlling and under-caring. He has a dead younger brother. His Mom is sleeping with a high-school teacher who hates Don and keeps marking him unfairly. His Dad is the principal of the school Don attends. This gets Don bullied even more, especially because Don's father doesn't believe him when bullies start framing him for various misdemeanors. His parents both preferred the dead brother. Three years after the death, his Mom still occasionally calls Don by the dead brother's name.

Whew! That's about 35 King stories and novels right there!

A mean chemistry teacher also singles Don out for unwanted persecution. We can tell this chemistry teacher is bad because he's a confirmed bachelor who watches porn movies in his basement. 

IN HIS BASEMENT! PORN! 

Sorry.

A super-hot, 17-year-old cheerleader seems to be making advances on Don. Ha ha, she's also making advances on his Dad! Yes, a teen-aged girl who is sexually aggressive and makes advances on her teachers. Is this Grant's salute to the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me"? Or is it just a really unpleasant part of the novel that has not aged well?

So so unpleasant.

Then a serial killer dubbed The Howler shows up in Don's small town of Ashford, New Jersey. The Howler has killed and partially eaten several teenagers in New Jersey and New York. 

You might think this would cause the formation of some sort of police task force or even an FBI presence. 

You would be wrong! 

Dealing with The Howler in Don's town devolves down to that town's small police force of what seems like three idiots, which does a whole lot of nothing. Boy, is this part of the novel ridiculously unbelievable! And it gets worse!

The town's two high schools are remarkably modest in their response to two students being murdered and eaten in a one-month period. And the police. Really, everyone. Don survives an attack from The Howler and his parents have him back in school within 36 hours. Seriously, Grant is just phoning in this shit.

So, as the back-cover blurb tells us, Don's encounter with The Howler unleashes a supernatural monster that makes The Howler look like a fart in an elevator. And that monster has a connection to Don, targeting those who've wronged Don in some way. It's sort of Carrie by way of Christine, except it's a giant super-horse sprung full-grown from one of the animal posters on Don's bedroom wall.

Oh, yeah. Don loves animals and wants to be a vet. His parents think being a vet is a road to financial ruin, which shows how stupid they are. This is definitely the only novel I've ever read in which parents resist the idea of their son becoming a veterinarian for financial reasons. I mean seriously, parents, you're school teachers. In the United States of America. Your salaries are not that big!

If Grant is trying to emulate King in the next 200 pages or so, he's hamstrung by his "quiet horror" approach insofar as the novel pulls away from the attacks of the monster at the moment of attack, returning to show the aftermath without too much explicit description. Grant also can't bring himself to give the novel a big climax (remember Carrie's death march through school and town?) or even a physical confrontation between Don and the super-horse (remember the garage battle in Christine?). 

At one point, Don hears the screams in the town football stadium and believes the monster has attacked the football game. If you think, as I did, "Bring it on!" at this point, forget it. The monster is not there.

Part of the problem with the novel is that Don is an odd but sympathetic figure, with so many problems heaped upon his head by Grant, with Don's tormentors (including his parents) consistently shown to be selfish, brutish, thoughtless assholes. 

Another problem lies in peculiar absences. The dead brother is the worst of these: our sum total of knowledge about why Don's parents prefer the dead son to the live one is that the dead one was obedient. OK! A flashback showing rather than telling about the brother never materializes. Even the trauma that would come with a dead son and brother is muted, barely considered by parents or Don. 

Once the horse starts killing people -- well, who cares, really? Grant's small town is such an abysmal place that it deserves to get leveled. Other than Don and Don's two best friends, Tracey and Jeff, there are no sympathetic characters. Well, OK, there's an old guy and his daschund. But even Jeff is a cipher, there only to form a potential romantic triangle with Tracey and Don, who also has a crush on Tracey. 

Tracey is drawn somewhat sympathetically until the last ten pages or so, when she does something that is completely unbelievable given what she's learned about Don and the supernatural in the previous hundred pages. Unless she's suicidal.

At the end (which isn't even really an end but more of a pause), I"m left again wondering if this was a failed attempt by Grant to write a Stephen King novel, or a failed attempt at parody. Or both. Its flaws, large and legion in number, are fascinating enough to make it worth reading. And frustratingly good moments of tension and character-building keep floating to the surface before being submerged again in the slurry. Just don't expect to feel satisfied at the end. Lightly recommended.

From a Buick 8 (2002) by Stephen King

From a Buick 8 (2002) by Stephen King: King's closest foray into what people now call the New Weird. Sort of. From a Buick 8 is as the very least a foray into the cosmic in which the horror elements are reined in, making Cosmic Mystery rather than Cosmic Terror the order of the day.

Circumstances leave Pennsylvania State Troop D with a bizarre automobile stored in a shed. It was left at a gas station by a creepy looking fellow. Its design is just enough off-normal to make it disturbing. And a quick check of its engine -- or its dashboard -- reveals that it shouldn't be able to run. Stamped on the engine block are the words 'Buick 8,' though the troopers will come over the years to call it a Buick Roadmaster. And on its first day in storage back in 1979, a veteran officer disappears off the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.

Stylistically, this is one of King's great achievements. Several first-person narrators (with one primary narrator) tell the story of the Buick Roadmaster over the course of one long night in 2001. The narrative voices are separate and distinct, and the rhythms of the telling approximate the stops and starts of oral storytelling. They're telling a ghost story around a campfire, but there's no fire and the ghost is real -- and not something as simple as a ghost.

There are a number of effective horror scenes scattered throughout the narrative, mostly rooted in Fear of the Unknown. In many ways, From a Buick 8 is a lengthy riff on H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space." But this time it's a car -- a car whose paint colour doesn't seem quite right to any of those who look at it.

King avoids the third-act problems of many of his more science-fictiony novels here by avoiding any final explanation for the presence and purpose of the Buick Roadmaster. Where Under the Dome or The Tommyknockers sputtered out at the end with disappointing explanations, From a Buick 8 roars off into the silence, unexplained and unknowable. Highly recommended.

Detectiveness

Christine: adapted from the Stephen King novel by Bill Phillips; directed by John Carpenter; starring Keith Gordon (Arnie Cunningham), John Stockwell (Dennis Guilder), Alexandra Paul (Leigh Cabot), Robert Prosky (Will Darnell) and Harry Dean Stanton (Detective Junkins) (1983): Competent adaptation of King's horror novel never quite soars, possibly because of budgetary restrictions -- the epic car chases of the novel have instead become epic studies in stupidity, as people try to escape the homicidal car by running down the middle of the road. Because that always works so well.

The script also errs in trying to squeeze in the entire timeline of King's lengthy novel, resulting in the triumph of plot over character. Carpenter manages some nice set-pieces and one truly great image involving fiery cars and fiery bodies, and the whole thing isn't boring -- just a bit frustrating. The acting by the leads is fine, though Harry Dean Stanton is wasted as a police detective, and Robert Prosky and Roberts Blossom blow the young leads off the screen whenever they share a scene. Lightly recommended.


Zero Effect: written and directed by Jake Kasdan; starring Bill Pullman (Daryl Zero), Ben Stiller (Steve Arlo), Ryan O'Neal (Gregory Stark) and Kim Dickens (Gloria Sullivan) (1998): Jake Kasdan's first film as a writer-director is clearly a labour of love, complete with a certain self-indulgence when it comes to trimming the fat off the film.

A modern riff on Sherlock Holmes, Zero Effect follows Holmes-like Daryl Zero and his assistant Steve Arlo as they unravel a case of blackmail. Pullman does surprisingly well as the twitchy, weird Zero -- indeed, casting decisions even in 1998 would have suggested that Kasdan accidentally reversed the casting of the two leads. The result is the sort of detective movie that would have been right at home in the theatres of 1974, but which vanished without a trace in 1998. Which is too bad, because I'd have liked to see more weirdly titled cases of Daryl Zero. Recommended.

Hell on Wheels

Christine by Stephen King (1983): King's novel about an evil car has one of his more potent evocations of high-school life, as amiable jock Dennis Guilder tries to protect longtime friend (and outcast geek) Arnie Cunningham from bullies and jerks galore. And a domineering mother. And a guy selling a rundown 1958 Plymouth Fury for too much money. And the supernatural. And, ultimately, Arnie himself.

The big mistake here isn't, as some critics claim, that King never solved a narration problem involving Dennis being sidelined for the middle of the story. Dennis narrates parts one and three in first person, while part two comes at us in third person, mostly omniscient narration that is nonetheless also 'written' by Dennis after the events of the story. The third-person narration allows us to follow characters other than Dennis -- most notably Arnie himself and the fascinating auto-yard owner Will Darnell -- when Dennis isn't around.

This third-person middle section solves two problems -- one, the depiction of events Dennis isn't present for, including a spectacular car chase; two, the problem of Dennis's own narration. Set in 1978 and narrated from late 1982, Christine gives us a narrator who reads a lot more like someone in his mid-thirties in terms of vocabulary and observation. Dennis just isn't credible as a 22-year-old narrator. But setting the main events of the book in 1968, or moving the frame narrative to 1992, would both have created new problems. So it goes.

As I noted, King's evocation of high-school life is mostly first-rate stuff. Arnie is one of King's most tragic characters, a good kid whose moral sense has been toxically compromised by incessant bullying and by his parents' obsessive, meticulous micromanaging of his life. When the intoxicating, demonic Christine comes along, a car only its owner could love, Arnie is pretty much doomed. That the 1958 Fury was not a popular or a particularly good-looking car is really part of the point: Arnie has fallen in love with an automotive outsider.

As with many of King's novels, the supernatural functions like a surrogate for addiction: the car becomes Arnie's obsession, and its corrosive effect on his own personality goes mostly unchecked by him, though much commented upon and protested by everyone around him. Like King's Carrie (or a thousand real-world high-school shooters), Arnie's been primed to be a murderer in the name of vengeance.

And he's ultimately the foil not just of the demonic car, but of her awful, bullying, resentful, deceased owner -- King's other great creation here. Christine's first love, Roland LeBay, manages to embody murderous obsession and self pity. His catch-all term for anyone who crosses him in any way -- "shitter!" -- is a small Kingian gem of condensed characterization.

There are a few narrative hiccups and at least one 'Wow!' moment of unbelieveable character stupidity towards the end of the novel, stupidity that serves only the plot and not common sense or what's been established up to that point. It's a novel that could have used more thinking through, but the scenes of high-school life -- and Arnie's squirm-inducing outcast status -- represent some of King's finest character work. Recommended.