IT (1990, 2017)

It (1990): adapted from the 1986 Stephen King novel by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen; directed by Tommy Lee Wallace; starring Harry Anderson/ Seth Green (Richie Tozier), Dennis Christopher/ Adam Faraizi (Eddie Kaspbrak), Richard Masur/ Ben Heller (Stanley Uris), Annette O'Toole/ Emily Perkins (Bev Marsh), Tim Reid/ Marlon Taylor (Mike Hanlon), John Ritter/ Brandon Crane (Ben Hanscom), Richard Thomas/ Jonathan Brandis (Bill Denbrough), and Tim Curry (Pennywise): 

It (2017): adapted by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise), Jaeden Lieberher (Bill), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), Sophia Lillis (Bev), Finn Wolfhard (Richie), Chosen Jacobs (Mike), Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie), and Wyatt Oleff (Stanley):

The 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It is more faithful to the book in many ways, even allowing for the fact that the miniseries tells the whole story while the 2017 movie deals only with the childhood sections of the novel. In the miniseries, British Columbia plays Derry, Maine while the real-world locations for the movie are mostly located in Ontario, Canada. Hmm.

The faithfulness of the miniseries does lead to a certain breathlessness at points, as the filmmakers cram an astonishing amount of the novel into about three hours. Why didn't ABC make It a six- or eight-hour miniseries? No idea. Without commercials, the miniseries clocks in at about 187 minutes, less than an hour longer than the 2017 movie while tackling the entire novel. That's some impressive condensation!

The performances by both the children and the adults the children grow into are good, for the most part, with Brandon Crane as a young Ben Hanscom especially seeming truer to Ben's physical appearance in the book than Jeremy Ray Taylor in the 2017 movie. We will not go on at length about the ponytail sported by Richard Thomas as the adult Bill Denbrough except to say that it is immensely distracting. Tim Reid is especially impressive as the adult Mike Hanlon. Yes, Venus Flytrap from WKRP. John Ritter is also pitch-perfect as the adult Ben Hanscom. 

One of the oddities of the miniseries is that Harry Anderson as the adult Richie Tozier towers over the other characters (Anderson is 6'4" while Ritter was 5'11" and Thomas is a shade below 5'9"), which seems weird if one has read the novel. Ah, Hollywood. 

Movie It's Jeremy Ray Taylor's Ben Hanscom seems about six inches too short for his character, and lacks the character-defining sweatshirts of his novel and miniseries counterparts, though only the novel explains the significance of a 'fat' kid wearing sweatshirts even in the hottest weather. Both miniseries and movie could use more character-building like this, as just the sweatshirt stuff in the novel makes Ben more poignant while also showing the young Richie Tozier's combination of insight and crude bonhomie.

The miniseries also hews closer to the age of the children in the novel while the movie up-aged them by a couple of years. Tim Curry's Pennywise is a brasher, less physically startling Pennywise than Bill Skarsgard's, though neither actor really captures the novel's idea that Pennywise should be appealing at first meeting. Their Pennywises are just creepy and scary all the time, a decision made by the directors, I'd assume. An ingratiating John Candy would have probably made the best Pennywise.

The miniseries leaves the truly cosmic origins of It (the creature) mostly untouched. Supposedly, the next movie will actually delve into this. I'll be interested to see how that goes. Both the movie and the miniseries do admirable jobs of adapting King's work. I'd guess that most people who saw the miniseries last when it aired probably remember it as beginning, as with the movie, with Georgie's fateful encounter with Pennywise in the storm drain. 

Not so! And it's not a puzzling choice, as the miniseries has to set up the dual timelines of its plot immediately. But it did seem a little Mandela Effect for a moment as I rewatched the miniseries for the first time in 28 years. Live and learn. Both miniseries and movie: recommended.

The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane

Even the cover is quiet. Too quiet...

The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane: William Sloane remains somewhat known today for this pseudo-science-fictional horror novel and To Walk the Night, another pseudo-science-fictional horror novel from the 1930's. They're both horror but very quiet horror -- Charles L. Grant would have been proud.

Filmmakers adapted The Edge of Running Water in 1941 as The Devil Commands, a solid and relatively faithful Boris Karloff movie with a completely anomalous title. 

The Edge of Running Water concerns the efforts of a scientist to build a machine that can contact the dead. He's motivated by the death of his wife from pneumonia. He has a strange woman as his helper. And he's called upon an old friend and former student he hasn't seen for years to provide some vital information needed to complete the experiment. Near a small town in the wilds of pre-Stephen-King Maine, the scientist's experiments have already attracted attention and rumour-mongering among that small town's residents.

And periodically, a strange thunder-like sound booms out from the scientist's house, a sound he will not explain to anyone.

The novel is long on mood and gradually-building suspense and somewhat short on actual scares. Sloane's first-person narrator -- that old friend -- can seem a bit glib at times, and perhaps even a little dense. However, that denseness works in the novel's favour when it comes to the cosmic horror that underlies the novel. 

Our narrator -- and, indeed, everyone else in the novel -- seems to be blithely unaware of the possibility that the experiment creates something much more disturbing than a telephone line to the dead. A terrible mystery may have been solved by the climax of the novel. But is a mystery solved when no one knows it, or at least admits to its solution?

Yes. Yes it is.

The Edge of Running Water is a quiet book, dominated at one point by an overly lengthy police investigation and throughout by the love story that develops between the narrator and the dead wife's sister, who has also come to find out what her uncle is up to.  Recommended.

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990)

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990): adapted by John Esposito from the short story by Stephen King; directed by Ralph S. Singleton; starring David Andrews (John Hall), Kelly Wolf (Jane), Stephen Macht (Warwick), Vic Polizos (Hose Guy), and Brad Dourif (Exterminator): Singleton's only film-directing credit; he was primarily known as a producer on such projects as Pet Sematary, Clear and Present Danger, and... Juwanna Mann? Well, at least he had range.

Rats are a problem at a decrepit Maine cotton mill in both the superior short story and this inferior movie.

Stephen King observed that the movie dumped a lot of money into the Maine economy. That's high praise!

But it's an enjoyable piece of trash, with mostly decent acting (though Pennsylvanian Macht's over-the-top struggles with a Maine accent are intermittently hilarious). Brad Dourif has an almost entirely self-contained and pointless cameo role. But he's always good, even in this dog.

Director Singleton seems to have no idea how to create mood in a horror movie. The basements, sub-basements, and sub-sub-basements are unterrifyingly well-lit, and Singleton is no Kubrick when it comes to well-lit horror. 

Pre-CGI problems abound with the rat actors as well. Real trained rats can't actually flood areas with people in them the way they do in the claustrophobic, rat-crowded story. So they instead put in appearances from time to time, looking unbearably cute. By the end, the movie seems to be about a heroic human saving a bunch of cute rats from a lifetime of servitude to a mean, giant rat-monster tyrant.

The giant rat-monster (you knew there was a giant rat-monster in this, right?), so effectively revealed in the short story, instead just keeps showing up throughout the movie. Apparently it has a clock to punch. As it seem to have free access to the upper levels of the mill whenever it wants that access, its Final Boss Monster status has been completely eroded by the conclusion, when we see it for about the hundredth time (subjectively).

Still, there are worse ways to spend 100 minutes. And the beefy, yelling guy with the high-pressure hose is an unintentional bit of exquisite comedy. Badly recommended (new rating!).

IT (2017)

It (2017): adapted by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise), Jaeden Lieberher (Bill), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), Sophia Lillis (Bev), Finn Wolfhard (Richie), Chosen Jacobs (Mike), Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie), and Wyatt Oleff (Stanley): Solid, occasionally inspired adaptation of Stephen King's enormous 1986 novel clearly aims at the mass market and, based on that stunning box-office performance, succeeds. One loses some of the best elements of the novel because of the crowd-pleasing approach. On the other hand, a halfway faithful adaptation of (half of) IT would be longer than Berlin Alexanderplatz.

The filmmakers ditch the three-timeline structure of the novel (roughly, for those counting at home, the 1950's narrative, the 1980's narrative, and Mike Hanlon's archival narrative that fills in the history of Derry, Maine as Mike moves closer and closer to the 1980's narrative). 

Instead, we get It Chapter 1, set in autumn 1988 and then summer 1989. That moves It up from its 1950's/1980's original timeline so as to avoid the entire movie being a period piece. King has done this with his own novels (The Stand was jiggered forwards in time for its 'Director's Cut' 1990 edition, for instance), so no big whoop. Well, except for the chuckleheads who immediately started comparing It to Stranger Things instead of the other way around. Idiots.

I do wonder if there's a 3-hour director's cut of It waiting on the shelves. Changes to the late-summer portion of the narrative almost suggest that a big chunk of material was filmed and then edited out so as to keep the movie below 2 1/2 hours. The kids lose a certain amount of that Hollywood touchstone AGENCY in this version, not so much planning their engagements with It as running willy-nilly into them. 

Unfortunately, the communal bonding elaborated upon in the novel is here reduced to one happy set-piece (swimming at the quarry) and one grim one (cleaning Bev's bathroom of spectral blood that only the kids can see). Gone, too, the Native-American smokehouse vision of It's arrival on Earth, apparently shunted to Chapter Two.

There are some decisions -- especially to temporarily make Bev into Penelope Pit-stop near the end -- that suggest the film-makers are setting up things to be paralleled in the next movie that are not paralleled in the novel (specifically, using the wife of one of the grown-up kids as bait, and even subjecting her to It's mysterious, brain-frying Deadlights). I'd have also liked more emphasis on the rotten nature of Derry in general. 

And Mike Hanlon really gets hosed, though again this looks like a decision glancing forward to a greater role in Chapter Two. The monsters and the dread are here. And Pennywise is creepy, though neither the filmmakers nor Pennywise-portrayer Bill Skarsgard seem to have the slightest idea how to make Pennywise appealing as a prelude to the revelation of his/Its true nature. He/It is just too scary to draw anyone into his web. The kids, though -- the kids are dynamite. Recommended.

The Tommyknockers (1987) by Stephen King

The Tommyknockers (1987) by Stephen King: 

"The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act." - Stephen King, the "act" being his addiction problems.

Who am I to argue with Stephen King on the topic of Stephen King?

The Tommyknockers is the worst thing -- novel, story, screenplay, comic book, greeting card, you name it -- the prolific King has ever written. I don't think it's even that close between The Tommyknockers and the second-worst thing. 

King wrote The Tommyknockers at pretty much Peak Addiction, and it is interesting from an autobiographical perspective as page after page dwells on the alcohol addiction of protagonist James Eric 'Gard' Gardener. 

And the townsfolk of fictional, tiny Haven, Maine (near demon-haunted Derry in Stephen King's Maine) also succumb to addiction of a type: well, an infection, anyway, from a long-buried spaceship that ends up getting unburied when Gard's former lover, Western writer Bobbi Anderson, stubs her toe on a projecting part of a giant spaceship in the woods behind her rural home.

Once exposed to air, the spaceship infects people with some sort of airborne virus or nanotechnology. The virus makes people progressively less human as it also turns them into assholes who like building high-tech gadgets. Soon, Haven is hard at work, working towards The Becoming, when they'll finish excavating the spaceship (it's saucer-shaped, natch) and go do bad things somewhere on Earth or elsewhere.

All this seems to have been predicted by a Maine folk rhyme about 'the Tommyknockers' that begins 'Late last night and the night before/ Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.' Even buried for millennia, the spaceship has exerted some malign influence on people living near it. It reminds me of King's previous novel, It, in which we see It crash into the primordial forest that would one day become Derry. Derry is located about 30 miles from Haven. Is there some sort of magnet that causes weird stuff to crash in this area of Maine? Is Amelia Earhart's plane out there too?

There's probably an OK but derivative short science-fiction novel buried in the bloat of The Tommyknockers. The novel's most obvious antecedent is Quatermass and the Pit/ Five Million Years to Earth, in which an alien spaceship is unearthed during a London subway dig and proceeds to alter the humanity around it as it draws power from its environment. The Tommyknockers is the rural version of that, and this time the Martians aren't Nazis: they're gadgeteers. They're King's heavy-handed, repeatedly spelled-out metaphor for the human beings who make atomic bombs, nuclear power plants, intelligence agencies, and every other ill on the Earth caused by technology.

King plays bait-and-switch with his protagonists. Bobbi Anderson takes point, but once the alien infection takes hold, the narrative switches to Gardener. And once Gardener gets really drunk in the middle of the book, the novel jumps around among various townsfolk and outsiders until Gardener starts to sober up around page 350 or so. The structure plays Hell with readerly sympathy, a problem compounded by...

The Tommyknockers give us King's least sympathetic, most caricatured set of characters in all of his writing. It's far and away King's sourest book. Part of the problem seems to come from King's decision to only supply characterization for most of the townsfolk after they're already turning into gadget-building assholes. Part of the problem comes from the fact that King falls back on some of his recurring stereotypes for characters, even when they should be at least nominally sympathetic. 

To cite one, we get a nebbishy man who lives at home with his mother who browbeats him. We also get a crusty senior citizen who knows where all the bodies in Haven are buried, not one but two writers as co-protagonists (and Gard is alcoholic -- did I mention that?), a super-smart kid who's ostracized by his peers but beloved by his younger brother, and a lot of small-minded small-town types. Once most of those stereotypes get infested, they're really annoying.

Even the people outside Derry are assholes. Gard has to deal with a mean woman who runs the travelling poetry show that pays his salary. You can tell she's mean because she's an upper-class twit with a pinched face and no breasts. Bobbi has been repeatedly terrorized throughout her life by an insanely domineering, evil sister, and you can be sure that evil sister will show up in Haven before the end of the novel. The bad characters in The Tommyknockers have no redeeming qualities. But we will spend a lot of time with them. Even doomed minor characters from outside Haven are assholes who sort of deserve to die. And die they will!

And we will know that many of them will die before they die for one of two reasons. Maybe King will employ probably his least endearing, corpus-wide trope -- the narrative voice telling us that the character we're reading about is going to die before the end of the novel. Or maybe King will indulge in the frustrating, suspense-cancelling structural tic he developed for The Tommyknockers, in which the novel describes events building to something catastrophic before jumping backwards in time to show us the events building to that same something catastrophic from a different narrative POV. This happens again and again, and indeed accelerates in the last 50 pages or so, as we see the same thing happen over and over again from a seemingly endless series of POVs. So long, suspense!

Two major characters have steel plates in their heads. And this is a major plot point. Two characters! What are the odds! King also brings back the evil Coke machine from Maximum Overdrive. I shit you not. I wish he'd also brought back Captain Trips from The Stand so that everyone in this fucking novel could die by page 100.

At several points, either King or his characters basically throw up their hands and start using other people's works to explain things. Thus, Peter Straub's Floating Dragon gets a shout-out from Bobbi and Gard. So, too, Poul Anderson's Brain Wave (wrongly in terms of Brain Wave's plot), the work of Robert Heinlein (dismissively and not remotely accurately in the assessment, BTW), and some of King's own work. It's Pennywise cameos for no real reason other than that a couple of characters drive through Derry. 

The Heinlein moment is especially weird. Having learned that the aliens (or 'Tommyknockers' if you prefer) are neither benign nor particularly intelligent, Gard thinks "So much for Robert Heinlein." As Heinlein wasn't known for writing a lot about benign, technologically advanced aliens, this statement makes little sense. 

It makes even less sense when one knows that one of Heinlein's most famous novels of the 1950's was The Puppet Masters, in which malign parasitic aliens invade Earth and take possession of human beings to advance their goals. They even stick people in fluid-filled tubes, as do King's Tommyknocker-possessed humans. 

And King even repeats a much different Heinlein trope, one seen in many American science-fiction works: humanity has something so special about it that unlike other races, it offers resistance to this alien threat. King has met the enemy, and King is Heinlein.

Much, much odder is a section in which King's narrative voice sings the praises of Canadian writer Robertson Davies and, specifically, Davies' Deptford Trilogy and, most specifically, those portions of the Deptford Trilogy dealing with the young Dunstable Ramsey's attempts to master magic tricks in the company of the younger Paul Dempster, who really will master magic and go on to become professional magician Magnus Eisengrim. So King really likes Robertson Davies. Not one of the characters -- King's narrative voice. OK. This novel is brought to you by the Deptford Trilogy. I'm surprised the narrative voice doesn't warn us that Robertson Davies is going to die.

I could go on, but I'm sort of exhausted. The novel ends in part with an astronomical statement that makes absolutely no sense. That pretty much sums it up. Populated with characters unpleasant or boring or both, derivative or dismissive of far superior works, The Tommyknockers is indeed, in King's own words, "awful." To flip the punchline of an old joke... and such large portions! Not recommended.

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988)

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988): Babylon 5 creator  and long-time Spider-man writer J. Michael Straczynski has also written three horror novels over the years, with this being the first. It almost seems parodically like a Stephen King novel at points. It's laced with portentous and generally pretentious quotes at the beginning and at each section break, which is very much a King trademark (lest we miss the point,  Straczynski quotes King on the novel's main epigraph page). It's set in small-town Maine, it involves a former resident of that town as a child returning as an adult, and it involves an ancient evil awakening and transforming townspeople into monsters. Yes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King's Salem's Lot, only with possession-crazy demons rather than vampirism as the culprit. 

The cast of characters who battle the evil includes a struggling writer, a Roman Catholic priest, and a medical doctor. OK, that's also quite a bit like the good guys in Salem's Lot. But wait, the protagonist has a wide array of psychic and telekinetic powers with which to battle the evil. So it's like Salem's Lot mashed up with Firestarter, The Shining, and The Dead Zone. There's also quite a bit of It. And there are Native American tribes mixed in because you can't have an American horror novel without a mysterious location tied into Native American spirituality.

Basically, if you haven't gotten enough Stephen King, Maine-based horror over the years, this novel may be for you. Straczynski offers generally well-drawn, sympathetic characters. The antagonist leaves a bit to be desired -- its speechifying, when it comes, is something of a disappointment. There's also a description of the Thing in its final form that really, really seems to anticipate South Park's ManBearPig. Snakes, cockroaches, and what appear to be malevolent, wall-crawling lobsters (well, it is Maine) show up in such a cursory fashion as obstacles to our heroes at the end that they seem to have accidentally wandered in from an Indiana Jones movie. 

And it's interesting to see a Wild Talent novel collided with a horror novel in this way, at least at the end when a full array of telepathic and telekinetic powers are needed to combat the antagonist. There's maybe a bit too much superhero in the main protagonist, but he's a relatively likable fellow for all that he's a Chosen One in the long tradition of genre Chosen Ones (though the Chosen One tends more to the epic fantasy and science fiction areas of genre).

The gem of characterization is the Roman Catholic priest, however, who takes a beating without ever losing his stubborn dignity. Why do atheists write the best characters of faith? In any case, I enjoyed the novel, though there's nothing that really stands out about it. Lightly recommended.

Revival by Stephen King (2014)

Revival by Stephen King (2014): Cruising in under the radar after the big splash that was 2013's award-winning Doctor Sleep, Revival is what Doctor Sleep purported to be: a return to full-blown supernatural horror by Stephen King. Like King's It, Revival is a horror novel that salutes a lot of other fictional horrors. It mainly concentrated on the horrors of the big screen in its overt references; Revival mainly goes after written horrors right from its Dedication page onwards, as King lists several horror writers and one horror novella (Arthur Machen's spectacular, more-than-a-century-old "The Great God Pan") to whom he's dedicated Revival.

We've seen King grapple with Machen's novella recently, in the mostly successful 2008 novella "N.", collected in Just After Sunset. And you don't have to have read "The Great God Pan" to enjoy Revival. Though you really should read it in any case. It's swell!

To use a baseball metaphor that seems appropriate to the baseball-loving King, Revival first appears to be a solid double hit by a slow-footed power hitter who's lost some bat speed in recent years. But the double falls into a gap between outfielders. Things start to happen. When the play is over, Revival's delivered a lurchy, gasping, but successful (and terrifically exciting) inside-the-park home run. It's not the sort of towering, out-of-the-park slam that was a novel such as The Shining. But it's impressive nonetheless, maybe more impressive for its relatively greater rarity.

Revival begins in very-small-town Maine. We're somewhere near other King towns such as Castle Rock, but Castle Rock or Derry would be a metropolis by comparison. King gives us something new with the Morton family, from which his narrator Jamie Morton springs: a family with more than one child, and the family dynamics this entails. It's rare ground for King, who's generally depicted one-child families (though sometimes, as in It and "The Body," families whittled down to one surviving child by tragedy). King is out of his comfort zone, which is good. The family stuff works. So, too, does having Jamie Morton grow up to be a recording engineer and occasional session musician rather than the standard writer-protagonist of so many King novels and short stories.

Told by Morton in the present day, Revival shows Jamie Morton's long, intermittent relationship with his town's preacher, from Jamie's boyhood in the 1950's and early 1960's to 2014. Three years into Preacher Charlie Jacobs' small-town tenure, a terrible tragedy ends his priesthood, and his belief in God.

The aftermath of this first tragedy (there will be many more, for many people) sees King write one of his finest scenes of non-supernatural horror. Jacobs gives a nihilistic, God-denying sermon at his church. That's not the horror. The horror comes with the townspeople's reaction to his sermon, a reaction that rings utterly true and horrible in its smug, nasty religiosity buttressed with the most awful, judgmentally toxic gossip. It's a great scene of horrific mourning, one to stand with the funeral scene in Salem's Lot.

Then... we're off. I'll leave the specifics of the plot for you to discover yourself. Jamie Morton's post-teen-aged problems parallel those of many other King protagonists; the solution to these problems is different from what we've seen before in King. Jamie and Jacobs form a twinned narrative, two addicts whose addictions ultimately merge into one.

Along the way, King nods both explicitly and implicitly to 200 years of written horror in English. Jacobs' obsession with electricity and what it can accomplish in the realms of life and death gestures towards that early megalith, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Obsessions with death, the dying, and what lies beyond death nod to Poe (perhaps most notably in one scene to Poe's short story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). 

And there are many, many others, including Machen, including H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. King also nods to himself nodding to H.P. Lovecraft in one of the horrific images offered at the climax of the story, an image which echoes something in King's explicit Lovecraft homage, "Crouch End." 

There are other King-on-King moments dotted throughout Revival, mostly to good effect, from the tiny, sinister "Billygoats Gruff" door in It to the terrible, hidden invaders of "The Ten O'Clock People." And for those of you who've read King's non-fiction horror survey Danse Macabre, there's a notable riff on something King discusses therein -- the Ray Milland-starring horror movie X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Seriously. And it works. And HE CAN STILL SEE!

Certainly, the horror takes awhile to build in Revival. And you may at points think you know where the text is going. Does it go somewhere unusual for King? Good question. It goes where it goes. I think the climax is terrific and utterly earned by what's gone before. Implications for everything that happens earlier in the text allow for a re-evaluation of the events we've read about... and, possibly, a re-evaluation of the narrator. Possibly. In any case, really a terrific and enjoyable horror novel from young Mr. King. I hope we'll be seeing more from him! Highly recommended.

Bedford Falls

The Keeper by Sarah Langan (2006): This atmospheric and chilling horror novel features first-rate characterization and the development of a real sense of place. Langan sets her first novel in the small, depressed Maine town of Bedford -- and over the course of the novel, Bedford falls. Ghosts and monsters walk the streets.

Indeed, the sheeted dead really do squeak and gibber in the Bedford streets at points, along with other monsters. The monsters of Bedford, though, are the manifestations of all its buried secrets. They have not invaded from Outside.

Langan uses third-person narration to delve into the inner lives of several characters, and does so skillfully without neglecting the atmospheric description necessary to showing the physical and social disintegration of the town as a whole, as both place and imaginative gestalt. At points, she "cuts loose" with visceral, physical horrors, but these things never take over the narrative. This is not a gross-out.

As with so much horror, supernatural events arise from human failure. Child abuse and alcoholism are the chief sins explored here, along with the morally corrosive effects of keeping secrets on both the personal and civic level. Bedford has its own skeletons, literal and figurative, in its closet. The closing of its primary industry before the novel begins becomes, over the course of the novel, a judgment on the town's failings -- and then it becomes something more complex and affecting.

Langan's characters are nicely developed, and their fates, for the most part, evade boiler-plate horror conventions. Startling moments in which the supernatural bursts into the "real" world abound. Through it all, Langan builds a convincing supernatural world populated by flawed human beings. There's evil here, but also hard-won goodness, very faint, very human, absolutely necessary. Recommended.

The Real Monster Homes of Maine

Hell House by Richard Matheson (1970): Matheson's great ghost story pays homage to Shirley Jackson's earlier, great haunted-house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in many of its attributes. As in Jackson's novel, Hell House gives us a quartet of psychic investigators led by an academic and weighed down by personal issues who've been brought together to stay in an extremely haunted house for several days.

Matheson's novel focuses on the always fuzzy world of "psychic research" far more than Jackson's did. The psychosexual issues are much more overt. And unlike Hill House, where the haunting seemed to be a matter of a Bad Place rather than individual Bad Ghosts, Hell House appears to be the domain of the ghost of Emeric Belasco. Matheson loosely bases Belasco on Aleister Crowley, black magician and self-proclaimed "wickedest man in the world." Belaso is much wickeder: his remote Maine mansion was the site of mass murder, suicide, and worse. But when the authorities finally broke into the mansion in the 1920's, Belasco was nowhere to be found among the dead.

Hell House is set in 1970. Two previous attempts to probe the mysteries of Hell House, the last in 1940, ended in the deaths or institutionalization of all those involved but one. And that one, a then-16-year-old boy judged to be one of the greatest psychics ever, is along for this expedition. Why? Because a dying millionaire is paying him and the others $100,000 each to try to figure out from the evidence of Hell House whether the human soul survives death.

As with his great, rational vampire novel I am Legend, Matheson herein sails the edge between the supernatural and the scientific. The physics professor who leads the expedition believes that ghosts are a product of human minds interacting with a charged psychic environment left behind by traumatic events in a specific location. There is no life after death except as an amorphous energy field subject to the fears and hopes of the living. The academic's wife isn't so sure. And the two psychics know that there's something more than that going on. But what?

Matheson doesn't write 'long.' Hell House is fairly brief and to-the-point, and its structure is as much mystery novel as horror novel. But the horrors are quite potent, and the characters sympathetically drawn even as they wrestle with their fears and their failings. Highly recommended.

11/22/63 (2011) by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011): According to his Afterword, King originally conceived of this novel in 1972 but decided not to work on it then because of the enormous amount of research involved in presenting the lead-up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. At the time of the novel's conception, King was still a part-time writer employed full-time as a high-school English teacher, the success of Carrie that allowed him to write full-time still some time in the future.

So it's perhaps fitting that the protagonist of 11/22/63 is one Jake Epping, Maine high-school English teacher in 2011 and soon to be a time traveller to the world of Ago (as he calls it) -- September 1958.

Basically, the premise of 11/22/63 is that there's a mysterious gateway in time located in the supply closet of a greasy-spoon restaurant in 2011. The proprietor of the restaurant, a friend of Jake's, has been using the gateway for years to buy cheap supplies from 1958 stores. The gateway always goes back to the same exact time, the duration of one's 1958 visit is always two minutes in 2011 no matter how long you stay in 1958, and every time you travel back in time, everything you did on your previous visit is erased. The restaurant owner has been buying the 'same' hamburger from 1958 for years, for example.

But now Al, the restaurant owner, is dying of cancer, having failed to live long enough starting in 1958 to make it to 1963 and save JFK, which he believes will fix almost everything that went wrong following JFK's assassination. So he convinces Jake to take up the torch. Both men want solid confirmation that Oswald acted alone (in both the novel and in King's mind, Oswald's status as a lone gunman is almost completely certain), so killing Oswald before there's some nearly complete proof of his approaching guilt isn't justifiable.

Al dies, leaving Jake with a large stash of money he's picked up in repeated trips to 1963 and copious notes on where and when Jake needs to be to confirm or disprove Oswald's guilt. And off we go, with an early sidetrip to demon-haunted Derry, Maine (location, most notably, of King's 1986 novel It) before the main event.

The laws of the time bubble mean that this isn't a science-fiction novel -- the past tries to protect itself from change, and some of the rules governing cause-and-effect would seem to require a conscious, self-correcting mechanism. That's OK, as King has never been all that good at science fiction.

That he sticks us in Derry a couple of months after the main 1958 events of It also points to the fact that this novel takes place in a universe where the supernatural works. And there are other potential complications. A seemingly harmless drunk always hangs out at the 1958 exit point of the bubble. But the drunk, Al has observed, actually seems to be vaguely aware that time is being mucked with. Is someone or something monitoring Jake once he makes his way to the past? Some of his nightmares suggest this may be true.

King's plotting is sharp here, free of most of the longeurs that plagued Under the Dome and a few other recent novels. The Derry sequence seems like the best section of the novel to me, partially because we revisit It from a slightly different perspective, and partially because Jake's double-outsider view of Derry as both a non-resident and a time traveller adds another layer to It. Derry really does resemble one of H.P. Lovecraft's supernaturally skewed towns herein. The town scares Jake for the months he spends there, despite the fact that the child-killing creature from It is (mostly) somnolent by the time of Jake's stay in Derry.

Once his business is done in Derry, Jake moves on, first to Florida and ultimately to Texas to begin gathering information on Lee Harvey Oswald. King leaves plenty of room for both exposition on the Kennedy assassination and for Jake's late idyll in a small Texas town where he works as a teacher and eventually falls in love. But time (or maybe Time would be more accurate) continues to try to stop Jake. Worse, strange coincidences and nightmares start to plague him. Can history be altered in such a large way? And what will 2011 look like when Jake returns to it, if he does return?

Well, that's the point of the whole later stretch of the novel, isn't it? King keeps the plot chugging along, and the final stages of the struggle to stop Oswald are as tense as any sustained sequence he's ever written. The novel also makes the historical characters explicable if not necessarily sympathetic -- even Oswald becomes a figure of pity as well as of wrath, as do his Russian wife and young daughter. Highly recommended.