WITA # 6: Hans-Åke Lilja

Continuing to re-print some of these old interviews I did for Cemetery Dance in the We Interrupt This Author series, here is a brief talk with Hans-Åke Lilja, who is one of the chief chroniclers of Stephen King's writing career. This interview is reprinted courtesy of Cemetery Dance, on whose website it appeared on August 16, 2010. As always, the material is a little dated.

For over thirty years, Stephen King has been the dean of horror writers, and arguably, his biggest fan is Hans-Åke Lilja, the proprietor of the Lilja’s Library website at http://www.liljas-library.com/.  Mr. Lilja has collectd the information acquired over many years into a new book from Cemetery Dance called Lilja’s Library:  The World of Stephen King, available now, and illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.  It will stand as one of the great resources for information about Mr. King’s life and work, and Mr. Lilja was kind enough to talk with us about the book and about himself.

Dead In The South - So, your book from Cemetery Dance is called Lilja’s Library:  The World of Stephen King.  Tell us about it.

Hans-Åke Lilja - It’s a collection of the reviews and interviews I had done for the site up till mid 2008 as well as some I did exclusively for the book. It’s a version of the site that you can read in bed. It also has a very nice intro by Bev Vincent and an interview (also by Bev) with me about the site.

DITS -  You are one of if not the biggest of all Stephen King fans.  What is it about his work that speaks to you?

H-AL - The main thing is that he can tell a story really well. He makes you feel for the characters. He makes you care about them. He makes you feel like you know them. And on top of that he also has the ability to take something really ordinary and turn it into something scary, in a believable way. 

DITS - How long have you been a Stephen King fan, and what got you started?

H-AL - I have been a fan since the mid 80’s when I got a copy of Carrie for Christmas. I got hooked and read everything he had written after that.

DITS - Since you have knowledge of Mr. King’s work I can only envy, what is your favorite or favorites among his many books and stories?

H-AL - Oh, that is the hard one! I can’t pick just one. I really love The Long Walk which also shows King’s ability to create great characters. Who else could write a book about people walking? I also love The Dark Tower, The Stand, IT and The Talisman. Of the shorter works I really like “Secret Garden, Secret Window” and “Survival Type”.

King and Lilja

DITS - Over the years, there have been many projects in connection with King announced that never saw the light of day, books that were never completed and movies that were never filmed.  If you could wish just one of these projects into existence, what would it be?

H-AL - That’s easy. I would love to see the animated movie version of Eyes of The Dragon that was planned some years ago. And if it were to be done today it would probably be even better since the technique is so much better. 

DITS - Do you have any ambitions to write fiction yourself?

H-AL - No. Unfortunately I have no skills for writing stories.

DITS - Now that this monumental task is completed and the book is out, what is next up for Hans-Ake Lilja?

H-AL - I’m part of another book coming out next year called The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book that I co-wrote with Brian Freeman and Kevin Quigley. It’s a quiz book about almost every King movie done. It’s also beautifully illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.

After that I really don’t know. I’d love to do another book about King but I need to find something that hasn’t already been written about and that isn’t as easy as one might thing… I will also keep the site going and I have some plans for it that I hope to be able to realize.

Poster for the new Carrie

The remake of Carrie starring Chloë Grace Moretz has a new poster. I have no idea if the movie is going to be good, but the poster is pretty cool. Amazing how often Ms. Moretz has (movie) blood on her face.

Dark Score Stories

Yes, I'm going to finish the Halloween movies, hopefully before next Halloween. In the meantime, check out the website A & E Television has launched that serves as sort of a prequel/backstory for their upcoming miniseries of Stephen King's Bag of Bones, starring Pierce Brosnan and Melissa George. It's called Dark Score Stories, and is fairly creepy. King fans can have fun finding the King references in the background of the photographs.
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From A Buick 8

For the Halloween season of October this year, I resolved to spend most of my reading time re-reading old favorites. Grand masters like Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, and my annual re-read of “The Colour Our of Space” guaranteed a spooky time. Throw in a couple of modern things (Bryan Smith’s Kayla and the Devil and Norman Partridge classic Halloween story Dark Harvest) and I was set.

For my King selection I decided to go with a book I hadn’t read since its release, and one of his books that inspires a great division of opinion among his fans: From A Buick 8.

In western Pennsylvania, a mysterious man drives his vintage Buick Roadmaster into a service station and disappears, leaving the car behind. The car is taken into custody by the local barracks of the State Police, and stays in a storage shed on their property for the next quarter of a century. The troopers learn the thing really isn’t a car, just a mimicry of a car. Strange lights are occasionally seen around it, there are mysterious temperature fluctuations nearby, and sometimes things come through. People, animals, and things also vanish nearby, indicating the “car” may be some sort of portal to…somewhere else. The story is told as a flashback, with the older troopers telling it to Ned Wilcox, the young son of one of the troopers who first encountered the object, and who has been recently slain in a roadside accident.

The story ties into King’s larger Dark Tower mythos, but it reads perfectly well without any knowledge of that series, and in my mind, not knowing anything else heightens the sense of mystery, so it shouldn’t make it difficult to read for someone who hasn’t read the other books. Many King fans dislike the book because there is a lack of a definite conclusion, and most of the mysteries are not solved in the end.
From A Buick 8 features two themes of King’s work. The first is the obvious connection to cars. Like Christine, the central object is a vintage car (or something that looks like one) with malevolent intent. King, like me, is old enough to remember the glory days of American car culture, so classic cars are a strong nostalgic totem in his work.

The other theme is one found in some of King’s later work, and is what frustrated many readers, the lack of a definitive conclusion. My pet theory is this relates to the age of the writer. When you are young, you have an often-misplaced confidence that in time all things will be revealed, all mysteries will be solved. Thus the more definitive endings and explanations of King’s earlier work. Carrie dies, the Overlook hotel explodes, Salem’s Lot burns to the ground. As you get older, you start to realize that not all puzzles will be solved, not all truths will be made clear. Sometimes, Godot never arrives. This is found in a good deal of King’s later work, in fact; his next novel, The Colorado Kid, is structurally identical to From A Buick 8. Old-timers tell a young person about a mystery, and that youngster is frustrated by the lack of an ending.

Although I understand why a lot of people don’t like From A Buick 8, the story works for me. Not every secret will be told, and sometimes you have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks.
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Under The Dome: The Series

Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome will become a TV series for the Showtime cable network, according the Deadline Hollywood. This will be developed for television by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks production company, so look for an addition of a precocious tween boy with a distant father to the story. Hopefully it will do better than the ill-fated plans for The Dark Tower films and series.
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A New Movie Version of The Stand

According the The Hollywood Reporter, CBS and Warner Brothers are teaming up to bring a new version of Stephen King’s classic novel The Stand to movie screens. George Romero tried to get the movie made back in the 1980s, and there was a fairly successful TV mini-series made in 1994. This is interesting news, and we will have to see how such a broad-scale novel translates into a movie format.
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Best Book of 2010

I thought I would try to get this in before we are so far along in 2011, everyone forgets 2010 existed. Rather than try to rank the books from 1 to 10 like I usually do, I’m just going to go with a list of honorable mentions, then the top book. All of this is just my opinion, of course. I would also like to say that I tend to read books when I get to them, which is often well after the publication date (and sometimes before it), so my favorite book of 2010 may be something I’ll read in 2017, if the world doesn’t end in 2012. There is a bit of uncertainty on my part as to when some books came out, and I’m trying to stick with books published in 2010, not ones I got to in 2010. I don’t know if Norman Prentiss’ Invisible Fences, a favorite book of mine, was published last year or not. I think I first got to read it back in 2008. If it is a 2010 book, it should have been a contender, but I think I picked it as my top book of 2008, so I arbitrarily excluded it this time.

One thing that might be mildly controversial: everyone talks, of course, about how the heart and soul of the horror genre is the small press. I read a lot of small press publications, and they put out a lot of good things, but this year, the books I enjoyed most were published by the traditional big publishing houses. I have an opinion concerning that which I hope to put down in writing someday soon.

First the honorable mentions. This year seemed to be a year in which vampires, at least part of the time, stopped sparkling and came back to the dark side. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan published the second part of their Strain Trilogy with The Fall, and Justin Cronin kicked off a trilogy with The Passage (review to come), a book that enjoyed a considerable boost from Stephen King. Peter Straub returned with the lyrical A Dark Matter. Stephen King published one of his periodic collections of four novellas in Full Dark, No Stars (review to come), which I thought was one of his strongest offerings in years. I enjoyed all these books quite a bit, and they mostly feature familiar names, and all come from big publishers. Perhaps I’m becoming more conventional, but I thought the books showed a generally higher quality of effort, and almost universally a stronger attention to editing, the great bugaboo of most of the small press.

My favorite book of 2010 is not from a familiar name, although it was a large mainstream publishing house. Australian author Stephen M. Irwin’s book The Dead Path hit all the right chords with me. The book, which told of a young man returning home to confront his childhood fears and a manifestation of The Green Man, heralded the arrival of a major new talent, in my opinion.

There you have it. The usual disclaimers, this is my opinion only, does not represent a scientific study, and no animals were harmed in the writing of this post.
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Ur

In addition to being the most popular horror writer for the last 35 year, Stephen King has always embraced experimental forms. He wrote a serial novel (The Green Mile), a novel available by download over the internet, long before such a thing became fashionable (the uncompleted serial novel The Plant), and simultaneously published two novels that were alternate takes on the same subject by himself and his alter ego (Desperation under his own name and The Regulators as by Richard Bachman). It is not, therefore, surprising he would be one of the first to produce a story for the Amazon Kindle E-reader, and to make it about the Kindle. It is called Ur, and it is also not surprising that a diehard Stephen king fan such as I would buy it as soon as I received my Kindle.

Wesley Smith is a professor of English at a small college, and something of a Luddite. He is one of those who steadfastly proclaim the superiority of printed books over anything electronic (as I was a year ago). When his girlfriend leaves him in part because of his old-fashioned ways, however, he decides to show her different by ordering a Kindle. Wesley has a bit of dyslexia, though, and makes some sort of error in placing the order. When the Kindle arrives, it is in the unusual color pink (Kindles are white or charcoal) and has some unusual features, chief among them the ability to tap into different Urs.

An Ur is an alternate universe. In our Ur, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, but in others he lived and continued to write for many more years. In others, he became a hard-boiled detective novelist, or some other variation. This is true of all other writers, and is obviously an English professors dream, the opportunity to read great novels never published in our reality. Wesley has made an excellent purchase.

The Ur-Kindle has another experimental feature that is not standard on the run-of-the-mill Kindle: the user can download editions of the local newspaper up to thirty days in advance. Through this feature, Wesley learns a disaster is about to take place, one that will claim the life of his ex-girlfriend and others. Wesley and one of his students have to use the knowledge gained to change the future.

All in all, the novella Ur is a bit lighter than most of King’s work, but his gift of characterization is as good as ever. Any of his fans should enjoy this, and for the hardcore fans, there is a connection to the Dark Tower series.

I also admit it was pretty cool to read a story about a Kindle on a Kindle.
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Dark Tower Movie

Comicbookmovie.com has reported (and Universal has confirmed, the release date for the first film in the series adapting Stephen King's Dark Tower series will be May 17, 2013. This is part of an ambitious undertaking which will have three movies, with seasons of a tv series between them as a bridge, to tell the complete Dark Tower story. Some people are leery of Ron Howard a the creative force behind this; and certainly the movie trilogy/tv series concept is one of the most ambitious gambles in entertainment history.
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Interview With Hans-Ake Lilja

My interview with Hans-Ake Lilja, author of Lilja's Library: The World of Stephen King, is now up at Cemetery Dance's site, click on the author's name to read it. If you are a fan of Stephen King, this book is quite a reference work, and would make a nice addition to your library. This interview is the sixth in my We Interrupt This Author series.
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Dolan's Cadillac

I am an unabashed fan of author Stephen King. Uncle Stevie and I go way back (in the sense that I’ve never met him, but I’ve been reading his work since very near the beginning), and I can say I’ve enjoyed everything he has written, on one level or another. The movie adaptations of his work, however, have been hit or miss for me. The latest of these, Dolan’s Cadillac, is a huge miss.

(Spoilers will abound in this review. However, if you’ve read the novelette on which the movie is based, you already know all the plot points anyway, and if not, you should be able to gleam everything from glancing at the box cover.)

The movie starts off on the wrong foot, with a terrible voice over. A note to filmmakers about something you should already know: Motion pictures are a visual medium. This means you should show the audience, not tell them. When you use a narrator to explain things, you are admitting you can’t cut it. The narration steals from another King work (did he get paid twice?) for the description of Dolan. The voice over describes him as being someone so scary that birds fall dead when he looks at them. However, in this movie, Dolan looks more like an overgrown kid who has forgotten his Ritalin. Dolan is played by Christian Slater, who I kind of like as an actor, but the script here calls for him to babble uncontrollably.

Robinson (no first name given, played by Wes Bentley) and his wife Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier) are schoolteachers trying to have a baby, for purposes of added poignancy. Elizabeth is in the wrong place at the wrong time and observes crime boss Dolan murdering twenty or thirty people. She courageously decides to testify against him, even though the federal prosecutor (Al Sapienza) tells her that every other witness against Dolan has been murdered. This doesn’t deter the brave Elizabeth, and she gets whacked, too. Unfortunately, she is killed only because she does a Very Stupid Thing, and even worse, the clever murder plot requires that she do that exact Very Stupid Thing at that exact time. I guess someone peeked ahead in the script.

His wife’s death destroys Robinson emotionally, which Bentley portrays with a goggle-eyed scowl (see box cover). Since it’s the same scowl he uses from the beginning of the movie, the effect is muted. Because the feds can’t do anything, Robinson decides to take matters into his own hands, first by buying a ridiculously large gun to kill Dolan (real assassins prefer smaller calibers because they are quieter and more accurate) and then completely wimping out when he gets the chance to use it, losing a lot of credibility points. Since he doesn’t have the nerve to use the gun, he concocts a Rube Goldberg type trap to catch and kill Dolan. He should have shot him when he had the chance.

Part of the problem may lie in the source material being better suited to about half the length of a feature film (there are only two characters in King’s original story). Much of the script was presumably added as padding to make it longer, and the added material is awful. There’s also the matter of the acting.

Al Sapienza, a good character actor, is fine as the ineffectual federal prosecutor, and Vaugier elevates anything in which she appears, both in terms of her looks and her acting. But Slater can’t make Dolan the monster he is supposed to be, possibly due to the script. It has him talking incessantly like a speed freak, and there are character inconsistencies. For instance, Dolan makes his living running Eastern European sex slaves into the country from Mexico, which seems somewhat low rent for a criminal empire. Toward the end of the film, an associate comes up with a way to maximize his earning, by switching to children, who are more valuable, and easier to pack. Dolan reacts with disgust at this, which is the wrong move. He is supposed to be a monster, and this is a revenge story. Trying to humanize him (I suppose that’s the intent) is counter to your goals.

Wes Bentley was once a promising young actor, who seemed on the verge of stardom after his role in American Beauty. He needs to raise his game or find better roles, or he’s heading for a second lead role in Anacondas 7: Snakier Than Ever.

I can’t recommend this movie to anyone under any circumstances.

Under The Dome

For horror readers of my generation, it’s hard to find much fault with Stephen King. He didn’t create horror, but his success certainly was the impetus and inspiration for a lot of the horror published over the last thirty years. Also his books such as Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and The Stand are classics of the genre. Some readers feel his writing has fallen off in recent years, but I think his later work such as Duma Key holds up with the best of his output. His latest release is Under The Dome.

The book, which is social commentary with a horror background, is something King has been working on off and on in various forms for over thirty years. It is set in the fictional Maine town of Chester’s Mill (not far from Castle Rock, so you would think the residents would have a certain familiarity with strange events), where an impenetrable, invisible dome suddenly descends, to the immediate misfortune of a woodchuck and a passenger plane, and long term for everyone trapped inside. Those trapped inside include (there is a cast of characters at the front of the book, which is invaluable considering the number of people who are featured in the story) Dale Barbara, a former Army officer who has become an itinerant short-order cook after being involved in something in Iraq which compelled him to leave the Army; Andy Sanders, the town’s First Selectman, dim-witted and amiable, and easily led; Big Jim Rennie, the Machiavellian Second Selectman, who actually runs the town and has some dark secrets, Junior Rennie, Big Jim’s sociopathic son, and Julia Shumway, publisher of the town newspaper.

Although the dome is the central event of the novel, it is something of a MacGuffin for the social commentary that is really at the heart of the book. If the residents can’t get out, their days are numbered due to the steady buildup of pollutants in the atmosphere, an obvious depiction of environmental concerns. The more cohesive thread running through the book involves the reaction of the individuals to the crisis. Big Jim Rennie sees it as an opportunity to seize more power, and to use it for personal gain. A de facto police state is quickly in place, and Rennie uses fear to sway the citizens to his side. Although the U.S. government wants Barbara to take over, they have steadily decreasing influence inside the dome.

King has made no bones about the fact that Sanders and Rennie are small town analogues of George W. Bush and Dick Chaney, and it is both realistic and disturbing to see how easily people fall sway to demagoguery. Crisis does not always bring out the best in us. There are obvious overtones of The Lord of the Flies, albeit it with adults reverting to savagery rather than children.

As is often the case with King’s work, the ending is the weakest part of the book, and, while the dome is explained, that is not terribly compelling either. But both of these things are secondary concerns. The book looks at people trapped in a giant fishbowl, with the pressure turned up, and in that King equals the successes of the past.

As everyone has mentioned, this is a long book, clocking in at 1,074 pages. Is it too long? In my opinion, a good book is rarely too long, and a bad book is never short enough. Under the Dome is good enough to give me a couple of late nights reading the thing, and if you are a Stephen King fan, it shouldn’t disappoint you.
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Under The Dome & On The Screen

If you haven't finished reading Stephen King's new 1074-page novel Under The Dome, you might want to hurry up. Empire Online reports that King and little known filmmaker Steven Spielberg are already working to develop a TV adaptation. With Spielberg's involvement in the project it would seem like this would be a done deal, but the two have been working on The Talisman for many years and we haven't seen it yet.
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The 14 Best Horror Short Stories of All Time!

As always, these are actually my favorite short stories of all time rather than the greatest. You don’t climb to the top of the heap of bloggers by observing truth in advertising.

If you are a regular blog reader (and if you are, thank you) you know I like lists, and if you aren’t, look at the sidebar and you’ll see. For some time, I’ve been planning a list of short stories to accompany the other poorly-received lists, but it was too daunting a task, as there are too many to choose from and the list varies from moment to moment. It’s also too important, as short stories have formed the true backbone of the horror genre. Recently friends began bugging me to produce one, so I figured “What do I have to lose?” So here it is.

The ground rules first. These are my own opinions, and you are free (and encouraged) to disagree, and to do so in the comments. Please feel free to give vent to any vitriol you may feel, although once again, “dipshit” has become a way too overused epithet. To keep the list somewhat manageable, and to keep my head from exploding, I limited the stories to one per author, so it wouldn’t be a list of the best Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft stories, or every short piece T.E.D. Klein has written. I also made arbitrary judgments on novellas. Instead of using word length measurements, if a novella “felt” like a short novel rather than a long short story, it was disqualified. Therefore, no appearance by “The Mist”, one of my favorites.

Why 14 stories instead of 10? This was as far down as I could cull it, so I hedged my bets and cheated.

1. “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft. In my mind, this is one of the few stories that continues to give me chills. I re-read it every year in October.
2. “Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner. I’ve spoken of my admiration for Wagner before, and this is probably his best.
3. “Who Goes There?” by Don A Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.). The basis for the movies The Thing From Another World and The Thing, I read it at a young age, and its central theme of paranoia about the true identity of those around you continues to resonate.
4. “Night They Missed the Horror Show” by Joe Lansdale. Lansdale has written a number of great short stories, but this tale of two young rednecks who should have watched The Night of the Living Dead is his best.
5. “Nightcrawlers” by Robert R. Mccammon. “Something Passed By” was a close second, but I love this story of a man truly haunted by the war in Vietnam, and the unlucky diner patrons who get to share that with him. “Charlie’s in the light!”
6. “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was the great master of sea-swept horror, and this is probably his best short story.
7. “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber. Leiber is probably best remembered as a science fiction author, but he wrote in a number of genres, and his forays into horror are second to none. This story of an artist’s model who is a psychic vampire is my favorite.
8. “The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King. King has written a lot of great stories, and most people would pick one of his early works as his best, But this story of a man doomed by the purchase of an ever-changing painting sticks with me. I’ll always wonder what was in the paintings that were burned.
9. “The Ash-Tree” by M.R. James. A classic story from a nearly forgotten writer.
10. ‘The White People” by Arthur Machen. The dark sage of Wales framed this story as the diary of a young girl. Probably one of the most influential horror stories ever written.
11. “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. The world around us as the source of menace. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorites.
12. “The Yellow Sign”, by Robert W. Chambers. The centerpiece of Chambers’ great collection of short stories The King in Yellow shows how horror can come from that which is not explained. (The sign itself is never described, and it’s effects are only loosely explained.)
13. “Black Man with a Horn” by T.E.D. Klein. Any of the stories from the far-less-than-prolific Klein that were published in Dark Gods (a must-read) or the story that became his novel The Ceremonies, “The Events at Poroth’s Farm” would qualify, but this is marginally my favorite of them. Beware the Tcho-Tcho.
14. "Pigeons From Hell" by Robert E. Howard. The creator of Conan wrote some fine horror stories, and this is generally seen as his best.


If you haven’t read any of these, and you are a fan of horror, I suggest you seek them out. Then come back and tell me how wrong I am.
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Free Stephen King Story

If you can't wait for Under the Dome to be released, the New Yorker has the King story "Premium Harmony" up on their site. Check it out.
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Under the Dome, Way Under the MSRP

As much as I usually avoid giving a plug to giant, humanity-hating corporations, I had to pass this on. Stephen King's about-to-be-released novel Under the Dome, is available for pre-order at Amazon for the amazingly low price of $9.00. I guess they are selling it below cost, hoping to make up the difference by selling in quantity. The book's suggested retail price is $35.00, so this is a bargain. Since the tome clocks in at 1,088 pages, even if you don't want to read it, you might want it to bludgeon your enemies.
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A New Stephen King TV Series Adaptation

According to a news story on the website shocktillyoudrop.com, a new TV series is in the works. It will be called “Stephen King’s Haven” and will reportedly be based on his novella, published by Leisure’s Hard Case Crime imprint, The Colorado Kid. The series will initially last 13 episodes. I am all in favor of as much as possible of King’s work making it to TV/movies, and I was one of those who liked the somewhat controversial (in the context of the HCC line) book, but it will be interesting to see how a short novel that mostly consists of two old-timers sitting talking to a young reporter can be adapted. We’ll see.
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Duma Key

Thirty years ago, when Stephen King was just beginning his career, one of his early proponents was John D. MacDonald, who wrote the introduction to King’s collection Night Shift, and mentioned King’s work in several of his own books. MacDonald was, of course, the progenitor of the “Florida novel”, a type of book that takes advantage of Florida’s unusual geography and demographic makeup. Now Stephen King has written his own “Florida novel”, Duma Key.

The protagonist of Duma Key is Edgar Freemantle, a successful building contractor in Minnesota. Edgar’s pleasant life is shattered in an on-site accident, which costs him his right arm, and leaves him with problems from an excessively shaken brain. The accident leads to the end of his career, the break-up of his marriage, and his estrangement from his previous life. On the advice of his therapists, he relocates to Florida, and takes up painting, a skill for which he finds he has great talent. He also finds something far more sinister, that there is something wrong with his new home, something which is giving power to his work, power to change reality.

At first glance, this seems like a more-or-less standard setup for a horror novel. But King works wonders here. This is a novel of supernatural horror, but it is also about dealing with loss, about trying to find redemption, and coping with redemption. Edgar pays a terrible price for his new skills.

As always, King is a master of characterization. The book is filled with indelible characters, like the beach philosopher Wireman, and his charge, Elizabeth Eastbrook. You develop feelings for the characters, which gives great power to their ultimate fates.

A lot of people delight in criticizing King’s recent work. Depending on who you ask, his masterpiece is either Salem’s Lot, The Stand, The Shining, or It, all books written in the first few years of his career. This book is very different. It is written by a man looking at 60, not at 30, and while it may not have the exuberant pacing of King’s first few novels, it more than makes up for it in the maturity of the writing. I have been a faithful reader of Stephen King since the beginning, and, in my opinion, this is one of the best things he’s ever written. And that is high praise, indeed.
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Cell To Infect Your Television

Stephen King’s zombie-ish 2006 novel Cell, much derided by horror fans, will become a television mini-series, according to Fangoria’s website. This will follow numerous other mini-series made from King’s work. Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) was supposed to direct this as a movie, but plans have apparently changed. Since I’m one of the few who liked Cell (I thought it was a great “popcorn movie” type of novel), I’ll be looking forward to it. The added length of the mini-series will hopefully allow for more character development.
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Sleepwalkers

What synchronicity. I read a novel by Mick Garris, and coincidentally (I swear) watch one of his first movies, Sleepwalkers. This could be a joyous confluence of events if the novel and movie were great ones. It falls a bit short.

The movie was scripted by Stephen King, based on one of his unpublished stories. To paraphrase Stephen Jones, unpublished with good reason. It’s one of his weakest efforts, without a doubt.

Mary (Alice Krige) and Charles (Brian Krause) are a mother and son pair of …..something. I suppose their supposed to be the titular Sleepwalkers of the film, although they are never described as such except in the opening titles, and there is no reason they would referred to as such. The opening states they are the origin of the vampire myth, but they seem closer to werewolves, since they turn into cat-like creatures at will, which seems to be their natural state. (Their true form is also revealed by mirrors, which makes me wonder why they keep mirrors all over their house. Their human appearance is an illusion, so they don’t need them. Dumb sleepwalkers.) Apparently, they live only by sucking out the soul/life force of a virgin girl. Only the son can do this, and he has to then feed Mom. (How did she get by before procreation?) The sleepwalkers can also make themselves and other things invisible, and can instantly change the make, model, and color of automobiles.

There is a slight overtone of incest in Mary and Charles’ relationship. By “slight overtone” I mean they graphically bang each others brains out every chance they get. I suppose that may go beyond “slight overtone.” This is a little out-there. Alice Krige is a definite babe, but I don’t think I’d go for her if she was my Mom.

The sleepwalkers have one Achilles’ Heel. Cats hate their guts, and the scratch of a cat burns them like acid and kills them. Cats are also attracted to them, as is evidenced by a lot of scenes of cats sitting around looking at their house. The cats actually look bored, but hell, they’re cats. Despite setting multiple traps, eventually there’s too much painful cat buildup, and the pair have to relocate.

Charles is going to high school and he focuses in on Tanya (Madchen Amick), a suitable virgin for eating. Unfortunately for him, she is Final Girl, and will be his undoing. Well, Final Girl and some cats. Charles does in a predatory gay schoolteacher (perpetuating a painful and inaccurate stereotype) and a cop. The cop, who acts at least slightly retarded, travels with a cat named Clovis who proves to be Charles’ undoing.

There are a number of cameos, but unfortunately the appearances of Stephen King, John Landis, Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper and Joe Dante are crammed into the same scene. If they were spread out, it would give the viewer something to watch for. There is also a brief appearance by Ron Perlman, always welcome.

The biggest flaw of the movie, other than the terribly stupid plot, is the (non)acting of Brian Krause. He’s the kind of actor that, when the director says “act naturally” stiffens like a board. Good looking guy, I suppose.

Garris would get better, and everything Stephen King ever wrote was better, so the future was rosier. Still, this is a movie only for Stephen King fanatics. And incest lovers.
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