Creeping Horror

I was talking the other day about reading Stephen King again, and how I'd been reading him since I was a teenager. I think I've worked out when it is he leaves me a bit cold, or the point at which the story starts to escape from me and leave me behind....

It's when the creeping horror, all that sly, suggestive, gradual stuff he does so well suddenly gives way to a full-blown manifestation of... something awful. It's when he brings the monsters on, that's when I go off him. When the true enemy reveals its horrid face.

It's not a problem I have with all horror writers. Just with Stephen King. This week, reading his latest stories, I've been pondering why.

The stories in 'Just After Sunset' I've enjoyed the most really hold back the full-blown revelation of the monster. My favourite has been 'N', which is a lovely and clever examination of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders . It's a proper ghost story, with multiple narrators and oblique accounts: a narrative wrapped in a successive layering of letters and analyst's notes. It's taking the neurotic ramblings of all those M R James heroes and H P Lovecraft loonies and updating them with a spot of obsessive naming-and-touching familiar to anyone with a mild touch of OCD (and what writer hasn't?). We're left on the brink of discovering the true horror in this story - as we are in any good ghost story. We see each of these doomed individuals follow each other into the dreaded Ackerman's field and its circle of standing stones... and the strange thinness and sense of evil lurking within... But we see little more than a reptilian eye. And that's enough for me, frankly. Lovecraft and James and all that lot were always best when we just got a glimpse. (There's nothing more unsettling to me, than that black plastic bin bag flapping down the beach in James's, 'Whistle and I'll Come...' )

There's another story in the new collection about the desktop belongings of office workers from the World Trade Centre, appearing suddenly in the appartment of their only surviving colleague. This is a lovely, seemingly benign haunting. But its effect is robbed by being followed up with a story that ends, quite abruptly in a capricious apocalypse, bursting, bleeding eyeballs and all. A story that seemed to be going in one direction - suddenly melts into nothing, as King confronts us with sudden, undeniable horror.

The differences between those two stories, 'The Things They Left Behind' and 'Graduation Afternoon' epitomise my reactions to his work. Back when I was seventeen and reading 'The Dead Zone' on a walking holiday in the Lakes, when I couldn't stop reading wherever I was until the thing was finished... it was the stuff just around the corner that kept me going. I was dragged almost against my will into that disturbing world of premonitions and assassination and the turgid workings of a damaged mind. And then, slightly later, when I read 'It'... I was carried along by the dreadful sense of history repeating itself... really feeling for these characters whose memories had been suppressed... who knew something terrible had once happened to them, and it was fated to happen again.

It was at the end of 'It's' huge double narrative that I lost my patience. I remember just how I felt, after a thousand pages of teasing and nastiness and glimpses of clowns and the monster at the heart of the labryrinth was revealed to be (spoiler)


... a great big giant spider.

I just didn't care. I didn't want a real spider, giant or otherwise. That stuff belongs elsewhere - in Ray Harryhausen, in Doctor Who. Anywhere but where it suddenly was.

This is probably a very personal reaction to King's work. I know people love the shocks and the spills and the sudden revelations... Sometimes his schlockier moments are great - but only, I think, when they're deliberately parodying or pastiching 50s horror comics or B Movies and we're in on the joke, somehow.

I don't think it's his horror stories I enjoy. Or the ones about serial killers and the ultra violent ones. It's his ghost stories that I really like.