Book Review: "Full Dark, No Stars" by Stephen King (2010)

Warning: some spoilers below

As much as I love, love, LOVE Stephen King, I'll be the first to admit that, even at his very best, he can be kind of a clumsy writer. Much as King himself described the late, great Robert E. Howard (of the original "Conan the Barbarian" stories), King tends to wield his considerable talent as bludgeon rather than a scalpel.

But, while he will never be a perfect writer, he is -- at his best -- a near perfect storyteller.

Full Dark, No Stars is a case in point.

The problem with Big Steve -- can I call you Big Steve? Thanks -- is that, as soon as he turned into a Bestsellasaurus Rex (his phrase), he appeared to believe that he really didn't need an editor anymore. I've always bristled at the oft-stated cliché that Steve could publish his laundry list if he wanted. But, as much as I hate to admit it, it's true. And, as time went on, the books just got longer...and longer...and longer...

Last year's Under the Dome was heralded by many as a return to form. It garnered (ridiculous) comparisons to The Stand. I disagree. It was good, but it wasn't great. The closest Steve has gotten to greatness in recent years was 2002's From a Buick 8, which -- aside from an absolutely godawful final chapter that I have since tried my best to block from my memory -- was taut, tight, original, and very scary. It was also the shortest book he had published in a long, long time.

Even though he has become so known for his massive, phonebook-sized tomes, with the exception of The Stand(1978), It (1986) and maybe Bag of Bones (1998) , most of them grow more exasperating than exhilarating as they ramble on (two of them -- 1987's The Tommyknockers and 1994's Insomnia -- are damn near unreadable).

This is what makes Full Dark, No Stars the first true King classic in probably about 15 years. It's a collection of novellas, much like the masterful Different Seasons (1982) and the very-good-if-not-quite-masterful Four Past Midnight (1990). This is the length where King is at his best. Most of my favorite King stories -- The Body, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, Secret Window, Secret Garden -- appeared in one of those two books. My other favorite King story, The Mist, is another novella first published in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology (1981) and reprinted in King's own Skeleton Crew (1985).

Add to that list at least two of the stories in the new collection. This is King at his leanest, meanest, darkest, Bachman best.

The first, longest, and best story in Full Dark, No Stars is 1922. Told in the first person in the form of a written confession by Nebraska Farmer Wilfred James, 1922 is a black-as-pitch examination of how apparent good fortune can lead to catastrophe. Wilfred's wife, Arletta, comes into an inheritance of 100 acres from her dead father. Arletta wants to sell the land and move to Omaha to open a dress shop. Wilfred wants to add the land to his own 80 acres. An immovable force meets and unstoppable object. Eventually (no spoiler here, this is revealed on the first page), Wilfred convinces their fourteen-year-old son, Hank, to help him murder Arletta and dump her body into an old well.

This being a Stephen King story, things go disastrously awry. The punishment meeted out to Wilfred, Hank, and Hank's innocent girlfriend Shannon is as tragic as it is absolutely horrifying. Supernatural elements aside, it's also all strangely plausible, rooted in the truth of 1920s Midwestern farm life.. King is a master at finding horror in everyday objects and situations, and in 1922 such things as a cracked drain pipe and a lady's hatbox gain almost totemic significance.

And, of course, there are the rats. I've never really had a fear of rats before, but I do now.

Steve follows this with Big Driver, a 70s-style rape-revenge fantasy that thankfully stays away from the inherent exploitation elements (Steve depicts the assault itself in just a couple pages, wisely getting in and getting out as quickly as possible) and instead focuses on the trauma and the aftermath. The lead character, Tess, is a semi-successful mystery novelist assaulted and left for dead on her way home from a lecture. Instead of reporting her attack she instead decides to exact her own justice. Steve makes a lot of the disconnect between Tess's fictional, light-hearted murder mysteries and the true horror of what she has experienced.

The story rings some false notes (there are a couple twists and turns that had me shaking my head) and wraps up altogether too neatly, but King paints a portrait of trauma that is both harrowing and heartbreaking, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to cheer Tess on when her simmering rage inevitably turns to murder.

Fair Extension, the third and shortest story, is the only one that sort of feels like fluff. Streeter is a miserable man in his early 50s dying of cancer. He meets a stranger by the side of the road who may be the Devil himself. Ole' Scratch offers Streeter a deal: he'll give Streeter a "life extension" if he agrees to fork over 15 percent of his income (it seems Satan has lost interest in souls and is instead looking for Caribbean tax shelters). The catch is that Streeter has to pick someone to receive all his bad luck. Streeter picks his best friend from childhood, Tom Goodhough, a successful businessman with a perfect family whom Streeter has secretly hated for decades.

The story is a breezy and entertaining black comedy, but there's very little substance to it. We get to see Streeter's life improve as Tom's falls apart in Biblical ways. That's about it. What I did like, however, is how Steve essentially turns the old Faustian morality tale on its head. We keep waiting for Streeter to get his comeuppance. It doesn't happen.

The book ends with A Good Marriage, which is Steve's meditation on Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, and how his wife claimed to know nothing of his murderous ways. Probably the less said about this one the better. Again, Steve very astutely stays away from most of the seamy details of the killings and instead focuses on the sheer horror of what it would be like to find out that the sweet, attentive husband you have shared a bed with for more than a quarter-century might actually be a psychopath. The story unfolds in some nice, unexpected ways, and leads to a conclusion that is -- while predictable -- ultimately satisfying. In many ways, it's the quietest of the four stories. It's also probably the most chilling.

I have no illusions that Full Dark, No Stars is going to be the start of a Stephen King renaissance. I'm sure his next book will likely be another bloated, overplotted brick. I'll read it anyway, and I'm sure I'll (mostly) like it. But until then, I'm thankful to have a little taste of the old, transcendent King that I have yearned for for so long.

A few thoughts on the response to "SEND"

SEND (2010) from Trifecta+ Entertainment on Vimeo.

I sort of feel like trying to write a really good story is a bit like conducting surgery while blindfolded. You hack away at the thing, hoping you don't hit an artery and kill it. You try to find the infected appendix or whatever it is you're looking for by touch alone and take it out.

And sometimes your hand slips and you stick your scalpel into a bundle of raw nerves.

That seems to be what's happened with "SEND."

I went to see a play back in August -- "Trust," by Stephen Dietz -- and I was floored by this one scene. One character confronts another about his infidelity. Glasses are thrown. Accusations are hurled. And my jaw was on the floor.

The actress in that scene was Amelia Ampuero, and I immediately had the thought that I wanted to do a movie with her where I would just put the camera on her face and let her do her thing. It seemed sort of crazy, like something you think about and right away realize won't work at all.

But then -- and this is just the way my brain works, folks -- I suddenly had this image of her covered in blood and talking about eating a rat. To steal my favorite metaphor from Stephen King, my Muse took a big old crap on the top of my head and the idea was there, whole and pretty much fully formed.

That's it. I initially thought this would just be a little web video, something I could post quickly while we were finishing up some of our larger projects. I figured it would be, at most, ten minutes long. I hammered out a draft that came out to about thirteen pages, sent it to a few friends for feedback, and contacted Amelia to see if she was interested.

Once Amelia agreed to do it, I incorporated some of the notes I had gotten from friends and started fleshing out the script. It began to bloat over the coarse of a few drafts, ending up at about twenty pages. A little long for a web video, but whatever. It would still be super easy to shoot, which was what I was looking for at that moment. Some people would stick with it, I figured, and some wouldn't.

As far as the content itself, as I saw the story taking shape I realized this had the potential to be a really striking and unsettling little film if we did it right. I liked that. I thought the movie would fuck with people. That's good. I like to fuck with people.

The shoot went well. Amelia was incredible, as I knew she would be. Mary's makeup was stunning. I started thinking that maybe this was a bit more of a "real" film than I had initially figured it would be.

I sort of knew I had a tiger by the tail when I started editing it last Monday. Amelia's performance was absolutely riveting. I found myself just sitting and watching it rather than working on it.

But I still had no idea.

After I posted it on Friday, I watched as the number of views climbed up to 100...then 300...then suddenly 1,500...3,600...finally over 6,000. Over 80 people reposted it on Facebook. An untold number sent the link to their friends via email. It wasn't exactly viral, but it was on its way.

Then the emails started rolling in. Amongst all the "way to go"s and "that was awesome"s that you expect to get from your friends, I started getting email after email from people I didn't know. Most of them seemed to be from women, many of them mothers. They all told me the movie made them cry. One woman told me that, immediately after watching it, she went and hugged her kids and then called her husband while he was at work to tell him she loved him. Yet another told me the movie was making her "rethink the way I'm living my life."

To which my response was "...uh...what?"

And then I got this email this morning:

"hi. you dont know me. a friend sent me a link to your movie Send and I just felt like i had to write to you to express my gratitude. I felt you made this movie about me. a year ago i split up with my husband. It has been a nasty divorce and i have at times even contemplated suicide, only not doing it because of my kids. but then I saw your movie and it made me realize what is important, and i cannot thank you enough. thank you thank you thank you"

(I wrote back and asked the sender -- who will remain anonymous -- if I could reprint that here. She said yes.)

I just don't know what to say to that.

I don't want to overstate this. I know we didn't cure cancer or anything. We made a movie. I guess all I can say is that I'm absolutely floored, humbled, and completely overwhelmed by the response. As a writer and filmmaker I've never experienced anything remotely like it before.

One thing I absolutely must say, though, is that I refuse to take credit. Sure, I think I wrote a pretty good script. But I had help from friends, who were not shy about telling me what worked and what didn't.

Really, this movie only exists because of Amelia. It was watching her on stage that inspired me to write it, and it was her performance in the film that, I believe, has led to the response that it has had.

And, of course, there's my beloved Trifecta team. There's Mary's makeup. You truly have to see it to believe it. There were Bust's costumes and guns, which is what gives that last scene the boxer's punch that it has. And -- even though I sort of shot this one myself -- there was Corey's invaluable advice and help with the lighting.

Beyond that, I don't really have anything else to say. I really, honestly had no idea. Sometimes you just stick your blade into a bundle of nerves, that's all.