The Stephen King Companion by George Beahm

Author:George Beahm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

63

MICHAEL COLLINGS ON FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT

1990

As with Different Seasons, which shares the overriding time metaphor both in its title and in the arrangement of its stories, each of the four tales in Four Past Midnight is virtually novel-length, each approaches the art of writing from different directions, each seems to belong to slightly different genres, and ultimately each varies in quality and evocative power.

“The Langoliers,” for example, shows the quintessential King at his best, spinning a tale of fantasy and horror. In what readers will recognize as vintage Twilight Zone fashion, characters discover that something has happened … and worse, that something unknown and indefinable is coming, threatening the eventual disintegration of everything (perhaps including time itself). King’s images of diminishing solidity, of worn-out matter, and of encroaching nothingness that is the Langoliers remain long after the story is over.

“Secret Window, Secret Garden,” on the other hand, belongs to a sequence of stories that anatomize the writer’s imagination and that includes Misery, The Tommyknockers, and The Dark Half. If Thad Beaumont is haunted by a murderous pseudonym, Morton Rainey is pursued by the specter of plagiarism personified in “his greatest creation—a character so vivid that he actually did become real.”

“The Library Policeman,” like so many of King’s finer shorter works, parallels psychic horrors with the deeper, darker horrors of “real life.” And, simply put, any horror story that depends for its climax on combining a variation on Heinleinian puppet masters with a wad of Bull’s Eye red licorice squashed on the railroad tracks deserves to be read.

“The Sun Dog” provides a narrative link between The Dark Half and Needful Things. In spite of the fact that the “sun” in question is a Polaroid camera—a “needful thing,” as it were, for young Kevin Delevan—King quickly connects that common, everyday object with an encroaching supernatural horror. In this story, King’s penchant for detail at times overwhelms his storytelling, so several pages, for example, are devoted to the relatively insignificant task of buying a roll of film. Similarly, when the Polaroid begins to develop and show something—the sun dog—moving inexorably closer to the barrier separating its world and ours, the story slows almost to a halt. One of the few tales that seem longer than required, it nevertheless prepared readers for what is to come in Needful Things.

Responses to the stories will vary with each reader, of course. Arguments as to which of the stories is the “best” will likely depend as much on the readers as on the stories. Of the four, however, “The Sun Dog” seems the weakest, particularly because it illustrates King’s occasional need for careful, stringent editing. “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” on the other hand, with its probing of diseased psychological states, resonates well with the earlier novels. Although none of the stories carries the weight and focus of “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” in King’s earlier quartet of tales (and arguably among his better performances), Four Past Midnight nevertheless demonstrates once again King’s unusual versatility and range of vision.

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