The Outsider – Stephen King

When I was a kid growing up, I consumed the usual Enid Blyton-s, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Then I entered Secondary One and I told myself I am graduating from these books and ready for something denser. I remembered stepping into Times Book Store in Lucky Plaza, walking past the romance section (I wasn’t ready for this yet😊) and going straight to the horror section… yes, I was ready to try something on the other end. I picked up Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror. It scared the wits out of me and I fricking love it. Before long, I discovered Stephen King’s Carrie and my love affair with horror truly began.

I didn’t stop reading Stephen King until after Dolores Claiborne which I remembered was a complete miss for me. There after I only picked up his books selectively like Joyland and Doctor Sleep. They were good but didn’t hit the heights like his earlier books. Then came Mr Mercedes, the first part of a hard-boiled detective trilogy. This is King stepping out of his comfort zone of horror and trying something new. I have to confess I didn’t enjoy it at all. Most of the time it was a pain to read. When the narrative should move faster, King loves to engage in some tediously self-indulgent description replete with street slang and vulgarities. Letting us know who the villain is so early in the narrative isn’t a good move in my book. The climax also plays out like something out of a B-grade made for TV movie. But then The Outsider, another investigative thriller, was voted #1 on goodreads and here I go again.

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

This is solid work from King, propulsive, tension-filled and nail-biting suspense up the Ying Yang. The story hinges on an impossible “what if” scenario – can a person be at two places at the same time? The story twists and turns to a payoff I hope explains the impervious situation satisfyingly and please don’t tell me there is an evil twin involved. Thankfully, there isn’t but The Outsider is not quite an investigative procedural in the classical sense. If you are a fan of those monster-of-the-week The X Files episodes, you are in good hands.

As usual, King nails that small town vibe and its cynical occupants to a T. The dialogue has immediacy and feels like it spout out of characters who are trapped in their own world. The plot is meticulously detailed, building up to a climax that has full-on supernatural trappings.

At nearly 500 pages, King could easily have shaved off the unneeded characterisations and the umpteenth fly-off-the-handle plot points. But for me, everything was compelling, even if King pokes fun at certain aspects without being preachy. Watch out for a scene involving Harlan Coben which is quite entertaining. I wonder how Coben feel about that passage about him.

The only thing that didn’t sit down well with me is that the book borrows a character from the Bill Hodges trilogy and with that came some big spoilers especially for End of Watch.

This is a fun read and King seemed like he was having a lot of fun writing this. It does have a cinematic feel to it and I loved seeing that creepy movie playing in my head as I devoured the book. The world we live in can sometimes be so cruel and unforgiving. If you think about it, the evilness in the story can be likened to the one we see in the world. We constantly feed this flagitious entity till it becomes alive and it looks like us staring back with a cynical smile. Yes, I can definitely believe that.

 

**** / 5

 

The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson

I am on a roll with Richard Matheson; the man can sure tell a good story. The Shrinking Man has a absurd premise, but I think Matheson was using it as a platform to deconstruct the male role in modern society. What makes a man, a man?

While on holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray shortly after he accidentally ingests insecticide. The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink.

Scott Carey is not a likeable character from the start. But as the story progresses, I understand his despair and anguish. Here is a man who is not just shrinking physically, his role as a husband, a father and his entire being are gradually eroding to oblivion. Contrary to what the world tells us, size does matter.

God sure has a dark sense of humour. Even as Scott shrinks, his desire for intimacy with his wife never reduces. It is disarmingly moving to see him try to clutch on to these things. If you take away a man’s height, power, stature, respect and his primal need to be with someone and the ability to provide, what does that make him? Is he still a man?

I know Matheson can tell a good yarn through his short stories, but a novel is a whole different ball game and he has come up tops. Interspersed in the main narrative are flashbacks detailing his painful emasculation of his role as a man, and the main storyline is a story of survival in a cellar of horrors. He has to battle a spider, birds, a cat and trekking across landscapes searching for scraps of food and water. All through it, I wondered how he got separated with his family and landed up in the cellar. It was superbly explained near the end.

The Shrinking Man ends on a heroic note as he engages the spider in a final battle and the narrative hits a bittersweet end that is surprising and stirringly hopeful. This is a poignant tale of man’s need to be needed and an excellent study of masculinity and loneliness.

PS – I may give the 1957 movie a shot. There is a cool Twilight Zone vibe about it.

The Best of Richard Matheson

My first introduction to Richard Matheson wasn’t through his stories, but an adaptation of his spine-chilling short story Button, Button in a Twilight Zone episode. It is still one of my favourite stories and if there is a lull in my class, I will usually share the story. And I do tell a mean story because the effect on the students is always priceless. A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing for Jason Mathews’ latest at the library and chanced upon Richard Matheson, a name that immediately brought back so many seismic memories.

Richard Matheson (1926-2013)  is the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Legend, Hell House, Somewhere in Time, The Incredible Shrinking Man (found this at the library 😊), A Stir of Echoes, and What Dreams May Come, among others. He was named a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention, and received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has also won the Edgar, the Spur, and the Writer’s Guild awards. In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In addition to his novels, Matheson wrote screenplays, and he wrote for several Twilight Zone episodes, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” based on his short story.

This being an anthology, there are always hits and misses, but IMHO there are more hits than misses. He is adept at all genres – in these 33 stories you will see science fiction, horror, time travel, fantasy, paranoia and even comedy. I like his writing style which doesn’t scream “look and kneel down at my writing prowess”. There is a simplicity and stark quality to it, and he knows how to depict ordinary people caught in horrendous situations, all in a space of less than 20 pages.

Some of my favourites include “The Last Day,” a poignant look at the end of the world from the perspective of a young man getting home to meet his mother for the last time; “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” a man recovering from a nervous breakdown sees a gremlin on the wing of the aircraft he is on; “Duel,” a most serious case of road rage involving an 18-wheeler on an empty stretch of desert road. I even saw the film adaptation of which the screenplay is written by Matheson. The film launched the career of some dude named Steven Spielberg.

Matheson makes it look so easy with the crafting of his uncanny stories. To read him is to realise you have just come across the blueprint of telling disturbing stories. He did it first.

 

Joyland – Stephen King

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

This is one breeze of a read at only 283 pages and the prose pulsed like the heart of a young man in love. It reads like the narrator is sitting in front of you at a fireplace telling you the story and the cool prose is full of carny, as in carnival slang. For example, the Ferris Wheel is called a chump-hoister.

It is short on the usual Stephen King scares but don’t let that deter you. Two of my fave stories by him are Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body, both novellas included in Different Seasons. Joyland‘s stylistics and narrative definitely belong in that same illustrious class. It is a nostalgic love story and it harkened me back to my first breakup. The second half gets spookier and a mystery surfaces. The scares are here but it’s tinged with a deep sense of melancholy. What totally came out of the left field and floored me is that I realized it is actually a beautiful coming-of-age story.

Naoko – Keigo Higashino

Continuing my book reviews written some time ago…

Winner of the Japan Mystery Writers Award, Naoko is a black comedy of hidden minds and lives. Navigating the interstices between the real and the unreal with perfect plot twists, this page-turner is also a critique of gender relations by a male Japanese writer, one of their best-sellng.

An everyman, Heisuke works hard at a factory job to provide for his wife, Naoko, and young daughter, Monami. He takes pleasure from the small things, like breakfast with both of them after a night shift. His placid life is rocked when, looking up from his microwave dinner one evening, he realizes the TV news that he wasn’t paying attention to is reporting a catastrophic bus accident and the names of his loved ones.

When Monami finally wakes from a coma, she seems to think she’s Naoko, who has died protecting her daughter. More disturbingly, the girl knows things only Naoko could know. The family life that resumes between the modest man and a companion who looks like his daughter and seems like his dead wife is ticklish-funny until it begins hurtling toward a soul-shattering end.

It’s been a while since I took less than a week to finish a novel. This is just a sublime piece of work. I first read The Devotion of Suspect X by the same author some time ago and bought Naoko at the same time. Thing is, I really hate Keigo Higashino… he fricking made me tear up! The end of chapter 38 made my eyes well up and the end of chapter 39 and all the way to the soul-shattering ending, my soul was in shambles. What an amazing ending – there are at least a couple of ways to understand it depending on your disposition! That’s not to say the rest of the chapters are nothing much. It’s really surprisingly good… in the beginning I thought I was reading something supernatural (the Japanese are so good at this), then it became a mystery, sashaying into romance, then heartbreak, revenge and… get ready for this… underage sex. I will not divulge the last point but suffice to say it was amazingly, poignantly and deftly handled, not at all salacious. The novel questions our concept of morality, mortality, immortality and gender play. I can’t remember the last book that have made me ponder so much about life. I have just finished reading it 30min ago and I still feel like I have lost something… but in a good way. The good ones always do that for me.

Goth – Otsuichi

Otsuichi is the pen name of Hirotaka Adachi. Goth won the 2003 Honkaku Mystery Award and it’s a good read, not fantastic, but good.

A notebook that leads to murder – a refrigerator filled with hands… a pit of dead dogs… an accidental suicide… a boy buried alive. Morino is the strangest girl in school – how could she not be, her obsession with brutal murders? And there are plenty of murders to grow obsessed with, as the town in which she lives is a magnet for serial killers. She and her schoolmates will go to any length to investigate the murders, even putting their own bodies on the line. And they don’t want to stop the killers – Morino and her friend simply want to understand them.

The writing isn’t top-notch but there is a rawness that I appreciate. This feels like the work of a new author with nothing to lose and he is willing to break any rules. There are 6 stories (plus a bonus story) and they are all subtly linked by location and themes. By themes I mean the fascination with death, suicide and killing. The horror is evident on every page but the horror doesn’t stem from the supernatural; it comes from the deep recesses of humanity’s dark side.

I enjoy the well-drawn characterizations. Their internal logic is sharply realized and I didn’t need to suspend my disbelief. The only logic I really needed to suspend is how could a small town contain so many killers, but that was easy because I love the characters and Otsuichi’s “devil may care” attitude. The narrative can change point of view on the fly, sometimes even within a story itself. But it is never confusing at all. There is also an investigative procedural thread running through all the stories that I enjoy tremendously. I also like that the murder-obsessed boy’s name is never revealed till the final story; a very interesting and calculated move.

Not all the stories worked well. A few fumbled trying to cross the finishing line. But the sum total of them is still remarkable. This is a very talented writer with a morbid fascination with death and all the demented inklings that go with it. Reading this feels like I was opening the Dark Side within me and I noticed I was swimming leisurely in a pool of red with a warm smile plastered across my face. Don’t flinch… we all have one.