King of the
Market
I started reading Stephen King novels when I was a young adult
(read: child), and I have never stopped. I started with Through
the Eyes of the Dragon, a YA book, but moved on to Carrie and Cujo in
short order. I read him through junior high and into high school. I read King’s
horror, his dark fantasy, and his short stories. One day, Lucifer willing, I
will write something lengthy about his oeuvre. , because I think his body of
work worth giving serious consideration. As I’ve read King’s output over the
last two decades of my life, King’s material has evolved in interesting ways.
Good old Stephen has maintained an almost self-satirically prolific level of
output. From his eyrie in Maine and from various vacation properties, he has
cranked out 61 novels, 11 collections, 5 nonfiction books, and 19 screenplays,
and that isn’t even the entirety of it. He has sold about 350 million books,
give or take, and has a net worth of roughly half a billion dollars (USD 500m,
or $500,000,000).
King is prolific, King is successful, and King is influential. Modern horror was in large part shaped
by him, and he has had an outsized
impact on the publishing of popular fiction in a larger sense.
One day, Stephen King will be held in the esteem of a William Shakespeare or
(certainly) a Charles Dickens. In fact Dickens – also a commercial author,
also fond of ghost
stories – is probably not a bad point of reference for King.
Dickens was highly critical of the
British aristocracy and of the condition of the poor in England in the 19th century.
Likewise, Stephen King’s politics could be characterized as
broadly “liberal” without being leftist; the staid, Joe Biden
wing of the Democratic Party, in short. King has been
criticized for the lily-white nature of much of his early work
(and his use of some fairly worn tropes when
he does bother to put Black people in his work), and clearly, in his 21st century
work, he’s trying to be a better white
guy. Given his overall Twitter presence and often-enjoyable flaying of Maine
Governor Paul LePage (a true bastard) and former President Trump, I’d call him a largely
benign presence, politically speaking.
Why does any of this matter? Well, because I’ve read If It Bleeds,
a collection of four previously unreleased novellas that came out in April of
2020. I am a seasoned Kingologist, having often discussed him in written pieces and
on the Madness Heart Press podcast Wandering Monster
(where I’m one of the hosts). Thus it felt almost obligatory that I review
King’s quartet of stories. A word right out of the gate: I very much enjoyed
the collected novella format itself, and wish more authors would explore it.
The segmented nature of If It Bleeds allows
me to give it a segmented review. Two out of four of the novellas in Bleeds are
good; one is great. And one is infuriating.
“If It Bleeds,”
With and Without Holly Gibney
“Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” and “Rat” are fairly straightforward King
fare; “Harrigan” is a passable attempt at a 21st century ghost story, and “Rat” is an engrossing-enough
tale of a writer going mad (sound familiar?). “The Life of Chuck” truly
shines. While it lies well outside the wheelhouse of horror and more like
something that might be included in The Year’s Best Short Fiction or McSweeney’s.
I enjoyed the experimental style of “Chuck,” and its heartbreaking message –
centered around a folk proverb, “when an old person dies, a library burns” – is
as well-realized as I’ve ever seen in King’s work. I highly recommend it.
That leaves the title novella of the collection, “If It Bleeds.”
To talk about “If It Bleeds,” we need to talk about Holly Gibney. Since his
early days, King has had a tendency to revisit a number of characters in different
contexts and settings. In his recent phase – what King-themed podcast Losers Club has called his “true crime
phase” – Gibney has been one of King’s most frequently-recurring characters,
having appeared in Mr. Mercedes, Finders
Keepers, End of Watch, The
Outsider, and, now, “If It Bleeds.” MILD SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
Unlike poor dead Bill Hodges, Holly lives on as the embodiment of
The Nobility of Law and Order in King’s universe. This is an odd position for a
person of King’s politics to take in their fiction. Hodges and Anderson are,
after all, both cops who have killed multiple people; and let’s not
forget Holly’s partner Pete, another retired killer cop. Sure, they may have
murdered enough people to fill a school bus over the course of those many
stories, but all the people they killed had it coming and/or were
monsters. It’s as though King’s conception of justice never evolved past the
early 1990s: and has certainly never encountered Black Lives Matter.
Holly Gibney herself is an irritating and poorly fleshed-out
character, a caricature, if you will, of
neurotic-but-brilliant mental illness. This is a misrepresentation of the
realities of mental health that has been a tired trope since at least the TV
show Monk.
I’ve heard more than one acquaintance tell me that they think Holly is supposed
to be “on the [autism] spectrum,” but I’m not sure that’s accurate. She is
obsessive, anxious, bullied by a one-dimensional ogre of a mother (another
recurring King trope). She is not particularly well-realized as “brilliant,” as
much as representative of self-indulgent impulses: a repellent figment crafted
from the most annoying parts of Stephen King’s personal moral code. King’s
moral code has, I might add, become increasingly God-centered in his later
phases, although that part of his cosmology has been a quiet but persistent
part of his stories going back at least to the beginning of his association
with Alcoholics Anonymous in 1987.
“The ideas of
the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
The architecture
that undergirds power in America is sometimes visible. Examples include police patrols,
walls and fences, “No Trespassing” signs, or any of the innumerable and minute
transactions that make up the beehive hum of 21st-century capitalism. Most of power’s structure is
invisible, however, composed of our norms, our collective morality (such as it
is), and our conceptualization of and responses to “evil.” The engineers of
this invisible support structure are sometimes politicians, but more often come
from the realms of money and the arts. Perhaps no author in 2021 can speak to
the confluence of these two realms quite like Stephen King, who has earned half
a billion dollars and sold hundreds of millions of books, and whose novels –
whether in their original form or as adaptations – have shaped American popular
culture for over 40 years.
It would not be fair to say that King hasn’t grown since the
publication of Carrie in 1974. People of color
appear more frequently in his work now than they used to, although many of the tropes
and awkward center-left characterizations of them still mar his
attempts to expand the scope of his empathy. Women, always prominent in his
books in some sense, have made progress in the Kingoverse as well. Holly
Gibney, the heroine of “If It Bleeds,” is one of his most frequently-recurring
characters these days. Holly also represents an attempt on the part of King to
portray mental illness with more sensitivity (Holly suffers from a complicated
and never-quite-diagnosed anxiety disorder). I suppose King could have picked a
worse avatar for his current true crime phase – the late, white ex-policeman
Bill Hodges, for example. Just kidding, Hodges was a
recurring character, and serves as Holly’s mentor and moral center.
Where It’s Forever 1985 and the Sun Always Shines
And that brings us to the central problem with “If It Bleeds,”
and with several of King’s recent novels (Mr. Mercedes, Finders
Keepers, End of Watch, The
Outsider). King wrote these books in the 21st century.
In fact, Mr.
Mercedes – the first Bill Hodges novel – was released a mere
six years ago, in 2014. 2014 also happens to be the year that protests against the
police killing of Black folks including Michael Brown and Tamir
Rice kicked off, protests that evolved into the movement known as Black Lives Matter. The
last few years have seen a rapid evolution in
public perceptions of the problem of police violence and the
unimaginable devastation it has inflicted on the Black community.
To read Stephen King, however, it’s still 1985 – or maybe 1994 –
only with high-tech wonder-phones and the ability to Google things. Brand names
are, in fact, one facet of 2020/2021 that manages to penetrate King’s books.
Holly Gibney, whom I suspect is a version of King’s ideal consumer/reader,
shops at Amazon, but laments the decline of brick-and-mortar bookstores. Now, this
might just be a worn-out center-left hobbyhorse, one that allows folks to feel
righteous, but not to think too deeply about end-stage capitalism. However, I
do think that it’s mighty convenient that Stephen King, gazillionaire
author, has crafted a character who has a lot of opinions about how “good”
people “ought” to buy books.
Having a lot of opinions isn’t a damning characteristic (I hope),
but Holly’s opinions – specifically – are horrible. Here is an example,
in which Stephen King (in Holly’s voice) lectures his readers:
“And are we really any better? Don’t people slow down for a good
long look at an accident on the turnpike? That’s roadkill, too.” I said that I
always looked away. And said a prayer that the people involved in the accident
would be all right. He said if that was true, I was an exception. He said that
most people like pain, as long as it’s not theirs. Then he said, “I suppose you
don’t watch horror movies, either?” Well, I do, Ralph, but those movies are
make-believe. When the director calls cut, the girl who had her throat slashed
by Jason or Freddy gets up and grabs a cup of coffee. But still, after this I
may not… [Pause]
…Excuse me, Mr. King, but what has put food on your table for
your entire life? What has paid for your vacation homes and your kids’ college
educations — not to mention provided lucrative careers for your sons once they
graduated? What has set up a personal money printing-press in your
office? Horror. And yet he sees fit to chide his readers for their prurient
interest in the gruesome and macabre.
Nor do Holly’s awful opinions stop there. At one point in “If It
Blooeds” she orders a pizza (King has to get those brand names in there,
doesn’t he?), and oh-so-casually adds:
Holly orders out to Domino’s—a small veggie pizza and a large
Coke. When the young man shows up, she tips according to Bill Hodges’s rule of
thumb: fifteen per cent of the bill if the service is fair, twenty per cent if
the service is good. This young man is prompt, so she tips the full amount.
Stephen King is worth approximately
$500,000,000. Minimum wage for a pizza delivery person is about $7.25
per hour. INCLUDING tips. King threw that little chestnut in there, and a
little chestnut can have big ripples. After all, King has an enormous – and devoted
– fan base. To throw a line casually shitting on lowest-wage workers into his story,
and to put it in the mouth of a person we are supposed to love and side with, is
genuinely immoral, and I was completely floored and disgusted when I
read it.
The above passage is representative of who Holly Gibney is,
however; the woman whom we are supposed to root for, in the primitive,
capital-g-Good versus capital-e-Evil morality of Stephen King’s world. And she sucks.
Sure, Holly Gibney kills monsters – but she is also a private investigator who,
King explicitly mentions, sometimes works in skip tracing and collections.
Trained at the aged foot of a killer cop (Bill Hodges), Holly is King’s version
of Law and Order, and I like it about as much as I liked Donald Trump’s.
Rex Autem Diligit Deus
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Holly Gibney, we are
reminded every few pages, prays. King’s religiosity has been a constant, quiet
presence in his work, especially since he joined the Alcoholics Anonymous cult
in 1987. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have any qualms with sobriety, and I don’t
even necessarily begrudge King his faith. AA’s God-centered,
cultic,
simplistic
moralism, on the other hand, I find insufferable and dangerous, and on the
occasions that it infects his work – such as this, or 1996’s Desperation –
the end result is frustrating.
In 2020-21, an increasing number of Americans have begun
to realize that policing needs to be fundamentally reexamined. Part of that
reexamination – part of moving forward – is going to be a reevaluation of the
stories we tell, and the heroines we invent to support those stories. I love
Stephen King (and have for decades). However, he is a man who at his core
prefers moral simplicity, the Cosmic Good versus the Cosmic Evil. This type of
storytelling becomes highly problematic when the avatars of that Good are also
stand-ins for law enforcement. Holly Gibney represents a worldview in which
meticulous and scrupulous attention to evidence and the judicious application
of State violence can literally defeat the boogeyman. (In
reality, cops aren’t exactly problem-solvers: on average, they catch six
out of ten murderers while four go scot-free. The situation for rape is abysmal:
the mighty Agents of Good clear less than a third of those cases.)
These days, I’m more interested in what the boogeyman has to say.
What are his (or her, be it a bogeywoman) story is. In “If It Bleeds” we are
given only the thinnest and most preposterous version of this, a ridiculous
escalation of mistrust of FAKE NEWS! into the realm of the literally monstrous.
Holly Gibney may overtly virtue-signal her distaste for Donald Trump, but
Stephen King’s choice of a newsman – or newsmonster, I suppose – as his villain
is telling.
Early in this review, I mentioned that three out of four of the
novellas in If It Bleeds are worth reading.
One of them, “The Life of Chuck,” is fantastic. On the whole, the collection is
worth picking up. The character of Holly Gibney, however, would be better left
in King’s rearview mirror, as would his fascination with true crime and
policing.
RATING: 3 / 4 Dead Clowns
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