Stephen King's Thin Blue Line

 

In two previous posts at Madness Heart Press (“Cops, God, and Stephen King,” posted in one chunk here), I delved into my long history as a Stephen King fan and touched on a few of the misgivings I’ve had about his recent forays into vaguely horror-adjacent detective fiction, especially his stories featuring the irredeemable Holly Gibney. Holly is, in fact, the name of subject of his newest novel (due on September 5^th). When I wrote those posts about King and cops/PIs, his cuddly relationship with murderous police officers and self-appointed snoops struck me as a (forgive the pun) novel development. Having now revisited some of King’s 1980s-1990s oeuvre, I now believe that this has been the case all along.

Now, I should issue a disclaimer right out of the gate that I grew up as and remain a Stephen King fan, although my appreciation now is marbled with criticism and caveats like a fine cut of beef. I recently took it upon myself to revisit a few King titles I hadn’t read in some time (read: at least 15 years) to see if I noticed anything new to appreciate and learn from. The answer to that question turned out to be “yes, absolutely,” but I also noticed an unsettling trend, and one that might initially seem hard to square with King’s Trump-trashing, Twitter Liberal persona.

The texts I chose to revisit weren’t precisely random; all take place within King’s tiny universe of fictional Maine. The fictional topography encompasses Castle Rock, Derry, and Haven, and has birthed countless short stories, novels, miniseries, films, and shows. As a representative sample of King’s 1980s-and-90s-era work, I chose to re-read It (1986), The Tommyknockers (1987), and Needful Things (1991). All three books had troubling elements, some of which can be excused by time and changing social mores and some of which were viler than an average insensitivity of the time. Before I proceed, a note: I’m aware that even the most well-intentioned liberals can look retrograde in retrospect. I’m also aware that when authors write a character, that character’s voice does not necessarily represent the author’s views (and, sweet Lucifer, I hope readers apply this latter bit of knowledge to my own work). Even so, it’s worth examining where things go wrong in fiction, the better to make sure that we learn from our mistakes. Holly Gibney, by far King’s most popular and recurring modern character, tells me that King’s views on the police have regrettably changed little, despite his superficial expressions of opinion (read: his tweets).

If King won’t or can’t change, let us learn from his mistakes. We’ll do this in chronological order.

 

It (1986)
The most troubling part of It, by far, is a depiction of 11-year-old children’s, um… “activities” in the sewers of Derry after their first tangle with the titular cosmic horror. Leaving that (and the novel’s ambient misogyny) aside, It presents a slightly mixed view of policing. On the one hand, the text recognizes police participation in public acts of vigilante brutality, and implies (if it doesn’t outright state) that the police of Derry are involved in the conspiracy that runs Derry’s affairs on It’s behalf.

It's a saner view of the police than I usually see in King’s books, but there are still things that should jar a reader, even keeping in mind that the book was written nearly 40 years ago. After all, the 1980s were the era in which the “War on Drugs” started by Richard Nixon and enthusiastically flogged by “Bonzo” Reagan became a literal war against this country’s residents. While pop culture and the news media wrung their hands about crime, police in storm trooper outfits regularly used machine guns and nigh-unlimited authority to rob, murder, and imprison a shocking number of Americans, most especially Black people. In such an atmosphere, where does one turn for a model of compassionate policing? How about 1958?

It’s a little disturbing to read King’s lionization of the 1950s as a time when you “could trust the police officer to get you safely home,” and in which the character Richie Tozier whips a cosmic horror’s ass by channeling “the voice of every Irish beat cop ever to walk a street after dark, checking the locks on the storefronts as he twirled his baton.” Stephen, if that cop is checking storefronts’ locks and he finds one unlocked, he was just as likely in 1958 as in 1986 to rob the shit out of the storeowner instead of protecting their “property” (a dubious normative model of policing to begin with).

 

The Tommyknockers (1987)
Evidently, The Tommyknockers was the last book King wrote before recovering from drug and alcohol addiction (good!) through popular American cult Alcoholics Anonymous (bad!). The primary protagonist of The Tommyknockers is an unlikable and unstable late-stage alcoholic and part time poet named James “Gard” Gardener, but the story is long and contains a number of minor protagonists in the form of the townspeople of Haven who resist or outright reject “the Becoming.”

One of these miniboss protagonists is Ruth McCausland, the Haven town constable. There’s a magnificently shitty Blake Shelton song where good ol’ Blake lauds the virtues of a “one-church town.” The tiny fictional community of Haven is a one-cop town. You might think that my reaction to that would be Hey! The fewer cops the better! Why not make it a no-cop town? Firstly, I’d like every town to be a no-cop town! Secondly, the thing I hate about a one-church or one-cop town is the consolidation of power in a monolithic and unaccountable institution. Power corrupts, and all that. My corollary to that statement would be that the more massively distributed and diluted power is, the better.

Take Ruth McCausland, for example. King describes her particular way of using small-town gumption (and mindless, small-town brutality) to solve a problem: specifically, the problem of a working-class man whom Ruth and the rest of Haven suspect of abusing his daughters. Does Ruth call social services, or perhaps file charges against the man? What are you, some kind of fancy city-boy? No, Ruth gets a seven-foot-tall, uniformed pile of testosterone named “Monster” Dugan to beat the man within an inch of his life, then banish him from town. Because fuck due process as long as we “know someone is guilty.” Isn’t that right, Twitter Liberal Stephen King?

 

Needful Things (1991)

One of the primary protagonists of Needful Things is a “good cop.” Right out of the gate, my suspension of disbelief is shattered. In fact, Sherriff Alan Pangborn is more than just a “good cop:” along with another King cop, Bill Hodges, he’s held up as one of the moral exemplars of Castle Rock, perhaps the only individual in town whom the demon Leland Gaunt not only avoids, but fears. (Note this in addition to Richhie Tozier’s magic cop impression, and one could build a theory that King views authority – a priest, a cop, &c. – as the natural antidote to the uncanny.) This is supposedly due to Pangborn’s night-incorruptibility and willingness to cut through red tape and speak plain truth to good ol’ country fucks folks.

Pangborn lectures and cross-examines his girlfriend, Polly, nigh-constantly about her rheumatoid arthritis, going so far as to scowl at her use of Percodan to treat her pain. In a grotesque metaphor that only a newly-sober Stephen King could have thought up, Polly’s monkey’s-paw pain relief pact with Leland Gaunt turns out to be a loathsome spider nestled against her breast. Which is to say: don’t take anything stronger than aspirin, kids, no matter how much pain you’re in! Sherriff Good Guy wouldn’t approve, and besides, drugs are Satan’s spiders!

His literary heroine Holly Gibney, a low-tipping, Karen-ass character who’s like a human version of a Neighborly thread is, in short, not an aberration. Despite his public feuds with Paul LePage (which, like every public feud, produced nothing but clickbait publicity for both hand puppets), despite his no-doubt noble intentions, Stephen King very much stands behind the odious thin blue line. His authorial drift from horror into detective fiction is disappointing, but par for our cop-worshiping, death-obsessed culture.

Who can blame him? (Me.) ACAB doesn’t move volume on e-readers.