Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for readers, writers, and anyone interested in how texts get made. This is a short episode that begins a new little series of things I'm calling where to start with.
Speaker: And each month or so I'm going to drop little guide on Instagram as well as in this feed where I introduce you to an author or a topic or a genre and give you some kind of ways into that thing. So if you don't know where to start with For example, today we're talking about Stephen King. If you've never read him, you're like, what do I pick up first? These little guides will hopefully give you some kind of access points to that thing.
Speaker: So given that it's Halloween this week, this is deep spooky season, so I'm hoping you're reading some horror, some gothic stuff. I thought, why not drop the Stephen King guide first So I'm going to take you through these six categories. Follow the Instagram at Books Up Close if you want to see this little guide. You should be doing that anyway. If you are supporting the podcast, please go on there and share episodes that you like.
Speaker: And if you're interested in this little series, please do share them too with people you think would like them. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, please do press subscribe right now and rate five stars on whatever platform you're on.
Speaker: Okay, so the first grouping of two texts is what I'm calling entry points. So if you've never read King before and you're like, let me just start with one book, what would it be?
Speaker: I can't think of any better place to start than his debut novel that came out in 1974, which is obviously Carrie. This is a short, sharp novel. It's like under 200 pages.
Speaker: It's ferocious. It's dark. It's really pacey. Like it's really quick. It's an incredible kind of character to study about this teenage girl who is bullied by people at her school. Everyone makes fun of her. She's kind of like cast aside her mother.
Speaker: has her own storyline going on and she's kind of also abusive psychologically and otherwise and Carrie one day snaps and we realise that she has telekinetic powers right and after the infamous prom scene which you all know with the pig's blood um she gets her revenge on the town. And for a debut is incredible, but also it's such an intimate look at a kind of teenage girl's experience. And King has spoken a lot about his wife, Tabitha, being kind of his key reader.
Speaker: And she helped him with that. He felt uncomfortable, I think, at first writing from this point of view, but she really encouraged him to keep going. And actually it becomes a book really tied together by that kind of feeling of marginalization, of being othered by people, which he explores throughout all of his books, right? Horror is about otherness in so many ways.
Speaker: And we begin, the opening scene is the girls in the shower and Carrie has a period and that blood, King as described elsewhere, kind of like he wanted to follow that through the book. So from that the kind of the pig's blood and then the kind of blood that comes from the almighty revenge that happens later on.
Speaker: I think it's just a really brilliant book. It gives you a clear sight into what King is interested in. and it won't take you long to read either. So I would start there, 1974. nineteen seventy four The other book, which is probably a surprising choice maybe, I don't know, is a book from 2018 called The Outsider.
Speaker: Now, The Outsider features a character called Holly Gibney who has appeared in other King books. um He writes this kind of run of crime novels with her in it and apparently he loves her. He thinks she's like his... alter ego or something i don't understand why i think she's quite a boring character but anyway this book i think is really good and you don't need to have read the other ones to know really what's going on like there's some backstory but um this is better than any of the books that came before there's some really problematic stuff in those other ones as well about race that we can talk about another day But The Outsider from 2018, like it begins quite horrifically with this kind of mutilated and abused corpse of a young boy in this kind of like small town Oklahoma. And what follows is a crime novel, like ostensibly it's a crime novel. It eventually becomes supernatural, just throwing that out there. but it is really intensively and beautifully written.
Speaker: I think it's like really sensitive. It's again very pacey, like you kind of well I did anyway, like flew through it. It's sad, it's dark, it's quite shocking, it's really affecting. And the supernatural element, which I don't always love,
Speaker: I don't think King always does it great. Often it swoops in I'm like, oh, not this. But actually it's done really well and it's quite haunting and it's quite horrific. And there's a beautiful set piece near the end in a cave in the kind of more desert-y part of Oklahoma. It's really good. And I think this book gives you a sense of King and genre, right? He, you know, he's a horror writer, but he also writes these crime novels. He also writes non-supernatural things which we'll come to in a minute. He writes kind of sci-fi stuff, fantasy stuff.
Speaker: And I think this book gives you a little taste of that crime and and I'm imagining many of you might like a crime novel so it's kind of easy to get into. You've got a clear like entry point to it and then you see all the other stuff that King does horror wise.
Speaker: Okay those are my two entry points. If you are done with that and you're like actually i just want his kind of like classic horror, I want key horror fiction, my two suggestions are Night Shift which is his first short story collection that comes out in 1978. There's some real bangers in there. The Lawnmower Man which gets turned into a film, Children of the Corn which gets turned into a film, is a recurring motif by the way,
Speaker: The Boogeyman, which is really good. There's some really scary stories in there and they're short. You can fly through them. You can read one a night before you go to sleep and have nightmares. It's really, really good. And I remember reading this book kind of early in my King journey. I must have been, I don't know, 15, 16. And it just really transported me. It's very visceral. And yeah, you can you can kind of feel him trying out form, tone, genre in a really exciting way. lots of them were published in magazines and stuff before it became the Clerkship.
Speaker: The other suggestion would be Salem's Lot, which comes just a little bit before it in 1975. And it is the kind of like preeminent contemporary vampire novel set in Maine. I'm sure you've seen TV or film versions of it.
Speaker: And it features Ben Mears, who is a writer, again, a staple of King's work. There's always a writer. And he returns to the town he grew up in. and it's this kind of small town in Maine. Again, really the heart of King's work is his depiction of these small Maine towns. Like really amazing kind of depiction of place and and community.
Speaker: The reason I love this book and for classic horror in particular is it gives you the vampire stuff and it does it really, really well. I think it's funny. It winks to Dracula and the kind of all the stuff that comes before it, but it's also its own thing.
Speaker: And the reason I love it is because the tension in this book is unbearable. There are kind of some interconnected characters and we kind of follow them as they're doing different things and they're all heading to the same place near the end.
Speaker: And the final stretch, which is, you know, the real culmination of this book actually is quite a lot of pages. So you're just reading and reading and reading because you're like i need to get to the end. I need to know what happens. And he kind of switches perspective and we kind of follow all these people moving. It's just so good. the tension is quite unbearable in that book and the ending really pays off. I think it sticks the landing perfectly.
Speaker: Okay, you've done your entry points, you've read your classic horror, or maybe you want something different. Maybe you're like, give me full claustrophobia realness. And these two books kind of almost have one setting, like not entirely, but mostly one setting. And this is such a ridiculously good thing to do as a writer. And I think very hard to just have your characters in one place and like not to move for quite a lot of the book. So one of them is Gerald's Game, which is from 1992.
Speaker: People might have seen the Netflix kind of adaptation more recently. um And it begins with a couple, you know, having some kind of kinky sex and the woman is handcuffed to the bed and the husband dies of a heart attack during this sexual moment.
Speaker: And they're kind of like houses in the middle of nowhere. So she's like trapped, right? She cannot get off the bed. She can't get out of the handcuffs. There's no one to call. And the book kind of just lingers with her in this.
Speaker: And is brilliant. i Again, it's like such a feat of imagination to kind of sustain that idea over a number of pages. And given we're only with one character really for most of the book, we're in her mind, we hear her thoughts. Eventually these characters in her mind kind of take over right there, these almost archetypes or figures that represent parts of her unconscious or kind of her social world and they were all talking at her kind of describing her in different ways it's really really fascinating like a really tense book if you want to get a sense of how he deals with tension like this is a good starting point and it's quite unusual
Speaker: The other book which I think is way more feral in every sense is Cujo from 1981 and um again maybe you've seen the movie in which a Saint Bernard dog gets rabies and he goes on this kind of killing spree again in this kind of small town and King described it as he wanted it to be a kind of brick of a novel right and just imagine this like brick being lobbed through a window and it is that right it's just There's no chapter breaks, really. It's just kind of just goes straight through.
Speaker: And he also wrote it ah the kind of height of his alcohol addiction. He kind of describes not really knowing or remembering much about writing the book. And in a way, lots of people have theorised it as a book about addiction, right? This dog, this rabid dog is actually representing something of that addiction.
Speaker: But what I think is brilliant about this book, even if it's written under those complicated circumstances, he still writes like an absolute demon. The book is like focused on this woman Donna and her four-year-old son Tad. Her partner is away and she needs to go get her car repaired and it kind of breaks down and her and the boy are trapped in the car as the Saint Bernard is like outside and it's throwing itself at the car. And over the course of like this day or so, the car is getting hotter, the sun is beating down from outside. It is unbearably tense and you kind of think you know where it's going and maybe you don't.
Speaker: It is really brilliant. I dare you not to try and read it in one or two sittings. It is thoroughly, yeah, entrancing. I think it's really, really good. Okay, if those aren't your bag, here's some other options. If you don't want Supernatural, if you don't want the kind of obvious horror, you want something different, I've got two suggestions and both of them have been turned into films with Kathy Bates, which again, no bad thing in my book. One of them is obviously the classic Misery, comes out 1987.
Speaker: Brilliant year for a book to come out. Those of you that know me know why. 1987, great year. This is obviously a story about... a romance novelist called Paul Sheldon who crashes in the snow, he breaks down, he gets looked after by this woman Annie who is like his biggest fan and she forces him to write a new book because the character she loves so much has been killed off by him and obviously the book takes a dark turn where she's kind of keeping him locked up in this house and he's trying not to go insane, he's trying to escape.
Speaker: is really really good. It's fun as well as being really dark. Again, super tense. There are also kind of interruptions throughout of like the novel that he's writing, so you get this kind of Victorian romance flowing through as well. I think it's quite funny, it's quite meta-textual if you like. It's thinking again about authorship and one's relationship to fans, audience, stuff like that. um It's a really great book. You can't go wrong with Misery, I don't think. And then watch the movie afterwards because it's brilliant. The other option is from 1992, Dolores Claiborne, and i don't hear people talk about this book enough because I think it is brilliant and again, no supernatural things in it. And it's narrated by this woman, Dolores, who works for this wealthy woman called Vera in a New England house. And she's a suspect in the murder of Vera.
Speaker: And the book is Dolores' confession, if you like, and it's written in her voice and King does this really well. He gets her voice spot on. She's kind of talking out loud. She's thinking to herself, there's it clearly an off camera, if you like, a dressy who's the policeman.
Speaker: And it's just really funny at the beginning and you really get into the voice quite quickly. But from there, the story unravels and it actually turns into this beautiful meditation on women's relationships, on intimate partner violence, on labor in the household.
Speaker: There's so much going on. like it's set around the solar eclipse. so you have this like beautiful kind of set piece in there as well. It's a really touching story as well as quite propulsive, even while it's not doing the kind of horror stuff that we might be used to. Okay, so those are those two non-supernatural options. Finally, if you want non-fiction instead of fiction, here are your two recommendations. I mean, they're the main two recommendations of his.
Speaker: One being on writing, which loads people talk about and a few people have recommended on this show before, comes out in 2000. It's split into two parts. One is a kind of memoir of of part of his life and then when he got into a bad accident he got hit by a car and he had to relearn to walk. It's really horrific but a beautifully written kind of memoir. And the other part of the book is this writing tutorial which still to me is so readable and so interesting and even if you don't take the advice I think it's just beautiful to read. Even if you're not a writer I think you might enjoy it
Speaker: He kind of talks through how he comes up with his ideas. um He always has this kind of what if scenario, like what if vampires settle down in a small main town, right? Which is Salem's Lot, obviously. What happens if a rabid dog started killing everyone?
Speaker: Cujo. So he kind of talks you through that process. He also gives advice on, you know, avoiding adverbs, canonical piece of advice from him. It's really, really great. If you are a writer, you will love this book and it's quite short as well. You will fly through it.
Speaker: The other option is the 1981 book called Dance Macabre, and this is a kind of overview of the horror genre, basically, in literature, in TV, in comics, in radio. If you are interested in horror, it's a great place to go, i think. it's ah It's a kind of survey book. It's not academic particularly.
Speaker: It's just very personal. It kind of goes through some of King's favourite things. It's very much about his influences. It's funny. But it's just a great overview of the genre and how he is kind of impacted by all this other stuff. He talks about War of the Worlds, kind of from sci-fi. He talks about Dracula. He talks about Frankenstein. There's some great stuff in there.
Speaker: And there's lots of really interesting genre things on kind of more the kind of pulpy books, on the use of radio. a really, really great book if you're interested in horror generally.
Speaker: So, those are your suggestions. You've got your entry point books, you've got your classic horror, you've got your one setting claustrophobic nightmares, you've got your non-supernatural texts, and then you've got some non-fiction options. I hope there is enough here to get you started with King and is a kind of way in for you. I'd love to hear from you about this. If you are a King fan, tell me which text you would have picked here. If you've never read King, let me know how you get on with these. I would love to hear from you and know more.
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