A top priority of my 2015 reading challenge was to take The Stand, Stephen King's epic apocalyptic fantasy published in 1978 and reissued by the authoA top priority of my 2015 reading challenge was to take The Stand, Stephen King's epic apocalyptic fantasy published in 1978 and reissued by the author in an unabridged version in 1990. When finished, another challenge would be to contribute something new to the discussion of a novel which many of you were handed on your first day of junior high or high school. When Bilbo Baggins glances in the rearview mirror, he sees Randall Flagg gunning down the highway and gaining on him in popularity.
If you've read the novel, please skip the following twenty-nine paragraphs. This plot summary is for purposes of my own dementia only ...
On June 16, 1990, Charlie Campion, sentry at an unnamed military installation in California, wakes his wife in a panic. He grabs their infant son and without packing, the family flees the base as it goes into lockdown. Unknown to them, a weaponized strain of the flu known as Project Blue has escaped and each of them has already been exposed.
Campion reaches the town of "Arnette" in East Texas before succumbing to the virus and crashing into a Texaco station. Of the good ole boys assembled here for their nightly political and economic discussion, Stuart Redman has the reflexes to shut off the pumps before they can ignite. Stu, a strong and silent type, works in a factory assembling calculators.
In Manhattan, singer/songwriter Larry Underwood completes a cross country drive from L.A. to reach his childhood home. After years of struggle, Larry has a hit single with a tune he initially wrote for Neil Diamond called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?". Lost in a 24-hour scene of drugs, booze and parasitic friends, Larry hopes to get his head together and begins patching things up with his estranged mother.
In Ogunquit, Maine, college student Frances Goldsmith breaks the news to her quasi-boyfriend that she's pregnant, a pharmaceutical mishap with her birth control pills being responsible. Frannie seems to realize how unhappy she'd be married to this guy and indicates that she plans on keeping the baby. While her father Peter supports her decision, Frannie's mother flies into a fury over her daughter's scandal.
In "Shoyo", Arkansas, a young drifter named Nick Andros is attacked by local yokels and after giving them a fight, is almost beaten to death. Nick, a mute who communicates through handwriting, impresses the sheriff with his integrity and is deputized when the lawman needs someone posted at the jail. The sheriff isn't feeling so well. It seems that a bad case of the flu is spreading through town ...
The virus that becomes referred to as Captain Trips spreads from Arnette like a killer chain letter. Charlie Campion infects almost every man at the Texaco station. One of these infects his state trooper cousin, who infects a traveling salesman, who infects hundreds who infect thousands. Captain Trips comes on like the flu: chills, fever, loss of appetite, progresses to swelling and finally, respiratory failure that proves fatal for 99.4% of those exposed. The military goes Gestapo, censoring news broadcasts, executing journalists who stumble onto the truth and finally, exporting the virus abroad in order to absolve the U.S. of blame. By month's end, most of the population is wiped out.
Stu, the sole survivor of Captain Trips from Arnette, had been interned at a medical facility in Vermont. He escapes execution at the hands of his Army guard and making his way through New Hampshire, crosses paths with a retired sociology professor named Glen Bateman and Glen's dog, Kojak. (The virus proved 99.4% fatal among man's two best friends, the dog and the horse). Parting ways, Stu stumbles across two more survivors, Frannie, and Harold Laudner, the obnoxious teenage brother of one of Frannie's friends. Harold harbors an unrequited love for Frannie and without family or friends to torment him, discovers survival skills he never knew he had.
Larry has a nervous breakdown escaping Manhattan, stumbling through a Holland Tunnel stacked with corpses and wandering the country with the conviction that he's no damn good to anyone but himself. Two survivors are watching him: a young schoolteacher named Nadine Cross and her ten-year-old ward, a regressed savage she refers to as "Joe". The boy is as hostile toward Larry as Harold is toward Stu, insecure that the women in their company will leave them for a stronger man. But Larry gains Joe's trust by playing the guitar and singing for him. Meanwhile, Nick bicycles through Oklahoma, where he meets Tom Cullen, a mentally retarded adult who can't read, but knows enough to save his new traveling partner from a tornado baring down on them.
All three bands share intense dreams, good and bad. On the light side, they're drawn to the goodness of Abagail Freemantle, a 106-year-old widow in Nebraska. Mother Abagail is convinced she's been chosen by God to lead her people across the country to Boulder. On the dark side, they're terrorized by a supernatural being going by the name Randall Flagg, also known as the dark man, the tall man, and the Walkin' Dude. Flagg is able to assume the form of a wolf, a crow or a weasel and has an eye powerful enough to watch all the survivors. In dreams, he lies to them, and menaces any good intentions they have left. Flagg is drawing followers to meet him in Las Vegas.
In Boulder, Glen compels Stu to start organizing a civil society before people start forgetting what that was. Stu assumes the role of town marshal, while Frannie and Nick also consult on a committee that begins making Boulder work for the survivors who begin streaming in. Feeling rejected and bitter, Harold and Nadine find themselves drawn into the fold of Randall Flagg, who has unlimited potential for corrupting mortal men and women, but is afraid of what he can't see, which is hope. Both sides sense a great battle coming ...
Stephen King began working on The Stand in the mid-1970s after moving his family to Boulder, Colorado. He was inspired in part by the news of the day: industrial accidents, government coverups and secret military projects coming to light, particularly germ warfare programs. King has often said that he'd always wanted to write an epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings but one with an American background. Some of his fans maintain that The Dark Tower series is the author's magnum opus, while others consider The Stand to be his best work.
-- King has an extraordinary gift for putting his lens right where I wanted it to be and in The Stand, he gives us a front row seat for the end of the world. A government lab turned into tomb? Check. A research facility with corridors that go on and on, filled with corpses and no apparent exit? Check. Civil society being rebuilt the right way in Boulder? Check. A society of fear being rebuilt the absolutely wrong way in Las Vegas? Check!
-- The Stand taps into the fascination and even sense of wonder that might come from surviving an apocalypse and rebuilding the world, as well as your own life, again. Food and supplies are plentiful. Wildlife begins to come back. The open road awaits. This is tempered with what King is really good at, which is plunging the reader into the absolute terror of losing your family, your safety and your state of mind in the aftermath of mass extinction.
-- My favorite characters existed on the margins of the story, namely, Tom Cullen, whose childlike innocence and susceptibility to hypnosis qualify him for hazardous duty in Las Vegas as a spy. Tom is in many ways a reader surrogate. The magnitude of Captain Trips is so great and the death toll so catastrophic that the only way to deal with any of it would be to revert into Tom's world of toy cars, Pringle's Potato Chips and his friends. He's limited in his thinking but enormously perceptive.
-- In addition to Tom, I loved the character of Dayna Jurgens, a fitness instructor from Ohio and abduction survivor whose mental and physical strength also qualifies her for spycraft on behalf of the Boulder group. Unfortunately, Dayna doesn't have a dry erase board mind like Tom, but her total commitment to her cause and her resolution to die a good death -- preferably taking Flagg with her -- were potent. King makes several allusions between post-plague Vegas and Nazi Germany, and I came to see some similarities between Dayna and Sophie Scholl.
-- The major characters -- Stu, Frannie, Larry, Nick -- all seemed like they could shop at the same hardware store in Maine. They're all white and almost exclusively male. I get that diversity is not really where authors were in the '70s and that King was probably writing characters he identified with, but it's disappointing to see the survivors of the apocalypse look so alike. Mother Abagail is guilty of every stereotype that has since been exposed as The Magical Negro.
-- I accepted the paranormal elements all right but King abuses deus ex machina to get his characters out of scrapes. Psychic visions reveal the true nature of other characters. Ghosts visit the living in their dreams with vital information. Decisions are based on directives from the Almighty, regardless of their logic. Consider how much King typically relies on divine intervention in his fiction and then consider how many pages he has here to slip this stuff into the story.
-- I don't believe that the government coverup material has aged well. Government paranoia was so of this time -- The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were in theaters while the book was being written -- and even King has admitted that if he wrote the book today, the virus would be released by terrorists, not the feds. The lengths the army goes to cover up the superflu stretches believability, maybe not in 1978, but definitely today.
-- Five stars and a must-read regardless. The weaknesses I've mentioned are more interesting to me than most of the strengths in a lot of other bestsellers. For example, the lack of color and the obsession with government conspiracy in the novel seem unavoidable considering when it was written.
The Stand has been in the works as a motion picture event since it was published. King adapted a screenplay he hoped George A. Romero would direct (they made Creepshow instead). Screenwriters tried whittling the material down to a three-hour movie until a four-part mini-series aired on ABC in 1993. Adapted by King and directed by Mick Garris, the mini-series is currently available for streaming on Netflix, but this production is from a time when television was still quite bad. It's cheaply made schlock for all ages that alters the novel in small ways, scene by scene until the mini-series resembles the book only in token ways. Ed Harris and Kathy Bates, veterans of King novels on the big screen, appear briefly in uncredited roles, teasing a real, A-class version of this novel that might finally be headed for theaters....more
She Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered . Leonard not only left a literary legaShe Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered . Leonard not only left a literary legacy of bandits like Ordell Robbie in Rum Punch and lawmen like Raylan Givens in Pronto or Karen Sisco in Out of Sight, but advised writers of tips he'd picked up in the trade. My favorite is:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." If Jordan Harper (male, born and educated in Missouri, based in Los Angeles) has never read Leonard's work, he could've fooled me. Published in 2017, his debut novel is terse, tough, tender and suffers no parts I wanted to skip.
The story opens not with a prologue (Leonard's Rules advised against prologues), but with Chapter 0: Crazy Craig, in which readers are briefly introduced to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel. Crazy Craig spends life confined to a Supermax cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, from where he commands not only Aryan Steel soldiers but their affiliates, white power gangs like Peckerwood Nation or Odin's Bastards all over California. Death warrants sent out to the gangs any number of ways when someone is deemed to need killing, Crazy Craig has issued a greenlight on an ex-con as well as the ex-con's woman and child.
Eleven-year-old Polly McCluskey is introduced at Fontana Middle School. A strange fifth grader, Polly often expresses herself using a teddy bear as a surrogate. Raised by her mother Avis and new stepfather Tom Huff, Polly hasn't seen her biological father Nate McCluskey in eleven years, not since he was sentenced to Susanville for armed robbery. Naturally, when dear old dad appears at her school with a stolen car and tells her to come with him, Polly figures he must have busted out. Her brain telling her to run, her legs obey her father. Stopping first at a sporting goods store, Nate quickly checks them into a motel room in Rancho Cucamonga.
One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly.
He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly.
"Come on and take it," he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up.
"Want you to take a swing at this," he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn't.
"Forget the bear," her dad said, his like you better not mess around. "Show me what you got."
Waiting for dark, Nate goes to check on Polly's mother and stepfather. He finds (view spoiler)[Tom in bed with his skull caved in and Avis knife-dead on the bedroom floor, a butter knife in her hand, having died fighting (hide spoiler)]. Nate also finds an ashy beer can in the living room and knowing how Avis felt about smoking, calculates that whoever committed this killing hung around the house for a while. Waited for Polly to come home from school. The answer to whether Aryan Steel is hunting Nate's daughter is "yes." When Polly figures out her mother is dead, she tries jumping out of the stolen car. In some more quick figuring, Nate determines Polly's best chance of survival is to stick with her.
Protected in prison by his brother Nick, a stickup man and killer many shades harder than Nate, Polly's father managed to stay out of trouble even after his brother died live on the evening news in a police chase. Nate's lucky stroke continued, winning an appeal and granted an early release. Good fortune turns bad when Ground Chuck Hollington, brother of Aryan Steel's president, approached Nate a week before his release. Offered a job working for the Steel, Nate declined, and Ground Chuck announced that he wasn't offering but telling. The fight is brief, Ground Chuck is felled by his own shank and Crazy Craig puts the greenlight on Nate, Avis and Polly.
Detective John Park, San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, is assigned the Huffs' double homicide and with Polly missing, proceeds in his manhunt with Nate McCluskey as his only suspect. Hiding out in L.A. where the soldiers of La Eme outnumber Aryan Steel, Polly's dad explains the situation to his daughter, who far from being a cuckoo, is on the genius end of the bell curve. Nate's plan is to inflict so much damage on Aryan Steel that the death warrant on Polly will be lifted. He solicits the cooperation of Charlotte, a Missouri transplant who got swept up with Aryan Steel and feels responsible for the greenlight on Polly. On the run, father and daughter bond over Mexican food and fight training.
"You take the left hand, your choking arm, and you grab your right bicep. It's just for leverage," he said. "I'm going to choke you now. When you feel it, just tap my arm. What are you going to do?"
"Tap your arm," she said.
"Right. When you squeeze a choke, you squeeze with your whole body. Like this."
The arm around her throat tightened slowly, and his chest pressed into her back all at once. And there wasn't any pain or anything like that. It was just that the world started to get smaller and farther away. And it was only right before the world disappeared all the way that she understood what was happening. She tapped his arm. The pressure on her neck went away and the world came back.
"You okay?"
She nodded. At least maybe she did. She felt a stranger in her own body.
"Tap sooner than that. You don't need to go to sleep to see it works. Did it work?"
She nodded like yeah. So weird that nothingness was so close to her, always, and she'd never even known. She wondered what else she didn't know, and the sugar rush intensified.
"We're starting with chokes," he said, "because you're small. Chokes, you don't have to be big and strong. See, all you're doing is squeezing those two little arteries at the side of your neck that go up and feed the brain. And even a little girl like you is strong enough to squeeze them."
He turned around.
"Now you do it to me."
She Rides Shotgun shares qualities with the contemporary pulp fiction of Don Winslow, author of The Dawn Patrol and Savages: The Golden State, brutal violence and electrifying prose that jumps off the page like a casino neon reflecting in a grimy puddle, language that breaks convention as savagely as the bandits in the story. Where Jordan Harper clears space between himself and the Don Winslow novels I've read is that he doesn't try to replace story and characters with style and formatting, but invested me in his characters. His prose sent a charge through me, like breaking news being wired into a teletype--
She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she'd picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he'd opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn't a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first.
Beyond the author's electric prose, though, is a story about transformation. Like all terrific open road adventures, it has a beginning, middle (there's actually a chapter titled Interlude: Whale Ship Cannibals which actually made me break into a grin, never having read an intermission in a novel before) and end. Harper takes no shortcuts, introduces no character or story element he doesn't later use and fills the novel with stark and harrowing description. My favorite involves Polly and Nate torching an Aryan Steel chop shop, but rescuing a fighting cock that the girl discovers caged up there. It's a lean, endearing and thrilling read and one of the best debut novels I've read.
Merged review:
She Rides Shotgun is what a novel looks like when the student has mastered . Leonard not only left a literary legacy of bandits like Ordell Robbie in Rum Punch and lawmen like Raylan Givens in Pronto or Karen Sisco in Out of Sight, but advised writers of tips he'd picked up in the trade. My favorite is:"Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." If Jordan Harper (male, born and educated in Missouri, based in Los Angeles) has never read Leonard's work, he could've fooled me. Published in 2017, his debut novel is terse, tough, tender and suffers no parts I wanted to skip.
The story opens not with a prologue (Leonard's Rules advised against prologues), but with Chapter 0: Crazy Craig, in which readers are briefly introduced to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel. Crazy Craig spends life confined to a Supermax cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, from where he commands not only Aryan Steel soldiers but their affiliates, white power gangs like Peckerwood Nation or Odin's Bastards all over California. Death warrants sent out to the gangs any number of ways when someone is deemed to need killing, Crazy Craig has issued a greenlight on an ex-con as well as the ex-con's woman and child.
Eleven-year-old Polly McCluskey is introduced at Fontana Middle School. A strange fifth grader, Polly often expresses herself using a teddy bear as a surrogate. Raised by her mother Avis and new stepfather Tom Huff, Polly hasn't seen her biological father Nate McCluskey in eleven years, not since he was sentenced to Susanville for armed robbery. Naturally, when dear old dad appears at her school with a stolen car and tells her to come with him, Polly figures he must have busted out. Her brain telling her to run, her legs obey her father. Stopping first at a sporting goods store, Nate quickly checks them into a motel room in Rancho Cucamonga.
One by one her dad laid out the things he had bought. A kid-sized metal baseball bat. A black hoodie and black sweatpants. A black ski mask. A long, wicked-looking hunting knife that seemed to hiss like a snake at Polly.
He picked up the kiddie bat, flipped it so he held the fat end. He held the skinny end toward Polly.
"Come on and take it," he said. She swallowed a lump of chicken nugget, suddenly huge in her throat as she tried to get it down. She took the bat. It was cold in her hands. It made her realize she was burning up. He pulled the cushion off the chair in the corner and held it up.
"Want you to take a swing at this," he said. She looked back to the bear like he could save her, but of course he couldn't.
"Forget the bear," her dad said, his like you better not mess around. "Show me what you got."
Waiting for dark, Nate goes to check on Polly's mother and stepfather. He finds (view spoiler)[Tom in bed with his skull caved in and Avis knife-dead on the bedroom floor, a butter knife in her hand, having died fighting (hide spoiler)]. Nate also finds an ashy beer can in the living room and knowing how Avis felt about smoking, calculates that whoever committed this killing hung around the house for a while. Waited for Polly to come home from school. The answer to whether Aryan Steel is hunting Nate's daughter is "yes." When Polly figures out her mother is dead, she tries jumping out of the stolen car. In some more quick figuring, Nate determines Polly's best chance of survival is to stick with her.
Protected in prison by his brother Nick, a stickup man and killer many shades harder than Nate, Polly's father managed to stay out of trouble even after his brother died live on the evening news in a police chase. Nate's lucky stroke continued, winning an appeal and granted an early release. Good fortune turns bad when Ground Chuck Hollington, brother of Aryan Steel's president, approached Nate a week before his release. Offered a job working for the Steel, Nate declined, and Ground Chuck announced that he wasn't offering but telling. The fight is brief, Ground Chuck is felled by his own shank and Crazy Craig puts the greenlight on Nate, Avis and Polly.
Detective John Park, San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, is assigned the Huffs' double homicide and with Polly missing, proceeds in his manhunt with Nate McCluskey as his only suspect. Hiding out in L.A. where the soldiers of La Eme outnumber Aryan Steel, Polly's dad explains the situation to his daughter, who far from being a cuckoo, is on the genius end of the bell curve. Nate's plan is to inflict so much damage on Aryan Steel that the death warrant on Polly will be lifted. He solicits the cooperation of Charlotte, a Missouri transplant who got swept up with Aryan Steel and feels responsible for the greenlight on Polly. On the run, father and daughter bond over Mexican food and fight training.
"You take the left hand, your choking arm, and you grab your right bicep. It's just for leverage," he said. "I'm going to choke you now. When you feel it, just tap my arm. What are you going to do?"
"Tap your arm," she said.
"Right. When you squeeze a choke, you squeeze with your whole body. Like this."
The arm around her throat tightened slowly, and his chest pressed into her back all at once. And there wasn't any pain or anything like that. It was just that the world started to get smaller and farther away. And it was only right before the world disappeared all the way that she understood what was happening. She tapped his arm. The pressure on her neck went away and the world came back.
"You okay?"
She nodded. At least maybe she did. She felt a stranger in her own body.
"Tap sooner than that. You don't need to go to sleep to see it works. Did it work?"
She nodded like yeah. So weird that nothingness was so close to her, always, and she'd never even known. She wondered what else she didn't know, and the sugar rush intensified.
"We're starting with chokes," he said, "because you're small. Chokes, you don't have to be big and strong. See, all you're doing is squeezing those two little arteries at the side of your neck that go up and feed the brain. And even a little girl like you is strong enough to squeeze them."
He turned around.
"Now you do it to me."
She Rides Shotgun shares qualities with the contemporary pulp fiction of Don Winslow, author of The Dawn Patrol and Savages: The Golden State, brutal violence and electrifying prose that jumps off the page like a casino neon reflecting in a grimy puddle, language that breaks convention as savagely as the bandits in the story. Where Jordan Harper clears space between himself and the Don Winslow novels I've read is that he doesn't try to replace story and characters with style and formatting, but invested me in his characters. His prose sent a charge through me, like breaking news being wired into a teletype--
She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she'd picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he'd opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn't a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first.
Beyond the author's electric prose, though, is a story about transformation. Like all terrific open road adventures, it has a beginning, middle (there's actually a chapter titled Interlude: Whale Ship Cannibals which actually made me break into a grin, never having read an intermission in a novel before) and end. Harper takes no shortcuts, introduces no character or story element he doesn't later use and fills the novel with stark and harrowing description. My favorite involves Polly and Nate torching an Aryan Steel chop shop, but rescuing a fighting cock that the girl discovers caged up there. It's a lean, endearing and thrilling read and one of the best debut novels I've read....more
My introduction to the fiction of South Korean author Han Kang is The Vegetarian. Published in 2007, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, thiMy introduction to the fiction of South Korean author Han Kang is The Vegetarian. Published in 2007, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, this is my dive bar book club's January 2025 assignment. That and its length--50,000 or so words, barely qualifying this as a novel as opposed to a novella--made this seem like a good way to get back into reading fiction, something I've taken six months off from.
This is a three-part novel set in present day Seoul. These sections concern Kim Yeong-hye, a thoroughly average young wife who perplexes all those who come into contact with her by waking one morning and refusing to eat meat. Yeong-hye alludes to a dream she had, the context of which seems too complex for her to explain to anyone. From there, Yeong-hye's ability to care for herself--eating anything, even fruits and vegetables--slip away. Yeong-hye's descent into madness is related by her husband Mr. Cheong, unnamed brother-in-law and older sister In-hye.
The prose is exquisite. Very terse but impactful. I could see everything clearly. If I had to name the thing Han seems most fascinated by, it's female anatomy. Anyone anticipating descriptions of food or drink or a guidebook on how to cut meat and dairy from your diet in 2025 will be disappointed. This isn't that sort of book about vegetarians. It's an allegory for how removed we've become from nature, I think. As Yeong-hye's father points out, our ancestors were carnivores and vegetarian diets are something relatively new to the human race, but I think Yeong-hye's dream is to live as a tree lives. I think she'd make a wonderful tree, but unfortunately, wakes up in a woman's body.
There wasn't anything in the novel that threw me across the room.
Characters react to Yeong-hye's spell in various ways, the men of the novel behaving in an appallingly awful way, while her sister is the only one to try to help. The most compelling character appears in the third section, a psychiatric patient named Hee-joo, receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania who by virtue of being the healthiest patient, looks after those unable to care for themselves, like Yeong-hye. I'd have liked to read a novel told completely in her voice, with Yeong-hye and her sister minor characters, but here I go rewriting the Nobel Prize winner ...
It feels good to get back into reading and discussing books with those both near and far away, if for no other reason that Han's prose was a tall drink of water with lime.
First sentence: Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.
Favorite quote: When a patient went missing, one possibility was that they had gone down from the mountains and already got as far as Maseok, or the opposite possibility, that they had in fact gone deeper into the mountains....more
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Daphne du Maurier. It’s been a few years since I’ve read The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Daphne du Maurier. It’s been a few years since I’ve read and loved Rebecca and have had Don’t Look Now and Other Stories on my reading docket for some time. It contains five tales published together in 1971: Don’t Look Now, Not After Midnight, A Border-Line Case, The Way of the Cross and The Breakthrough. The very first is the very best. The law of diminishing returns applied the more I read, with the collection taking a nose dive at the end of the second story and never recovering.
In Don’t Look Now, a married couple named John and Laura holiday in Venice, recovering from the death of their daughter who suffered a meningitis infection. At a restaurant, they're beguiled by a pair of middle-aged identical twin sisters, one of which appears fixated on John. He determines that twin to be blind. Laura follows the other one into the restroom and returns to confide to her husband that the blind twin had a vision of their daughter standing behind them. She added that John also has second sight but fails to realize it. Finally, the twins issue a warning that the couple will be in danger if they remain in Venice, none of which John takes seriously.
In Not After Midnight, a prep school headmaster named Timothy Grey holidays on the Greek isle of Crete. Rejecting his chalet due to his desire for privacy and for a view of the surf so he can paint, Timothy discovers his new accommodation was recently vacated by a man who drowned while swimming at night. His only real vexation is an obnoxious American guest named Stoll and the man’s silent wife. He gradually begins to spy on the couple. Adding to the intrigue is a card he discovers in the chalet written by the drowning victim, which reads “Not after midnight� and 38, the number of the chalet belonging to the Stolls.
In A Border-Line Case, 19-year-old actor Shelagh Money has returned home to look after her ill father. She's concerned that his condition might not improve quickly enough for her to accept her first major theater role, playing Viola in Twelfth Night. Her father appears on the road to recovery, reminiscing about an old navy pal named Nick Barry who he fell out of touch with. Suddenly confronting Shelagh with a look of horror, he dies. Feeling the need to reconcile her late father’s relationship with the man he was thinking about when he died, she travels to Ireland to seek the reclusive Commander Barry out.
It's always the same when you come face-to-face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake ... My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you ... Let me answer the telephone ... Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened.
In The Way of the Cross, British tourists from Little Bletford congregate in Jerusalem, where the vicar who was scheduled to lead their tour of the Holy City falls ill and is replaced by a young minister. In The Breakthrough, an electrical engineer is loaned out by his employer to the salt marshes near Saxmere, where he discovers an eccentric scientist is working on a project to harness the lifeforce at the moment of death.
Don’t Look Now and Other Stories is grand in that each of the tales involves a British tourist or tourists who grant themselves a much-needed change of scenery only to encounter more than they bargained for. It’s sublime packaging on the part of du Maurier, or perhaps very disciplined, considering all of the stories were published the same year. Don’t Look Now is the best, an eerie exploration of the clarity and mystery of a psychic vision, or what happens when you’re provided an answer without understanding the question. It uses foreshadowing to build suspense very well. This served as source material for an offbeat thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie released in 1973.
Du Maurier establishes atmosphere and parses out detail supremely well in all five of the stories, particularly Not After Midnight, which should serve as a warning that while on holiday, never ignore local superstition. She promises more than she’s able to ultimately deliver in this story. A Border-Line Case runs off the tracks at the halfway mark rather than the very end, failing to provide the necessary intrigue for all of the build-up. The Way of the Cross is self-indulgent nonsense that goes absolutely nowhere. The ideas sifted through in The Breakthrough don’t even hold up. But the overall effect, combining psychological realism with a love of the past, is one that definitely makes me want to read more from the author.
Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England. Her father was a prominent stage actor and theater manager and her mother—until her retirement in 1910—also an actor. Some of Daphne’s early work was published in the weekly British magazine the Bystander. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. One of its fans, a World War I veteran named Frederick Browning who’d risen to the rank of major, wooed du Maurier and they married a year later. They had three children and Lady Browning continued to publish under her maiden name to great success. Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, Hungry Hill and My Cousin Rachel, and her short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now would all be adapted to film. Du Maurier rarely granted interviews for print or television and resided for much of her life privately in Cornwall, where she died in 1989.
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Daphne du Maurier. It’s been a few years since I’ve read and loved Rebecca and have had Don’t Look Now and Other Stories on my reading docket for some time. It contains five tales published together in 1971: Don’t Look Now, Not After Midnight, A Border-Line Case, The Way of the Cross and The Breakthrough. The very first is the very best. The law of diminishing returns applied the more I read, with the collection taking a nose dive at the end of the second story and never recovering.
In Don’t Look Now, a married couple named John and Laura holiday in Venice, recovering from the death of their daughter who suffered a meningitis infection. At a restaurant, they're beguiled by a pair of middle-aged identical twin sisters, one of which appears fixated on John. He determines that twin to be blind. Laura follows the other one into the restroom and returns to confide to her husband that the blind twin had a vision of their daughter standing behind them. She added that John also has second sight but fails to realize it. Finally, the twins issue a warning that the couple will be in danger if they remain in Venice, none of which John takes seriously.
In Not After Midnight, a prep school headmaster named Timothy Grey holidays on the Greek isle of Crete. Rejecting his chalet due to his desire for privacy and for a view of the surf so he can paint, Timothy discovers his new accommodation was recently vacated by a man who drowned while swimming at night. His only real vexation is an obnoxious American guest named Stoll and the man’s silent wife. He gradually begins to spy on the couple. Adding to the intrigue is a card he discovers in the chalet written by the drowning victim, which reads “Not after midnight� and 38, the number of the chalet belonging to the Stolls.
In A Border-Line Case, 19-year-old actor Shelagh Money has returned home to look after her ill father. She's concerned that his condition might not improve quickly enough for her to accept her first major theater role, playing Viola in Twelfth Night. Her father appears on the road to recovery, reminiscing about an old navy pal named Nick Barry who he fell out of touch with. Suddenly confronting Shelagh with a look of horror, he dies. Feeling the need to reconcile her late father’s relationship with the man he was thinking about when he died, she travels to Ireland to seek the reclusive Commander Barry out.
It's always the same when you come face-to-face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake ... My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you ... Let me answer the telephone ... Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened.
In The Way of the Cross, British tourists from Little Bletford congregate in Jerusalem, where the vicar who was scheduled to lead their tour of the Holy City falls ill and is replaced by a young minister. In The Breakthrough, an electrical engineer is loaned out by his employer to the salt marshes near Saxmere, where he discovers an eccentric scientist is working on a project to harness the lifeforce at the moment of death.
Don’t Look Now and Other Stories is grand in that each of the tales involves a British tourist or tourists who grant themselves a much-needed change of scenery only to encounter more than they bargained for. It’s sublime packaging on the part of du Maurier, or perhaps very disciplined, considering all of the stories were published the same year. Don’t Look Now is the best, an eerie exploration of the clarity and mystery of a psychic vision, or what happens when you’re provided an answer without understanding the question. It uses foreshadowing to build suspense very well. This served as source material for an offbeat thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie released in 1973.
Du Maurier establishes atmosphere and parses out detail supremely well in all five of the stories, particularly Not After Midnight, which should serve as a warning that while on holiday, never ignore local superstition. She promises more than she’s able to ultimately deliver in this story. A Border-Line Case runs off the tracks at the halfway mark rather than the very end, failing to provide the necessary intrigue for all of the build-up. The Way of the Cross is self-indulgent nonsense that goes absolutely nowhere. The ideas sifted through in The Breakthrough don’t even hold up. But the overall effect, combining psychological realism with a love of the past, is one that definitely makes me want to read more from the author.
Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England. Her father was a prominent stage actor and theater manager and her mother—until her retirement in 1910—also an actor. Some of Daphne’s early work was published in the weekly British magazine the Bystander. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. One of its fans, a World War I veteran named Frederick Browning who’d risen to the rank of major, wooed du Maurier and they married a year later. They had three children and Lady Browning continued to publish under her maiden name to great success. Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, Hungry Hill and My Cousin Rachel, and her short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now would all be adapted to film. Du Maurier rarely granted interviews for print or television and resided for much of her life privately in Cornwall, where she died in 1989.
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