Just After Sunset by Stephen King -- A Book Review

Photo: Hardcover edition (and the one I read) from its Wikipedia page.

Very entertaining collection of short stories, which I apparently bought, put on the shelf with my collection of all his books, and then completely forgot about and never read.  A recent article in Entertainment Weekly informed me that a movie (or show, I forget) would be made of one of them, "The Things They Left Behind."  (It's an okay story about objects left behind by those who died on 9/11.  They create psychic damage to those who own them--and they suddenly turn up out of nowhere.  He did what he could with this one.  Nice little story.)  This story sounded unfamiliar. I can't say that I can recall the plot of all of King's 200+ short stories, but I'll at least remember the title.  Not this time.  Turns out, never read the book.  Just a little blip to remind me of my old age...

Anyway, this book of short stories is best remembered for the ideas behind the stories, rather than for the awesomeness of the stories themselves.  I don't mean this as a slight, but there's nothing in here that rivals "Jerusalem's Lot," or any of the truly good and freaky short stories from Night Shift or Skeleton Crew.  But there are some good ones here; just not great ones.

I've already written a blog entry about "Willa," which is maybe my favorite here.  He does everything with it that he could, which I can't say for some of the other good ones.  Anyway, this one is more about happy resignation in the...waystation between here and there, I guess.  I think an entire novel could be written about this waystation, where time is elastic, and the people are in denial.  But there's a really good honkytonk bar nearby, and you can dance all night if you let yourself...Great idea, fully realized.

"Stationary Bike" is another good one, but I don't feel he did everything with this he could have.  (So much so that I've written some notes for what I think will be a good short story of my own.  There won't be a stationary bike in it, and...Well, hopefully, you'll see.  In a magazine someday.)  A man needs to lose weight and is a bit lonely after a loved one dies.  He buys (see title) and, because those things really are as boring as hell, imagines himself on a road to a little town he used to love.  This being a Stephen King story, you know his imagination gets away from him, and weird things happen.  This could go in a million directions (a la Duma Key, or a story about a traveling guy in a painting that I hated...the story, I mean), but it ends with...well, I won't ruin it for you.  But for me it was a letdown.  A metaphorical letdown, no less.  But some great ideas and images.

"N." is a very good story that could have been so much more.  A psychiatrist gets rained in by his suicidal / OCD patient who kills himself in defense of a Lovecraftian horror that's got a Lovecraftian name--and a field named after early schlock writer Forrest Ackerman.  The psychiatrist then descends into "Sole Survivor" mode.  He doesn't eat his own foot, but...essentially the same.  This one could easily be made into an episode of some series, or maybe a really bad movie.  But good story.

"The Cat from Hell" is a short story you might remember from 1990's Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.  An evil cat kills those who live with a guy who owned a company that tested its meds on thousands of cats, killing them all.  He hires a hitman to kill it, but he fails.  In a rather gruesome way, a la the old guy with the cockroaches in the last segment of Creepshow.  This is a story from King's early days, and it shows.  It's amusingly gross, but...(nitpick alert!) there's a sentence towards the end that begins: "And the last thing he heard was..." and then a paragraph later, he sees and hears a great many things until the end.  Oh, well.  Early shock stuff, with badguys twirling their mustaches and reaching appropriate ends.

"Ayana" is a very good story with nostalgic sadness, like the last third of Insomnia.  This is probably the best-written story here, and a very good premise.  This is immediately followed by a story of an old guy who gets trapped inside a Port-A-Potty, and is covered in what you might expect.
Opposite ends of the King spectrum.  But you like that, or you wouldn't consider reading his stuff in the first place.

Lastly, a little nod to Stephen King, who gets paid at least $10 million per novel.  Or, maybe, per novel manuscript.  As you know, he turns those out like I get sinus infections.  It takes a lot of short stories to equal one novel manuscript, but he turns them out by the hundreds anyway, though in terms of time taken, it's undoubtedly not worth his time, financially, to do so.  But he does anyway, because he likes them.  Short stories are making a little bit of a comeback these days.  This is due in a small way to writers like King and Joyce Carol Oates (though she's more known for her short stories than for her novels, I think) who have kept the flame alive and passed the torch.

The Road Less Traveled and Tough Choices

 Photo: It's got a long address, and I'm lazy, so I'll link it here.

Despite the high rating I'd give to this book, it's time to let it go.  By this, I mean it's off to the box for my yard sale, or the box to my used bookstore for credit, or yet to the box for donations to my local Salvation Army.  Probably in that order.

Why am I letting it go after all these years?  Why, if I'd rate it so highly?

Well, first, why I like(d) it.

It's got one of the all-time great opening lines for any self-help book: Life is difficult.

It is, indeed.  I also believe that life is often (though not always) supposed to be hard.  To not accept or expect this is to live a life of frustration and an inability to adapt.  That's me saying that, by the way, not Peck.  But he'd agree with me.

Peck was amongst the first of the popular self-help guys to really preach self-responsibility.  Or, at least to the point that he did so with popularity.

This is huge for me, philosophically and psychologically.  I've tired of the nature vs. nurture debate because it seems that many are trying to explain away self-responsibility.  It's not my fault, I have ADHD.  It's not my fault, I was raised that way.  It's not my fault, that's what I was taught to believe in.

He was the first to say that, no, everything was actually your responsibility after all.  Especially after a certain age.

I'm all for that.  I embrace that.  I live it and breathe it.  Nobody's more hyper and hyperactive than I am.  Yet I focus, accomplish much, balance my finances, control my emotions and treat others with respect.

But...

Here's why I don't really like it anymore.  It's not just because Peck turned out to be an addict, a sex addict, and a very frequent cheater on his wife.  But keep those things in mind as we continue--and remember the phrase "traditional values" in his title.

I didn't realize before, when I read this in my teens, how actually preachy it is.  I don't mind, now, that it's religious.  But I do mind that a trained psychiatrist would use religion and God as self-help.  Is that belief, or is that maybe a little too self-serving?  Dubya bought into this sort of self-help religion, as many recovering addicts do.  Which is fine and good, but...for a psychiatrist to preach this so heavily in a self-help book?  That's blasphemy, in my opinion, but blasphemy for practicing psychiatrists and self-help professionals and religious leaders alike.

Is religion supposed to be so self-serving?  Can one get better psychologically if one doesn't believe in the Christian God? According to Peck, in this book...Well, no.  Kind of.

And don't even get me started on the phrase "traditional values" in his title.  A psychiatrist should really, really know better.

What if you, and your problems, aren't traditional?  Can you still benefit from psychotherapy?  Well, yes, but according to this book?  No...kind of.

He hedges a lot when it comes to this kind of thing, like his psychiatrist self and his televangelist self were warring for control.  When his psychiatrist self wins, this book is almost ingenious. When he writes about accepting responsibility, delaying self-gratification, the difference between neurotics and personality-disordered people, and overall personal self-responsibility, this book is a winner and deserving of the 10+ million copies it's sold, and its place for a number of years on the best-seller list.

Ultimately, for me it's time for it to go.  I have literally hundreds of books, and it's time to make some tough choices.  This is actually a tough decision for me, but many books simply must go, so...

In terms of a book review, I reiterate that I do recommend this book because of its heavy reliance on self-responsibility.  It made a huge impression on me when I was a teenager, and this book was partially responsible for my decision to also major in Philosophy, and to focus on Existentialism, if I could.  I could and I did.

So this was an important book for me, and it may also be for you.  Read it and learn from it, if you wish.  But don't feel badly if you don't keep it in your bookshelf.

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

 Photo: Bellevue Hospital Ambulance, New York Times, 1895--from the Wikipedia page of The Alienist.

Been a few weeks away with illness, exhaustion, overwork, and some good headway on my novel and some shorter pieces.  Sort of an odd time lately, mostly without focus.  I've been reading six or seven books, and writing too many things at once--and not completing any reading or writing at all.  My sleeping patterns have been all screwed up, and...blah blah blah.  I'm tired of my own whining, but it is what it is.

That changed with The Alienist, a novel so well-written that I finished all 597 pages in just a few days, even waking up early to read it.  I read it through my cluster-headache on Sunday; I read it through an otherwise scattered-minded few weeks.  It cut through all that and straightened my focus and psyche out--for quite awhile, I hope.

I'd heard great things about this for a long time, and finally I gave it a go, with regret, since I'm trying to finish about six other things, like I said.  But I'm glad I did.

This novel has a lot going for it.  It's told in a first-person limited POV, by a reporter narrator who's good at describing his world without making it seem like he's purposely describing his world.  But he is, and he needs to for us, because he's describing 1896 NYC (and a little of D.C. and New Paltz, NY, too).  Caleb Carr does a fantastic job making this world interesting and alive, and the crimes he covers--and the investigation they cause--are top-notch.  (But not for the squeamish.) Essentially Carr describes the first wrinkles of what has become known as criminal profiling, which basically can be boiled down to analyzing the crime, and then asking yourself, What kind of person could have committed this crime, exactly this way, in this exact place and time?

As readers of this blog should know, I've long been interested in this kind of thing myself, so it was very cool to see some characters using these methods as the focus of their investigations.  In addition to profiling the crime, they profile a letter the serial murderer sends to a victim's mother--with some handwriting analysis as well, also new at the time--and there's a lot of attention paid to the earliest childhood years of many criminals in the book, also a cornerstone of criminal profiling.  Abusive and criminal parents will, more often than not, create abusive and criminal offspring.  This sort of implies that it's more nurture than nature, and that free will isn't all that strong, either, but that's a misreading that many people today--and many characters in the book--suffer from.

I'll leave that to the reader.  Bottom line is, if you like historical fiction, or crime/criminal investigation, or the 1890s in general, or if--like me--you happen to like all of those things combined, than this book is the one for you.  As I've said about some of Stephen King's books, there's something to be said for a 597-page book that's read in about three days.

As I mentioned, it was so good that it straightened out my psyche for a few days, and made me feel more complete, more whole, more in my own realm--whatever the hell that is.  Next up: his follow-up, The Angel of Darkness.

As the footnote at the beginning of the book says, an alienist is today's psychiatrist, or mental health researcher, as someone who needed to speak to someone like this (because there were few private practices in those days, so most people, especially the poor, would have to be committed to a facility or to a hospital to speak to one) was thought to be alienated, both from their society and from their own true natures.  (Sort of like how I've felt the last few weeks, though not to the extremes you'll read here.)  So a helper to these people would be an alienist.

Caleb Carr himself is quite an interesting guy, as is the story surrounding Lucius Carr, his (in)famous father.  It seems as if his father stabbed to death a man who was hitting on him, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac helped him dispose of the body and of some evidence before Carr confessed.  He served a couple of years in an Elmira prison, then worked for UPI for 47 years, though he was apparently also an alcoholic and an abusive father.

Caleb Carr comes off as a novelist of historical fiction who also dabbles in historical articles and books (and, it turns out, screenplays of two Exorcist prequels), but it turns out to be the opposite.  He's a well-respected historian.  Caleb has an injury to his arm and shoulder, similar to his alienist character, and he lives in a beautiful, self-made home with a wrap-around porch, in the mountains--alienated from his society, and recovering, as Carr admits, from being alien to himself.

Art imitates life.