a nitpicking new year to you too: a review reviewed

Stephen King's fiction enjoys a large readership not just in the US but abroad and especially India. His forays have primarily been in horror and Indians love horror. He also manages to take interesting ideas, observations and characters and explore them in a rather simple welcoming style. Despite almost always working with a few genres, he manages to churn out books that are notches above the average bestseller.

Unfortunately, reviews of genre fiction in India still have miles to go before they reap. There are the unfortunately few reviews like this and then there are people who don't understand the works of Stephen King and foolishly dare to review them. It seems fit to begin my new year in this neighbourhood by ranting about a piece of fluff that, when all things are considered at Judgement Day, will be quite inconsequential. Yet, it is to griping about people and things that don't even deserve a modicum of attention that I am destined to devote my time.

The exhibit for the occasion is a review of Stephen King's recent novel 11/22/63 in the Deccan Herald by someone named Payel Dutta Chowdhury. If this public LinkedIn profile is the right one, the reviewer is a professor at Garden City College in Bangalore and also the head of the English department. This also makes a lot of what follows even more unpleasant. This is someone who should have known better.

We are off to a flying crash with the opening

Stephen King's latest magnum opus, 11/22/63, promises to be a rare juxtaposition of facts, fiction and much more.

The use of magnus opus is troubling. Does the reviewer wish to imply that King has been churning out great works for a while? There is no doubting that this is a work on a larger scale than perhaps anything that King has tried before, but have there been others?

Does anyone know any of the other rare juxtapositions of facts, fiction and much more? (I know only one: the coefficient of the linear).

The second sentence darkens the lentils even further

A master of the science-fiction genre, King's recent novel blends historical fiction and real life events.

Let's pick the grammatical nit first. Any editor worth his or her salary would have fixed this sentence. As it stands now, A master of the science-fiction genre refers not to King (as it should have) but to his recent novel. Let's now look at a problem that's arguably a more important one. I wonder if anyone familiar with Stephen King's ouevre would call him a master of the science fiction genre. It's a perfunctory label that only suggests that the writer's knowledge of King's work might be limited to a subset comprising either his works like The Gunslinger and Firestarter or absolutely nothing at all.

What follows next is a complete synopsis in précis, which reduces King's novel to basic elements of the plot, stripped of everything that actually made the novel interesting. The synopsis also pays tribute to Taran Adarsh in its completeness. It also constitutes the majority of this review. That should tell you that if you were looking for an interesting examination of the novel, if you were looking for reasons to read this novel (or not), if you were looking for a useful point of view, this is the wrong county to be in. Unless a grammatically incomplete line like Definitely, an interesting and insightful read is enough for you (in which case, just scroll down to the bottom of the page, read that line and get on with your life). The synopsis owes a lot to the Wikipedia page for the book (search for "recently-divorced high school English teacher"), King's reason for abandoning the idea in 1971 and other bits about the background of the novel (search for "price of a pint of root beer").

This brings us to the rest of the bits in the review, which, thanks to that very popular search engine called Google, were clearly swiped without attribution from elsewhere. A few bits come from Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times: the opening (which means that I must redirect my criticism above to Ms. Maslin), the premise (search for "revisit and even revise"), the description of the book's cover (search for "happy and unscathed").

With all this plagiarism, one wonders why the number of pages of the novel according to this novel (850) is different from the actual number of pages (849; 842 pages for the actual novel starting from chapter 1 and 7 pages for King's afterword). When both Ms. Maslin and the Wikpedia page agree that 849 is the right number, why would someone invent a different number? If you add the extra pages between the hard front and back and subtract the two protective thicker sheets, you get 864, which matches the number listed on the book's official site. Since no official paperback edition appears to have been released yet, the plot, as they say, only thickens.

The seemingly original contributions only offer more evidence that the amateur writings on Rediff are not alone; consider this:

King wants to remind his readers that the past does not want to be changed and in order to reaffirm his views, he examines the "butterfly effect" — a phenomenon whereby a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.

Something tells me that King's novel is likely to lose a few readers thanks to this review. I only hope that the book reviews in the Deccan Herald do not have a large bunch of faithful readers.

Meanwhile, let us mourn the fact that someone got paid for this sorry piece of plagiaristic piffle.

PS: I wish someone from the New York Times would fix the date in the title of Ms. Maslin's review; the date (and the title of the book) is 11/22/63 and not 11/23/63.

1408

Mikael Häfström (whose Derailed came up in an old post hereabouts) manages to imbue his adaptation of Stephen King's short story with enough atmosphere and to mark a minor miracle in the canon of King adaptations. While it offers no threat to Frank Darabont's leisurely undulating approach, the film makes a worthy addition to the horror genre by deftly building a competent atmosphere of dread and taking its time doing so.

John Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a skeptical writer debunking the paranormal, imbuing the character with a genuine credibility. The elements are familiar tropes of horror, and specifically of the he-who-scoffs-at-the-haunted-house-has-it-coming subset of stories. Despite his sarcastic asides and dry wit, Enslin's a tragic figure dealing with the death of his daughter and a separation from his wife (a trait shared by several characters in King's fiction). The film takes its time setting things up for us as Enslin makes his way into room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel (despite the fervent pleas of hotel manager Gerald Olin played by Samuel L. Jackson). There's great restraint in the narrative as the screw begins to turn and the inevitable unfolds, backed by the inspired use of We've Only Just Begun by The Carpenters. Right until the end, the film refuses to yield to the temptation of devolving into a mess of flash cuts, moments of quick shock and cheap thrills. This doesn't threaten the rich curve of Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, but has no need to fear joining the ranks of Maximum Overdrive. It's an evil f*cking room, said Gerald Olin and you had better believe it.

glen miller, shirley jackson and some nightmarish interior design {march 31, 2005 / april 01, 2005}

With Rose Red Stephen King got another shot at exercising his writing in the medium probably best suited for adapting his works -- the small screen. The mini-series has always afforded King's works a better chance at breathing and growing on viewers that the movies have. King's rich descriptions and characterisation are a strong hurdle for any screenplay adaptation. He manages to overcome the lack of the visual aspect of the written word so well that when it comes to adapting his stuff to the screen, screenplay writers are faced with the challenge of coming up with something even more visually striking. Add to that a rich pool of clichés in the genre, and we have an insurmountable problem of coming up with a new way to send a jolt up your spine.

This mini-series has King exploring a familiar icon in the horror genre -- the haunted house. Correction: the evil house. The strongest influence would be Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House, in fact, is an influence that King refers to in numerous interviews. (As an aside, I'd recommend The Haunting, a creepy experience that works on the Tournier-tested principle "that which we don't see scares us more"). But noting the Shirley Jackson influence won't get you any points, because the dialogue is peppered with explicit references (Shirley Jackson was right; some houses are born bad).

So we're treated to a bunch of rather unsavoury characters distinguished only by the focus of supernatural attentions -- the equivalent of Danny in The Shining, if you will. She loves listening to Glen Miller and so you're treated to a lot of big band jazz. The mansion's filled with several interesting rooms boasting interesting deceptive designs and miscellaneous evil vibes. However, everything else is strictly cheesy and headed downhill. Every character is a recognisable stereotype, there's a "People Proximity Counter" that keeps running through some integers of little to no consequence. The trade-offs in quality for filling out the length of a miniseries are evident: why else would Joyce Reardon choose to ignore the vastly more entertaining psychic demonstrations of Annie Wheaton and focus instead on a house that seems less inclined to provide demonstrations to guarantee her tenure. Imagine watching something like this in real-time with commercials on television. Now, that's horrifying.

Books past and current

I finished reading William Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories, a sequel to Star Trek Memories his clearly solipsistic but tongue-in-cheek reminiscences playing Captain James Tiberius Kirk on the classic TV Show. This book is about the 6 Star Trek movies and Star Trek: Generations (where Kirk breathes his last). Being a Trek fan, I didn't take too much time reading this lightweight collection of memoirs and it's heartening to see Shatner poke fun at his attempts to sing (Mr. Tambourine Man and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are cult classics, but clearly indicate his future as a singer). And it's not the ego-fondler that was Where No Man Has Gone Before.

A couple of days ago I finished reading Black House, the sequel to The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. The plot adds elements reminiscent of past King works like The Dark Zone and Insomnia. I haven't read enough Straub to detect past influences. King's contributions bear his signature: the italicized inner thoughts, the gibberish spouted by evil characters, the italicized, uppercase emotional outbursts... There are also references to myths that King visited in other novels (in-jokes, perhaps?) like ka and the crimson king. It was a great read -- a pageturner, if you wish to call it that. My favourites would be the Hegelian Scum (a clique of intellectual bikers) and Henry Leyden, a blind DJ with multiple radio personalities who can see more than mortals with sight.

My current read to work is Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock classic, which is an approachable text on what made Vertigo one of Hitchcock's most talked-about films. There are no humanities buzz words floating around here, so come all ye reluctant readers.