Stephen King long ago became a franchise instead of a writer. For the first decade or so of his career, he consistently published novels that were among the most enjoyable of the era. Nobody was better at diving into a story and instantly creating a world that sucked you in, providing interesting characters and creating suspense about what would happen to them than King. At the same time, he seemed to have trouble with endings. In fact, between Carrie and Dolores Claiborne King’s peak period of creativity he really provided a deeply satisfying conclusion to less than half of the twenty novels he published during that fertile period. And The Dead Zone alone contained what can be called a genuinely great ending.
Since the early 90s, Stephen King continued writing zippy beginnings in such books as Insomnia, Bag of Bones, and Dreamcatcher and Hearts in Atlantis, though really a collection of novellas, starts out fantastically but his ability to hold the reader has faded. I skipped massive sections of Insomnia and Bag of Bones and never even finished Dreamcatcher. I only managed a few pages of From a Buick 8 before growing bored. It continues to fascinate me how a man who so easily draw you into a story seems to have such a hard time building to a conclusion. Maybe he’s only good at creating the suspense and not at unleashing it. Often King’s writing reminds me of a work recently created by another wildly popular artist name Steven. Spielberg is also great at creating suspense, but he differs from King in being able to provide a payoff. Usually.
Then there’s Munich, Spielberg’s meditation on Israeli assassins hunting down those responsible for the Olympic tragedy of 1972. Again, Spielberg manages to instantly draw you into his vision, presenting several flawed but fascinating individuals. But something went wrong this time around. I think especially of the sequence in which a bomb has been planted in the phone of a suspected Islamic terrorist that is to go off when he answers it. Unknown to the Israeli agents is that the man’s little girl is in the apartment. Spielberg brilliantly sets this scene up, but as it plays out you begin to see the manipulation that he usually hides so well. It seems false and contrived. For the first time, he couldn’t pull it off.
That’s the way it seems almost always with Stephen King. As I said before, The Dead Zone may well be King’s most perfectly crafted novel. It’s got a genuinely tragic hero. It’s got suspense and enough of the supernatural in it to qualify it as a horror story. But it’s really not. It’s an incredibly sad novel, almost gothic in its atmosphere of dread and foreboding. And then when you toss in the political subplot, it’s also timely. There are only two ways this novel can end and maybe that’s why King was successful. It builds to a conclusion not unlike The Manchurian Candidate and the payoff is incredible. It’s the second best thing Stephen King ever wrote.
The best thing Stephen King ever wrote was his miniseries Storm of the Century. If you haven’t seen Storm of the Century, I highly recommend you rent it. (It’s currently not available on Netflix for some reason.) King’s track record with his ABC miniseries deal has been iffy, to say the least. It was very entertaining, featuring a brilliantly malevolent performance by Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown. The Langoliers was a disaster. The Stand and The Shining both had moments of near-greatness, but were overly long and too ripe for melodrama. Storm of the Century is probably an hour too long, but it proves that King can write an ending.
The title is misleading. It sounds as if it’s going to be a disaster movie ala Irwin Allen. What it’s really about is a small island populated by people with secret sins who are trapped by, well, the storm of the century. Into their midst appears a strange, in every sense of the word. He calls himself Linoge and after killing an old woman is placed into the town’s small jail cell. This Linoge played brilliantly by Colm Feore turns out to have some very awful powers: he can force his will upon people and some very bad things happen. Cryptically, he offers to go away on one condition only: if the townspeople give him what he wants.
SPOILER ALERT
What Linoge wants remains uncertain for most the miniseries. Along the way he reveals some dirty little secrets of the town’s residents and causes them to kill off a few here or there. Finally, toward the end, he tells the residents to congregate in the town hall and he will reveal his mystery. It appears that Linoge is a demon not the devil, understand, but just one of many demons and he is very mortal. In fact, he is dying and he needs a child to raise and take his place. So he makes a deal with the town: Give him of their children and he won’t destroy them all.
And this is what makes Storm of the Century King’s masterpiece. Because what we’re dealing with here is real horror. Not vampires or zombies or little girls who can start fires. All great horror is about masking the deepest psychological fears we have. And one of those fears is that we all possess the capacity for unspeakable evil. They say anybody is capable of murder, but few of us really believe it. We create boogeymen from Manson to Hitler, from Dahmer to Saddam to create this Other, this inhuman beast that we can point to say “there, that’s evil.” In that way, we can refuse to admit that evil is really inside us all.
At the same time there is another horror being faced in Storm of the Century. It is the fear that overcomes any parent when he sees or is told that his child did something horrible. I can only imagine what it must feel like to be told that your child murdered somebody. And I can only imagine that the parent must lay awake nights wondering if there was something he could have done differently. How much of what our children do is our responsibility? How accountable should we be for the kind of adults our children become. After all, when they do something brilliant, most parents are quick to take credit for raising them right. But what about when they do something evil? And to what ends are we willing to go to raise them right?
This is also at the heart of Storm of the Century. The final part of this miniseries is truly haunting. The townspeople are gathered with the knowledge that if they don’t give Linoge what he wants, he will kill them all. On the other hand, if they sacrifice just one child, he will leave them in peace. The parents are forced to choose a stone from a bag, and the ones holding the black stone will lose their child. Obviously, King is toying with the concept of the sacrificial lamb and Jesus. The unfortunate child will bear the sins of the city, so that all may live.
Only the town constable fights against the decision to do as Linoge asks. Of course, he has a young son. But he also stands as the voice of opposition. What is at stake in Storm of the Century is a choice. Would you, as a parent, be willing to sign an agreement that stated your son or daughter would grow up into the embodiment of evil, or would you rather he or she die with you? What would you do? It’s not an easy question to answer. After all, the parents know they will never see their son again, nor even be sure of what evil acts he commits. All they know for sure is that he will be raised by a demon. But they and the other children will live.
King does something in Storm of the Century that he rarely does in his novels. He uses the trappings of the horror genre to comment on the human condition. Even in his best novels, Stephen King usually is willing to go for the gore. In other words, he uses all the excesses that the horror genre allows. In Storm of the Century he turns the genre on its head. Because, ultimately, the real evil in the story isn’t Linoge. It’s the other townspeople who are ready to sacrifice another man’s child for their own safety. Tim Daly stars as the constable and it’s the best performance of his career. He is truly heartbreaking.
The movie officially ends several years later, when Daly has moved across the country and is divorced from his wife. He has kept in touch and we learn that the townspeople didn’t really recover from Linoge’s visit too well. Relationships have ended, people have committed suicide, things are not as they were. Meanwhile, Daly has moved on. As we see him, he’s walking down a street and he glimpses Linoge and a teenager. He runs after them and, in the most chilling moment of the movie, his grown son turns to look back him, his face filled with evil.
