I’ve pulled no punches about the fact that I am not a fan of many of Stephen King’s post-1990 novels. Last year, I was less than thrilled with the overlong and rambling Fairy Tale.
In recent decades (King’s career is now so long that this is the most meaningful unit of measurement), his best work has often been his collections of short fiction.
And most recently: You Like It Darker (2024). I purchased this book in hardcover within days of my disappointing read of Fairy Tale, because—when King is at his best, he hits them out of the park.
I only recently got around to reading this latest short story collection, though. (I have a rather large TBR backlog.) I am happy to report that You Like It Darker is one of his best short story collections in years—probably since the aforementioned Everything’s Eventual. Not every story in You Like it Darker is a home run. But a handful of them are.
“Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is a long short story about a man who is framed for a murder he did not commit. The whole thing starts with a recurring bad dream about a buried body.
“On Slide Inn Road” is a shorter tale about a family trip gone wrong. It reverses some of the usual age dynamics that you see in stories. This one is more of a crime story than a horror tale. (There are no supernatural elements.) But it’s a good one.
Rattlesnakes is a novella set in Florida. This is also a sequel to Cujo (1981). The main protagonist of that book, Vic Trenton, is now in his seventies, and he’s been through a lot in the intervening years. He goes through a lot in this story, too.
The Answer Man is another novella. In 1937, a young man meets a roadside hawker who can foresee the future—for a price. The young man interacts with “the Answer Man” over the next sixty years.
This is ultimately a story about finding meaning in life’s unexpected challenges and tragedies. This one is an absolute gem, and worth the entire price of the book.
***
Stephen King is now 77. I started reading his books in the 1980s, when he was only in his thirties, and I was in my teens. (Note: I’ve gotten older since then, too.)
I hope that Stephen King continues to write for many years to come. That was my overriding thought, as I finished this collection.
At the end of 2024 I read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone for the second time.
I had read this book for the first time back in 1984, when I was fifteen going on sixteen. In the intervening years, I had never revisitedthe book. (I did see the 1983 film adaptation starring Christopher Walken. While this was a valiant effort on Hollywood’s part, the movie simply didn’t capture the essence of the complex, multilayered source material of the novel.)
‘The Dead Zone’: an experiment in rereading
I decided in December 2024 that forty years was enough time to wait between readings of The Dead Zone. I therefore gave the book another reading. While I remembered most of the major plot points, I had forgotten enough that the book was “fresh” in my rereading.
I also did this as an experiment of sorts. I have been disappointed by Stephen King’s recent novels. Last year I plodded my way through the meandering Fairy Tale (2022), and I struggled to finish it. I was glad when Fairy Tale was over. I nearly gave up on The Outsider (2018) and Doctor Sleep (2013). I did give up on Cell (2006), Under the Dome (2009), and Lisey’s Story (2006), abandoning all three books midway through.
And yet, I recalled loving Stephen King’s early novels so much. Seemingly everything published under his name between 1974 and 1983 was pure gold. Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, The Stand…I had gone through all of those books like a hot knife through butter. And that was back when I had the distracted mind of a teenager.
I wondered if my tastes had changed, or maybe matured. For example, I still enjoy the music of the Canadian rock group Rush. But I have backed off from my teenage assertions that Neil Peart’s lyrics are absolutely brilliant, a complete system of philosophy set to music.
The fifty-something eye can simply not see the world through the teenage lens. Therefore, a rereading of The Dead Zone would be a worthwhile test. Had Stephen King changed? Or had I changed?
‘The Dead Zone’: not quite a horror novel
The Dead Zone is the story of Johnny Smith, a Maine English teacher who emerges from a car accident and a four-year coma with psychic powers. Not long after his awakening, Smith discovers that he has an important mission to perform, one involving an act of political violence. But in committing this one act, Smith will literally save the world.
Although there is a serial murderer subplot, The Dead Zone is not a horror novel in the conventional sense. If Stephen King hadn’t written it, The Dead Zone would have been shelved in the science fiction section. The Dead Zone reminds me of something the late Michael Crichton would have written.
So what did I think? Forty years later, I will tell you the same thing I would have told you in 1984: The Dead Zone is an absolutely brilliant novel. I enjoyed The Dead Zone just as much as a 56-year-old as I did at the age of not-quite-sixteen. In fact, I enjoyed it more, because there were some layers and references that went over my head forty years ago, that I appreciated this time around.
The power of narrative drive
Why is The Dead Zone such a good novel? The premise? Well, yes, the premise is an intriguing one. But Stephen King, in the early years, made magic with vampires in ’Salem’s Lot, his second novel. Vampires were hardly original by the time ’Salem’s Lot was published in 1975. Bram Stoker had already done them seventy-eight years earlier.
The Dead Zone has a compelling premise and strong central characters. More than that, though, The Dead Zone has a strong narrative drive. Although by no means a short book, there is not a single wasted scene in The Dead Zone. There are no meandering subplots.
The problem of the Frankenstory
Fairy Tale, by contrast, is what I would call a Frankenstory. It lacks a coherent wholeness. If you read the book, you’ll find that it is actually two novels in one. There is the “in-this-world” story that comes in the first half of the book. And then there is the portal fantasy.
Or, no…that isn’t exactly right. It would be more accurate to say that Stephen King devotes a full novel’s worth of space setting up the main story premise in Fairy Tale.
I first noticed that Stephen King’s style had changed back in 1986, when I read It. Whereas before his novels and stories had moved along a straight narrative throughline, now they meandered to and fro.
What else makes a novel a Frankenstory? A story with too many characters, especially point-of-view characters. (This is a particularly pernicious trap for many fantasy authors.)
***
Anyway, I very much enjoyed my reread of The Dead Zone. The book really is that good. I recommend it for those who would like to read Stephen King at the top of his game.
**When walking down lonely roads at night, beware the hellhounds!**
Jason Kelley is a college filmmaker who has accepted a challenge: walk eleven miles down the most haunted road in rural Ohio, the so-called Shaman’s Highway.
If Jason completes his task, he’ll win a $2,000 prize.
But before he reaches his destination, he’ll have to cope with evil spirits, trees that come to life, an undead witch, and packs of roving hellhounds!
A creepy supernatural thriller! Not for the faint of heart!
These are very good stories, on the whole. I enjoy Benson’s work somewhat more than I like that of his contemporary, M.R. James. Benson’s tales are more lurid, prefiguring the pulp writers of the 1930s and 1940s.
E.F. Benson’s ghost stories influenced H.P. Lovecraft, who influenced Stephen King.
Benson’s stories do follow a pattern, however. A single male protagonist travels to a location where supernatural events are known to take place. Often this is a resort, an old manor, or a guest house.
Strange things happen, and the action builds to a not unpredictable climax. The haunted location is usually the scene of a gruesome murder in the distant past.
So yes, there is a formula, but an entertaining one. If you like ghost stories with an old-fashioned feel to them, you might want to give this collection a try.
The Walking Dead debuted on AMC in 2010. As most readers will know, The Walking Dead was a series about…the zombie apocalypse, of all things.
People die, come back to life, and prey on the living!
The Walking Dead was immensely popular from the get-go, among both critics and viewers.
But that didn’t last, as we’ll see shortly.
In one sense, the creators of The Walking Dead did not create anything new. The Walking Dead was not the first zombie tale available to viewers.
Since 1968, the filmmaker George A. Romero (1940-2017) had churned out movies in his “dead” series. These included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Diary of the Dead (2017).
While Romero’s movies enjoyed a strong cult following, they never really achieved mass appeal. Many horror movie fans liked them, but not much of anyone else did.
The appeal of The Walking Dead, on the other hand, extended far beyond the relatively small audiences that are usually drawn to extreme horror.
The Walking Dead was similar to Romero’s movies. But also very different.
The Walking Dead had plenty of flesh-eating zombies, just like the George A. Romero’s films. The Walking Dead was violent and intense, just like the films of Romero.
But unlike Romero’s films, The Walking Dead was also focused on quality scripts and character development. The Walking Dead was as much a drama series as a horror series.
And the drama was top-notch. Many viewers cared more about the characters and their struggles than they did about the zombies.
Herein lay the difference.
As a result of this difference, The Walking Dead attracted millions of viewers who had never had any interest in the horror genre—and certainly not in the gruesome zombie sub-genre of horror.
I was amazed at how many of my female friends, in particular, became diehard fans of the show. Women who, in high school, would have scoffed at the idea of reading a Stephen King novel.
Even my mother enjoyed the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. And my mom had never had any interest in horror movies. (She’d always hated them, in fact.)
***
The “secret sauce” of The Walking Dead was the well-written drama and character development mentioned above, interwoven with the expected tropes of the zombie genre. The combination of the drama and the horror made The Walking Dead a favorite of anyone who loved a good story.
But then things deteriorated. During the fifth and sixth seasons, the taut storytelling and character development of the first few seasons were replaced with repetitive violence and gore—an insidious temptation in anything zombie-related.
This trend hit a nadir in the first episode of the seventh season. The seventh season’s initial installment began with an act of sadistic human-on-human violence that was well…over the top.
This was the now famous—or infamous—“bat episode”. The villain Negan brutally killed two of the show’s main characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
I watched it, and hated it.
I wasn’t alone. Millions of other viewers hated it, too.
As more than one critic pointed out, The Walking Dead had degenerated into “torture porn”.
George A. Romero’s zombie films had also wallowed in the excesses of human depravity and cruelty.
This, too, is a common trope in zombie stories. It’s a natural outcome of the genre’s premise. As the world descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, the surviving humans give in to all the evil impulses that society ordinarily keeps in check.
That theme has its place, but it can easily be overdone—even in a zombie apocalypse story.
George A. Romero’s movies overdid it.
And now The Walking Dead had overdone it, too. In a big way.
***
But why?
Here’s my theory: The Walking Dead’s producers, writers, and showrunners had lost sight of what made the show so darned great in its first few seasons.
Or maybe they never identified it to begin with….
***
Over the years, I’ve followed numerous rock bands, novelists, and movie producers whose creative careers rise and fall with the following trajectory:
The creator comes out of nowhere with a sequence of masterpieces. This might be a run of near-perfect albums, page-turning novels, or edge-of-the-seat movies.
Then one day, the creator releases something that “isn’t quite up to their usual standard”.
Then the next thing is equally lackluster.
And the next thing. And so on. Nothing is ever quite the same again.
***
Such a creator may continue to ride the coattails of their previous work in the marketplace, but the glory days never return. After the debacle of Season Seven, AMC continued to milk the cash cow of The Walking Dead for four more seasons (plus a slew of spinoffs).
But for most of us, the magic of those first few seasons was gone.
What is the cause of this observable and so often repeating phenomenon? A rock band, novelist, or filmmaker shouldn’t be subject to the age-related declines that are so inescapable for athletes.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to artists. It can happen to restauranteurs, self-employed tradespersons, and corporate employees.
***
This is the other side of quality control.
Just as you need to understand what you are doing wrong when things go badly, you also need to understand what you have done right when you hit one out of the park.
Or hit a bunch of them out of the park.
***
How do you know that?
You analyze your process. You identify your secret sauce, and keep on doing what works.
It wouldn’t have been difficult for the writers, producers, and showrunners of The Walking Dead to get together and say: “What makes our show so successful is strong dramatic storytelling, combined with the horror elements of the zombie genre. So let’s keep doing that!”
Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
The Rockland Horror 5is presently in production. The fifth book will mark the end of the historical arc of the series. The series will continue in modern times (post-1985) with a spinoff series.
If you’re new to The Rockland Horror series, start here. If you’ve read the first four books already, you can preorder Book 5 here.
Below is a series of scenes from THE ROCKLAND HORROR 4, an upcoming installment in THE ROCKLAND HORROR series.
In the following scenes, undead samurai warriors have invaded the town of Cumminsville, Kansas!
They’ve come across the Pacific Ocean and half a continent. They’re on their way to Rockland, Indiana, of course!
***
From THE ROCKLAND HORROR 4:
As the dusk fell, a man named Roy Hollis pushed back his wife’s frilly curtains from the living room window of his one-story farmhouse. Roy’s farm lay four miles outside the town limits of Cumminsville. The middle of nowhere, really.
Roy gazed out across the rows of his cornfield.
He had a bad feeling tonight.
Something foul was afoot.
The sun had begun to set about an hour ago, but there was still a trace of sunlight above the western horizon. It burned the top of the cornstalks gold, orange, and red.
Roy strained his eyes examining the cornfield. He was sure he had seen a trace of movement amid the cornstalks.
There was no wind tonight. It might have been a stoat or a bobcat. The little farm was surrounded by woods, and animals of every kind.
Roy hoped that it was something as harmless as a stoat or a bobcat.
“Whatsamatter, Pa?” Randy asked. Randy was Roy’s fourteen-year-old son.
Roy turned around, and was a little startled to see Randy standing just behind him.
“You alright, Pa?”
“I’m fine, son. It’s just—don’t sneak up on me like that, okay?”
“Sure. But what’s wrong outside? Why are you looking out the window?”
“I just thought I saw something moving out in the cornfield,” Roy said.
“You want me to fetch the .22 and go have a look?” Randy responded eagerly.
Randy was disappointed that the war had ended before he was old enough to serve. He was always looking for some excuse to fetch the family’s .22 rifle and go on a mock patrol.
“No,” Roy said. “Don’t you go out there.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t go. Now listen to me, son.”
“Yessir,” Randy said, deflated.
Randy’s other son, twelve-year-old Micah, sat at the kitchen table, poring over a copy of Life magazine.
Life magazine was filled with news about the war. Roy did not need to read Life. He already knew all about the war. He had been there, done that. Roy was a recent veteran, after all.
Although he had been married and old enough to avoid the draft, Roy had nevertheless enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He had honestly believed that Hitler and Hirohito had designs on taking over the United States. They would plant their Rising Sun and swastika flags not just in godless New York and Washington DC, but also in little salt-of-the-earth towns like Cumminsville, Kansas.
That prospect might seem far-fetched now. It had seemed all too realistic in December 1941, when Germany and Japan were winning all the battles, and taking territory left and right.
Roy had joined the United States Navy and served in the Pacific. He had had a few close calls near the end of the war, when the Japanese started going after American ships with those kamikaze suicide attacks.
His war, though, had been nothing like that of the marines who had been tasked with the duty of going ashore, and removing the enemy from their entrenched island positions. Roy was very grateful that he had chosen the Navy, and not the Marine Corps.
Since returning to Cumminsville, Roy had occasionally found himself on edge. Lingering anxiety from the war, he supposed. There were articles about that in the newspapers, too. Men who had returned from the war, but who could not remove the war from inside their own heads.
“Got a bad feeling tonight,” Roy said to no one in particular.
His wife, however, answered him from the kitchen.
“You need to relax, Roy,” Mabel Hollis said. “No one’s going to be sneaking up on the farmhouse. There are no Japanese soldiers in Cumminsville.”
Mabel was cleaning up the remains of their dinner, recently concluded.
“I know that, Mabe,” he said, closing the curtain. “I know there are no Japanese soldiers in Kansas. Of course I know that.”
Tonight, however, he wasn’t completely certain that was true. Tonight he had a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, and he couldn’t say why.
***
Some time later, the Hollis family was listening to a broadcast of The Jack Benny Program on the big Magnadyne radio in the living room of the farmhouse. Mabel, Randy, and Micah all laughed uproariously throughout the show, but Jack Benny’s jokes simply didn’t resonate with Roy like they had before the war.
By the time the thirty-minute show ended, Roy had barely cracked a smile.
Moreover, he had a persistent feeling that something was in his barn that didn’t belong there. The same thing that had been in his cornfield an hour ago.
He couldn’t have described exactly how he knew this. It came to him in a vision. Not a vivid, picture-perfect vision like the evangelical preachers sometimes claimed to have. This was a vague sensation, partly seen and partly only felt.
In any case, though, Roy sensed that it would not let him go until he checked, and knew for certain.
He began to stand up from his rocking chair.
Mabel looked over at him uneasily. She had been sitting on the sofa, working on one of her knitting projects while she listened to the radio.
Randy and Micah usually occupied the floor while the family consumed radio programs. The boys sat Indian-style throughout the broadcasts, leaning forward with rapt attention. They were still there, even though Jack Benny had just concluded.
The evening news broadcast was beginning. Randy was interested in news about the emerging postwar order—or rather, disorder. Randy was still planning to enlist when he turned eighteen. He said that by then, there would be another war, this one with the Ruskies.
Now Randy and Micah were looking up at their father, though. Roy stood in the middle of the living room.
“I think I’ll go have a look-see in the barn,” he said.
“Why?” Mabel asked. “Did you hear something?”
“No,” Roy answered. This was the truth. Also, Mabel was no fool. There was no way she would believe that he had heard something in the barn while Jack Benny was playing on the radio. No one’s hearing was that sharp.
“Want me to—?” Randy began.
“No,” Roy said. “Stay here with your mother and brother.”
***
Roy did not take the .22 rifle to the barn with him. He took a 12-gauge shotgun that he kept in the home’s mud room, immediately off the kitchen.
Before he set off, he lit a kerosene lantern. That would not only light the way, it would also keep the mosquitos at bay.
Roy desperately hoped that all of this would turn out to be nothing, that a few hungry mosquitos would be the worst perils he would encounter on his way to the barn and back.
He exited the farmhouse through the door off the mudroom. He began his walk out to the barn, the lantern in one hand, the 12-gauge in the other.
The short walk, across the main yard and skirting the edge of the main cornfield, was uneventful. No mosquitos, even.
Then he came to the big, unpainted wooden barn. The barn had been there since the late 1800s, when Roy’s grandfather, father, and uncles had built it.
He pushed the sliding barn door open, making it creak on its runners. He set the lantern down in the grass while he did this, to free one hand.
The barn door open, Roy picked up the lantern again and looked inside. He was reminded again that he needed to electrify the barn, now that he was home for good. That had been on his to-do list even before the war. There was adequate light, though, between the lantern, and what moonlight came in through the barn’s two clear glass windows.
The family had one horse, a gelding named Priam. Priam was edged back against the rear of his stall. The horse’s eyes were blank, almost as if the animal were drugged.
Priam was…scared? Was that possible?
Roy set the kerosene lantern on his nearby workbench. (He kept the 12-gauge in his right hand.) Then he spoke soothingly to the horse.
“Whatsamatter, Priam?”
The horse did not answer him. He just continued to stare at Roy with those blank, dark eyes of his.
What was there for Priam to be afraid of? There were no wolves in this part of Kansas; there hadn’t been for nearly a hundred years.
And on a related matter: why, exactly, had he deemed it necessary to come out here?
It was just that very intense feeling he had gotten, while listening to Jack Benny. And that half-formed vision of an intruder
Roy heard something shift behind him. He turned around and saw the intruder. And yet, that description did not really do justice to what he saw.
The creature standing in the open doorway of the barn looked vaguely like a Japanese soldier from the late conflict. And yet, it wasn’t a Japanese soldier, either. It was some hideous malformation that was based on a Japanese soldier, but it had elements of something else.
Since returning from the war, Roy had taken an odd interest in Japanese history and culture. This interest bewildered even him. But he felt a compulsive need to learn more about his former enemy.
There were several books on Japanese history in the Cumminsville public library. These books informed Roy that Japan had long been a martial society. He had read about the samurai warriors, who had hacked each other to pieces with curved, razor-sharp swords.
The samurai had dressed for combat in armor that was designed to intimidate the enemy, as well as protect the wearer. Roy had seen illustrations of the old samurai warriors, clad in full battle gear.
The creature standing in the open doorway of the barn looked something like one of those medieval samurai warriors. Or a misshapen version of that.
The thing had glowing red eyes.
“Wha—?” Roy said, trembling.
The intruder opened its mouth, revealing rows of long, canine teeth. No—more like crocodile teeth.
In the space of just two seconds, a complicated series of thoughts went through Roy’s mind. There was no way he could even begin to understand what this thing was, or exactly what it wanted.
What was clear enough was that it was hostile. He had to kill it now, or it would kill him.
Roy began to raise the shotgun.
But the intruder was too fast.
Roy Hollis’s shotgun did go off in the final second of his life, as the intruder raced forward at him, but the muzzle of the gun was knocked astray. The shotgun boomed, and buckshot scattered harmlessly into the far wall of the barn.
Roy’s blood splattered on the wall of the barn, too.
Priam, the gelding, began bucking and whinnying in his stall.
The horse drew the attention of the supernatural creature.
The intruder moved with impossible speed, covering the floorspace of the barn in a mere second.
A few seconds after that, Priam was silent, too.
***
“Did you hear that?” Randy said, addressing his mother and younger brother. “Out there in the barn, I mean.”
Micah and Mabel nodded. They had all heard the sound of the shotgun going off. They had also heard Priam, whinnying in what sounded like distress, before his whinnying was abruptly cut silent. This far out in the country, sounds carried long distances with clarity. And the barn was a short walk from the house.
“I heard it,” Mabel said. Then she added, hopefully, “Your pa might have killed a weasel or a skunk out there.”
Randy didn’t immediately contradict his mother, but he didn’t share her interpretation, either. That wouldn’t explain why Priam had whinnied, and then gone instantly silent.
“I’m going out there to see,” Randy said.
Mabel began to object. Randy, in a rare act of outright adolescent defiance, cut her off.
“I’m going out there,” he said. “Pa may be in trouble. He may need my help.”
“All right,” she acquiesced. “But give him a few more minutes, okay? Then you can go out there and see.”
“A few more minutes,” he agreed. “Then I need to go.”
***
Randy stood on the front porch of the farmhouse, holding the twenty-two.
His mother had still not liked the idea of him going outside to investigate. But when another ten minutes had passed with no sign of Roy, Mabel had relented.
Looking out into the night, Randy called out for his father.
“Pa! Are you there?”
No answer.
Then a dark blur, roughly the size of a man, moved across his field of vision, in front of the barn.
Randy blinked. The shape had moved so fast that he could not fully catch sight of it, especially with the darkness factored in.
Then another blur. And another. Both of similar size and shape.
Then more blurs, rushing to and fro.
There were three shapes in total. They were moving across the yard in a bizarre, zigzagging pattern.
Randy knew, somehow, that these things were responsible for whatever had happened to his father.
(And something had to have happened; because his father had not returned to the house, or answered Randy’s calls.)
But what the heck were they? He had anticipated nothing like this.
“Where’s my pa?” Randy shouted, his voice trembling.
One of the blurs paused, perhaps midway between the barn and the front porch of the house.
It looked at Randy. And now Randy could see it, partially illuminated by the moonlight. But he could not believe it.
Randy took in the creature’s glowing red eyes. Its mouth opened, exposing razor-sharp teeth.
His hands shaking, Randy aimed the twenty-two and fired.
The thing darted out of the way,before Randy had even pulled the trigger.
Randy lowered the gun. Beneath his terror, and his dread regarding the fate of his father, was bewilderment. How had it moved so quickly? The thing traveled at a blinding speed, like a large, monstrous hummingbird.
That was the last thought that would ever go through fourteen-year-old Randy Hollis’s mind.
One of the thing’s companions took Randy from his right side. Randy never even saw it coming; and he never learned the full truth of what had happened to his father, either.
That’s the end of the excerpt!
This is a secondary plot line—which takes place far from Rockland, Indiana. But it will give you a taste of that the book will be like.
THE ROCKLAND HORROR is where history meets horror!
THE ROCKLAND HORROR 4 will be released in early April!
I’m presently working on The Rockland Horror 4. As the title suggests, this is the fourth installment in The Rockland Horror series.
The release date for the book has been set for May 3, 2022. It should be available before then, however. (I would imagine sometime in January or February of next year; March at the latest.)
If you would like to order the book in advance (at a reduced price), then you can do so here, via Amazon. Another advantage to the preorder is that the book will drop automatically onto your Kindle when it comes out.
If you would prefer to wait, or if you haven’t read the first three books of The Rockland Horror series, then you can either check back here (I’ll announce the actual release with a blog post, of course) or check The Rockland Horror series page at Amazon.
A note on reading order. While each of the books is a self-contained story, they are best read in order. If you haven’t read books 1, 2, and 3, I would recommend that you start with those.
It was a chilly, wet day in March 1917, and thirty-year-old Joe Cullen was overdue for a smoke break.
Joe shot a quick glance over his shoulder. He wanted to make sure that his foreman was nowhere in sight.
Joe was relieved to find himself completely alone on the tree-lined road. All around him, there was nothing but the silent woods. And the light, cold moisture falling from the leaden sky.
Well, almost nothing. There was the Briggs House, too.
This thought made him smile self-consciously. Country people and their superstitions. Never mind that Joe was as country as they came. He also read books, dagnabbit. He had knowledge of the broader world.
He bent and laid his shovel down in the long, sallow, late-winter grass at the edge of the road. The road itself was muddy, owing to the wet weather. He did not want the handle of his shovel to get muddy, too. He still had a lot of work to do with that shovel before quitting time.
That done, he stood, removed his gloves, and slipped them into the lower left side pocket of his coat. From the lower right side pocket he removed a box of Lucky Strikes and a box of wooden matches.
Joe was wearing a broad-rimmed hat, a treated canvas raincoat, and heavy boots. The overhanging tree branches—though still bare of leaves—also caught some of the light rainfall. But when you were working outside in weather like this for an entire day, it was impossible to avoid either the dampness or the chill.
Today’s precipitation was not a hard, driving rain; but it was a steady, unrelenting spittle that varied between mist and drizzle. Fireplace weather, Joe’s mother would have said.
But there would be no fireplace for Joe today—not until quitting time, at least; and that was still several hours away.
***
Joe was currently employed by the Indiana Department of Transportation, a brand-new state agency created by the Indiana Highway Act of two years prior. Joe was part of a crew that had been charged with preparing Washington Hill Road for paving.
At present, the road was all packed earth and gravel. It was literally the same road that had been used in the pioneer days. Washington Hill Road turned to mud every springtime, or even during a midsummer thunderstorm. That might have been suitable for the age of the horse. It would not do for the age of the automobile.
As he paused to light his cigarette—cupping both the cigarette and the match in his hands to shield them against the moisture in the air—Joe allowed himself a look at the Victorian mansion that was impossible to miss at this point on Washington Hill Road.
The Briggs House rose above him in the distance. The decrepit monolith appeared old-fashioned and dark, even when silhouetted against today’s cloudy gray sky.
The Briggs House was on the left side of the road. It stood at the top end of a long, winding, overgrown private lane that rose to a promontory. When the trees were bare, the roofline of the mansion could be partially glimpsed far below Washington Hill, Joe knew. He was a lifelong resident of Rockland, Indiana.
He smiled to himself, and took a drag on his cigarette. Joe Cullen knew all about the Briggs House—the murders, the whispered stories of witchcraft and necromancy. Much of that was pure fabrication, and at least half of it was pure nonsense.
Joe Cullen had no way of knowing that within a matter of minutes, he would hold an entirely changed attitude about the Briggs House.
About The Rockland Horror saga:
“A terrifying multigenerational horror saga set in a cursed house in Indiana. Zombies, evil spirits, and supernatural monsters!”
The third installment of The Rockland Horror saga is now available on Amazon:
The 20th century holds new horrors for Rockland, Indiana!
The year is 1917. In faraway Europe, the Great War rages on. The world waits anxiously to see if U.S. President Woodrow Wilson will take America into the conflict.
By now, the events of 1882 are fading into the stuff of legend, for all but the town of Rockland’s oldest residents.
I suspect, however, that Lovecraft’s excessive reliance on first-person narration traces to his generally weak sense of character and characterization. As I previously noted, every Lovecraft character is essentially the same person: a solitary male engaged in arcane pursuits, often with the assistance of an uncle who is a professor at Miskatonic University.
But all writers, I should note—me included—have their quirks and habitual crutches. This is not a condemnation of Lovecraft, but merely a literary observation.
