The latest historical context essay from the excellent ‘Stephen King Revisited’ website showed up in my inbox this week. If you’re a King fan, I highly recommend you check out these essays. Penned by King expert Bev Vincent, they often contain information that is new to even a dedicated consumer of King trivia.
This new instalment is devoted to Pet Sematary, which is right up there with The Shining and ’Salem’s Lot as one of my all time favourite King novels. Along with the story behind its conception, Vincent recounts King’s utter dislike for the book – in fact, if not for a contractual obligation with his (soon to be former) publisher Doubleday, it might never have seen the light of day.
“When he reread it six weeks later, he deemed it too gruesome and disturbing to be published,” Vincent explains. “His wife found the scene where Gage Creed dies hard to deal with. Taking her advice, and that of [fellow author] Peter Straub, he put the manuscript back in a drawer, where he intended it to stay forever, and moved on to The Dead Zone.”
After writing Pet Sematary, King seemed to lose his appetite for unhappily-ever-afters. He had been quite the proponent of them in his early career. The infamous fate of Tad Trenton in Cujo is perhaps the most cited, but if we scan King’s bibliography we find a trove of endings that are outright grim or which at best insinuate that hope might grow from the aftermath of terrible events.
Carrie. Under her mother’s thumb and tormented by bullies, Carrie White lashes out – and ends up dead for her troubles.
’Salem’s Lot. Pretty much everyone close to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie falls victim to vampires. A plot to exact vengeance subs in for a happy ending.
The Shining. Wendy and Danny Torrance get away in the end, but there’s no redemption for poor old Jack.
Rage. About as depressing and miserable an ending as one can imagine.
The Long Walk. Nihilism, fatalism, despair, uncomfortable shoes.
Roadwork. You can’t beat City Hall.
The Running Man. The only way to overthrow your oppressors is via a kamikaze mission.
And then we have the short stories. Jesus, nearly every story in Night Shift comes to a depressing or blackly comical conclusion, as do half of those in Skeleton Crew.
In looking back on the ‘Richard Bachman’ series of books, King suggested that they showed he was “still callow enough to believe in unhappy endings”. But is he right? Is an unhappy ending a childish way of interpreting life through fiction?
Given the above list of novels and story collections also represents the preponderance of my favourite King works, my answer of ‘no’ won’t come as a surprise.
To refute this, I intend to throw more of King’s own words back at him. In On Writing, he insists that an author has to tell the truth about life, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be to certain sections of society. As someone who watched his mother-in-law die from leukaemia, I am well credentialed to attest that sometimes there are no happy endings in real life. She was the lynchpin of our family, the beating heart, and the ramifications from her passing continue to wash through our lives.
Perhaps that is why many readers detest unhappy endings. Not because they are callow, but because they aren’t – they are too close to the stripped bone of truth. The broader public wants verisimilitude from its entertainment, but only to a point. I suspect this explains why the godawful Doctor Sleep has a higher rating on Goodreads than the brilliant Revival. In its harrowing finale, Revival tells us the potential ‘happier ever after’ religion has force-fed us is a lie – and that’s something the average person would rather not contemplate.
The corollary question, then: What do readers like me (and I’ll warrant we’re a minority) get out of a downbeat ending?
I’d like to say it shows we’re mature enough to handle that ‘stripped bone of truth’, but I don’t think that’s right. I enjoyed King’s ugly endings long before I could begin to understand the philosophical concepts outlined above.
I suspect it comes back to the visceral thrill addiction that is at the root of much horror fiction. King himself likened it to a rollercoaster ride, where a passenger gets a kick out of a simulated near-death experience because he knows he will be safe in the end. With an unhappy ending, the rollercoaster flies off its rails and crashes to the ground. My reactions to Tad Trenton’s death in Cujo and the horrifying Lovecraftian vision of the afterlife in Revival were much the same: I can’t believe this is happening!
An unhappy ending delivers a dose of fear undiluted by hope. That means a more intense rush – one that’s too intense for a good many readers.