SOURCE: "Different Writers on Different Seasons," in Shadowings: The reader's Guide to Horror Fiction: 1981-1982, edited by Douglas E. Winter, Starmont House, 1983, pp. 38-43.

[Morrell, Ryan, and Grant are all noted authors of horror and suspense fiction. In the following forum, which originally appeared in the journal Fantasy Newsletter in 1982, they each provide an analysis of one of the four novellas in the collection Different Seasons.]

[David Morrell on Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption:]

Writers can be loosely separated into two groups—those who put in and those who take out. So F. Scott Fitzgerald believed. By this standard, anyone familiar with the work of Stephen King knows which category he belongs in. He's a putter-inner. He develops, amplifies, elaborates. His prose is packed with evocative descriptive details; his plots are crammed with twists and turns. We find exceptions, of course: his first novel, Carrie, is fairly short and lean, as is The Mist. A few of his short stories ("Strawberry Spring," for example) move along briefly and simply. For the most part, though, he tends toward bigness and fullness. A recently completed novel, IT, runs to almost 1300 manuscript pages. The Gunslinger, one of his many publications this year, is a part of an epic, The Dark Tower, that he estimates will eventually reach 3000 manuscript pages. Putter-inner indeed.

The impressive scope and density of his work is matched by the variety of forms he has turned to: short stories, novels, screenplays, essays, a non-fiction book about horror, and a comic book adaptation of his movie Creepshow. What was left for him to do? His latest book, Different Seasons, provides the answer. Somewhere between the short story and the novel lies a literary twilight zone called the novella. roughly 30,000 words, it can't be called short, but it's not exactly long either — a half-breed, if you will. In an afterword, King explains that following Salem's lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Firestarter he had "just enough gas left in the tank to throw off " one of these. Now all four are collected here.

Their subject seems as new to him as their format. Only one of the pieces belongs to the horror genre with which King's readers associate him, though some horrific passages do appear in two others. Alan Ryan . . . and Charles Grant will discuss them in the . . . reviews that follow. My own responsibility is the first novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which isn't horrific at all. Not to worry, though. I bring good news—it's wonderful, moving, entertaining. King is a master storyteller, no matter what kind of subject he writes about. Assuming you've read it (or plan to), I'll avoid discussing the plot, except to note that it's set in a prison and deals with the friendship between two convicts serving life terms. There's action, mystery, sentiment, an uplifting theme, a surprise conclusion. I read it at forty-thousand feet and never once remembered to grip the arms of my seat to hold the plane up. The reason I began this brief review by discussing King as a putter-inner is that I can't get over the amount of story King stuffs into this novella's 100 pages. Another writer might have taken three times the space and still not achieved the density King does. lots of vivid description, plenty of interesting background, plot complications galore, and all this texture is combined with speed. I attribute this amazing effect to King's understanding of the novella format. Too long to be short, too short to be long. The paradox results in characteristics normally associated with either the short story or the novel but not with both. In choosing this format, King gets the best of both extremes. Of course, the format alone can't account for the success of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (the title, by the way, is cleverly related to the plot). In an epigraph, King warns us to trust the tale, not its teller. Frankly, I'd just as soon trust the teller, and in this case, my trust paid off.

[Alan Ryan on Apt Pupil:]

Like many writers, I spend a lot of time standing around in bookstores. Very often, the remarks one overhears are at least as interesting as the latest titles just appearing on the shelves. For a writer, listening to random, unsolicited comments in front of the "Bestseller" or "New releases" shelves can be a very instructive and revealing exercise.

I heard a great deal of comment on Cujo when it was first published in hardcover. I heard more comments on it when, a year later, the paperback arrived. I heard people talking about it with friends and with clerks and cashiers. They hated it.

In the Barnes & Noble Bookstore on New York's Eighth Street, an outlet with an unusually high percentage of sophisticated, experienced readers, one asked a friend if she had read it. "Oh, I hated it," the friend replied. "I read all his other books and liked them, but this one was too much. It's just savage and cruel. The way he tortures everybody . . ."

Much could be said in response to this, of course, but I think the woman's meaning is clear. She simply does not wish to believe that the world is such a difficult, demanding, and often cruel place in which to live, that reality can be so damned harsh. If that woman presses on and continues to read Stephen King's work—and I'm satisfied that she will—she is going to be one very disturbed lady when she finishes Apt Pupil.

King's story-telling rests on a solid bedrock of reality and, to a very large extent, it is this casual realism that makes his everyday horrors so unnerving. Todd Bowden, the "apt pupil" of the second story in Different Seasons, is thirteen years old and, King tells us in the very first sentence, "the total ail-American kid." When we first see him, he is delivering newspapers, riding "his twenty-six-inch Schwinn," and wearing "Nike running shoes."

On that first page, Todd is blond, blue-eyed, and "smiling a summer vacation smile." Much later in the story, when he smiles again, it looks very different indeed. "Todd smiled: a weird upward corkscrewing of the lips. A strange sardonic light danced and fluttered in his eyes." And on the last page: "He was smiling excitedly, his eyes dancing . . . the excited smile of tow-headed boys going off to war."

Much, of course, has happened along the way. Todd has met and become inextricably tied—both circumstantially and psychologically—to Kurt Dussander, an excommandant of a Nazi concentration camp, now living out his last years under an alias in the California sunshine. Under the unwilling but detailed tutelage of Dussander, Todd is drawn more and more into a fatally entangling web constructed of Dussander's recollections and his own dark taste for horror. He especially likes, as we all do sometimes, the "gooshy" parts, something to keep in mind the next time you hear the traffic reporter on the radio warning about rubber-necking delays at the site of an auto accident.

It may just be, King leads us to suspect in Apt Pupil, that there is nothing about smiling Todd Bowden in particular, as an individual, that leads him down the same path Kurt Dussander has followed, a path of random violence and bloodshed, crimes directed not at individuals but at anyone who happens to come along the road. rather, when we view the story on an allegorical level (or simply react to it on an allegorical level, as that lady in the bookstore unconsciously does), we suspect that, as with the events in Cujo, the story could just as readily take place next door . . . or, worse still, just down the hall or around the corner or even in the mirror. If "the things that live in the catacombs" ever get out, King suggests, "most of them would look like ordinary accountants. . . . And some of them might look like Todd Bowden."

King manages in Apt Pupil to make the story both realistically particular and universally applicable, creating a kind of double-whammy of horror for the reader. He gets us involved with the actual characters and at the same time lets us know, through their very realism, the quality that makes them so much like us, that they could, with little more than a name transplant, actually be us.

I don't think the unhappy lady in the bookstore is going to like Apt Pupil any more than she liked Cujo.

[Charles L. Grant on The Breathing Method:]

Literary critics are perhaps too fond on occasion of proclaiming certain narrative frameworks outdated. Stories told in the form of letters and/or journals are supposedly passé, as are those whose narrator is sitting at a campfire or in a train compartment or in a club room. Style (the manner in which an author puts his words together) does, of course, change with the times when we are speaking of so-called popular literature.

There are styles which, by virtue of the author's power with words, transcend the contemporary. And no critic who has ever lived has yet been able to travel into the future in order to see just which style has that particular transcendence.

By the same token, it is sheer folly to deny an author a literary framework simply because it has been used before, no matter how often, no matter how popular it once was.

A true storyteller uses whatever works for the story being told; and there are few better frameworks than a narrator sitting down with an audience (both within and beyond the fiction itself) and saying: "I am going to tell you a story. You can believe it or not as you will, but it happened."

Stephen King, perhaps the time's premier storyteller, isn't afraid to resurrect "old" frameworks. One of these is the club setting. He has used it twice—in "The Man Who Could Not Shake Hands" and now in The Breathing Method. And in both instances he has also exhibited the understanding that, in the best of these types, there is always more than one story being told—the main story, which is ended by the last page, and peripheral ones dealing with the club members, which may or may not end before the narrator is finished.

What is marvelous about the club at 249B East 35th Street is its uniqueness. It is at the same time Kiplingesque and King—not an ordinary club, not an ordinary building, its staff very far from ordinary indeed. One does not go to 249B and listen to a story; one goes, listens and experiences rather odd things. The narrator of The Breathing Method, David, is at once telling the story he heard and the story he has lived over the years he has been going to the club—"if it is a club."

The Breathing Method itself (that tale told by member Emlyn McCarran) is King speaking with a different voice, less colloquial and less emotional than usual; in that respect, perhaps less powerful than it might have been. But it succeeds in spite of this because of the setting—where the emotion and the power come from those listening rather than the speaker.

In this case, the club motto—"It is the tale, not he who tells it"—is more than accurate, because the tale of a doctor and his young female patient gains depth not from its particulars, but from eliciting reactions, especially from David.

There will be calls, I would imagine, for more stories to come from 249B—and I am certainly doing the same. Yet there is one I don't want to know—how how the club was created, who "Stevens" really is and what is really upstairs—because it is not always what you say, but what you don't say, that brings the chill in spite of the fire on the grate.