SOURCE: "The Mist" and "Different Seasons," in Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, New American library, 1984, pp. 86-94, 104-11.

[Winter is an American fiction writer and critic. In the following essays, he examines The Mist and Different Seasons.]

In The Mist, Stephen King conjures the quintessential faceless horror: a white opaque mist that enshrouds the northeastern United States (if not the world) as the apparent result of an accident at a secret government facility. This short novel is a paradigm of the complicated metaphors of Faustian experimentation and technological horror consistently woven into the fiction of Stephen King. Those who read The Mist will not likely forget the haunting inability of its characters to comprehend, let alone explain, what is happening to them. It has been claimed that the central fantasy of horror fiction is "that the unknowable can be known and related to in some meaningful fashion" [John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and romance, 1976]. The Mist completely belies that view, presenting a chilling dislocation in which horror and mystery are no less adequate than science, religion, or materialism to explain the human condition. As in Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1937), the whys and wherefores are secondary, even tertiary, as King unveils a reality that cannot be solved and, indeed, that cannot even be understood. In so doing, he demolishes the artifices through which we perceive reality, noting how much science, religion, and materialism shape our thinking and our lives, and questioning whether these shapes are desirable.

The technological horror theme is an obvious exploitation of the subversive tendencies of horror fiction. The common interpretation of the massive interest in supernatural fiction in the late 1800s, when many classic ghost stories were published, is that these stories represented the "swan song" of an earlier, pre-technological way of life. That view is put forward often to explain the current upsurge of interest in macabre fiction and film. Charles l. Grant has noted that horror fiction serves as "the dark side of romanticism," not simply a medium of escape but a rejection of the real horror and skepticism generated by our technological civilization in favor of a sentimental vision that confirms the possibility of the unknown. It thus seems quite logical that the contemporary horror story often utilizes an exaggeration or extrapolation of modern technology as its surrogate for the unknown, operating as a cautionary tale that simultaneously rejects technology while reassuring the reader that things could nevertheless be worse.

The halcyon years of "technohorror" were the 1950s, when fear of the ultimate possibilities of mankind's technology, omened by the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was exposed at the visceral and readily dismissed level of the grade B science fiction movie. As the 1960s and 1970s progressed, celluloid unrealities called Them (1954) and The Beginning of the End (1957) were hauntingly evoked in grim realities with equally colorful names like Agent Orange, Three Mile Island, and love Canal. Our belated awareness of the negative implications of technology, coupled with growing doubts about the ability of technology to solve the complex problems of modern society, has rendered "technohorror" a theme of undeniable currency, requiring the horror writer to take but a simple step beyond front-page news.

As a child of the fifties whose anxieties were fed by B movies and whose "fall from the cradle" occurred with the sublime intersection of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the launching of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, it seems only natural that Stephen King has written about "technohorror" since his earliest efforts at fiction. His high school story "I Was a Teenage Grave robber" concerned the monstrous results of secret experiments with corpses, while his first serious attempt at a novel, The Aftermath—also written during high school—depicted a post-holocaust world molded by the directives of a computer that scientists could no longer control. Although Carrie included a suggestion of genetic mutation, The Stand was King's first published novel to probe in depth the fears generated by technological civilization. Both The Stand and Firestarter linked science and authority in an amoral tryst, yet concluded with an optimistic hope for new beginnings. In The Mist, King posits only the end.

David Drayton, the narrator of The Mist, is a commercial artist—a person whose career is devoted to creating artificial representations of human life. With his wife, Stephanie, and five-year-old son, Billy, Drayton leads an almost idyllic existence at a lakefront home near Bridgton, Maine—a replica of the home where King and his family lived from the summer of 1975 to the summer of 1977. Their life is shattered by a freakish summer storm that sends the Draytons to their cellar, where David has a remarkable precognitive dream—the very same dream, in fact, that caused Stephen King, after weathering such a storm, to write the story:

I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and behind Him everything that had been green turned a bad gray and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.

In the morning, a peculiar mist brews over the lake. It is moving across the water toward Bridgton—moving against the wind. When Drayton's wife asks what it is, Drayton thinks: " . . . the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God."

Drayton drives his son and a neighbor into town to report downed electrical lines and to obtain grocery supplies. They find the Federal Foods Supermarket jammed with people. Speculation is rampant that something has gone wrong at the government's secret "Arrowhead Project" across the lake. As Drayton waits in the checkout line, he is distracted by an intangible concern. Billy interrupts his reverie, and Drayton observes: " . . . suddenly, briefly, the mist of disquiet that had settled over me rifted, and something terrible peered through from the other side—the bright and metallic face of pure terror."

The mist settles over the supermarket, and although many people rush out to view the peculiar phenomenon, none returns. Gradually, with fever-dream intensity, the "pure terror" infecting Drayton is animated as the monstrous inhabitants of the mist are divulged. Tentacles writhe out of the mist to snatch away a bag-boy; bug-things stretching four feet in length flop along the store windows, only to be gobbled up by pterodactyl-like monstrosities that plummet out of the mist. Huge spidery creepy-crawlers spin corrosive webs, and segmented parodies of lobsters crawl across the parking lot. The spawn of the mist seem endless in horrifying variety; but the mist, and what it signifies, is more important than its monsters: "It wasn't so much the monstrous creatures that lurked in the mist. . . . It was the mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will." The mist takes on a symbolic significance—it is the unknown, not only in a physical sense but as the realm of experimentation.

Conspicuous by its absence from The Mist is a stock character of the "technohorror" nightmare—the scientist. We are offered only straw men: two young soldiers trapped within the supermarket who commit gruesome suicide in confirmation of the feared source of the disaster. The culprits of the Arrowhead Project remain as faceless and opaque as the mist itself. And this only increases our unease; there is no patent lunatic or misguided zealot on which to foist our responsibility.

The Mist takes the form of a nightmarish, surreal disaster film. The besieged occupants of the supermarket are a representative sample of humanity, put to the test of the external threat of the mist and the internal claustrophobia—and madness—of the supermarket. They undergo hysteria and fragmentation, and acts of courage and of stupidity result only in bloodshed while the inevitable leadership struggles take place.

King deftly creates the tension between illogic, religion, and materialism that is his forte. Drayton's neighbor, a vacationing New York City attorney, proves not to be a pillar of objectivity or calm; rather, he heads a group of people—wryly described by Drayton as the "Flat Earth Society"—which simply refuses to believe in the disaster despite quite tangible evidence. They walk into the mist, to their deaths. Another group, which grows in number as time passes, believes perhaps too strongly in the disaster, interpreting it as God's punishment. They are headed by Mrs. Carmody, an otherwise innocuous old lady given to folk tales and remedies, who seemingly thrives on the disaster. This group soon demands a human sacrifice in appeasement of the mist. A third group, including Drayton, attempts a rational, pragmatic solution to the horror. They construct defenses, fight off the intrusions of monsters, and ultimately undertake an ill-fated expedition to a neighboring pharmacy. Their failure gives credence to the increasing zealotry of Mrs. Carmody and leads Drayton to organize an escape effort.

Readily apparent in The Mist is the influence of George A. romero, virtuoso director of the classic low-budget horror film Night of the living Dead (1968) and its powerful sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1979). On one level, romero's films plunder our dire unease with death and decay, hypothesizing that the dead will return to life with a singular hunger for human flesh. On another level, however, these films consider, in an intelligent and ironic sense, the horrific siege of reality. romero terms his masterwork "an allegory meant to draw a parallel between what people are becoming and the idea that people are operating on many levels of insanity that are only clear to themselves." [Filmmakers Newsletter, quoted in Danny Peary, Cult Movies, 1981.]

In Night of the living Dead, romero's zombies trap a group of strangers within a deserted farmhouse. romero inverts the commercially successful disaster film, supplanting melodrama with nihilistic abandon: the young, attractive lovers are killed in an escape attempt; the older businessman becomes a raving coward rather than a calculating, take-charge leader; the little girl turns on her mother, butchering her with a garden tool and then devouring her; the "token" black becomes the leader—and only survivor—of the defense, only to emerge the next morning so shattered by the experience that he is mistakenly shot as a zombie. The theme is replayed to an almost absurdist premise in Dawn of the Dead (which was produced after The Mist had been written, but before it was published), in which a similar band of survivors barricades itself within a suburban shopping mall.

The thematic parallels between The Mist and romero's "living Dead" films are numerous; perhaps more striking is the manner in which the imagery of The Mist evokes the intensely visual and visceral quality of film. "You're supposed to visualize the story in grainy black and white," notes King. Unlike any of King's earlier fiction of length, it is written entirely in first-person singular and structured on a scene-by-scene basis. And its narrator consistently repeats, as if in self-assurance, that the creatures of the mist are the stuff of grade B horror movies. Not only does King thereby reinforce the several levels of perspective; he presents an irony equal to that of the "just the flu" epitaph of his short story "Night Surf"—that the end of the world, when it comes, should indeed resemble a grade B horror movie.

The defense of the Federal Foods Supermarket takes on surreal aspects that intermingle shock and sardonic humor, paralleling the shopping mall confrontations of Dawn of the Dead. One of the pterodactyl-like creatures breaches the defenses, savaging a bystander before being set aflame. King recounts the incident with delightful imagery and an obvious send-up of the gravely serious narrator of traditional Gothic fiction:

I think that nothing in the entire business stands in my memory so strongly as that bird-thing from hell blazing a zigzagging course above the aisles of the Federal Supermarket, dropping charred and smoking bits of itself here and there. It finally crashed into the spaghetti sauces, splattering ragu and Prince and Prima Salsa everywhere like gouts of blood.

A bug-thing immediately clambers through the broken window, but before the male defenders can act, a sixty-year-old school teacher, Mrs. Reppler, charges with a can of raid in each hand and sprays it to death.

Although clearly self-conscious, The Mist is not parody. like George romero, King attempts—and succeeds—in balancing a pandemonium seesaw whose ends are occupied by pure horror and outrageous black humor. We are disturbed by The Mist because, like its narrator, we do not know exactly what to do when confronted by its horrors: "I was making some sound. laughing. Crying. Screaming. I don't know."

The typical disaster film produces a fascist answer—strong leadership will persevere, while the weak are dispensable. In The Mist, Stephen King, again like George romero, holds differently: horror produces not the best but the worst in people, and when it does produce a semblance of good, that good is usually unrecognizable to the world outside. Drayton is less than a heroic figure; uncertain of the fate of his wife, he nevertheless feels compelled to have sex with another of the survivors, and he is drawn into the doomed expedition to the drugstore. Finally, under the compulsion of the growing religious mania of Mrs. Carmody and her followers—and of the simple urge to see the sun again—Drayton leads a tiny group to his land rover, again suffering the loss of two companions. By the novel's close, Drayton and his comrades are barricaded within a Howard Johnson's; only then does he ponder the difficulty of refueling—and only then does he face the possibility that the mist may go on forever.

The flight from the supermarket is Stephen King's most literal and most lovecraftian night journey. Drayton's narrative has no ending in the traditional sense. His group is heading south, hoping for refuge from the dark and seemingly endless tunnel of the mist, but they find only a surreal landscape of desolation and monstrosity. Yet the ultimate horror is nearly unseen, and it is all the more horrible given Drayton's dream on the night before the coming of the mist:

Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny doors of human perception. . . .

I don't know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. . . . Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.

This numinous vision, a nonrational confrontation with the apparently divine, omens the impossibility of escape. The growing sense of a mysterious profanity, latent in the religious hysteria of Mrs. Carmody, is manifest in this dark mirror-image of the God of Drayton's dream. like The Stand, The Mist explicitly evokes Biblical stories of plagues embodying the wrath of God—and, of course, the archetypal story of the great flood. Although The Stand confirms the power of faith, The Mist refuses to offer a rainbow signaling man's triumph over adversity and the promise of a new day. As if animating Novalis's aphorism—"Where there are no gods, demons will hold sway"—King offers a universe without salvation, imbued with the feeling of one's own submergence—of being ant-like, trivial, before the footsteps of an unseeable God-thing.

For many readers, horror fiction is meaningful because its acceptance of the existence of evil implies the existence of good. Indeed, Russell Kirk contends [in The Surly Suller Bell, 1962] that supernatural fiction confirms "hierarchical" Christian values. The Mist is particularly terrifying because it proposes a transcendence of notions of good and evil, right and wrong; King moves his characters and readers through an ever-darkening universe of chaos and hostility. The line separating civilization from chaos—and indeed, life from extinction—has parted like the mist, and only "pure terror" remains.

The fiction of Stephen King offers no theological polemic, although—the aesthetics of The Mist notwithstanding—it does not embrace entirely the "cosmic pessimism" of H. P. lovecraft. King's stories typically celebrate the existence of good, while graphically demonstrating its cost. In Carrie, The Stand, and The Dead Zone, King offers the intervention of God as a potential—and indeed, persuasive—explanation of events. His version of God harkens less to modern Christian values and their source, the New Testament, than to those of the Old Testament, and particularly the Book of Job. On the other hand, King's most optimistic and pessimistic novels, Firestarter and Cujo, ironically lack any explicit religious elements.

In The Mist, King uses religion as well as materialism not as a dramatic foil to horror, but as its counterpoint. Just as he pushes the aesthetics of horror to the limit, so too are the aesthetics of religion and materialism tested in the extreme. In The Mist, as in several of his novels—Carrie, The Dead Zone, and The Talisman—religious fanaticism is an artifice of control, the means by which its proponents impose the illusion of order upon a situation virulent with chaos. Similarly, the seeming obsession of David Drayton in The Mist with brand names and products—from an opening comparison of power saws to the final resting place at Howard Johnson's—reflects materialism as an artifice of control. The numinous vision climaxing The Mist profoundly disintegrates any remaining illusions of order—and indeed, suggests horribly that order may lie at the heart of chaos. King's lesson seems clear: that order—or at least release from chaos—cannot be imposed; if it exists, and to the degree that it exists, it will be discovered.

Writing about the horror story [in his "Introduction" to The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural 1981], King has noted:

The best tales in the genre make one point over and over again—that the rational world both within us and without us is small, that our understanding is smaller yet, and that much of the universe in which we exist is, so far as we are able to tell, chaotic. So the horror story makes us appreciate our own well-lighted corner of that chaotic universe, and perhaps allows a moment of warm and grateful wonder that we should be allowed to exist in that fragile space of light at all.

Although the dark, apocalyptic quality of The Mist suggests that our "fragile space of light" may be dwindling, David Drayton's night journey through the mist has not yet reached its end. The novel's final word is "hope," even if this hope is clouded by ambiguity and despair. And unlike Drayton, the reader has the protection of perspective. The setting of The Mist, so reminiscent of the grade B horror film, is one of total security; we can leave at any moment, the lights will flicker on, and we can step safely into a more familiar world.

At 249B East Thirty-fifth Street in New York, we are told, there stands a nondescript brownstone house to which only certain people are invited. Inside meets a curious, informal club whose common thread is a penchant for the telling of tales. Toward the close of an evening the club members will gather their chairs in a semicircle before the massive fireplace in the library. A story will be told; then a toast will be raised, echoing the words engraved upon the keystone of the fireplace mantel: "It is the tale, not he who tells it."

You will not find that brownstone in New York City, but it stands at the heart of Stephen King's collection of four short novels, Different Seasons. The members of the club at 249B East Thirty-fifth Street have a special fondness for the tale of the uncanny, but "[m]any tales have been spun out in the main room . . . tales of every sort, from the comic to the tragic to the ironic to the sentimental." In Different Seasons, King moves beyond the horror fiction on which his fame is securely based to present those "tales of every sort," told through an array of fictional storytellers, all of whom ask the reader to judge the tale, not he who tells it.

The four novellas of Different Seasons were written between 1974 and 1980, each immediately after King completed a book-length novel, but they were offered for publication for the first time in this collection. Their different tones and textures reflect the "different seasons" of the title, yet beneath each lurks a decidedly macabre quality. "Sooner or later," King notes, "my mind always seems to turn back in that direction. . . ."

The opening novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, finds King working the theme of innocence as effectively as he considered the theme of guilt in The Shining. Set in the fictional Shawshank state penitentiary in southwestern Maine, it is the first-person narrative of an inmate identified only by the nickname red. Serving triple life sentences for murders, re d has become the prison's entrepreneur—"I'm the guy who can get it for you"—but his story is less about himself than another lifer whom he meets and befriends in the prison yard. Andy Dufresne is a former banker, convicted of the murder of his wife, and he makes curious purchases from red's black market enterprise: a rock hammer and a poster of Rita Hayworth. Dufresne insists upon his innocence, and red's story tells of how the irresistible force of that innocence succeeds against the seemingly immovable object of Shawshank. In challenging the constricting, dehumanizing environment of the prison—from the sexual brutality of the "sisters" to the corrupt prison overseers to the ever-present walls of stone—Dufresne displays a quality that is symbolized for re d in his seeming dedication to a form of art, the shaping and polishing of stones taken from the yard:

First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and finishing with those rock-blankets. looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been worked and made—that's the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think—and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man's brute persistence.

"Hope Springs Eternal" is the subtitle of the novella, and in it, King extols the power of hope: "[H]ope is good thing . . . , maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." But hope, we learn, is nothing without persistence—and in the end, Dufresne's persistence is the only vindication of his innocence, as his years of chipping a hole through the wall of his cell, hidden by the poster of Rita Hayworth and her pin-up queen successors, provide the only avenue to freedom.

Apt Pupil, the second and longest installment of the volume, is subtitled "Summer of Corruption," and it is a tale of demons by daylight: the corruption of "the total ail-American kid," Todd Bowden, through his fascination with an aging Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander. On the novella's first page, we meet thirteen-year-old Todd—blond, blue-eyed, and "smiling a summer vacation smile." Ever the perfect student, Todd discovers Dussander living out his final, impoverished days hidden in Todd's idyllic California hometown. He is not shocked by Dussander's role as death-camp commandant, but intrigued; he blackmails Dussander, promising not to reveal Dussander's identity if the former S.S. officer will tell him stories of the camps: "I want to hear about it. . . . Everything. All the gooshy stuff."

The telling of tales of the past horrors produces a nightmare symbiosis, in which Todd becomes the "apt pupil" to Dussander's reluctant tutelage. The placid, plastic modernity of sunny California—captured wryly through snapshot glimpses of suburban life—crumbles before dark memories of the Holocaust. The partnership inexorably takes on a pathological bent as Dussander, haunted by the specters of his past, embraces again his murderous ways, while Todd sets out upon the painfully familiar path of American violence. His smile has changed; on the story's last page, it has become "the excited smile of tow-headed boys going off to war."

King's message is simple and chilling; in the words of his Nazi-hunter, Weiskopf (who himself is identified as a storyteller):

"[M]aybe there is something about what the germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out. And what do you think they would look like: like mad Fuehrers with forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches, heil-ing all over the place? like red devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?" "I don't know," Richler said.

"I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants. . . .And some of them might look like Todd Bowden."

The centerpiece of Different Seasons is its third novella, The Body. It is patently autobiographical, told by a narrator, Gordon lachance, who is a doppelgänger for Stephen King—a bestselling writer of horror fiction "who is more apt to have his paperback contracts reviewed than his books." Subtitled "Fall from Innocence," it is the story of lachance's first, childhood view of a dead human being.

Stephen King's first confrontation with death occurred at age four, according to his mother, when one of his playmates was killed by a passing train. In The Body, Lachance tells of an adventure that he had at age twelve, to which he attributes his evolution as a writer: an overnight quest with three friends through the woods outside Castle rock, Maine, in search of the body of a boy purportedly killed by a train. The story unfolds through stories—indeed, two of lachance's early short stories are reprinted in the text ("Stud City" and "The revenge of lard Ass Hogan," both which, in fact, are early King short stories originally published in college magazines.

"The only reason anyone writes stories," King tells us here, "is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality." A recurrent theme of King's fiction is the completion of the wheel whose turn begins in childhood. "The idea," he has said, "is to go back and confront your childhood, in a sense relive it if you can, so that you can be whole." We are haunted by our childhoods, by the important things we lost on the long walk to adulthood: the intensity of loves and fears, the talismanic rituals and objects of affection, and the moments of certain comprehension of our place in the scheme of things. To tell of these things now, as adults, exacts a high price:

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for the want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Unlocking that secret is difficult, as King laments: "The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them." In The Body, he reaches out to his past more directly than in any other story—crossing a bridge of time not unlike the railroad trestle that is the setting for the novella's most frightening scene. What he finds are memories of childhood friendships, of laughter and bravado, of tears and pain, all tinged with a wistful nostalgia. When he returns to the present, that bridge (again like the trestle) is gone, but the storyteller—and his story—endure.

The final novella of Different Seasons is set in that mysterious brownstone at 249B East Thirty-fifth Street. "A Winter's Tale" for the collection, The Breathing Method answers the question "Who will bring us a tale for Christmas then?" Christmas, the traditional time for the telling of ghostly tales, offers the visitants to 249B East Thirty-fifth Street (and the readers of Different Seasons) the horror tale expected of Stephen King, written in a framework evocative of both Jorge luis Borges and Peter Straub (to whom the story is dedicated).

The narrator of The Breathing Method is a middle-aged, unambitious attorney whose foremost love is books. He tells the story of his introduction to the club at 249B East Thirty-fifth Street and, in turn, of the Christmas tale that is told there one night. This story within the story is the reminiscence of an elderly, genteel doctor whose experiments in the 1930s with a predecessor of the lamaze "breathing method" of childbirth produce a frightening result when the mother dies in labor.

As these levels upon levels of narration suggest, The Breathing Method serves as a fitting conclusion for King's collection of stories about storytelling. That imaginary brownstone at 249B East Thirty-fifth Street encompasses the jail cell where red begins his tale of Andy Dufresne, the small bungalow where Kurt Dussander recalls the crimes of an uneasily buried past, and the room where Gordon lachance taps out his sentimental retrospective on an IBM keyboard. The stories all flow from that brownstone—a metaphor for the storyteller's mind—whose keeper, appropriately enough, is named "Stevens":

[T]he question that came out was: "Are there many more rooms upstairs?"

"Oh, yes, sir," [Stevens] said, his eyes never leaving mine. "A great many. A man could become lost. In fact, men have become lost. Sometimes it seems to me that they go on for miles. rooms and corridors. . . . Entrances and exits.". . .

"There will be more tales?"

"Here, sir, there are always more tales."

Sandra Stansfield—the doomed, husbandless mother of The Breathing Method—completes the cycle of King's seasonal protagonists. Each faces the rite of passage—from childhood to adulthood, innocence to experience, life to death—as inevitable as the change of seasons. When Gordon lachance describes the railroad tracks that defined his journey, he pinpoints King's obsession with the theme:

There's a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister. raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet a fellow your own age halfway . . . It seemed right to do it this way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisle—it's what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you down when you get buried.

In the night journeys of Different Seasons, we find a "brute persistence" as relentless as the rite of passage, the change of seasons—and in that persistence, the dilemma and a final horror. When Sandra Stansfield refuses to allow even her own death to prevent her from giving birth, King offers a parting image of a stone statue as timeless as the stone walls of Shawshank in which the collection of stories began:

[T]he statue . . . stood, looking stonily away . . . , as if nothing of particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard as senseless as this one meant nothing . . . or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.

The four short novels of Different Seasons [confirm]. . . that the deepest horrors are those that are real. Indeed, the very reality of Apt Pupil caused some concern at King's paperback publishing company, New American library, which initially asked that the novella not be used. As King recalls:

They were very disturbed by the piece. Extremely disturbed. It was too real If the same story had been set in outer space, it would have been okay, because then you would have had that comforting layer of "Well, this is just make-believe, so we can dismiss it."

And I thought to myself, "Gee, I've done it again. I've written something that has really gotten under someone's skin." And I do like that. I like the feeling that I reached between somebody's leg like that. There has always been that primitive impulse as part of my writing.

I don't really care for psychoanalyzing myself. All I care about is when I find out what it is that scares me. That way, I can discover a theme, and then I can magnify that effect and make the reader even more frightened than I am.

I think I can really scare people, to the point where they will say, "I'm really sorry I bought this." It's as if I'm the dentist, and I'm uncovering a nerve not to fix it, but to drill on it.

As these comments suggest, in answering the questions of whether Stephen King can write more than horror fiction, Different Seasons did not presage a change in the direction of King's writing. John D. MacDonald's prediction in the "Introduction" to Night Shift—"Stephen King is not going to restrict himself to his present field of intense interest"—has proved correct, but only to a point—a point on which King is highly vocal:

[T]here are a lot of people who are convinced that, as soon as I have made enough money, I will just leave this silly bullshit behind and go on to write Brideshead revisited and spy novels and things like that. I don't know why people think that. This is all I've ever wanted to write; and if I go out and I write a novel about baseball or about a plumber who's having an affair with some other guy's wife—which I have written, by the way—that is just because it occurred to me at the time to write that story. And I don't think anybody would want me deliberately to reject an idea that really excited me.

As if to make his point certain, the projects that followed Different Seasons have proved decidedly horrific. Close on the heels of its publication came the release of Creepshow, the first motion picture created specifically for the screen by Stephen King, and two flat-out horror novels, Christine and Pet Sematary.