[In the following essay, Magistrale offers a mixed assessment of King's short fiction collection Skeleton Crew and asserts that the stories focus on the same themes as King's longer fiction.]

When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.¹

All artists have personalities and distinctions that give shape to their art; no one is equally skilled at everything. Artists who attempt to stretch beyond their innate powers command respect but frequently risk failure. The problem is compounded by the vagaries of audience expectation. Every artist who presents work for public consumption has an image, and for careerist reasons must change it only with extreme caution.

I suspect that King's greatest achievements, like those of his early mentor William Faulkner, will continue to be his novels. While loquaciousness and a tendency toward looseness in plot are major liabilities in some of his longer fiction, King nonetheless appears to require a broad venue in order to best develop characters and themes. The short story is pressed to its limits in his hands; King's are often too derivative of blood-and-guts horror fiction, overly sentimental, or just plain silly. On the other hand, several of his short tales are paragons of precision and psychological terror. When a reader finishes an exquisite example, such as “Last Rung on the Ladder” or “The Monkey,” King's failings elsewhere in the genre can be immediately forgiven.

In Stephen King, The First Decade Joseph Reino begins his examination of King's first collection of short stories, Night Shift (1978), with the assertion that the book is “a representative anthology of Stephen King's short fiction with dramatic situations so interestingly rendered that curiosity is immediately aroused” (Reino, 100). Reino's assessment is also applicable to several selections from King's second collection of short fiction, Skeleton Crew (1985). Michael Collings and David Engebretson insist that Skeleton Crew is the better collection of the two, “more consistent in quality than Night Shift, more descriptive of King's versatility as a writer.”²

Skeleton Crew contains a wide and uneven range of material. In “The Monkey,” “The Raft,” “Nona,” and “The Reach” King has never been more adroit in handling narrative pace and psychological subtexts. In “Here There Be Tygers,” “Cain Rose Up,” “The Wedding Gig,” “Mrs. Todd's Shortcut,” “Uncle Otto's Truck,” “Survivor Type,” and “Gramma” his plotting is less exacting, his themes less sophisticated, his conclusions telegraphed and predictable.

Skeleton Crew, however, offers a representation of the major themes and issues discussed elsewhere in this book and given more elaborate consideration in King's longer fiction. There is, for example, work that exposes the dangers inherent in scientific technocracy and religious zealotry (the novella The Mist); stories that are representative of the science-fiction genre (“The Jaunt,” “Beachworld,” and “Word Processor of the Gods”); simple morality fables, like many of Poe's tales, in which acts of criminal behavior return to haunt the perpetrator, suggesting that an offense against another is also an offense against oneself (“Uncle Otto's Truck” and “The Wedding Gig”); and tales that are most rewarding when their subtextual properties are pursued: “The Raft” as a study of the rite of passage from childhood freedom to the terrors of adulthood, and “The Monkey” as a psychoanalytic tale examining the deleterious consequences of self-repression and guilt.

Reino makes careful note of King's tendency to link individual stories in Night Shift through patterns of repetition: “a phrase, quotation, theme, or question repeated with dramatic effect not unlike the well-known incremental techniques of traditional ballads on tragic themes” (Reino, 100). This proclivity is likewise evident in Skeleton Crew, as several stories carry a variation of the refrain “Do you love?” Sometimes raised as a terrifying self-indictment (“Nona”), sometimes uttered in absolute certitude (“The Reach”), the phrase functions within a variety of interesting contexts, and its potential meaning shifts in a manner appropriate to the context in which it appears.

In “The Raft” the question arises as Randy, the young central consciousness in the narrative, is about to be swallowed by a gelatinous creature that floats upon the surface of Cascade Lake. When he first poses the question “Do you love?” it comes from within the warm recollection of summers past, and his answer is affirmative. But by the end of the narrative—and this is in keeping with the plot's progression from Randy's response to a naive and simplistic college dare to his serious confrontation with death and loss—Randy's query, as well as the answer he receives, have changed in tone. His final address is to the hydromonster itself, and it expresses a desperate hope for a last moment of kindness rather than a dreamy wish for personal fulfillment. The answer, however, as if in Melvillian confirmation of nature's essential indifference toward the human world, is provided by a loon's scream “somewhere, far across the empty lake” (SC, 270).

On a more affirmative note, “The Reach” concerns another variant of the same question. Stella Flanders' journey into the Reach is not the lonely death experience that Randy undertakes. In place of his “empty lake,” Stella discovers a community of souls from her past—a society of the dead, who seek her not for punishment or out of malevolence but because of the enduring power of love. In spite of the cold and snow that surround Stella, her death is neither isolated nor painful. In fact, the conclusion of the tale indicates that her last journey completes the natural cycle of life and, at the same time, begins another one.

In addition to some variant of the phrase “Do you love?” lakes are a conspicuous presence in many of the tales in Skeleton Crew. In The Mist the white cloud that carries in it the mutant results of the Arrowhead Project comes in directly over a lake, as does the terrible summer storm that appears to precipitate the mist's arrival. The lakes in “The Monkey,” “The Raft,” and “The Reach” come to represent much more than mere bodies of water; they evolve into symbols for the unknown or the unconscious mind. In each of these stories the lake serves as a barrier to the protagonist's past or future that he or she is forced eventually to traverse. The character's physical crossing of the lake—walking across the frozen ice in “The Reach,” swimming the water in “The Raft,” or using a rowboat to get to the lake's epicenter in “The Monkey”—corresponds to a psychological crossing, the symbolic welding of two distinct eras in time (usually present and past). Thoreau discovered metaphoric correspondences to himself in the mystic waters of Walden Pond; likewise, King's Skeleton Crew characters experience some sort of transformation in their water crossings or journeys. But whereas Thoreau's lake usually signified the most affirmative elements in his nature, King's waters tend to mirror the dark side of the human psyche—its secret sins and lost vision.

The short story has one great advantage over the novel: its forced concision creates an intensified effect. Because it can be read in one sitting rather than over a series of days or weeks, the short story leaves a more powerful imprint on the mind. This seems particularly true of short fiction that is ever mindful of its psychological implications, its efforts to reveal a specific condition or personality disorder. The stories analyzed in this [essay] were selected not only because of “the grace and finesse with which they are narrated and their ultimate terrors skillfully unveiled” (Reino, 103), but also for the value of their psychological complexity. “The Raft” and “The Monkey” in particular are two of the finest examples of psychological terror to be found in American literature. In this present era of “slash-and-gore” horror films and fiction, readers who lament the passing of the psychological Gothic, fully realized in the tales of Hawthorne and Poe, would do well to examine “The Monkey” and “The Raft” carefully. Like “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “The Black Cat,” these two King stories are best appreciated as allegories of the human heart. Their terrors, although couched in highly personalized contexts, actually veil subtle truths about the dark realities of the human condition. “The Raft” and “The Monkey” underscore the struggle to prevail over forces that have, finally, less to do with supernatural phenomena located outside the self than with the mind's own destructive impulses. “The Reach” endures as one of the most optimistic and certainly the gentlest tale ever narrated by Stephen King. If novels such as Pet Sematary and The Shining pose a view of the afterlife in terms of Dionysian energies aligned with evil, “The Reach” offers a positive counterpoint: that death does not signal the end of human love but rather its perpetuation. The Mist, the longest work in the collection, continues the technocratic critique King raised in the early Bachman books, The Stand, Firestarter, and, of course, The Talisman and The Tommyknockers. Like these novels, The Mist indicts the misdirected experiments of a technology that is ultimately beyond the understanding of those who created it. Often cited especially by students as a favorite King text, The Mist moves as swiftly as a summer thunderstorm from the security of familial domesticity to the nightmare of a world completely upended.

THE CLOUDING OF HUMAN MINDS

With the notable exception of an albino tentacle that is severed in battle at the loading dock behind the Federal Foods supermarket, the supernatural special effects of The Mist are not in evidence for a full two-thirds of the novella. This is a remarkable achievement in itself, given that the characters and the reader are both profoundly conscious of a supernatural presence for nearly the entire length of the narrative. King holds his reptilian and crustacean creatures in abeyance to force our attention onto the tale's real abhorrence: the behavior of human beings who suddenly find themselves confronting adversity and tragedy.

Ironically, as the pearl-white mist shrouds the market microcosm in a soupy fog, those who are trapped inside unveil their true personalities. Stripped of their social veneers as a result of the circumstances in which they find themselves, the men and women of The Mist exhibit the full emotional spectrum of human responses—from avarice and immobilizing fear to unselfish compassion toward complete strangers. In the controlled microcosm of the supermarket, which becomes the scene of slowly unfolding levels of terror and the hysteria of mass despair, King measures the courage and coping skills of his protagonist-heroes.

Some of the men, frustrated in their helplessness, decide to test themselves physically against the creatures who inhabit the mist. Norm, Jim, and Myron, the stockboys, initially respond to the situation with a blind male bravado that is unguided by reason. Others, we are informed, “had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable earthquake, and these poor devils had fallen through” (SC, 96). Brent Norton, the New York lawyer, on the other hand, refuses to see the cracks in the “hard cement of reality” and clings to a desperate rationality, even as he witnesses proof of the irrationality outside. Devoid of any imaginative capacity, he and his “Flat Earther” group are unable to abandon the complacent order that has sustained their place in the world. Norton's hyperrational stance in defiance of the novella's surreal developments is shown to be no more viable a response than Mrs. Carmody's emotional ranting. Whereas Norton completely shuts out the new reality occasioned by the mist, Mrs. Carmody has no difficulty accepting the changes brought about by its arrival. However, it is her medieval interpretation that is suspect.

Most of the characters in The Mist thus demonstrate a deficient understanding of, and response to, the adversity they are forced to encounter. For most, the reality of the mist highlights the failure of the human mind to interpret accurately what the senses supply it by way of empirical evidence: “Norton was imposing a mental gag order on himself. Myron and Jim had tried by turning the whole thing into a macho charade—if the generator could be fixed, the mist would blow over. This was Brown's way. He was … Protecting the Store” (SC, 73). The fact that the creatures who emerge from the mist resemble pterodactyls and other primordial life forms from the deep sea suggest a further connection to the behavior of the humans inside the food market. As Hitchcock's disruption of nature can be seen as a comment on the human world in his classic film The Birds, King implies that the bestial level of social interaction that takes place inside the supermarket is reflective of the primeval devolution occurring just outside its glass doors and windows.

Several of the characters, however, manage to face the mist without illusions or the need to deny their fears, and for them this communal tragedy presents the opportunity for personal growth. Focusing their attention and energies on the welfare of others rather than indulging their own terror, Hattie Turman, Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, and the novella's first-person narrator, Dave Drayton, cope best with the deteriorating situation around them. When Amanda and Dave decide to make love in what proves to be a final moment of quiet on the first night, it is a spontaneous act that underscores the need for human interdependency, the bond that is forfeited by the other characters who remain inside the market: “We lay down then, and she said, ‘Love me, David. Make me warm.’ When she came, she dug into my back with her nails and called me a name that wasn't mine. I didn't mind” (SC, 103).

Amanda and David, along with those who support them, rise above the self-centered arrogance that informs the attitudes of Norton, Carmody, and the Arrowhead Project, which is responsible for producing the monsters. The mist's very existence must be attributed to basic human negligence: the failure to care enough about the welfare of others and the environment we share. Near the narrative's conclusion Dave Drayton posits that “it was the mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will” (SC, 122). This is not exactly correct. The degree of weakness and lack of will that Drayton references is finally not caused by the fog; the real lack of will in this story concerns public failure to monitor sufficiently a technocracy that has been given too many tax dollars and not enough accountability. The culprits of the Arrowhead Project, as Douglas Winter points out, “remain as faceless and opaque as the mist itself” (Winter 1984, 100). The mist, then, is a metaphor for the clouded vision that inspired the Arrowhead Project as well as for the moral ambiguity that later engulfs those inside the market and leads to Mrs. Carmody's rise to power.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF “THE MONKEY”

What does the little toy monkey in this story represent? This question is, of course, critical to unraveling Hal Sherburn's relationship with the monkey, much less the story's core meaning. Is the simian toy some sort of dark talismanic device that is a harbinger of death? Or does it maintain a more specifically personal connection to Hal? The tale supports both interpretations. The fish that are mysteriously killed when the monkey is entombed at the bottom of Crystal Lake would appear to indicate the randomness of evil. Yet the fact that the toy is intimately connected to Hal, linking him to his childhood and events that occurred over 20 years ago, suggests that the monkey is also some sort of psychological signifier to Hal's past. I wish to pursue this latter interpretation, not only because it is the richer but also because it stands in opposition to Douglas Winter's approach to the text as an illustration of “outside, predestinate evil” (Winter 1984, 227).

One of King's greatest skills as a writer is his ability to describe the terrors associated with childhood, particularly the shadowy guilts that frequently attend a child's initial experience with death. In It, for example, the personal guilt that is established after the murder of Bill Denbrough's younger brother becomes a motivating force in the older boy's relentless pursuit of It. And in The Body Gordie La Chance assumes the onus of his older brother's death in light of the cold indifference that characterizes his parents' state of bereavement. In these two texts King implies that for children the mystery of death is even more complicated than it is for adults, for in their confusion and innocence children often assume a measure of personal responsibility.

Drawn back to his “home place where [Hal and his brother] had finished growing up” (SC, 144) for his Aunt Ida's funeral, Hal finds himself highly susceptible to the unhappy memories of his childhood, which revolve around the deaths of loved ones. In his anger and grief after the accidental death of his best friend, Johnny, Hal had believed that a toy monkey was somehow responsible, and he had buried it in a deep well located on his aunt's property. Although the boy had had no direct influence on Johnny's fall from the treehouse, he had been both traumatized by it and, more important, filled with tremendous guilt. Hal had been both secretly relieved that “it hadn't been his turn [to die]” (SC, 147) and dimly conscious of how easily it might have been: “Johnny had been climbing the rungs up to his treehouse in the backyard. The two of them had spent many hours up there that summer” (SC, 145). Unable to articulate these feelings because of their complexity and his own desire to repress them, Hal had projected them onto the toy monkey—“it was the monkey's fault” (SC, 145)—and buried his own guilt, like the monkey thrown down the shaft, deep within the “dark well” of his psyche. This psychological nexus is supported years later when Hal finds himself drawn back to the “rock-lined throat” of the cistern, in which he sees “a drowning face, wide eyes, grimacing mouth … It was his own face in the dark water” (SC, 144).

The recent death of his mother-surrogate aunt, the journey back to his former home, and his current struggles as husband and father serve to reactivate all of Hal's submerged adolescent anxieties, which have never been adequately resolved. Thus, the monkey “resurfaces” from the well as Hal's past terrors are brought into juxtaposition with his present crises. Hal is “losing Dennis” (SC, 143), his oldest son, and his relationship with his wife is equally strained: “Just lately she took a lot of Valium. It had started around the time National Aerodyne had laid Hal off” (SC, 143). That the monkey returns at this point in his life is an indication of Hal's lingering childhood vulnerabilities. His insecurities about his career, his marriage, and his parenting are reminders of the powerlessness he knew as a child.

Hal's monkey is a psychological signifier of his repressed past. We have traced how his condition was exacerbated by Johnny's accidental fall from the treehouse, but Hal's initial level of guilt had actually been established years prior to that incident. The monkey itself had first been discovered in the back of his father's “long and narrow and somehow snug back closet” (SC, 150). Hal had felt the urge to return repeatedly to this closet, “trying, as best [he] could, to somehow make contact with [his] vanished father” (SC, 150). In an unnerving parallel to King's own personal history, Hal's father, “a merchant mariner, had simply disappeared as if from the very face of the earth when [Hal] was young” (SC, 144). As is often the case with small children whose parents divorce or die, the boy had grown up feeling as though he were somehow personally responsible for his father's disappearance, perhaps believing that his parent's actions were the result of something he had done or failed to do as a son. It is significant that Hal had discovered the monkey only after repeated visits to his father's closet and that the appearance of the toy had coincided with the deepening of Hal's sense of personal loss and guilt.

The monkey is thus linked to Hal's psychological disturbances, and each time Hal is made to experience death, his condition worsens. The sudden and terrible losses of his mother, his babysitter, his best friend, and his brother's playmate would have been difficult for any child to accept, even with the assistance of loving parents and a professionally trained counselor. Hal, however, had had no one to advise him on interpreting these tragic events, and his subsequent pain and confusion had easily been translated into guilt. Unable to sustain a barrier between himself and these dark accidents of fate (Johnny's fall and Beulah's murder) and natural conclusions to life (his mother's brain embolism and Aunt Ida's stroke), Hal had felt responsible for their occurrence. In the mind of this assaulted child, the monkey had become an extension of his hyperdeveloped conscience. His efforts to create a physical distance between himself and the toy had been symbolic of his own self-avoidance. For almost three decades Hal had repressed his guilt, channelled it into the buried monkey. As an adult, when Hal is forced to address these old, submerged feelings, the monkey resurfaces (in addicts' jargon, Hal has never gotten the monkey off his back): “There was the guilt; the certain, deadly knowledge that he had killed his mother by winding the monkey upon that sunny after-school afternoon” (SC, 159).

As an adult, Hal is in a more advantageous position to acknowledge and confront the deep psychological disturbances he misapprehended as a child. But to accomplish this he would probably need the help of a psychotherapist to bring to consciousness that which has been repressed, so that personal integration and wholeness might become a real possibility. Unfortunately, he never seeks or receives such assistance; he has only the unqualified love of his youngest son, Petey, to help him shoulder the psychic burden that the monkey represents. His commitment to Petey enables Hal to weather a tremendous storm (symbolic of his inner personal strife) in order to reinter the toy in “the deepest part of Crystal Lake” (SC, 167). Hal puts trust once again in his capacity for self-discipline. Like the well on Aunt Ida's property, the lake is another metaphor for Hal's unconscious mind, and at the end of the tale Hal's guilt is once more pushed back into its “deepest part.” Significantly, however, on this occasion the monkey (Hal's guilt) proves much more difficult to repress. Hal must risk his very life in his struggle to “get rid of the monkey for another twenty years” (SC, 169). While the story appears to imply in its optimistic conclusion that this may well be the case, any student of Freud would concur with Hal's own self-diagnosis: that unless he experiences the type of release that would be obtained by acknowledging and confronting his long history of guilty associations, the monkey and all that it signifies is “just going to come back and come back and that's all this is about. …” (SC, 161).

ALLEGORICAL RITES OF PASSAGE

King begins “The Raft” with this sentence: “It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to that part of the world in October, and although they didn't get going until six o'clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there” (SC, 245). Thus he places the reader immediately at the heart of the story, revealing a hyperconscious awareness of time that lends a breathlessness to the narrative's pace. From the distance separating Pittsburgh and Cascade Lake, to the late hour when the journey commences, to the autumnal finalities associated with late October, the narrowing perimeters of time are made almost palpable for the reader. The syntax of the sentence itself—which contains two dependent clauses, one right after the other, that both begin with although—suggests the potential danger inherent in whatever action these characters have elected to undertake. Their motives are as yet unknown, but there is already a foreboding quality, conveyed by the opening sentence's suggestion of the deliberateness of the choice to venture out in spite of the ominous changes taking place in the landscape. This evocative opening also forms a nexus to the full symbolism of the tale's deepest meaning: we will soon learn that the characters featured in this sentence are in the “October” of their adolescence, on the verge of adulthood. Although we share in their naïveté at this point in the narrative, the opening sentence embodies the story's metaphor of chronological entrapment. These young people are about to lose touch with the great freedoms of childhood—deathless summers, irresponsibility, and personal immortality—as their futile attempt to thwart time's advance is mirrored in a growing psychological desperation.

What begins in the first few pages of “The Raft” as a whimsical salutation to summer (SC, 248) deepens into a highly allegorical indictment of the rite of passage into maturity. The tale is about nothing less than the transitional terrors associated with growing up in America. As a child Rachel recalls swimming out to the white raft, but once there she remained “for damn near two hours, scared to swim back” (SC, 247). The hydromonster partly symbolizes universal childhood fears, in particular those associated with the unknown. In this context the raft comes to represent an intangible transitional barrier that separates innocence from experience, adolescence from adulthood. Randy confirms this when he remarks that the raft “looked like a little bit of summer that someone forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year” (SC, 247). Just beyond the raft, however, inhabiting the deepest waters of the lake (which serves, as in “The Monkey,” as a means for visualizing the human unconscious), is the amorphous hydromonster—the manifest symbol of the imminent adulthood that each student must face.

The hydromonster, as “latent with symbolism as Melville's white whale” (Winter 1984, 172), represents the cannibalistic impulses King affiliates with the adult world throughout his canon. Moreover, the adjectives used to describe it—“circular,” “masculine,” “mute,” “purposeful,” “even-shaped,” “lithe Naugahyde,” “criss-crossing”—all suggest elements of containment and/or rigidity. I will have more to say … on the subject of how the adults who populate King's fictional world frequently oppress young people, physically and psychologically, and how evidence of this can be traced throughout King's canon, from Carrie to It.

In light of the broad definitions of negative adulthood presented in King's fiction, it is interesting that the one constant in the majority of his adult characters is their aptitude for betrayal. The young adults in “The Raft” come to exhibit some of the negative traits of adulthood in their interpersonal behavior. As the story unfolds, all of the relationships, same-sex as well as heterosexual, deteriorate. Randy and Deke have been college roommates for three years, but Randy does not trust his friend around women, and when Deke glances at Randy, “it [is with] more loving familiarity than contempt … but the contempt [is] there, too” (SC, 252). The two boy-men are similar only in terms of their mutual insensitivity toward Rachel and LaVerne. The girl-women are treated either as children to be silenced or threatened, or sexual toys who must always make themselves accessible. For most of the story the females are reduced to male fantasy objects, little more than breasts and bottoms, and they vie consistently for Deke's attention. Even in the midst of their peril, they perceive themselves solely as sexual competitors, turning exclusively to the men for any measure of comfort. Randy also discovers that his best friend and his girlfriend are lovers; they have thus betrayed both him and Rachel. Randy contemplates all this while trapped on the raft. At one point he acknowledges to himself that “the black patch on the water scared him. That was the truth” (SC, 252). Much is suggested in this double-edged association between the hydromonster and truth. Does “that was the truth” merely indicate Randy's honest acknowledgment of his fear? Or does it mean something more—that in the presence of the black patch Randy gains sudden, truthful insights?

Literally stripped of their clothes, all of the child-adults, and Randy in particular, are also stripped of their illusions. Even Randy's sole moment of comfort in LaVerne's sexual embrace proves transitory at best: she is literally swept from underneath him at the very moment when “the tactile sensations were incredible, fantastic” (SC, 266). Randy's losses seem to be orchestrated by, or at least centered in, the hydromonster itself. It lures him to study its “flaring nuclear colors,” falsely deceiving him into believing that “perhaps the thing could fix it so there was no pain; perhaps that was what the colors were for” (SC, 269). At one point or another in each of our lives we share Randy's blind faith that the world of adulthood will somehow be if not a triumphant experience, at least a manageable one. But the reality of the aging process always brings disillusionment and concludes in death, even as we try, like Randy, to believe that there must be some way to “fix it so there [will be] no pain.”

In the concluding pages of “The Raft” Randy clings to a series of kaleidoscopic memories from adolescent summers: “the feel of summer, the texture; I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers, girls in bikinis on the beach … the Beach Boys oldies” (SC, 267). These memories of boyhood, however, are no more a shield against the dark realities of adult life than is the raft an adequate barrier against the hydromonster's assault. The physical deaths that occur in this tale, albeit grotesque and graphic, pale in their capacity to evoke terror and sympathy from the reader when measured against the story's subtext of innocence betrayed. In his last hours of life, bereft of human comfort and anticipating his own demise, Randy learns what we all must in light of the harsh realities of aging: that the cocoon of innocence—symbolized appropriately in Randy's romantic urge to “say good-bye to summer, and then swim back” (SC, 248)—is lost once we have emerged from it.

DO THE DEAD SING?

Stella Flanders' 95-year-old imagination is death-haunted. From the beginning of “The Reach” to its conclusion, her life is seen in reference to those she has buried. In fact, Stella's reach has very little to do with the actual “water between the island and the mainland” (SC, 489); it is, instead, the spiritual swell that continues to link her to the men and women of Goat Island who were her family and friends: “Your blood is in the stones of this island, and I stay here because the mainland is too far to reach. Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross” (SC, 493).

Content to have spent her entire life never having journeyed across the Reach to the mainland, Stella is now an old woman whose past is more meaningful than her present; the island dead have been whispering to her long before she sees her first apparition. Although she shares an apparently warm relationship with her living son and grandchildren, for the length of the story Stella's only topic of communication with them concerns the past and those who are dead. Douglas Winter postulates that “When Stella Flanders embarks upon her journey, she understands what she is leaving behind in the ‘small world’ on this side of the Reach: ‘a way of being and a way of living; a feeling’” (Winter 1984, 10). This is not precisely accurate, for while Stella does relinquish the present and her commitment to those still alive on Goat Island, she does not abandon her past, as Winter suggests, but rather rediscovers it in her reunion with those she has lost. Indeed, although she maintains a connection with the dead that grows increasingly stronger in the course of the narrative, she indulges her recollections not out of weakness or morbidity but because they remain a conduit to love. This is why death poses no real fear for Stella; she knows that “it don't hurt … All that's before” (SC, 504). Her past is not left behind when she chooses to cross the Reach, as her “small world” is reanimated in contact with the island's dead: “He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared almost absurdly courtly, and his face was Bill's face, unmarked by the cancer that had taken him” (SC, 502).

The story's optimism is sustained by the nucleus of a small town, and this is critical to understanding Stella's attitude toward her existence: “I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I'll stay where I am” (SC, 492-3). Stella's perspective on her Maine home is unique in King's canon. With the possible exception of The Dead Zone, in which we see a community working in unison to capture a rapist-murderer stalking local women, King's general treatment of small-town America is neither flattering nor equivocal. In contrast to the citizens of the malefic microcosms of ‘Salem's Lot, Haven, Castle Rock, and Derry, the Goat Island inhabitants in “The Reach” take care of one another, view their neighbors as integral members of an extended family, and continually emphasize the importance of caring interpersonal relationships:

“Children,” she would tell them, “we always watched out for our own. We had to, for the Reach was wider in those days and when the wind roared and the surf pounded and the dark came early, why, we felt very small—no more than dust motes in the mind of God. So it was natural for us to join hands, one with the other.

“We joined hands, children, and if there were times when we wondered what it was all for, or if there was any such a thing as love at all, it was only because we had heard the wind and the waters on long winter nights, and we were afraid.”

(SC, 499)

Stella's appreciation that her own identity is inexorably linked to the larger social community reflects the more affirmative side of King's social self. In a conversation I had with him …, King mentioned that his choice to remain a resident of Bangor, Maine, was based partly as a result of his commitment to the community itself as a place that has nurtured both his family and his fiction. Although his novels and stories pose a rather bleak portrait of communal life in America, King's own personal feelings toward Bangor seem to closely resemble Stella's feelings about Goat Island in “The Reach.” King continues to give back to the town in which he lives: he remains an active presence in Bangor's political life, he has given numerous public lectures at the local university at Orono, he has supported benefits to raise money for Bangor's neediest, and he recently contributed funds to buy baseball uniforms for the town's Little League.³ Whenever a director seeks to film an adaptation of one of his texts, King always lobbies hard to set the film in Maine in an effort to share some of his financial success with his fellow citizens: “For years I've desperately wanted to get film crews into Maine. There are parts of Washington County where twelve weeks of shooting could generate more income than the place sees in a year.”⁴ In another man of King's wealth and stature, these activities might appear to be token gestures, but in his case they genuinely reflect his awareness of his responsibilities as a citizen and a human being.

In “The Reach” Stella Flanders understands that the only hope for men and women in the face of nature's awful cruelty is the degree of commitment we give to one another: “They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her” (SC, 504). Her character embodies a side of Stephen King that is seldom noted either in popular reviews of his fiction and films or in scholarly analyses. She represents the life force that sustains each of King's small-group relationships—from that of Danny, Wendy Torrance, and Hallorann in The Shining to that of the members of the Losers' Club in It. The heroes and heroines in King's fiction do not triumph as a result of their personal independence or complacent withdrawal from corruption. Their endurance is based upon the degree to which they have not sacrificed their humanity and upon their quest to find others with whom they might entrust their love. Stella Flanders never really fears a reunion with those who have died, because for her the dead wear sympathetic faces and retain the most important capacity with which human beings are endowed. As King wrote in Danse Macabre,

the horror writer is not just a writer but a human being, mortal man or woman, just another passenger in the boat, another pilgrim on the way to whatever there is. And we hope that if he sees another pilgrim fall down that he will write about it—but not before he or she has helped the fallen one off his or her feet, brushed off his or her clothes, and seen if he or she is all right, and able to go on. If such behavior is to be, it cannot be as a result of an intellectual moral stance; it is because there is such a thing as love, merely a practical fact, a practical force in human affairs.

(DM, 403)

Notes

1. The Mist, in Skeleton Crew (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), 101. All references to selections from Skeleton Crew hereafter cited in text as SC.

2. Michael Collings and David Engebretson, The Shorter Works of Stephen King (Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1985), 130; hereafter cited in text.

3. For an insightful glance into King's relationship to Bangor's Little League, the reader should consult King's essay “Head Down” (New Yorker, 16 April 1990, 68-111). The commission King received from The New Yorker upon publication of this essay was donated to purchase new uniforms for all the baseball teams in Bangor's Little League system. Aside from being an expansive treatise on King's great love (and thorough knowledge) of baseball, the article also reveals a good deal about the author's fascination with adolescent American boyhood and the solidarity among athletes playing in team competition.

4. Quoted in Jeff Connor, Stephen King Goes to Hollywood (New York: New American Library, 1987), 82.