Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I inherited the Book Club Edition of Pet Sematary from my aunt. Or I bought it for a buck or change at a forgotten garage sale, but that would be meaningless, so I think of my aunt when I read my Stephen King novels now, regardless of the actual origin.

As one of the first of King’s prolific bursts, this book fits into that time period. That is, he build suspense and dread, but ultimately the end rushes through the climax and leaves one with the obvious lingering evil still out there. In what I’ve seen from this era (see also Christine), the victory over evil is very tenuous and it’s apparent that it will eventually catch up with the survivors of the story.

So let me continue with the beginning…. or at least the plot. Dr. Louis Creed moves his family from the Midwest to small town Maine where he’s going to run a university infirmary. In the front of the house, there’s a two lane highway used often by oil tankers. In the back woods, a burial place for pets. The family has a cat. You can see where this is going. I, owner of an aging cat whom I know won’t lie upon my lap while I read Stephen King books forever, dreaded reading this book, and I was going to put it off indefinitely until I decided to denancy my self and just push through the death of the cat and the horrors beyond. I did. At least the death of the cat and so on where handled off page fairly well.

Come to think of it, King leaves most of the gory wetwork off the page in this particular volume. We don’t get a lot of flesh peeling from the muscle, tendon, and bones kind of thing going on, but we do get the idea that it’s going to happen, and we put the book down thinking we’ve gotten a pretty gory dose of it, but textually, there’s not much there there. That’s what makes King so powerful; he builds the dread and he makes you think you’re getting gore, but it’s your own imagination splattering blood on the wallpaper.

Another thing that makes King powerful, and what draws his readers into the books, is that he doesn’t play favorites with his characters. Most writers rely on series for their long-term fiscal viability, and with every series one or more characters run through the plot in little danger. Sure, they get shot and sometimes almost die, and sometimes a major or minor character dies in a Very Special Episode. But the reader can proceed page-to-page with the comfort that the main characters will be tested and will prove true. King can spend pages making us like one or more characters in a book right before they die suddenly. The reader has to pay attention because although four main characters walk into a scene, four main characters are not guaranteed to walk out of the scene. In every moment, King’s characters risk life and limb from dark forces outside of their control. King takes this aspect of life and amps it up to make clear the tenuous hold we each have on our lives. Overall, the effect works.

Ergo, even though I didn’t care for the ending, I appreciated that the book achieved its goals in manipulating my emotions. Did I like it? Well, it was effective, and I enjoyed the writing. I’ll read more King, of course. Because I enjoy the works and, quite frankly, because my aunt (and the garage sales of past days) have left me with quite a few remaining on my bookshelves.

I paid this book at Borders on the day it came out, but that will come as no surprise to those of you who know me or who have read this blog for the last couple of years. I have been a strident Parker partisan for about twenty years now (see also "Meeting Robert B. Parker").

This is the fifth Jesse Stone novel, and I don’t mind telling you, I like this series least. Jesse Stone comes across as less hard-boiled and more simpering….although he’s hard enough with the bad guys and bantery enough with his police force, his issues with his ex-wife and whatnot really take too much of the book. Any of the book is too much. Unfortunately, as the snippets of him with his therapist unfold in a linear arc beginning with the first book and only advance the character when taken over the course of the series and advance the character independently of the action within the book, which means they’re ultimately superfluous.

Jesse Stone, within this book, has to deal with sleazy sex and murder among the yachting class. He and his force plod along, encountering old standards Captain Healy and Rita Fiore and making a new acquaintance with a no-nonsense cop in Florida who’s now eligible for repeat encounters in any or all of Parker’s series or perhaps a series of her own (since the whole Helen Hunt/Sunny Randall thing seems to have gone by the wayside).

Still, I enjoyed the book and read it almost in a single sitting. Parker’s dialog-laden prose is not very dense, and he hits a lot of familiar tropes, so long time readers can almost skim.

I bought this book about a year and a half ago at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $3.95. I don’t know why I was looking for an almost scholarly survey of private eye fiction, but I bought it.

As I mentioned, this book surveys the evolution of the private eye character within American fiction from its origin in the pulps through the middle 1980s (when the book was published). It identifies certain eras (early pulps, post WWII detectives, sixties touchy-feely detectives, and modern detectives) and then identifies certain seminal authors and their most famous or influential creations. The book includes Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Ross MacDonald, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, and Richard S. Prather among the obvious. I’ve read books from each of these and probably work from among the others in the list. Oddly enough, these sorts of summary books not only inspire me to read more of these authors, but also to write more so I can hopefully get included in some of these volumes in the future. If I’m lucky.

(As for inside baseball, Roger L. Simon is only mentioned in this book when the author notes that a character is not as Jewish as Moses Wine. Simon and Wine do, however, make up a large portion of Sons of Sam Spade: The Private-Eye Novel in the 70s, which I read in college when I should have been attending Biology 001.)