(6 of 10)
A great many of the King-Bachman books seem to have been written on a word processor by a word processor. The author often employs three exclamation points !!! where one would suffice, shows a blithe disregard for grammar ("My mother used to tell my brother David and I to 'hope for the best and expect the worst' "), and produces metaphors that obviously embarrass their creator: "He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into the Great Wasps' Nest of Life. As an image it stank." But all along he displays one talent that never flags -- he is able to convince the reader that the unreal is actually occurring. Critic Jacques Barzun once analyzed the technique of the effective horror novelist: "Since terror descriptions must perpetually make the reader accept yet question the strange amid the familiar, the writer pursues the muse of ambiguity. He begins by establishing a solid outer shell of comfort -- the clergyman's study, the lawyer's book-lined room, the well-placed camping tent, or the cozy room at the inn or club, with fortifying drinks at hand. But soon a vague unease, a chill in the air, or else a strong shock undermines or shatters composure. No rhetorical onslaught . . . can equal it; the intrusion, fluid and elusive or sharp and violent, destroys all past security." King begins with all the reassuring American trappings: the 7-Eleven stores, the ribbons of superhighway, the town high schools that seem part of an ordered landscape. Then come the hints of malaise and, abruptly, what A.D. Hutter, a professor of English at UCLA, calls King's "brilliant creation of a shared nightmare." A marriage breaks up and a trusted dog suddenly turns on its owners; a teenager's love affair with his Plymouth Fury is totaled when the car is possessed by the vengeful ghost of a previous owner; the caretaker of a vast mountain resort hotel finds himself slowly overtaken by the malevolent spirits envisioned by his little boy; two college students volunteer for a government experiment and become parents of a daughter with a unique gift: she can make things burst into flame with the force of her will. All of these fantasies are built on an armature of moral order. The good suffer, but the malefactors perish. "Beneath its fangs and fright wig," the author confesses, the horror tale is "as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece pinstripe suit."