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James Kidd

If It Bleeds
by Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton
4/5 stars
Sifting through works of fiction for real-life parallels can be a treacherous business. Never more so than when the work of fiction in question teases with real-life promise.
Take “Rat”, the enjoyable concluding short story in Stephen King’s new collection, If It Bleeds. Its hero, Drew Larson, is a writer like his creator.
But while King has published enough books to fill his own store, Drew has always found that story ideas came “when they came at all – a little at a time, like dribbles of water drawn from a well that was almost dry”. Moreover, Drew trickles on: “There was always a chain of associations he could trace back to something he’d seen or heard: a real-world flashpoint.”
One of the many devilish ironies of “Rat” is the moment of inspiration that changes Drew’s life (or so it seems) is not only overwhelmingly sudden, but seems disconnected from his happy but otherwise underwhelming life.

King, by contrast, after an early-21st century slump (to my mind at least), is enjoying a gilded late period precisely because his art is connected to deeply felt personal concerns. Many of these riper tropes are present in If It Bleeds: most obviously and poignantly, age, ghosts and a preoccupation with death.
One could argue that death, along with addiction, has been King’s raison d’écrire from day one. But in these older, wiser days (King is 72), it ain’t how you die – or in the case of Pet Sematary (1983), don’t – it’s the way in which King tells it.
In the opening story, “Mr Harrigan’s Phone”, a reclusive, Warren Buffett-ish billionaire (John Harrigan) asks our narrator, nine-year-old Craig, to read to him. Then, having spent years narrating Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence, Craig is devastated when he finds Harrigan’s body.
King’s uncanny knack of fusing horror with the mundane has always been central to his success
This loss sparks King’s supernatural parable, more or less about the perils of the internet, but moves towards a rather more heartfelt consideration of the meaning of loss. “When an old man dies, a library burns,” Craig thinks after he is rocked by a second death, of a favourite teacher.
This African proverb is a fair summary of King’s second story, “The Life of Chuck”. What begins as a pre-apocalyptic fable of environmental collapse mutates into a more intimate portrait of private grief.
“I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside,” a character muses to his nephew.
The shift from the cosmic to the personal is eased by King’s nicely judged running joke. The only light relief afforded by Armageddon are the mysterious appearance of billboards starring the utterly anonymous Chuck Krantz. Chuck, it turns out, is the dying man whose world is falling to ruin.
His story is told from two recognisably King-ish perspectives. There is a folksy, vivid celebration of youthful abandon: in Chuck’s case for dancing. In the other, Chuck discovers an upstairs room housing a mystical portal that his grandfather believes reveals the moment of your death.
Chuck enters this room as inevitably as Jack Torrance orders a preternatural drink in The Shining (1977). But instead of hurling his hero into an inferno, the vision dangles Chuck, and the reader, off the edge of the most ordinary cliffhanger: the inescapable thought of our own ending.

The other late-King signature on show in If It Bleeds is an intense, self-conscious engagement with storytelling. This lends all four stories a vaguely familiar feel.
King’s habit of name-dropping significant books during the action shows no sign of diminishing: Dickens is a particular favourite, as is American thriller writer John D. MacDonald. The grim literary fairy tale “Rat” happily name-checks Grimms’ fairy tales, along with Hans Christian Andersen, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Faust.
Even more tantalising are nods to his own work. “Rat” remixes The Shining’s writer on the edge of a nervous breakdown while “Mr Harrigan’s Phone” extends a fruitful King subgenre: technophobic horror. The plot, whose McGuffin involves a possibly demonic iPhone, is most obviously a mini-upgrade of the highly enjoyable Cell (2006), in which zombies are triggered by mobile phone calls.
Stephen King to Margaret Atwood, 10 books you can’t miss
But the semi-moral of King’s story – your smartphone is as intoxicating and alluring as whisky – echoes the crude shock tactics of “Big Driver” (from 2010’s Full Dark, No Stars): a woman on existential and literal autopilot is delivered by her satnav into the arms of a psychopathic rapist.
“Mr Harrigan’s Phone” is similarly concerned about technology’s dehumanising potential but its conclusions are less histrionic: “I wasted an hour of beautiful summer daylight this morning watching George Jones videos,” Harrigan sighs, expressing his love-hate relationship with YouTube.
King’s uncanny knack of fusing horror with the mundane has always been central to his success. It is a tightrope at times, and now and then King wobbles and even comes a cropper. The demonic rat that eventually scuttles into “Rat” was initially en-rat-uring (to mimic King’s rodentine puns), and then a little pat.
The rather ho-hum “If It Bleeds” repeats the worst devil-in-human-form excesses of The Outsider (2018), although it was interesting to read a story that ends pre-emptively in February 2020 that was unaffected by Covid-19.
Far more often, though, King’s flirtations with formula and even cliché highlight his native strengths. His prose expresses its artistic debts with humility and a cheerful sense of fun. “Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that,” Craig admits in “Mr Harrigan’s Phone”, allowing King to crack a self-deprecating joke about the final scene of Carrie, the movie.
More profoundly, the exquisite dismay we feel as Drew succumbs to his demons owes everything to King’s talent at ushering his readers towards the blindingly obvi­ous. What terrifies is not sensationalised evil or narrative contrivance, but stubborn old human frailty: insecurity, procrastination, obsession, self-doubt, fear, denial.
These, as King knows only too well, are more than a match for even the most devilish talking rat.


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Books and literature

If It Bleeds: Stephen King’s new collection of short stories explores age, death and talking rats

If It Bleeds, the new collection of short stories from Stephen King, explores familiar themes of horror and human frailty. Photo: Handout

Stephen King's novel If It Bleeds.[10MAY2020 BOOK REVIEW POST MAGAZINE]

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 26:  (EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE) Author Stephen King visits the SiriusXM Studios on September 26, 2017 in New York City.  (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)[10MAY2020 BOOK REVIEW POST MAGAZINE]Credit: Getty Images

Dying for an iPhone: investigating Apple, Foxconn and the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers

An assembly line at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory. Photo: AFP

Dying For an iPhone by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai[03MAY2020 BOOK LEAD POST MAGAZINE]

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Terry Gou (C), chairman of Foxconn's Taiwanese parent company Hon Hai Precision, visits the Foxconn plant in Shenzen on May 26, 2010.  The Taiwanese boss of Apple manufacturer Foxconn headed to a sprawling factory in southern China where a spate of worker suicides have stoked anger about labour conditions. Gou, the chairman of Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Precision, flew into the booming city of Shenzhen aboard his private jet with travelling Taiwanese reporters, urging the media to see the factory for themselves.AFP PHOTO / VOISHMEL (Photo by VOISHMEL / AFP)[03MAY2020 BOOK LEAD POST MAGAZINE]CREDIT: AFP

FILE - In a Feb. 14, 2020 file photo, employees wear face masks as they stand in a reopened Apple Store in Beijing. Apple Inc. is warning investors that it won't meet its second-quarter financial guidance because the viral outbreak in China has cut production of iPhones. The Cupertino, California-based company said Monday, Feb. 17, 2020 that all of its iPhone manufacturing facilities are outside Hubei province, and all have been reopened, but production is ramping up slowly. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The story of Swire, British ‘hong’ in Hong Kong: a tale of empire, enterprise and family feuds

Swire’s Coca-Cola bottling plant in Quarry Bay, in 1978. Photo: SCMP

Aerial view of Taikoo Shing at Hong Kong Island. 30MAY12

= FILE PICTURE = File picture for the story of 60th anniversary of Hong Kong based Cathay Pacific Airways. Handout Picture from Cathay Pacific Airways, showing a DC-3 passenger aircraft in the air over Hong Kong in the late 1940's. The plane, affectionately called Betsy, was the airlines's first aircraft, made it first flight in year 1942. Now housed in the Museum of Science and Technology. Cathay Pacific has re-purchased this old Dakota for US$45,000 in year 1983. It was formally registered as VR-HDB in Hongkong in 1946, on the same date as the name of Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd wa registered.

Handout  image of John Swire of Liverpool born 1793. 29MARCH2020 BOOK REVIEW POST MAGAZINE]

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Yan Lianke’s Three Brothers honours his family and the struggle to survive in mid-20th century China

Chinese author Yan Lianke, whose new book, Three Brothers, remembers his father and two uncles. Photo: AFP

At the height of the Great Leap Forward peasants all over China were marshalled into massive labour-intensive projects like here were members of the Gangkou commune in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province, march off to work behind red flags. This photo was taken in Autumn of 1959 when slogan was "Go all out and continue Great Leap Forward and defeat rightism". XINHUA PHOTO

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Older, wiser and not above a self-deprecating joke or two, the horror writer’s gilded late period continues
While at times formulaic, King knows where the real horror lies – in fears of our own shortcomings



Older, wiser and not above a self-deprecating joke or two, the horror writer’s gilded late period continues with a collection of four works in If It Bleeds.


An assessment or critique of a service, product or creative endeavour.  Film reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of art exhibitions. (Eg. Crazy Rich Asians: an important film, yes, but a good one?)


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Review | If It Bleeds: Stephen King’s new collection of short stories explores age, death and talking rats

Older, wiser and not above a self-deprecating joke or two, the horror writer’s gilded late period continues While at times formulaic, King knows where the real horror lies – in fears of our own shortcomings

Older, wiser and not above a self-deprecating joke or two, the horror writer’s gilded late period continues

While at times formulaic, King knows where the real horror lies – in fears of our own shortcomings