If It Bleeds, by Stephen King

Stephen King is so good at so many things — pacing, characterization, rising tension, scaring the hell out of people — that frequently it’s only after I finish one of his books that I realize the problems with it.  In his new collection, If It Bleeds, every one of the stories annoyed me to some extent while I was reading it, but the reasons for that annoyance didn’t become clear until I thought about them later.

The first story, “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” is about a young boy who goes to work for a wealthy old man and becomes friends with him.  The boy, Craig, gives Mr. Harrington the eponymous iPhone, though he has to convince the man, who’s stuck in his ways, to use it.  (Tangentially, I can’t believe that by the first decade of the 21st century a billionaire doesn’t understand a lot of what the internet can do.  He’d at least wonder why all the other stockbrokers seemed better informed than he was.)

So far it’s pretty good, though.  There’s a lot of King’s virtues, heart-warming interaction between characters but also a sense of menace coming closer — early on Craig mentions “the trouble I had with Kenny Yanko.”  Then Mr. Harrigan dies, and Craig, while viewing him in his open casket, tucks the phone into his pocket.

And then we discover that this is a story about contacting the dead via telephone.  I mean, come on!  How many stories like this have been written since the phone was invented?  Probably the theme of reaching out to the dead through a new medium goes all the way back to the telegraph and maybe beyond; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a story somewhere about a ghost writing in cuneiform on clay tablets.  After this, of course, “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” goes through its conventional paces, becoming less interesting all the time.

In “The Life of Chuck,” a character named Marty sees a billboard that says, “CHARLES KRANTZ.  39 GREAT YEARS!  THANKS, CHUCK!”  As Marty goes about his day he spots this message more and more: while he’s trying to connect to Netflix, being written by a plane in the sky.  Meanwhile, everything around him is failing, to the point where the world seems to be coming to an end.

The problem is — well, none of this section is necessary.  Its only connection with the rest of the story is thematic; King drops Marty and his wife unceremoniously and moves on to Chuck.  Meanwhile, though, we’ve become invested in Marty and his ex-wife and whether they’ll survive and maybe even get back together again.  Sometimes King is too talented for his own good; if he hadn’t made these characters so interesting I wouldn’t have minded so much when he left them.

I had another problem with “The Life of Chuck,” though.  King, thankfully, appears to have dropped the Magical Negro characters who populated his earlier works, people like Mother Abigail in The Stand and John Coffey in The Green Mile.  (I actually hadn't realized he'd done so many of them until I looked around the net and found this informative article by Nnedi Okorafor.)

Unfortunately his new method of writing minority characters is to make them just like straight Christian white people, only with a different color skin or religion or sexual orientation.  In “The Life of Chuck,” when Chuck’s parents die he goes to live with his grandparents, who are Jewish.  (Chuck is half-Jewish.)  King then goes on to say that Chuck’s Grandma collects clothes for the Lutheran homeless shelter (a shame that Jews have no charities of their own to collect clothes for, but what can you do?) and that they watch A Christmas Carol every year on Christmas Eve.  And to skip ahead for a bit, the next story, “If It Bleeds,” has one of King’s recurring characters, a black college student named Jerome who, in an earlier novel, would jokingly say things like “I sho do, suh!” and “Yassuh boss!”  I feel hesitant commenting on whether a black character is realistic or not, but I can’t believe Jerome, as he is presented, would ever use these phrases.  (Fortunately he, or King, grows up a bit in the current story.)  On the other hand, I have no qualms about saying that using a few Yiddish words does not make a character Jewish.

“If It Bleeds” also brings back Holly Gibney, a young woman from several previous novels.  I like Holly, and I suspect so do many of King’s readers: she’s a shy woman, not at all neurotypical, who’s been kept under her mother’s thumb for years.  In Mr. Mercedes she helps someone investigate a crime and turns out to have a talent for detection.  Over the course of her appearances she becomes more self-confidant, and learns more about how to act in the world.  In this story we meet her mother, a woman so horrible it’s amazing that Holly ever managed to leave the house.

King likes her too, as he makes plain in the afterword: “I love Holly.  It’s as simple as that… She stole my heart.”  Maybe for this reason, he spends a lot of time with her, recounting her history from previous books.  And recounting it, and recounting it … “She is the woman who, along with Bill and Jerome, saved those children at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex.  She is the woman who…” It gets a little tedious.  I mean, save some stuff for the people who haven’t read those novels yet.

(There’s also a policeman with a partner named Marcel Duchamp.  I don’t know about you, but if I had a partner with that name, it would give me serious pause.  And yet it’s presented without comment or explanation.)

Holly is tracking down a vampire who enjoys people’s pain, a trope as cliched as the one in “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.”  The last story, “Rat,” is about a writer who makes a deal with the devil — or in this case a sinister rat — to be able to go on writing.  Only “The Life of Chuck” has a premise with some originality, the idea that everyone contains a world, a world that vanishes when the person dies.

Still, these stories kept my interest while I read them.  All the talents I mentioned earlier are on display here.  But then — I guess I’m never satisfied — I have to go and compare this to King's earlier collection Different Seasons, and remember what a revelation that was.  Recommended for people who already like King, or need something to read on another featureless day in lockdown.