Overall I like this longish Stephen King story pretty well. It focuses on a wind-up toy monkey I know from the Close Encounters movie and elsewhere, a 1950s-era toy that had a resurgence in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe even because of this story, although first I would like to know whether King was influenced by the Spielberg movie. King and Spielberg are both very strong on 1970s-era middle-class, young, usually suburban family life. In this story King makes the toy a harbinger or perhaps somehow the agent of doom by insisting on it. It’s true he’s really good at evoking the toy, particularly the sound of it: jang-jang-jang-jang accompanied by gears or springs working. I picked one up myself in the ‘80s at a garage sale or thrift store or something, although it never scared me (and I didn’t know this story anyway until much more recently). The wind-up gyrations even charmed me, which unfortunately makes it an obstacle for me to overcome in this story in terms of believability. Sure, I can see the creepy side of the thing, but it just reminds me again that King often depends on the spaces of novels to work most effectively. The late scenes in this story, with a man rowing to the deepest part of a lake and the sudden storm and all that, reminded me of the furniture-moving pulp styles of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a really big scene, almost ridiculously so, e.g., the cloud formation, the rowboat falling entirely to pieces, etc. I just noticed there’s a movie version coming out next month directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daugher, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House)—might be interesting. I wasn’t particularly moved by the family elements in the story, the father and son business, but that again might speak to King’s greater strengths as a novelist, where family stuff is often prominent and effective, with the space to breathe life into it. Here it is more like reflexive, with the jang-jang-jang-jang as a signal for anxiety and Pop and Junior a signal for pathos. King is going for the epic qualities of “The Great God Pan” and “The Dunwich Horror,” which have little of family feels. So he’s not quite getting it right in the story format, but he’s on the right track in many ways. David Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, discusses, in his introduction to “The Monkey,” “... the extent to which [King] is synthesizing and mutating, from his voluminous reading on horror, the entire historical development of the field.” That is absolutely true enough. After my teen exposure to the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies in the ‘60s (including the magazine), King was my next jolt of experience in horror literature, both for his novels and, even more importantly, for Danse Macabre, which was very inspiring even if I could not really connect with Frankenstein, Dracula, or other landmarks he brought to my attention. I think the subtle problem in this story is a matter of overthinking it, or possibly trying too hard. It’s not that I have problems anymore with the ponderous, pulpy furniture-moving style.
Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.
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