I finally added this to my collection after seeing the movie A Good Marriage which is the last story in this book of shorts. The story Big Driver is the second story in here & it has a movie coming on lifetime this Saturday. You are probably thinking the way I am, Stephen King on lifetime whattttt??? But I will watch it then blog about the book vs the movie after.
For now however, I have finished the first two stories in here.
The first being 1922.
It is a story about a man that has murdered his wife & the consequences that proceed.
It starts with Wilfred Leland James, known in the story simply as Wilf. He is in a hotel room & he is writing is confession. The date is April 11, 1930. He is in the Magnolia hotel in Omaha, Nebraska and he writes "how in June 1922 he murdered his wife Arlette Christina Winters James and hid her body by tupping it down the old well."
He also states that his son Henry helped after he cozened him for 2 months. Henry was only 14 at the time & it was a regret that Wilf still holds to this day.
He writes this confession as he hears the scurry of the rats in the walls that he coinciders his judge & jury & they have found him here in the hotel & plan on bringing him to justice.
So what brought about this murder? Land of course. It's a farmers bread & butter & Wilf owning 80 acres that had been passed down from generation to generation was hoping to add the 100 acres in Hemingford home, Nebraska that had been willed to Arlette by her late father.
Arlette on the other hand wanted to sell the land to Farrington's Hog Butchery & Wilf did everything in his power to stop her. Eventually she threatened to take over his farm & sell it to them as well.
Wilf would die before handing over his land which seemed his death would not be a problem for her & so the plan was devised.
Wilf had dreamed about how easy it would be to end her life but as in real life he learned it was not so easy & his abilities were not for anything other than farming. It was a messy situation but in the end Arlette was no more.
What came next would ultimately ruin the life he has known. The next eight years would bring destruction of the world he knew and the consequences of his actions would lead him to no alternative then to sit in a hotel seeing his dead wife and hearing his jury coming for him.
Even as a short story Stephen King brings his brilliance & visual mastery of a man who has done a bad deed & yet you feel sorry for him as you read his world crumbling like a decrepit building the tears stream down your face as you can not bear it. Proof that he is a master storyteller & not just a horror writer.
The next story is Big Driver:
This story is about a writer named Tess who sees success with her book series called The Willow Grove Knitting Society. The series consisting of twelve books so far follows a group the solves murders.
She takes speaking engagements to build up her nest egg but only ones that she can drive to & does not stay overnight more than a day so that Fitzy her cat would not be alone.
She gets a email from Ramona Norville who is the head librarian at Chicopee Public Library and is writing as the president of Books & Brown Baggers which puts on a noon lecture each month with people encouraged to bring their lunches & she states how popular the event was. Originally Janet Evanovich had been schedueled but need to cancel so could she fill the spot & she was offered an honorarium of fifteen hundred dollars.
It would be a quick in & out for her & it was close enough to get home the same night.
Tess agrees & spends the day speaking, mingling & signing autographs.
After all is done Ms. Norville hands her the money & gives her directions for a short cut that would save her a lot of time.
After plugging the address in her gps she heads away seeing the sign for I84 but passing it in lou of the shortcut.
She heads down Stagger lane which is a deserted dirt road ignoring all the horror cliches in her head.
With her mind elsewhere it was too late for her to notice the pieces of broken wood with the nails all over the road till one ended up in the front wheel of her expidition & she ended up with a flat tire in a ditch. She sees salvation coming her way in the form of a white van that belongs to a rock group called the zombie bakers only to watch helplessly as the swerve to avoid all the broken wood, kicking up dust & heading off down the road never seeing her on the side.
She decides to pick the pieces of wood up & toss them aside so the next person to come along would not be the same fate.
Of course there is no service on her phone so she has to wait for the kindness of strangers which comes in way of a guy in a blue ford 150 pickup who pulls over to help the damsel in distress.
The man is a massive presence standing well over the six feet mark with a faded hat & bleach splattered overalls. Causing Tess to be uncomfortable but his happy go lucky attitude changes her tune & she feels bad about his truck door being open & the possibility of his battery dying while changing her tire that she goes to shut it but notices the broken pieces of wood (the same that caused her tire distruction) in the back seat. As it's clicking in her head she turns to find him hovering over her.
He hits her & she blacks out. When she wakes he is raping her on the floor of a broken down store & as she tried to get away he strangles her. Eventually she playes dead & finds herself being dragged into a culvert & left. She isn't the only one in there finding another two victims who had indeed been killed.
She listens for him to leave & runs away. Running down the road she ducks out of sight at every headlight that passes for fear that it is him coming back after her.
When she finally makes it home she realized the woman she was is not who she is now & she starts plotting her revenge.
It is a story about what lengths one will go to when the person they know gets violated so violently that they disappear from exsistance and are replaced by a stranger.
As you read you cheer for her even though you know it's leading her down a dark path.
In conclusion even if you have never read a Stephen King book it would be worthwhile to pick this one up. I look forward to reading the last two stories when I am finished with my next blogging for books review.
Stay tuned for my book vs movie review of Big Driver after Saturday & my follow up of this rest of this book. So far I am rating this 5 stars!
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