From Rhode Island: Birthplace of Mr. Potato-head... it's ************************** ASTRAL AVENUE ************************** Number 1 November 1986 "Eff the ineffable!" JUDGEMENT IN ALL THINGS TOPICS OF PRESENT INTEREST Right Up to Date PUBLISHER'S NOTE Astral Avenue is an actual Providence street located not far from our home. Short, tree-lined, unprepossessing, it and its inhabitants have never yet exhibited any overt trace of Kozmic Konsciousness. And yet... light fractures strangely there on a summer's day; mailmen have been seen to enter and SKIP SOME HOUSES; LOVECRAFT NEVER WALKED ON IT; and there are STRAY DOGS ROAMING FREE. We wonder.... KING OF AMERICA "He thought he was the King of America/ Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine/ Now I try hard not to become hysterical/ But I'm not sure if I am laughing or crying." -- Elvis Costello I do not wish to indict Stephen King's story in the October issue of OMNI ("The End of the Whole Mess") simply because it is a lame, boneheaded, implausible farrago of old ideas and cliches. After all, plenty of momentarily captivating SF had been written based on stale or improbable notions (A. E. Van V.: Q.E.D.). No, what I object to about King's story is that it is patently the work of a man who -- at this stage of his career, after however many best-selling words -- still cannot write with any degree of competence larger than that of an apprentice hack. I identify three major failings in King's writings, which I'll try to illustrate from this one story, where examples abound. The reader himself is invited to look for instances in King's novels. 1). King has only one voice. By this, I do not mean that all his fiction is identifiable as emanating from the same man. That is hardly a flaw. No, I mean that no matter how a King story is narrated -- first person, as here, or omniscient third person -- no matter how many characters are involved (basically two here, casts of thousands elsewhere), EVERY DESCRIPTION, EVERY WORD OF DIALOGUE, IS FILTERED BLATANTLY THROUGH KING'S OWN SET OF QUIRKS. There is no differentiation of characters in a King story, there are no perceptions evident but his. King inhabits a one-man universe. "T.E.O.T.W.M." features two brothers: one ostensibly a bright, but normal writer; the other a "genius." Their speech, mannerisms, and actions are identical. WRITER: "Good shit, too." GENIUS: "...bullshit...bullshit." WRITER: "...some weird shit..." GENIUS: "Shit..." Is this some hidden commentary on the writer-narrator's lack of talent, or how he and his brother think alike? I doubt it. What it is, is Stephen King talking as he would aloud. (Compare this laughable portrait of a genius, by the way, to Greg Bear's superior work in BLOOD MUSIC, which has much the same theme as the King story.) Let's look at some more examples of how a King story is like being trapped in an empty room with the author himself. The narrator is born in 1980; his brother in '87. But if you think they exhibit consciousnesses formed by the events of the 'eighties and 'nineties, forget it. They talk just like King, exhibiting all his by-now familiar tics: roots or retro music (Chuck Berry, Youngbloods, George Jones); baseball stars from two or three decades in the story's past (Catfish Hunter, Ron Guidry); LSD; old TV shows (WILD KINGDOM, ANDY OF MAYBERRY); comics (Peanuts); toys (Paddington Bear, American Flyer wagon); celebrities (Rodney Dangerfield). The depressing list goes on. If King had really wanted to limn characters born in the 'eighties, he could have stuck with all these same interests, but just updated them. Teddy Ruxpin instead of Paddington, different rock stars, etc. But that would have been too much work. And it wouldn't have reflected King's own youth, his only imaginative source. 2). King's figurative writing and his literal/descriptive writing fail to seduce or convince the reader, and frequently accomplish just the reverse. King employs the same metaphors over and over and over. Mostly they involve excretion or fearful sex. "Asshole," "pissing in their pants," "pass a mental kidney stone," "social diseases," "AIDS virus," "my back teeth are floating," "potty trained," "our dad farted so much," "I want whores to douche in it." And let us not forget the "shit" leitmotif. But I can't go on. After a while, it's like fill-in-the-blank: if you can think of a urogenital image, King'll use it. Perhaps this is some grand Yeatsian "Love has pitched its temples in the place of excrement" riff. Yeah, and maybe Billy Idol now houses the spirit of John Lennon. These aren't planned tropes, they're psychoanalytic free-association -- and they're simply embarrassing. As for his attempts at transcribing reality in a convincing manner, King fails because he only knows three tactics: a) make it "cute"; b) make it "gross" (a favorite King word, used in "T.E.O.T.W.M."); c) make it "hip." All three stratagems are miserable substitutes for simply observing reality and transcribing accurately. CUTE: "genny" for generator; "footy pajamas"; "Bow-Wow" for Howard. GROSS: "died raving and pissing"; "his body... impaling itself on a tree"; "some senile farmer got pissed at a pig and hit him with a shovel". HIP: "acid flashback"; "the goddamnedest popskull"; "a big bulldyke who smokes Odie Perodie cigars" (my fave). King seems to believe that by employing these three tactics he will create fiction that allows him to live up to his undeserved rep as a popculture maven, someone who has his finger on the pulse of America. To me, that describes William Burroughs and his work. Who King sounds like is Johnny Carson. The same mentality is evident: funny words like "Albanian" and "nostril hair" automatically rate a laff. 3). King has no sense of pace, plotting, or climax. This is a familiar charge against the man, and I will not belabor it here. I only direct your attention to the ostensibly thrilling but draggy passage about the boy genius's glider, and the interminable "Flowers for Algernon" ending. And although King seems to realize his lack of brevity -- "Shit, I can't afford these digressions" -- he does nothing about it, perhaps realizing, rightly so, that he hasn't developed (and probably never will, at this point) the skills to shape his fiction consciously, and must rely on whatever tepid lava is vomited up. (Also note this Freudian slip: "Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his modifiers misplaced... such flaws... plague most writers all their lives.") King is the F. Marion Crawford of our day. His work is like pigeontracks in cement: arbitrary, but with a semblance of intention. But cement is just sand and water, and crumbles eventually. AVEDON ASKED HER TO POSE, BUT SHE ATE HIM A recent frontpage article in the Arts section of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES mentioned a "life-size sculpture of the Sphinx." Is this one of New Journalism's fictional sources? "GER--? GER--? DOES IT MEAN 'PROTO'?" Has anyone else noticed that a prominent Soviet spokesman is named "Gerasimov"? Who knows Russian out there? Does "asimov" mean something, and is "ger" a prefix? What if "asimov" is the Russian word for some kinda slug or sumpin? We demand to know! GRAFFITO OF THE MONTH "Dyslexics of the world, untie!" FREEFLOATING INVECTIVE: PASS IT ON "The sheikh of my quarter is a creature of such horrible ugliness that I doubt not he was born from the coupling of a hyena and a pig. His approach is pestilential; for his mouth is no ordinary mouth, but rather a dirty anus like the hole of a privy; his fish-colored eyes pop sideways; his scabby lips are like a venereal sore and jet out spittle when he speaks; his ears are a sow's ears; his flabby painted cheeks are like an old ape's bottom; his teeth have fallen from his jaws from eating filth; his body is fretted with every foul disease of the earth; as for his anus -- well, he has not got one: for he has so long given himself to be a ditch for the tools of donkey-boys, nightmen, and sweepers, that his arsegut has rotted away and is now a cave stuffed with cotton swabs to prevent his tripes from falling out." -- 1001 Nites, "The Tale of the Sweeper Wakened." ASTRAL AVENUE -- Paul Di Filippo 2 Poplar Street Providence, RI 02906