Literateur: A Couple Re-Reads

For the longest time, I never re-read books. I felt like: been there, done that. Next!

Since I'm cranking out prose now, I get curious about how my favorite authors pulled off their tricks. Because I want to rip them off.

So!

Just finished re-reading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers. I liked it well enough at age 14. As an adult, its faults are glaring. 

Woman discovers alien ship buried in her backyard, unearths it, finds it gives her strange mental powers, then the dormant alien force gives everyone in her town mental powers...except for one guy who has a metal plate in his head. Mayhem ensues as people are trapped in the town. It's like a rough draft for Under the Dome, with elements from It thrown in for seasoning. 

King gives us two likeable main characters up front, then makes the mistake of turning it into an ensemble epic about the entire town and the two people we like get pushed to the background. The townspeople just aren't that interesting, making it all feel like a drag. 

King admits Tommyknockers is his least favorite of his books, written heavily under the influence of drugs, with lotsa drug allegories throughout. (The same could be said for Misery, but that one integrates the drug allegories better and was more concise.) Its biggest problem is terminal bloat. This thing is 750 pages when it should be half that, at most. 

Then the ending just farts in your face. Way too much death and doom, not emotionally earned or resonant. It misses the mark in almost every way that It perfectly hits the mark. Both books have similar endings and similar plots. And they were written around the same time. Interesting to see an author hit and miss with such similar stories at a similar time.

The so-so 1994 TV miniseries adaptation starred Jimmy Smits as the guy with the metal plate in his head. That's how they labeled him in the credits: "Guy With the Metal Plate in His Head."

Another reread: William Peter Blatty's Legion. The author of The Exorcist wrote this semi-sequel to his notorious classic in 1983. It was filmed a few years later (by the author, writing and directing!) as Exorcist III. And it wisely ignores the events of the atrocious Exorcist II: The Heretic. 

It's a gem. Although structurally a murder mystery, the mystery and supernatural aspects take a backseat. It's mostly the old Jewish detective character philosophically rambling about the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people. Which sounds horrible (I normally hate it when authors whine about this issue because they're usually just sloppily soapboxing), but it totally works. 

And Blatty reaches a surprisingly original conclusion at the end: an answer to why the world is the broken way it is, all of which went way over my head when I read it as a kid. 

Ready for it? Here you go: the giant flash of light that we know of as The Big Bang was Lucifer ("Lord of Light") falling from heaven. And evolution has been the slow process of Lucifer trying to form himself back into an angel of light. Thus: we are all Lucifer.

Your mind blown yet? It should be! 

It's so rare for me to find an original idea anywhere anymore, so even when a new idea is bonkers, I like it because I haven't heard it before.


-Phony McFakename
 

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