Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#15

[For previous entries, click the "Top Twenty Countdowns" label under Features in the right sidebar]

#15. "Chattery Teeth"

King doubles the frisson in this Nightmares & Dreamscapes piece, melding the "psychotic hitchhiker" story with the tale of carnivalesque horror.  Traveling salesman Bill Hogan picks up two dangerous items when he stops off at the low-rent emporium known as Scooter's Grocery and Roadside Zoo.  The first is a cagey young drifter who dubs himself Bryan Adams (after glimpsing the singer's CD in Bill's van); the second is the eponymous novelty.  Bill and company set off on a ride through the Nevada desert during a mounting dust storm that turns the open road into a Gothic locale: "skirls of sand running across the desert floor" are likened to "fleeing ghost-children," and passing cars and trucks "loom out of the blowing sand like a prehistoric phantom with round blazing eyes."  The excursion takes an even darker turn when Bryan Adams proceeds to pull a knife on Bill; chafing at the attempted robbery (he's been victimized before by a hitchhiker), Bill wrecks rather than surrenders his van.

Angry as a rattler, Bryan Adams strikes out at Bill, who has been trapped in his seat belt by the accident.  But then our seemingly hapless hero receives some unexpected (by him, not the reader) aid: the presumed-broken, jumbo-sized Chattery Teeth come to life and attack Bryan Adams.  King's talent for transforming innocuous objects (e.g., cymbal-clashing monkeys, speed-ironing laundry machines) into terrible instruments is on full display in this Creepshow-esque climax of graphic comeuppance.  The Chattery Teeth hardly seem jokey when they clamp down on Bryan Adams's nose and then drop down to take a meaty bite out of another, below-the-belt protuberance (when "Chattery Teeth" was adapted for the TV-movie Quicksilver Highway, the castration scene was unsurprisingly cut out).  The last thing Bill sees is his ravaged assailant being hauled off the side of the road: "The Chattery Teeth were dragging Mr. Bryan Adams away to Nowhere, U.S.A."

But Bill hasn't had his last encounter with the Chattery Teeth.  When he returns to Scooter's nine months after the bloody incident, he finds that the proprietor Myra has been holding onto the teeth for him (she found them sitting on the porch the day after the storm, and figured that they had fallen through the bottom of the paper bag Bill had been carrying when leaving).  The dime-store item has turned up like a bad penny, yet rather than becoming unnerved by this uncanny development, traveling Bill is comforted by the idea of taking possession once more:

[...S]uddenly he found himself thinking of the kid.  Mr. Bryan Adams, from Nowhere U.S.A.  A lot of kids like him now.  A lot of grownups, too, blowing along the highways like tumbleweeds, always ready to take your wallet, say Fuck, you, sugar, and run.  You could stop picking up hitchhikers (he had), and you could put a burglar-alarm system in your home (he'd done that, too), but it was still a hard world where planes sometimes fell out of the sky and the crazies were apt to turn up anyplace and there was always room for a little more insurance.

Bill pockets his newfound insurance policy and drives off contentedly.  He's no longer defenseless against the predators haunting the open road.  In fact, you could say that he's armed to the teeth. [cue Cryptkeeper cackle]