Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#13

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#13. "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French"

"What is deja vu?" is the correct response to the Final-Jeopardy-type title of this story collected in Everything's Eventual.  Viewpoint character Carol Shelton experiences a chronic case of that strange feeling as she travels with her husband Bill to a 25th-anniversary second honeymoon on Captiva Island in Florida.  Along the way, Carol hears unidentifiable voices ("Floyd, what's that over there? Oh shit.") and makes inexplicable discoveries (the flakes of burnt paper stuck in hair like "black dandruff")--disorienting story details that only make sense in retrospect.

In true American Gothic fashion, King's story highlights the dark underbelly of everyday life.  Carol ruminates: "Besides, it wasn't just love that held people together.  There were secrets, and the price you paid to keep them."  Some of the big secrets impinging upon Bill and Carol's marriage are Bill's former affair with his secretary and Carol's private decision to get an abortion (she tells everyone she suffered a miscarriage).  The story also Gothicizes an everyday American scene, as a drive down an ordinary Florida roadway keeps morphing into a fiery apocalypse.

The eventual plot twist that Carol and Bill are dead (having perished en route to Florida when their chartered Learjet crashed) is no jaw-dropping shock, but what distinguishes "That Feeling..." is King's dramatization of Carol's experiences following the accident.  The religious images (e.g. a roadside billboard of Mary) that Carol glimpses take on a disturbing significance as she belatedly catches on to what is happening:

She opened her eyes and looked around the sun-brilliant cabin of the Lear 35, and for a moment she understood everything--in the way one understands the tremendous import of a dream upon the first moment of waking.  She remembered asking [Bill] what he believed you got, you know, after, and he had said you probably got what you always thought you would get, that if Jerry Lee Lewis thought he was going to hell for playing boogie-woogie, that's exactly where he'd go.  Heaven, Hell, or Grand Rapids, it was your choice--or the choice of those who had taught you what to believe.  It was the human mind's final great parlor trick: the perception of eternity in the place where you'd always expected to spend it.

Or the choice of those who had taught you what to believe.  Here King's story takes a wicked twist, positing Catholic guilt as a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Carol's strict religious upbringing (nuns wielding rulers and spook stories about eternal damnation; a grandmother who gave Carol a medallion of Mary for her tenth birthday, telling her to  "Wear her always as you grow, because all the hard days are coming") has now trapped her in an endlessly looping nightmare.  For the indoctrinated Carol, Mary had been "the ghost of all her childhood days," and now the Mother of God will continue to haunt Carol in her personal hereafter.

Apropos of a cyclically-structured story about deja vu, "That Feeling..." is a work that warrants multiple readings (once the plane-crash plot twist is known, one can appreciate the various clues that are threaded throughout the text).  King's narrative holds that Hell is repetition, but the author's Constant Readers will be happy to return to this masterfully-crafted tale of the afterlife.