Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#10

[For a list of previous entries on the countdown, see yesterday's post.]

#10."The Reaper's Image"

This very early story (first published in 1969, and later collected in Skeleton Crew) showcases King's precocious talent, his mastery of atmosphere and setting.  The action takes place inside the Samuel Claggert Memorial Private Museum, a quintessentially Gothic locale with its "suit of armor guarding the shadows of the second-floor corridor," its "grotesque scrolled candelabra," its "maze of statuary," and its "ghastly glaring portrait[s]."

As potential buyer Johnson Spangler and tour guide Mr. Carlin wind their way toward the upper levels of the Claggert mansion, the atmosphere grows ever more oppressive, conveying "a smell of long-dead flies in shadowy corners, of wet rot and creeping wood lice behind the plaster.  The smell of age.  It was a smell common only to museums and mausoleums."  The two men climb up into the attic through a trapdoor in the ceiling, and enter a cobweb-strewn gable storeroom that houses the item of Spengler's interest: the DeIver looking glass.  The mirror, crafted by John DeIver in Elizabethan-era England, is a magnificent object in and of itself, but also bears a spotted history.  Select gazers have reported glimpsing an ominous hooded figure looming behind their reflection in the mirror; their strange claims prove even more memorable when these unfortunate viewers each vanish without a trace soon thereafter.  Spangler, naturally, scoffs at such superstitious tales, until he has a first-hand encounter with the mirror's dark mysteries.

The brilliance of this 8-page gem is that the looking glass's transatlantic trajectory (it plagued a British duchess, then later a Pennsylvania rug merchant and a New York judge once the object was shipped to America) reflects the story's own literary turn.  King might be working here with traditional Gothic props, but he situates them within a distinctly American context.  Instead of simply offering readers a (European) castle anomalously transposed onto U.S. soil, he presents the antique-cluttered manse of a late-19th Century captain of American industry.  In this light, it's surely no coincidence that one of the mirror's latter-day victims is given the surname "Bates," the same as the main character in Robert Bloch's prototypical novel of American Gothic, Psycho.

"The Reaper's Image" is often overshadowed by King's subsequent, more expansive horror stories, but this finely-crafted early work has the capacity to make a haunting impression on anyone who stops to lay eyes on it.