[For previous entries, click the "Top 20 Countdowns" label under Features in the right sidebar.]
#7."N."
King has gone the Lovecraftian route before, most notably in "Jerusalem's Lot," "The Mist," and "Crouch End," but never more frightfully than in this novella collected in Just After Sunset. And while OCD forms a a central theme here, readers shouldn't expect to find some cozy episode of Monk. Similarly, the narrative's primary setting, Ackerman's Field, produces a crop of beasties more harrowing than any of the Universal lot celebrated in Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
The novella proves an excellent example of American Gothic fiction on a couple of levels. First, in its update of the epistolary mode of the traditional Gothic novel ("N." is comprised of letters, e-mails, newspaper clippings, and a psychiatrist's case notes). Moreso, though, in its conception of something awfully supernatural lurking within/beyond nature. The patient N. (as he's referred to in Dr. John Bonsaint's notes) is an accountant by trade but a landscape photographer by hobby. One day, in pursuit of a picture of rural tranquility, he stumbles upon a distressing scene: a Stonehenge-type arrangement, which he believes forms a gateway between our own world and a world filled with giant, malevolent
creatures. Worse, he thinks that his accidental glimpse has upset the taslismanic balance of the stones (whose number seems to waver between eight and seven: "I had activated the place just by looking at it. Human eyes take away the eighth stone. A camera lens will put it back, but won't lock it in place. I had to keep renewing the protection with symbolic acts" (acts utterly consonant with the symptoms of OCD: counting, touching, placing. Appropriately, Ackerman's Field lies just past "Serenity Ridge Cemetery," whose name suggests the dividing line between peace of mind and debilitating compulsion). Nature gives way to nightmare, as N. perceives a gathering "outer darkness" within the circle of stones--an ominous, vista-distorting presence that uses the very "sunset to see with," and that seems "to mock the beauty of that silent spring morning." In the exhausting aftermath of his unfortunate discovery, N. also discerns that the summer solstice (a highly pleasant time of year in most people's minds) is actually the point of greatest danger of the cosmic horrors breaking into and overwhelming our earthly reality.
"N." does not just feature cyclopean grotesques reminiscent of the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos but emulates Lovecraft's work in its creation of a mounting sense of dread via a speaker's ongoing attempt at recounting--at articulating the unspeakable. The novella's premise that mental illness might be transmitted from patient to analyst "like cold germs on a sneeze" also forms a brilliant analogue of the nightmares the horror author like King determinedly passes on the reader (though N. remains anonymous in the narrative, his name might as well be Stephen.)
And for all those readers who fear that they might have been "infected" by N.'s story just like Dr. John Bonsaint, I assure you that it was mere coincidence that this novella charted at #7 on the Top 20 Countdown. So don't even give a second thought to that odd number; there's nothing inauspicious about it.
Nothing at all.
Right?
***
One final note: for those who like their horror even more "graphic," "N." is also available online as an original video series, and has been adapted as a hardcover book by Marvel Comics (Stephen King's N.).
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