Book Review: Full Dark, No Stars (Part 1 of 4)

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King (Scribner, 2010)

[Four novellas, reviewed over four consecutive days here at Macabre Republic.]

Today's Review: 1922

This leadoff piece is the best written and most terrifying (musophobes beware: there are some ghastly scenes involving rats), setting the tone for the entire collection.  It is a self-described "ghost story," where the haunting might stem from either supernatural (hellish vengeance from beyond the grave) or psychological (the narrator's guilt-ridden id) sources.  Eight years after the titular date, narrator Wilf James sits in an Omaha hotel room penning his confession, of having coerced his then-14-year-old son into joining his father in a throat-slashing murder of his mother (Wilf's "bloody divorce" follows a bitter dispute with his wife Arlette over the 100 acres of rural land she has inherited--she wants to sell out and move to the city).  Wilf recounts the bedroom killing in mesmerizing detail, and the aftermath of the grisly deed is even more suspenseful, as father and son attempt to get away with their crime by sealing Arlette's corpse inside an abandoned well and then pretending that she ran away from home.  A clever plan, no doubt, but one destined to turn into a smashing failure.

An unreliably-narrated tale of brutal murder in an isolated farmhouse, 1922 reads like Poe meets Capote (with a hint of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls").  But in its chronicle of the catastrophic repercussions to a singular act, the novella most strongly echoes the grim naturalism of Frank Norris (whom King cites as a literary idol in his afterword to FD, NS).  "Poison spreads like ink in water," Wilf notes (a figuration of doom worthy of Norris's magnus opus, The Octopus) toward the end of his confession, after both he and all those around him have been reduced to misery and ruin.  1922 is unrelentingly bleak--as one might expect of a novella whose Midwestern mise-en-scene was inspired by the stark photos in a nonfiction book entitled Wisconsin Death Trip--yet proves that in 2010 King continues to reign as the nation's greatest writer of American Gothic fiction.