Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#5

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#5. "The Reach"

In her 95 years, Stella Flanders has never once set foot off Goat Island, but now her long-dead husband keeps appearing to her, coaxing her to venture across the frozen-over Reach.  The aged Stella hasn't merely imagined the revenant, though--a fact confirmed by key details at story's end.  Bill is a psychopomp (as symbolized by the dead sparrow that prefigures his visitations) calling Stella not to Raccoon Head on the mainland but to a more metaphysical destination.

This concluding selection in Skeleton Crew is not just a ghost story--it's a finely crafted work of American Gothic fiction (a paragraph concerning family lineage even appears to be modeled on a passage in William Faulkner's novella The Bear).  The narrative does more than chronicle the death of an old woman; it creates a portrait of small-town life beyond the mainland.  King captures the insular nature of such a community, whose members are wont to gossip about their neighbors but quick to lend a hand in times of need.  The residents of Goat Island "watched out for their own in other ways as well," like the time a mob of local menfolk murdered an outsider accused of child molestation.  For better or for worse, the islanders band together (a theme King returns to in Storm of the Century), and according to Stella, this close-knittedness is a product of geographic and climatic circumstances:  

"We had to [look out for one another], for the Reach was wider in those days and when the wind roared and the surf pounded and the darkness came early, why, we felt very small--no more than dust motes in the mind of God.  So it was natural for us to join hands, one with the other.

"We joined hands, children, and if there were times when we wondered what it was all for, or if there was ary such a thing as love at all, it was only because we had heard the wind and the waters on long winter nights, and we were afraid."

For all the howling of harsh winter storms, "The Reach" is a muted story--haunting yet not harrowing.  The idea that the wind carries the voices of the deceased is not a cause for terror but rather a spur to existential inquiry about the reach between the here and the hereafter: "Do the dead sing?  And do they love the living?"  Stella's encounter with Bill and his spiritual circle furnishes affirmative answers to both questions.  Even in death, the inhabitants of Goat Island watch out for their own.