Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#4

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#4. "Rainy Season"

A downpour of carnivorous toads in a sleepy rural town--sounds like a biblical plague meets a grade-B movie on Sci-Fi.  But in Stephen King's hands, such premise makes for a rousing horror story, and a premier work of American Gothic fiction.

This Nightmares & Dreamscapes tale reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone scripted by Shirley Jackson (one of the main characters here references "The Lottery" by title, but Jackson's "The Summer People" is another obvious source text).  Once every seven years on the night of June 17th, the bucolic community of Willow, Maine must endure an unnatural disaster.  The reptilian deluge ravages the town, but such damage is "small price to pay for another seven years of quiet prosperity in this mostly forgotten Maine backwater."  Another "part of the ritual" is the arrival of a pair of outsiders on that ominous day, who must be told about the toads and encouraged to spend the night outside the town limits (or to at least close the shutters of their residence tight if they refuse to leave Willow).  Vacationing couple John and Elise Graham ignore the warning, of course, and suffer the bizarre consequences.

The climactic attack (by toads with needle teeth, lumpy bodies, and black-and-gold eyes that bulge "like freakish eggs") is at once terrifying and revolting, but "Rainy Season" is more than a Kingly version of a conte cruel.  Actually, the main characters here aren't the Grahams but the pair of locals they meet at the General Mercantile.  Henry Eden and Laura Stanton are charged with playing the welcoming committee for outsiders on the 17th, and this duty of attempting to inform the endangered couple (who never heed the advice to stay away) has grown wearisome for the elderly Willowers.  At one point John Graham refers to them as "Farmer Jekyll and Missus Hyde," but the pair might just as easily be likened to the standoffish duo in Grant Wood's iconic painting American Gothic.  And while we can only guess what's going on inside the heads of Wood's dour-looking subjects, we are given a clear understanding of why King's characters are so dyspeptic--why Henry Eden (he of the ironic surname) hopes he'll be dead and buried when free-falling toads carpet his hometown's streets seven years hence.

"Rainy Season" brings one helluva storm to Willow, and a memorable story to readers.  But as we'll see next time on the countdown, this isn't the first time that King has made masterful use of the married-couple-stumbles-into-strange-town plotline.