Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#3

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#3. "Children of the Corn"

King has gone down the married-couple-stumbles-upon-queer-little-town road repeatedly in his short fiction, but his first foray remains his best.  Burt and Vicky Robeson drive cross-country toward California in a "last ditch attempt to patch up their own marriage," but their road trip hits the skids when they make an ill-fated detour through the dark heartland of America.  Gatlin bills itself as "THE NICEST LITTLE TOWN IN NEBRASKA--OR ANYWHERE ELSE!", but such welcome turns out to be an egregious piece of false advertising.  "Somewhere up ahead," Burt speculates when approaching the town, "there would be a drugstore with a soda fountain, a movie house named the Bijou, a school named after JFK," and while Gatlin does feature many of these Rockwellian elements, the scene there proves decidedly sinister.

This Night Shift story is a masterpiece of suspense, presenting a string of ominous details: the boy who runs out of the corn field with his throat fatally slit; his corn-husk crucifix; the strange evangelism airing on the local radio station; the utter ghost town that is Gatlin, with its wall calendars twelve years out-of-date; the converted Baptist church, with its portrait of a vulpine Jesus behind the pulpit ("a pagan Christ that might slaughter his sheep for sacrifice instead of leading them"), and its record book of Biblically-rechristened children (none of whom have lived past the age of nineteen).  Making these discoveries, Burt slowly pieces together the puzzle of what has gone wrong in Gatlin, figuring that the titular children "got religion and the[n] killed off their parents.  All of them.  Isn't that a scream?  Shot them in their beds [an allusion to Capote's In Cold Blood?], knifed them in their bathtubs, poisoned their suppers, hung them, or disemboweled them, for all I know."  And why?  "The corn.  Maybe it was dying.  Maybe they got the idea somehow that it was dying because there was too much sinning.  Not enough sacrifice."  Paging Shirley Jackson...

All of this build-up leads to a terrifying payoff, as the gang of grim-and-proper young pagans at last appears and attacks the Robesons.  When Burt attempts to hide out in the labyrinth of the corn field, though, he discovers that he is dealing with not just a case of religious mania run amok but something truly supernatural:
 "something huge, bulking up to the sky...something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs."  He Who Walks Behind the Rows actually exists, and this dreadful, Lovecraftian figure makes a fitting deity for Gothic America: "Out there, in the night, something walked, and it saw everything...even the secrets kept in human hearts."

"Children of the Corn" has perhaps been overshadowed by its popular film version (featuring a young Linda Hamilton and Courtney Gains as the malicious Malachi), but the original story forms a brilliant example of King's work in the short-fiction mode.