Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#1

#1."It Grows on You"

Where else could the countdown end but in Castle Rock?  The story is set after the events of Needful Things, and the town has seriously decayed: the Rock is now "like a dark tooth which is finally ready to fall out."  It "seems the whole goddamn town is dying," and the perfect emblem for this condition is furnished by the "deathly" look of the abandoned, rotting mansion known as the Newall house.  King has steeped himself in American Gothic tradition here; the spooky house--"empty for eleven years now, no one has ever lived there for long"--recalls the titular domicile of Shirley Jackson's classic novel The Haunting of Hill House.  Moreover, the "leaning, crepitating bulk" of the Newall house stands atop a ridge overlooking the section of Castle Rock called the "Bend"--an obvious reference to "Frenchmen's Bend" in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels.

King echoes Faulkner not just in details of setting but also in terms of characterization.  Joe Newall, a mysterious outsider distrusted, if not despised, by the locals, is modeled after Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! (like Sutpen, he distances himself from the community, and "never crosse[s] the threshold" of the town church).  Newall's wife Cora, meanwhile, is drawn from the same grotesque cloth as Emily Grierson in the classic Faulkner story "A Rose for Emily," as can be gleaned from a juxtaposition of verbal portraits:

[Emily's] skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her.  She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue.  Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand. ("A Rose for Emily")

[Cora Newall] was a grainbag of a woman, incredibly wide across the hips, incredibly full in the butt, yet almost as flatchested as a boy and possessed of an absurd little pipestem neck upon which her oversized head nodded like a strange pale sunflower.  Her cheeks hung like dough, her lips like strips of liver; her face was as silent as a full moon on a winter night.  She sweated huge dark patches around the armholes of her dresses even in February, and she carried a dank smell of perspiration with her always.

Like its Faulknerian predecessor, King's story foregrounds the biased attitudes of the townspeople, who trade in vicious gossip about the Newalls.  Fact accordingly blurs with fancy: "In January of 1921, Cora gave birth to a monster with no arms and, it was said, a tiny clutch of perfect fingers sticking out of one eyesocket.  It died less than six hours after mindless contractions had pushed its red and senseless face into the light."  When Cora suffers a fatal fall down a staircase in her home, "a rumor went through town (it probably originated at a Ladies Aid Bake Sale) that she had been stark naked at the time."  Not to be outdone, Benny Ellis claims that Newall "had gouged out his daughter's one eye and kept it in a jar of what Benny called 'fubbledehyde' on the kitchen table, along with the amputated fingers which had been poking out of the other socket when the baby was born."  The Newalls may in fact be an evil clan, but the exact nature of that evil is hard to discern because of all these wild tales told by the locals.

Indeed, the story's plot is as unruly as the architecture of the sprawling Newall house, but this skewed structuring only makes the hints of lunacy that much more disconcerting.  The climax comes in the midst of a sex dream: old-timer Gary Paulson--one of the the group of "cronies" who hang out at Brownie's Store and fixate upon the Newall house--suffers a cerebral hemorrhage while dreaming of the time when the adult Cora lewdly exposed herself to him back when he was a child.  Paulson dies gasping the enigmatic words "The moon!" and then the story concludes with the following brief paragraph: "The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland, a new cupola starts to go up on the new wing on the Newall house."  It appears that the home feeds vampirically on the townspeople, thriving on their misfortune.  This Northern Gothic mansion was always being built up when the Newalls resided there, and continues to metastasize even when it lacks living occupants (in terms of King's haunted houses, the Newall place hearkens back to the Marsten House in Salem's Lot but also looks forward to the eponymous Rose Red).  The story's title thus proves to be a sinister pun.  Forever pondering the prominent home, which was "an affront to the sensibilities and an offense to the eye," the crew at Brownie's would often quip, "But it grows on you."  That it does, but not in a good way for the remaining populace of Castle Rock.

Beautifully written and rife with haunting imagery and incident, the story itself grows on you (like a worm battening on your gray matter).  It's the type of narrative that invites repeated readings, each as effective as the last in establishing a sense of weirdness.  This "story about secrets and sickness," as the author aptly labels it in his endnotes to Nightmares & Dreamscapes, turns the reader into an analogue of the men in Brownie's Store, obsessed with a looming house of gloom and the dark history of its former(?) owners.  For all these reasons, "It Grows on You" ranks as the greatest work of American Gothic short fiction that King has written to date.