Stephen King Goes To the Movies: A Review

At current, Stephen King has released seven collections of shorter works, give or take. That “give or take” addendum has to be in there because of the nature of King’s writing. The Gunslinger, the first of the Dark Tower books, can technically be considered a short story collection – after all, the tales came out one at a time in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. But are they stories or are they chapters? The verdict remains foggy. Same goes for The Green Mile, whose chapters were released in chap-book format over a period of six months. The collection is absolutely a novel … but there are some who would disagree.

Then there’s the curious conundrum of Hearts in Atlantis, whose cover categorizes it as “new fiction,” thereby avoiding the question of its nature. It’s a volume of five interlocked works, most of which can be taken alone (with the exception of “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling”), but gain a certain resonance when taken together. Personally? I think the thing’s a novel.

Ah, but then there are even wackier cases. The Bachman Books? Those were five individually-released novels before collected into an omnibus edition. And what of the Octopus Press collection that includes Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and The Shining? There’s no way anyone’s going to sit back and tell me that The Shining is a short story.

So: conundrums, and plenty of them, but at least we can agree on some definites. Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and the new Just After Sunset are definitely short-story collections. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight are King’s two novella collections … forgiving the fact that every piece in Four Past Midnight is longer than Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Dolores Claiborne.

But now in marches Stephen King Goes to the Movies, and I have to tell you, I have no idea what to make of it. It’s comprised of five stories, and taken in this context, I suppose we must refer to them as stories: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (made into the film The Shawshank Redemption), “Low Men In Yellow Coats” (made into the film Hearts In Atlantis, which continues to strike me as odd, since there is a story called “Hearts In Atlantis,” and it has nothing to do with the movie), “Children of the Corn,” “The Mangler,” and “1408.” Two of these come from Night Shift, and one each from Hearts In Atlantis, Different Seasons, and Everything’s Eventual.

So I reiterate: I have no idea what to make of this.

Each story is preceded by a short introductory note – a page or two, in general – regarding King’s feelings on the stories and the movies that eventually sprung from them. The Amazon.com product description raves: “This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia!” I need to make this point quite clear: there is no movie trivia in this book. At all. The closest the book comes to insider gossip is that King alludes to the fact that one of the movies needed a reshoot. Maybe.

There is some fiction trivia here, though, and it’s pretty good. King talks a little – and I do mean a little – bit about where the genesis of his stories come from, along with some writing-process tidbits (I liked his assertion that, despite “Shawshank” pointing to the contrary, he’s usually very good with titles.) There’s also a very, very exciting mention of the fact that Hearts In Atlantis, as a collection, is not quite finished. Here, sir, there are always more tales.

But what else? Unfortunately, not much … and I can’t seem to figure out who this collection is for. New readers who like King’s movies and want to try out the fiction? It might just be easier to hand them Different Seasons and tell them two amazing films and one pretty good one came out of it. Maybe it’s for completists like me who need to own everything by King that’s been put between two covers? Could be, and for a paperback at $7.99, it’s not really a huge investment (although if you’re a lunatic collector, like I was in the mid-90s, you can always pick up the Subterranean Press hardcover for $75. But … really?)

As a book, Stephen King Goes To the Movies just doesn’t make any sense. There are three outright horror stories, one Dark Tower story, and then “Shawshank,” which is neither. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas spread across an entire career. It can’t even rightly be called a “greatest hits” collection, because while most of these stories are terrific, “The Mangler” is merely very good. Among these giants, it can only look small in comparison.

For a collection like this to work, you would need (a) longer, more in-depth introductions to the tales, and/or (b) a different line-up. How about “The Lawnmower Man,” and a discussion about the controversy surrounding that? “The Woman In the Room,” maybe, which was Frank Darabont’s first King adaptation. Maybe a look into why Different Seasons has yielded pretty terrific results, but Four Past Midnight hasn’t given us any films that rise above mediocrity. Or what about “Trucks,” from which King’s own Maximum Overdrive sprang, or some of the more interesting “dollar babies,” like “Paranoid: A Chant,” or “The Last Rung On the Ladder.”

I love Stephen King, I really do. I am looking forward to Under the Dome with a palpable fervor. But putting out a collection of recycled stories without much in the way of new material (a Top 10 list of King’s favorite movies based on his work is the best of the new stuff) just isn’t something I can recommend. The new stuff in Stephen King Goes To the Movies took me all of fifteen minutes to read, and for eight bucks, that’s just not enough.