Delayed Reaction

I have a feeling that I'll need to write about each and every one of the short stories I read in this Stephen King book....

I was actually relatively unimpressed with the most recent one I read, about an old man's recollection of a childhood brush with the devil himself by the banks of a river in his small hometown.

The writing was good, but I didn't really feel the story went anywhere, and I certainly wasn't frightened, especially not to the extent which the first two I read frightened me.

Mr. King included a small afterword with each short story with his thoughts on it, and he admits that this isn't one of his favorites either, so I felt validated in my opinion and moved on.

However

It was an exceptionally dark and cold night last night while I was driving home. The clouds hung low, the fog rolled in thick off the coast, and the darkness was less an absence of light and more a tangible presence, oppressive and heavy...

I tried to ignore these dark thoughts that flitted about like bats in the deep recesses of my mind, but I found no relief, rather, the more I attempted not to think about it, the more I found myself convinced I was being watched....by the darkness.

At this point I still couldn't place the source of my fears, but suddenly a light flared in through my windshield as i drove by a construction site on the side of the road in Pismo, and I could have sworn that I saw a figure in my back seat, a figure with a long, pale face and deep holes where his eyes should have been, holes that flickered with the light of an unholy flame.

As quickly as it was there it was gone, but now I had a face for my fear, the man in the black suit, the man who appeared before a nine year old boy on the banks of the rushing river many many years ago. And suddenly I remember the last line of the story...

"Suppose he were to come back and find me so....And suppose he is still hungry..."

I was terrified the whole rest of the drive home, constantly checking my rear view mirror, dreading the possibility of sighting the face in my back seat again. My eyes darted wildly from the road in front to the darkness racing by my windows searching desperately for a dark figure following along in relentless pursuit....

But I saw nothing.

Stephen King? Good writer. I'm not sure what it was about this story that took so long to hit me, but it hit hard.

Suppose he's still hungry....

If I don't read it...it won't happen...

I'm in a book.

I don't mean literally in a book, nor do I mean, figuratively, that I am reading a book.

I mean to say that I am reading a short story so ...engaging, that I feel as though I am in the story, that I am the protagonist, that the conflict is my conflict, and that his terror is my terror.

Unfortunately, the story is of a man in a venom induced state of near-death being brought in to an autopsy room in a body bag. Not dead, but unable to communicate the fact that he is living, the man is doing all within his power to stop the doctors from cutting him up like so much beef.

I can't read the rest...I have to read the rest....I don't want to know what happens...I must know what happens.

If I don't read the story, I won't find out that he dies, and therefore I die, I won't have to go through the excruciating torment of being alive during my own autopsy. However, if I don't finish it, I remain in this constant state of terror, poised on the brink of madness, praying that I might survive this ordeal, but never knowing if I'll be strong enough, if the doctors will be attentive enough.

I must know,

Stephen King is a sick sick man.

loren