The latest Stephen King collection tells four stories, three of which involve violence against women - though King, always a hugely sympathetic writer, avoids sensationalism, while also providing bitter comeuppance for each of the perpetrators. Vengeance and just desserts is a recurring theme throughout.
1922 is a first person account of the life of Wilfred Leland James, a Nebraska farmer who, together with his son Henry, murders his wife to stop her selling off his land. But Arlette James does not go quietly into the night - nor, indeed, the well into which her body is dumped - and memory of their crime drives both husband and son to madness. The Steinbeckian detail is rich, and the tragic fate of Henry and his girlfriend Shannon is straight out of Badlands. The story is strong enough I could easily have done without the more traditional horror elements - notably the rats that haunt, plague and eventually seal Wilf's fate - and it was good to see King tackling a period piece again.
In Big Driver, we find a more typical King protagonist, a mystery novelist called Tess, raped and left for death in a roadside ditch on her way back from an author appearance in backwoods America. King shows admirable restraint when dealing with the crime itself, then sets his heroine on a surprising, twist-filled path to vengeance. None of the stories in this collection take the route you expect, and I kept on rooting for Tess, even when her quest for retribution led to a potentially suicidal fate. Revenge fantasy at its most satisfying.
After that, we need a little light relief. Fair Extension is the story of a terminally ill man given a second chance... at the expense of his best friend. Reminiscent of Richard Matheson's Button Button (filmed as The Box), the shortest story in this collection once more confounds expectations to darkly comic effect. Let's just say that Harry Street ain't big on guilt or regret.
The book closes with A Good Marriage, in which a faithful wife stumbles upon a dark secret about her husband that changes her life. Based on those accounts of the wives of serial killers who remained blissfully ignorant of their husband's crimes, this paints a vicious moral dilemma, gracefully avoids making the husband into a predictable cartoon threat, then executes an elegant solution I didn't see coming.
