Nowadays, it’s easy to see Stephen King’s name and have a conceived notion of his legacy. He remains well into old age one of the most prolific authors of his generation, producing masterpieces that dig under people’s skin and recontextualizes fears we’ve long taken for granted. In this Short Stop series, I will explore a period before he was the icon we know and love. Even with a handful of bestsellers to his name, his status had yet to cement. That is why I’ve chosen to take a look at his first story collection, “Night Shift,” and hopefully get a glimpse into the writer taking shape, before his style was cemented into a cultural touchstone. Was he always the master of horror, or was there a simpler time when he was as messy and weird as the rest of us? All it takes is turning the page to find out.
The most amazing thing about this unexceptional story is the great hypothesis of why King liked it enough to think he should direct a movie version. While this is jumping the gun a little as far as outline, there’s a lot of nothingness in “Trucks” that leaves you to wonder what it was that made him sit back at his typewriter, hands behind his head, and say, “Yeah, I really knocked that one out of the park.” It would be one thing if he had only a half-dozen works that he was known for, and “Trucks” called for an adaptation, but at this point in “Night Shift,” EVERY story has been put to celluloid in some form. Some are offshoots of more significant novels. As much as this is just an embarrassingly shallow 26-page read, it’s hard not to wonder why it has any legacy, let alone one so closely associated with its creator.
I’m not opposed to writers working behind the camera. As is the case with Stephen Chbosky and The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012), it can provide and expand on personal insight. Then again, that story was semiautobiographical. At the time of Maximum Overdrive (1986), he hadn’t reached that level of transparent vulnerability. He was still knocking out a few novels a year amid a drug addiction so infamous that it can be seen in the advertisements for this movie. The ironic thing is that because of his ubiquity as “The Master of Horror,” it should work as this campy, scenery-chewing horror pastiche reminiscent of William Castle. His deranged stare should be an understatement of what’s to come. Instead, he’s selling a sentient killer truck movie, and I’m taken the hell out.
His contemporaries, such as Michael Crichton and William Peter Blatty, had also made films, but those feel more reputable compared to Maximum Overdrive, which earned your humble narrator a Razzie win. This was a chaotic study of indulgence and, if there’s any significant expansion on the anemic source material, it wasn’t enough. With that said, the audacity mixed with the novelty of using the same team behind Silver Bullet (1985) makes for some kind of lark. Even still, you ask what King thinks of collaborating with cinematographer Armando Nanuzzi, and you’ll hear him joke that his biggest lesson on set was new Italian profanity.
I know this isn’t an essay on Maximum Overdrive, and yet there’s nothing really worth digging into. It’s a sentient killer truck story that plays out in a very cyclical format, where a group of residents at a gas station are trapped watching these automated machines zoom down the street. It’s the type of cheese where King has them annihilate a car off the road, which, in typical action fare, rolls over and blows up. There is a George Miller mentality to this story that could work, but none of the protagonists have any agency. There’s nothing that’s resolved. I’d even argue it’s an inferior version of “The Mangler,” which ends with King throwing up his hands and walking away, but without any sense of effort to stage a counterattack.
Reading these pages, I couldn’t help but imagine King and his overactive imagination sitting on the couch, maybe a bit buzzed, flipping through channels and landing on The Love Bug (1968). As he’s watching Buddy Hackett get drunk with Herbie, he begins to laugh and think how funny it would be if the car murdered everybody at the pivotal race finale.
Given the late-60s craze of auto racing, I get why “Trucks” sounds appealing, but this is just a monster truck show without the nuance. This feels very much like a dated story rooted in trends of its time in ways that leave anyone under 40 a bit confused. Reading this, I think of the trucker songs and “Convoy” trend. Add in some pathetic subplot about running out of gas, and I’m thinking of the late-70s economic crisis. Even with these elements, it feels like a tapestry that hints at the paranoid nature of machines taking over mankind without having any creative insight. The only thing this story has on its mind is maliciously laughing at the cast of characters as they walk outside and face their fates with gruesome collisions.
To give him some credit, he has a gift for making this ultimate nadir fly by. Even for as repetitious as things are, he writes the pages with brief paragraphs and dialogue driven by emotion that keeps the intensity always at the center. There is uncertainty whether a truck will drive into the building or even why they’re here. Yet the author manages to get across how trapped these people are. If they leave, there’s a chance for disaster to strike. Because of this, the story feels claustrophobic despite being in a desert setting. There’s this great hook of trying to figure out how to escape these circumstances.
The irony, as was true in “The Mangler,” is that this is a widespread issue. If insight can be derived from the closing pages, it’s that King seems insistent that mankind has created its own conflict. Even as these machines rust, new ones will be created to take their place. It’s a cyclical, never-ending read of The Industrial Revolution with the grace of Reefer Madness (1936), where the problem likely seemed nightmarish, but whose tonal panic keeps the good intentions from feeling more than farce. I don’t know that “Trucks” has much on its mind, but I want to believe that King got to that never-ending story hook and assumed it would satisfy. Instead, it grasps as many straws as the characters who are slaves to machinery, running out of resources to please their new overlords.
I guess I give him credit for making the trucks sentient but not anthropomorphic. There’s no sense of playful banter with a truck that will infiltrate the crew and save them. It’s just a story about madness and nonsense running amok. People get hit by cars. If you go based on the author’s love of pulpy b-movies, this isn’t a terrible idea. However, I think that I get caught up with how even the most impulsive of stories so far have some grounded base of logic and pathos. Something is connecting the reader to the fears of everyday life. Maybe the fear of getting hit by a big truck is a good enough entry point. It’s definitely practical, but there’s so much else not here to compensate for the oversimplified execution.
I’m not sure if King could’ve predicted automation being as prominent as it is now, where self-driving cars (and, as the ending suggests, planes) are a thing and stand to overpower their master. Even so, I’d like to think there’s something there, where maybe all the press of Ralph Nader fighting for clean emissions with The Green Party could lead to a twist. I get it’s too sensible for edge-of-your-seat thrills, but at most, this just guilts the middle class who work on assembly lines into realizing they’re being paid to be part of the problem. Also, as a snake eating its own tail situation, how do you get past the idea of resources running out? King walks up to that line with the gas subplot, but do they just keel over after that? I’m sure if you are an addict needing gasoline every few hours, it’ll go by fast. Again, why didn’t we just listen to Ralph Nader?
Then again, this was published in Cavalier around the same time as “Gray Matter,” which is another loopy story I don’t really care for. Even so, it embraces its tropes and attempts to find humanity within its addiction metaphors. There’s something to latch onto. “Trucks,” well, have trucks. It may seem cool as a spectacle, but this suffers from being something King insisted on directing a film for. It makes you question his judgment, where he did this over… anything else, really. With that said, there was a 1997 made-for-TV version starring Timothy Busfield that received equal dissent. It’s not just him who’s unable to find the core of this story that works. Apparently, like the trucks, it’s CURRRRSSSSSEEEDDD! Oohh! Spooky, scary.
I feel like I set myself up last week with “Battleground” by hoping it was the worst I’d see. Unfortunately, this beats it by leaps and bounds. At least before I could deconstruct cultural tangents. Here, it’s as straightforward as it comes. Trucks go vroom and smashy-smashy. It’s not bad if you take out any intellectual pursuit, but it’s just so empty and exists for the sake of exploitative and coarse violence. It’s fun, sure, but the fear fades fast in ways most of the aforementioned stories don’t. Again, I wonder why he insisted that he needed to make a movie of this one. Maybe it was a call for redemption, which, in all honesty, it was on an enjoyment level. However, it still works better as novelty than anything to take seriously.
Coming Up Next: "Sometimes They Come Back"
Comments
Post a Comment