Needful Things: A Novel

I read this book at the recommendation of my boyfriend. One of my favorite movies is 1408 (which is based on a short story of Stephen King's), and my boyfriend said this book was a similar flavor of psychological horror.

The premise is that a shop owner sells items to members of a small community in exchange for "harmless pranks" that end up being very harmful. It's fun to see the creative ways that shop owner, Leland Gaunt, comes up with for how to pit the town against each other.

The book is long, and I must give King credit for pacing it incredibly well. He takes time to build up your curiosity about the new store in town (what it sells and what the owner is like), but you find out before too long. Then King sells an item to his first customer, Brian Rusk, and he reveals that Brian must play a prank ... but he doesn't say what the prank is. The entire book is paced this way: a mystery is introduced, and when it's resolved a new one is introduced, so while you're always curious about what comes next, you don't get exasperated or impatient because other mysteries are being resolved in the meantime.

There are an awful lot of characters in this book, and my boyfriend said he didn't have any trouble keeping them straight. Well, I had trouble. I could keep the women straight, but not the men (I think because there were more male characters than female ones). I listened to an audio version of the book, so perhaps it would have been easier if I could have turned back a few pages to double-check where I had seen a character's name before.

I enjoyed this book, mostly. It kept me engaged and intrigued, and I cared about the outcome. There were two parts, though, that I didn't like:

(1) The beginning and end have an unnamed character speaking in a local accent, local lingo, etc., and during these periods of the novel, the character is actually speaking to "you." By that, I mean pretending that you are sitting next to that person in real life, and saying "Look over there" and "What did you say? Yes, of course I can see that!" I found that annoying.

(2) Towards the end of the book, there were about a hundred pages that read like an action movie. You know the part in an action movie where they're switching scenes rapidly, showing gunfire and people chasing after each other and there's very little actual conversation or emotions? It was like that.

Finally finished reading Stephen King's NEEDFUL THINGS, which has probably been the most consistently enjoyable book of my recent return to King's canon. A sprawling book, with dozens of major characters, the parochial, "OUR TOWN circa 1991" setting nevertheless makes everything feel very intimate and quaint...at least until proprietor Leland Gaunt quietly arrives in town and sets up a shop that accepts all forms of payment--cash, checks, credit cards...even souls--and sets off a chain of events that turns smalltown America into a self-contained Armageddon. All the things you love about Stephen King are on full display here--the bellylaugh-eliciting turns-of-phrase; the powerfully textured and nuanced evocations of places, peoples and time; the deeply chilling, nauseating horror; the wicked, bitter, coldly accurate observations of human nature and, minor qualms about some rocky canting back-and-forth between audience-winking broad humor and some really dark, brutally serious commentary aside, King's voice holds consistently throughout the entire narrative (which is more than I can say about the "what the hell?" jumping of the rails that happened during the last 100 pages of IT). That is not to say this book is one of King's all-time classics (it isn't, though it's far from the bottom of the pile), or that it doesn't have its failings (it does), but it's still a dynamite [pauses while former readers of the book wince] read! Ultimately, I only have two major complaints and two minor ones; in the category of the latter, there are the aforementioned schizophrenic tonal shifts, as well as a great amount of repetition in the plotting. There's a good defense for it but, nevertheless, after the umpteenth citizen of Castle Rock is primed by Mr. Gaunt for a destructive task, a sense of "all right, Stevie-boy, we know what Gaunt's up to and how he goes about it--we get it already!" weariness begins to set in with the reader. In terms of more substantial complaints, we spend far too little time with the true main characters at the heart of the story, Sheriff Alan Pangborn (of the earlier book THE DARK HALF) and Polly Chalmers. King is too interested in spending dozens of pages tightening the myriad strings tied to dozens of lives into a vile knot that he doesn't seem to realize that the reader spends much of his/her time frustrated, wondering what's happening in the lives of the two characters we care about most. Secondly, there is some harsh and worthwhile commentary about the nature of Man and His unceasing capacity to confuse want with need and to turn a blind eye to the blessings all around him to focus on bright baubles that can never love us back--the whole "the things you own end up owning you" FIGHT CLUB mantra--that is undermined by a trick, a type of hypnosis, or brainwashing, performed on his victims by Leland Gaunt. It's a bit of a Catch-22 in that none of the goings-on in NEEDFUL THINGS would seem believable for a minute if Gaunt didn't perform this mental sleight-of-hand but, when it becomes a necessary device to put all the chess pieces together in service of his plot, it actually waters down King's intended commentary. In simpler language, if people can't do the horrible things they do in this story without some supernatural prompting of which they're not fully conscious taking place, then Man surely isn't as bleak at heart as King wishes to make a case for. This sort of trickery, this conniving stacking-of-the-deck, serves the character of Leland Gaunt well, but the message of the story not at all. As with most narrative failings in King's books, they don't damage the tale irreparably, but they do prevent the book from really taking off and reaching its full potential. A final note to interested readers--you owe it to yourself to read THE DEAD ZONE, CUJO, "The Body" (novella in DIFFERENT SEASONS), THE DARK HALF and FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT before reading this book. It is the conclusion of a town's sad saga, and should not be your starting point for seeing if there's something nice to eat (or even better, a nice forgotten, but well-tended, collectible for sale) at the little dot on your map marked Castle Rock while you tour the great state of Maine. Now, I'm off to the first short story collection of King's I've read in years, NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES...

Needful Things has Stephen King at his best in some places and at his worst in others.

First, the good: Needful Things gives you 950 pages of classic King doing something he's really, really figured out how to do well: lock some average Joes in an enclosed space (usually a small town or a single building), introduce some horror/paranormal catalyst, and then bring it all to a slow boil before your eyes. This is a central driving force in Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Tommyknockers, IT, Misery, Under the Dome, and probably many others I haven't read yet. Also, the book concludes a loose series of novels and one novella that center around Castle Rock, ME... those being The Body (which became the 80s hit movie Stand By Me), The Dead Zone, Cujo, The Dark Half, and, finally, Needful Things. There are a few recurring characters and other Easter egg winks at those who've read the others, but there's no need to go through the "series" in any particular order.

Now, the bad stuff: Parts of Needful Things are almost literally unbelievably cheesy – which is terrain King can fall into from time to time. Apparently when he was drafting "Needful Things" he was trying to put together a sort of 80's satire thing under a veneer of Horror Story. Something got mucked up in the works, however, and the result is entire sections and subplots that have that ghastly combo of being funny when they are not trying to be, and vice versa. This was also allegedly the first book King wrote sober in his entire career – which, good for him – but maybe some of the crap can be chalked up to the fried nerves of substance recovery. Gaunt is a pretty obvious Satan stand-in, okay, but I could have done without the scene where Ace Merrill catches him eating an uncooked rat.

This book shares a ton of similarities with The Tommyknockers, that disaster of an alien book written just beforehand during whose creation King was for the most part coked straight out of his gizzard. The Setup: Conservative and Sexually Repressed and Abusive and Somewhat Dumb Rural Mainers Get Exposed to a FOREIGN ENTITY & Away Go Everyone's Pesky Repressions & Out Comes the Homicidal Lunatic Underneath (Us All?).

In The Tommyknockers the FOREIGN ENTITY is a spaceship buried in the rural Maine woods, stumbled upon by Bobbi Anderson, who writes Western novels. Bobbi goes insane and unburies the thing and exposes the whole town to some weird cocktail of alien radiation that was insulated for millions of years by dirt. Everyone gains telepathic powers and genius mechanical insights but also loses his or her mind and slowly becomes an amorphous blob like the Adenoid in Gravity's Rainbow. The world is saved by a drunk poet named Jim G. Jim G. is insusceptible to the seduction of ancient intergalactic mind control air poison because of a steel plate in his head from an old skiing accident. King has since himself dismissed the book as quote "awful."

In "Needful Things," the foreign entity in question goes by the name Leland Gaunt. Gaunt is a Twilight Zone-ish mystery man of assumed infinite age who opens a new flea market in Castle Rock, ME, setting in motion a catastrophic annihilation of the town from within. Once you buy something at Needful Things – something you feel you desperately need– for a low price, this Gaunt fellow gains hold of your mind and soul and dreams and sexual fantasies etc. etc. etc., and you start doing bad things to repay a debt which never ends.

All things considered, like the Tommyknockers, Needful Things is an enjoyable book if you can choose to ignore its flaws, which abound, and which occur to some degree in a lot of King's stuff from this time period. Over-expositional dialogue, random cutesy tangents by the narrator that don't mean anything or go anywhere, gratuitous detail for its own sake, the occasional character who if real would perhaps be the dumbest human currently alive, etc. But the story remains thrilling and emotionally strong at times, and King takes expert care in weaving all these intersecting plot-lines and backstories in and out of one another, and you probably won't put the thing down if you start it. This is a testament to King's work ethic and bottomless imagination, which (as that unchecked combination tends to do, see D. Lynch or C. Dickens for more) has produced some great work and also some total stinkers.

That said I'm happy King worked through this low period and kept chugging on rather than sitting back on his fortune from the 70s/early 80s, because some of his recent stuff has been a serious return to form in my opinion. He is a fiercely talented storyteller who remains as lovably fallible as ever. For the heavy duty King fans and/or compulsive completionists, Needful Things is a quick read and satisfying conclusion to the Castle Rock stories. For everyone else, please skip it and go read The Stand, IT, Dark Tower, The Dead Zone, Different Seasons, On Writing, or 11/22/63.