If It Bleeds | Tracingtrails

At this point, is it really necessary for me to state how I get excited at the news of a new Stephen King book? If you’re an owner of Tracing the Trails or if you have been following the reviews on this site, that fact should be self-evident. But If It Bleeds enters into its own category for me and while I concede that it has taken a long time for me to get this review down into writing, it’s only because I was taking my time reading it, wanting it to last as long as possible.

If It Bleeds is a collection of short stories but the term “short story” is more elusive and complicated than you might think it should be. When most people think “short story” they are likely picturing what we in the industry might call “anthology length stories.” In other words, a story you might find within the covers of a magazine. A story that you could probably read while sitting in a waiting room or on the train, commuting to work. The stories in this new book from King would be better categorized as stories that aren’t long enough to stand on their own as a novel but longer than a short story. A format that, in the horror industry has become very popular over recent years.

Yes, I’m talking about the novella.

For as much as people make about Stephen King being paid by the word or by the page, he doesn’t get enough credit for his shorter works and when it comes to novellas in particular, his talents can really shine. A novella can offer a similar experience to a great movie, packing in just the right amount of story, enough to keep you captivated but not so much that it requires a huge investment of your time or attention. To date, King has published three other books of this format, a collection of four novellas. These of course are, Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight and Full Dark, No Stars.

You can find my reviews for all of these books in Tracing the Trails. But to bring you up to speed with the necessary facts relevant to this review, while I adored Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, Full Dark, No Stars was a bit of a letdown for me. I wouldn’t call it a bad book but it definitely fell short of what I was hoping for. So while I was still excited to see If It Bleeds hit the market, based on the progression of his other novella collections, I was a little worried as well.

If you held me down and forced an answer out of me, I would say that a big part of why Full Dark, No Stars was less successful for me was caused by the overall theme of the book, something which his previous two collections didn’t have. All the stories in Full Dark were centered around the concept of revenge. And while none of the stories were terrible, none of them were really that great for me, either. How many stories can you really write about revenge? Something awful happens and you either find or don’t find satisfaction. And the fact that they were all a part of the same collection made the repetition of the theme more acutely felt and diluted the effect of pretty much all the stories contained within. Going from story to story had a feel of rinse and repeat that I’m not used to finding in King’s work.

As such, If It Bleeds offers up four stories that are about as unlike as you can get so right away, just on that basis the book is a huge victory for me. If you’re looking for stories that feel like they came from the “King of horror”, you aren’t necessarily going to find those here as, truth be told, I don’t think he’s been writing that way for some time now. But what this book does offer is a series of compelling tales that engage and fascinate.

For me, that notion captures the heart of what draws me to King’s work. It isn’t about the scares. For me, his work is about the humanity of his characters and in seeing those characters drawn through a series of events or experiences that we can’t help but take notice of, just because we have to find out how all this is going to come out in the end. Many of his stories are frightening but beyond the superficiality of that fact, what his stories consistently contain is what can happen to a person’s life when circumstances take an extreme turn for the worse.

With that in mind, let’s look at the stories

I think what I find most endearing about this story is how so much of it is, in the strictest terms, not at all relevant to the overall drive of the plot. It’s the kind of thing that if you were to drop it into an average writer’s workshop, you’d be locked into a closet with your manuscript, a flashlight and a red pen. Cut, cut, cut, as Ms. Birdie would say (You have my respect if you get that one) But the thing is, the story is drawn upon a fabric that is so rich, I don’t really care if any particular point we land on is crucial to the overall picture.

In this tale, the main character, Craig, has been tasked with helping with the care of a retiree, Mr. Harrigan. It was a pleasantly written dynamic, one that often felt reminiscent of Bobby Garfield and Ted Brautigan from Hearts In Atlantis. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like King was ripping from himself, necessarily. Rather, in the sense that I immediately liked what I was reading because of the emotional correlation. It’s the same way I instantly felt connected with the relationship between Edgar and Wireman in Duma Key because of how much it reminded me of Louis and Jud from Pet Sematary.

And this gets back to my point that the playground on which King really shines is in that of character development. He somehow manages to craft a character that feels both familiar but at the same time fresh and intriguing. The thing about Ted Brautigan is that when I read Hearts In Atlantis, I came away wishing he was a real person that I could meet and converse with, just so we could talk about Lord of the Flies. Or maybe Village of the Damned. With this novella, while I have zero experience and very little understanding of finance or economics, I would probably enjoy wasting away an afternoon in a coffee shop, listening to Mr. Harrigan babbling away about stock portfolios and investment strategies. King manages to take his research and present it in a form that I still find entertaining.

In King’s book on the craft, On Writing, he discusses how much his books are inspired by the “what if” scenario. What if you found a special graveyard where everything you buried came to life? It’s something he does often and does well and it comes through bright and clear in this story. King manages to introduce some genuinely creepy atmosphere with some fairly minimalistic moments that also place our protagonist into a serious moral quandary, not entirely unlike some aspects of another recent offering, Gwendy’s Button Box.

Revenge scenarios play out often in King’s work but despite that I thought he still managed to succeed here. And despite the veneer of this being a fairly “safe” story, there are still some chilling and disturbing moments tucked within the blankets of this narrative. Sometimes the best horror happens on the flip side of a blade of simplicity. This novella accomplishes that for sure and I thought it was a solid choice to lead off the lineup.

It’s interesting to see this novella as a kind of microcosm within the collection, itself. A novella in a collection of novellas that in and of itself is made up of three basically independent stories. But one point from the beginning I really want to stress here is how what makes Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight so great is the variety from tale to tale. That stories like Rita Hayworth & the Shawshank Redemption could have been placed in the same collection as Apt Pupil. Or that the Langoliers could be found between the same covers as Sun Dog.

This absolutely holds true for If It Bleeds as the first two stories are so completely different but also captivating in their own rights. Either would stand on their own and I think would be great for expansion into a full novel.

Being totally honest, I had to read this one twice before I could really begin to wrap my brain around the implications, to separate out what might be actually happening and what might simply be metaphor or symbolic. But once I began putting it all together, I had to pay King respect for what he has done here. On the surface, the concept might be fairly straight forward but King presents it in a way that is beautiful and nostalgic, again putting forth fantastically sculpted characters. I really went through the emotional paces with this story. Within a few mornings I went from loving the opening section to despising the ending because I didn’t understand it but when I backtracked and paid a little more attention I landed on the resolution that this might now be one of my favorite novellas from King.

I can’t say enough how much I loved the first section though, a flash of apocalyptic brilliance where we enter into a world that is literally falling apart. It isn’t at all clear at all what might be going on here and the entire makeup of what we see is pretty unsettling, if not terrifying to contemplate.

I’m obviously not going to explain too much and ruin anyone’s experience but obviously Chuck lies at the center of all of this, despite not actually appearing until the second part. This is not going to be a neatly packed nesting doll of a story where you can immediately and clearly identify point A leading to B and C and so forth. This is going to challenge your ability to put links together and pick up on clues left behind for you by the author.

My advice would be to allow yourself a good, quiet spot to enjoy the story. Keep the distractions out and really think things over. Read the first act and put the book away for a day or two before returning to act two, again taking a break before finishing. Take some more time off and do that again. And remember that Chuck is your king. If you remember that simple fact, I think the rest will fall neatly in line for you. And once the tumblers start to click and you start constructing this universe on your own, it’s truly a mind-bending moment. It was for me, anyway.

The life of Chuck.

Live it.

Before I get into the heart of the story itself, I wanted to take moment and discuss a more overarching issue here. I find it interesting, if not a little perplexing how Holly Gibney has become such a polarizing figure in the Stephen King universe. People seem more often than not to be either one hundred percent on board with her or they just despise her. Why all the vitriol? I can speculate of course, the Internet after all is a breeding ground for speculation but I can’t offer up any more than that.

This could be a simple case of people calling out what they see as excessive recycling on King’s part, beating into the ground the same character instead of moving on to other territory. It could also be that in the tense social media era we live in, many have turned on King because of what they see as his politics, so naturally anything he does is going to be refracted through that lens of discontent. And of course there’s the obvious elephant in the room, that returning again to a strong female character could be characterized by some as pandering to an SJW agenda. It feels silly to even write that but one inherent downside of social media is that every viewpoint gets the same weight in its expression.

I don’t think any one of these possibilities is completely right or wrong. Like everything else, I suspect that any and all of these reasons could be an explanation for at least some and if they were pinned down and forced to explain, people would scatter all over the board in terms of explaining their distaste.

But regardless of the reason, it really is a shame for people who close themselves off to the experience as I found the story mostly entertaining. It’s not perfect and it isn’t my favorite from the collection but it still has value.

Holly was originally brought into our lives via King’s Bill Hodges trilogy and she appears again in his followup novel, The Outsider, one of my favorites of King’s recent books. And if you’re a fan of The Outsider, I think you will be more likely to enjoy If It Bleeds as it functions as a kind of outro to that story.

The crux of this story begins around a horrific incident of violence, the bombing of a school. And I can’t help but draw the comparison to The Outsider, which also begins with a horrible act of violence performed against a child. The children who are killed in this novella are nameless and carry less distinction than The Outsider but the similarity in the narrative device offers a great feeling of the two stories being a connected part of the same product. In the course of things, Holly discovers something about a high profile reporter, something that begins like a merely curious puzzle and quickly progresses to the disturbing.

For as much drama as the main character seems to provoke, it was to be expected that my attention would be more firmly drawn to this one. I think my mindset going in was maybe higher in anticipation than the others but despite coming in with more scrutiny, I still found it entertaining. The monsters that inhabit this as well as The Outsider have always been captivating for me and I’ve enjoyed what King has done with them.

Being an honest Constant Reader, though, I did feel like there was something missing as well. It’s entertaining and hits the spots it needs to. It just felt a little by-the-numbers to me. Almost like he had detached an appendage from another book and molded it up to be able to stand on its own.

One point that kept running through my mind as I read was what the difference would be for readers who hadn’t read The Outsider. As I said, I do believe that If It Bleeds can still be enjoyed on its own and actually, I think the novella will come across as more intense and disturbing if you’re experiencing these elements for the first time. For those of us who are already well versed, the impact of If It Bleeds is inherently going to be somewhat diminished and diluted as the conclusion of the tale did feel somewhat inevitable, like the plot of The Outsider had simply been reformed and presented in a slightly different form.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I see positives and negatives on this aspect. All the parts that a book need are there and fundamentally, everything is explained but if I look at the story independently on its own, it feels a little flat and too dependent on the thing that came before it. Perhaps this would have worked more effectively if it had actually been the final act of The Outsider instead of being presented as its own thing. Bizarrely, it reads at times like when publishers will include an excerpt from another book to try and press you into buying that one as well.

The characters really save this story. And while Holly has become the oddly eyeroll-inducing spark for many fans, I think that King’s enthusiasm for the character comes through clearly. He does a good job writing her and she is more than capable of carrying the weight of this book. If I look at this from the perspective of a character driven tale, I would give it high marks.

The plot itself may be fairly standard in the way it unfolds and in the way the “twists” are revealed. But the sacrifice of maybe what could have been a more dynamic plot is maybe acceptable in exchange for seeing a group of characters that are so well crafted.

My recommendation would be to go the full distance and read The Outsider in advance of reading this. It’s what I did and I found the read quite enjoyable. And while this will likely cause many of you to grind your teeth in frustration, the nature of this story does make me suspect that this book may not be the last we see of Holly Gibney.

I suspect that she isn’t quite done with us, yet.

While this is interesting, it’s easily my least favorite of the four. And it is to be expected that all of the tales can’t be expected to deliver for everyone.

At its core, this is the story of a writer who is suddenly flooded internally with the idea for a full length novel. It’s something he has evidently tried and failed at before, so badly that while his wife is happy for him, she is nervous about the road which his writing seems to lead him down. And I will say that I appreciated how King was able to accomplish this point without drowning us in exposition. We just get glimpses of some dark periods in his past following his various failures to succeed with his work. But despite his wife’s nervous anticipation, our main character decides to head out of town and rent a small cabin where he can write without distraction.

Because that has always worked out so well in the universe of Stephen King.

One thing this novella brought back for me was the experience of reading Misery and how much perspective we got on Paul Sheldon’s writing process. And while our author in this isn’t as successful as Sheldon, it was still fun to be seated in the front row as he went though his process of artistic creation.

There are high points to the story that are beautifully evocative and creepy, of the writer isolated in his cabin by a storm. In a way, the isolating effect of this storm was an effective metaphor for his decision to write his novel in the first place. After all, his desire to leave his family behind to create the thing happens just as abruptly and has the potential to do to his emotional stability the same as this storm which has destroyed the landscape around him.

As far as what doesn’t work for me, the beginning of the story seems to drag a little. There is a big feeling of winding up for something but it isn’t clear what and while the excellent atmosphere kept me reading I did find myself at times wondering when we were going to get to the point.

Also, and straining to not spoil anything, but when the rat finally enters, stage right, while I respected what King was going for with a kind of fairy tale vibe, it felt a little out of balance with how the story began and I thought the narrative pulled its punches a little in parts that could have been more dark and compelling.

I still enjoyed it and I suppose that it should be expected that after three great novellas, there should be one at the end that’s more of a dud. Of his four novella collections, only Four Past Midnight has been able to hold me captive through all four stories.

Rat is not the first time there has been an exploration of where creativity comes from, as if the mental stew that coughs out the concepts we write about is an actual place, instead of some imagined playground. The notion that ideas could be physical things that can be gifted upon us by some external actor.

The life of a person who chooses to write a book is complicated. It is dark at times and can affect everyone who happens to be in close proximity to that person. And the overarching point I would take from this novella is that this thing we do, this endeavor of writing is never going to be easy. And it’s important to remember that when we tuck ourselves away in the confines of our own head to chase down some scant plot thread, that decision touches everyone around us. And when we’re lucky, we can return home from our own internal endeavors and find everything where we left it.

This task we have taken upon ourselves isn’t easy. For those who don’t write, it may seem like no big deal but trust me, it’s a massive endeavor that plays assault daily on our self-esteem.

So go give the writer in your life a hug. Trust me, they will appreciate it.

For me, If It Bleeds was a triumphant return for King to his novella format. I don’t know if we will ever get another and if we don’t I think he has gone out in fine form with this. It’s a quatro of tales that I really enjoyed, each one incredibly unique and diverse in their own right. As a fan of the horror genre, I think the novella is where the fears and the screams take peak form. It’s a format that the King family has done well in – check out the novella collection from King’s son, Joe Hill, titled Strange Weather. It’s a good sign that this gift for the fiction, particularly in the shorter form, definitely made its way into the genetic coding for this great family.

It's all pretty damn eventual, isn’t it?