“Life is basically a rusty hubcap lying in the ditch at the side of the road, and life goes on … This is as good as it gets. Her ship will not come in. There are no boats for nobody, and no camera is filming her life. This is reality, not a reality show.”
It would be difficult to top the dark feel of Stephen King’s most recent novel, “Full Dark, No Stars.” Yet he attempted to do so with his (very) short story that recently appeared in The Atlantic, titled “Herman Wouk is Still Alive.”
In this brief piece, King examines sad, despairing existences through the veil of white trash. He touches on the current state of the economy, the brutalities of aging, class divides and the war, in the context and from the perspective of two trailer brides who have no business parenting.
“Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.”
Juxtaposed with the perspective of two successful, elderly poets (yet even these two are not entirely what they seem) trying to rekindle old passions, the end result is essentially “Thelma & Louise” gone way, way wrong. There is beauty in the writing, but it’s over so quickly you almost don’t know how to react or respond—which only speaks to the magic that King is still so ever-capable of.
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