Stephen King's BLOOD AND SMOKE
By: Denise DumarsDate: Wednesday, March 08, 2000
Stephen King is known for breaking taboos in his horror fiction. In the audio collection BLOOD AND SMOKE, he perhaps breaks the last taboo, for these stories all have smoking tobacco as an integral part of their plots. Indeed, the packaging of this three-cassette collection (also available in CD format) resembles a pack of cigarettes, perhaps Marlboro, and even has a warning on the side of the package: 'Listening after dark my cause fear, trembling, and lead to acute paranoia.'
Cute. But the stories are, of course, not cute; in fact, they range from disturbing to creepy to downright frightening. The first story on the tape, 'Lunch at the Gotham Café,' is a Stoker-award winning tale previously published in the anthology DARK LOVE and thenceforth available in specialty press editions. The other two stories, '1408' and 'In the Deathroom,' are available only in this audio edition. Only '1408' is supernatural horror; the other two are firmly rooted in the all-too-possible.
These are also not, by any means, 'short' stories. Indeed, each fills up an entire tape, both sides. They are read by the author, which gives them a certain emphasis that the listener must judge as correct, as well as a charming hint of a down-east accent. The author is also, clearly, uncomfortable with some of his own words; I've never heard a more tentative 'motherfucker' uttered.
In 'Lunch in the Gotham Café' a man named Steve Davis finds that his wife has suddenly left him and wants a divorce. He decides to abruptly stop smoking, and when he goes to meet his soon-to-be ex-wife and her lawyer at the Gotham Café, a very strange maitre d' named Guy will change all of their lives forever. This story features madness and the buckets 'o blood we've come to expect as a part of King's repertoire. It's definitely not a story the whole family can listen to while drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows. And whether or not Steve, the main character in the story, takes up smoking again after his ordeal--well, no spoilers.
Mike Eslin, the main character in '1408' is an ex-smoker ever since his brother died of lung cancer. He still wears a cancer stick behind his ear, however, as did the journalists of old. He decides to write a story about a haunted room in The Dolphin Hotel in New York City, even though the hotelier is against it, fearing for Eslin's safety and his own liability in the matter.
Eslin has an interesting back-story. Having been an Iowa workshop writer, his ambition was to come to New York and become a much-lauded literary poet and fiction writer. Needless to say, this did not transpire, and Eslin eventually had a big hit with a book titled TEN NIGHTS IN TEN HAUNTED HOUSES. Though embarrassed about his 'hack' work, he has found a successful formula for writing and is not inclined to change. So for his book on haunted hotel rooms he wishes to stay in room 1408, a room that has claimed the lives of numerous visitors due to 'suicides' and mysterious 'natural' and 'accidental' deaths.
What follows is an account of one of the most original, most truly unsettling hauntings you will ever experience. Indeed, I can think of nothing else in literature like the haunting in this story. 'Haunting' is perhaps not a good word for it, as there are no ghosts--as we think of them, anyway--in the tale. Once again, cigarettes form an integral part of the story, and the tale also gives non-writers something of a look into the mind of a professional writer and into the realities of writing in today's world. As a supernatural horror story, '1408' is one of King's most chilling shorter works, and I dare you to listen to it at night, alone.
The third tale is a one of torture and interrogation. In the story 'In the Deathroom,' a newspaper reporter named Fletcher is being held in a Latin American country against his will. He is in the Ministry of Information, in a room that has obviously been used as a torture chamber. His torturer smokes Marlboros (some significance here?) and offers him one. At first he declines, having stopped smoking three years before. As the horror of his situation sinks in, and he learns what has happened previously in the room, eventually he accepts his interrogator's cigarette. The truth of why Fletcher is in this predicament will come near the end of the tale, and the story includes one of the most innovative uses ever of a cigarette in fiction. The tale is harrowing and disturbinga real nail-biter.
This collection will provide a fine three and a half hours of listening pleasure, which is no mean feat. Be prepared for some graphic violence. Do cigarettes, indeed have some uses in our society? At least in horror fiction, such as this, they do.
BLOOD AND SMOKE, Simon and Shuster Audio (casette/CD), November 1999. Written and read by Stephen King. $22.00
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