LOTR moment

[serai]

While I'm doing relatively mindless tasks at work, I often listen to recorded books on my headphones. Today, while I was enjoying the uncut edition of Stephen King's The Stand, I came across this passage:




There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated. Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high, and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove.

The door was good to begin with. Small and deliciously hidden, it was like the doors you encountered in fairy tales and childhood fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did. (Her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to.) It was an Alice In Wonderland door, and for a long time her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith’s workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earth and sides, and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of damp and wet soil and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies. One which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party.

Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there. But to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called “the toolshop” by her father, and “that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer” by her mother) had been enough.




Does the fact that hearing that made me fight back tears make me just a soft-hearted ol' loony?

Comments

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

Isn't that lovely? People who think he's just a horror story writer (read "hack") don't realize how he can use words to take you back in time, or to a completely different world, and there are things of great beauty in his books. And he's a fan of LotRs too, another reason I like him.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

In that one way - the way in which people dismiss him - he's a lot like Tolkien. But I've always been amazed not by his stories (which can be rather formulaic at times) but by his extraordinary ability to make characters come to life, and his eye for the real details of the everyday, and how he can weave them together to create something awesome and terrifying. (One of the most terrifying, and memorable, of his passages (from The Shining) concerned Jack Torrance's memories of his alcoholic father. That passage had nothing supernatural in it, and yet it sticks with me to this day, and always will.)

In his use of the everyday, he also reminds me a little of Shirley Jackson, although her talent lay more in scaring you with things that really aren't scary, and that wouldn't be except for some undefinable undercurrent to the way she uses words. King is, of course, far more overt in his terror, but it seems he has learned both from Jackson and from the Professor that it's the details, the sense of the real, that makes fantasy so effective. Writers who ignore those details, or who try to make their worlds too high-flown or strange in every way, that fail miserably to enchant us.

[mews1945.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I know the passage you mean in The Shining, and you're right, it's terrifying. He did the same thing in "It" with Bevery's father, who scared the bejesus out of me.