The Sun Dog

A Note on 'The Sun Dog'

Every now and then someone will ask me, 'When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?'

I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump dead on.

The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written - and that includes a lot of the funny stuff - was written in a serious frame of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing uncontrollably over some wild and crazy bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I'm never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode - it isn't in me - but that doesn't mean I don't care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I
can
do, however - as Nils Lofgren once put it, 'I gotta be my dirty self ... I won't play no jive.'

If
real
-meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!! - is your definition of serious, you are in the wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I'm not the only one doing business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, jr, Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern.

I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons: love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of my talent and intelligence. I am no one's National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm serious, all right. If you don't believe anything else, believe this: when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I say.

A lot of the things I have to say - those Really Serious Things - have to do with the small-town world in which I was raised and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call 'real life,' and I believe that lives as they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call 'society.' This idea is certainly open to argument, and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I'm just saying that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of thing in
Came,
and continued on a more ambitious level with
'Salem's Lot. I
never really hit my stride, however, until
The Dead Zone.
That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem's Lot without the vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become 'my town,' in the sense that the mythical city of Isola is Ed McBain's town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20S...King%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (1 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

Grubb's town. I have been called back there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives - Castle Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town.

As the years passed, I became more and more interested in - almost entranced by - the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or unpublished:-how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father's car, how Ophelia Todd's husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it). Following
The Dead Zone,
which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called 'The Body'; Cujo, the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town (the best of them, at least in my mind, are 'Mrs Todd's Shortcut' and 'Uncle Otto's Truck'). All of which is very well, but a state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J. R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don't play in that league.

So at some point I decided - first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place - that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn't just want to walk away; I wanted to
finish
things, and do it with a bang. Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please -the
last
Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think 'out of order' is the story of my life), but now they
are
written, and they are serious enough
...
but I hope that doesn't mean that they are sober-sided or boring.

The first of these stories,
The Dark Half,
was published in 1989. While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in
Pet Sematary),
the town of Castle Rock figures in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called
Needful Things,
which is scheduled to be published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock.

The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's larger figures in 'The Sun Dog,' but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and Gordie LaChance's
bete noire
in 'The Body') Ace Merrill. 'The Sun Dog' also sets the stage for the final fireworks display
...
and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about
The Dark Half
or
Needful Things.
One other thing needs to be said: every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and 'The Sun Dog' is a story about cameras and photographs. About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. I myself take bad photos (I'm one of those guys who always manage to cut off my subjects' heads, get pictures of them with their mouths hanging open, or both), but I have a great deal of respect file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20S...King%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (2 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

for those who take good ones
...
and the whole process fascinates me. In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really
thought
about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time
...
and there is something
so peculiar
about them.

This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for almost a year. And that's enough out of me, I think. It's been great to be with all of you again, but that doesn't mean I'm letting you go home just yet.

I think we have a birthday party to attend in the little town of Castle Rock.

September 15th was Kevin's birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun. The Kevin in question was Kevin Delevan, the birthday was his fifteenth, and the Sun was a Sun 660, a Polaroid camera which does everything for the novice photographer except make bologna sandwiches. There
were
other gifts, of course; his sister, Meg, gave him a pair of mittens she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent - as she always did - a string tie with a horrible clasp. She had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already had twelve unused string ties with horrible clasps in a drawer of his bureau, to which this would be added - lucky thirteen. He had never worn any of them but was not allowed to throw them away. Aunt Hilda lived in Portland. She had never come to one of Kevin's or Meg's birthday parties, but she might decide to do just that one of these years. God knew she could; Portland was only fifty miles south of Castle Rock. And suppose she
did
come ... and asked to see Kevin in one of his
other
ties (or Meg in one of her other scarves, for that matter)? With some relatives, an excuse might do. Aunt Hilda, however, was different. Aunt Hilda presented a certain golden possibility at a point where two essential facts about her crossed: she was Rich, and she was Old. Someday, Kevin's Mom was convinced, she might DO SOMETHING for Kevin and Meg. It was understood that the SOMETHING would probably come after Aunt Hilda finally kicked it, in the form of a clause in her will. In the meantime, it was thought wise to keep the horrible string ties and the equally horrible scarves. So this thirteenth string tie (on the clasp of which was a bird Kevin thought was a woodpecker) would join the others, and Kevin would write Aunt Hilda a thank-you note, not because his mother would insist on it and not because he thought or even cared that Aunt Hilda might DO SOMETHING for him and his kid sister someday, but because he was a generally thoughtful boy with good habits and no real vices. He thanked his family for all his gifts (his mother and father had, of course, supplied a number of lesser ones, although the Polaroid was clearly the centerpiece, and they were delighted with
his
delight), not forgetting to give Meg a kiss (she giggled and pretended to rub it off but her own delight was equally clear) and to tell her he was sure the mittens would come in handy on the ski team this winter - but most of his attention was reserved for the Polaroid box, and the extra film packs which had come with it.

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20S...King%20-%20A%20note%20On%20The%20sun%20Dog.HTM (3 of 119)7/28/2005 9:22:38 PM

The Sun Dog

He was a good sport about the birthday cake and the ice cream, although it was clear he was itching to get at the camera and try it out. And as soon as he decently could, he did.

That was when the trouble started.

He read the instruction booklet as thoroughly as his eagerness to begin would allow, then loaded the camera while the family watched with anticipation and unacknowledged dread (for some reason, the gifts which seem the most wanted are the ones which so often don't work). There was a little collective sigh - more puff than gust - when the camera obediently spat out the cardboard square on top of the film packet, just as the instruction booklet had promised it would.

There were two small dots, one red and one green, separated by a zig-zag lightning-bolt on the housing of the camera. When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed on for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly.

'It's ready,' Kevin said, in the same straining-to-be-offhand-but-not-quite-making-it tone with which Neil Armstrong had reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. 'Why don't all you guys stand together?'

'I hate having my picture taken!' Meg cried, covering her face with the theatrical anxiety and pleasure which only sub-teenage girls and really bad actresses can manage.

'Come on, Meg,' Mr Delevan said.

'Don't be a goose, Meg,' Mrs Delevan said.

Meg dropped her hands (and her objections), and the three of them stood at the end of the table with the diminished birthday cake in the foreground.

Kevin looked through the viewfinder. 'Squeeze a little closer to Meg, Mom,' he said, motioning with his left hand. 'You too, Dad.' This time he motioned with his right.