Books I Didn't Finish: Needful Things

I was recently recovering from a bout of covid and found myself unable to do much of anything to pass the time. What I needed, I decided, was a book that would grab me. Something fast-paced and not challenging, something that would go down easy.

What I needed was my favourite author and close personal friend, Stephen King. And none of his bad newer stuff. I wanted vintage King. As luck would have it, at some point I had picked up his 1991 release Needful Things in a Kindle sale, a book that I knew absolutely nothing about. Despite hailing from the middle of King’s golden age, it’s not one that seems to get discussed a lot.

Turns out, there’s a reason for that.

Okay, “golden age” is maybe debatable, depending on when exactly you think King’s output started to go downhill. Personally, I think he’s always been highly variable–The Stand was only his fifth novel, and it strongly showcases all of his bad habits–and while Needful Things came out almost a decade after what I consider to be his best work (Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption), it was also five years prior to what I consider his second best work (The Green Mile), so I’m willing to put it firmly in the pre-decline era. The point is, I went into this expecting a certain level of quality.

The book is another one of what I call King’s “small town epics”, where the plot revolves around a quaint American burg being menaced by something supernatural and there’s fifty seven viewpoint characters all providing a panoramic description of the action and delving into, like, the corruption at the nucleus of the American psyche, or whatever. This time around the burg in question is Castle Rock, a recurring location in King’s work from this era, and the supernatural menace is the titular Needful Things, a new shop in town whose owner, the affable and sinister Leland Gaunt, provides his customers with exactly the things they need to fix their various problems and crises–in exchange for doing little favours for him. Said favours take the form of increasingly serious tricks played on their fellow townsfolk, which the customers perceive as harmless pranks (especially when they’re under Gaunt’s semi-hypnotic influence) but which in actuality inflame the passion and tensions boiling under the town’s skin, sometimes to the point of bloodshed. All of this scheming on Gaunt’s part is building to some sort of violent crescendo, and it’s up to Sheriff Alan Pangborn to put a stop to it, assuming he can connect the dots in time and realise that the sudden rash of strange happenings and murders all share a common element.

Right off the bat, I was charmed by how delightfully corny this all is. From his creepily elongated fingers, to his eyes that every customer sees as a different colour, to the way people are instinctively repulsed by his touch even when under his hypnotic spell, the book wastes absolutely no time in establishing that Leland Gaunt is a horror villain utterly lacking in subtlety. This is the kind of thing that annoys me intensely when it gets dropped into a horror novel two-thirds of the way through, but I’m willing to play ball with it when the book is up-front about its cheesiness. Take out the occasional bout of profanity or sexual innuendo, and Gaunt would slot right into a Goosebumps book (indeed, since the first Goosebumps book was published in 1992, he very well might have inspired a few of RL Stine’s villains).

As I said, I was fully on board with this. We’ve got a cackling moustache-twirling Mephistopheles, we’ve got a town full of people with barely-contained hang-ups and neuroses and violent impulses, you can see exactly where all the train cars are and how they’re going to collide, let’s watch the crash unfold.

I said, let’s watch the crash unfold.

Any second now.

How many pages does this book have? That many? Seriously?

Yes, we’ve run head-first into that classic Stephen King problem known as Too Many Fucking Characters. The plot of Needful Things (or at least the 70% of it I could stand reading) basically consists of a long series of interlocking crimes where someone pranks another citizen at Gaunt’s behest, then is pranked themselves in turn by someone else, and for every single one of these encounters the book insists on showing us both sides of the exchange. Very occasionally one of the viewpoints will skate by as a brief aside, but more often than not we get a full chapter section–if not an entire chapter–with a new point of view character, complete with their backstory and motivations and inner thoughts. By the time I put the book down, almost every single named person in Castle Rock had gotten at least one POV section to themselves, usually to show on-page something that could easily have been left up to the reader to infer.

This absolutely murders the pacing of the story. If you put together everything that actually happens in the part of the book I read, it doesn’t add up to much; a more concise author could have covered it all in less than half the page count. But this tedious practice of dragging every single goddamn person who Gaunt involves in his schemes (which is, again, almost every named person in the entire book) on-stage so they can have their moment in the spotlight drowns the story in masses of unnecessary padding.

This might have been excusable if either the things that were happening or the people they were happening to were more interesting. On the “things happening” front, the book is incredibly repetitive. Over and over again we see someone arrive at Needful Things, have a chat with Leland Gaunt wherein they notice all of the same creepy things everyone else has noticed but are entranced by him anyway, buy some magical knick-knack that cures their chronic illness or reconnects them with their lost childhood memories or makes them hallucinate that they’re having sex with Elvis or whatever, Gaunt makes them do a favour as payment, they agree to do it even though something in the back of their mind makes them realise they shouldn’t, then some time later they pull a prank on someone and they feel conflicted about it but they’re too attached to the joys of Elvis-fucking not to go through with the act. The particulars change, but these scenes all play out the exact same way, with the exact same thought process and emotions every time.

This is all completely unnecessary. Once the book has established how Gaunt operates, you could just have all of this weird shit happening to people in town and the reader could intuit that he put someone up to it in exchange for an item from the shop. In most cases we really didn’t need to know who exactly it was who carried out the prank, and we definitely didn’t need their backstory and emotional hang-ups, and we super didn’t need to actually see them do it. A smaller cast of characters could also have allowed the pranks to have more impact because they’d be happening to people we actually know and care about; as it is, most of the victims of Gaunt’s trickery feel utterly disposable.

Regarding the characters,“flat” doesn’t feel like a strong enough word. Castle Rock in this book is a town populated entirely by crude stereotypes and one-dimensional stock figures. The housewives are all chocolate-munching gossips, the religious folk are absurd Ned Flanders caricatures, the abusive spouses are screaming tyrants, when someone snaps and goes violently insane (as happens multiple times) they turn into cartoonish, knife-waving Bedlamites straight out of a Victorian sensation novel. The closeted gay men are…

Actually, we’ll get to that one later.

The interactions these walking emojis have with each other are just as nuanced and grounded as you would expect: every spat turns into a screaming match, every difficult conversation devolves into melodramatic weeping and rending of clothes, people are constantly breaking down in tears or blowing their tops or metaphorically falling to their knees in the grocery store. An awful lot of these scenes reminded me of Twin Peaks when it’s being soap opera-ish, the crucial differences being that a) Twin Peaks was being over the top on purpose and b) in between the soap opera stuff, Twin Peaks is actually scary. And also I guess c) Twin Peaks didn’t take so fucking long to get to the point.

So we’ve got an ever-expanding nest of characters bogging the story down, and most of those characters are too flat to be interesting. The element that’s supposed to cut through all of this and provide something resembling a plot is Sheriff Alan Pangborn’s investigation, but that runs into its own problems. This part of the story is essentially a murder mystery where Alan is looking into a mutual murder that Gaunt pulls off as an early test run of his schemes, which Alan perceives a hidden hand behind. (This is essentially the inciting incident of the plot; it happens well over a third of the way through the book). The problem with this is that the reader knows exactly what actually happened, because we saw it all unfold from every conceivable angle, so Alan’s entire storyline is just a long, long sequence of him puzzling over mysteries that we already know the answer to.

I don’t think this is necessarily a fatal flaw. A process of investigation can be gripping even if the reader already knows the solution to the mystery, and showing things from the perspective of both the perpetrator and the investigator, as King does here, can make for a lot of dramatic tension. Breaking Bad essentially mined this concept for four entire seasons of TV, to great effect. The problem is that the good Sheriff just isn’t a very interesting character, and neither is Gaunt’s first victim who he’s trying to track down, and the whole thing is just sooooooo fucking sloooooooow, interrupted as it is by fifteen different viewpoint characters who all do the same god damn things over and over again.

By the time I crossed the halfway point of the book, I realised I no longer cared about how it was going to end and was looking for a reason to jump ship. I got my excuse during yet another side plot about a middle school principal whose stash of child pornography gets exposed by one of Gaunt’s agents. The way this is all discussed seems, to me anyway, to conflate paedophilia and homosexuality in a way that by 1991 I really think people should have known not to do. (King gets justifiably raked over the coals for his treatment of race, but not enough people bring up the fact that his earlier work can be pretty rotten when it comes to portrayals of gay people, It notwithstanding).

Had the rest of the book been better, I might have been more willing to write this off as clunky phrasing implying something that wasn’t intended. But given all of the other problems I’ve outlined in this post, I was really not inclined to be charitable.

There’s no way around it: this is a bad, bad book, written by an author who not only has done better but was actively doing better at the time. And the sad thing is, I think King knew it. Fairly early on, I realised that the whole “town full of quirky quirksters who have big weepy soap opera conflicts” was reminding me of Twin Peaks; specifically, the Sheriff's deputy who throws up whenever he sees a dead body reminded me very strongly of a specific Twin Peaks character. The thought was scarcely across my brain before I ran into this:

“Norris just had that kind of a stomach. Sheila Brigham liked to tease him by saying he was like Deputy Andy on that TV show Twin Peaks, but Norris knew he wasn’t. Deputy Andy cried when he saw dead people.”

Acknowledging that you’re being a hack doesn’t absolve you of being a hack.