Saturday, April 5, 2014

How Not to Write Poe (A Tutorial by Stephen King)

For some reason, I ended up reading a collection of Stephen King short stories. I was surprised to find a re-envisioning of Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Cask of Amantillado." King did not plagiarize or copy the story--the details are very different and the Poe story is even referenced at one point.

However, since I'm not a huge fan of King's style, the takeaway was, "Gee, now I realize all the things I really liked about Poe."

So here's a run-down of Poe's "Cask of Amantillado" and King's "Dolan's Cadillac." Both stories follow the same basic structure:

1. The protagonist harbors a grudge against somebody.
2. The protagonist comes up with a clever plan to get revenge.
3. The protagonist lures the victim into the trap.
4. The protagonist buries his victim alive.

Now, the main difference between the stories (aside the face that King's is much, much longer) is that King spends a lot of time on steps 1 and 2, while Poe spends the bulk of the story on steps 3 and 4. We have no idea what Fortunato did to Montessor, only that Montessor is pissed. King, however, gives us the entire backstory of the characters. Dolan is some kind of mobster, who assassinated Robinson's wife before she could testify. He killed his wife.

Oh, wives in popular media! What a thankless task is yours! Always providing some cheap emotional shortcut. Either you die and spur the hero on his manhood-winning quest of revenge, or you cheat and the hero is forced to kill you himself oh-so-sympathetic and tragic homicide.

Do we learn anything about the characters from the added backstory? Well...meh. Robinson is made out to be such an average Joe, there's not much to say about him. In fact, the revenge cycle is what's supposed to raise him to a noteworthy level. The wife has even less personality and only appears in the story as a ghost to spur on his revenge. As for Dolan, we only see him through the eyes of Robinson, who envies his wealth and success with women.

(Note how this trivializes the relationship between Robinson and his wife Elizabeth. Robinson envies not, for example, Dolan's happy family life, but Dolan's many conquests. As if to say, "You have lots of toys, and yet you took my only toy! How mean! My manhood is ruined!" It's David and Uriah all over again.)

Looking to Poe, what do we know about Montessor? Well, what don't we know? We know he's a master manipulator because he understands the way people's minds work. (Note how he gets his servants out of the house by denying them the night off.) He's a good liar. He's proud. He's ironic and keeps making allusions that go over his victim's head. He carries a rapier just cuz.

In both stories the victim is drawn in about equal detail. When we do finally get some lines from Dolan, he shows himself to be shrewd in an almost animal way. And then desperate in an animal way. Fortunato is a pompous douche who's always making patronizing remarks to Montressor right up to when the trap is sprung.

Let's look at that trap. In "The Cask of Amantillado" we don't get a lot of details about how Montessor set up the trap. We don't know exactly what's going on in his head, which makes the sense of impending doom all the stronger. In "Dolan's Cadillac" lots and LOTS of time is spent on how Robinson managed to bury and entire Cadillac in the middle of a road. How he learned to work the machines, the characters he met...Now, there is a suspense that the whole thing will go somehow wrong. But I think the extra detail just makes the plan less believable. It's so complicated you want to say, "But would that even work???" instead of focusing on the story. Montessor's plan is not so ingenious. In fact, it's incredibly simple and therefore easier to believe. The execution of the plan is what we're waiting for, anyway.

Now, when your future victim is traveling in a Cadillac and you're waiting at the road construction site, there's no chance to talk to him or know what he's thinking. Therefore, the most memorable scene in Poe's story--where Montessor lures Fortunato down into the cellar, pretending to urge him to return while actually egging him on--is entirely absent from King's story, just by virtue of the setup.

What both stories have is the burying alive part. And even though King's does take forever to get to the payoff, the payoff itself is pretty good. There are some creative details such as Dolan shooting the driver and the irony of a safe car becoming a deathtrap because the back window is unbreakable bullet-proof glass.

Of course, Poe pretty much invented the modern short story. And the horror genre. So...yep, no comparison. What's ironic to me is that even though Poe was writing a century earlier, his finished product is much closer to what we would consider a "modern" short story. Earlier short stories begin with a lot of exposition and try to make everything clear (often by means of an omniscient narrator), ending with a denouement. More recent short stories start with the action and don't give a lot of explanation. In a strange reversal, King seems to want to explain everything while Poe leaves a lot to the imagination.

Truly, Poe was ahead of his time. A genius with horror and a genius with the short story form.

4/8/14
Edited for to correct the spelling of "Dolan." The character may be forgettable, but at least I could remember to spell his name...

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