Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Follow the trail, check you can still see the breadcrumbs that once lined your way on previous occasions you walked through the forest of words, and don’t forget your lamp which casts a thousand shadows, which brings you face to face with the nightmares and ogres of repression, those beings that take delight as they taunt you as sleep, as you live in your bleak desires and dreams; for If It Bleeds, then let the trail lead, let it escort you straight to the crossroads of Heaven and Hell.
A writer, arguably never truly knows where a story, at least the fine details and introspection, comes from, many different sources can be credited, can take the bow for the inspiration, but it is the writer who weaves the narrative together, who like a surgeon can either wilfully misdirect the reader and cut the wrong part of the body open, or who can find ways to leave threads, the entrails hanging, where the reader understands they have become the keeper of what remains.
It is what remains in a writer’s mind perhaps that sees the art of the short story take its place in the annals of literature, and whilst there is always a call for the easily digestible story in one setting, there is, undeniably, uncomfortably, a part of the reader that hankers for the tale to played out, to have the true five course experience rather than the buffet on offer.
Some writers though do make the most of the medium, and Stephen King has certainly been amongst that number in the past, especially under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, his first collection in his own name in 1978, Night Shift, Different Seasons, to which the incredible Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption made its sensational entrance, and 1990’s Four Past Midnight, the prolific American author has grabbed the attention of the reader with style, with intense fear and the control needed in which to stop the soul short from wanting to go on, to delve further into the mystery which has opened up; a split in that quiet Earth rather than the chasm to which some never return.
However, the master of Horror and the chilled blood latest collection, If It Bleeds, struggles to even allow the reader the chance to look into the fracture in the storyboards crust, the trail of blood stopping short at the mouth of the fissure, and what the reader is left with is arguably a sense of insecurity, of a lost connection between dynamic and visual prose, and that of a hurried sense of attempting to beat Time; and whilst the title story, If It Bleeds, is a welcome return to the life of Holly Gibney, there is a concern that all is not as it should be, that Mr Harrigan’s Phone lacks conviction of belief, The Life of Chuck could have been an absolute monster of a story, and one that perhaps is not too late to turn in to a fully-fledged novel in its own right, and the book’s fourth story, that of Rat, is sadly one of the weakest stories to have the name Stephen King stapled to it in fifty years of writing.
Let It Bleed is not one for the purists, those who see such stories as The Langoliers as some of the finest examples of suspense, who see Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption as indelible observations on the American system of justice, instead the reader might consider that the book itself is one of a race against Time, of putting pen to paper and collect thoughts because the trail, for the time being, has become mixed with grit and pebbles disguised as breadcrumbs.
Ian D. Hall