Heart Attack

Work-at-home Friday and here we are. Tug is still snoozing upstairs, and I have to go to my appointment at the pain management clinic later this morning during a break from work-at-home duties. I managed to somehow make it through the entire week without being completely worn out and exhausted by last night–a first–and I’m not entirely sure what that means? Am I getting used to this schedule? Was going in at eight on Monday better than going in at seven thirty? Maybe, but it may have been the evenings spent with a kitten donut sleeping in my lap while I watch an episode of Moonlighting and reread The Dead Zone. It’s actually been kind of a lovely week, honestly, one of the better ones in recent memory.

Last night’s episode of Moonlighting was “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” one of the more legendary episodes and one that really made everyone stand up and pay attention to what they were doing. (I’d be curious to know if the guy who created The West Wing was influenced by it as well; while the shows were vastly different they also had a lot of similarities–the rapid fire overlapping dialogue, for one.) It’s a very simple premise; in the course of a job Maddie and David hear a story about an old LA club where a very noirish type murder grew out of a love triangle, in which the band’s singer and the horn player have an affair and eventually her husband is murdered. Naturally, David and Maddie put their own spin on it–Maddie convinced she loved the man who killed her husband and it was all for love, while David is convinced the woman was a Phyllis-type from Double Indemnity type femme fatale who suckered her lover into killing her husband and taking the fall. They argue, go home, and both fall asleep–to dream their own versions of the story. The episode was also introduced by Orson Welles–which I’d forgotten–and this is probably one of the best episodes of television ever produced. (I also realized, while watching “The Lady in the Iron Mask” episode, that the entire plot of my aborted fourth Scotty book, Hurricane Party Hustle, was directly lifted from this episode.)

I have to say, I am enjoying the hell out of my rewatch of this show, which is exceeding my wildest hopes and memories that it was as good and classic as it was when I originally watched and fell in love with it back in the 1980’s when it aired. It’s definitely one of the three most influential television shows on me and my writing–along with Dark Shadows and Scooby Doo Where Are You?–and I am so delighted that it’s streaming at long last.

I also read more of The Dead Zone last night and have reached the third and final act, in which almost all of the storylines introduced throughout the course of the book have wrapped up to set up the final denouement between Johnny Smith and Gregory Stillson, the monstrous populist politician. It’s really remarkable, you know, that King was so amazingly gifted and able to structure a novel so brilliantly so early in his career. I also remember that King wasn’t taken very seriously either by critics or the Academy in the those earlier days of his career; he got roasted pretty regularly by critics even as he was selling books in the millions; horror not being taken seriously as a genre, for one, and the enormous popularity he enjoyed naturally meant “well, he can’t actually be any good, can he?” But he was. Yes, there are some problematic stuff in his earlier work (the depictions of queer people aren’t great–but are there; he seriously has an issue with overweight people; and he does have a tendency to only use people of color as “magical” characters), but the world-building, the character building, the internal monologues of the characters, and the completely realistic way he develops and reveals the characters to the readers all the while telling a very compelling and fast moving story you cannot put down is all there from the very beginning. (Of course, the Straight White Male Literary Icons were the only people getting critical acclaim back then, your John Updikes and Saul Bellows and John Gardners and Philip Roths and William Styrons and so on…and the bestseller lists were peopled with mostly straight white men like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon and Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace and Herman Wouk–things are better now, I ‘d say) I’ve just finished the second act, in which Johnny is working as a private tutor for Chuck Chatsworth, with the inevitable call back to the lightning rod salesman’s futile foreshadowing attempt to sell the owner of Cathy’s, a steakhouse/hang out that always hosts Chuck’s high school graduation party. Johnny has a vision of the place being struck by lightning and burning rapidly to the ground with celebrating teenagers trapped inside. He tries to convince Chuck not to go, and even Chuck’s father, not quite believing, offers to host everyone at the Chatsworth house instead–getting about half the crowd…and it is during this get-together that Johnny’s horrible vision comes true and the news of the tragedy breaks. It’s really an incredibly powerful, well constructed scene, and the character of John Smith, the victim of fate who never really understands why he has been so cursed, is really one of King’s best.

I wish I could write a novel half as good as this one, which I am looking forward to finishing tonight. I think next up will be Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare.

And on that note, I need to get back to work and. get cleaned up for my appointment. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in on you again soon.