The Terror of the "Unknowable": Thoughts on Two of King's Scary Short Stories

I am finding that Skeleton Crew contains some very good stories.  I just read two stand-outs, "The Monkey" and "The Raft."  The original cover image for this collection features an image of "The Monkey," so how could I not read that one?  And "The Raft" is apparently a fan favorite, because I hear it mentioned a bit more often than a lot of King's other short fiction.  

I found both of these stories to be entertaining, creepy, well-written works.  One thing that stands out about them is that both stories center on premises that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would likely come off as absurd.  But in King's hands?  They are effectively unnerving.

One of the reasons they work is that King elects to regard the evil entities as mysterious and unexplained.  (The black, oily monstrosity in "The Raft" is described at one point as an "unknowable thing.") The less-is-more approach is generally an effective one when dealing with evil in stories.  The scariest things and ideas are usually the ones we can't fully comprehend.

King is a master at making the impossible seem frighteningly real.  The idea of an evil, murderous wind-up toy monkey is a gem.  Again, at face value, it sounds a little ridiculous, doesn't it?  But King somehow manages to take a seemingly innocuous thing from childhood and turn it into a haunting symbol of fear.  King does an exceptional job describing Hal's reaction to the toy, particularly the way he perceives its devious facial expression and jagged grin, and the violent clanging of its symbols.  As the story progresses, King gradually convinces us that, yes, there does seem to be something wicked, possessed even, about the thing.

There is a sense of dread to the story, something that is evident even through the final passages.  Evil in King's work is often powerful, unyielding, merciless.  That's part of what makes his work so enduring and universally popular, I think.  There is something extremely terrifying about a force you can't escape.  In "The Monkey," King evokes this feeling by giving the reader a sense of Hal's essentially lifelong relationship with the toy, and the monkey's enduring, apparently immortal power.    

"The Raft" works in a similar, if tighter and more constricted, way.  It is a bleak, nasty horror story about a deadly force that preys on four young helpless victims.  It is more urgently paced, but is filled with a similar sense of sickening dread, and also builds toward an uncompromising conclusion.  In tales like these, King goes very dark.  The idea "The Raft" is built on is simple, straightforward, and brutally effective.  Like "The Monkey," it sounds silly.  Also like it, King turns the scenario into a vividly realized, bona fide nightmare.

Of the two stories, I prefer "The Monkey," mostly because it benefits from greater detail and depth.  A lot of what works about the story is Hal's relationship to the monkey, and what it represents as a totemic symbol of death in his life.  

But King also takes the time to give dimension to Hal's relationship with his sons.  Hal's history and upbringing have a legitimate bearing on how he feels and interacts with his own boys, and as a result he becomes a more complex character than we expect.  Does it also serve to make the perpetual torment and fear he lives with more dreadful?  It sure does.

Because of the emphasis King places on detailing Hal's history with the demented toy, the story achieves a cumulative power that gives the tale surprising weight and resonance.  

Here is one of my favorite passages from the story, which concerns Hal's reaction to seeing the monkey, boxed up, being hauled away from the house following his mother's death:

He had jumped up and down twice, as high as he could jump, his arms spread, palms held out, and if any of the neighbors had seen him, they would have thought it odd almost to the point of blasphemy, perhaps--why is that boy jumping for joy (for that was surely what it was; a jump for joy can hardly be disguised), they surely would have asked themselves, with his mother not even a month in her grave? (p. 190, Scribner paperback, 2016)

This is a terrific bit of writing.  It's an effective moment emotionally, conveying the relief young Hal feels, thinking the torment might finally be over.  And it plays on the fact that those perceiving Hal might mistake the cause of his joy for something ugly and inappropriate, which is a nice observation that so often we misinterpret and misjudge what we see.  It's also a clever way to accentuate the isolation Hal experiences, and his inner torment.  There is a private, and very personal, element to his fear.

Hal cannot escape the monkey; it appears to be maliciously drawn to him, taunting him, pursuing him.  This idea is contrasted with "The Raft," where the evil, though no less destructive, seems more random and less purposeful; its a terror the kids basically encounter by chance.  Both kinds of evil are terrifying, but in different ways.

All in all, I think "The Monkey" is prime short-form King; crisply written, but given greater weight and depth than I expected.  As the story progressed, I cared about Hal's plight, wanted him to find some way to be free of the monkey's torment.  On some level, I was horrified by the fact of the monkey, by the presence of evil, asking myself "Why?  Why does such a thing exist?"  In life, we ask ourselves these questions whenever we glimpse the reality of some especially vicious and hateful thing.  Often, we cannot know the answer.  King frequently uses his fiction to explore this dilemma.  His literary worldview incorporates the presence of heinous evil, and it is often the source of great fear and misery in his stories, something brutally experienced but rarely understood.  "The Monkey" conveys this essential concept quite well.  

And there is no denying that "The Raft" is a great story too: incredibly tense, frightening, and deliciously dark.  I think King has fun when he writes gripping, gruesome stuff like this.  Given what he does with such a simple premise and relatively basic character dynamics, it's a testament to what a talented storyteller he is.       

King's exceptional ability to convey the essence and experience of fear is often discussed and rightly praised.  But there is perhaps no one more skilled at turning the potentially absurd into something genuinely chilling.  It doesn't always work--"The Mangler" is a memorable example of an idea that's sillier than it is scary--but when it does, the results are frighteningly fun.