Stephen King has just released, so far exclusively available as an e-book download through publisher Scribner, a new story, Mile 81. As a preliminary ‘technical’ aside, as the tale is just under 17,000 words in length and consists of eighty pages, it could be considered, depending upon the classification system being employed, as either a lengthy short story, novelette, or novella. While it really should not and does not matter which classification/label is selected, I’m personally choosing to classify it as the latter, if for no other reason than to justify placing its title into Italics rather than enclosing it within quotation marks as would be appropriate for a short story.
As for the story itself, Mile 81, set in King’s beloved Maine on a hot and hazy summer’s day, introduces the readers to protagonist, ten-year-old Pete Simmons, whose three-years-older brother George, having been assigned the task of watching him for the afternoon by their parents, instead abandons him in order to play a potentially dangerous game of leaping off the edge of a gravel pit on his bicycle with the rest of his gang of older friends, the “Rip-Ass Raiders.” The gang of young teens don’t want any mere ‘baby’ ten-year-old hanging with them; George has sense enough to realize that such pastimes are too dangerous for his younger brother, though he’s quickly able to self-justify gifting Pete with the princely sum of two dollars and leaving Pete all alone with the admonition that he, “Do me a favor and don’t get in trouble. Stay in the neighborhood.” (Mile 81, at page 3)
The bored Pete, of course, doesn’t long obey his brother’s instructions and, armed with his trusty magnifying glass and his bicycle, decides to check out the abandoned rest area just off the Mile 81 marker and exit off of I-95 expressway. Pete, using the remembered instructions a schoolmate had given him, locates the abandoned highway rest area and finds a way inside. Once inside, Pete, in an effort to do something he hopes will prove worthy of admiration from his older brother and the rest of the “Rip-Ass Raiders,” decides to experiment with a half-full bottle of vodka he has discovered—and promptly downs enough of the still-potent liquor to get himself buzzed and to fall asleep on top of an old mattress left there by some older and more mature teens who’d made use of the item for purposes other than sleep.
It is at this point in the story that things take a sudden, potent turn towards the “Twilight Zone.” As young, inebriated Pete is dozing and sleeping-it-off inside the abandoned shell of the rest-stop, an unusual, driverless, slow moving vehicle, seemingly a station wagon covered in mud though it hasn’t rained at all recently, appears on I-95 near the exist to the self-same abandoned Mile 81 rest area and coasts to a stop outside near the end of the rest area’s entrance ramp in plain sight to all traveling down I-95. The driver’s side front door of the station wagon then opens wide, beckoning – though there’s nobody to be seen inside the vehicle.
The remainder of King’s tale describes a number of Good Samaritans who, lured by the site of the strange, mud-covered station wagon with it’s driver’s door open, decide to pull up either behind or in front of the stopped vehicle to see if they can render any aid or assistance to the occupants of the seemingly disabled auto. The oddly mud-smeared station wagon is not quite what it appears to be, and the mystery deepens, as successive Good Samaritans driving past on I-95 are drawn by the ever-increasing number of empty vehicles that begin to line the entrance ramp to add their own vehicles to the ever growing lineup.
The story is, as no doubt many reviewers will point out, “classic King” in that it resonates with many familiar themes and tropes that author King has utilized to usually great effect throughout his long and successful career. There are obvious echoes of his prior works, including The Body, Christine and From a Buick 8. Make no mistake though, Mile 81 is an original and engrossing work of fantasy and horror; just one that doesn’t waste effort trying to explain the origins, methodology or raison d’être of its monster. It just “is” and the fact of its reality and presence is sufficient to elicit causal responses from those who encounter it, and send chills aplenty though the readers. Author King, in a masterful display or skillful, precise writing, presents the reader with brief but brilliant and evocative portraits of the successive Good Samaritans who decide to stop and try to assist those in the strange indeterminate brand station wagon with its open, beckoning front driver’s door. The readers cannot help but become invested in the future of these just-introduced characters.
Eventually, it is up to the recently awakened and hung-over Pete to try and save two even younger children from the same fate that has befallen everyone else (adults, all) who’ve encountered the strange station wagon. Pete’s eventual plan is original and something wonderfully simple that is convincingly something only a child might come up with. However, for those well conversant with genre fiction, it is perhaps somewhat obviously foreshadowed within the story itself.
Nevertheless, Mile 81 is an absorbing and thoroughly entertaining read and well worth any fan of King’s work and/or good fiction to purchase. To label this as ‘vintage King’ is meant as a compliment and the tale will warm the heart (while freezing the blood) of any of the author’s “constant readers” who have been looking for some good, ‘old fashioned’ horror from the author that hearkens back to the kind of tales he wrote relatively early in his career. King has always been exceptional at getting inside the minds of children and Mile 81 is no exception. The story is set contemporaneously, in the present – and indeed, Pete and the other children are quite different than those children that author King has previously brought to life harkening from the 1950’s, 60’s, etc. Indeed, King’s young teens of the second decade of the 21st century speak with verisimilitude; voices somewhat coarser than their earlier generational cohorts, and now routinely using words that would have made George Carlin blush.
Keeping with contemporary technology and mores, Mile 81 is exclusively available as an e-book. The author has had a long relationship with this ‘emerging’ technology (one which has certainly now arrived), having previously written and released the very first mass-market e-book in 2000 (the novella Riding The Bullet). More recently he wrote/released a very early story not only for the Amazon Kindle e-reader, but about that ubiquitous e-reader (Ur). For those who own a Kindle, or any compatible e-reader or tablet, purchasing Mile 81 should be a “no-brainer.” It is a far more entertaining way to spend a few hours than any computer game, television show, film, or DVD. For those who have yet to purchase an e-reader or tablet, Mile 81 offers a compelling reason for finally succumbing to the siren call of the electronic reader. Anyone who might doubt that author King still has the “good stuff” can be reassured, as Mile 81 proves that he can still hurl a literary fastball at speeds exceeding one hundred miles and hour, and right in the readers’ strike zone.
- Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems 1971-2012 - September 15, 2013
- That Which Should Not Be - March 12, 2012
- Cosmic Forces - November 11, 2011
- Mile 81 - September 4, 2011
