Big Names, Short Stories, Mixed Results

Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan/Richard Chizmar, A Face in the Crowd/The Longest December

Dean Evers, an old New England widower in Florida, has become a reluctant Tampa Bay baseball fan. He whiles away lonely hours, largely estranged from his only son and with few surviving friends, by watching the Rays and reading. One hot afternoon, watching a low-stakes game, he sees a familiar face in the stands. A face from his personal past, which shouldn’t be possible, as its human is long deceased.

I can’t tell how much of “A Face in the Crowd” Stephen King wrote, and how much Stewart O’Nan contributed. King’s short fiction, unlike his novels, follows a reliable trajectory, building not toward some jump scare or twist, but toward a sense of inevitability. Characters see themselves as participants in events, until discovering that they’re mere passengers. Who knows if King wrote this story, or if O’Nan borrowed King’s vibe.

However, King and O’Nan aren’t this book’s star performers. Not only is their page count barely sixty percent of Richard Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” but their story is much more widely spaced and set in a larger font. Cemetery Dance Publications, Chizmar’s indie imprint, presumably put King and O’Nan on the cover to sell Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” which is more thematically ambitious but, ultimately, disappointing.

Bob Howard’s comfortable suburban Maryland life gets upended one snowy morning when local detectives appear at his neighbor’s door. A just-the-facts investigator informs him that his sweet, avuncular neighbor, James Wilkinson, has bodies under the floorboards. Bob finds himself beset on all sides, by suspicious neighbors, greedy reporters, and fair-weather friends. Everybody wonders what Bob knew, when. Then the midnight hang-up calls start.

This story differs from the other by rejecting a reliable beat sheet. Sadly, without a comfortable outline, Chizmar seems uncertain what story he wants to tell. Is this an amateur sleuth mystery in which a neighborhood family man must uncover deep secrets? A satire of the media circus following lurid crimes? A lone man’s descent into madness as the pressures of maintaining middle-class respectability crumble around him?

Yes, all this and more. Chizmar has selected an ambitious slate of themes he wants to address, backed by his admitted fondness for Twilight Zone-inspired narrative, but he seemingly doesn’t know how to keep all the balls in play. He gets just enough of one theme going to wet his readers’ whistle, then caroms onto another. It almost feels like he doesn’t know how to carry the themes forward once he’s introduced them.

As an author, I enjoy writing short stories because they let writers do something novels never permit: they let authors focus on character and plot, and politely ignore backstory. In full-length novels, the physical mass simply demands the author explain everything, or nearly everything, because there’s room enough. But short stories make no such demand. The brevity permits that, sometimes, things simply happen because they happen.

For instance, Dean Evers doesn’t need to ruminate on deeper themes of his buried past suddenly appearing on the Jumbotron. It simply happens because it happens. Evers tries to fight the inevitable but, like Oedipus Rex, his resistance becomes part of his breakdown. Yes, observant readers already know where his story is headed, and everyone except Dean realizes he can’t fight the tide. What tide? Doesn’t matter, the story’s over.

But Bob’s story, simply because it’s longer, has room to address the questions it raises. It just doesn’t, and one wonders whether Chizmar has started something he doesn’t know how to finish. The swarming, shark-like media frenzy gets introduced, then gets forgotten. Similarly, the pressures which the investigation puts on Bob’s ability to do his job, which is high in pressure but low in prestige. And the psychological toll on his family.

Indeed, in the final resolution, I find myself wondering why it stops there? Bob’s story not only isn’t done, but the “conclusion” actually opens more cans of proverbial worms about his family, his past, and his mental health. One wishes Chizmar took some guidance from King, whose notoriously long, family-oriented conclusions at least give readers some sense of where our protagonist now stands in a world forever changed.

These stories are arranged back-to-back, with two front covers, in the style of the old Ace Doubles that kept pulp classics in print during the 1960s. They feature two stories that go in different directions and ask different questions, but appeal to the same thriller audience. Both feel like good narrative introductions. Sadly, both also feel like something the authors intended to finish writing later.