The End Of The Whole Mess

The end of the world is an intriguing idea. Hell, I like the end of the world. I love it even, and I gain much enjoyment when I read about the end of all this. Stephen King has a few stories about The End. I've read plenty of King in my time, a nasty habit passed on to me by my mother and my aunt, who are diehard fans. My first King read was The Stand when I was thirteen years old. I was rightly frightened of its size; after returning its forty thousand pages to the bookshelf, I was exhausted. I felt like I'd been kicked in the neck. After returning to the art of reading, I needed a shorter work. I asked my aunt, "What you got that's shorter, shorter, shorter than The Stand? With a devious twinkle in her eyes she said, "Step into my parlour, sir," referring to her linen closet.

On the third shelf, beside the guest linen, were stacks of Stephen King novels. There were even a lonely pair of Dean Koontz novels. To this day I'm not sure if there were any other books in the house All I'd ever seen her read was King. Recently she confided in me that she tries to read The Stand twice a year. She showed me Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game, but her brief synopses didn't interest me. She gave up, telling me there were plenty of King books on the shelf and even a special few in her room under her bed, were I to find the wherewithal to make such a painstaking decision.

Under her bed, I happened upon a book entitled Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993). Liking the title, I flopped myself onto her worn, ugly-brown, yet impossibly comfortable loveseat, and flipped a few pages. Delighted, I discovered that it was a book of some twenty-three short stories, and even a poem thrown in for good measure. Twenty years on I still haven’t read all of the stories, having left a half-dozen or so unread for no reason.

The second short story, entitled "The End of the Whole Mess," has always frightened me more than any scrap of writing that King has put to paper--and that's no small bit of paper.

Let's hear what the narrator, Howard Fornoy, says in the very first line of this excellent story:

<blockquote>"I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah..."</blockquote>

Pretty direct, but that's how King writes. Decent fiction should grab the reader's attention at the outset. I prefer to have novels grab my attention in roughly the first four words.

At this point, I should inform the reader that the rest of this piece contains spoilers both great and small. If you decide to read and enjoy this work, go do that. The internet will wait. Otherwise, please continue. You've been warned.

That opening line is very correct, too: the narrator's brother, Bobby, attempts to save the world, which we find out in the next two paragraphs, but he fails. The reasons for this are not totally clear, but King writes:

<blockquote>"My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy, was the Messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with his own discovery four hours ago."</blockquote>

The focus of the story is an interesting science-fiction approach to the end of all violence on earth, through super-genius Robert Fornoy's discovery of a cure for it. He says, "I think it's the water...Something in the water."

He finds a well just outside Waco, Texas, in the center of a town which is almost completely calm in an near-future world where Albanians attempted to airspray London with the AIDS virus. Throughout the story we are told of Bobby's incredibly vaunted intelligence, and we find a pattern: he never quite gets it (whatever it is) exactly right. It is a subtle and excellent theme: he never settles on any one school of learning, never completes university; he builds an airplane out of a wagon and crashes it. As a child, he had his allowance taken away for creating a makeshift radio station. Saving the world from violence and war is no different: he doesn't bother testing his "cure" on a small group. This is a Stephen King story, so naturally something goes wrong: Bobby succeeds in releasing an extremely potent version of "The Calmative," an aerosol version of the Waco well water, into the atmosphere, and only later does it appear that high incidences of premature senility and death occur, thus destroying humanity utterly. “The Calmative” kills in high concentration. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

The story is short, but over its few pages, Howard, a talented writer, loses his ability to write. It's very effective for such a short work.

No one is safe, not even the narrator or his Messiah brother. This is clearly and frighteningly apparent in King's writing in the last three pages of the novel. Howard Fornoy, our narrator and voice throughout the entire telling of the story (it's written in the first person), loses his mind as he writes. The following passage is located near the very end of the story, but if I were to add the “sic” convention to every misspelling, there would be one between every word, and I don't want to do that.

<blockquote>"we...wor big long sleekers in the ran, so no war and everybobby started to get seely we din and I came back here because he my brother what his name</blockquote>

<blockquote>"Bobby"</blockquote>

Think that's good? Very rarely, I think, can an author structure a sentence so perfectly within the context of the story that it will stick out forever in your mind, scare the reader, make the reader cry, cause near-hysterical gales of laughter. I will give one more line of this excellent story away, the one that causes my hands to tremble years after I lost interest in King’s work, years after I lost my need to be scared. This one is also near the end of the book, and it scared the shit out of me.

<blockquote>"I see wurds but dont know what they mean"</blockquote>

I pulled Nightmares & Dreamscapes out from under my bed a while back, and instantly I wanted to be scared. So I opened to page 57, and read. I read until the pages began to quiver. I sat for a few moments afterward, staring. A slow smile crept across my face, and I said to no one in particular, "Holy shit." Stephen King has sold millions of books--he points out often that he's in the business of scaring people. He does it well. As with most authors, he is hit or miss. The mark of a good author is to leave the reader wondering, marvelling and maybe even shivering at the tale told. I will never forget this story. That was the point.