Events upon events have piled up over the last week so I can understand how all of you have been held in utter suspense, waiting for our next review to be posted. With a combination of both school work and a social life, I've been left with little to no time to read this past week. For those of you who are concerned, I'm still making my way through House of Leaves, but progress has been hindered to about snail's pace. And for those of you who aren't concerned, I went to the zoo yesterday. I think one of the more profound and enlightening animals I was able to see was the giraffe. To my understanding, they're the only mammals that sleep standing up. This must mean that their leg muscles are some of the strongest in the world (right?).
Anyways, all this is related to a short story that has been at the forefront of my mind ever since being exposed the master of modern horror himself, Stephen King (animals to horror - there's a connection there somewhere). It's hard to sum up all that King has done in his career, from snorting lines of cocaine, to writing in drunken stupors, to composing entire novels and not remembering a single event from the night before; naturally King is nothing short of a "mad-artist". In one of his earlier short story compilations, Everything's Eventual, he pens a story entitled "The Road Virus Heads North" about a man, Richard Kinnell, who purchases the bizarre painting of a malevolent-looking man who's driving a car similar to his own. The painting has an equally disturbing past, which captivates Kinnell, who's always a fan of the slightly horrific (much like King). When the tortured artist who created the painting died, he burned all his other works and left a cryptic message behind stating how he couldn't take what was happening to him.
As Kinnell continues his trip back home to Maine (a recurring setting in almost every King story), he notices the painting begins to change with each place he stops at. At one point, Kinnell attempts to ditch the painting at a rest stop, but finds to his horror, the sinister image has beat him to his own house and now displays a bloody massacre of a yard sale from whence he first purchased the painting. As the man in the car looms ever closer to Kinnell's house, Kinnell begins to frantically think of ways of how to change his impending death.
King has always been a fan of "moving pictures" stories and this is certainly an outgrowth of that love. The reader is immersed in a sense of dread and anxiety as Kinnell's painting gradually becomes more violent and warped. Along with being a solid stand-alone story, the rest of Everything's Eventual is equally macabre and enjoyable. While there can't be much drawn from the story in the way of changing mankind or one's soul (as Spence's novels seem to be about), this one is merely for entertainment and horror purposes only. Yet, that's not to say it's not worth reading, though.
-- Zach
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