Needful Things – Stephen King, 1991 ★½

Let the Buyer Beware

Imagine a whole town crammed to the gills with Gollums; a countryside alive to the steady murmurings of “My precioussss” every evening as the lights go down. If that sort of thing impresses you as profound rather than monotonous, Stephen King has just the novel for you.

As the setting for several King novels and shorter stories, Castle Rock, Maine has seen a lot of crazy things. Now it’s Leland Gaunt’s turn to warp its reality.

Gaunt is the proprietor of a new store, “Needful Things,” a sort of curio shop offering offbeat merchandise catering to the special desires of a diverse array of local residents. The price is always right, too; just what the would-be buyer has in hand.

“The world is full of needy people who don’t understand that everything, everything, is for sale…if you’re willing to pay the price,” he says.

And there’s the catch: To seal the deal, the price includes a “trick” on an unsuspecting neighbor, something perhaps small in nature, but huge in the damage wrought. Also, once someone buys the object in question, the object tends to exert an unhealthy influence over that person’s life.

Take Brian Rusk, a pre-teen baseball-card collector. He becomes Needful Things’ first customer when he visits the store and finds himself holding a 1956 Sandy Koufax baseball card. Not only is it in mint condition; it’s autographed to someone named Brian. Gaunt offers him the card for just 85 cents and a “deed,” the latter involving a trick on someone in town he doesn’t know.

Brian is so blinded by desire for the card he’s only too happy to agree. In time, he plays his trick, feels bad about the result, and becomes a compulsive worrier over the fate of his card, guarding it in his room to an extent that he becomes a stranger even to his little brother.

In an interview with Paris Review, King described Needful Things as his satire on the Reagan era. Gaunt’s form of capitalism may be a bit older and cruder than mere supply-side economics, but it’s hard to miss the inferences to the post-Reagan political landscape in which Needful Things was written. Gaunt even labels one of his few opponents in town a “Communist.”

“Selfish people are happy people,” Gaunt opines, no doubt channeling Ayn Rand.

King fans seem to be lukewarm to the novel, or as lukewarm as “Constant Readers” ever get with their man. Sure, the Amazon.com reviews are full of five-star ratings, but they are the kind that usually run a line or two and offer little more than generic salutes to “The King of Horror.” Even flak-catchers of his like Delores Claiborne and Under The Dome have their dogged champions; Needful Things generates little more than a passing nod. It’s one of those consignment-store specials of his, novels from the post-Misery-era you find gathering dust on back shelves; their original dust jackets in pristine condition, their pages unmussed by human hands.

Why the apathy? Perhaps it’s because it was more or less his farewell to a popular setting: The Dead Zone, perhaps King’s finest novel, was set there, and so was the classic novella “The Body,” later made into the movie Stand By Me. Both those works get call-outs here, “The Body” more conspicuously. Another Castle Rock novel, Cujo, is not only referenced but has its main location revisited during the course of the story, though the connection drawn here is rather lame.

Yet the problem with Needful Things runs deeper. As King’s last Castle Rock novel, Needful Things proves a poor way to get out of Dodge all around. The novel is bursting with energy, but the wrong kind. King's characters all talk like 12-year-old boys, and act like sugar-addled toddlers, even before we reach the apocalyptic ending where just about everything comes crashing down.

Two things you expect from King, effortless yarnspinning and involving characterization, are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the Rusk scenario is played out again and again as Gaunt’s store is visited by a succession of cardboard figures all-too-easily transformed into dead-eyed subjects of his diabolical will. The repetition becomes numbing, but King keeps it going for hundreds of pages.

I got the feeling King was trying to work in a more comedic vibe than usual; an early, bloody showdown between two women features kitchen implements wielded as deadly weapons. Two other aging females fight over their love for Elvis Presley, something Gaunt triggers when he sells one of them sunglasses he said were owned by the King.

Some of this plays amusingly enough; in a way, King’s lack of empathy for his characters makes their predicaments easier to laugh at than is the norm for his work. I really enjoyed the depiction of one of the fighting females mentioned above, Wilma Jerzyck. King overplays her Polishness well past the bounds of political correctness for the sake of cheap laughs, but in making her so overpoweringly nasty she bursts forth from the narrow confines of her surroundings to become one of the novel’s few successful caricatures.

The moody woodcut art that comes with the original hardcover edition is one of Needful Things' few strengths. Here we see young Brian in the dead of night bicycling by the curiously open store where he will meet his eventual fate. [Image from the Stephen King fan blog http://wecovetwhatwesee.tumblr.com/]

About her husband, King writes: “He did not just live in fear of her; he lived in awe of her, as natives in certain tropical climes once supposedly lived in awe and superstitious dread of the Great God Thunder Mountain, which might brood silently over their sunny lives for years or even generations before suddenly exploding in a murderous tirade of burning lava.” It’s a classic depiction of a cowed husband; as recognizable I’m sure to others as it was to me.

But the one-note stylings of our author this time out present serious drawbacks. None of the characters, including Gaunt, have much in the way of an internal life, or anything of a personality that extends beyond their function to the repetitious plot. There’s a central relationship in the novel, between the town sheriff and the owner of a sewing business, but King never made me care about either of them, or anyone or anything else in this novel. He loves her, and she him, but both are troubled by things that Gaunt will take advantage of before book’s end.

Making matters worse is the fact that King introduces a lot of characters, most of whom will have some dealings with Gaunt (and some who don’t still behave irrationally anyway, because he wanted to send off Castle Rock with a bang). There’s a drunken lowlife who becomes attached to a foxtail Gaunt sells him, while Brian’s cowlike mother ignores her son for the crude satisfaction of pleasuring herself in her bedroom, imagining she is keeping company with Elvis.

You know you are in trouble when a key conflict is a new Thirty-Years War festering between local Baptists and Catholics over a casino night, something King tries to play off as typical late 20^th-century ecumenism in action. Here, and elsewhere, King pushes tension to extremes.

He does this in other novels; sometimes it works, like in the crazed opening of Cell, where technology lays Boston to waste in one fatal instant. Here it just feels excessive, a long parade of people coming undone because some item in Gaunt’s toy chest turns them into grasping maniacs.

SPOILERS - I was never sold on the objectives or methods of Gaunt. What is he up to, exactly, and why does he involving himself on making all these "deals" like a diabolical Monty Hall when all he needs to do is talk to or touch someone to bend him or her to his will? If he's stealing souls, as the novel offhandedly suggests, isn't the victims' lack of free will in the matter a sticking point for the transaction's finality?

The more the novel went on, the more convinced I became that, for a King novel, this was one time where less would have definitely been more. Instead of a community invested with zombie-fied minions, why not just three or four of the more sordid characters (of which there are many)? Instead of just having Gaunt cackle and rub his hands in glee as events unfold, why not give the sheriff character some bones to chew on, instead of unquiet rumblings upon which he never acts? SPOILERS END

Some King fans will no doubt enjoy the brutish, Hobbesian quality of this grim parable for what it is, but if so, it's strictly for the converts and not the uninitiated. There's nothing here of the complexity of his other darker works, say Pet Semetary or It, where the actions that bring about tragedy make a kind of sense. This is all about pushing things to 11, and even when the result is moderately compelling, as it becomes by the time we come to the novel's climax, it's a matter of too-little-too-late. The transitory nature of the book was the main takeaway for me; a feeling as little as I cared about how things turned out, King cared even less. Even worse than a thin story is an unmistakable sense of authorial detachment. Needful Things presents a needless example of a master spinning his wheels.