Pages 255 - 295, Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck: Too Real

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What Happened: Hunkered down in his home office, Big Jim Rennie calms his pet First Selectman Andy Selectman down ... just in time to see his hated enemy Barbara, talking to the editor and his not-so-controllable Third Selectman, Andrea Grinnell.  Shortly thereafter, Barbie, Brenda and Julia Shumway show him the letter for the President, supposedly putting Barbie in charge.  Just as Barbie suspected, Rennie dimisses it: the Prez and the rest are out there; he's the boss in here.  Meanwhile, posters are going up everywhere: they're going to fire a cruise missile at the wall, tomorrow at 10 a.m.Rennie isn't taking any of this well.  He privately confronts Brenda and makes it clear if she supports Barbie in the coming confrontation, he'll cut off her Oxycontin supply, and she needs those drugs.  Elsewhere, his son Junior sits in the dark with the rotting corpses of his victims and draws comfort from them, Rusty Everett's kids have another premonition, this one about bloody golden baseballs ... and Lester Coggins forces a meet with Rennie.  He has to confess, Coggins says.  They all have to tell the truth about the meth lab behind the church.  In rsponse, Rennie kills him -- smashes his skull with his golden baseball.  He's standing over the body in his study when his son comes in. And like a good son, Junior helps finish him off and takes the body away.  Together, they will use the body -- along with Junior's own victims -- to get back at Dale Barbie. Somehow.  And even that pales in comparison to the rape and beating of poor, stupid, drunk Sammy by the "deputies."

So much happening and none of it good.

A few years ago, Dan Simmons -- another brilliant writer who understands genre fiction -- wrote Children of the Night, a vampire novel set, in part, in Ciacescu's Romania.  One of the main themes of the novel: the pansy Victorian horror of blood-sucking counts and romantic mesmerism are nothing, nothing, compared to the real horrors of what human do to each other every day.  Strangely, it's probably one of Simmons least successful novel -- not because of the 'tour' of the hell that was Romania in those days, but the relative thinness of the fantasy elements.

SK's doing the same thing here on an almost-intimate level.  The brutal beating-murder of Coggins (who, let's face it, was annoying as hell), even its discovery by Rennie's son and Junior's own participation, is almost tame, almost incidental, compared to the very real, truly awful gang-rape of white trash Sammy.  Look at it, King's saying: you've got a fairly typical (though wonderfully written, brutally abrupt) Hammer Horror Movie violence on one hand: a preacher beaten to death with a gold-plated baseball and choked about by the murderer's son, no less -- and a coolly described, blow by blow (literally) recitation of a real-life, very brutal gang rape.

Which is worse?  God, is there any comparison?

In fact, it works so well that the preacher's murder actually rings a little hollow, seems a little stilted.  When Rennie says, "It's my will, you troublesome fly," it's just ... not real.  Not like what happened to Sammy a few pages earlier.  Not like what can and does happen daily around the world.

This is King's real talent, isn't it?  He understands horror -- all kinds of horror -- and presents it to us in unflinching detail.  And then asks us ove and ove: what's worse? The EC Comics horror, the happy grand guignol you can shrug off ... or the real horror that humans perpetrate upon each other, in the open sunlight of every day?