Night Surf [Pt. 1]

Rik: Welcome back to We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print vs. Film. In this column, my buddy Aaron Lowe and I do side-by-side comparisons of the written works of author Stephen King against their numerous filmed adaptations. In our premiere edition, we kicked things off by tackling one of the short stories from his 1978 collection, Night Shift. The first story was Graveyard Shift – you know, the one about mutant killer rats in a textile mill – and the movie was its 1990 film adaptation.

Strange as it might sound, not every Stephen King story has been given a filmed treatment. And of those that have, not all of them were filmed for the feature film trade or for television. Enter the Dollar Babies. As King started to see some success in the mid-'70s, he created a way for college students who were aspiring filmmakers to use any of his short stories – but not his novels – to create their own films. To make things nice and legal, he charged them a single dollar bill (it is also known as "the Dollar Deal"), and made them agree to the caveat that they could not release the film commercially without his expressed permission. King would also keep all film rights to the work outside of the student's permission to use it for their film, and each filmmaker also had to give King a copy of the film when it was completed. 

Most of the Dollar Baby filmmakers never went anywhere, but one that rose up from their ranks was Frank Darabont, the Oscar-nominated director of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist adaptations years later. Darabont got his directorial career started with a Dollar Baby adaptation of The Woman in the Room in 1983. It was one of the few Dollar Babies to be distributed on VHS, and clearly gave Darabont the launch he needed to get his foot in the door in Hollywood. But most Dollar Baby films were merely a good opportunity for a young filmmaker to work with some quality written material to form the basis for their film. Fame and fortune was never the point of the game.

The Story: Night Surf (1969)

Rik: We are going to focus this time on the third story in the Night Shift collection, Night Surf, first published in 1969 in Ubris Magazine, the literary journal for the University of Maine, where King attended classes. While it was not picked up as a Dollar Baby for many years, in 2002, the first short filmed version of Night Surf was produced. According to the Wikipedia page listing of all known Dollar Baby shorts and from further searches on the web, there have since been four other adaptations of the story.

Night Surf has been a story that always kind of stuck around in the back of my memory, even though I had not read it for many, many years until a few weeks ago. When I revisited it, most of the details of the story were easily dredged back up for me, and the nihilism at the heart of the story definitely hit me in ways both pleasant and unpleasant, especially after years of wrestling with severely dark thoughts (leading eventually to meds and therapy) myself. I do remember the story as being one of the most interesting and well-crafted pieces in Night Shift, so it was good to see it hold up so well in those aspects for me when I read it anew.

Without going right into the details or plot of the story itself, or its slight ties to another much longer and more famous Stephen King work, I want to have my co-host Aaron talk about his memories or feelings regarding Night Surf.

Aaron: To be honest, I have no real strong connection to Night Surf. As with Graveyard Shift, most of the details came flooding back as I started reading, but I had no nostalgia associated with the story, and I haven’t even thought of it for years. When I reopened the Night Shift collection and looked through the titles, my thought when seeing Night Surf was ‘Oh yeah, isn’t that the short story that kinda sorta inspired The Stand?’ That makes sense, when you think about it; I read this collection when I was thirteen years old, fourteen at the most. At that time, I would have been unaware of its connection to The Stand, and I likely would not have cared. I was almost a decade younger than the young adults we meet here, and worlds away from the problems they were facing. At that age, I was not in the mood for a bitter, fatalistic look at my own mortality. In order for me to be interested, death had to be gory and bizarre, not vague and encroaching. I was invincible, and death existed only for me to find entertainment in it. A few years later I revisited Night Surf once I finally got around to finishing The Stand, and my increased enjoyment of the material came mainly from the fact that it existed alongside a novel I had enjoyed quite a bit. 

Which is what made revisiting this particular short story so interesting. Now, I’m over a decade older than the young adults we follow, and my new perspective has afforded me a renewed appreciation of what King was able to accomplish here in such a brief story. I know I made some variation of this statement last time, but I had forgotten how succinct and focused King could be at this point in his career. His novel, The Stand, is 1,152 pages long in its final published form, but King got there almost a decade earlier, and in a far briefer thirteen pages at that. 

As an adult I was able to place myself more easily into the mindset of the characters we meet, and while it wasn’t exactly a pleasant place to be, it did ring true to me in a way my younger self would have had no comprehension of. The irony of reaching the age when you normally head out to experience the world, only to have the world fall inevitably apart at the same time, is remarkably poignant here. Stephen King was 22 when this was published, around the same age the characters appear to be (maybe slightly older), and he clearly felt a connection to these kids facing the end of the world while they should be starting their lives. It’s also easy to look at this as an expression of end-of-the-sixties nihilistic bitterness; although I’m not too sure how much should be read into that. King largely missed out on the turbulence of the sixties, cloistered as he was at the University of Maine. I’ve always had the impression that he viewed counter-culture from a distance, or as an outsider to that world. If we want to get really pretentious and meta-textual, we could imagine that the end of the world in this story represents the decay of the hippie ideals of the sixties, and the characters facing this decay represent the largely disinterested Stephen King himself, looking on with some sadness, some contempt, and a fair amount of nihilism.

I have a feeling I’ve just gone out on a limb that isn’t quite sturdy enough to support my weight, and I should probably stop myself before I go any further. But this is interesting to me; I’ve been reading King for so long that his books seem to be part of my DNA, and yet I’ve never really gone back to the beginnings with a critical or analytical eye. 

Rik: And I would have to say that I am removed enough from reading him regularly that there is an equal fascination for me in rediscovering the subtleties at play in his writing, when I normally think of him as relishing the opportunities to be over-the-top and shocking.

I agree with your take, tentatively noted as you would have it, of King representing himself in the thoughts and actions of the kids in Night Surf, looking on at the end of their world (at least on a human level) and finding themselves completely powerless before it, and dealing with it in the only way they can. Being relatively the same age as the characters in the story, it is no surprise that, if he didn’t fully identify with the characters, he could at least grasp rather precisely the post-teenage mind of his time when faced with the horror of not just personal but racial obliteration. Then there is the rather misogynistic Bernie, who delights in relating to us the details about his girlfriend Susie that now disgust him to the point where the real enjoyment he seems to get out of their relationship is in making her cry. If there wasn’t some of that in King’s early makeup, he had at least known or observed somebody of his age who had similar character traits. (And I will not deny that such behavior became a sad and regretful component of my first marriage, once I realized early on that it was off the rails and bound for a hard crash. As soon as I figured out that she would get jealous of even the weather girl being on the screen at the point that we turned the television on at night, all bets were off. I became a torturous bastard.) 

I find it interesting that for a story that starts off with an extremely shocking statement – “After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach.” – and closes with the main character, Bernie, fairly certain that he and his friends are soon to meet their doom, the details surrounding the town and the beach itself are rife with a nostalgic sheen. There is so much loving detail in the pop culture minutiae of the place – the songs he mentions that are played on the now dead radio stations that have been taken over by fellow jokesters, the undisturbed trinkets and kitsch at the boardwalk gift shop, the product name drops like Cracker Jacks, Lincoln, and Gibson guitars – that it almost becomes a loving remembrance of what the world is losing with mankind’s passing, but also at the same time, an ironic statement on our ultimate triviality in the history of the planet itself.

Going back to that opening line, Night Surf starts off with that “Bang! Zoom! To the moon!” of a sentence, but then the rest of the paragraph and the couple that follow, the narrator intentionally (or perhaps absent-mindedly, like the shock was not perceived that way within his system) plays down the shock of a man being burned to death by telling us of trivial matters like the tape deck his buddy Corey carries around, the various call letter combinations of local radio stations, and who is behind the controls at them now that nearly everyone else is already dead. The burnt man is then mostly forgotten for a couple of pages until Bernie, in relating how he and his friends love the beach, as an aside throws in, “Hadn’t we just offered it a kind of sacrifice?” Then it goes for a couple of pages before we get any real details regarding the man they have burned (or sacrificed), where he came from, and why they have committed this act. 

Aaron, how do you feel about the way King starts this story, and then downplays that opening and slowly works his way back to that detail through the rest of the story?

Aaron: The premature revelation is one of Stephen King’s most frequent tropes. That little bit of information thrown out there in an almost offhand manner, intended to hook you into the story immediately so that he can then take his time building back to that moment or idea. Just about every book King has written includes some variation of that trick. You’ll be reading along, following a character, and then King will just offhandedly remark that said character is about to die sometime in the next hundred pages, and then he’ll mostly ignore that information, bringing it up just often enough that you don’t forget something horrible is lurking in the future.

As a kid, this used to bother me a lot. I would get frustrated with King’s insistence on spoiling his own stories, when I would have preferred to discover the atrocities within at my own pace (although, on the plus side, this did allow me to keep from forming attachments to a lot of doomed characters). As an adult, I’m more aware of his goals when he self-spoils a story. Stephen King gets a lot of flak from people about his tendency towards less-than-thrilling finales, and I’ll admit that I’ve bemoaned his difficulties with endings on more than one occasion. I think the real reason the endings to Stephen King books tend to be disappointing is because Stephen King himself doesn’t seem to care about the big finish. A lot of authors seem to be building towards some shocking development in the third act, while King will often blatantly tell you what the third act will entail so that he can focus on what really interests him; the way his characters behave within outrageous situations. I view this tendency to start with a bang and finish with a whimper as a sort of journalist tactic; you start with the most important information first to hook readers with short attention spans, and then you slow things down to provide background and nuance to the shocking headline.

You mention Bernie’s misogyny, and that’s certainly a pretty glaring element of the story. He is absolutely horrible to Susie, in words, actions, and thoughts. I think this goes back to what you said during our Graveyard Shift discussion, about how far King is willing to go to make a character unlikable, but is his attitude an extension of King’s own?

A few years ago my wife read her first-ever Stephen King work when she was assigned The Body as required reading for a class she was taking. She did not enjoy it, and one of her main complaints was the rampant misogyny. Although I didn’t remember the specifics fully, I knew immediately what she was talking about. There are a few topics that King doesn’t quite understand, yet can’t stop writing about, one of which is the opposite sex. King characters tend to have dim views of women, and even the heroes aren’t above dropping some shockingly sexist remarks. In the argument about whether the sexism comes from the characters, or if it’s really what King thinks, I believe it’s a little from column A, a little from column B.  Certainly we’re never supposed to think Bernie is a hero, or that his actions towards Susie are acceptable, but it recurs so much that sometimes it can be hard to figure out King’s angle. 

But then, King was only 22 when he wrote this story (or younger, since the story was published when he was 22), and very few guys are saints when it comes to attitudes towards the opposite sex at that age. As much as I can agree with my wife that the characters in The Body say some pretty offensive things about women, I can’t deny that the attitudes of the children rang pretty true to me when I first read the novella. That’s the way most kids I grew up with thought and talked (regional dialects notwithstanding); it’s an adolescent understanding of the mysterious opposite sex. Two years after the publication of Night Surf, King would marry his wife, Tabitha, a relationship that is still going strong. Looking through his bibliography it’s easy to sense that Tabitha may have had some impact on King’s attitudes over the years, as he’s started writing women in larger roles and as more complex characters. But that’s the way it is with every successful artist: you grow and mature and your opinions either change or become more complex. 

And as you say, emotions in relationships can be mysterious and shifting, never more so than around the age these characters are, and the anger and frustration Bernie is feeling with his situation seems to be finding an outlet in his actions toward Susie. At any other point in his life, when Bernie fell out of love with Susie he probably would have broken it off immediately, and likely in a fairly compassionate (or at least not intentionally cruel) manner. Yet here at the end of humanity, there’s nowhere else for him to go. It’s his bad luck that the world ends when he falls out of love with his girlfriend. His “any port in a storm” comment is disgusting, and yet also sort of true. If they aren’t together, neither of them has anyone else, so being miserable together is preferable to being miserable alone. Bernie is a mess of negative thoughts and emotions, no matter what his apathetic demeanor might suggest, and the sad truth of the matter is that when you’re in that situation, causing others misery actually feels good. It feels good to be angry and have a target, and to attack and see your blows land.

Which brings us back to that burned body at the beginning of the story. King lets us know that this group of shallow, petty individuals has just killed a human being, and he only gradually lets us know how this has affected them, or even why they’ve done it. We’re focusing on Bernie’s inner life, and through this window we can extrapolate what the rest of them are feeling. They’ve been living alone for an undisclosed amount of time now, subsisting off of food scavenged from empty shops and homes. Every single person they knew and loved has died slowly and painfully. They’re young, at the prime of their life, and with nothing to do. The goals they’ve been raised with are now suddenly meaningless just as they were about to take their turns in the race. No more movies, no more dances, no more first dates or job interviews or baseball games. Eventually the batteries in Corey’s radio will die, and even the music will be gone. Imagine that frustration, that fear, the desolation and loneliness It’s not difficult to see how they could work themselves up to killing a sick and dying man, even if we don’t get to witness this moment. Night Surf takes place immediately following this act, and documents the fallout of this action.

Everyone continues their lives as they were before, but Bernie is admitting to himself the hopelessness of his situation; Needles is admitting he’s sick and they’re probably all doomed; Susie is realizing that Bernie doesn’t love her and never will again. This is cause for introspection, as Bernie looks at his surroundings with a renewed appreciation for what has been lost. The story is all the more heartbreaking for how it ends, as Bernie is able to look at Susie with something approaching compassion, and treat her with the kindness she had been missing. But that’s not enough. They’re still going to die, alone and in pain and with nothing left behind to prove they were alive.

We alluded to the story’s connection with The Stand, but we didn’t quite get into that. For the most part our discussion of that novel can wait until we eventually get to it for this series at some point in the future, but we should at least acknowledge the connection here. In both stories, humanity has been almost entirely wiped out by a super-flu popularly nicknamed Captain Trips, but aside from that premise they don’t really have much to do with each other. There are no callbacks or links between the stories beyond the virus, and even that may be tenuous at best. I have a feeling you don’t agree with me on this, but I’m of the opinion that Night Surf doesn’t quite take place in the world of The Stand. King has an underlying mythology that connects almost all of his books and stories (though more often than not that information is never brought up within the work itself), but I’m of the opinion that the world in this story is more of an alternate reality version of the one in The Stand. I think I can see your argument forming, but why don’t you go ahead and expand on that.

Rik: I have read elsewhere the opinion that these stories do not take place in the same universe. I have to take issue with that. I don’t know if the attitude stems from a certain snobbishness from fans of the much revered and beloved epic novel against the merely thirteen-page story that predates it and dares to share characteristics with the larger book, but often that attitude seems fairly tossed off when I have encountered it. “Oh, well, since these stories probably don’t exist in the same universe, I guess it doesn’t matter all that much, blah blah blah…”

So, why can’t these two pieces exist in the same universe? Are we sure King did not intend for them to be linked, at least in some small way? He gives the super-bug in each the same name – Captain Trips; that in itself suggests that they may be related, at least superficially, within the same universe in King’s mind, if not on paper. Perhaps Night Surf really was meant to be a companion piece to The Stand, portraying in a few brief pages an example of how most of the world dealt with their sad fates in the midst of an annihilating plague; you know, the ones who didn’t travel to a centralized location in the United States to start a new civilization and ultimately attempt to do battle against a demonic super-villain.

If the origins of the respective super-flu strains in each story are different, perhaps it is because Bernie should, because of his youth, be counted as an unreliable narrator. Sure, he gives us an accurate representation of his physical surroundings, but he refers to A6 (the official designation for the virus also referred to as Captain Trips in the story) as having spawned from Southeast Asia. There is also talk of a previous virus, named in the story as A2, aka the Hong Kong flu, which in 1968 (around the time the story was originally written) was a very real concern, causing a global pandemic at the time. (Around 33,000 people died in the U.S. alone.) In Night Surf, the teenagers (as I am referring to them from here on out, even if they are a little older) believe that having had previous exposure to A2, which they all have had, makes you immune to catching A6. They will be sorely disproved of this notion by the story’s end, and so we already have an example of youthful belief in popular rumor that leads to disaster.

Taking into account The Stand’s portrayal of Captain Trips being a super-virus developed and eventually unleashed accidentally from a U.S. military installation, it can be easy to surmise that the stories are actually unrelated. I would also accept the angle that Night Surf is merely a thin first draft of or attempt at what would eventually become The Stand, and thus the similarities are only on the surface level. But, I tend to reject both notions, as I can see quite easily how Night Surf can exist within the same exact universe as The Stand. 

We now live in an age where we see every single day how rumor and innuendo spread almost uncontested on the Internet, especially on the social media sites most frequently dominated by teenagers and young adults. The reasonably educated and streetwise alike are apt to fall into the most basic of information traps online, myself included, though I really try to make every attempt to vet information where I can before reposting or even starting to believe what I have read. (Sources, people… look for them, and if you can’t find them, look again before spreading the craziness further...)

Having already seen that the teenagers in Night Surf are prone to believe popular rumor regarding viruses, is it possible that the idea that the bug sprang forth from Southeast Asia (the source of many global pandemics in the past century) is merely a common scapegoat to distract the general public away from the true cause of the illness? How easy would it be for the U.S. military to plant the notion in the press – a far smaller target to manipulate from the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s as opposed to now – that the super-bug came from across the ocean, to throw journalists off the track of its true origins? And far removed from this media subterfuge, mere teenage boys and girls caught up in the plague’s path of human obliteration at a remote beachside town use the knowledge that they have gained from their friends’ word of mouth mumblings or from talking heads on the television, and let that info guide their actions as they wander about aimlessly until at last life has been drained from them. And some of this information gets passed to us in the thoughts and narration from Bernie. I have to believe that he is honest in the way that he tells his story to us, but that doesn’t mean that everything he believes about what is happening around him is necessarily the truth. At worst, he is a new breed: the reliably unreliable narrator.

Aaron: My belief that the stories were related but otherwise unconnected stemmed mainly from the different origins of the virus, but as you pointed out that could easily be explained by these characters not having all the information. I also half-remembered King saying something about this debate, and my memory was that he backed up my position. In my research online, I could find no instance of King actually addressing this question, but certainly a lot of fan discussions saying they can’t be related because of the perceived inconsistencies. Perhaps I was being snobbish after all, because as I searched further, I saw that Night Surf as it appeared in the collected edition had been revised from its original form. It was published in 1969 for Ubris, but then published again in Cavalier in 1974, before being ultimately collected in what we can assume is its final form in 1978 for Night Shift. And then the smoking gun: I found a blog where a King fan tracked down a copy of the August 1974 issue of Cavalier in which Night Surf was republished. His report back confirmed that in the entire story, as published in 1974, the phrase Captain Trips is never used. 

So, King did revise the story at least once before collecting it in 1978. That isn’t hard to see in its finished form; the characters listen to Angie by the Rolling Stones, a song that was four years away from being released when King first published Night Surf in 1969. But did he add the Captain Trips connection because he was thinking about The Stand? Probably. Night Shift was released in early 1978, while King would have been prepping the release of The Stand later in the year. He probably saw the story complimented his novel, and quietly altered it to fit more cleanly within that world. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done something like this. The Stand itself is probably the greatest example of his tendency towards revision, where he completely revised and expanded the story to add in several hundred pages of material he was forced to cut out for length. He also changed the timeline to make it more current, and updated many of the pop-culture references to the late eighties instead of the late seventies. He revised his novel The Gunslinger in 2003 when he realized that subsequent books in the series contradicted events, character names, and locations that had been established in that first novel. Most recently his novella Ur was heavily revised for its inclusion in the collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. Among the edits was a 500-word tangent where the characters discuss the Kennedy assassination. Why was it removed? Because King explored that tangent further in his novel 11/22/63, and likely felt it would be redundant for readers of Ur in its new form.

Now, with definitive (or as close to definitive as we’re likely to get) proof that Night Surf and The Stand take place within the same world, this actually raises my appreciation of the story. One of the most striking passages in The Stand (revised edition) is one in which King describes some of the people who never made it to Colorado or Vegas, who died along the way. In The Stand, the survivors are called to either place to take part in a great battle between good and evil. And while that goes on, there’s this small group of survivors, dying alone because they never heard the call. Possibly they never got the call because they aren’t technically survivors; Needles is dying, and who knows what will happen to the rest. But the loneliness at the heart of both works is amplified by the knowledge of what is happening elsewhere.

Rik: I might be displaying my own ignorance here, or an ignorance that I have developed along the way because it has been twenty-odd years since I last cracked any edition of The Stand. Were the survivors called instantly to take part in this battle, or was there a short, definable period where the disease ran its course through humanity to sort out who would be ultimately considered as “survivors”? If there was the latter, perhaps these kids are still at the tail end of that “sorting out” period? If so, it could stand (no pun intended whatsoever; no, really…) as an interesting parallel to the events we will see later in The Stand. Or, here is another option: What if they have been called, and just haven’t started to make their way as of yet, or are just slow in starting out, getting waylaid by temptation? And what if the side to which they have been called is Randall Flagg’s army? Might that explain the urge to suddenly burn someone else alive without showing any mercy or emotion?

Aaron: Like you, it’s been about twenty years since I read The Stand, so my memory is just as fuzzy as yours. I seem to remember that some of the characters started getting the call while the world was still dying out, you are probably correct in questioning whether we can call these kids “survivors”. One of them is dying already; who knows if any of them will be left in the weeks following the story’s end?

[Part 2 of our discussion of Night Surf will pick up with our reviews of the five available Dollar Baby short film versions of the story. You can find Part 2 here. We hope that you have enjoyed our talk about the short story and that you will join us for the next installment.]