Aaron Lowe: Welcome back to We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print Vs. Film, where Rik Tod Johnson and I read a particular work from Stephen King, watch the associated movie, and then have an in-depth conversation about both. For those wishing to read along at home, we’ve been working our way through the stories in Stephen King’s 1978 collection Night Shift. Previously we have discussed the short stories Night Surf and Graveyard Shift, and the various filmed entertainments derived from them. If you’re new to this series, we invite you to check out both of our previous discussions, which can be found easily on this blog.
The Story: The Mangler
[Night Shift, 1978; first published in the December 1972 issue of Cavalier magazine]
Aaron: Last time we each commented on the subtlety on display in Stephen King’s writing. Night Surf gets by on a persistence of mood, as King created an entire world and atmosphere in an incredibly brief story that featured very little in the way of action. The story managed to be both elegiac and prosaic, making poetry out of the story’s everyday location and mundane details. The Mangler, though, represents King on the other end of that spectrum: blunt, forceful, and as subtle as a hand caught in the unforgiving gears of an industrial machine. This is the first really Grand Guignol story we’re encountering in this collection. Graveyard Shift had some fairly gruesome moments, but most of the hard stuff happened “off screen,” while in The Mangler, we get several detailed descriptions of horrific mutilation.
The gore may be one of the reasons that this story seems to have been seared so deeply into my brain, as I remembered almost everything about it as soon as I read the first two lines. “Officer Hunton got to the laundry just as the ambulance was leaving—slowly, with no sirens or flashing lights. Ominous.” Stephen King has always had a way of beginning with a memorable hook, a line that pulls you into the rest of the story and stays with you, and as soon as I read this one I remembered everything: Officer Hunton’s college professor friend, the hand of glory, the mutilations, the slight silliness underneath the horrific surface, everything. Yet strangely, the thing that I remembered clearest of all has absolutely nothing to do with the main story.
Before I get into that, Rik, what were your memories of this particular story? Had it stuck with you in any way past your initial reading of it?
Rik: Honestly, from my original readings back in the day, apart from the title, I don’t remember the details in this story much at all, and certainly not as much as many other stories from Night Shift. And I wouldn’t remember any details in this story at all if it weren’t for the profoundly disappointing movie Tobe Hooper made from it (but more on that later).
This would lead one to believe that The Mangler is one of the least impressive stories in the book for me, and based on those initial readings, you would be right. I was a burgeoning gorehound at the time I first read Night Shift, and apart from the specifics about how a certain character ends up in a form not normally found at a crime scene (which I always remembered, but we will also get to the details of that image soon enough in this discussion), I was already too caught up in learning how disgusting makeup effects were done onscreen to really be affected much by the gore in the story.
But returning to an old favorite book, years after you last picked it up, and rediscovering an author you had put aside for a good while can be a marvelous thing. I would admit that when I was first reading King, while I had read an awful lot since I was a kid, it was a lot of rather juvenile action-adventure (as much as I love Burroughs, Doc Savage, and their lot to this day), science-fiction (chiefly Verne, Wells, and Bradbury), and older authors like Poe and Twain. (And, conversely, Hunter S. Thompson -- at waaaayyy too young an age -- but that is a story for another time and place.) Sci-fi, superheroes, and jungle adventure were pretty much my concentrations, and apart from Poe, I was just starting to get into horror writing. I had not even read Lovecraft yet, though he was soon to come precisely because of Stephen King’s non-fiction work, Danse Macabre, which was probably far more influential to me than I have ever really admitted. I was still a teenager, and really just heading out into the world of adult writing (apart from that Thompson affair). King and his short stories really opened a door for me into the adult world, but The Mangler seemed to be hidden in another room that I almost completely forgot existed.
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| "The Mangler" first appeared in this skin rag in December 1972. |
Aaron: One major difference between our experiences with Stephen King’s books is that you had a group of friends with which to share your thoughts, while I was sitting alone in my room or in the backseat of cars, and when the story was done I had no one with whom to discuss it. Among my group of friends, I was the bigger reader, and no one I knew was reading the type of stuff I was starting to move towards, so I would get really excited about a book, and have nowhere to share that excitement. Sometimes the clerk at Video City would see me renting The Shining and we’d have a brief conversation about how the book was better, but I couldn't really talk to anyone my own age. My family would listen patiently if I wanted to talk about books, but I was a bit hesitant when it came to Stephen King, because I was afraid too much parental scrutiny would result in my access to his books being revoked. The closest I came to discussing his books with my family was when my mom told her friend I was reading It, and the friend said the book had scared her so badly she had to stop reading and slept with the lights on for a week.
At the time that attitude confused me, and I couldn’t relate to it at all. Stephen King books, and It in particular, often feature some highly disturbing moments, and some frightening imagery, but I don’t actually recall being scared by one of his books. At that age, scary was something reaching out and startling you, but reading removed that part of the equation. So even though I was a skittish and easily startled kid, the books allowed me to comfortably experience those thrills while still feeling safe. And so while I’m sure the vividly described mutilations in The Mangler were a part of my enjoyment as a youngster, those parts of the story didn’t actually reside in my memory (aside from the person-folded-like-laundry detail you briefly mentioned above).
Rik: I would have to say that I have rarely, if ever, actually been scared by something I have read on the printed page, apart from a newspaper story on some item of personal consequence. But in fiction, especially horror stories, even by masters of the genre? Not so much. I can really get caught up in the action, and worry for the characters, and wonder if they are going to come out alive. But fear for my own safety from something fictional I am reading? I, too, have had people tell me a particular book was just far too scary to be able to pick up again, or made them want to not leave their house. My reaction is usually, “What… are you three?”
I know that what I actually found most striking about Poe, whom I rarely would describe as scary, was how the bleakness of his own existence seemed to manifest itself and permeate every word that he put down on paper. His poems and tales were most often certainly macabre and dark, but scary? The same goes for most horror writing, for me, at least. However, I am very easy to scare when watching a movie or listening to someone tell a scary story, just as I am easy to scare in my day to day life given a particularly dark alley or an unknown neighborhood. I think for me, fright is so tied to the senses, especially sight and sound, for me. For me, it is a far more visceral thing. Merely myself reading words silently on a page, no matter how precisely conveyed and masterfully written, allows me to separate fully the world of the book from the world around me. But, a talented storyteller, such as one of my many actor friends (though not all of them…), can read the same story aloud to me, and I may get scared witless by their performance. This is because the words have left the page and entered the realm of the physical for me, adding an extra dimension to the experience.
For as many horror comics as I have read, including the great E.C. Comics titles, being scared was never an option either. As in straight horror literature, it was always more about shock and surprise in my mind. Gory scenes fall into the category of shock for me, and so the folded laundry bit from The Mangler definitely is grouped in there. And hence, it is probably why I did recall that bit years later, simply because the shock of something happening to a person in that manner, which is so far out of bounds of the norm, impressed me enough to force myself to catalogue it in my memory.
Aaron: This is the second story in the Night Shift collection, the other being Graveyard Shift, to be set within an industrial textile business. Though it was a textile mill in the earlier story, and a laundry in this one, the milieus are noticeably similar. This is an early example of Stephen King writing what he knows, as he spent some time working in this field as a young man. He brings it up in his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and clearly the experience was a formative one. This is also the second time E.C. Comics has come up in our writings, another formative influence on him. King was evidently greatly influenced by the gruesome comics as a child, enough so that he’s made several explicit references to them and one film, Creepshow, in direct homage. I think King first and foremost considers himself a storyteller, and I think he’d use that word in lieu of "author" to describe his profession. In his public appearances and nonfiction writings, he cultivates the persona of Uncle Stevie, gathering his "constant readers" around to hear the latest sick and gruesome tale, which brings us nicely back to The Mangler.
A lot of The Mangler takes the form of tales being told by and to the main characters, and it gives the story itself the feel of a scary story told around a campfire, or at a slumber party where the storyteller tries to get their audience to scream at the finale. It is one of those tales that has stuck in my memory more than anything else in this story; the account related to Officer Hunton by a state inspector, about the possibly haunted refrigerator.
Let me backtrack a little bit.
The Mangler opens with Officer Hunton called to the scene of a horrific accident at an industrial laundry, where a young woman has been caught in a piece of machinery known ominously as “the Mangler”. This is the source of the infamous description of a folded body, to give you an idea of how bad this accident was. Initially it’s believed that the machine was faulty, and either the owners or the state inspector who verified the safety of the machine will be held accountable for the young woman’s death. When six state inspectors go over every inch of the machine, and declare it safe, Officer Hunton confronts one of them, suspecting, possibly, bribery. At this point, the state inspector admits that he felt uneasy around the machine, even though everything was officially safe and operational. It is here that the inspector tells Officer Hunton about a case he dealt with concerning an icebox in someone’s backyard, in which a dog had suffocated when the door closed on it. Sometime after the icebox is sent it to the dump, a child went missing, and was later found dead in the icebox. When someone went to remove the door from the box, to ensure nothing like this ever happened again, they found several dead birds inside, and according to the man originally telling the story, the box tried to close on his arm while he cleared them out.
This story is not related at all to the main plot of The Mangler. It exists primarily to get the audience used to the idea that evil could have seeped into the titular laundry folding machine, and it could have developed a taste for blood. And yet I find it by far the story’s most intriguing element, and something about it stuck with me. Even at that young age I was developing a predilection towards the creepy and unexplained. I preferred “haunting” to “terrifying,” and despite his reputation as a more "meat and potatoes" author, King at one time excelled at these types of asides, even in a story as visceral as The Mangler. These tangents often succeeded in giving me chills, even if they were only chills of excitement, not terror.
As much as I clearly enjoy this story, it features some of my least favorite actual prose so far in this collection. At times, I could sense Stephen King writing; it didn’t feel effortless, as he often does, it felt strained. At least some of that has to be intentional, as The Mangler is the pulpiest story we’ve covered so far, and he must have adjusted his style accordingly. But it didn’t feel entirely natural to see King describe a character as a ‘tall drink of water.’ You mention that you highlighted some of your favorite passages from the story, and I’m curious to hear what you thought of King’s style here.
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| "The Mangler" was reprinted in this collection in 2009. |
As you stated, pulp thrills are precisely what we have here in The Mangler. The pulp influence is blatantly obvious, but given the higher bar set by Night Surf, it is a bit of a letdown to suddenly see King almost slumming it. But I have to attribute this entirely to the order in which I am reading the stories. The tales in Night Shift were never meant to play off each other in a particular way, nor do they reference each other, and most of them were written and originally published in various magazines years apart from each other as well. The book is merely a collection of these unconnected stories, and though we started somewhat in book order at the beginning (leaping over the first story that has no filmed adaptation as of yet), we are already skipping around a bit. The fact that we read The Mangler after Night Surf and immediately find it lacking in comparison is partly our own fault, though The Mangler is definitely a lesser story in quality and content.
The Mangler is a prime example of a talented writer deciding to wade in the shallow end of the pool for a change, seemingly just for kicks, but coming out more wet than usual. This does not mean that the excellence of King’s writing has betrayed him from story to story, just that he is working in a vein of the genre that requires less finesse than Night Surf. But while we have identified the story as having the qualities of pulp, King still manages to give us sentences and phrasing that are evocative and pleasurable. He has a short paragraph late in the story where there is an encounter between Officer Hunton and a city inspector named Martin:
“Martin poured him a two-ounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp. The glass fell unheeded to the carpet and his hands, like wandering ghosts, sought Martin’s lapels again.”“Hands, like wandering ghosts”… fan-fucking-tastic. You want haunted? How about a man who has just gone through what he has in this story, and seen what he has, and had to take all of it in and come out believing the opposite he has ever believed about this world, so that his anger has overtaken him to the extent that his hands can be described as haunted things that lash out without his agency to guide them? It’s a lovely turn of phrase in a story that probably doesn’t deserve it, but it lives here nonetheless.
Aaron: That is indeed a great phrase, and having now read through the story for a second time, I’ve found my own favorites to highlight. I’ve also found a few that remain clunkers for me. In his book On Writing, King has an amusing quote; “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” He then lays out his theory on adverbs, and how they are often the sign of bad writing. And The Mangler has quite a few adverbs. People sit reflectively, they stare expressionlessly, and things happen ominously. As you say, King is punching below his weight class here, and for the most part I’m willing to chalk this all up to King trying on a specific style of writing, but I don’t think it’s a very good fit. I think King bumps up against its limitations, either intentionally or not, and it felt like I could feel his hand explicitly trying to influence the reader more clearly in this story than in others.
Despite the few problems I have with the prose, King’s ultimate weapon in his arsenal is still his thorough understanding of stories, specifically scary stories, and how they work inside and out. The Mangler is exquisitely structured as a piece of shock theatre, and he’s able to make quite a few events that should read as deeply silly come across as deadly serious. First and foremost this comes from the story’s use of anecdotal exposition. Take the passage I cited above, about the killer icebox; as I said, it gets the reader used to the idea of inanimate objects developing a bloodlust, while also giving The Mangler overall the feel of a campfire tale. The tone of the icebox anecdote is more subdued than the bloody descriptions we’ve had so far, and grounds the story in a more realistic, relatable form of dread. Every time The Mangler goes over the top, King pays for that extravagance with a more human moment. It’s also a delicate balance, because the in-your-face treatment of some gorier moments also work to distract from some of the screwier developments he hides in simple conversations. Would the reader be as willing to accept Jackson’s rundown of the different demons that could be residing in a piece of industrial laundry equipment if we hadn’t just spent some time in Mrs. Gillian’s hospital room hearing about all of the accidents, minor and major, that have been happening around that machine? Wouldn’t the idea of an off-duty cop and his college professor buddy interviewing a woman with the sole intention of determining whether or not she’s a virgin be somewhat laughable, or downright offensive, without the preceding scene where poor George Stanner gets his arm ripped off?
The story gives us information and developments at such a pace that we, as the reader, safely buy into everything that happens and don’t really question things as they go along. It helps, of course, that the story is told at such a breakneck pace, and that the gore is so memorably written. As a kid, I can’t remember being incredibly floored by the descriptions in this story, but as an adult more familiar with the human body’s inherent frailty, I found it hard to read the scene where Mr. Stanner loses his arm. I could almost feel Stephen King giggling to himself, imagining the squirming in his audience as he described the blood in Stanner’s arm being squeezed back to his shoulder until it looked like the skin would burst. And yet for all that, King still knows when to pull back, as in the description of the folded body to which we keep referring:
“’It tried to fold everything,’ he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. ‘But a person isn’t a sheet, Mark. What I saw… what was left of her…’ Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. ‘They took her out in a basket,’ he said softly.”The impact of that image is sold more by Officer Hunton’s reaction than by anything he actually says aloud. There’s no description of bloody scraps of flesh, or of bones shattered to dust in order to actually fold a body. There have been intimations earlier, and those stick with us through to this scene. King got the ball rolling, and now he’ll let our imaginations do the heavy lifting for a little while. It’s another example, in a story full of them, of how deeply King understood the mechanics of storytelling at such a surprisingly young age.
Rik: I also love that description – and especially the restraint in the description – of the folded laundrywoman. It is another of those moments that shows how deft King is in choosing the exact moment to really catch the reader off-guard but keep him interested in exploring deeper into the story.
On the broader side of things, however, is my favorite larger passage in the story, just after the attempted exorcism, when the Mangler goes from mere stationary piece of machinery to slowly springing fully blown to life as a lunging, shambling, demonic thing bent on destruction. That I should be so taken with a sequence centered around the revelation of such a creature should not be a surprise given my natural penchant towards the monstrous in nature, but King does a supreme job here of breathing gradual and frightening life into that creature. The transformation takes place over almost a full page, and each line and paragraph is imbued with yet another step towards the Mangler’s full sentience and the eventual doom that it portends. King describes the change as the Mangler attempts to break free of its moorings as being…
“…like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit. And it wasn’t precisely an ironer anymore. It was still changing, melting. The 550-volt cable fell, spitting blue fire, into the rollers and was chewed away. For a moment, two fireballs glared at them like lambent eyes, eyes filled with a great and cold hunger.”The transformation continues and we get more news of its transmutation from mechanical device, including the already deadly safety bar slamming upward so that it creates the illusion of a “gaping, hungry mouth full of steam” and a “moving canvas tongue,” the parts of the machine still in place but now alive and approximating the details of an organically born creature.
Aaron: The transformation scene is indeed a great passage in the story, and it’s a testament to King’s skill, even this early in his career, that it isn’t met with eye rolls and dismissive snorts. Indeed, he succeeds in making the transformation feel like a thing of awe, rather than a cartoonish development, which it could have easily felt like. Part of that is due to a preceding section of the short story, where King fully tips his hand as to what type of tale he is telling.
Throughout the short story, as Officer Hunton and Mark Jackson gradually come to accept that the Mangler is possessed, they spend some time trying to determine exactly what type of demon they might be dealing with. They know for a fact the blood of a virgin was spilled on the machine, they then used educated guesses to figure out that horse’s hoof (in the form of Jell-O, which was eaten near the machine) and probably bat’s blood (they roost in the building) were also spilled onto the machine. This leads Jackson to believe that it is a fairly minor demon from a voodoo-like religion that inhabits the machine. A few mentions are made to a hand of glory, and how bad that would be for them if that were used in the accidental incantation that summoned the demon. They assume they’re safe from that particular threat, however, because it’s unlikely that anyone tossed the hand of a dead man into the Mangler. Unfortunately for our heroes, one of the machine’s first victims suffered from indigestion and took antacids for this affliction. One of the main ingredients in said antacid is belladonna, also known colloquially as “the hand of glory”.
It’s here that Stephen King lets us know exactly what he’s up to; he’s not going for a short story about horrific evil and triumphant good, he’s going for the ironic reversal. In true E.C. Comics tradition, we may be horrified, but it’s also a bit of a sick cosmic joke. As good as our heroes are, as well intentioned and knowledgeable as they may be, they still overlooked some small detail that is going to result in bloody tragedy. King even underlines this misunderstanding, in what I swear will be the last passage we quote directly:
“…a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face.”I read that as King taking the time to point out how ill-prepared and off base our heroes were. Its position in the story – just before the big finale – seems intended to be a bit of a wink and a nod in the direction the story is about to head. The exorcism begins the way most exorcisms in pop culture begin, with readings from the bible and splashing of holy water, but things begin to go south in a big way rather quickly. In just a couple of short pages one of our heroes is dead, the other is likely insane (or on his way there), and a horrible demon-plagued piece of industrial machinery is stalking the midnight streets of some small Maine town. When I read this story I half imagined the characters posed within comic book panels.
Rik: Indeed. Your imagining of comic book panels is apt, given the Creepshow and E.C. Comics connection. It is perhaps the best way to approach such a story. While King himself eschews their use for the most part here, every sentence on the last three pages of The Mangler could practically be completed with an exclamation point closing each one. The manic finish is almost metaphorically a giant exclamation point. And comics are the natural home of the exclamation point. (Seriously, read a classic comic and try to find a non-interrogatory word balloon that doesn’t close with an exclamation point. Periods are vastly outnumbered there.)
I do want to discuss a couple of the characters – primarily Hunton, but also another character who really only appears by name in the story -- and some story elements further, but most of what I wish to say is too wrapped up in how they were portrayed in the film adaptation. So, let’s close the short story portion of this discussion, and pick it up again in Part 2 in a couple of days.
[To be continued in Pt. 2 on Wednesday, June 20, 2016...]
A We Who Watch Extra: Totally unrelated to the Mangler story or film was this appropriately named toy vehicle released by Mego in 1976, featuring Spider-Man and the Green Goblin:
It's entirely coincidental, but we find it interesting that Stephen King used the Green Goblin on the front of the villainous toystore truck in his only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive. It does make us wonder if he ran across this toy in the '70s and did it as an in-joke.
Toy pictures used with the kind permission of The Mego Museum website. Visit them at http://www.megomuseum.com/.
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