Screen adaptation

Among the stories included in this book, I think "Fair Extention" would make a great movie.

It tells us about Dave Street, a man with brain cancer, who has only a couple of months left. One day on his way home he notices a tent with a sign "Fair Extension". When he enters, the salesman, called Elvid (devil backwards) tells him that he sells any kind of extensions: money extensions, nose extensions, even life extension. So Dave thinks this man is crazy and wants to leave, but the salesman promises to cure his cancer for a week to prove it's real.

When Dave goes to a doctor he shocks everyone - the tumor is gone! Streeter returns to the Fair Extension and decides to make a deal with the devil. All he needs to do is to transfer 15 per cent of his monthly income to some charity fund and he also need to name a person he really hates to balance the scales of fate. This person turns out to be his best friend since school, Tom Goodhugh, who had more luck than Dave and became rich and successful.

After the deal is signed Dave returns home, his cancer is cured and moreover, his family gets more and more successful, while terrible things begin to happen with Tom Goodhugh's family. His wife gets cancer and dies in a month, his son who was a decent sportsman gets brain damage and becomes mentally challenged. Tom looses his money, his company and family. But Dave doesn't even feel guilty. He and his family are very happy and rich now, but Streeter isn't happy with what he already has, he wants more.

The whole story is very dark and gloomy. It could make a good noir movie. From the middle of the book the feeling of despair is rising. And the ending would look very good on a screen:

He turned to Janet and saw that she was crying. He tilted her chin toward him and solemnly kissed the tears away. That made her smile. 

“What is it, honey?”

“I was thinking about the Goodhughs. I’ve never known a family to have such a run of bad luck. Bad luck?” She laughed. “Black luck is more like it.”

“Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. It’s just how the world is.”

She put her arms around him.

“I love you, sweetie. You always look on the bright side.”

Streeter shrugged modestly.

“The law of averages favors optimists, any banker would tell you that. Things have a way of balancing out in the end.”

Venus came into view above the airport, glimmering against the darkening blue.

“Wish!” Streeter commanded.

Janet laughed and shook her head.

“What would I wish for? I have everything I want.”

“Me too,” Streeter said, and then, with his eyes fixed firmly on Venus, he wished for more.

P.S. There's also a good trailer, made by a group of amateur directors:

Alternative ending

I would like to write about an alternative ending to "1922", because this story has some points that could probably change main character's life. The way he did it, Wilfred ended up in a hotel room of a city he couldn't stand, killed by both huge supernatural rats and guilt for his wife's and his son's fate.

In my opinion he didn't have to choose suicide as a solution to his problems. He could simply go to the police and confess. Of course he would get some penalty, but he wouldn't feel so guilty for what he has done because he would be punished for it.

But on the other hand, the events took place in 1920s, it was the time when most killers were sent to the electric chair, because it was a new kind of execution and the judicial system was experimenting with it. The main character himself thought about it:

"For the first time since Sheriff Jones had come out to the farm, asking his cheerful, no-answers-needed questions and looking at everything with his cold inquisitive eyes, the electric chair seemed like a real possibility to me, so real I could almost feel the buckles on my skin as the leather straps were tightened on my wrists and above my elbows."

Moreover, even if he managed to stay alive and go to prison, I think the rats would get him anyway, because it wasn't simply guilt that was haunting him, but some kind of curse or a divine penalty.

Cultural aspects

In all stories of this book the author refers a lot to the modern culture.


First of all the language of the characters in the first story has the style of the beggining of the XX century. It's mostly the language of farmers. But at the same time the main character of "1922" is an educated farmers who likes to read books in the evening after a hard day on a field.

"He set the lamp down by the book I had been reading: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street."

"It sounds to me as if she got as tired of you fellows as she did of me and the son she gave birth to. Said good riddance to bad rubbish. A plague on both your houses. That’s Shakespeare, by the way. Romeo and Juliet. A play about love."

Just like in most of Stephen King's books the events take place in the U.S.A. and all geographical places that are mentioned are real and can be found on a map.

For example,

"April 11, 1930 Magnolia Hotel Omaha, Nebraska"

The hotel still exists and is open for the customers.

"The next one was Marjorie Duvall's North Conway Library Card, and it had an address: "17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire."

Using Google Street View we can get even better understanding of the place.

As the heroine of the second story is a writer, it is full of references to  books and movies.

"A mile or so after passing the Colewich sign, Tess began to hear a low, rhythmic thudding that seemed to come up from the road through her feet. Her first guess was of H.G. Wells's mutant Morlocks, tending their machinery deep in the bowels of the earth..."

"She lay limp in his arms, feeling like a girl in a horror movie, the one who's carried away by Jason or Michael or Freddy or whatever his name was after all the other ones are slaughtered." 

It has references to some famous singers too:

"I’ll sing Bonnie Tyler’s hit record. I’ll sing “It’s a Heartache.” I’m sure I know the words, I’m sure they’re in the junkheap every writer has in the back of her…"

The third story mentions a lot of events that happened in the world:

"2008, what a year! China hosted the Olympics! Chris Brown and Rihanna became nuzzle-bunnies! Banks collapsed! The stock market tanked!"

"In 2009, Chris Brown beat the hell out of his Number One Nuzzle-Bunny after the Grammy Awards..."

"In June, Michael Jackson kicked the bucket..."

Big Driver

The main character of this story is Tessa Jean, a writer and a journalist of a local newspaper. She takes a ride to a writers' meeting in another town and, following her editor's advice to take a short cut, gets into a trap set by a rapist - the Big Driver. Almost dead, she manages to get home, and that night a new woman is born, a woman who decides not to go to the police, but to take revenge by herself and to save other possible victims in future.

In the calm morning light of a suburban Connecticut morning, the answer was ridiculously simple: an anonymous call to the police. The fact that a professional novelist with ten years’ experience hadn’t thought of it right away almost deserved a yellow penalty card. She would give them the location—the deserted YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU store on Stagg Road—and she would describe the giant. How hard could it be to locate a man like that? Or a blue Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights? 

But while she was drying her hair, her eyes fell on her Lemon Squeezer .38 and she thought, Too easy-as-can-beezy. Because… 

“What’s in it for me?” she asked Fritzy, who was sitting in the doorway and looking at her with his luminous green eyes. “Just what’s in that for me?”

Armed with her Smith & Wesson Lemon Squeezer, she goes to her editor, a woman who sent her into the  trap, and finds out that she is Big Driver's mother, and that she was the one who planned it. Tessa kills her and finds the address of her son, who shares a truck company with his brother.

She goes to his house and waits, when the car shows up in the driveway, she decides to act, and when the truck stops she opens the doors and shoots the driver. But suddenly she understands that it isn't Big Driver, but his brother - Little Driver, as she calls him.

Then she goes to Big Driver's house and kills him too, but she feels guilty for killing an innocent man and decides to write a confession and commit a suicide, but her inner voice tells her to check Little Driver's house first. There she finds her purse that the rapist has stolen, with a dozen other purses. She burns the confession and heads for home.

In this story the concept of the Conniving Man is not expressed through characters' speech. The heroine has a habit of making up voices in her everyday life because she feels lonely. And when her personality breaks, her dark side talks to her through different inanimate objects around her, mostly through her GPS receiver, that she programmed to use the voice of her favourite writer. Unlike the old Tessa, her new personality is observant, calculating and confident. The moments she wants to stop or feels afraid, the voice persuades her that she's doing the right thing and provides a lot of arguments that she can't resist.

1922

The main character is Wilfred James, a farmer. The story is written as his confession. He says that he killed his wife, Arlette James and cozened his son into it. He did it for a piece of land that her father left her. Wilfred wanted to unite his farm and this land, but his wife wanted to sell it and move to a big city. He also says that after many years living together he started to hate her.

In this story the idea of the Conniving man is described for the first time.

"I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man. And I believe that by March of 1922, when the Hemingford County skies were white and every field was a snow-scrimmed mudsuck, the Conniving Man inside Farmer Wilfred James had already passed judgment on my wife and decided her fate"

After doing the deed, Wilfred gets haunted by his wife, he has hallucinations and some strange things start to happen. His farm is attacked by huge rats that kill his cows and he believes that it is his dead wife who sends them to get revenge. His son Henry gets crazy and decides to run away with a neighbour's daughter and start a life of robbers, they begin to rob banks all over the state. But one winter day they get into an ambush and both of them get killed. When Wilfred gets the news he believes it is some kind of divine punishment and feels his fault in it.

A year after he has to sell the farm because he doesn't have money, and, has to move to a town, just like his wife wanted. There, he works as a librarian until one day he is found with his wrists bitten by rats in a hotel room and this confession on the table next to a gun that he was going to use to commit a suicide.

In my opinion the story has some common points with "Crime and Punishment" by Fedor Dostoyevsky. The main character is afraid that somebody could find out what he did. But unlike "Crime and Punishment", everything goes pretty well for the main character, he manages to hide his crime and nobody ever suspects him. He is also haunted and gets crazy like Rodion Raskolnikov. And I think that if you forget about supernatural elements in this book, the ending could be a simple suicide of a man who couldn't live with the burden of his deed anymore.

Even more vocabulary

shunt - отодвигать, перемещать
"The matress has been shunted aside."

cue - реплика
chuckle - посмеиваться
"It was a play, and this was my cue to look puzzled. Then to chuckle, because chuckling came next in the stage directions."

abscond - сбегать, скрываться
decamp - убегать, сниматься с места
flit - упорхнуть
"Absconded, Mr Lester. Decamped. Took French leave. Did a midnight flit."

avid - заядлый
"As an avid reader and student of American slang, such terms occur naturally to me."

riddance - уборка, устранение
"Said good riddance to bad rubbish."

contiguous - смежный, прилегающий
"...that piece of property, which is contiguous with Hemingford Stream..."

flutter - трепетать, развеваться
"There was a note fluttering beneath one edge."

badger - дразнить, изводить
"He tried to badger us, but he had nothing to badger with"

insinuation - намек
"The first time he asked a lot of questions, that really weren't questions at all but insinuations."

twitch - дергаться
bulge - выпячиваться, выдаваться
"His lips were twitching and his eyes were bulging."

More vocabulary

stagger - пошатываться
"He staggered toward the bed."

counterpane - стеганное покрывало
shroud - саван
"We rolled her up, making the counterpane her shroud."

ooze - сочиться
bloated - раздутый
"...oozing blood as a bloated sponge will ooze water."

quilt - лоскутное одеяло
"There was a quilt in the closet."

gorge - горло
"I fought with my gorge and lost."

murky - мутный, грязный (о воде)
"There was an echoing splash when it struck the murky water at the bottom."

siren - сирена
gooseflesh - гусиная коже
prickle - выступать, покалывать
"A high siren of laughter commenced behind me, a sound so close to insanity that it made gooseflesh prickle all the way from the crack of my backside to the nape of my neck."

stride - большой шаг
"I reached him in three strides and slapped him as hard as I could"

rustling - шуршание
"I had always found that quiet rustling a comfort."


bellowing - мычать
"Our few cows were bellowing, their morning milking hours overdue"