Let’s talk about vanilla villains1. Boring bad guys, needy neerdowells, annoying antags.
If you’ve listened to the podcast recently (if you haven’t you’re out of the KvLT) you know we’ve been neck-deep in The Shining and General-Stephen-King-Stuff. Now, I haven’t watched Doctor Sleep in movie form yet2 but I did read the book and since you all this listened to the podcast, it shouldn’t come as any surprise, I really didn’t like the villains King gave us. It’s especially maddening because I liked almost everything else in the book quite a lot.
I can hear some of you, “We love Rose the Hat!” or “Alcoholism was the real villain!” or “You’re blinder than Dave Stone!”
Am I in the minority? I refuse to take the time to find out. For myself, I know that Rose The Hat and her band of Shine-Guzzling Irish-Traveler-Vampires didn’t elicit anything but groans of frustrations. Well, except when they died, I quite liked that.
Part of it has to come from not ever feeling like they truly posed any threat to Danny, and after their first mental confrontation, it was apparent Abra posed more of a threat to True Knot than vice-versa. A lot of it comes from just finding them out of place in a sequel to one of my favorite ghost stories.
With a lot of writers, you can see “the cracks.” Not in a bad way, it’s more that you see the genesis of the idea. King isn’t any different. I can see him on vacation with friends or family, running into these “RV people”, asking himself questions about their life, and coming up with both the incredibly mundane and the notably ghoulish answers. It’s a recipe for something, but not what I wanted.
I don’t believe that a sequel has to be grander in scale, or up the stakes (the buzzier way to phrase it) but for me, it’s important to keep the right tone. The tone doesn’t have to match exactly, that’d boring, but the True Know ended up a little too kitschy for a The Shining sequel.
Anyway, I’m reading The Outsider by Stephen King now.
Not that these villains are necessarily vanilla. I just enjoy an alliterative title.
See our ‘The Shining’ episode of VHS KvLT for Kyle’s thoughts. SPOILER: It’s bad and anyone who likes it is bad too. Also, fuck the world.