Needful Things: A Review

What would you do for an item that your heart deeply desires? How much of your own morality would you sacrifice to get something that fills your heart with joy? Stephen King’s 1991 novel, Needful Things asks this question and like so many of his books, King weighs the costs with the literary freedom that only fiction can provide.

King is well known for being a horror novelist and, for some people, this is enough to stop them from even opening one of his books. And yet, as I have written before, horror literature, probably more than any other genre, is social commentary. The elements of the horror genre are an allegorical mythology laid over reality which allows an absurdist rendition of the scenarios described in the book which facilitates an encoded criticism of culture and society. The Invisible Man is a critique about science run rampant; Dracula is a critique of the sexual sins of the aristocracy; Frankenstein is a critique about the patriarchy's unconscionable actions toward women and children; the Wolfman is a critique of the fear of the primal within us. The criticism intrinsic within each of these stories lays out a dire warning to the reader about the world they live in. Horror novels are dark and often gruesome fairy tales that attempt to teach us important lessons. The horror aspects themselves are merely artistic representations of those morals and warnings done up in fancy dress to awaken our most elemental fears.

The world in 1991 was somewhat different than today, but not so much so that the events of Needful Things will be lost on us. Like the tales mentioned above, the warnings in this book are timeless; Needful Things could be set in any year and the lessons would be the same. It holds up, as they say and that means that the problems portrayed in the novel are timely. 

Needful Things is a black comedy of the first quality, laying overt supernatural horror aside (at least at first) to create a hysterically realistic pantomime of our most central frailties and to point out the darkness that lies just beneath our human exteriors. The novel is an examination of the Devil's Bargain with a murderous twist that shows clearly the fragility of human goodness before laying those frailties on a chopping block for the author's sharpest knife. In it, King deftly creates a tense and stressful situation when people in a small town turn their morality over for treasures they desire but don’t need at a cost far more dear than money can buy.

A new store has just opened in the western Maine town of Castle Rock. The proprietor is a mysterious, tall man with odd, large hands and jangled teeth. Displayed in the front window of the shop are a few rare knick knacks, but no one wants to be the first to go in.

Passing the store one day, Brian Rusk, an eleven year-old boy who is about to become the lynchpin upon which this entire horror/comedy unfolds, enters the store under the awning upon which is printed Needful Things. Inside, Brian meets Leland Gaunt. Gaunt is a man of genial nature. He is also the preeminent salesman. Although he is somewhat off-putting to Brian, the boy is still amazed by his experience of an artifact which seems to fill his mind with sound and noises. Later, Brian is shown a Sandy Koufax card, which the boy covets, but knows he cannot afford. Gaunt gives it to him for a pittance and the promise of a harmless prank. Brian does the prank, unintentionally setting into motion the first tremors of unease in town. In the meantime, he is constantly checking on the card, obsessed with it and fearful of its loss or destruction. Through the card, it seems that Gaunt can communicate with Brian, shifting the boy’s conscience aside and coercing him to do as he promised.

When another member of the town visits Gaunt and falls in love with some carnival glass lampshades, Gaunt charges her a meager price for the apparently valuable object in return for her promise to commit a small prank on another member of town. Likewise, each of his initial customers partake in small harmless crimes which cause others in the town to come to blows.

As we are introduced to the residents of Castle Rock, we’re shown some of the normal and expected antipathies between groups and individuals in any small town. The Catholic church in town is planning a casino night to raise funds for a new building. The Baptists are mad as hornets about the “gambling” and there has been a war of words in the letters column of the town’s newspaper. A town council member has been stealing funds to pay for his horse gambling habit while his paranoia and panic deepen to madness. The town drunk is angry about having to walk home in the rain after the local bartender refuses him his keys. Each of these and many more, including Brian’s mom and her best friend, are lured slowly into Needful Things, where Gaunt shows them something they cannot possibly live without and can have for a meager price if they agree to perform small insults on other residents. The small pranks spark into horrible conflicts as the residents shed propriety for vengeance.

Gradually, tensions build, threats are shouted, scuffles and fights breakout and in each case, the “pranks” are performed by someone who is uninvolved in the particular beef, so that the ones who are pranked are forced to believe that their particular enemy has done them wrong, when in fact it is just someone beholden to Gaunt for their own special needful thing.

Alan Pangborn, sheriff of Castle Rock, and his love interest, Polly Chalmers, are the protagonists of the story. Alan, whose wife and younger son were horribly killed in a car accident that was possibly the result of his wife’s brain tumor, is deeply depressed and dealing with the grief of his loss. Polly, a secretive woman with a dubious history is suffering the horrible pain of debilitating arthritis in her hands. Alan and Polly are newly in love, and are still going slowly down the path to trust and commitment. Gaunt determines that the sheriff is an enemy, “a man who cannot be fooled” and so he sets out to keep Pangborn away from Needful Things so that the ultimate gag can be played on the townsfolk. Polly, however, desperate to ease the horrid pain in her hands, falls prey to Gaunt’s nostrum—an amulet that takes away the pain and seems to clear her thinking. 

Soon enough members of the town are viciously killing one another or are losing themselves in the obsessive madness for their particular treasures. Provoked to fury by Gaunt’s pranksters, the Catholics and Baptists begin a real set-to in the downtown. Other townsfolk are slowly understanding their culpability in the deadly game of pranks and take their own lives or fall into delusion and, in all of the tension, Polly is given a letter that convinces her (falsely) that Alan Pangborn has been snooping around her private history. It is obviously a prank and yet, blinded by her need to be without pain and by Mr. Gaunt’s amulet (inside which something scuddles and shudders) she breaks off the relationship with the sheriff.

As events come to a grisly head, Gaunt, clearly enjoying the chaos, sets up a table and sells firearms to the townspeople, while manipulating a notorious duo to place dynamite all over town preparing for a final theatrical finale of fire and death. A storm builds over Castle Rock as Alan Pangborn realizes that Gaunt is far more and far worse than he appears and prepares for a final showdown with the evil trader of souls!

King’s work is a masterpiece of town life. There are so many characters, so many different situations that it can feel as though the master of horror has gotten himself tangled up in a Gordian knot of plotlines and character stories. And yet, King deftly negotiates the tensions, the storylines, the characters and the coming cataclysms, keeping the reader interested and turning pages. The movie version of the book, which came to theaters in 1993 and had an all-star cast, was equally engaging, yet the book better captures the frailties and flaws of regular people and though the movie is worth a watch, it doesn’t hold a candle to the fuse of tension King lights in his novel.

The premise is simple. People are greedy. They want Things. In order to obtain those Things, they would do almost anything. Leland Gaunt helps them get what they want and in return, they become unwitting agents of chaos. Although the story itself is well-known for its essential horror, there is very little horror of the supernatural kind. The only monsters lurking in Castle Rock (other than Gaunt) are the regular people who dwell there. The horrors that they commit against each other are the consequences of having their own fears and desires known by a demonic trickster, but no less awful than the horrors committed by all of us each day, when we forget that we aren’t the only people on earth.

The moral of the story is an easy one to plumb. The sins of greed, pride, wrath, sloth, lust, envy and gluttony are on display in each of the prominent characters of the book. They are provoked to do horrible things by Gaunt’s ability to make rusted and dirty toys and snake oil seem like dearly desired rare treasures. The people in the story cannot see their treasures for what they are (junk) because they are blinded by their desires and their desperation to do Gaunt's bidding. As tensions rise, the worst in each of them become evident and as the Bible clearly points out, the wages of sin—in Castle Rock at least—really is death.

Needful Things feels a little cumbersome, especially when we think that the story is set a few decades ago. In that sense, with limited communication and the lack of “googling”, the people of Castle Rock are an island community, set apart by their rural isolation. King often sets his adventures in small towns, because he seems to know that where the people are quaint and even backward, bad things can happen. The novel is a criticism of the small-minded and sometimes foolishly narrow worldviews adhered to in such places. The residents are easy targets for the eldritch monsters that, like a pestilence, seek the immunocompromised. There are few protections to the rural mindset when it is allowed to become fallow with its own idiosyncrasies and unchallenged thinking.

Gaunt is a modern take on the imp Rumplestilskin, promising deeply held desires, while tricking everyone and pricking everyone on to violence of his own making. The horror is quotidian. The conflicts between the characters are beefs that we know and understand and may have experienced. The Letters to the Editor section of my town’s now nearly defunct newspaper certainly was a battleground of ideological proportions, usually between the evangelicals who were espousing thinly veiled bigotry or the political inanities of the paranoid or otherwise mentally unwell and those people who tried (and often failed) to strike the rational and reasonable note. So brutal were these outbursts that a street war often did seem like the natural next step in the evolution of tension and aggression. The novel perfectly captures the pathos and self-loathing of a small town brilliantly. 

Although not King’s best book by a long shot, (here I would suggest “IT” or The Dark Tower series) “Needful Things” is a classic story with unforgettable characters, great interpersonal dialogs and King’s unforgettable storytelling. It’s a very funny novel. As he, Virgil-like, leads us into the underworld of human frailty, negotiating a trail of horror that is as human as we are, we are shown just how dark the human soul truly is. Needful Things is a worthwhile read and possibly a morality tale that needs a resurgence in popularity. Gaunt could show up today, selling houses or phones or other coveted items for small favors. Despite its age, it feels like we need to hear the lessons it is trying to teach us again in the modern era.