Without Power, What?

Monday—Memorial Day—when others were gathering for barbecues or visiting relatives or playing by their pools or joining pickup games of wiffle ball, we huddled in our dark house, not watching TV or listening to Internet music. It was positively medieval. We merely sat and waited for the power to come back on. 

The Monday holiday began, as most Sundays do for us, with me starting some loads of laundry and cleaning the house and Micki working on schoolwork. The night before had been fraught with heavy storms and the electrical service had flickered and then failed for an hour or so in the small hours. I had drifted fitfully before that, worrying that the storm would uproot our giant oak or sycamore (or both). Micki said she heard the explosion of a transformer a few blocks away, but that our power had remained unaffected. I did not hear any of that. When the power failed, I flashed awake, catapulted out of the dreamless into bleak, electricity free darkness. 

We keep our room dark during the brighter half of the year by a Victorian process of drawing heavy, light blocking curtains across our windows before bedtime. A small blue digital clock in our bathroom and a similarly blue LED on our wall-mounted TV are the only sources of light in our sleeping quarters once we've turned off our bedside lamps. In the middle of the night, when the urge to use our ensuite bathroom arises (as it invariably does) we don't have to turn on a light because our dark-adapted eyes are easily able to see the room's obstacles by the pale blue wil-o-the-wisp gleam.

In the subterranean velvety blackness of our room when our house was without  power, I hit first one toe on the corner of the bed and then another on our dogs’ crate. Stifling groggy gasps of pain, I was reduced to flailing and waving my hands to find the required surfaces in the bathroom in order to manage the necessary nocturnal micturition. I then stumbled around the house to ascertain if the damage to the grid had been caused by the massive oak tree in our front yard or by any of our trees. Satisfied that someone else's big oak had caused the loss of power (this time), I headed back to bed where the silence of an electricity-free house rang in my ears like an in-person performance of a Souza march while my poor toes throbbed in 3/4 time.

As usual, our neighbors, who face the street that crosses ours (and who's back yard abuts our courtyard) still had power and, like the swell elderly folks they are, they were up at 1 in the morning with all their lights on, being way more with it than we are at half their age. That they retained power merely extended my aggravation. Nothing irritates me more, in our suburban existence, than power outages. I was further disgruntled by the fact that less than fifty feet away, people weren't suffering. They had air conditioning, the use of their electric kettle, TV and lights. I went back to bed and lay there trying to figure out if my eyes were open or closed. Later in the morning, after the sun climbed over the hills, I fell into a deep and oddly dream-filled sleep. In one of these dreams, I was straining away at an old fashioned hand-operated water pump and getting nothing but sand to pour out. 

I admit that I have been spoiled by the constant and wonderful flow of ceaseless (almost) energy that silently powers everything from our WiFi router to the electric kettle. Not for me, the taking of a basket of clothes to the creek to bang on a rock with lye powder or washing dishes by hand (oh, the humanity) or boiling oatmeal on the stove. I can load our clothes into a machine and press a button; the dishwasher is more efficient than a personal kitchen maid and the microwave makes my daily bowl of restoring oats in three minutes flat. The work is accomplished while I do other things. Not for me, either, the unjoyous rannygazoo of battling the rightful landowners of the prairie while trying to find a safe place to squat in the starlit gloom of a summer night, not worrying that I might wind up hovering over an irritable rattlesnake. Also, when we have power, I keep our house lit up like the “island” command center on an aircraft carrier. It not only fends off the burglarious chicanery of, what Margaret Thatcher in another context called “youthful hooligans” but it adds a general boost to the sense of safety for those who may wish to wander through our well-lit streets by night.

There are several reasons why power loss is so frustrating to me. The main one is that we now live in the 21st Century, where, as I recall,  we were told to expect technological conveniences on par with what cartoon men like George Jetson had as he zoomed around in a flying car and never needed to charge his handheld devices. Energy availability wasn’t questioned. We would have plenty of cheap and safe power, or so it seemed. Nothing could be less true. Today, we still connect to the grid by obviously frail and easily broken wires strung on the carcases of turpentine-covered pine trees that snap like toothpicks when the wind blows. A squirrel, doing a high wire act along one of those wires could trespass the deadly transformer and be flash broiled, plummeting 309 homes into the Dark Ages for six hours. There has to be a better way.

Last year, someone fired bullets into a substation in order to stop the proceedings of an event that offended their ‘manhood’. State officials haven’t released who these geniuses were, but apparently a .308 round fired from a high velocity rifle can disrupt the power to 2,100 citizens on a freezing January night and all we can do is throw up our hands in frustration. I think perhaps we can solidify our utilities to make them impervious to all but the most frantic weather (or dipshits). 

The second reason power loss upsets me is that my father worked for the electric company for nearly four decades and worked hard to get people their power back and I know that those workers in our area understand that haste is required. I know well that when storms cross the county, crews of electricians thick as summer mosquitoes head out in their big bucket trucks to repair the grid as quickly and safely as possible. Such crews cost the company time-and-a-half every hour they take to complete repairs. We pay a lot for uninterrupted access, it’s cost prohibitive to have to effect speedy repairs after big storms. These are excellent reasons to reinforce the grid against weather.

Pop Bare was often on call and sometimes had to head home from gatherings or church or leave off mowing the yard to put on his work clothes and go help get other people's power back on, especially when weather was a factor. They knew that the people depended on them for power often had lifesaving equipment or necessary electronically powered gizmos, the loss of which could mean loss of life or property. In his neighborhood in those days, electrical service was primarily underground and so not susceptible to tree limbs and drunken drivers. He knew that he performed a nevertheless necessary and essential service.

Pop and his crew worked hard both at upkeep of the grid and also at emergency repair. They could get the power back flowing in just a few hours way back then. In our current age of AI weather predictions and radar models that can forecast twenty hurricane paths, you would think that a neighborhood like ours, where the streets are lined with ancient trees, would be a prime location for a prepared crew to await the devastation. They could literally set up shop on any one of our streets or in the seemingly endless supply of church parking lots and be within two minutes travel to begin sorting things out. Yet, they still operate by a model of waiting to schedule a crew until damage is reported. I have never understood this. If they aren’t going to strengthen the grid, they ought to at least have ‘special forces’ teams waiting on the ground most likely to be affected. I’m glad to open our home to a group of electricians if it means getting them on their way to the fallen oak tree and downed lines faster.

One good thing is that our house meter now reports through instant flash that power is interrupted. They updated all the houses in our community over the course of six months (but didn't tell us) and so one clear day in February, after Micki had gone to work and I was earnestly soaping the crust in the shower, the power went off. Slick with suds, I crept out to see what the fuss was and observed a worker replacing the meter immediately outside our bedroom windows. Clutching at my robe like a blushing hotsy-totsy in a pulp romance novel, I popped open the window and asked what the matter was. The man looked at me, apparently startled by the peninsula of shampoo foam rolling steadily down my forehead and told me that they were changing out our meter. He explained the purpose and then, with rather less than the milk of human kindness one might expect from a man who had disconnected power without notifying me first, said it would be about ten minutes before the lights came on. I wrote a terse letter to the power company that week. My eyes were still burning from the shampoo.

On Memorial Day, with a load of clothes in each of our washers and one load in the dryer and while I was chirruping along to upbeat tunes as I vacuumed, a tree on a main artery road just two blocks from us, karate chopped a telephone pole in half and killed power for 135 electric bill-paying residents. The power company sent texts within minutes to alert us and keep us posted (far better than in previous years) but the serious damage meant that we would be without power for up to seven hours.

My groovy elderly neighbor consolingly said, as I scooped storm debris from the pool, that our ancestors did without power for generations, so we can manage for a few hours. That was easy for him to say while his power was still on. Also, our ancestors didn't know any better. They had derived means of living without power because they had no other options. Once electricity flowed into their neighborhoods and homes, they got appliances that ran on power and never looked back. My well-meaning (and very hip) neighbor is nevertheless correct. Although I don't think I have lived anywhere where we lost power so often (including in the three-hundred year-old house in rural Pennsylvania when I was a kid) it is a hardship on par with forgetting one's belt; hardly a nightmare. More an inconvenience.

During an ice storm in the early 2000s which left us without power for three days, some people out in the county had to manage with no electricity for two weeks. One friend at that time who lived out in the county boonies had to resort to boiling water and throwing out loads of recently bought food and going without heat or hot water for showers. Their septic system backed up and their well failed. We were the lucky ones in that scenario. In recent years, the power loss caused by hurricanes has been quite a discomfort and this year is going to be a terrible one for the big sea storms, or so they are telling us.

Our son and his wife have a house that is located well off the main road, up a winding dirt lane and down a muddy track that leads to their seven-acre fairyland. Out in those wilds, power loss is as regular and expected as sunburn at the summer pool party. They have a propane-powered generator that kicks in within seconds of a loss of power. During a visit a few years ago, a series of nasty storms blew across the mountains downed trees and caused flash floods and mud and rock slides. We cozily watched DVDs and cooked using their air fryer as if nothing was wrong.

True to their word, the power company got the grid repaired (at least temporarily) a little before their predicted deadline. We were up late working on laundry that ought to have been done hours before. We cooked hotdogs on the grill and settled before the TVin the relative coolness of a newly engaged air-conditioning system. Our plans to sit by the pool and play yard games were ruined but we made the most of the day by reverting briefly to a more primitive lifestyle. 

I have often promoted an idea that, like our ancestors, there is something to be honored in the old ways. To squall about not having power is in direct antithesis to those sentiments. I acknowledge the hypocrisy. It is mainly that our lives have now been ordered to fit a post industrialized world. Like all resources on our small planet, if someone stands to make a buck, we will have to pay if we want to enjoy those benefits. Electricity, which is a natural resource, is generated and maintained and sold to us (at a premium) by companies that hold the valve. The least they could do, for what we pay over the course of a thirty year residence, is prevent all but the most devastating interruptions. That would be a return on investment that would make the electric bill feel a little less like highway robbery.

I'm not ignorant of the fact that thousands of people in many places across our globe are suffering the effects of war, genocide and irredentist ideology. They'd just be happy to have a cup of tea without their ears ringing with rocket fire. They certainly deserve it, but they might be a little sad to hear that even in the blessedly safe and quiet leafy suburban streets of smalltown NC, we periodically have to deal with power loss that could be prevented with a little forethought by the power companies.

Forget flying cars and transporters, I'd be happy if we could just eliminate interruptions to the power grid without having to pay scads for a natural gas generator. Not to be cynical, we're quite lucky to be able to have all that we have, even when the power goes out. Our oak didn't fall (this time) and our house was spared storm damage. Someday we may zoom around like George Jetson, but for now, I can hope that power outages will be a thing of the past, soon. That's what I would call shocking (but acceptable) leap forward.

The man with the letter: a warning

This essay started as an article that I toyed with publishing as part of my five year series with our local newspaper back in 2015. As you will see, it has hard words for that paper and for members of our community. Although long drafted and ready, I chose to wait. The situations described wound up foreshadowing a series of now infamous national events. I have updated the original essay in order to account for January 6th and the current ongoing criminal hush money trial and other questions of democratic security challenged by the far right. In that sense it has been significantly updated and widened in scope (which may explain the length). In previous essays, I have battled with ideas and thought processes or asked philosophical questions of the far right mindset without naming names, interested to, as much as I could, address the concepts rather than the mob that adheres to them. In this essay I am more direct and abandon the pretext of delicacy. 

The time for prevarication has passed and only rigorous honesty about the worst ideologies in our nation can be of any real help. With that in mind, if you read this and have been a Trump supporter, or a MAGA supporter (or both) I don’t hold back. Nevertheless, I hope you will push through. We have learned to ignore information that we don’t like to hear, preferring to stay buried in epistemological ignorance, hiding in the shelter of one-sided news that allows no criticism or challenge to our way of seeing things. If our democracy is to survive, the era of living in echo chambers, especially of political and religious construction, must end.

About a decade ago, I was standing at the front desk of the library with my colleague doing our regular daily jobs. A man approached the desk. He asked to speak to me. He offered his hand and I shook it. He then handed me an envelope, after introducing himself. As I looked at him, his name and features fell into place with a thud in my head. The man with the letter was a little more bald than his newspaper picture and a little more pallid, but it was suddenly clear who this was. My hackles went up. As my eyes careened over his face and physical appearance, I noted a distinct bulge under his left arm beneath his ratty leather jacket which was zipped up, but it was clear he had a shoulder holster with a gun in it. He told me to read the contents of the letter with smarmy Southern politeness and then departed. 

Shaking, I asked my work chum to cover a minute and went off desk to open and read the contents. As my eyes fell over the many pages within, I slowly understood what had happened, and in a fit of growling rage, I began to tear up the letter. Thanks to my friend's cool head (he had come around to check on me) we decided I needed to show the letter to the director, so I stopped short of rending it to confetti.

The contents of the envelope were a printout of a Facebook post and the comments thread that followed. The man had made the post, but one of my friends in town had shared it on his own page. In that thread were comments by many others and one from me. That one was highlighted. I had written, “This is mental illness.”

This post, which was an unedited and desperately poorly written diatribe against the LGBTQ+ community, had also been submitted to the paper and had been published in cut down and edited form. Unhappy with the way his letter to the newspaper had been edited, he posted the uncut version on his Facebook account. His letter, despite being revised, was still a dangerous diatribe aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, full of poisonous threats and promises of eternal punishment (and some more immediate punishments as well). 

It turns out that another member of this gaggle of squawking halfwits was also connected through social media to my friend and saw that he (my friend) had shared the man's post. He (the other guy) shared it back to the man with the comment thread and my response attached with everyone else's. 

At the end of the long list of comments folded into the envelope was a short list of “evidence” for “when someone is a communist” and a note to the library leadership to fire me directly when they read the letter. Another copy was mailed to the library (which arrived the next day) addressed to the library director. 

The man was, at the time, the ‘president’ of the local tea party, a group of far right goons who spouted overt religious rhetoric and thinly veiled bigotry anytime they had the chance. His politics and ecclesiastical views were on total display in his regular letters to the editor. He wrote two or three times a month or more and many of those letters were printed despite the fact that he had no real policy positions, only foam-flecked scapegoating. 

Tea party groups had gained some national inertia at that time due to the incoherent ramblings of the then governor of Alaska, as well as a host of other right wing candidates who were making an appeal to the lowest common denominator because the president happened to be a black man and LGBTQ+ humans had recently gained some much deserved rights. 

This self-proclaimed ‘leader of the county tea party’ had been railing against everything, expounding about conspiracy theories and promoting himself as the only real Christian, for years, but his output had increased significantly by this point. His content was standard claptrap, full of rant and complaint. Such hysterical talking points are now so ubiquitous in the public sphere that they have become the laughable, eye-rollingly ridiculous product of groups and individuals who are teetering on the brink of lunacy. They have been led to this point by a former president who, pied piper-like, set an example of low tone and incoherent blathering that was easily parroted by people who were angry about everything, felt persecuted for their beliefs and wanted revenge for their lives. I might have recognized this typical victimhood complex in this man, but back then, a younger and somewhat less experienced person, I was deeply upset by the encounter and felt as though this individual was an exception rather than the rule.

Our community was reeling from the fact that the local paper's editor would allow such dangerous language to be printed. Several of her own writers protested. I wrote to her as well and asked that she consider the damage such a letter could do to young people. I felt it was my professional responsibility as a teen librarian and former educator to advocate for the kids in my community. She replied via email that she had “cleaned up” the original letter and that it had been far worse in its original form but persisted without apology. When I read the version on my friend's account, I was already seething at the ludicrous example of “unbiased” that had given this man a platform in the paper. The unedited version was, in fact, so much worse that I realized that the man's problem wasn't that he was an evil person so much as that he was deeply unwell and deserved pity rather than derision (though, I admit I definitely derided him after he tried to get me fired).

It was after this that he brought the letter, while armed, to the library. I had already decided to turn a blind eye to the man's incoherent and vicious ideas published in the paper. He was sick. He could perhaps be pitied but he deserved to be ignored more than anything, the way one might ignore someone with a sandwich board upon which is painted The End is Nigh. This man was an escaped convict of the laugh academy and nothing more. To give him more attention via our outrage was to keep him in the public eye.

After his threat, which was exactly what the county government's safety and HR departments deemed the contents of the envelopes and the man's behavior, an official letter was drafted warning him that further actions would lead to serious legal consequences. I was not pleased by this, as you can imagine. I wanted him to be punished. He had threatened me and had brought a gun into the library, which contravenes a number of local ordinances and laws, not to mention trying to get me fired from a job I love and trying to ruin my good name.

The county justified their inaction because they did not wish to poke what they saw as a hornet's nest. The director expressed some concern about my safety, however and did continue to check on me regularly. For a long time after that experience, I did not feel safe. How hard would it be for this person to gather up his friends and harm my wife or our kids to get even? It would be only too easy, and he obviously felt free to do whatever he wanted without consequence already. 

Fortunately the man never spoke to or about me again in a public venue, but it turned out he had problems of his own. Nevertheless, it wouldn't be long hence that such goblin-minded goons would feel empowered in their hateful ideology to beat people up at political rallies or kill people with their cars, and—at the behest of their beloved leader—invade a national building. This wouldn't be all. There were a host of other serious crimes that began as this man's type of ongoing angry raving and wound up injuring someone or worse. Only last week, David DePape was convicted and sentenced to 20 years for attempted kidnapping and 30 years for bludgeoning the husband of the former speaker of the House. DePape’s crime began as very similar behavior as the man who came to the library and eventually ramped up to screaming pitch by exposure to propaganda and conspiracy theories online and by being a huge follower of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Q-Anon conspiracy theories. 

The local tea party fools were just a larval stage for a much more sinister and eventually far more violent political movement that was in every way a direct result of those original right wing theses. The tea party was a prototype of the MAGA movement and the angry, miserable evangelical and far right zealots in small town USA were ripe for the picking.

Even after his behavior to me (of which I made the paper's editor clearly aware) the man was made a ‘guest columnist’ and invited to write an 850-word article quarterly. In one of those, the man blasted the state legislature for not being strict enough in redrawing electoral maps. The implication was that their leniency had allowed for Obama’s reelection because too many people of color and other ‘lefties’ and ‘pinkos’ had apparently unfettered access to the polls. Later, North Carolina’s gerrymandered districts were struck down as being too racist, but he did not balk at the connection his own professed beliefs had with bigoted disenfranchisement.

Not long after, the director called me to his office and updated me about the man. He told me that the man had—in one of those delicious moments of sheer irony—gotten caught voting twice, once with his own address at one polling station and once from the address of his girlfriend or his business at another. He wound up being charged with misdemeanor voter fraud and was exposed to his spouse as a philanderer, too. 

He got very quiet after that, and soon moved to Florida, where the political climate was probably more to his liking. Several years ago, I found out he passed away suddenly, alone and miserable, likely of COVID. This was verified by a former colleague who moved to that part of Florida. His obituary was the standard of that period. Despite his reprehensible behavior and beliefs, he was lauded as being a man who would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. I wondered as I perused the saccharine eulogizing what the family would have made of his taking a gun to threaten a librarian or of his stance on LGBTQ+ issues. 

He predeceased the ill news of November 2016 and the events of January 6, 2021 and the oil slick of nightmarish political scandal in between, in which I'm sure he would have reveled. He may have driven to DC to take part in the insurrection. Such was his rhetoric and mentality that he would have easily morphed into a MAGA goon. As I watched video that fateful winter day of people breaking into the Capitol, I saw so many who were of exactly the same mindset. 

I am certain that many good and otherwise normal people bought into the tea party ideologies around the time that this happened. They later traded their rationality and good sense for a red hat and gave their loyalty to a man who made his wealth by talking people into financial ruin.

Today, those people seem beyond the ability to change their minds or step aside from their devotion. Those same people have shown themselves ready to ban books, fire librarians, remove rights from LGBTQ+ and people of color, to rage at immigrants and hurl spittle at women’s bodily autonomy. They have been motivated by political candidates who know just what to say to stoke up their misery and outrage and who used the latent racist and sexist and evangelical framework of the tea party talking points to build a political movement that ultimately seeks to destroy our democracy. The MAGA movement claims to be patriotic, but they wanted their candidate to stay in office, despite having clearly lost, all the while shouting “stop the steal” and bringing guns and weapons into the Capitol. The hypocrisy is thick as cement.

People that I know and love voted for and rejoiced when Donald Trump was sworn in. I did not. I recognized him for who—and what—he was and the subsequent four years and even beyond became a kind of slow, cold war of ideas with the people who I knew had obviously lost their way. Those of us who did not fall for Trump’s ‘charisma’ have long lamented the almost religious zealotry that Trump followers lavish on their god/man guru. Despite his obviously being a phony, a rapist, a conman, a corrupt criminal and a thief of super secret documents, they still hope for him to take office yet again. They continue to send him money, despite the fact that he unrepentantly attempted to break the laws of succession in order to stay in power. And I now believe that these people do not or cannot see their own complicity. 

It has become so much like a political version of the old cliche about televangelists: the TV preacher is caught in (in Trump's case) several compromising positions, showing just how abjectly immoral and unethical he is and yet the people continue to tune in and send him money and vote for him, totally buying into his false promises and raging at the people he says to blame because they believe his promise of a political miracle—all the while knowing in their hearts it can never happen. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

The man with the letter has become in my mind a prefiguring of this mentality. He was, as I said, a larval stage of the final, venomous MAGA form we have now. Even non-MAGA conservatives have begun to see the insanity and inanities of this final version, but to no avail. The man with the letter is like an Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) prophet, bringing his vision of the wrath of his political god to a small Southern town and deciding that I was a living example of everything wrong with our society. Today, there are masses of people just like him and they not only are completely dyed-in-the-wool theocratic fascists, they freely admit that they want to trash our country's Enlightenment ideals and democratic principles in order to set their hero in power in perpetuity.

As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird, "A mob acts out of emotion, absent facts, absent contemplation, mostly absent responsibility. What they get in return is anonymity. Conscience can be exhausting. It'll keep you up at night. [A] Mob's a place where people go to take a break from their conscience”. The gods know that I have my own political beliefs, like almost everyone does. Why hide the fact? Why not discuss and allow those ideas to be purified in the crucible of rigorous public discourse? If I were confronted (and I have been) with challenges to my moral or ethical position, I might need to reflect for a while. Why wouldn't other people be willing to reflect about their own positions and change if it meant harm to their country? But then, I forget that we cannot reason with the irrational, and the MAGA movement and its former tea party variation have always been based in irrational quicksand.

Perhaps I was wrong for writing that on my friend's post. Maybe I was caught up in my own mob mentality. Maybe my comment on that man's post was a stinging lash to his already distended illness. Maybe he responded so viciously because he realized that someone (myself, my friends and others) could see what he hoped to hide behind a wall of utter gibbering nonsense. Sometimes, when I reflect on my interaction with that man, I remember that his reaction was because he both hated and feared me. What if calling me a communist was his way of compartmentalizing what he felt was the most horrible and nightmarish possibility he could ever imagine: that he was completely wrong in every aspect of his life and that his hypocrisy was on full display?

I've shared this story, not to teach a lesson and not as a platform upon which to place my own apparent self-assured worldview. It is merely a tale of how a lone individual with untreated paranoia and a few other cerebral maladies fixated on a lowly librarian and how, by doing so, became an allegorical representation of the more recent and far worse political movement he so would have loved. I know that it is unreasonable to expect those reading this who may support Trump to change their affiliation, for whatever reason. I wish it wasn't so difficult to convince people, but then, that is up to them, not me.

However, maybe they can see that the side they have chosen is lathered up with the worst of humanity and that, like evangelicalism and other extremist movements, it draws from an entire sea of deeply unwell and miserable people who are easily swayed into mob behavior. This realization alone might get them to second guess their red hats and financial contributions, but it is beyond time for straight talk regarding their support of Donald Trump. Far more is at stake than just an election.

My story is the least of a hundred that are happening even as you read this account, right here in my state and all over the country. Goons of the worst possible kind at every level of local and state and national government or who are affiliated with insidious groups are trying to convince voters that librarians are corrupting your children or taking over the elections and promising violence in response. Many of my colleagues at the state level have had to endure far worse than me, but my story happened at the beginning of this movement.

There were many contributing factors that led to the man coming to me. I blame the former editor of the paper, most. Her delusion about being “unbiased” allowed him to feel justified in his behavior and gave him a platform. It is a good thing that she no longer holds the key to who can contribute. I also blame social media and cable TV news channels for their undue influence and emotional manipulation. 

Had Trump's followers, as I have said a million times before, been able to see through the tissue paper cons of a snake oil salesman, they wouldn't have to double down every time they are challenged in order to prop up fictionalized worldviews and conspiracy theories. Neither would they need to promote their own doubt-filled beliefs with hats and shirts and specially made Bibles, which they truly hope hide the truth of their own complicity and credulity and hypocrisy.

Trump is on trial for misuse of campaign funds to cover up a sexual affair. He may go free. Even if convicted, it will not stop him from running for office. The man with the letter, had he lived, would be a pious supporter of Donald Trump. My hope is that after my description of that terribly unwell individual and his hateful deed, supporters of the MAGA movement that I know who read this will be more reflective about their position and decide that they do not want to follow in that train of goons and thugs. Again, I may be naive, but, part of what has allowed me to heal from the experience is an unquenchable hope that people will depend on their better selves rather than continuing to be duped. Ultimately, whatever they choose will decide how and if our country survives.

Although it might seem that I am making a play for the other political party, I hope that my standard motifs will make clear that, though this is an issue which resides in the political realm, it is actually a moral issue. To the argument that the other side or other candidate is just as bad, I merely shake my head. It is a false dichotomy. Given the choice between a man with the propensity to burn down my neighborhood and a man who is actively gathering gasoline and matches (and who is already in trouble for having attempted arson several times before) I'd happily choose the former every single time with no questions asked. The people who put a strong man in power, hoping that his authoritarian disposition will end their social maladies are historically always the first to be clapped in irons by the power they create. Never in history had a dictator willingly rescinded his power once he had it. Donald Trump is making plans to burn down America and his MAGA faithful are hysterically gathering the kindling. The people who are not MAGA goons and yet still plan to vote for him are no different morally than the people who busted into the Capitol building. They may not go to rallies or put flags on their cars, but their financial and electoral support are essentially no different than if they had done so.

It’s time to call the MAGA movement what it is and it is time to hold those supporters accountable for what they want. 

It is that simple. The choice is theirs, but whether or not they are willing (or able) to finally cast off their affiliation with authoritarianism through Donald Trump’s MAGA movement will depend if they can face being held accountable for their participation as accessories to the downfall of democracy. If he regains power, that is surely what awaits us. He’s even said that himself.

Omega Crag realeased this week!

My wife, award-winning middle grades author of the Zahra of the Uwharries series, is a wonder. She never does anything by halves and somehow manages a pace of productivity that I couldn't muster in my finest moments. She has not only changed careers from non-profit marketing director—she will be concluding her second year as a middle school social studies teacher in a few weeks—she decided to get her masters degree as well. Add to all this a panoply of other roles and responsibilities, like being a mom, a grandparent, a wife and a caretaking daughter, you can see what I mean. She's got it together.

On top of all of this frenetic and sometimes overwhelming “hectivity”, to borrow her own word, she has completed her third book in the Zahra of the Uwharries series, entitled Omega Crag. The book will be available tomorrow, May 17th, online. If your local bookshop doesn't carry it, please ask them to and remind them that this is book three in a five book series; they need to order the first two, as well.

The middle grades kids in your family who love to read will adore these books and I have it on excellent authority that Omega Crag is the best of the three so far. Heck, even if you don’t have early teens around, I suggest just buying them anyway. You’ll enjoy them, too! And if, like us, you have a wee one scampering about, it’s not too soon to begin reading chapter books to them. It is developmentally appropriate. Start them early. Plus, they'll look nice on that special shelf of books in their room.

In fact, buy two copies of each book. It's important for parents of young readers to be engaged with what their kids or grandkids are reading. This creates for adults and their smaller humans a topic of common interest. It also helps to make a habit of chatting about what the kids are reading. Literacy is a family activity, after all! 

Micki’s books are excellent for a family book chat, yes, but they are just excellent any way you cut it. This claim, which I make fully within the reasonable expectations that I have the evidence to back it up, is not just my husbandly bias. I do not make it (solely) as a proud hubby or as a young adult librarian who has been reading and curating a YA collection filled with sometimes subpar fantasy for over a decade (although those are both true) either. Micki’s first two books, Society of the Sentinelia, and Blind Fairy, respectively, have both won the AAUW Young People’s Literature Award for two consecutive years. It is rare enough for authors in our state to get just one award. To receive two consecutive awards from the same auspicious organization suggests a level of authorial competency that is quite rare. 

They’re that good.

To quote Levar Burton from the wonderful children’s literacy program Reading Rainbow, “But, you don’t have to take my word for it”. If you read her books, you’ll find out yourself just how excellent they are.

Micki’s main character is Zahra, a 12 year-old scraebin (a small fairy-like creature no bigger than a loblolly pine cone—all fairies are scraebins, but not all scraebins are fairies). In the first two books, Zahra learns that she isn’t just an ordinary scraebin. Now, with the help of her Heart Animals, she takes on her role as The Convener; a powerful fairy who must bring together three special fairies called The Trilaterian, who will save the future of the scraebins. But only Zahra can reset the balance of nature within the Birkhead Wilderness and the colony of scraebins that dwell there. Her adventure will test her mettle and put her life at risk. How will she fare? Only one way to find out.

Readers of books like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia will appreciate the fantasy elements;  and like those books, Micki’s Birkhead Wilderness is teeming with magical creatures and she creates a burgeoning world of characters and mythology far beyond what the eye can see. Those who liked the Harry Potter series or the books of L. Frank Baum will enjoy the adventure and action-packed writing and themes of nature that shift the reader’s perspective to preservation and protection. 

Micki does all this while maintaining a robust selection of household plants and a courtyard full of herbs and a garden full of tomatoes and while finishing her massive and slightly cumbersome final project for her masters degree. My beautiful and tired wife has two more books to write for the Zahra series and I’m told that things will only get more exciting.

Micki’s book can be purchased here. I encourage you to take a hike into the realm of Zahra of the Uwharries and buy Omega Crag. If you haven’t yet read her first two books, buy all three! You won’t be disappointed.

Certain Sides

We all take sides on current events or topics of social import. As Welsh singer Tom Jones so eloquently crooned, “It's not unusual.” I have often worried about my own tendency to land on one side or the other of a topic and have likewise wondered if this tendency is more sinister than it at first appears. As I look around in our culture, it seems that certain sides are really out of whack with any intelligent moral position, but also, the urge to take a side itself may be the real and most dangerous threat to human solidarity.

Right now if you polled your neighbors and depending on their age and economic security you might find that some of them have taken a ‘side’ on certain current events. They may be for Ukraine or for Russia; for Israel or Palestine; pro-life or pro reproductive rights; convinced there is an immigrant problem or claiming that this is not as serious as some would want it to seem; in support of protesters at colleges or flatly anti-protest, to name a few possible positions. Everyone seems to take a side, but it may not be that simple a position to defend once chosen.

Where any of our neighbors fall on these particular topics will depend greatly on their own experiences, whether or not they have been to college, how much money they make and where their political sensibilities fall on a fairly wide and deep spectrum. They may also be influenced by where they live, whether they are residents of rural or urban areas or how (or if) they worship. The first real shock of looking at the results of those polls would be to find that your neighbors don't think like you do or, more surprising, that they feel as passionately about these subjects as you do about your own.

It isn't strange to wish to have an opinion on one or all of these topics nor is it strange to feel strongly about them. It is another thing altogether to take a side merely because of a preexisting prejudice or because we’re led to believe that such a position is inherently the only correct one by outside sources. We all have strongly-held beliefs, prejudices and a host of other motivating factors that may make us wish to choose a side, but those factors do not need to be obeyed. Not choosing a side on a topic until enough information is gathered and evidence processed and sources verified is also an excellent option. We often want to seem to be partisan, as if we’ve done the work and are choosing a position that most reflects our own moral code, but this is an illusion in most cases. No side is ever black and white. The more complex a subject is, the more difficult it is to take a side because there are so many factors that we do not or cannot know. And yet, the motivation to take sides in an issue is ancient and part of our tribalistic human nature.

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As primates we tend to follow social pressures so that we are not marginalized in our natural social groups. I think many people adhere to their particular beliefs not because they actually believe them but because they think they have no choice. Their families or communities or adopted groups make them feel they have no real freedom in the matter. This is specifically true of political and religious belief. In one case that made the news a few years ago, a woman got national notice for her strong positions as a Republican in her local and state affairs, but later openly confessed that she had felt she had to adopt those ideals because her husband and parents were all of the same ideology and she felt she had no freedom to “come out” against the grain of their beliefs. Another example is someone who, after voting a certain way for their entire lives, cannot look at their party and its ideals objectively. They seem unable to choose to stop supporting that party or change party affiliation or abandon the illusion of a two party system entirely and vote as an independent simply because that's how they have always voted.

Likewise, anonymous studies done in larger Southern Baptist congregations during the first decade of this century have shown that of an entire church group, more than half admitted that they never believed the dogmas of their faith, but felt they could not safely express those doubts for fear of losing their communities or social standing within those groups.

This is true for all of us, of course, and though we are often too subjective to see it, we also hold beliefs that are influenced by the many scenarios sketched out above. All of us have taken a side on some subject and usually not because we’ve done the hard work necessary to make an intellectual or moral decision, but because we’re afraid of being on the wrong side or of losing our community or faith group or both. This, more than any other motivating factor, can explain why some people are so vocal about certain topics. It’s not because they haven’t been presented with good arguments against their own beliefs, but rather because they fear that admitting that they have been wrong means that they will lose face in their community or that they are stupid or deficient. To lose buy-in socially has way more serious consequences (or so we think) than just admitting we were wrong in the first place. Most of us actually need the comfort and safety provided by groups and organizations since we define who we are by the tenets of those groups rather than by sorting out what we actually think on our own.

A YouTube content provider who has tried to show that the earth is flat, when shown data that proves their position wrong, cannot just accept the new data and change sides with no consequences. People will unsubscribe from their channel and they will face backlash. To prevent this, while knowing that they are wrong, they will work even harder to maintain their former position. This isn’t just true on YouTube, but in the pulpits and podiums of political and religious platforms everywhere. I once watched a local county man get put into place by an expert who—in front of the news vans, county government officials and a large slice of the public—made it clear that the gentleman's position was utter nonsense and pulled up the data to prove it. A week later, that man was still writing letters to the editor and posting on social media his original theses despite having been proven wrong in a powerful and very public way. Perhaps the pain of changing one's position and having been proved wrong is sharper than the social consequences of losing an affiliation.

Part of the problem, too, is that we live in an age of propaganda and superfluous information. We are constantly flooded by “breaking news” and fed talking points that may not be correct or even American in origin but that are designed to confirm our inmost biases. In a startlingly eye-opening discussion before Congress just a few weeks ago, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder gave several verifiable examples of Russian propaganda that had been taken up by the Chinese (and filtered through social media and certain news agencies) which had been proclaimed on the floor of the House or Senate as fact by members of Congress. This demonstrated that some individuals who have been elected to office to make laws to protect us were actively parroting talking points that came directly from Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machines. As if to drive the point further into our national heart, one of the representatives—someone who has a long history of spouting conspiracy theories—mentioned a Russian talking point during that very discussion, further cementing Snyder’s thesis, which he neatly underlined in that moment.

I have previously read Snyder's books and was aware that at least one former elected official was well known for supporting and spewing Russian propaganda while in office. What surprised me was that, with such a clear example on display during Snyder's time before the House committee, the representative whose gaff proved his point didn't immediately lose their constituency and political relevance. But then, I'm forced to remember what I already know. This particular adherent to ridiculous beliefs is actually just a mouthpiece for the people who put them in office, almost all of whom are equally convinced by Russian and Chinese propaganda themselves. The representative isn't an exception, but the rule. 

I would have been impressed if this member of Congress had, faced with the folly of their own ludicrous ideology, checked their position and publicly admitted that they had been duped. It would have gone a long way to helping their constituents see that they, too, may have been hoodwinked. Such an act, though, is a pipe dream. It would never make their preferred news organizations anyway, because that kind of admission would undermine the entire strategy of those platforms, which is to prevent people who watch them or subscribe from thinking for themselves.  

Partisan extremists cannot be elected if they admit they have been wrong about a talking point their own constituency have been told to believe by those so-called news channels. Such an admission from a person in leadership will never happen, mainly because we live in the “double down” era, where people dig in harder even when they know they are wrong just to keep a false idea alive to maintain their own positions of power and influence. The representative cannot create chaos or spout Putin’s propaganda if they don't have a platform.

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To allow a cultural problem of this nature to continue without dealing with it is untenable. An entire population of willfully ignorant people pretending to be certain just to feel as though they are justified in holding ludicrous opinions is a recipe for collapse. The symptoms of that collapse are no longer invisible. At every stage and level of our national polity, there is a distinct stench of certainty without the evidence to back it up which is compounded by a stark refusal to change one’s opinions once proven wrong.

Though this is a terrible state of affairs, the solution to this problem is fairly simple: foster a culture where people's opinions are based on verifiable sources and evidence, but then teach them that even these are not enough to be certain. Teach the children in schools right now that they can no longer afford to be “certain” about anything and that to take strong sides in anything past sports affiliation is a danger to themselves and our nation. Teach the kids that to actually, factually know a thing is a very rare position that must be born up on evidence and the hard work to excavate that evidence. We must teach them to be less dedicated to taking a particular side and more dedicated to trying to understand, as much as we can, that things change and we must change with them. Finally, in order to truly convey this new way of thinking, we must model it ourselves, abandoning the rigors of stolid side-taking and giving up those things we hold onto for all the wrong reasons. 

Repeatedly, things I once strongly believed have been proven wrong. It is difficult to be in a position of having been mistaken, but as Plato pointed out, this merely gives us the ability to learn something new. If I am wrong and admit it, I can adopt a new position, which gives me the ability to expand my knowledge and my thinking. The tenth step of the twelve steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program states: I continued to take personal inventory and when I was wrong, promptly admitted it. I’m not saying we all need to go to some AA meetings, but the foundational principle of AA is rigorous honesty with ourselves. It’s really hard to delude oneself if you live by a principle of regular inventory of the things we think we know and of the sides we choose to take.

There will always be people who refuse to change their minds. Their excuses are myriad. They may be too old or too comfortable with how they imbibe information. They may be too solidly plugged into those news channels and other “spun” sources. They may be tainted with prejudices or other moral frailties that blind them from seeing the immorality or foolishness of the side they choose. They may just think that the other side of the discussion is far worse and there are no other options.

These may seem like excuses and they assuredly are barriers to being a freethinker, but in most cases all of these obstacles can be overcome in time.

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When the facts change, I try to change my position accordingly. So my sides will always change and I will never be certain about anything. Yes, there are things that I sometimes feel certain about and about which we can be relatively sure we are right, if only from a moral position but those positions are defensible for that reason. That can only be a rare thing, too. For this reason, I try not to take sides, because it creates the illusion of a stable or strong position which is really built on sand.

Taking a side requires more than just watching TV or reading the newspaper. It requires actual research and study. The talking heads on TV and the newspapers and radio hosts may repeat their talking points enough for us to, like parrots in a cage, repeat back what we have learned by rote, but that must not be thought to be actual knowledge or understanding. A person who relies solely on this position is doomed to be on the wrong side of history regardless of where they fall on topics in the modern era.

Nevertheless, taking on a new or different position or choosing not to take a side are costly social behaviors. Such audacity can sometimes be life-threatening.

The time when a person providing a new point of view or at least thinking for themselves was carried away to be burnt at the stake by an angry mob is not quite over. Galileo, Copernicus, Spinoza, Lamark, Descartes, Hume and many others faced not just criticism for their fearless willingness to not adhere to the certainty of the church or political beliefs. Just a few years ago, a vice president of the United States was pursued through the national Capitol building by bloodthirsty goons with a noose because he refused to accept their cockeyed belief that the election was stolen. The seriousness of that scenario cannot be overstated. In the modern era, in the democratic Capital of the world, a member of the executive branch of our government was pursued by individuals threatening to hang him up by his neck until dead.  

I don’t think of this man as a moral exemplar. It is likely that, tested on his religious beliefs, we would find him to be recalcitrant and unwilling to change his mind. And yet he did do the right thing in the long run, which counts for something. One wonders what may have played out had he been caught and executed. Would the people who supported and encouraged his death from positions of power now be held accountable or would they merely adjust just enough to avoid the stigma of having been very wrong. I know at least one TV channel where talking points are continuously adapted so that their hard position on the very wrong side of things can be maintained. And people gobble it up as though it was the gospel, but then, not even the gospels are certain or verifiable.

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The slowly dawning realization that just because we hold knowledge or choose a side does not mean that we are correct may be one of those flaws of human nature that we must endure for as long as we are not extinct. My hope has always been that we can prolong the date of that extinction by being less certain and more skeptical of the things we’re told to believe or that are unarguably true. It’s tempting to think that, despite what the talking heads in the news or on social media claim, we can think for ourselves and rather than choose sides, apply doubt and our critical faculties to try to find out as much as we can about every side. If we have to make a choice, hopefully we won't shirk the responsibility to do the intellectual equivalent of thinking hard and leading with skepticism in all things.

This is why there are always a few people out there who seem to not take sides. They are neither Republican nor Democrat, they do not attend either Protestant or Catholic (or other) worship, they are not pro Israel or Palestine, but prefer to think that there are bad people on both sides who are harming good people on both sides. We can, in most cases, assume that Putin is a bad man, but not all Russians are and that we are responsible for remembering that, at the end of the day, we’re all of the same species and deserving of the benefit of the doubt.

I would like to think that the era of certainty, especially of the vile political or religious kind, is coming to an end. That the flare-ups of political and religious extremism are symptoms of rage at their own irrelevance. That they are irrelevant isn't new, but that these positions no longer obtain even ethical stability is perhaps one of the oldest problems of civilization.

The individuals that seek to maintain their own power or revenue streams will try to undermine our thoughtful desire to be freethinkers with propaganda and lies. I would prefer to be a person who is unsure; only knowing, as Socrates said, that I know nothing for certain, rather than being a person who would risk their entire life, reputation and moral position to keep hold of an ideology just because that’s what I’ve always thought or worse, because some millionaire newsman told me to think that way. 

Now is not a time for “Certain Sides”, but rather a time to admit when we are wrong and change our position, no matter how long we have voted or worshiped a certain way. Our children and grandchildren will thank us.

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.