The Books: “Different Seasons” ‘Apt Pupil’ (Stephen King)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King

The second novella in this collection is called “Apt Pupil” and it was also made into a film (rest in peace, Brad Renfro – always thought he was a nice young actor, sad). A young kid becomes overwhelmingly convinced that his elderly next-door neighbor is a Nazi war criminal in hiding. The kid has become obsessed with the Holocaust – it haunts his dreams, he can’t stop thinking about it … it grabs hold of him and never lets go. I remember my first encounter with the Holocaust – and how difficult it was to get my mind around it. The sheer numbers stun you – because you don’t even know what “6 million” even looks like – it’s hard to picture that many people all at once. The kid befriends his next-door neighbor – but it’s more like he insinuates himself into his life, because he wants to get closer to the Holocaust, and he believes this man was one of the perpetrators against the crime of humanity. Some of the details of the story are lost to me, it’s been a long time – but basically, the kid goes off the deep end. He becomes convinced that the homeless people lying around their city, under bridges, etc., – need to be killed. The riff-raff of the world … the world needs a cleansing. So he begins his mission. Like a one-man wrecking ball. I can’t remember much else about it … but I remember being captivated by it when I first read it … and King just has this way of describing the “series of events” that leads up to a catharsis/confrontation … so that there is no doubt in your mind the horror that is underneath it all. He just takes you through it step by step (and yeah, sometimes his “steps” could be edited down – he takes 3 pages for what could be one paragraph) … but I don’t mind that so much. I definitely don’t mind it if the person is a good writer – and King is great. To me, the best thing about him is (because I’m not into genre fiction, not in the slightest) – his interest is always in what happens to a person when he or she is confronted with horror. Whether it be a crazy clown in the sewer … or the fact of the Holocaust … King is interested primarily in the psychological. And so am I. That’s why I find him not just fun to read … but a bit addictive. I want to get inside other people’s psychologies as well. And King is all about that.

I remember the following excerpt – parts of it almost word for word, it made that much of an impression on me when I first read it.

Watch how King powerfully sets up the kid’s obsession. How the obsession leads to murder and madness will have to wait … but here King is setting the stage. He’s so so good that way.

EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King – Apt Pupil

He remembered in the fifth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs. Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.

‘It comes all at once,” Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That’s why Careers Day is so important, children – it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.” And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out not to be teaching fifth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.

Todd had thought Mrs. Anderson was full of bullshit at the time, but that day in Foxy’s garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn’t been right after all.

The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. He remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He remembered Foxy’s crewcut, and the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it. He remembered everything.

“I know there’s comics here someplace,” Foxy had said. His mother had a hangover and had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. “Neat ones. They’re Westerns mostly, but there’s some Turok, Son of Stone and –”

“What are those?” Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the stairs.

“Ah, they’re no good,” Foxy said. “True war stories, mostly. Boring.”

“Can I look at some?”

“Sure. I’ll find the comics.”

But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics. He was lost. Utterly lost.

It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.

It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course – not the stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pajamas – but World War II. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets with net on them and the krauts wore sort of square ones. He knew that the Americans won most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them from Germany onto London. He had even known something about the concentration camps.

The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs in Foxy’s garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive.

Here was Ilse Koch. Here were crematoriums with thick doors standing open on their soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and prisoners in striped uniforms. The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of control on the east of Santa Donato, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy’s garage but caught somewhere crosswire in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things, and his hand began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a column of print beneath a picture of tangled bodies at a place called Dachau, this figure jumped out at him:

And he thought: Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that’s twice as many people as there are in L.A.! But then, in another magazine (the cover of this one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi uniform approached her with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw it again:

His headache got worse. His mouth went dry. Dimly, from some distance, he heard Foxy saying he had to go in for supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay here in the garage and read while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and said sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war magazines, until his mother called and asked if he was ever going to go home.

Like a key turning in a lock.

All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets as well as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short men. They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.

Like falling in love.

Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything about it – a yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall, the oil-stain on the cement floor, the way the magazines had been tied together with orange twine. He remembered how his headache had gotten a little worse each time he thought of that incredible number,

He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those places. Everything. And I want to know which is more true – the words, or the ads they put beside the words.

He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back under the stairs and thought: She was right. I’ve found my GREAT INTEREST.