One of King's lesser-known short stories is a surprisingly devastating piece of realistic fiction on par with his early novellas.
Stephen King's latest collection of short stories hit stores last month and, per my request, hit my Christmas tree earlier today. As someone who specializes in short fiction (specialize is a bit generous--I don't have sufficient patience for anything longer than a novella), King's short stories service both my affinity for the aforementioned style and creative storytelling. I might not be able to recount every detail of King's longer works, especially those that suffer from the King Crash and Burn, but a great number of his short stories still have their claws stuck into my brain. Who can forget the chilling conclusion to "The Jaunt" or the horrifyingly visceral "I Am the Doorway"? Even his goofier projects (which feature villains of the industrial washing machine variety) still make an impact, primarily because they allow King to flex his strongest creative muscles in one tremendous burst.
While his latest endeavor, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, isn't quite as memorable or disconcerting as his early anthologies, it has no difficulty absorbing the reader in King's succinct, yet lush, prose and enchanting narratives. As a whole, it is significantly better than his 2008 anthology Just After Sunset, a surprisingly weak and scattered effort that produced a few diamonds in the rough--the short, but tantalizingly voltaic, "Graduation Afternoon" and the moving, richly-realized "The Things They Left Behind", both of which are trenched in post-9/11 paranoia--but was ultimately disappointing. The book would have been a staunchly mediocre publication had it not contained one of the best things King has written since the nineties.
The aptly-named "The Gingerbread Girl" is the second story in the book and a bit of a whopper, almost a novella. Initially, I was a little intimidated by the length, especially after enduring the book's predictable, unmemorable clunker of a beginning, but I pressed on out of intrigue. I sometimes have trouble focusing on text and am wont to set a book aside every ten or so pages. With "The Gingerbread Girl", however, I devoured it in a single ravenous gulp. I recall setting the book aside after I finished and staring vacantly at the wall for a moment while I attempted to grasp what I had just read. I also remember thinking: Well, I should just put the book down forever. It won't get better than that.
"The Gingerbread Girl" concerns a young woman named Em who loses her newborn daughter to crib death and takes up running to cope with her grief. "Only fast running would do." Her obsession with running causes the rift between herself and her husband Henry to intensify until Em finally runs away from her life. She moves into her father's small house on Vermilion Key in Florida, where Em spends her days reading and running on the beach. One day, Em encounters a car in the driveway of a mansion she thought was empty and discovers a dead girl in its trunk. She finds herself in the clutches of the mansion's sadistic owner, who is ready and willing to make Em his next victim.
Despite its length, the story gallops along at a breakneck pace. We get introduced to Em and her trauma, which is presented with sharp, unflinching realism, we learn how her obsession with running evolves, we cheer for her when she finds solace in her beach house--all without missing a beat. The prose here is classic King: simple, honest, and heart-stopping. The confrontation inside the mansion is some of the best thematic writing King has ever done and while there isn't much dialogue in this particular story, the narrative is absolutely spellbinding in its uncanny ability to trap the reader in Em's world.
This brings me to another strength of the story: Em. While King is justifiably proficient at writing male characters--particularly those with a preference for teaching English and New England beer--his female characters leave much to be desired. Literally. King never hesitates to describe, in exquisite detail, the largeness of a girl's bust or her coltish legs or how wonderful a cotton skirt looks on her figure. We get it, Stephen. You're straight. We're convinced. Even mothers and grandmothers are introduced with a quick evaluation of their physical assets! No one cares about how her breasts were "token nubs". King will wax poetic about his male character's morals and emotional dilemmas, then relegate his female characters to roles like put-upon wife or saucy mistress with little regard for their character development. Em, however, is written well enough to carry the entire story herself--and without ever stopping to explain to the reader that, yes, she had breasts. Her feelings regarding her daughter's death, as well as her mounting disgust towards her husband's behavior, are portrayed as complicated, but not wrong. King really put some considerate thought into shaping Em's emotional response, as well as her fixation on running, which becomes a crucial plot point later in the story.
It is this plot point that makes this story so astonishing. The examination of grief in the work's first half is impressive on its own, but when Em finds herself desperately trying to escape her kidnapper, there is a single scene that is branded into my memory like a hot iron onto hide. Em is tied to a chair, frightened and angry and frantic, when she begins to flex her now muscular legs. All those months of running, running she believed was just a method of coping with her child's death, have prepared her for this moment. King depicts this moment somewhat ambiguously, refusing to chalk it up to the work of a higher power or shoehorn a supernatural element into a strictly grounded story. It is up to the reader to interpret the gravity of this theme. There is no way to accurately summarize just how incredible this moment is in the story, especially since it's proceeded by a white-knuckled action scene that is redolent of some of the best passages from Misery.
While "The Gingerbread Girl" is by no means perfect--the villain receives so little characterization that I presently can't remember a single thing about him--it is an incredibly strong, entertaining, and at times poignant short story that truly embodies the spirit of a good Stephen King short story. The protagonist is sympathetic and so real that she occasionally runs right off the page, the prose is fresh and thematic, and the finale will keep your pulse racing. In a book of bitter disappointments, "The Gingerbread Girl" is a deliciously sweet treat that will leave you satisfied.
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