My Auntie Susan introduced me to Stephen King when she gave me a copy of The Stand in around 1978, when I was 12, and that was what was great about books in the seventies, before home video and when cinemas didn’t let you in to the scary stuff unless you looked like you could pass for 18 – there were no such walls around books. And because this is Stephen King I can’t help feeling that this was in some way a possession, like the demon that jumps from partner to partner in the movie It Follows. King has been with me ever since, and I now feel that the rest of the world has finally caught up with my own opinion, that he is as fine a writer as we have, and would be far more feted if his material wasn’t so damn entertaining.
King has always had a nice line in short stories, and I’ve picked ‘Grey Matter’ from his first collection, Night Shift, because it so perfectly captures a boy’s relationship with beer, this strange stuff which, on first taste, is absolutely disgusting but which can take its own hold on you (possession, again). Suffice to say, in this story, the beer takes hold in rather a different way. The story is also a great example of King’s masterful eye for the inflections of everyday speech, particularly the speech of his home state, Maine. The narrator is believable from the very first line, because he speaks like what he is, an old man shooting the shit with his friends in a windswept smalltown grocery store in the depths of winter. He’s full of magnificent proverbs and aphorisms which ring entirely authentically, in my ear at least, my favourite being ‘when you get up to seventy without an oil change, you feel that north-east wind around your heart.’
First published in Cavalier, October 1972. Collected in Night Shift, New English Library, 1978
A Personal Anthology 