You Like it Darker

Stephen King's "Two Talented Bastids"

I’ve got two copies of the audiobook for A Lonesome Place for Dying to give away! First to comment or reply and ask, gets them. Check out an audio sample on the landing page here.

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The lead-off story from Stephen King’s new collection You Like It Darker is one of his shaggiest and strangest, yet also most compelling. I can’t quite wrap my head around it.

I like King’s early novels a lot, but I love his collections. The later King of “A Death” and “Big Driver” is my favorite later King. He does certain things as well or better than anyone, suspense and desperation and working class friendship. He’s the last of the pulp writers, the guys who knocked out five-cent-a-word stories for Manhunt, hoping for the occasional sale to Cosmo or Playboy. I love that about him.

In “Two Talented Bastids,” a pair of lifelong pals go on a hunting trip in the mid-70s. One is an aspiring novelist, the other a wannabe painter. Middle-aged and working class, Laird Carmody and Dave “Butch” LaVerdiere are comfortable but by all accounts, unexceptional.

Something happens on that trip which Butch and Laird never talk about, not to Laird’s son Mark, not to the tenacious reporter determined to find the truth years later. But soon after that trip, Laird becomes a famous novelist, and Dave a wildly successful painter.

The story is told by Mark, now middle aged himself and with Laird recently deceased. By Mark and the reporter are struck by the strange fact that Butch and Laird both became famous artists later in life. A coincidence, or something else?

Something else, of course (no spoilers to that). Mark finds a manuscript of his father’s recounting the trip. Is it a fiction, the truth, or something Mark made up himself?

“Two Talented Bastids” has a compelling question at its center, which ties into a more philosophical debate about talent and where it comes from.

The two men were well liked; everyone said so. And they neighbored. When Philly Loubird had a heart attack with his field half-hayed and thunderstorms in the offing, Pop took him to the hospital in Castle Rock while Butch marshaled a few of his dump-picking buddies and they finished the job before the first drops hit. They fought grassfires and the occasional house fire with the local volunteer fire department. Pop went around with my mother collecting for what was then called the Poor Fund, if he didn’t have too many cars to fix or work to do at the dump. They coached youth sports. They cooked side-by-side at the VFD pork roast supper in the spring and the chicken barbecue that marked the end of summer. 

Just country men living country lives. 

No violins. 

Until there was a whole orchestra.

You can read a longer excerpt of the story here.

Questions aside, there’s a sloppiness to the story that might be on purpose. It rushes through the supernatural explanation, and there are several glaring anachronisms in Laird’s manuscript—Judge Judy mentioned in a 1970s tale, or an Epi Pen being deployed years before it was invented. Are these on purpose? A clue to the story being fake? I have no idea.

It’s a bit weird how ‘talent’ and million-selling fame are treated in the story as the same thing. Laird and Butch are mediocre, and then they’re rich and famous and brilliant—all three being synonyms in the context of the story.

I guess you could read “Two Talented Bastids” as a commentary on King’s own success, if you wanted to. Or on his sons following him into the writing trade, having to negotiate their father’s fame. Maybe King is as mystified by talent and success as the rest of us. The story could also be purposefully shaggy—of course the answer is a fantasy, and whoever dreams of being brilliant and under-appreciated?

“Bastids” isn’t King’s best story, but it’s doing something different than most. If you have thoughts on it, I’d like to hear.