‘Every age of man has had a devil, and every age has paid for his desires…’
Billed as ‘The last Castle Rock story’ upon publication in October of 1991, Needful Things was Stephen King’s first novel following his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol addiction. While it sold well (over 1.5 million copies), it was not a critical success and it hasn’t emerged as one of King’s better-known novels in the years since its release (although it did inspire the excellent Rick and Morty episode ‘Something Ricked This Way Comes’). This was my first foray into Needful Things and while it certainly isn’t perfect, you can’t beat dancing with the devil from time to time…
Castle Rock is a sleepy Maine town with a dark underbelly that is gleefully exposed by shop owner and lord of the underworld Leland Gaunt. One by one, the residents of Castle Rock fall under the spell of Gaunt and his eponymous antique shop Needful Things until the whole town starts to fall apart. Local Sheriff Alan Pangborn and his lover Polly Chalmers act as the moral compass for the town while Danforth “Buster” Keeton, the town’s head-selectman and Castle Rock legend Ace Merrill become Gaunt’s goons.
Despite its similarities to W.W. Jacobs’ influential short story The Monkey’s Paw, the basic premise of Needful Things is an intriguing one. A mysterious man rolls into town and anyone that enters his shop leaves with the thing they’ve always wanted… but at a terrible cost. The return of Pangborn (from The Dark Half) and Ace (from Stand By Me) is satisfying rather than forced and Gaunt himself is a suitably sinister presence (although there are obvious similarities to Straker from Salem’s Lot). The problem here is the plot. There’s too much of it. While King is often excellent at conjuring up a novel’s worth of townsfolk to inhabit his fictional worlds, too many of the characters here feel samey or derivative. There are only so many times you can read about a flawed, selfish character visiting Leland Gaunt, leaving with a trinket and then carrying out a heinous act in return. This cycle repeats for hundreds of pages with little variation although the subplot involving Brian Rusk, a boy who just wants a Sandy Koufax baseball card and instead ends up wracked with guilt, breaks the monotony somewhat.
King is often criticised for his endings but I think he wraps things up quite nicely here (that being said, this wasn’t King’s final visit to Castle Rock after all, he has returned many times since) and I was rooting for Polly and Pangborn until the very end. King followed this book with Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, two of his most interesting and singular works, and so Needful Things marks the end of King’s wild drug years and sees the emergence of a new writer beginning to take shape. It’s interesting when viewed through that context but it deserves to be remembered as one of King’s lesser novels.