by Rocky Wood
In Chapter Seventy Slade arrives in Harding. In Seventy One it is the evening of 29 June. Rowsmith and Edgars meet for dinner at Uncle Pete’s in Harding. She tells him something of her past, including the story of her dead boyfriend, Donald Knowles. Don’s mother had murdered him after he decided to marry Edie while she lived with the Knowles family in Gates Falls, Maine. They also see Arnie Kalowski having dinner at the restaurant with Kit Longtin. As the chapter ends the riot is beginning in Harding.
In Chapter Seventy Two Janet Cross had wandered Harding that afternoon. She went to the movies, fell asleep and woke at 9:30pm. She went to Mike’s Place but walked in on a confrontation between gangs. A Negro boy took her out the back of the restaurant and raped her. In Seventy Three Kenny Roth and Meg DeClancy return to the downtown from the dog races and head for a floating craps game behind Uncle Pete’s. They are attacked and Roth is beaten and stabbed. Meg runs. Nearby, oil tanks explode. In Seventy Four the Slade rally begins at 8:25pm. Slade whips the African Americans in the audience into a frenzy. Suddenly, Webs McCullough yells racial abuse and throws a smoke bomb, causing a panic. In Seventy Five McCullough and his men escape Slade’s rally. The rioting spreads in Harding. Webs’ group arm themselves. Slade tours the streets of the South City in the back of a pickup truck, urging people to go home.
In Chapter Seventy Six an oil tank explosion finds Kit Longtin and Arnie Kalowski in a cheap fleabag hotel room on Dock Street, where they had just had sex. They leave the Hotel but one of Arnie’s car tires is flat and he has to change it. Fire-trucks head toward the oil tank and docks fire. Four African Americans shoot at Arnie and Kit as they drive off. Arnie swerves to avoid hitting a woman, crashing the car into a light pole and stalling it. They run from the car into the crowd. In Seventy Seven, Coolidge sits at home, reading childhood books. His wife, Ann had gone to the Slade rally. He drives to his office where he falls asleep.
In Chapter Seventy Eight the Riot is described. Three separate “rumbles” occur between the Dock Street Socializers (white) and Memorial Circle Traders (black) gangs and there are many deaths. It is interesting to note that during a gang fight between the Socializers and the Turner Street Oligarchs in 1962 a boy was turned into a vegetable after a brick was dropped on his head, reminding us Jack Mort from The Dark Tower cycle. The firemen at the Docks fire are nearly helpless and the fire spreads to nearby tenements. The National Guard is called out. Thirty two people have been killed by midnight. In Seventy Nine Slade continues to try to get people off the streets but a white man shoots him. In Eighty McCullough’s group robs the South City Savings and Loan, using plastic explosives bought with some of the blackmail money. They take the haul and head toward Harding High School. In Eighty One Rowsmith, who had served as a nurse during the Second World War, helps at the temporary infirmary in a police station and is there when a shocked Janet Cross is brought in.
In Chapter Eighty Two Kit Longtin is put on a police-protected city bus, leaving Arnie Kalowski to be put to work fighting the fires. He comes across Edgars who is also helping the firemen. After calling Rowsmith at the police station they set out to meet her there. In Eighty Three Coolidge awakes in his office and realizes there are people in the school. Coolidge shoots Pete Venness with a BB pistol. McCullough returns fire with a shotgun, killing Coolidge. In Eighty Four Coolidge is dead; Pete Venness wounded in the eye. McCullough locks Venness, the money and Coolidge’s body in his office. Jigs, now realizing the danger McCullough presents, shoots him. Bull-Run then throws Jigs down the stairs, seriously injuring him. In the mayhem, McCullough accidentally shoots Bull-Run in the head. Marty, Spooner and Hash run, taking the unconscious Jigs with them; and in Eighty Five McCullough dies as he crawls back toward the money.
In Chapter Eighty Six, Slade wakes up in hospital and sees Roy at his bedside. He is then taken into surgery. In Eighty Seven the National Guard arrives in Harding and the fire is contained. A doctor tells Rowsmith that Cross had been raped. In Eighty Eight Arnie Kalowski and Edgars arrive at the infirmary. Edie Rowsmith tells them that Janet Cross had died at 2:50am that morning (30 June). Arnie screams and runs from the infirmary as dawn is just beginning to show.
Part Four is titled Good Mornin’, Blues. In Chapter Eighty Nine Meg DeClancy awakens, having survived the riot. In Ninety Slade comes to after surgery. He will live and the attempted assassin has given himself up. In Ninety One the remaining gang members’ car blows a tire 100 miles from Harding. Jigs had died during the trip. In Ninety Two Edgars drives Rowsmith to her apartment and they discuss both Arnie Kalowski’s situation and the causes of the riot. They go inside, together. In the concluding Chapter, Ninety Three, Arnie Kalowski arrives home. Edie Rowsmith rings him and they agree to meet at 3pm. Arnie then tells his still catatonic father that he loves him and gets him ready for bed.
Although it has not been published Sword and the Darkness represents the debut of a famous King town – Gates Falls, Maine. Edie Rowsmith lived there with John and Cass Knowles before his mother murdered John and Edie moved to Harding. Gates Falls is one of King’s earliest towns and he has continued to mention it throughout his career. It is a key location in Graveyard Shift, It Grows on You, The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan and Riding the Bullet. It is also mentioned in Blaze, The Body, The Dark Half, The Dead Zone, Gramma, Hearts in Atlantis, Movie Show, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, Needful Things, The Plant (the electronic version only), Rage and ‘Salem’s Lot. The town of Gates Center is mentioned and it also appears in It Grows on You.
Harding, based on Detroit as noted earlier, itself appears to be the same city in which Richards lived in The Running Man.
Chapter Seventy One is the most powerful section of the entire novel and would make a superb stand alone story, subject to some rewriting and editing by King. This Chapter tells Edie Rowsmith’s back-story in Gates Falls, Maine before the War. In reading this Chapter I formed the view that as a stand alone effort it would represent one of the top ten or so of King’s short stories. In my opinion, if a reader did not know this was King’s writing from 1970 most would assume it was from a later King period, most likely the early 1980s. This makes it some of the most exciting of the material at the Fogler, a clear if slightly unpolished view of Stephen King the professional writer. Indeed, this discovery makes it clear that King was destined to be a writer of the horrors humanity inflicts upon itself as much as mainstream horror, and most certainly not the standard run-of-the-mill writer of race riot and “contemporary” novels.
As publication of this book neared King kindly agreed to allow this Chapter to be published, as originally written. It follows this review (readers should tackle the Chapter before reading the next paragraph).
Edie Rowsmith’s story is as poignant as any King has ever produced. She related it to her school teacher friend and lover, John Edgars, the night of the Harding riots. Edie was one of twelve children, only four of whom lived beyond the age of five. Her only surviving brother died of peritonitis aged fifteen. She attended Gorham Normal School before moving to Gates Falls, Maine in 1938, where she began teaching at a two-room school. She boarded with the Knowles family. She and the son, Donald, fell in love. Don was college educated, worked at a bank in Brunswick and in addition to being the apple of his mother’s eye was also the focus of her ambitions. On 31 January 1939 Don returned to Gates Falls with an engagement ring for Edie. When Don told his mother he wanted to marry Edie she killed him with a kindling hatchet and cut off his genitals. Edie found the body later that morning, along with a catatonic Cass Knowles. Cass ended up in a “place” in Augusta. Her dreams lost, Edie moved to Harding and Edgars was the first chance she’d had for real love in the intervening thirty years.
One of the more interesting characters is “Webs” (short for “Cobwebs”) McCullough, a psychopath in the tradition of The Dead Zone’s Greg Stillson. A white man born and raised in Wilmot, Pennsylvania, at an early age he began to kill cats and dogs. Aged fourteen, he killed a nine year old boy with a piece of rusty pipe.
He left Wilmot at the age of 15 and five years later turned up in Harding, where he revamped a local gang, the Oligarchs. In between he had killed an itinerant laborer in south Texas and an old woman in Reno. He always wore dark glasses. He planned and started the riot in Harding in June 1969 as a cover for a series of robberies. One of the gang members shot him on the night of the riots after his psychopathic streak became too much even for them and he died shortly afterwards.
As one of King’s earliest attempts at a novel Sword in the Darkness has numerous weaknesses, not the least of which is its overcomplicated, schizophrenic nature. There are simply too many storylines competing for the reader’s attention, many of which add nothing to the overall impact. On the other hand it is exciting to see King literally bursting from the cocoon of his youth and college career, only three years before Carrie would be accepted for publication. Many of King’s trademarks are clearly evident and future researchers will perhaps use this manuscript as a benchmark in King’s career – one of the last transitional works before he became a fully-fledged brand-name author.
The story has a Bachman flavor to it, with its dark, unrelenting spin deeper and deeper into disaster. This Bachman feel is not unexpected, considering a number of the novels later published as Bachman paperback originals were written very early in King’s career.
Another major flaw in the novel is the multitude of characters, which tend to overwhelm the reader and make it hard to keep all in focus. The gang members in particular go by a series of complicated nicknames and their gangs are hard to keep apart. The reader may also find it unclear which groups and characters are white and which black, something of a problem in a race riot novel. On the positive side King does a great job of showing the motivations of almost every character, a skill he would quickly refine, and presents Harding as a fully-fledged, living city through skilful and observant description.
King has made it quite clear that this novel will never be published, even in a revised form. The subject matter, a race riot, is highly dated and would perhaps even lead to accusations about King’s motives in choosing such subject matter. At one point in his career there were ridiculous implications that King was somehow racist in his portrayal of African-American characters. These accusations did not stand even the simplest scrutiny.
In the authors’ opinion King’s decision never to publish this novel is the correct one. While epic in scope and a compelling story it suffers from a certain lack of literary maturity. It is immensely interesting to observe the early developmental stages of the style that would become King’s and shows us something of the writer who was to take the publishing world by storm.
133 Stephen King: The Art of Darkness p.21
Chapter 71 – Sword in the Darkness
By Stephen King
Editor’s Note: For more detail of King’s unpublished novel, Sword in the Darkness, see the previous chapter. We thank Stephen King for allowing the publication of the Chapter below.
As the Chapter opens on June 29 of 1969 disaster is about to visit the mid-western city of Harding. A criminal gang, led by the psychopathic Webs McCullough, is about to set off a race riot by creating a disturbance at a speech by black activist Marcus Slade. During the riot they plan to commit a series of robberies while the police are otherwise engaged.
As these events are about to unfold two teachers from Harding High School, Edie Rowsmith and John Edgars meet at Rowsmith’s apartment before heading to dinner. Edgars had recently been dismissed from the school after being falsely accused of sexual harassment by a student and intended to leave town to remake his life. He and Rowsmith, some twenty years older than Edgars, had formed a casual romantic attachment.
He was five minutes early and sat in the living-room leafing idly through a copy of Newsweek while she carefully applied her lipstick. It had taken her almost a half-hour to make up; maybe she wasn’t old (no maybe about it), but habits and fears were hard to reverse. She had a horror of making herself look garish, had been subconsciously afraid all afternoon that she would end up looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane--that she would see herself in a sudden pained wince of his eyes.
“Well, this is the big night,” John called in to her.
“It is?” She blotted the lipstick and looked at it anxiously; it was really too red. And yet anything pinker would be too young, perhaps make him think she was trying to be kittenish.
“Marcus Slade,” Edgars said. “He speaks at South City Manual Trades tonight.”
“I’d forgotten,” she said, unhappily slipping her lipstick back into its holder. “Do you think he’ll get a big crowd?” She ventured timidly through the door. She had worn the green dress with the low back--worn it almost defiantly. She had studied her neck and shoulders in the mirror. It looked good. Dammit, it looked good. The skin was smooth, unmarked. The skin of a girl, still.
He got up. “Yes, I think they’ll turn them away at the doors. You look fine, Edie.”
She felt the weight slip from her shoulders. “I look like what I am,” she said dryly. “A lady French teacher on a hot night. But I’ll take the compliment--I worked for it.”
John grinned. He was wearing a light gray suit of some shiny fabric and a pale blue tie and he looked very fine indeed. She said so.
“Yah,” he said. “Suit takes off ten pounds. But let’s go.”
He had parked his car in front of her building, and he drove through the heavy downtown traffic casually but well. The streets seemed oddly deserted, and the sun hung halfway over the horizon like a drop of blood.
“Red sun at night, sailor’s delight,” John said.
She nodded, but her thoughts were far off. Partly on Don and the evening in Gates Falls, Maine (the sun had been red that evening too, but it had been winter, a cold sun), and partly somewhere else, in a casual kind of limbo.
“John?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re the nicest person I’ve met in Harding. And I’ve been here a long time.”
“You’re New England, aren’t you?”
She was startled, then amused. “It still shows?”
“Only a little.” They had skirted The Circle and were now approaching the docks; she could smell the salt, the fish odor, could see the dusty pigeons that flapped and wheeled against the darkening sky. “The way you go light on your r’s. The way you drop your g’s on some of your -ing words.”
She smiled. “I was born in Scarborough, Maine. My mother was a school-teacher and my father was a carpenter. They were quite a couple. Quite a couple.” She looked down at her hands, plain, rather long-fingered, unringed. “I was the fifth of thirteen children. Eight of them died before they were five. My only brother, John, died of peritonitis when he was fifteen. He kept a journal. I have it. It’s remarkable. I think he might have been quite a writer one day.”
“And your sisters?”
“One died of breast cancer two years ago. Cal and Lois are both married. Pennsylvania and California.”
“Why did you never marry, Edie?”
“I almost did. His name was Donald Knowles. He--” she hesitated only fractionally--“he was a great deal like you, John. Very nice. Gentle.”
“What happened?”
“He died.”
“I’m sorry,” John said. He put on his blinker and she looked up to see they were turning into the parking-lot of Uncle Pete’s. She blinked, a little surprised. She had all but forgotten where they were going.
“At times I am too,” she said. “Sorry, that is. Sometimes not. I’ve had a reasonably good life. Not an exciting one, but good. I am satisfied.” She told the lie with a calm ease.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Edie.” He stopped, and the car-park boy came over.
“You’ve said that before,” she said, suddenly grinning. It wasn’t an easy grin. The memory of Don, unquiet in its grave for so long, seemed to be stirring with a disquieting life of its own. Things better left covered were shifting. It frightened
her.
John gave the car-park boy a dollar and they went inside. Uncle Pete’s was all done in blue--blue tables, blue chairs, blue lights. An unobtrusive band dressed in midnight-blue tuxedos was playing an unobtrusive tune which also sounded blue. No one was dancing.
The headwaiter, also tricked out in blue, seated them, produced menus, then retired. “My God, the prices are unbelievable!” she said. “John, you can’t--”
He put a finger across her lips.
“No more,” he said. “This is my night, Edie. Give me what I want.”
She smiled. “All right, Mr. Edgars. You asked for it.” John beckoned the waiter, and she proceeded to order a huge steak (Maine or no Maine, she had always detested seafood), shoestring potatoes, peas, a small salad, and ice cream to follow. John ordered lobster.
“And to drink?”
Edie hesitated for a moment, at a loss, and John said promptly: “Martinis. Wine with the meal, which I leave to your discretion.” The waiter nodded and melted away.
She was about to say something about martinis making her giddy when she stopped, hesitated, and said: “Isn’t that Arnie Kalowski over there?”