![]() The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs in Foxy’s garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive. He had even known something about the concentration camps. He knew that the Americans won most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them from Germany onto London. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets with net on them and the krauts wore sort of square ones. He had known about the war, of course – not the stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pajamas – but World War II. Boring.”īut by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics. ![]() “What are those?” Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the stairs. They’re Westerns mostly, but there’s some Turok, Son of Stone and –” His mother had a hangover and had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. “I know there’s comics here someplace,” Foxy had said. He remembered Foxy’s crewcut, and the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it. He remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. Anderson was full of bullshit at the time, but that day in Foxy’s garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn’t been right after all. ![]() That’s why Careers Day is so important, children – it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.” And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out not to be teaching fifth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards. You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. ‘It comes all at once,” Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST. He remembered in the fifth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs. He’s so so good that way.ĮXCERPT FROM Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King – Apt Pupil How the obsession leads to murder and madness will have to wait … but here King is setting the stage. Watch how King powerfully sets up the kid’s obsession. I remember the following excerpt – parts of it almost word for word, it made that much of an impression on me when I first read it. I want to get inside other people’s psychologies as well. That’s why I find him not just fun to read … but a bit addictive. Whether it be a crazy clown in the sewer … or the fact of the Holocaust … King is interested primarily in the psychological. To me, the best thing about him is (because I’m not into genre fiction, not in the slightest) – his interest is always in what happens to a person when he or she is confronted with horror. I definitely don’t mind it if the person is a good writer – and King is great. ![]() He just takes you through it step by step (and yeah, sometimes his “steps” could be edited down – he takes 3 pages for what could be one paragraph) … but I don’t mind that so much. I can’t remember much else about it … but I remember being captivated by it when I first read it … and King just has this way of describing the “series of events” that leads up to a catharsis/confrontation … so that there is no doubt in your mind the horror that is underneath it all. The riff-raff of the world … the world needs a cleansing. He becomes convinced that the homeless people lying around their city, under bridges, etc., – need to be killed. Some of the details of the story are lost to me, it’s been a long time – but basically, the kid goes off the deep end. ![]() The kid befriends his next-door neighbor – but it’s more like he insinuates himself into his life, because he wants to get closer to the Holocaust, and he believes this man was one of the perpetrators against the crime of humanity. The sheer numbers stun you – because you don’t even know what “6 million” even looks like – it’s hard to picture that many people all at once. I remember my first encounter with the Holocaust – and how difficult it was to get my mind around it. The kid has become obsessed with the Holocaust – it haunts his dreams, he can’t stop thinking about it … it grabs hold of him and never lets go. A young kid becomes overwhelmingly convinced that his elderly next-door neighbor is a Nazi war criminal in hiding. The second novella in this collection is called “Apt Pupil” and it was also made into a film (rest in peace, Brad Renfro – always thought he was a nice young actor, sad). Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King ![]()
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