Mrs. Todd's (Pastoral) Shortcut (Critical Essay‪)‬

A surprisingly complex feature of Stephen King's 1985 story collection Skeleton Crew is its six-page appendix, modestly entitled "Notes." Located after the final story and containing accounts of most of the foregoing contents, the notes are largely anecdotal: this or that story was written when I was living here; this or that magazine originally turned the story down. But in these notes King also tells us what inspired some of Skeleton Crew's tales and gives us a glimpse at not just where and when he wrote them, but how and even why. Plenty of writers (plenty of artists in every medium, for that matter) have given productive and interesting accounts of the creative process. An earlier writer of weird stories, King's literary ancestor and sometime fellow New Englander Edgar Allan Poe, for example, famously described in his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition" how his poem "The Raven" was the result of a series of thoroughly rational decisions based around an initial selection of a subject--the death of a beautiful woman--and a vowel sound--the long o, as in the concatenation word Nevermore. The rest of the poem, Poe confides to us, unfolded with a certain degree of inevitability. Most readers of the essay come to doubt Poe's sincerity, either because of its immodest claims or because its rapid appearance seems designed to cash in on the poem's celebrity. But while the motives behind retrospective statements of authorial intention like this may always be open to skepticism, they seem to feed a very real appetite among consumers of emerging literature for interpretive guidance. When a story or a novel first appears, where are we supposed to locate it among its sources and analogues, or among the writer's other works? What else, beyond the words on the page, is the author willing to tell us about the genesis of the work, or its denouement, or any given moment in-between? Inquiries like these seem to be very persistent, especially in a consumer culture like ours, and the answers they elicit are often very instructive--though sometimes, as in the Poe case, more for what they don't say than for what they do.