Meg's got an idea! Finally!

More baseball in the Heffernan homestead last night (Reg, hope you don’t mind I tell people all about your family’s obsession with the sport), although it really is odd that my friend Reggie watches so much of it in the post-season. She’s not into sports beyond this. She doesn’t dig basketball or football or golf or any of the girls’ sports we have at RCHS and she’s always trying to get out of PE. She won’t even walk to the Starbucks near our school which is like, three blocks away. She drives everywhere, which I guess I would too if I had a car and a license. Reg just started driving with her permit which means technically she has to have a licensed driver in the car but her parents don’t really enforce that. Sometimes her older brother Billy will come with us to school (he’s a senior) but most often, it’s just Reg and me. Her parents gave her their old Explorer, the one they use to haul stuff around. When she turns 16 next month, they’re buying her a new car. Pretty sweet.

Anyway, I didn’t get to post last night because the Mets beat the Cardinals to tie the series and there were like, a million home runs and Reggie and her brothers Tivo’ed the game and had to watch the highlights over and over again and it got to be late and I had to get home to finish my French and help Lucie iron her work clothes. Rainout in St. Louis today so I can finally post tonight.

After much research of other people’s blogs, I have finally decided what my blog theme will be. I call it Mega Girl’s Meta Lists. I got the idea from this one woman who posts three beautiful things she sees or experiences every day. It was like one of those “aha” moments for me, like, “Why didn’t I think of that myself?” She writes about things big and small: a child playing with a balloon in a park or a great cup of coffee. But since I can’t steal that idea, much as I would like to, I decided to go my own way.

I am using a Top 3.5 (Top 10 is so Letterman). What’s the half, you ask? Well, there’s first place, second place, third place, and then honorable mention, which is like a half. But they won’t be topics like my favorite albums or my favorite movies which are too easy and don’t mean anything. They’ll be meta lists – lists beyond lists, lists that mean more than just the elements contained within the lists. They will be the way to get to know me and who I am, which I think is what Evelyn wants us to do. I think the individual is at the heart of the media and that is why it matters.

So without further ado, here is my first Meta List:

Top 3.5 Scary Stephen King Novels:

1. The Shining
2. It
3. Pet Sematary
3.5 Cujo

Since it was just Friday the 13th and Halloween is right around the corner, I was thinking about my favorite scary stories and since there really is no scary without Stephen King, I figured let’s not beat around the bush and just go with his books. And for all you people who sniff at Stephen King and call his stuff trash, I have this to say: get over yourselves. I love books but I am certainly no snob about it. I love “Animal Farm” for its political allegory and I love Harry Potter for its magic. I recognize what classic literature is but pop fiction is great too. And just because something is more complex doesn’t make it better. I think it just takes so long for people to get through Tolstoy that when they finish, they feel such a sense of accomplishment. But they don’t necessarily feel joy. “Wow, I finally finished ‘War and Peace,’” they say. Not “Wow, what a great story ‘War and Peace’ is.” No one I know has ever said they loved that book. But pretty much everyone I know loves at least one Stephen King novel.

Now, “The Shining” is not the movie, which also scared me half to death. The book is about the boy, Danny; the movie is about Jack Nicholson. Both are great but the movie is not the book. The isolation of the Overlook Hotel works its evil on the family and the little boy, cursed with a supernatural ability, is the only one who can save them. The movie “overlooks” (ha, ha) the father’s abuse of the boy, which I think is a mistake. It’s important to know that Jack, an alcoholic, hits Danny because later in the hotel, when Jack physically becomes a monster, Danny is the one to save his mother and himself. The little boy stands up to the father and stops the abuse. This book has some scary scenes in it. I love it. I have read it three times so far and it’s a pretty long book.

“It” is very scary. I never saw the TV movie that they made but Lucie said she couldn’t watch the whole thing. This is one of those “older people recount their memories” stories. A group of friends recover their memories of their childhood and yes, there is a clown and if you are already predisposed to a fear of clowns, this book won’t help you get over it.

“Pet Sematary” is creepy because it’s about people coming back to life. It’s kind of sad, too because the father wants so desperately to have his dead son back. Of course it’s never that easy in a Stephen King novel. You can’t just come back from the dead; you have to bring evil with you.

“Cujo” gets honorable mention only because I wasn’t scared that much. Lucie hated it, though, because of the big bad dog. This also was made into a movie and Lucie hated that too. My sister is sort of afraid of dogs in general, which is why she said we can’t ever have a pet, even though I always swear I will take care of it. So I put Cujo on the list for her.

Pretty much every Stephen King book has been made into a movie (some good, most bad) and The Simpsons have parodied just about every movie (love The Simpsons!). It’s hard to capture what King gets right. There is something about the way he writes, not just what he writes, that scares people silly. His characters are normal, everyday people. They are working class or middle class. There are no architects or advertising executives like other stories use (architecture and advertising seem to be the only careers for people in books and movies). And unlike traditional horror movies where kids having sex at camp are eviscerated in their sleep, King’s victims are all ages. Although he has definite morals, no one in his books is all good or all bad. I like that.