Stephen King's latest short story recently appeared in the New Yorker.  You can read it here at the New Yorker website.  I wonder what Stephen King in the 80s would have said, if you had told him that one day he would be published in the New Yorker?  

I wonder if Stephen King in 2009 remembers what it was like to be that earlier, scrappier, broker Stephen King?  I've wondered this for years, as I watched King's protagonists reflect his gradually rising standard of living.  And his poverty-level characters go from working class heroes to buffoons and scary idiots - from "I" to "The Other."

I ask this because "Premium Harmony" paints poor people in the cruelest possible fashion.  Ray is a chain smoker and his wife Mary is fat, and neither of them has the willpower to overcome their addictions.  If I didn't know any better, I would think this story had been written by a staunch "homeless people choose that lifestyle" Republican.  

According to Wikipedia, Stephen King is a Democrat who voted for Obama, so I think it can more likely be chalked up to King's surprising lack of introspection. After all, this is the man who didn't realize that The Shining was about his own drug addiction until about ten years later.  

Nevertheless, I was surprised to see King - who lives in a small town, surrounded by the sort of people you see at Walmart - openly mocking the sort of people you see at Walmart.  And a little surprised to see the New Yorker carrying it.  The New Yorker has a reputation for heedless snobbery, and I'd have thought someone along the line would say, "Oh that's going a little too far, even for us, don't you think?"

While reading "Premium Harmony" I couldn't help but think of the recent A.V. Club article, "Checking Out of the Overlook: 16 ways to survive a Stephen King story."  Item number 3 is "Avoid off-brand merchandise," and sadly, this is the bullet point that Mary overlooked.  

Ray argues that they should go to Walmart to get a kickball Mary wants to buy as a birthday present.  But Mary insists on stopping at the lesser, off-brand store instead.  Doing so, she even forces Ray to ask her to buy off-brand cigarettes (the eponymous Premium Harmony brand), thus double sealing her fate.

The item I would have added to the A.V. Club's list is "Don't be fat," because being fat is surely going to get you killed in a Stephen King story.  In fact, being fat is one of the worst things you can be in King's world, perhaps because it is portrayed as a voluntary condition.  And who would voluntarily be so ugly?  Fat characters are inevitably stupid and often cruel, and typically are the first to die.

Mary is fat, needless to say, and Ray spends a lot of time pondering how disgusting it is. 

"He's parked too close to the concrete cube of a building and she has to sidle until she's past the trunk of the car, and he knows she knows he's looking at her, seeing how she's now so big she has to sidle. He knows she thinks he parked close to the building on purpose, to make her sidle, and maybe he did."

Too much time, really, and I started wondering what King's wife Tabitha (on the far side of svelte herself) thinks about all this.  

Then again, this is yet another recent King story featuring a couple on the edge of divorce.  King has always written his life into his stories, whether consciously or not.  (I was surprised Ray hadn't recently broken his hip in a car accident.)  Between this and Duma Key, a person really has to wonder how the old King marriage is faring these days.