Stephen King loads ‘Gwendy’s Button Box’ with scares
His new novella takes readers back to Castle Rock, Maine
Stephen King takes a trip back to Castle Rock in his new novella
Gwendy’s Button Box (Cemetery Dance Publications, 180 pp., out of four), a different sort of coming-ofage story about a mysterious stranger and his odd little gift.
Co-written with Richard Chizmar, King ’s zippy work returns to the small-town Maine locale of The
Dead Zone, Cujo and other early novels to introduce Gwendy Peterson, a 12-year-old girl in 1974 wishing to get in shape and rid herself of the moniker “Goodyear.”
Gwendy is doing her daily workout at the local park on the grimly nicknamed Suicide Stairs when she meets an odd man with a black hat. Richard Farris comes bearing a mahogany box with various colored buttons and levers, handing it to her with an ominous caveat: “It gives gifts, but they’re small recompense for the responsibility.”
Pushing one lever delivers delicious chocolate animals; the other offers valuable silver coins. The eight buttons, however, are a bit harder to push because of the weight of their destructive significance — the black one is called “the Cancer Button” for a very good reason.
The story revolves around a childhood spent protecting this box. Gwendy discovers its positives and negatives, watching history unfold and worrying about the wooden accessory’s effect on the greater world at large and her own microcosm of friends and family.
The novella is an interesting form for King: It’s longer than the short-story gems he’s unleashed, shorter than the epics that have given a grand mythology to sometimes just a small town, but one where he has shown he’s a master with The Mist and The Body. The reader spins through Gwendy’s teenage years pretty quickly here, getting to know her well enough but missing some of the folksiness and magic that’s made King ’s past small wonders so great.
Still, the book is extremely well-paced and with not that many pages to turn, it’s a fun read that never loses momentum.
Gwendy also acts as a neat sidebar to King ’s other Castle Rock tomes.
Hardcore fans get an expansion of the weird town’s geography, and Gwendy’s Button Box feels like it belongs in this locale that’s always been a pit stop for scary Americana and the normal turned deadly — as in, Cujo’s sweet St. Bernard becoming a killing machine.
Gwendy nicely captures that same winning dichotomy between the innocent and the sinister: Things go very wrong around this little girl, and King and Chizmar leave you wondering if it’s the potential horrific danger of the box or just life itself being kind of a putz.