Secret Window, Secret Garden (Stephen King)

Secret Window, Secret Garden
The Four Past Midnight series, Story 2
Stephen King
Viking
Fiction, Horror
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: "You stole my story" are the first words out of the man's mouth - the last thing any writer wants to hear, but especially not Maine author Mort Riley. He has enjoyed decent success on the bookshelves, but his life is now in tatters, which is why he's living in the lakeside vacation cabin and his now-ex wife Amy is back in their home in Derry. Worse, the words have stopped flowing, and a writer without words is hardly a writer at all. And now this utter stranger, John Shooter, stands on the cabin doorstep threatening him over a short story he published years ago, claiming Mort somehow stole it from his home in a flyspeck of a town in Mississippi. It's a ridiculous claim, of course, but Mort needs proof, and he needs it fast. If he can't find it in three days, then John is prepared to seek "justice" in his own cold, cruel ways... ways that could involve his neighbors, his friends, and even Amy.
Originally part of the novella collection Four Past Midnight.

REVIEW: Another novella from the Four Past Midnight collection, Secret Window, Secret Garden opens with a writer's nightmare: a stranger, possibly a crazed fan, on the doorstep with accusations of plagiarism that could destroy what career and life Mort Riley has left. He scoffs at the claim, of course, but the manuscript John hands him - titled "Secret Window, Secret Garden" - is almost the mirror image of his own early story "The Sowing Season", about a man who catches his wife cheating and plots to murder her and hide the body in her garden, in ways that are very hard to ascribe to mere convergent literary evolution... made all the more surreal now, after Mort himself caught Amy in bed with a family friend, culminating in their recent divorce. But Mort has no idea who the man is, nor has he ever been to Mississippi. If anything, it's more likely that John read Mort's story in a magazine and either forgot when he wrote his own tale or deliberately mimicked the story - but, of course, now that he needs it, Mort can't seem to find the issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine that "The Sowing Season" originally appeared in, and the furious stranger won't accept his word on the matter. It isn't long before John shows Mort just how seriously he's taking this... and Mort, driven to the brink of sanity already by the failure of his marriage and the block that threatens his future as a writer, finds himself responding with both paranoia and violence of his own. He resists reaching out to the local law enforcement - the "law" in the sleepy lakeside town where he's staying isn't particularly effective anyway - and when he does reach out to others, bad things tend to happen, as John always seems to be a step ahead of him. The situation spirals out of control along with Mort's sanity, which was already frayed long before his wife's affair. The result is, in typical King fashion, harrowing, gruesome, and tragic, a life disintegrating before the reader's eyes. It lost half a star for drawing itself out a bit long once the big twist was clear, and for lingering overlong in the aftermath, circling its point a few times too often before actually getting there.

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