Stephen King's Skeleton Crew: The Monkey (1980).

A while back I wound up delivering an article I didn't, in the strictest sense, intend to write.  A short story like "The Monkey" is one of those stories I knew I was going to have to get around to sooner or later.  It's been one of those long-term items on a hypothetical list of artworks that would have to get their day in the spotlight on this site one day.  The only catch was that for the longest time I was operating under the assumption that such a seemingly simple short story like this, while maybe popular among Stephen King fans, was still not the kind of high profile idea that a place like Hollywood would have all that much interest in these days.  I'd have thought this went double for an industry whose soul focus (both at the time and even now) still seems to be squarely fixed on the kind of properties that were best guaranteed to be the next major tentpole franchise.  If it wasn't a comic book or a major Fantasy or Sci-Fi franchise, then it didn't exist so far as the current incarnation of Tinseltown was concerned.  So of course I was proven wrong somehow.  It just seems to be one of the grand unspoken laws of the universe, or something, to always cheat the next would-be prophet to come along.  Whatever the case, I'll be honest, I was just as surprised as anyone to discover that Neon Pictures had snapped up the adaptation rights to what was otherwise considered to be this small and insular bit of latter day pulp fiction.  For the longest time, I thought its popularity was limited to the confines to Horror fandom.  In other words, while I thought it was good, I never would have guessed that it had any kind of shelf life awareness outside its own unique circles of and within the confines of the Horror genre.

Apparently, Hollywood was eager to prove me wrong.  So when the first trailer for the film adaptation dropped it came as a genuine surprise.  Though if I'm being honest, I was also cautiously optimistic.  A lot of the reason for that is down to a basic understanding of the kind of narrative we're dealing with here.  The idea of a plot revolving around a supernaturally possessed demonic toy was an old one even before King got his Inspiration for this particular work.  It's a concept that I've been able to trace as far back to a 1920s literary ghost story by M.R. James.  And even long before him, the very notion of a spectrally animated inanimate object probably owes its ultimate origin to ancient works of folklore, such as the Golem legend.  So it's not the most original concept King's got a hold of here, yet it can be fun whenever the writer manages to do it right.  In a case like this, what we're dealing with here is the kind of narrative that can be made to work in at least one of two possible approaches.  It can be played straight, or else done tongue-in-cheek.  King narrates the whole thing straightforward, while Oz Perkins decided to see if he could try hand at this material in a more humorous, parodic route.  This is something that's pretty obvious from the way the body count stacks up in the film adaption.  You can tell this even from just a casual glimpse at what we're shown in the trailers.  Where it's apparent that with few exceptions, all the deaths are handled in a clear tone of macabre humor.  Almost each moment of supernatural violence is never once displayed with anything like a complete straight face.  Instead, it's like watching a series of jokes being setup and told in a series of grisly, yet amusing punchlines.

This was all something I could pick up on just from the trailers, and like I said, I greeted it all with a note of hopeful caution.  That's because while I had experienced a straightforward rendition of this idea, I was also well aware of just how possible it was to turn this same concept into a complete genre send-up.  There's a lot of humor that's still left waiting to be mined in a notion like this.  It was this gut level understanding that made me somewhat eager to see what Oz Perkins could do with King's original material.  I've already written up my thoughts on the final results in an earlier post.  It can all be read about here.  To summarize a long story, the biggest reason why I have to call the film version a failure is because it's clear the mind of the director is being pulled in two directions at once, and he can never make up his mind what sort of tone he's supposed to tell the story in.  This means the narrative proper has to suffer from a lot of forced comedy that has this hollow, artificial quality to it.  This is an element that refuses to jibe and meld with the more serious qualities that lurk just underneath all the attempts at humor.  It's pretty clear that what we've been given counts less as an honest adaptation, and is better described as an unfortunate snapshot of the film's director in a moment of personal crisis.  It's clear enough that Oz Perkins was going through a grieving process of his own while making the film.

He'd lost first his famous father way back in the 80s, and then just recently his mother sometime before he commenced work on this aborted attempt at a King adaptation, and it left a mark the director.  This is obvious enough once you realize the way the film telegraphs Perkins' inability to know just what to do with the clashing emotions and thoughts that were running through his mind as he tried (and hence failed) to assemble the pictures he'd made into a coherent narrative.  It's pretty clear that was something of an impossible task for someone who still couldn't figure out how to handle his own grieving process.  It's the sort of situation where the artist really should have just taken time out for himself.  Get a better grip on his feelings, and see how things looked once he's had time to process his experiences into a more rational framework.  I almost want to say the film version of the "Monkey" is less a film, and more a textbook snapshot of the artist's inner turmoil once he's discovered that he's having a harder time time dealing with the loss of his parents than he might have expected.  That's a serious matter, one that needs to be handled with greater care than Perkins allowed himself to have.  For this reason, while I can't call the movie a good adaptation, I am willing to let it slide and to wish the director well.

That just leaves us with the original source material to talk about.  Like I said, I knew I'd have to get around to this story sooner or later.  I just always thought that time would be somewhere further down the line.  The failure of Perkins' efforts, however, has sort of forced my hand in the matter.  It now seems like I'm going to have to go out of my way to point out what it is about this simple short story that has made it popular enough to get the attention of Hollywood, and why it's still cited as one of the minor yet genuine classics in King's career.  This, then, is a close look a the tale of "The Monkey".

The Story.

The Inspirations and Themes of a Short Story.

There's an amusing bit of confusion going round about how this particular story came about.  That's because there are at least two clashing accounts of where the tale's Inspiration came from.  In a now criminally neglected work known as The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, a former friend of King's, Chris Chelsey, pins the origin point of the story back to an old movie that he and the author once caught together when they were friends palling around as kids.  According to Chelsey, "When we were younger we used to hitchhike up to Lewiston to go to the movies.  When a good horror flick was playing, we would go and see it.  And at one point we went to see a movie called "Dementia-13."...And in that movie there's a sequence where a monkey claps cymbals together, and from that sequence he got the image that he later used in "The Monkey".  Chelsey maintains that, "To this day I don't know of any other source where that could have come from.  I knew him pretty well back then, and we were together pretty regularly, and that was such an effective sequence that it stuck with him.  Right after that he began to use it.  That image began to appear in his stories soon after we saw "Dementia-13."  I believe the film also has a very ominous clown figure as well.  In fact, I believe "Dementia-13" was the first movie I saw to ever use the ominous toy motif (51)".

At the very least, I'll have to admit that's a fascinating bit of trivia to hear about.  And it is worth giving Chelsey at least this much credit, there is room enough left over for speculation in terms of how a now obscure Francis Ford Coppola flick (yes, really) might have left an impact on the future writer's Imagination.  To give a good for instance, while the film itself is best described as just a Psycho clone (Roger Corman even hired Coppola on the promise that he would deliver just that and nothing else) the plot itself centers around an Irish Mansion that belongs to a clan known as the Haloran family.  So with if the picture contains that many familiar names and motifs from King's work, then it becomes necessary to at least grant Chelsey's words a seat at the table when it comes to trying to pinpoint the sources for King's work.  At the same time, what gives me pause, and keeps me from giving a one-hundred percent endorsement of his thinking is that even before Corman and Coppola produced Dementia-13, Shirley Jackson had written and published a novel called The Sundial, which has as its main setting an old, dark, and decrepit mansion known as Halloran House.  King himself even mentions this novel as a partial Inspiration for his work on The Shining in the pages of Danse Macabre.  So it's like we've entered this gray area in terms of where the author gets his ideas from.  It's possible that the image of a creepy wind-up toy lodged in the author's memory, yet it wasn't enough to trigger the Creative Idea proper that eventually led King's mind to send up a flair from its basement workshop.

According to the writer himself (at least so far as he can tell or remember, anyway) the way the whole idea for a demonic toy came about is something he discusses in the Author's Notes pages of his Skeleton Crew collection.  It's there that he writes, "I was in New York City on business about four years ago.  I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street.  There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all bending and grinning and clapping their cymbals.  They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of my walk back to the hotel wondering why.  I decided it was because they reminded me of the lady with the shears...the one who cuts everyone's thread one day.  So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, mostly longhand, in a hotel room (751-52)".  If I'm forced to make a choice between which account of this story's creation is the correct one, then while I'm willing to indulge Chelsey on the idea that maybe a film like Dementia-13 is like the plot of ground in which the initial Seed Image was planted, it still might not have been enough to generate anything like a complete Creative Idea for a story.  It might have took a fateful re-encounter with the same wind-up toy on the streets of Manhattan Isle for the seed to spring forth.

I'm also willing to lend a greater amount of credence to King's claims for where his Inspiration came from on account of how he describes the train of thought that his encounter with the toy vendor on Fifth Street got going in his mind.  It was this second encounter with a creepy looking toy that generated yet another Poetic Image in his head, and it seems to have been the melding of the real life child's plaything together with this Imaginative Image that helped serve as the real catalyst for the narrative under discussion here.  It's the presence of this Image that I believe carries the vital clue to the meaning of King's story.  So getting a proper read on it is going to be what determines my own take on "The Monkey".  Before we get to that, however, there's basic nature of the plot to go over.  I almost want preface this aspect of things by going "Stop me if you've heard this before".  You've got this ordinary, everyday protagonist whose going along like always, same as the rest of us.  And then one day, just like that, he runs smack dab into a demonic supernatural toy, clear out of the blue.  Said toy then "comes to life" and proceeds to wreck all sorts of havoc on the main character's existence.  Now based on just that bare bones description, there's only one name or title on the minds of most of us reading this.  If the name isn't Chucky, and the title belongs to some film other than Child's Play, then I'll be surprised as hell.  Because really, it's kind of like what other choices do most of us have in a scenario like this?

The supernatural exploits of Charles Lee Ray has gone on to attain the sort of level of pop cultural ubiquity where it sort of becomes impossible to think of the possessed toy trope without seeing that cackling little bugger's eerie, leering visage in our heads.  Just about the only other contender for the role nowadays would have to be someone like Annabelle, or perhaps Megan.  Beyond this famous triumvirate there's not been much room for our attention spans when it comes to scary dolls and toys in the Gothic pantheon.  The net result has been to leave Stephen King's offering to this field in something of a lurch.  Which is a shame, because as the author himself attests, this is a story with a surprising amount of thematic weight to its efforts.  Let's start with the basic premise.  At the heart of this story stands one of your basic Everyman figures, named Hal Shelburn.  In and of himself, there is nothing remarkable about him.  He could just as easily be the protagonist of a normal, slice-of-life, coming-of-age story where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens.  Then one day he and his older brother go rummaging around their dad's old closet.  It's there Hal unearths a wind-up toy Monkey from an old Ralston Purina feed box.  From that point onward, Hal's life stops being normal.  An uncharitable perspective would be to say that from the moment he finds the Monkey, the protagonist is doomed to find himself at the mercy of one of the worst nightmares imaginable, a literary Gothic cliche!

It's possible to at least understand where a take like that comes from.  If a name like Chucky or Annabelle is all that crop into your head every time someone speaks of a demonic toy, then an unfortunate side effect of this mental association is the notion that tired and worn out cliches are all we're talking about, or have to work with here.  That's because one of the detrimental ramifications of the Child's Play franchise is that it's all responsible for playing into the sort of hackneyed Splatterpunk aesthetic that defined the Horror cinema of the 80s.  The major problem of the Chucky series is that it's a neat and concise part and parcel product of that artistic milieu.  As a result, is it any real surprise to come back to a film like this and be able to see all the cracks in the film's foundations?  Those are all movies that make the same mistake as the works of Freddy and Jason.  They make the fatal error in believing that the work of Horror is all about how many buckets of blood you can pour on the audience, and leave it at that.  These are films that forget there's more to terrorizing the audience than just trying to create what Roger Ebert once described as "Vomit Bag" flicks.  The bucket of stage blood will always have its place in the genre.  However, what masters of the form like King understand is something that Hollywood often overlooks.  In order for that bucket full of red dye number 5 to be effective at all, you've got to give the audience a reason to care about all the ways in which it is applied.  That means the readers have to have a narrative that can first grab and then hold their interest to the very end.

Another crucial factoid that writers like King, E.A. Poe, and Shirley Jackson realized long ago is that sometimes less can always amount to a whole lot more.  If that weren't the case, then would we still be talking about films like The Blair Witch Project long after its initial pop culture moment has come and gone?  I'd argue that staying power like that is what separates the true Tale of Terror from the hackwork.  It's true people remember a figure like Chucky, but never with the same level of intensity as that reserved for the first breakout Found Footage film.  I feel the need for all this nitpick sorting is justified in order to clear the readers minds of certain preconceptions that might serve to cloud our judgment when dealing with a story like this.  Because the setup sounds so damned familiar, there's always the risk of mistaking a work of genuine artistry with that of cliche.  One of the unfortunate things I've learned in being a fan of the Horror genre is that it really can be that difficult for viewers and readers to tell the difference between Art and dreck.  What that means in practice is sometimes you've got to clear the road ahead if you want your readers to gain anything like a clearer view of any genuine example of Gothic creativity when we run across it.  This is probably an issue that all genres have to deal with, yet it seems to hit hardest in the genre of Things that Go Bump in the Night.  With all this out of the way, it's now possible to start off on gaining a better understanding of King's original short story.

While the basic premise might have to be described as familiar (main character discovers demonic toy and has to find away to defeat it) then the way King handles this old material is of a decidedly more sophisticated manner than anything to do with the likes of Chucky.  For one thing, it's clear the writer is interested in more than just special effects.  King seems capable of that rare feat of taking what is an essentially pulp premise, and proving how pulp can also amount to Art.  The way the author does that is by discovering that the story is after bigger game.  We're not treated to the sight of a bunch of stock character from Slasher film central casting ambling about on the stage while they wait for the supernatural psycho killer to pick them off, all while annoying us with examples of paper thin characterization.  Instead, we're allowed into the lives of make believe figures who nonetheless do a very decent job of making us care about them as if they were flesh and blood human beings.  Hal Shelburn's no one-dimensional Final Survivor going through the regular motions.  Instead, he's just this down on his luck kid who has the bad fortune to stumble upon a hole in the column of reality.  That's a surprisingly accurate description of what happens to him in the course of the story.  And the fact that it's possible to describe his narrative in such terms is a good indicator that this plot is a level or two above the typical examples of 80s Splatterpunk dreck.  It's clear this is an intelligent form of Horror story.

Rather than treating his cast like a walking shooting gallery for the Horror to pick off, what King treats his readers to instead is best described as series of snapshots in a family photo album.  It's a potent metaphor that the author has drawn upon in shaping his two best works, The Shining, and It.  The reason it works as an apt description for the misfortunes of Hal Shelburn is because of an inherent aspect of the item in question.  The whole purpose of any photo album is to function as a chronicle of history.  In doing so, it also functions as a form of genuine slice-of-life storytelling.  The narratives that most albums relate may have to be piecemeal by nature.  Indeed, one of the ironies of such books is that the history in question is often only decipherable to the all the people smiling or grinning back at the camera.  They're the ones who possess all the keys that can unlock the nature of the story that each photo represents.  This is something that I think a lot of fiction writers have been able to pick up on, which is why you sometimes find the idea of photo albums being used in various types of novels and films.  It's a great backstory shorthand, and a creative way of conveying narrative depth.  While it's true that King doesn't utilize the concept in a direct sense for this short work, the way he lays out the major beats of his plot with careful precision does put one in mind of looking at a carefully laid out album.

In this case, the story that all the photos have to relate is a tragic one.  If you want to carry the picture book metaphor even further, then these are the photos it has to relate.  We're treated to snapshots of Hal Shelburn at various points in his life, and how his seemingly random encounter with a child's wind-up toy (of all things) has impacted his world.  The first snapshot is pretty simple.  It feature Hal and his older brother, Bill, along with their mother outside their modest family residence.  Next up is a series of stills taken amidst a common narrative.  Here's Hal and Bill playing in their room together.  The next series of snaps showcases the boys rummaging through a back closet tucked away behind the room they shared together.  The next photo up is one of those well paced setups.  The kind that allows the photographer the ability to capture not just as much of the space, but also the ambience or atmosphere in which the picture is taken.  Hence, the next photo contains neither of the boys.  Instead, its an image of the back closet behind their room, and what the image in the photo tells us is that this isn't just a mere walk-in storage space.  It's much more akin to a hidden attic; one with all sorts of antique bric-a-brac stored away long ago and forgotten about.  The general atmosphere contained in the snapshot is one that could go either way.  It could be the start to an exciting adventure of discovery, or something else.

It's the kind of setting you might find in a film like the original 90s era Jumanji, in other words.  It's brightly lit, and there might even be a sense enchantment in the air.  Yet there's also the sense that whatever magic is at work in a place like this might also be the kind that can turn from sweet to sour in the blink of an eye.  The next series of stills in the camera roll aren't special to the viewer.  Though you get the sense that they mean a lot to the two brothers rummaging through the room.  Perhaps that's because a lot of it used to belong to their long departed father, who claimed he was going off to sea one day, and then never bothered to come back, according to their mother.  Maybe this explains the odd note of poignant obsession with which the camera lingers over a series of otherwise unremarkable objects.  An official navigator's license; a bunch of maps and charts of the ocean; an entire volume of books known as Barron's Guide to Navigation; a battered bowler hat which seems to have come from England's Piccadilly Circus;  a pair of seaman's binoculars; a snow globe with a miniature Eiffel Tower inside of it; a collection of rare foreign stamps and even rarer foreign coins.  Some of this may pass off as interesting to an outside observer.  Its easy to pick up on the sense of excitement from the boys as they rummage through their dad's old things.  We then reach one snapshot in particular, and it grants us our first off-note.  The object it shows is simple, yet you'd swear you never knew a photograph could function as its own jangled, discordant minor key until the moment you laid eyes on this picture.

The item in the photo looks unassuming enough.  It's just an old Ralston Purina food box, probably about as battered and shabby as that old hat from London's West End.  The bowler gave off this quaint sense of jaunty antiquity, however.  The vibe the viewer gets from the box is something else.  It's akin to looking at an old, familiar artifact straight out of Greek myth from Pandora's perspective.  The viewer gets the sense that to even just peak inside that Ralston box is to invite misfortune.  The next few snapshots do nothing to discredit our misgivings.  The next photo is taken from a downward angle as the camera glances into the open lid of the Purina box.  We can just make out the top of some kind of object within the box.  It's too dark to see inside, even with the photo-flash on, yet it looks like the top of a little child's head.  The next snapshot is the real corker.  It contains the box once more, yet this time its empty, and turned over upside down.  Sitting comfortably beside the Ralston Purina carton is the item that was waiting resting or lying hidden inside it.  A brief internet search by an intrepid few would be able to pinpoint the item as a standard copy of the Daishin C.K. Company's Musical Jolly Chimp.  

All it amounts to is a wind-up toy, the kind where you turn the key and it performs the kind of repeating actions which probably only produces a sense of amusement if you're say, under the age of five, or thereabouts.  Basically, what we're dealing with here is the kind of toy that's meant to operate on the same logic of entertainment as that of one of those old Teddy Ruxpin dolls that used to be a big deal back in the 80s.  The only difference is the Daishin Chimp is a lot cruder in its actions.  It can't pretend to talk like Teddy, and it has no stories to tell (at least one hopes).  Instead, all it can do is to bring its artificial limbs together in one simple repeating pattern, with a pair of cymbals attached to its make-believe paws, producing a low, yet audible and monotonous "jang-jang-jang" sound.  What grabs the viewer the most about this toy from nowhere is the look in its eyes.  An artificial creation can't really be said to "look" at anything, anymore than our current digital AI tech can be said to actually "think" (at least one sure hopes on that last score).  The funny thing is that's not the sense you get just from looking at a photo of it.  In it's first appearance, the thing in the photograph is positioned in a dead centered angle.  So that it's gaze is directed right into the camera lens.  It's an unnerving sight, to say the least, and you wonder what could have possessed gotten into the photographer's head to want to arrange the picture at just such an odd angle.  The sight of the Chimp makes the discordant note grow stronger. 

The next series of snapshots doesn't help things any.  Each one is an image of the Monkey photographed from various angles.  Whoever owns this camera has some fucked-up idea of due diligence in their sense of professionalism.  All the following pictures have the Monkey in them.  Some photos are taken from a distance, others in medium shot.  One will give us an image of the toy from the left, another from the right.  If the Monkey has introduced an off-note into the proceedings, then these next few photos demonstrate an uneasy sense of constancy within the discord.  No matter which angle the picture is framed from, unless the lens is focused on an exact side profile of the toy, the Monkey's glance always appears to be focused on the same dead-center point of the camera's gaze.  It creates the eerie sense that the toy is not just looking into the viewers eyes, but also following them as they move about the room, tracking their movements like a predator stalking its prey.  The only picture in which it seems as if the outside observer is granted a break from that gaze is one snapshot where its clear the Monkey is being photographed from the back.  Then a sinking feeling starts to rise in the viewer as their gaze tilts up to realize that somehow the idiot behind the camera has managed to capture to Chimp's reflection in a mirror on a wall opposite.  It's blank, glazed eyes just peer up over the top of the mirror frame like a demented version of that old Kilroy illustration.  It's almost as if the damn thing is going "Peekaboo"!

What that series of photos confirms to the observer is that this Monkey isn't just having its image captured from all the right wrong angles.  This isn't an lifeless inanimate object that can't ever know itself.  Instead, it's very much like the lines from an old book has it.  "That was no" mere "capuchin, no cute little organ grinder's mascot; that was a big mean old baboon (44)".  And it isn't just glancing into the camera as it has its picture taken.  It's not grinning either, although its always possible that's what a fool could mistake such a visage for.  That goddamn thing is leering right at the viewer.  Its grin is the kind that contains a great deal of malice behind it, the sort that lets you know its ready to bite at any time.  By now, the sense of discord has grown beyond a simple off note.  At this point, the sense of unease has come to resemble Bernard Hermann's main theme from Psycho, the kind of schizoid tune that a wind-up toy can keep in rhythm and time to with its cymbals.  Something about that Monkey gives off an air of bad luck.  This perception of omen-like dread increases when we take a look at the next couple of picture in the photo album.  For moment there's a clear sense of relief as that damned capuchin is no longer in sight anywhere.  Instead, it's just a few pictures of young Hal Shelburn playing with his childhood friend Johnny McCabe.  The first one shows Hal and Johnny outside his friend's house.  The next shows the boys building a treehouse together in Johnny's backyard.  The one after that shows the treehouse complete, and the two kids posed up in it, positively beaming at their accomplishment.  It makes the picture that follows all the more of one, big, cosmic slap in the face.

We're shown Hal and his already miniscule family standing around young Johnny McCabe's coffin before its lowered six feet under.  The boy took a fatal spill while climbing up to the treehouse, only to have a loose plank come apart in his hands, and send his head down a few inches too many into the knife-edge of his spinal column.  The next few snapshots don't get any better.  We're shown a picture of Hal's older brother Bill Shelburn standing next to his own best friend, Charlie Silverman on a street corner outside the brother's house.  The next photo is of a rusted Hudson Hornet with trace elements of blood on the grill, front hood, and spattered across the starred glass of the broken windshield, followed by the Silverman boy's obituary.  The photo album just goes onward like this for some time, and all of it tells the same story of what happens when an ordinary Everyman finds himself confronted with an extraordinary set of circumstances.  It's the basic foundation for all of King's work as a whole, and in the case of a work like "The Monkey", what we've got is an example of the artist being able to fire on all cylinders.  This particular short story tends to be one that is often cited by both scholars and fans alike as a good instance of Classic King.  It's when the writer is at his best, and it shows on the page.

It is just possible to make a case that a short story like this might just function as the best possible sort of introduction to King and his entire secondary world.  That's because the entire setup represents what many regard as the best strengths of the artist reduced almost to their essence: a main character up against a supernatural threat.  In a way, this is also the basic building block of the Horror genre as a whole.  All King has to do with a Creative Idea like this is to find the right story to fill in this outline with, and let it tell itself.  That seems to be what's happened more or less with "The Monkey", yet it's not a full explanation of just why it works as well as it does.  Granted that most folks will like the idea of a good Campfire Tale every now and then, what is it about this story of a demonic killer toy (which still isn't the most original idea out there, even back when King wrote it down) something that many are willing to hold up as a classic of the Genre?  I've heard many reasons offered for why this is, yet in terms of actual scholarly analysis, there seems to have been very little in the way of critical commentary on a story that a lot have called one of the author's best.  What little amount of comment that's been made on this work was best summed up in the opening of an essay, Monsters from the Id, by Joe Sanders.  It's there that he's able to present us with a neat encapsulation of were the critics stands.

Sanders begins by asking an obvious question.  "What could be frightening about a broken clockwork monkey that can't even bang its little cymbals together when someone turns its wind-up key?  Yet King somehow does involve readers in a distraught father's memories of a series of violent deaths during his youth that seem to portend the destruction of his present family.  The toy monkey is featured on the cover of King's second collection, Skeleton Crew, and the story somehow is genuinely disturbing.

"Critics have recognized the effectiveness of "The Monkey" but have had trouble identifying the source of its power.  The major critical issue appears to be whether the little doll embodies a threat from outside, something that intrudes into the small circle of ordinary human experience from the surrounding darkness, or whether the toy monkey reflects something already present in Hal Shelburn, the story's protagonist.  Douglas Winter, in Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, stresses the former; for Winter, the monkey represents "external evil, symbolized by the wheel of fortune" and acting purely by chance "without apparent logic or motivation" (70, 71).  Tony Magistrale draws a much closer connection between monkey and man, reminding us that the toy is "associated with the violent events and subsequent guilt of Hal Shelburn's adolescence" (74).  Magistrale also relates that guilt to "part of his [Hal's] subconscious mind which is unable to overcome the events of his tragic youth," though this does not fully explain how Hal's youth became tragic (74).  Other critics have tried to pull these extremes together.  In The Many Facets of Stephen King, Michael R. Collings sees the monkey as a "child's toy that delights in mayhem for the sake of mayhem" (95) but adds that King is "capitalizing on a childhood fear (web)".  The one constant is that it's the very thematic import of the author's words that tend to got overlooked here.  King has already handed us the key that will unlock his narrative theme.

It all goes back to what the writer tells his Constant Readers in the author's notes section where he describes how he got the idea for "The Monkey" in the first place.  We'll have to circle back to it in good time.  Right now, however, it's worth turning to look again at Sander's summation of the critic's dilemma, because it makes a good place to start for unpacking the artistry of this tale.  To begin with, I've got to give both Magistrale and Winter credit.  A close reader will be able to recognize that they are at least doing their best to try and take the author's own thoughts into account.  I'm just not sure either of them ever quite does it in the correct way.  For both of the two scholars just mentioned, it all begins with an observation King makes in the pages of Danse Macabre.  It's there that King puts forth the maxim that, "All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will—a conscious decision to do evil—and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes the human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.

"The stories of horror which are psychological—those which explore the terrain of the human heart—almost always revolve around the free-will concept; “inside evil,” if you will, the sort we have no right laying off on God the Father. This is Victor Frankenstein creating a living being out of spare parts to satisfy his own hubris, and then compounding his sin by refusing to take the responsibility for what he has done. It is Dr. Henry Jekyll, who creates Mr. Hyde essentially out of Victorian hypocrisy - he wants to be able to carouse and party-down with¬ out anyone, even the lowliest Whitechapel drab, knowing that he is anything but saintly Dr. Jekyll whose feet are “ever treading the upward path.” Perhaps the best tale of inside evil ever written is Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where murder is committed out of pure evil, with no mitigating circumstances whatever to tincture the brew. Poe suggests we will call his narrator mad because we must always believe that such perfect, motiveless evil is mad, for the sake of our own sanity.  Novels and stories of horror which deal with “outside evil” are often harder to take seriously; they are apt to be no more than boys’ adventure yarns in disguise, and in the end the nasty invaders from outer space are repelled; or at the last possible instant the Handsome Young Scientist comes up with die gimmick solution...as when, in Beginning of the End, Peter Graves creates a sonic gun which draws all the giant grasshoppers into Lake Michigan.

"And yet it is the concept of outside evil that is larger, more awesome. Lovecraft grasped this, and it is what makes his stories of stupendous, Cyclopean evil so effective when they are good. Many aren’t, but when Lovecraft was on the money— as in “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and best of all, “The Colour Out of Space”—his stories packed an incredibly wallop. The best of them make us feel the size of the universe we hang suspended in, and suggest shadowy forces that could destroy us all if they so much as grunted in their sleep. After all, what is the paltry inside evil of the A-bomb when compared to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, or Shub- Niggurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young?  Bram Stoker’s Dracula seems a remarkable achievement to me because it humanizes the outside evil concept; we grasp it in a familiar way Lovecraft never allowed, and we can feel its texture. It is an adventure story, but it never degenerates to the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Varney the Vampyre (64-5)".  These are the twin polarities that King sets up as the guiding boundary lines for the way in which the Horror of any given Gothic work is or will tend to unfold with the narrative progression.  A story like "The Monkey" seems to be giving the critics a bit of trouble, as they can't seem to make up their minds about where to situate the terrors associated with the title character.

Magistrale, for instance, goes so far as to try and explain away all of the supernatural elements in the story, effectively painting the main character not as a man tormented by supernatural evil, but rather from the ongoing collapse of his own sanity.  Now to be fair, if you posit that the critic's reading in this case is akin to that of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" where the protagonist projects his own loss of reason onto another person or object, then while I don't think such a reading is able to hold up to scrutiny quite as well as Magistrale might like, it is still possible to applaud the scholar for what at least sounds like a nice and clever bit of critical ingenuity.  Where the theory fails to hold up in my view is in its inability to explain away what amounts to a frankly unbelievable amount of bad luck our main lead is put through and has to suffer.  It might have been one thing if the writing was ever able to establish at any definitive point that Hal is a less than reliable narrator, or that there are traits of his personality that come off as less than stable in terms of his behavior toward others.  Hell, there is even a moment early in the story where such an opportunity is presented when Hal confronts his older son Dennis for possession of drugs, and just generally being a complete dickhead.  This would have been the perfect opportunity to establish that maybe Hal is a few beers shy of the proverbial six pack.  Even the way in which this could have been done is obvious by letting the main character be abusive toward his kid.

Indeed, such a dramatic turn of events would not only have established a note of unreliability to Hal's character, it would also have acted as pointer to why Dennis himself acts like such an anti-social misfit.  What else could you expect him to do?  He's just picking up all the bad habits he learned from hid old man.  However, at no point in their confrontation with his son does the father ever come off as the next Jack Torrance in the making.  Instead, he's just this frustrated figure at loose ends, doing the best he can to hold his life, and hence his family together.  This is made the most clear when it comes to the relationship that Hal shares with his youngest son, Petey.  If anything, the two come off as a pair of antitypes to Danny and Jack.  The upshot of which is that while Magistrale can be applauded for a bit of creativity on his own part for granting us the faint outlines for how a different version of this short story could have gone, it ultimately is based more off the critic's own preferences, rather than on any concrete detail of the narrative proper.  It's one of the few yet glaring moments when Magistrale lets his own aesthetic preferences cloud his otherwise considerable judgment on King's canon.  There are times when Magistrale finds hard to take the idea of Supernatural, or outside evil (which is a prevalent recurring trope in just about all of King's fiction) with anything like serious consideration.  The best example of this is when he finds issues with both It and The Shining novels, because of their Supernaturalism.

Still, Magistrale is close to the mark when he claims that the settings in stories like "The Monkey", "The Raft", and "The Reach" all "come to represent much more than mere bodies of water; they evolve into symbols for the unknown or the unconscious mind.  In each of these stories the lake serves as a barrier to the protagonist's past and future that he or she is forced eventually to traverse.  The character's physical crossing of the lake - walking across the frozen ice in "The Reach," swimming the water in "The Raft," or using a rowboat to get to the lake's epicenter in "The Monkey" - corresponds to a psychological crossing, the symbolic welding of two distinct eras in time (usually present and past).  Thoreau discovered metaphoric correspondences to himself in the mystic waters of Walden Pond; likewise, King's Skeleton Crew characters experience some sort of transformation in their water crossings or journeys (88)".  I'd argue that's essentially a correct reading of the short story.  It's just that this is a vantage point that you can still maintain without it having to be at the expense of the less than natural Gothic elements of the story.  Again, sometimes Magistrale displays an unnecessary prejudice against even the mere literary presentation of the Supernatural in Horror fiction.  It's an often recurring weakness of his, and it seems to be one that fellow scholars like Doug Winter seem to be less bothered by.  For whatever reason, Winter seems less worried by the presence of the Uncanny in this story.

Nonetheless, while he does come closer to an accurate reading of "The Monkey", there still seems to be an sense in which he just manages to miss the full target.  He's correct enough in claiming that this is a work centered around the notion of "Outside Evil", to use King's words.  However, there are still aspects of the story overall that he strangely fails to take notice of, even while it's clear that he's coming at the work from a much more sympathetic perspective.  This brings us back to King's author's note on the Inspiration for the story, and the one particular Poetic Image that each commentator tends to overlook: The Woman with the Shears.  It's the ruling metaphor that the story's title villain constantly puts the writer in mind of.  Which means that, as such, it will have to be the ability to get as an accurate reading on this figure, and how she is embodied in the wind-up toy at the heart of King's narrative, which will determine a more precise explication of "The Monkey's" themes and meaning.  So to back-up and unpack the author's words, King says that watching not one, but a whole damn line of those Daishin models lined up on the street somehow put him in mind of a very specific literary character, "the one who cuts everyone's thread one day (752)".  What's clear is that the artist has given his readers a clue, one that's probably meant to be followed up on, if anyone in the audience is smart enough.  In other words, we've been given a shovel, pick, and the outlines of a map.  See what you can dig up that!

For me, typing in King's words produced an immediate result, one that I'm not sure either Magistrale or Winter had the luxury to afford.  This is not just because the Internet wasn't around back when they wrote their criticism of King's short story, but also because the author hadn't written a work like Insomnia yet.  That's a tome which, regardless of its flaws (of which there are many) still manages to serve one useful purpose.  If it doesn't quite work as a story, it's still one of the two useful palimpsests that the artist has created for his readers.  A useful guidebook that can help the attentive fan to unpack the themes of his other works.  This is the ultimate value of, and purpose which a book like Insomnia is able to serve.  The other major King text which does the same would have to be The Stand.  It's in the pages of Insomnia that King finally lays out the meaning behind the image of the Lady with the Shears, and it comes during a conversation between the story's two main leads.  That's where the author gives us a bit of information that almost sounds like it could be a follow-up to his initial remarks on his reaction to viewing that line of wind-up monkeys gathered in a row on New York's Fifth Street way long ago.

"It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn’t get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan horses. The story was about three sisters – the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don’t ask me; I can’t even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be...I don’t remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one – Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference. When she decided it was time to cut, she cut' (430-31)".  The names of the first two sisters are Clotho and Lachesis, for anyone who's interested.  Also, yes, there is a third sister in the act King is mentioning, and yes, her name is Atropos.  Together, they are known in the realm of Classical Mythology as the Moirai, or the Three Fates.  For some reason, seeing a Daishin mechanical toy at a street vendor's one day is enough to put someone like Stephen King in mind of these aethereal siblings, or at least one of them.  He also seems to have maintained enough of a fascination with this otherwise obscure bit of ancient mythology to have returned to in various ways, both direct and otherwise, throughout the course of his writing career.  It might be easy to see why this is the case.

King's the kind of guy who tends to play his personal life "close to the vest", as they say.  However, this hasn't stopped him from incorporating bits and pieces of his own experiences into his fictions as part of the plots in his novels.  The most famous example of this still remains the artist's utilization of the auto-mobile accident that almost took his life as key narrative beats in stories like Dreamcatcher or Kingdom Hospital.  This is just the instance that everyone (even those who aren't Constant Readers) knows about.  There are plenty of other examples of King placing his own life, or else the general sort of experiences of the past that he shared with his age demographic back during the 50s and 60s, within the pages of his books.  The best examples of King taking his personal experiences of those decades and using them as various illustrations of narrative fodder can be found as a general background knowledge and/or atmosphere which colors the action of works like The Stand, Hearts in Atlantis, and of course, It.  Those are all books in which the writer allows the reader into the world as he knew it growing up.  It's this ability to tap into his past that allows novels such as 11/22/63 to carry such an impressive sense of thematic weight and historical depth, and it's probably part of the explanation for why these have been among either his most well liked, or highly regarded literary efforts.  You don't get any of that with a work like Insomnia, though maybe you do get a bit of the author's life experiences, up to a point.

It might not be the grand extent as that found in works like Hearts, yet it is there, all the same, telegraphing to the attentive reader that here is a sample of the author telling not just about a probable personal experience he had growing up, but also of how it has been allowed to shape the nature and contours of his craft.  When we hear the character of Ralph Roberts reminiscing with a certain fondness about learning a good deal of the Greco-Roman Myths, I'm inclined to think that this counts as one of those times where the writer's personal background experience is being used in the service of both plot and characterization.  In other words, it's King letting his readers know "This is where I got at least some of my ideas from.  It's just a bunch of old Greek mythological stuff I learned somewhere either in middle school, high school, or college, and I've been a fanboy of that stuff ever since.  This is something you could tell if you ever bothered to pay attention to all the times it's cropped up in my work".  It's easy to imagine a younger version of King at about the same age as the Loser's Club members when they were kids being told all about how Theseus entered the Labyrinth and slayed the Minotaur, or how Perseus flew to Medusa's Island and vanquished the gorgon.  Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if this is where the artist first learned about a number of concepts that would later go on to structure his own methods of literary composition.  Within the pages of Insomnia, one of the characters lists off "four constants of...existence...These four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose, and the Random (465)".

In real life, King breaks down whatever constants he can either find or name in the following set of pairs: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Apollonian and Dionysian, Outside and Inside Evil, Individual and Society, Fate and Free Will, and of course, Life and Death.  That's a lot of twenty-dollar wordage, and some of it stems not just from the Classical, but also the Renaissance Age.  These two eras appear to be an undergirding bedrock of King's literary Inspirations, and hence their natural enough (I guess?) expression in just about all of the creative output that he's given us.  It can be found on its fullest display in works like It, The Shining, Salem's Lot, Hearts, The Stand, and to a less successful extent in works like The Dark Tower series and Insomnia.  King's Author Notes also seem to imply that it forms the backbone of "The Monkey".  For whatever reason, guys like Homer, Spenser, and Shakespeare seems to be a part of this particular writer's toolbox.  Not that there's much to complain about if that's the case.  I mean, hey, if you can take an honest to God lesson from guys like the real life Big Bill and make it work, then I guess all anyone can say is more power to you!  All that's worth noting about this bedrock Inspiration in this case is that it was a part of this Literary Tradition that King's mind leapt to when he first saw all those wind-up toys lined like some wicked, mechanical army on the streets of New York.  

Conclusion: A Textbook Example of Classic King.

In other words, "The Monkey" is yet another story in which the nature of the plot is ultimately determined by the artist's concerns with questions of Fate and Free Will, and whether or not there is anything like a Purpose behind the seeming Randomness of daily life.  The titular toy villain at the heart of this little Creepshow narrative therefore seems to be meant as a dual symbol of sorts.  He appears represent two potential dangers in one.  The first is the threat of Random meaninglessness.  The second might be described as the threat of Fate over Free Will.  There's also one other category that can be applied to the narrative as a whole.  It's all structured and plays out as a clash between King's two opposing Apollonian and Dionysian movements: the struggle of Order against Chaos.  The Monkey, therefore, is meant to function as this Dionysian agent of disharmony.  Some rogue element in the Macrocosm that threatens the very existence of a number of lives associated with one particular Microcosm, that being the life of Hal Shelburn, his family, and even the unlucky few passing strangers who happen to wander into the deadly orbit of the Monkey's Cymbal-Shears.  The only question this leaves us with in terms of sussing out the story's meaning are ones that take us back to the debate between Magistrale and Winter.  Is this a story of Outside or Inside Evil?  Well, if I had to take a guess, then I suppose I'd have to fall somewhere along the Winter side of the scale.  It's clear enough from the narrative that the Horror in Shelburn's imaginary life is something that's meant as coming from outside his own mind and schemes.  Here's a mere Microcosmic Everyman figure set upon by the Moirai.

Or at least the protagonist has had the bad fortune to run afoul of at least one of them, anyways.  That's another interesting aspect of how King handles the concept of the Grecian Fates.  He doesn't seem to have liked one of them, in particular.  That being the Lady with the Shears, the one who snaps the lifeline of all humans when she decides that their number is up.  It's easy to imagine King as a young school student with his overactive Gothic Imagination taking all this information about the Fates in, and then getting the hell freaked out of him by the character of Atropos.  A lot of it has to be down to the way she's presented, even in the original mythic source material.  She's just this crone who goes around carrying this freaky, giant pair of scissors, which she then uses to basically end the lives of others with a single "snip"!  Man, how fucked up does that sound?!  It's kind of easy to see why the last of the Fates would leave such a horrific Imaginative impact on someone like King.  Not only is Atropos pretty freaky in her own right, but King also has the kind of mind that seems naturally receptive to such a Poetic Image, and all of the inherently Gothic multitude of themes that can be attached with it.  It's left enough of an impact to the point where Atropos was Imaginatively transfigured into the form of a demonic possessed toy.  It also explain why she crops up as a villain in a lot of his other writings.  

The question is whether it's right to claim that the crux of this story is all a matter of mere Fate?  Is it something that is meant to happen to the likes of Hal Shelburn, or is it just Random chance, or something else?  If I have to take an option, then I'll go with Door No. 3, because while I don't see anything in the story that telegraphs that this is all something that's meant to happen to the protagonist, it also seems a mistake to claim that the events of the story are without meaning, either.  If anyone should claim that this means the author has caught himself out in trying to thread a particularly tricksy, and maybe even impossible thematic needle, then while I might be able to see where a line of thinking like that is coming from, I also still think that the answer is a lot easier than just a simple Either/Or.  Like I say, the meaning of the narrative action amounts to something else.  It's true that in taking Inspiration from the last of the three Grecian Moirai, King's story has more or less tied itself to themes relating to Fate and Free Will.  The trick to realize, however, is that admitting this is the direction the narrative has taken for itself is not the same as placing either the plot or the writer in a dead end spot.  Asking about whether our lives are Fated from the start isn't the same as proving that human being's lack Free Will.  If the story is trying to tell us anything, then the answer it poses to these heady questions seems to offer a complexity that is more compatible with the vagancies of human choice.

Things are getting a bit too philosophical here, so I'll go back to the author's own words to help clarify things.  There was something King once said about the possible Purpose or Random nature of life in general.  He was discussing The Dead Zone, rather than "The Monkey", and yet what he had to say there sounds like it could shine a better light on the themes of Hal Shelburn's Gothic Everyman plight.  It's true that Hal's not facing the same kind of challenge as Johnny Smith, yet King's statements on the symbolism of the Zone bare striking applicability to the events of the "Monkey".  You could almost say that the short story amounts a transfiguration of that earlier novel's themes, this time in a more digestible miniature format.  According to King, "everything that's symbolic in The Dead Zone points in one direction.  It seems as though our lives are governed by these little 'chance' events.  If you draw back and take a longer view, maybe there's a pattern to it all.  I like to think there is; I'd hate to think that life is all random (Vincent, pg. 60)".  At the same time, there's a nice bit of irony added on to this train of thought.  That's because while it's obvious that King harbors a clear fear of the potential meaninglessness of existence, he also seems to harbor misgivings about a universe (or Macrocosm, to use the old Shakespearean terminology) in which everything is Fated to the loss of Free Will.  It's easy enough to understand the anxiety generated by both trains of thought, as either loses human agency.

So what's the solution?  Well, I can never answer for anyone else except me, here.  However, I would figure that the best way out of this impasse is to consider that if "there's a pattern to it all", then part of what makes it meaningful, or a good Purpose, is that it's precisely the kind of pattern that has Freedom of the Will as a feature and not a bug.  Rather than resigning ourselves to either Randomness, or a fatalistic Determinism, the saner outlook is one which allows a place for the choices we make in the shaping of our lives.  It's a Classical, Aristotelian Golden Mean, one which is able to synthesize the important elements together, while also discarding all the mistaken notions and false starts.  Besides which, such an outlook has one crucial factor in its favor.  It's the only vantage point that doesn't do away with morality, and hence leaves the human mind at the mercy of sinking into a kind of psychological brutality that's worse than that of the beasts that perish.  We seem to have gotten a bit too philosophical here again.  I can't say this was the sort of avenue I was expecting to be lead down when I started to unpack the artistry of this story.  At the same time, I can at least hope that it's offered some food for thought.  In any case it's the author's own fault.  He started it all by telling us about the ruling Poetic Image that both Inspired and hence guided the narrative contours of "The Monkey's" plot.  

In doing so, King seems to have given us not just a lot of food for thought out of one, simple short story.  He also seems to have given us a clear demonstration that even the most "pulpish" of popular fiction ideas can contain a surprising amount of sophistication within its workings if you look hard enough.  Perhaps that's one of the reasons why this is regarded as not just one of King's best, but also one of his Trademark Narratives, the kind of story that both Constant and casual readers can point as an example of the prototypical King story.  "The Monkey" is a fiction born out of the writer's fear of one particular Poetic Image, that being the last of the Three Sisters of Fate, Atropos, the Lady with the Shears.  It's clear that the Image was enough spark a great deal of terror in the artist's young mind.  Also that the artist's fear of this Image and of all the negative ideas it symbolizes was enough to generate a tale whose ultimate meaning seems to be the desire to defeat and even conquer Fate itself.  What King's Imagination seems to have done is taken the Concept of Fate, and allied it to the themes of Dionysian Randomness.  In this setup, it's clear that the writer doesn't view Fate as an agent of Apollonian Order, but instead is aligned with the forces of disordering Chaos.  Hence, the entire crux of Hal Shelburn's Hero's Journey is simply to break out of any confining and deterministic mold that would lead him toward a meaningless existence, and in doing so find the strength necessary to be the actual shaper of his own destiny.  It's the sort of theme with a great deal of resonance for today's world.  If I had to take a further guess, then if push comes to shove, this is the sort of mindset where King's own thinking on matters like this tends to always fall back on, at the end of the day.  Perhaps that's also another reason why this is one of those stories that audiences keep coming back to it, even after all these years.  

It should go without saying, however, that if I've made this story sound like heady existential slog, then rest assured that's not the case.  There may a lot to unpack in a simple seeming narrative like this, yet however much sophistication there is to the yarn, the good news is that King is smart enough to know that it's his day job to be an entertainer, first and last.  Which means what the writer has given us here amounts to a good, old-fashioned Gothic campfire tale.  The sort of story that would have been right at home in the pages of the Tales from the Crypt comics, or else as a fun and thrilling film by the likes of Joe Dante.  As was said earlier, this short story is often described by both Constant and casual readers as a prime example of Classic King.  What they mean by that is a number of things.  On a technical level, it means that the stylistic and narrative polish of this work is of such a quality as to typify what the writer's work is like at it's best.  He's managed to hold on to his position as the primary Master of Horror for over four whole decades, and works like "The Monkey" are often held up with good enough reason as examples of what that quintessentially American sense of Gothic mastery looks like.  It bears all the hallmarks that King is best known for.  It's got a perennial setup of a normal Everyman figure being confronted with, and having to face off against an element or agent of supernatural evil.  There's a gift for capturing the voice and colloquialisms of modern day Americana, so that the reader is given and easy sense of atmosphere and stylistics that helps the reader to fall under the spell of the narrative.

It also showcases the author's skill at ratcheting up the tension as the supernatural threat begins to escalate.  He's able to place us right in the shoes of Hal Shelburn as his attempts to rid his life of the literal Monkey on his back become more desperate with each new turn of the page.  There's the author's skill at creating a sense of narrative depth, which is able to grant his own particular brand of Gothic storytelling an Epic quality which is similar in many ways to that of Tolkien, except King was able to compress all of that into the confines of just fifteen to twenty or so manuscript pages.  There's the writer's gifted use of Horrific imagery, as in the final moments of the tale, when Hal must see if he can face off against the demonic wind-up toy, and in the course of which he's granted a ghastly vision floating at the bottom of the aptly named Crystal Lake.  These are the elements that, taken in isolation on their own, mark out "The Monkey" as one of King's essential texts.  There's another thematic layer to this work, however, and this time it lies in the short story's status as a prime example of what was and remains the marvel known as 80s era Fantastic fiction.  There seems to have been something special about the Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror fiction that was produced in that decade, a sense of collective Inspiration which seems to have channeled itself across all the major mediums of artistic expression.

It's one that included books, films, and even magazine short stories like this one.  King seems to have had his Creative Idea somewhere in the inaugural year of 1980, and he published it in a now defunct pulp rag known as Gallery.  It sort of marks "The Monkey" out as the author's first major story of the decade, and in a way its fitting that his efforts are the first one out of the gate.  Because there are enough elements to this simple short narrative which would go on to become staples of a number of great stories in all three of the major Fantastic genres.  It's almost as if King was blessed with an Idea that contained a lot of the blueprints for the numerous Fantasy and Horror stories which went on to define the landscape of that era.  In just this simple short offering alone, you have a set of story contents that would go on to define stories like Dante's Gremlins, various episodes of the 80s incarnation of The Twilight Zone, or anthology series like George Romero's Tales from the Darkside.  It might even be possible to claim that one of the child protagonists in "The Monkey" bears at least a thematic relation to the wide-eyed, questing kids of the films of Steven Spielberg.  That's the thing about the 80s when looked at from the objective vantage point of years later.  There was a kind of creative cross-pollination between a lot of the big artistic names that defined the era, and King's efforts are a part of it all.

So from what might be termed the zeitgeist perspective, a short story like "The Monkey" tends to function as one of the prototypical cultural artifacts of the 80s Fantasy/Horror genre.  It's one of the reasons it really is a shame that it didn't get a film adaptation by the likes of Joe Dante in the aftermath of his breakout success.  One of the oft unspoken glories of a work like this is that all of its primary plot points are of such a nature that can allow them to be dramatized in a number of different narrative tones with an adequate enough result, providing the inherent integrity of the story remains respected.  If you do this, keep this one proviso in mind, then there's no reason an adaptation of this work couldn't succeed as either a competent straightforward retelling of the story as King describes, or else you can keep the same dialogue and narrative plot beats, yet also transfigure them into the kind of quasi-Spielbergian aesthetic that directors like Joe Dante were famous for.  It's more than possible to imagine an 80s film version of this story with either John Ritter or Tom Hanks in the lead role, and while the ultimate point of the story remains that of Horror, there's also plenty of room to sprinkle in the notes of macabre humor and wonderment that Dante was always a pro at.  That's what I mean when I say that this simple piece of literature functions as a primary artifact of 80s pop culture.  It seems to have left that big enough of an imprint in the Imagination of that decade which has made it the classic it is today.  

In terms of both the author and his own literary output, it is just possible to claim a short story like this as having something of a special place in the artist's canon.  It's just possible to make the case for "The Monkey" as something of a necessary stepping stone in the development of King's artistry.  The reason why its at least possible to say this is because one could view it as something a trial run for the later novel that would one day become known as It.  I'm not sure how much of a stretch such an idea like this must sound like, however a mixture of shared story elements combined with a close attention to the later tome's chronology of composition is enough to maybe leave such a vantage point as up for consideration.  The reason I can't help but figure "The Monkey" as a trial balloon (pun intended) for the later exploits of Pennywise the Clown is because of the number of similarities both the novel and short story share in terms of their respective executions.  Both stories center around ordinary people being confronted with a monster.  Their interactions with this Horror isn't limited to just one chance encounter, either.  Instead, much like the Losers Club, Hal Shelburn's dealings with the Monkey are stretched out to cover the crucial years in the development of the protagonist as a child.  The demon toy could even be said to service the same literary function as It, or vice versa.  Both are Dionysian forces that leave legacies of carnage and chaos in their wake.  Their sole purpose is to bring misery to others lives.

It is even possible to consider Pennywise as It's own symbol of chaotic Fate.  A servant of Random senselessness who's ultimate threat isn't limited to the endless catalogue of childhood fears, but might also extend to the sense of dread that comes from a lack of meaning.  This is the way King tends to ultimately view Fate in the vast majority of his fiction.  Rather than treat it as an agent of Apollonian Purpose, the fiction has a tendency to portray Fate as this kind of walking cosmic joke that prowls the night in search of victims.  For the author, it really does seem as if Fate and the threat of a Random existence are one and the same, at the end of the day.  As one of the heroes in Salem's Lot explains it, "Death is when the monsters get you".  It's the logic that the narrative of "The Monkey" applies to its title character, and the same narratological stance seems to be at play in the portrayal of Derry's own Boogeyman.  And really, what better creature to act as a cipher for the threat of meaningless than the one childhood Horror that is able to transcend all cultures, language, and boundaries?  Here we're shown this same threat in literal miniature, yet its dramatic purpose (in a nice bit of irony) is more or less the same as the Dionysus of Derry.  The Monkey likes to take or ruin lives because it can.

Last but not least, it's also possible to claim that there is a great sense of thematic overlap in terms of the endings to both the short story and the later novel.  Both fictions center around the necessity of confronting the trauma of the past.  The only major difference is that in "The Monkey" this overarching goal is kept to a more or less personal sphere of reference.  In the novel version, however, this theme of confronting the past is thematically enlarged to function as a veritable Microcosm that encompasses the sins of both modern American society, and the more or less Puritanical past that birthed the Nation's ills.  It remains the greatest literary tour-de-force in all of King's writings, and the author deserves accolades for it.  However, what I think has to be realized is that maybe none of this Creative Idea would have been half as impressive if King hadn't started out with a trial balloon like this one.  Every great undertaking requires preparation first.  If you want to be a champion swimmer, then you've got to start out with just dipping your toes in the current to begin with.  I think a case can be made that this is what King is up to in creating "The Monkey".  What we have here, in other words, could be described as a case of the Imagination priming the artist's mind for a great work by presenting it in miniature.

I'd at least like to suggest that this could be one ultimate explanation for the existence of this classic little short story.  Nor is it an exaggeration to claim that it earns that description.  What you've got on your hands here at the end of the day is fine little bogey tale.  Something that deserves to be put up the same shelf space as The Monkey's Paw,  Gremlins, or the works of Edgar Allan Poe.  In fact, if I'm being honest, then I'll have to confess I rate this one short story higher than either Annabelle or Child's Play.  There's a whole lot more going on with King's narrative in terms of not just thematic weight, but also in terms of essential story elements like the necessary build-up of tension, the thrill of powerful Gothic action sequences, and just an overall better way of handling with intelligence the kind of premise which is pretty darn ridiculous on the face of it.  We enjoy stories of possessed evil toys, yet the minute you stop to give it a moments thought, then it's easy to see why most people go to see Chucky in order to laugh at him.  There is an element of the ludicrous that's more or less built-in to a story idea like this.  It takes genuine talent to elevate what would otherwise be a pure Schlock premise into the realms of Artistic finesse that's usually reserved for the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In being able to do so, King has created a chiller which is able to be an 80s pop culture icon, while also being able to avoid all the various pitfalls of excess that defined many of the Horror genre's efforts of those years.  He's got this innate skill for taking simple concepts and finding the sophistication hidden away inside them all.

It's one of King's most unremarked upon skills as a writer, and in my worst moments I sometimes wonder if that really is because we believe in our deepest heart of hearts that Horror just isn't the kind o genre that deserves to come with any kind of genuine artistry attached to its efforts.  Such a fate would make a certain kind of sense.  Horror has always been the black sheep of the the popular genres.  If you were to poll King against Tolkien, then I'm guessing Middle Earth would clobber Derry ten for 10.  It probably wouldn't even be a contest.  In which case, all I can do as a fan of the Gothic is to serve as a rallying cry for the genre's prospects.  Part of the way I do that is by pointing to stories like "The Monkey" as a prime example of the neat little efforts of fun and enjoyment that can be had from the realm of Bump in the Night.  It's for all of these reasons I'm able to say that Stephen King's "The Monkey" is well worth checking out.  It's one of those stories that has to stand as an example of Classic Stephen King, and also might just be the perfect gateway drug for future fans of the Horror genre.