Perhaps one of the most audacious adaptations of the works of Stephen King is Haven, a new TV miniseries about a somewhat haunted female FBI agent and some very strange shenanigans in small-town Maine. The audacity stems from the fact that Haven is loosely based on King’s 2005 crime novella The Colorado Kid—a novella notable for being about an unsolvable mystery that indeed remains unexplained at story’s end. Herewith, a series of blogs examining the hows, wherefores and whys concerning various adaptations of Stephen King’s works. Adaptation is a slippery skill, and those who play with it often change not just the rules but the game itself, as the residents of a small town called Haven, and a dead guy nicknamed ‘Colorado,’ know all too well…

Haven Blog, Part 3:
CARRIE IS A FAIRY (TALE)
by Gary Butler

Five episodes deep, Haven continues to develop itself as an entity that embraces and goes beyond its source material, Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid. As with many good mysteries, the story of the Kid begins with its ending: The man is dead, and despite Haven being by intention a supernatural series about a town full of misfits with shadowy pasts and darker presents, straightforward detective work will be required to figure out why ‘Colorado’ was killed, not to mention who he even was in the first place.

Good thing, then, that the show’s lead character is an FBI agent. Audrey Parker also happens to be an orphan, who has dedicated a chunk of her life to wondering who her parents were. Looking at a newspaper picture of the Kid’s body, beside which stands a woman who is an absolute ringer for Parker, the agent can’t help but wonder if she was fated to end up in the little town that attracts psychic phenomena like a lightning rod.

Detection requires backwards thinking—because all cases of homicide start with the body. In King’s book, the Colorado Kid’s mystery is never actually solved; one of the author’s many reasons for letting it play out thusly is by way of showing that “real life” doesn’t always include the answers. Perhaps ironically, King’s acclaimed coming-of-age short story, “The Body” (1982)—which became the equally acclaimed film Stand by Me (1986)—also involves a “real life” (which is to say, non-horror) setting and a corpse whose story is never revealed.

Anyhow, forget about real life: There’s a strong argument for fairy tale in the idea that Parker will discover her parents’ identities—and, indeed, find her place in life—in the town of Haven. Of course, being a TV series inspired by the work of Stephen King, even if our hero’s quest is met with success, it’s a safe bet that the victory will be dark, possibly pyrrhic.

King has met with great success alluding to fairy tales in his works; he has also likened horror films to fairy tales in terms of the visceral way film forces viewers to engage with inner darkness, much like the captive audiences of the then-verbal-only fairy tales many centuries past. King’s The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) is the best example of the author’s written explorations, as the book is told in fairy tale style. The multi-volume Dark Tower series (1982-current) directly references Robert Browning’s 19th-century poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, but also touches on the fairy tale legend of Childe Rowland. Carrie (1974)—one of the best of the King film adaptations (Brian De Palma, 1976)—is, of course, the Cinderella story told in reverse: the belle and the ball and, in King’s case, the blood.

It’s also interesting to note that director Stanley Kubrick intentionally made references to fairy tales in his adaptation of The Shining (1980), based on King’s 1977 masterpiece. Among many notable points, demented father Jack Torrance becomes the big bad wolf (even quoting “I’ll huff and I’ll puff”), while his wife and son become Hansel and Gretel (following breadcrumb trails, being lured into places of danger).

Getting back to Cinderella, the process of adaptation has made some heady changes to the girl’s story over the centuries, most notably the glass slipper. The original legend is French, and involved a slipper of white fox fur—“vair,” in the parlance of the times. In modern French, the homonym “verre” translates to…glass. And it’s well known that the Grimm fairy tales have been sanitized over the ages to remove darker allusions and fates for their protagonists.

Maybe an adage for adaptation, then, is: the more things change, the more things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the more mysterious. As the mystery deepens in Haven, it will be interesting to see how this impacts not just the poor, poor Colorado Kid, but all of the people around him, however Grim(m) their personal fairy tales may be.

TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, Haven Blog #4: YOU ARE MY SON, SHINING, MY ONLY SON, SHINING