Perhaps one of the most audacious adaptations of the works of Stephen King is Haven, a new Showcase Original series 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 6:
TROUBLES, TROUBLES—BOILING BUBBLES?
by Gary Butler

In the genres of horror and suspense, there is the mysterious, and there is the unknowable. The former can be explained—albeit, sometimes in only the vaguest manner but enough to, essentially, ‘make sense’—whereas the latter at the very least defies explanation, if not outright refuses to be understood.

The mysterious and the unknowable are no strangers to the works of horror legend Stephen King. His 2005 novella “The Colorado Kid” centres on a dead man, the titular ‘Kid,’ the nature of whose death proves impossible to solve: The body simply shows up on a beach one day and, before long, the trail of whys and wherefores dries up. Not the most satisfying ending for a story, the author himself admits in a candid afterword—but real life offers no such guarantees, King adds, pointing to the numerous murders that go unsolved every year, everywhere.

Haven is, of course, loosely based on “The Colorado Kid.” The Kid in this case is also dead and, 11 episodes deep, his death remains unexplained—for now. Lead character Audrey Parker, an FBI agent with an almost magnetic knack for the supernatural, has discovered a baker’s dozen of clues indicating that her past and the Kid’s are linked. In this sense, the ‘mysterious’ aspect is fulfilled.

But King wanted the Kid’s fate to be unknowable. Is he willing to let the TV show alter this core aspect of his book?

If so, well, fair enough: TV and print are entirely different media. And while King has inserted numerous instances of the unknowable into his books over his four-decade career, the vast majority of them have been eliminated when adapted for the screen.

For just two examples, consider The Shining and Pet Sematary, both of which feature the unknowable.

King’s 1977 novel of The Shining included a dark presence in the attic of the haunted hotel. Near the end of the story, the psychic boy hero, Danny, is being chased by his father (actually, his father’s dead body, killed by his mother but reanimated by the hotel), who traps the boy on the attic stairs. It’s a frying pan and fire situation—Danny senses evil in the attic, and knows to avoid it, but knows that if he goes down the ladder, his father will ‘get’ him. How he escapes is less important than the fact that he does not, ultimately, enter the attic. The horror beyond its door remains shuttered, therefore unknowable to the reader. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation removed all references to the attic.

The case of King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary is not dissimilar. This time, the path from the country-roadside pet burial ground to the spiritual, backwoods, ley-lined resurrection field is a long path, described in the book as taking hours upon hours to walk. And during this walk, protagonist Louis senses that something terrible is coming for him—something greater than the evil-enough fate that befalls any of the resurrected lives. This larger evil is in the air, perhaps of it; again, it is never confronted, never revealed and again, the film adaptation (1989) excised it completely.

Speaking of ‘it’… The closing moments of King’s 1986 novel, It, finds the collective of heroes—the Losers—confronting the neighbourhood-pervasive evil, which resides in the sewers. As King writes it, intentionally, the beast cannot be described; the human eye cannot process the information, and the author states that the best rationale that can be offered is to equate the thing to a giant spider—forget about the eye: this is the only way that the human mind can make it out intact. Understandably, the 1990 TV adaptation simply presented the beast as a spider, no questions asked.

Meanwhile, back in Haven, the small seaside town has been beset with ‘troubles’ since the very first of the 13 episodes. In fact, every episode has featured what amounts to a ‘trouble of the week’—a supernatural phenomenon that can be explained only by accepting as fact the scientifically, forensically impossible. Two episodes away from the series’ grand conclusion, the question of the resolution of the death of the Colorado Kid still hangs in the air, but so too does the question of the ‘troubles,’ which have yet to be explained collectively.

Interestingly, in this week's episode—“The Trial of Audrey Parker”—there is a notable, passing occurrence of the unknowable: A box being smuggled by the honorable thief, Duke. By episode’s end, the box’s contents remain a mystery—and it’s just possible that we’ll never know. The question that might egg on certain viewers, though, is: Does it matter?

TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, Haven Blog #7: THE ENDINGS JUSTIFY THE MEANINGS