The little town of Castle Rock, Maine, has witnessed some strange events and unusual visitors over the years, but there is one story that has never been told…until now. 

There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong (if time-rusted) iron bolts and zigzag up the cliffside. At the top of the stairs, Gwendy catches her breath and listens to the shouts of the kids on the playground. From a bit farther away comes the chink of an aluminium bat hitting a baseball as the Senior League kids practice for the Labour Day charity game. 

One day a stranger calls to Gwendy: ‘Hey, girl. Come on over here for a bit. We ought to palaver, you and me.’ On a bench in the shade sits a man in black jeans, a black coat like for a suit, and a white shirt unbuttoned at the top. On his head is a small, neat black hat. The time will come when Gwendy has nightmares about that hat….

I had one of those ennui-ridden days yesterday. I had the time and the inclination to read but none of the books I’d downloaded called to me. I nibbled at a couple of them but I couldn’t taste them. My imagination couldn’t get any traction. So I opted for novelty as an antidote to listlessness and searched for something short and satisfying that I could read in an afternoon. I found ‘Gwendy’s Button Box‘, a novella co-authored by Stephen King (a go-to comfort read author for me) and Richard Chizmar (who I wasn’t familiar with) nd consumed it in an afternoon.

I was glad that I’d opted for the audiobook version. Maggie Siff’s narration was engaging and soothing and soon I was lost in another Castle Rock story in the 1970s, this time following a decade of the life of a young girl called Gwendy after she has an encounter with an extraordinary man who gifts her a box that is both a blessing and a curse.

I liked Gwendy, as Stephen King intended me to. She is brave, disciplined, mostly kind and is as honest with herself as any of us are capable of being. She’s not perfect and she’s very young so some of her decision are not a wise as they might be but those things just made her easier to engage with.

The box… well the box is terrifying. It’s like handing a child a nuclear bomb and saying “Only press the button if you’re sure it’s the right thing to do”. To make things worse, the box establishes a silently symbiotic relationship with Gwendy, offering her rewards that build dependency and reshape her life to the point where her ownership of her achievements is undermined and she questions the truth of her own identity.

This is a ‘thought experiment’ story, a ‘What if?’ speculation about power and choice and consequences, a reflection on the Spiderman truism that ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ that, in Stephen King’s hands, also becomes the life story of a nice young girl whose childhood is ended early by an understanding that the world is not a safe place and that destruction is just a press of a button away, whether that button is in the hands of Nixon or Brezhnev or by Gwendy herself.

I was cruising along happily in the story but I couldn’t see how it could be brought to an end, unless it turned into another ‘IT‘ and one decade became three and I was watching Gwendy decide if Y2K would end the world.

The ending, when it came, was dramatic and a little sad but a little too neat and too cosy to be entirely satisifying. Still, my ennui was gone. I’d had an entertaining afternoon and I was ready to read something else.

Then I found that Stephen King’s ‘The Music Room’ had been added as a bonus story. It’s short, stylised and delightfully dark and twisted. Just the amuse-bouche I needed to clear my palette and move on to my next book.

The last thing on the audiobook is a conversation between Stephen King and Richard Chizmar about their collaboration on this story. The two of them were internet friends who often exchanged emails and chatted about things. One of those things was a story that Stephen King had started but couldn’t find a way to finish. He’d sent it to Richard Chizmar, who turned it into the ‘Gwendy’s Button Box’ I’d just read. Of course, the geek in me desperately wanted to see what the story looked like before the collaboration started and I found myself going back over the story in my head to see if I could find the join.

There are two more Gwendy novellas but I’m not heading there just now. Maybe the next time ennui has me it’s grip, they can help me get free.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of Maggie Siff’s narration.