The Deathroom: Response

Stephen King seems like an unlikely candidate to write such creepy stories; he just seems too normal to write about masochism and killers and ghosts. The Deathroom is the story of a journalist named Fletcher, who supports a communist revolutionist group with information and gets caught. He appears before a panel of officials, who promise him freedom as they unveil the cruel machine they intend to kill him with. This sets the tone of the story: he soon begins to believe that he’s trapped. The first scene, when he is brought into the interrogation room is terrifying; it’s almost as if you, as the reader, are the one being brought before these officials.

Unlike many standard interrogation room stories where the nervous, sweaty man gets tortured with some science-fiction-like device before spilling the beans, only to have his brains splattered out anyway, King detaches himself from the convention of the genre, opting for a more optimistic ending. He achieves that by painting the officials as almost laughable captors. He makes the seemed ringleader seem like a total stereotype. The exception is the one woman Fletcher takes to calling “the Bride of Frankenstein” for her austere visage and Marge Simpson hair. The torture scene was not as graphic as it could have been, but Fletcher’s escape was a call to a bloodier era as he turns the electrical torture device against them. “One of Heinz’s cheeks either tore open or melted” It was borderline vomit inducing at times, but that’s what readers want with this kind of writing.

Despite the story being set in an unnamed Latin-American country, and having a vaguely political undertone, King doesn’t try to make the American-style democracy the hero. The journalist supports the communists with his whole being, partly because the government of the country framed the revolutionaries for killing American nuns; one of them was Fletcher’s sister. King captures the “nefarious, corrupt government” archetype without making it feel contrived.