The novel lacks scenes to make the heart stop and grow cold, like Johnny Smith shaking hands with a madman in “The Dead Zone” and instantly knowing the man’s secrets, or Louis Creed’s terror in “Pet Sematary,” when the corpse of his cat, risen from the dead, brushes against his leg in the dark.Īnd few people in Castle Rock are worth liking, much less caring about. He has no grand plan for Castle Rock, just an appetite for its destruction. Leland Gaunt sorely lacks the sinister motivations of a Randy Flagg, the Dark Man in King’s modern-day Armageddon “The Stand.” Although a husband hammering his wife to death is hardly the result of a harmless little trick, Gaunt only does it for enjoyment. The problem with “Needful Things” is the monster isn’t scary and the characters aren’t worth being scared for. It’s a fitting denouement with enough Technicolor, King-style gore to satiate.īut, as King said, you don’t get scared of monsters you get scared for people. Most of the town residents are primed to kill with the most convenient lethal weapon at hand, a hammer in one case, a corkscrew in another. In a matter of days, the citizens of Castle Rock are finished talking behind their hands, and the town explodes into an orgy of meaningless violence.

The tricks are the strings attached to the needful things.

His plan is to set townsman against townsman by asking them to play “harmless little tricks” on each other, tricks that will reveal their secrets and eat at their hearts. Gaunt knows the town’s secrets, its old grudges, dark desires and long-closeted skeletons, and he knows the town will be willing to pay anything.īehind the veneer, Gaunt is the kind of man - or thing - that lunches on live rats. Hugh Priest wants a Davey Crockett foxtail that makes him feel like he can start his life over.

The town’s head selectman wants a toy racetrack that will enable him to win back everything he’s embezzled from the town coffers.

Castle rock needful things