Have been reading Bentley Little's The Store, getting nostalgic for a time before I started hating Walmart

BLOT: (17 Oct 2011 - 03:57:41 PM)

Have been reading Bentley Little's The Store, getting nostalgic for a time before I started hating Walmart

I have been reading through Bentley Little's The Store. Stephen King went on a little praise-blast for it specifically, I think in one of his columns for Entertainment Weekly, a few years back [see cover below for a well placed blurb about Little in general], and I picked it up. Sat it down. Never opened it. This October, a week or so ago, I went, "What horror novels do I have to read?" Which is kind of like asking a cashier at a really well stocked ice cream stand what flavors they have in store. Sometimes the presence of choice is just as bad as its absence. Can eat up a lot of brainmeat RAM cycles just choosing a path. In the midst of this moment of "which horror to prioritize" despair, I got The Store out and sat it at number 2. Number 1 was Laird Barron's The Light is the Darkness. That's done, so now on to this.

What's it about? Well, a retail chain store called "The Store"—While its description as a tan box with white sidewalk, no windows, and a handful of smoke-colored glass doors is not directly an amalgamation of Walmart and K-mart, it is pretty damned close—opens up in a small, Southwest town. It drives smaller businesses out of business, gets people really excited about the savings forthcoming, and scares the bejeezus out of Bill, a local man who keeps getting creeped out by it. For good reason. Animals that come in contact with the construction site die. There are hints of blood being used in the foundation. Accidents clog the building process. The chain has a record of weird, fatal events occurring at its other locations. Then we start getting some definite proof of the evil behind the scenes and, well, that's as far as I've read so far...

The novel is a [very thinly veiled] commentary on Walmart and other big-box stores—Target, K-mart, etc—who started branching out into small communities in the 90s and had a really complicated impact: the final cost/boon of which probably is a long way off from being figured up. For every small store drive out of business these big-box stores hire twice as a many workers while for every cheap good they put on a dining table for Christmas, they crowd out better, locally crafted products. Somehow stores like Walmart have managed to tie themselves into the American bloodstream, so that people who criticize Walmart are treated as equally criticizing the country, itself, but that's marketing gone mad and some psychopathic levels of tribalism combined into one. I pretty much detest Walmart more than any other business besides, maybe, two or three, and the only thing I find sexier than America is your mom after she forgets to take her lithium for a couple of days. So, you know, there.

Reading The Store is sifting through passages where people have quite sincere conversations about consumerism, retail loyalty, the high prices of low costs, outside contractors in local economies, and hiring practises of corporate America. Then, toss in some weird creepy stuff. As it goes, the preachiness decreases and the creepiness because more definite (by page 100, we have molestation of a sweet, innocent character and then we get..."The Guantlet"). I would hate the preachiness more if it wasn't for the fact that so much of it tends to be spot on. There is a quote about people who are against taxes the most tend to be the biggest fans of militarism. There is a bit about how people will, despite any loyalty to local stores, mostly shop where they can save money. About how some of the same people who preach about corporate greed and the death of small town America will flock first day to grand openings of bigger stores and to any big sales. About how big-box stores will lose money on some products to drive out competitors. There are even old people greeting people at the door of the eponymous The Store.

The biggest flaw, outside of the altogether non-subtle preaching that probably could have been done in a slightly more low-key way and been just as, or more, effective, is that this novel is written and set in the late 90s and yet talks about big-box stores as though they were so impossibly the future that they make personal jetpacks seem blasé. There is even acknowledgement of that fabled beast of yore called "Shopping Malls" but The Store still effectively astounds people. I get the fact that this is a supernatural-esque effect in store, but the fact that there is no version of it in the bigger towns that the central family shop at (they go there for the malls and better shops, something pointed out more than once) and the fact that no one in the book compares The Store to any of the above mentioned big-box places, makes it feel...unnecessarily gimmicky. Maybe Walmart wasn't in vogue in the Southwest at the time the book is set (circa 98)? Maybe the book is set some years before that in the past and there's no way to know? Still, it seems to be getting fun and as of right now I recommend it.

As a final note, it has made me sort of wistful for the days that I did shop at the little, pre-Super, Walmart in Andalusia, AL. There have been effectively no times since that time, when I have felt quite so happy and satisfied as a consumer (brief forays into OnCue in Brewton being the likely exception). When I would go and sort through their literally hundreds of tapes and CDs and their literally dozens of books and have a good time. This would have been...'93 or '94. Something like that. Was never the place where the cool kids roamed, that was the Hardee's parking lot out near the Interstate. It was just a place, where you could buy stuff. Now when I walk into one, I never get that feeling of a down-home little store gotten a little bit bigger. I get the feeling of a place that hates me but loves my money and is willing to compromise. I'm getting old and crotchety.

As a final, final note, or a post script, when looking on Wikipedia for an article on The Store, I found two things. First, there is a potential movie in the works, and secondly, there is another book called The Store, which has this bit as part of its description: "Miltiades Vaiden and his wife own a profitable store in the small town of Florence, Alabama where Vaiden has no qualms creating an artificial friendship with some of the newly free local blacks, or even the now economically desperate whites, cheating them out of their money to ensure his own success." Hot damn, I'm on it.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011