Book Review : Stephen King - The Langoliers (1990)
Planes are fucking scary. I don’t care what statistic proving they’re a thousand times safer than cars you can come up with, the idea of riding a metal tube 30 000 feet in the air is terrifying alone. That’s when nothing goes wrong. Flying is such a weird state of suspended reality, it makes for particularly awesome horror. A lot of weird shit can happen when you’re officially nowhere. I don’t know if plane horror’s a thing (it has to be a thing, right?), but Stephen King has a plane horror novel called The Langoliers and it’ll give you cold sweats if you’re scared of flying.
The Langoliers tells the story of ten people who fall asleep during a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston. They wake up and find the plane deserted, without even a pilot in it. Fortunately, pilot Brian Engle was a passenger and steers the ship in time for an emergency landing in Bangor, Maine. I know, right? Where else? The airport is also completely deserted. No passenger seems to understand what’s going on except Craig Toomy, a sociopathic investment banker who tells them creatures his father use to scare him with have finally come for him and he’s absolutely right.
The first half of The Langoliers consists in ten people freaking each other out because of inexplicable circumstances. It’s kind of great. There’s way too many characters for the novel to be consistent, but tension inherent to landing (and what the passengers will find out there) is palpable. The plane is basically ushering them into a Netherworld, like Charon through river Styx. This is what great horror does: it lets the inexplicable linger on because whatever explanation you can come up with will be a thousand times scarier than what is actually happening.
What makes The Langoliers freaky is that Stephen King applies this horror-to-audience relationship to his characters. They are the helpless audience of world altering events.
That precarious balance goes to shit once the crew lands in Bangor, though. I mean, it’s great for a while. Craig Toomy gives some background on the Langoliers and does something completely insane, but once the light sheds on the situation and the blob-like monsters are seen…. The Langoliers loses almost all of its unspoken tension. They’re not exactly complex or nuanced. They’re time-eating monsters that make everything disappear. In other words, the quintessential metaphor for death. The goal becomes suddenly clear: outrun them at all cost.
I liked The Langoliers. It was a little too on-the-nose with the existentialist subtext for me to love it, but it successfully captured the alien atmosphere and inherent dread of planes and airports. It doesn’t really matter how corny the monster was at the end, the incertitude and the weirdness of stepping into the unknown were successfully transposed. I might’ve been a good audience for The Langoliers because planes and airports already freaked me out, but the atmosphere really got to me. Not an iconic Stephen King novel, but an efficient one.
7.1/10
