Review: Children of the Corn, Stephen King
“What did he say?” Burt asked her. “What did he say about corn?”
The story starts when Burt and Vicky, a couple trying to save their marriage, drives to California to visit Vicky’s brother. As they go through a rural zone of Nebraska, they end up running over a little boy — who, they find out, had previously been murdered with a cut to his throat. Vicky wants to flee, but they decide to report the body. That is where everything starts to go wrong.
I loved this shorty, but what I really love about King’s writing is the way he can create a constant tension that genuinely holds the reader’s attention. In Children of the Corn — which is already a classic — he does it with perfection, by putting together all the elements to outline a horror atmosphere. There are the creepy children, the empty lot [and empty city], the religious cult and even a demonic creature to complete the package.
We’re saving our marriage, he told himself. Yes. We’re doing it the same way us grunts went about saving villages in the war.
Besides that, there is also a very well figured subplot; the tension between Burt and Vicky, as well as their never-ending fighting, shows up the importance given by King to the psychological construction of his characters, even when they are not so deeply explored.
I’d recommend this to all King’s — and horror in general — fans
