dolan's cadillac

Awesome story. I love creative homicidal revenge stories. Did anybody else think Christian Slater was a pretty lame Dolan? I think Peter Greene would have been a good cast for Dolan. He just looks like a scum bag.

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Originally Posted by Ranger_Strider

I have a few thoughts about : Dolan's Cadillac

First, I have read 'Danse Macabre' about twenty-five years ago, and there is something SK said in that that has always stuck in my mind. That is that all the really good stories have already been told and it is up to us to (more or less) contemporize those tales. So, in that light, Dolan's Cadillac is merely E.A. Poe's 'Cask of Amontillado' retold, with the stakes raised a bit.

Second, what bothers me is that in the endnotes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes SK speaks at length about his inspiration and genesis of that story, but never once nods to Poe.
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He says the inspiration came from driving through such a construction site, like that described in Dolan's Cadillac. However, the only allusion I can see is that Dolan

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is buried beneath the Earth

while Fortunato is buried behind a brick wall. The stories don't compare very well. At the most they are both tales of revenge.

I wonder if the critic has ever sat at a desk night after night, week after week, etc., adding yet another rejection slip to an entire host of rejection slips. I think anyone who does this is doing it because they love the craft and want someone else to enjoy something they wrote, not just for money. And I see nothing wrong with taking an older idea and putting a new spin on it. It's called imagination.

All I have to say on this topic is that Stephen King wrote a darn good story here. He took a basic concept like revenge for a murdered wife and interweaved all the essential threads to make the story fabric. Getting a job with the highway department was quite the imaginative brainstorm. The interaction of Tink and the foreman (I can't remember his name right now) added excellent dialogue to the story, and the ending with the sandstorm and how there would be a RPAV was just the final paving (pun intended!) to firmly cement the story.

This is one of my fave novella in the collection. Lol