n the Stephen King novella "Everything's Eventual," a 19-year-old
high-school dropout with the unfortunate name of Dinky Earnshaw fatuously explains that he's got a good job now. He used to be a
clerk at the "Supr Savr," where he worked with morons and was relentlessly
bullied by an aggressive dimwit named Skipper. But now Skipper's dead and
Dinky's got a new job, where the main perks are that he gets his own house
and his own car and virtually anything he asks for, including CDs that
haven't been released yet. He also gets a small wad of cash each week,
provided he doesn't look for the people who drop it through his mail
slot, and that he remembers to destroy or throw away any money left over at
the end of the week. In his usual down-to-earth style, King stretches the
tiny details of this situation out to great length before finally settling
down to the obvious and compelling questions: what exactly is this
mysterious job, and what does a dead supermarket clerk have to do with
it?
"Everything's Eventual" is the centerpiece of Stephen King's F13,
a "virtual horror" software package consisting of random bits of spooky
software. The CD, which can operate on either a PC or a
Macintosh, includes horror-based screensavers, sound files, desktop
themes, and three mini-games, also referred to as "time-killers."
Two of these time-killers operate very similarly: In "Bug Splat," nasty
cockroaches crawl across the screen until the player clicks on them to
squash them messily, whereas in "Whack-a-Zombie," nasty skeletons pop out
of graves and chuck bones at the screen until the player clicks on them to
make them lie back down. "No Swimming," the third mini-game, looks more
like the familiar fishtank screensaver, except that the fish are actually
piranhas, and it's possible to toss them a cow, horse, dog,
alligator or rhino to skeletonize.
Lots of tricks, not many treats
Apart from the original King story, most of F13's contents will
take about an hour to explore and lose interest in. The mini-games in
particular are disappointing; the graphics are convincingly grotesque, but
highly redundant, and playing one level is just the same as playing 50.
The audio files, suitable for use as system alerts, are cute but basic
(screams, chops, crunches, etc.), and the "DeathTop Patterns"--a field of
roaches, glazed-looking eyeballs, the words "Stephen King" and "F13," etc.--simply seem like filler. Most of the work on this CD went into building
the "Scream Savers," which have conceptual and operational problems, but at
least show flashes of creativity. For instance, in the creepiest one, "It's Just Lightning," periodic bursts of light reveal an
unsettlingly gaudy clown toy moving around a darkened basement, grabbing
weapons to threaten a mumbling homeowner who's trying to fix the
lights. The utility uses static images rather than animation, which gives
the entire thing a stiff, forced appearance (and frequently means the sound
effects don't match the action) but at least the images themselves are
spooky. "Stephen King Trivia" is also interesting, at least for anyone who
wants to know when King's most likely to sport a beard, or when he sold his
first story, or what that story was.
"Everything's Eventual" is at least a solid King story with an
intriguing premise and the author's trademark obsession with style and
detail. But reading it on a computer screen, against a dim, parchment-like
background in light letters, quickly proves irritating. How hard would it have been to let readers vary the font, or at least the font size?
Unfortunately, that level of interactivity was apparently beyond F13's designers. The concept behind F13 is a
little more basic--tricking collectors and King fanatics into paying $30
for a novella they can't get in paperback yet, under the premise that
they're getting a lot more for their money.
