We’ve all heard the old adage that you could catch a cold if not properly dressed when outside. Trisha gets pneumonia after being lost in the woods for nine days. Is there any truth to this old wives’ tale? According to Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, you can’t catch a cold from being cold but it can lead you to being more susceptible to illnesses. “Cold weather can dry out the lining of your nose, leaving you more vulnerable to an infection. Some research also suggests that prolonged exposure to the cold may suppress the immune system.”4 Trisha’s pneumonia was a lung infection caused by a virus or bacteria. These germs made the air sacs in her lungs fill with fluid, phlegm, or mucous, making breathing more difficult. Pneumonia is the number one leading cause of death in the world for children under the age of five. In the United States, pneumonia tends to be less fatal for children but is the number one reason they are hospitalized.5
Pneumonia is the most common cause of sepsis and septic shock, causing 50 percent of all episodes.6
Trisha survives her encounter with the bear in the woods and is able to find some peace, maybe even faith, by the end of the book. She points up at the sky, like her hero Tom Gordon does, to signify that perhaps there is a higher power.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Gwendy’s Button Box
Throughout Stephen King’s prolific career, he has written novels, short stories, and screenplays. He has even written as two men, creating his alter ego, Richard Bachman, in order to publish at an accelerated rate. He has worked with Michael Jackson on the music video “Ghosts,” appeared in films like Pet Sematary (1989) and even directed the film adaptation of his story Trucks into Maximum Overdrive (1986). So, it should be no surprise, as a creator devoted to storytelling, that King has collaborated with fellow writers. His first cowritten novel was The Talisman (1984) with Peter Straub. They worked together again to bring the sequel, Black House, to readers in 2001. In 2017, two coauthored King works were released. Sleeping Beauties, written alongside King’s son Owen King, is the story of a strange epidemic spreading across the globe. Focused on a small town in Georgia, Sleeping Beauties depicts a world in which women are cocooned like moths and men are left to figure out how to fix the chaos. A starkly feminist novel, it allows the women to save themselves. Owen King is currently writing the pilot script for AMC.
In Sleeping Beauties, the fictional disease is called “Aurora” in which women become homicidal when their cocoon is disturbed. It is named after Sleeping Beauty (1959) herself, Disney Princess Aurora.
The other collaborative work in 2017 was the novella Gwendy’s Button Box. Set in the 1970s in Castle Rock, Gwendy’s was written with a longtime friend of King’s, Richard Chizmar. It is the story of a middle schooler named Gwendy who is given an odd, magical box by a stranger. This box, which she keeps a secret from her parents and friends, is both a blessing and a curse. It gives her small chocolates that once eaten, make her life better. She loses her extra weight, gets straight A’s, and is a star on the track team. Yet, there are buttons on this box that carry a considerable burden. The stranger who gives her the box, mysterious much like the man who gives Jack the magic beans, explains that each button corresponds with a particular continent of the world. And if pressed, chaos will ensue. A curious child, Gwendy eventually presses the button that represents South America.
Before September 11, 2001, the Jonestown Massacre was the biggest single event of intentional American death. There were only thirty-three survivors out of nearly a thousand souls.
She finds out the next morning that the Jonestown Massacre, in which over nine hundred people perished, occurred the evening before. Convinced she is to blame, Gwendy is wracked with guilt. She can’t stop thinking it is her, and not Jim Jones, who is to blame. Later, the mysterious stranger assures her it is cult leader Jim Jones, not her press of the button, that caused the deaths. This led us to question the concept of coincidence.
Many of us have experienced odd coincidences we can’t explain. Some believe this is the work of God, or perhaps the cosmic wisdom of the universe. Mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller took a more scientific approach, defining coincidence as “a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.”1 They explain in their 1989 research article “Methods For Studying Coincidences” that given the large number of humans on the planet, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” More importantly, humans are not able to fully, mathematically appreciate what is truly unlikely. What we feel is a coincidence is rooted in our own personal belief systems. We are more interested in coincidences that have to do with us, rather than other people. In the Atlantic article “Coincidence and the Meaning of Life,” writer Julie Beck uses the example of birthdays:
People can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother’s birthday, or your best friend’s. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So, there are several birthdays that a person could have that would feel coincidental.2
People who describe themselves as religious tend to believe more in coincidences.
Again, the observation of coincidences are in a way, egotistical, as Beck explains that research proves it reflects more on the person experiencing the coincidence than the actual mathematical likelihood:
Research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.
In a strange coincidence, nurse Violet Jessup lived through three shipwrecks! She was a passenger on the RMS Olympic when it struck another ship, as well as on the HMHS Britannic as it hit a sea mine, and she managed to escape on lifeboat number sixteen on the tragic voyage of the RMS Titanic.
In the fictional, magical world of Gwendy’s Button Box, it’s hard to say whether Gwendy pressing the button corresponding with South America really did set the Jonestown Massacre into motion, but as we know in the real world, it was no simple button, or coincidence, that caused such a blight on our collective history.
What is a fortunate coincidence (if we do say so ourselves!), is that we had the great honor of interviewing Richard Chizmar, coauthor of Gwendy’s Button Box, as well as the founder of Cemetery Dance Magazine and Publications.
Meg: “Writing fiction can be a very personal creative endeavor. Can you describe how Gwendy’s Button Box came about, and how logistically you and Stephen King handled writing a book together?”