Grove Koger

I’m fascinated by coincidences—unexpected connections or correspondences that seem significant.

One such coincidence involves Stephen King’s long 1977 novel The Shining and Paul Bowles’ 1983 short story “In the Red Room,” which was originally published in Antaeus.  

In Chapter 37 of the novel, the little boy Danny sees the letters REDRUM “flashing off and on” in a medicine cabinet mirror. Then he sees the same combination—REDRUM— “reflecting dimly from the glass dome” of a bowl, but “now reflected twice.” And he realizes that the letters spell MURDER …

In the 1980 motion picture of the novel, the boy (played by Danny Lloyd) scrawls REDRUM onto a door. It’s a masterfully unnerving scene, and one of the many ways in which director Stanley Kubrick transformed King’s frightening words into even more frightening images.

Paul Bowles’ story, which you can read here on the Classic Short Stories site, runs to fewer than 3,700 words, and its relatively short span stands in striking contrast to King’s long novel. Chances are you’ve read the novel or seen the movie, but the chances are equally good that you haven’t read the story. It involves a visit that the narrator’s parents, Hannah and Dodd, pay him while he’s living in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. One day, the three are walking through a botanical garden where they encounter a young man who, oddly enough, encourages them to visit his house.

One of its rooms, it turns out, has “glistening crimson walls and ceiling,” and is almost entirely “filled by a big bed with a satin coverlet of a slightly darker red.” The room, we’ve already learned, has been the scene of a brutal crime, but equally chilling are the insights that Hannah, who knows nothing of the crime, draws from the visit. “That room had a particular meaning for him. It was like a sort of shrine.” And then she adds, “Well, what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”  

Bowles’ story was reprinted in an attractive edition by Sylvester & Orphanos in 1981, and then reprinted again in the second edition of Bowles’ collection Midnight Mass (Black Sparrow, 1983).

King has written admiringly of Bowles’ works, and, in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000), included the latter’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky on a list of recommended books for aspiring writers. However, I suspect that Bowles knew nothing about King. I don’t find his name in the indexes to any of the books about Bowles that I own.

But to get back to the subject of coincidences, do the appearance of REDRUM in King’s novel and a red room in Bowles’ later story amount to one? I’ve realized that the concept of “apophenia” is more appropriate here. It refers to a tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things, and I think I may suffer from it.

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