Stephen King
Literary Fiction
Pages 37-82
The Mangler is the next short story written by Stephen King that I really enjoyed. The mangler is an old school laundry machine. Officer Hunton is sent to the store because apparently someone's arm got stuck in the the machine and was pulled in between the rollers flatting the poor women making for a slow agonizing death.Officer Hunton suspected that the safety bar wasn't working, but to his surprise when he tested it the machine shut off immediately; therefore, the women should have also set it off when her arm went to far into the machine. Hutton discussed the matter with his close friend Jackson and neither one of them could make sense of it. Then next week one of the steam pipes from the blue ribbon laundry machine broke off and burned 6 of the workers, killing 3 of them. Jackson believes that the machine is possessed by a demon. Hunton is then convinced that Jackson's assumption is correct when they find out that the blood of a virgin is one of the ways to posses an inanimate object. Cherry weeks before these incidents began cut her finger on the machine bleeding all over it, they discovered that she was a virgin.Hunton and Jackson attempt to preform an exorcism, but come to realize that the machine is possessed by a much stronger entity, the hand of glory. The holy water does nothing to it and it soon rises out of the ground using the pipes as legs. Hunton runs out of their screaming leaving Jackson behind to die.
I'm amazed by the creativeness of Stephen King's writing. I could never have thought of a laundry machine to be something you could base a horror story off of. In fact credits found it to be so good they made a movie of it. I'll have to watch the movie and compare the the book to it and see what the movie changed. I can't wait to read more of his stories, so far they are all so good.
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