TVSquad

(S01E05) "The Road Virus Heads North," from Stephen King's collection Everything's Eventual, is a pretty straightforward horror tale, especially for King. That doesn't mean it's a bad story, but it seems like the kind of spooky campfire tale that would come easily to him, and this TV adaptation moves along rather quickly, just like the story itself. The living painting that chronicles the journey of the madman within it is based on an actual painting owned by King.

Tom Berenger plays a horror novelist named Richard Kinnell who lives in Derry, Maine (the same fictional town where King's novels IT and Insomnia take place). King uses part of his story to poke fun at people who ask him the same two questions over and over: Where do you get your ideas? And do you ever scare yourself? Kinnell encounters those questions when he attends a book signing where rabid fans cheer and crowd around him as if he's a rock star rather than just a writer. He has other things on his mind however, because he just received his first colonoscopy and it's possible he has cancer. On his drive back home he stops off at a yard sale and purchases a painting of a crazy-looking driver with scraggly hair driving a car across a bridge. The painting is titled "The Road Virus Heads North" (natch) and the woman who sells it to him explains that the kid who painted it was a depressed coke-addled genius who painted several other paintings much more horrific than this one, but burned them all on the front lawn before hanging himself with a chain in the garage.

As he continues home, stopping to visit an aunt and later his ex-wife, Kinnell notices the painting is changing, and that the driver of the car is stopping at all the same places he has. He decides to get rid of the cursed painting by chucking it in the river, but since this is a horror story we know that's not going to be enough. The painting ends up right back in his back seat, but this time it's changed to a gory scene of the driver having hacked off the head of the woman who sold him the painting in the first place. His ex-wife throws the painting out, but once he arrives home it pops up again, and Kinnell realizes he's faced with an inevitable. The Road Virus is coming for him, and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

The cancer angle is a new addition that isn't in King's original story, and it does add a nice dimension, making the story somewhat more feasible. Kinnell believes the Road Virus is just that, his own virus, but in one dream sequence the driver scoffs at Kinnell's egotism and explains he's actual Kinnell's fear, not his virus. Sure, okay, that works, too. Like I said, this isn't one of King's multi-layered tales, just a very simple ghost story, and that works just fine. It leaps out, scares you for a moment, and then sends you on your way. I can totally dig that.