In our King short fiction class, two of the monster-themed stories we read were “The Boogeyman” (from the 1978 Night Shift collection) and “The Crate,” which was featured in the 1981 The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, with adaptations in the Creepshow comic anthology and George Romero’s anthology film (both 1982). King’s fiction features a wide range of monsters, some of which have specific strongholds and places of power, while others range more freely. The monsters in “The Boogeyman” and “The Crate” require unique spatial consideration, however. While they occupy finite spaces—the closet for the boogeyman and the crate for that story’s creature, respectively—those spaces prove ultimately unknowable and uncontainable. 

In “The Boogeyman,” Lester Billings is talking to a psychiatrist named Dr. Harper after the deaths of his three children, who were killed by the boogeyman in their closet. Lester’s oldest son Denny clearly identifies the source of the danger and articulates his terror, with Lester recalling that Denny “pointed right at the closet when he said it. ‘Boogeyman,’ the kid says. ‘Boogeyman, Daddy’” (98). Billings dismisses this as the nightmares of an imaginative child, refusing even a night light to allay the boy’s fears. When the boogeyman comes, Denny screams for help but is dead by the time Lester gets to his son’s room, and in the aftermath of this tragedy, Lester remembers vividly that “The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack” (99). This horror is repeated with the Billings’ daughter Shirl and their younger son Andy and each time, the closet door is slightly ajar. Lester begins to become more aware of the boogeyman and get a better sense of what kind of creature is preying upon his children, recalling a glimpse of “something [that] moved. Back in the shadows, by the closet. Something slithered” (101, emphasis original). The boogeyman lives in the closet, a space that Billings should be able to see clearly and completely, to take ownership of and protect his children. Spatially speaking, it is small and confined. But of course, this is not the case. The closet isn’t just a closet, but a source of horror, for both the Billings children and for Lester himself. This space that should be finite and knowable is instead a source of endless horrific possibilities. 

Similarly, in “The Crate,” the crate itself is easily mapped, its confines clearly demarcated. The crate is “about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three feet deep” (575-6). The crate has been underneath the stairs at Horlicks University (where Arnie Cunningham’s parents later work in 1983’s Christine) since being sent back from an Arctic expedition in 1834. Professor Dexter Stanley and the janitor who found the crate set about opening it with the intent of seeing what’s inside, to chronicle and inventory whatever useful materials it might contain. But despite its age and the limited space of the crate itself, it holds untold horrors, as the creature within emits “a low, hoarse growling sound” (580) before attacking with a “snarl and gobble” (581). The creature is only glimpsed in fragments, “Something dry and brown and scaly as a desert reptile … with huge claws” (581). Just as there is no logical explanation for the boogeyman to lurk in the Billings’ children’s closet, there is no logical way that this creature could have survived for nearly a century and a half, stowed in a relatively small box under the stairs. But there it is, alive and hungry. 

In both “The Boogeyman” and “The Crate,” the protagonists cannot get a clear look at the finite spaces from which their threats emerge: the closet is shrouded in darkness and Lester’s aversion and fear keep him from looking too closely, while the aggression and violence of the creature in the crate keep Dex and his friend and fellow professor Henry Northrup at a distance. They never get a good look at the spaces these monsters occupy. In Lester’s case, he is adamant about this incomprehension, screaming “I didn’t see anything!” (101, emphasis original) when Dr. Harper encourages him to provide more specific details, forcefully refusing whatever he has seen, however incompletely. While those spaces remain unknowable in part because of this limited visibility, they are also unknowable because these are special spaces that do not play by the rules of logic and an orderly world. Objectively, they may be finite, knowable spaces, but subjectively, they are the site of uncontainable horror. 

Part of this uncontainability might also come from the protagonists themselves and the darkness they bring into these spaces: Billings is not a particularly kind or empathic father. He abuses his wife and takes a “tough love” approach to his children, dismissing their fears and refusing Denny’s desperate plea for a nightlight. Dex’s friend Henry hears Dex’s story about the crate and while he feigns horror at the creature’s violence, he self-servingly decides that this creature is a perfect solution to the problem of his horrible, domineering wife Billie, drugging Dex so he can lure Billie to the crate and be rid of her forever. These men become complicit in the terrors that emerge from these unknowable spaces, Billings passively and Henry actively. The darkness of these spaces hide monsters, but they also conceal these men’s dark secrets. 

And in the end, it is impossible for these finite spaces to hold their horrors: Lester returns to Dr. Harper’s office after his appointment and finds once again that “the closet door was open. Just a crack” before the boogeyman emerges from that dark space, “still [holding] its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand” (107). “The Crate” is a bit more open-ended, with Henry containing the creature and sinking the crate in a nearby quarry, confident that the problem is solved. The two Creepshow adaptations offer a different conclusion, however, one in which the creature is bound to escape. The spaces where these monsters live are uncontainable and so are the spaces in which the stories’ protagonists attempt to confine them. 

[Page numbers for “The Boogeyman” are from the 1978 Doubleday hardcover edition of Night Shift and page numbers from “The Crate” are from 1981’s The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg.]