Our last King-inspired soup recipe from Castle Rock Kitchen in these cold days of January before we head back to Hulu’s Castle Rock for Season 2 is Theresa Carle-Sanders’ “Haddock Chowdah for Old Men.” Chowder is even more tangential to “Gray Matter” (published in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift) than Insomnia’s (1994) mulligatawny and Revival’s (2014) “Sloop.” In Insomnia and Revival, the soups in question existed in the real world and were a meal for someone, though the details of those dishes and their consumption are referred to rather than represented. In “Gray Matter,” though, the chowder is hypothetical, engaged through simile. As the narrator talks about Richie Grenadine’s degeneration, he recounts in horror how Richie had his son heat up his beer on the stove, asking “Can you feature that? The kid all by himself in that apartment with his dad turning into … well, into something … an’ heating his beer and then having to listen to him—it—drinking it with awful thick slurping sounds, the way an old man eats his chowder. Can you imagine it?” (175).

“Gray Matter” is a bold choice for food-related adaptation. In his nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, King outlines three key levels of horror: terror, which is an existential and uncontainable kind of fear; horror, which is the physical, real-world threat of the monster or other danger; and the gross-out, which relies on disjust and abjection. “Gray Matter” has a whole lot of the gross-out in it: Richie has been infected and is being overtaken by some creeping gray fungus-like matter, which gradually eradicates his humanity. The men hear about these grotesque details from Richie’s son Timmy and when they go to investigate, they see it for themselves, “a huge gray wave of jelly, jelly that looked like a man, and leaving a trail of slime behind it” (180). 

Consumption is central to the gross-out of “Gray Matter.” Richie contracts this virus (or whatever it is) by drinking a tainted can of cheap beer, and once it has entered his body, there’s no escaping it. When Timmy peeks through the door one day, he sees the monster eating the decaying body of a cat that it had secreted in the apartment walls, and when the men from Henry’s Nite-Owl go to investigate, they realize that the monster’s appetites have gone beyond these walls as well, as they remember that “Two young girls and some old Salvation Army wino had disappeared in town during the last three weeks or so—all after dark” (180). The Grenadine apartment is on the top floor of an old Victorian house and as the men walk up the dark stairs, they realize the rest of the building is empty, which doesn’t bode well for the Grenadine’s erstwhile neighbors. 

All in all, “Gray Matter” is not a story likely to entice the appetite. But Carle-Sanders attempts to subvert this abjection and uses the story as a jumping off point for her recipe for “Haddock Chowdah for Old Men.” The chowder recipe itself is for a savory, creamy soup with generous portions of fish alongside vegetables like potatoes and celery. Echoing Timmy Grenadine’s unpleasant task of warming his dad’s beer on the stove, the recipe features pale ale in the simmering stage, which results in an interesting flavor profile. It’s a good chowder, but maybe one that’s best consumed at a remove from its immediate literary inspiration.

[Page numbers for “Gray Matter” are from the Anchor paperback edition of Night Shift].
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