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I always thought it was strange that Stephen Kings publishers thought his short story The Monkey was such a big deal. Compared to the other stories surrounding it in his indelible 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew, it felt like a whiff. That book is home to some of his all-time most memorable, hardest-hitting shorter works, including The Mist, The Jaunt, The Raft, and especially my all-time favorite King story, the ridiculously ghoulish Survivor Type. Plus its full of interesting oddities: poems, a full-on 50s pulp science fiction story (Beachworld), some weird unexplained vignettes that feel like dreams King never assigned to a narrative. And then theres this story about an evil wind-up toy?And yet, on the cover of my battered old Signet paperback edition of Skeleton Crew, there was the monkey, with pride of place the image the publisher had chosen to represent the whole shebang. Why? Is a classic wind-up monkey toy really that unsettling, even given the fixed stare and bared teeth? But in edition after edition of Skeleton Crew down through the ages, it resurfaces on the cover art.A gory new movie adaptation is on the way this month, from Longlegs writer-director Osgood Perkins. So I figured it was time to look back at the Stephen King story and see if I could understand why so many book publishers, at least, felt The Monkey was Skeleton Crews central hook.What stands out about The Monkey in 2025,45 years after its first publication,is how visceral Kings language gets. The story jumps around in time as it tracks a mans long relationship with a toy windup monkey that resists all attempts to discard or destroy it. It just keeps turning up in unlikely places, starting with the opening paragraphs, when protagonist Hal Shelburn and his family are exploring the attic of Hals childhood home, and his older son Dennis finds the monkey in a box.Hals immediate response is to suppress a scream, which sets up one of the storys biggest sources of intriguing friction from the very first sentence: A wind-up toy is a ludicrous thing to find terrifying, so Hals obvious trauma and terror sets up a major curiosity gap. As the story progresses, King keeps finding new ways to describe the look and feel of the monkey in ways that similarly highlight the toys unlikely, unnatural awfulness: its balding, mangy patches, its glazed eyes, its large and carnivorous teeth, its mechanical body writhing or humping whenever its internal mechanics start up. But mostly, he finds graphic, awful ways for people or animals to die whenever the wind-up monkey starts banging its cymbals together.Theres always been a fully invested, go-for-broke tone to the imagery in Kings writing, and in this case, I dont just mean him embodying evil as a wind-up toy. I mean, for instance, the way Hals vivid imagination leads him at one point to visualize a local mans car, sunk in an area lake years ago, as now inhabited by the rotting corpses of all Hals lost loved ones, complete with a back seat full of dead children. Its a compellingly morbid daydream that has little to nothing to do with the story, but King describes it in loving detail, drawing a clear and horrible mental picture that puts us in Hals increasingly ragged mindset. That level of color makes stories like The Monkey feel much darker and more dangerous than the would otherwise.But even apart from these sorts of morbid images, King packs on the ominous foreshadowing, starting with the obvious tension between Hal, his pill-popping wife Terry, and Dennis, a 12-year-old whos been smoking pot and mouthing off to his parents. (Throughout the story, Hal seems perilously close to writing Dennis off as a lost cause in order to focus on his sweeter and more beloved 9-year-old son Petey pretty shocking behavior from someone were expected to empathize with, especially considering how minimal Dennis offenses are and how young he is.)This is a familiar King hallmark that persists to this day: The tendency to enrich even the shortest stories with a lot of close character detail and complicating incident. Theres no narrative urgency that requires this story about a cursed killer toy to delve into Hals employment problems, and the little strains on his relationship with each of his family members. But all these details do establish early on why hes under so much pressure that the toys return paralyzes him, and why he turns to Petey for companionship and support in facing the monkey, even at the risk of bringing him into lethal danger.Where The Monkey really comes alive, though, is in the escalating and increasingly unhinged rants Hal imagines for the monkey as the deaths pile up. Every time the toy activates and bangs its cymbals together, someone or something dies. Starting in childhood, when he first finds the thing, Hal imagines a malevolent, gleeful intelligence behind it that challenges him to imagine who its killed each time it starts up again. He puts its rictus grin into words, starting simply with a single paragraph where it mocks him (Jang-jang-jang-jang, whos dead?) and building up to longer, more frequent, and increasingly maniacal rants full of graphic and creepy details. Given that the toy monkey never actually speaks, Hals elaborate imaginary voice for it underlines his disintegrating mindset. Its a reminder of how raw and aggressive Kings writing style was in the 1980s.This frantic internal monkey-voice is one of the things I most remember about my early reads of The Monkey, and one of the things I liked least about it. The trope of an internal voice feeding a protagonist information or whipping them into an emotional frenzy (or both) is a longstanding wrinkle of Kings, one he uses so much in books from Rose Madder to Liseys Story that they sometimes stand in for actual character interaction or story development. Here, my first impression was that it was just him going overboard, trying to make a fairly random object scary by giving it a voice that only really exists in its victims head.Going back and reading it all these years later, though, The Monkey seems much more like a giddy pulp exercise. Its one of the many King stories that explores the incomprehensible aspects of death (particularly who dies, and when and how) through a weird, unlikely, even borderline silly vehicle, then ramps up the tension and focuses in on the protagonists dread and desperation until the story becomes a barreling thrill ride. The late going gets odd Ive never been able to fully picture how Hal rows a boat even once it cracks in half and fills with water but the sense of foreboding and fear never eases up. If anything, the fact that so much threat can be packed into such a ridiculous object just underlines how Kings commitment to oddball ideas makes him stand out as a horror writer.Theres a small nod late in the story toward some kind of larger message, as Hal muses on the nature of evil, and whether its more likely to be unaware and uncomprehending, or awake and malicious. And if you read the Wikipedia page, youll see several examples of scholarly writers trying to map much larger Jungian or Freudian symbolism onto the monkey, as a metaphor for unresolved childhood fear or suppressed destructive impulses.But coming back to Stephen Kings The Monkey ahead of Osgood Perkins The Monkey, the story doesnt feel remotely like a modern horror metaphor about trauma, or an exploration of how Hal needs to bury his hostility toward his former employer, his fragile wife, and his resentful older son. It feels far more like King following the straight-line path that his publishers may have followed when deciding on the cover of Skeleton Crew: Things that share some facial similarity with humans, but arent human, can be fairly creepy. Things that sometimes move like theyre alive, but mostly dont, can be fairly creepy. Never knowing exactly when or how were going to die, and knowing that death may come for us in an unexpected and seemingly arbitrary way, is inherently creepy.Maybe The Monkey doesnt need to be about anything more than the sense of facing all these things, and pushing back against them. Hal cant control fate, or death, but he can at least resist the embodiment of it that haunts his life. That alone is enough to make The Monkey stick in readers minds and on publishers cover art, all these decades later.
