The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet

The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is a novella by Stephen King first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1984 and collected in King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. The title is in reference to the narrator's belief that insanity is a sort of "flexible bullet" – it will eventually kill you, but how long this process takes, and how much damage the bullet does before the victim finally dies, are impossible to predict. Since the publication of this story, King has occasionally used the term "flexible bullet" to describe insanity, in reference to this story.

Plot summary

The main character is Henry (usually referred to as simply "the editor"), fiction editor for "Logan's," a struggling magazine. Henry receives an unsolicited short story from up-and-coming novelist Reg Thorpe, and considers the story to be very dark, but also a masterpiece. Through his correspondence with Thorpe, Henry learns of – and, due to Henry's own alcoholism, eventually begins to believe in – Thorpe's various paranoid fantasies. Most notably, Henry and Thorpe believe that their typewriters serve as homes for Fornits – tiny elves who bring creativity and good luck. The story, told from Henry's perspective as he relays it in anecdotal form at a barbecue, concerns Henry's descent into Thorpe's madness. Meanwhile, Henry also struggles to get Thorpe's story published, despite the fact that "Logan's" is in the process of closing its fiction department.

Connections

In the television mini-series Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a fornit's symbol can be seen on a letter in the story "Battlegrounds".