‘Bullet’ classic King, but lacks punch> Ghost tale in e-book form has momentum and all the spooky-tale tricks

The most chilling part of Stephen King’s novelette “Riding the Bullet,” an e-book available exclusively on the Internet and released Tuesday to the public, isn’t the story itself. It’s the creepy feeling you get from scrolling down through rather than turning pages.

But don’t be too wowed on the computer front. We’ve known this was coming in the publishing world, and we’ll leave the technical considerations to school kids, computer geeks and experts, such as the three co-workers (plus an agent by phone) it took to download our copy onto a Visor hand-held computer from Peanut Press, the server for Simon & Schuster Online.

The play’s the thing — even if its only about 60 pages long and costs $2.50. This is, after all, King’s comeback tale after being struck by a car last June. Reports don’t clarify if King wrote “Riding the Bullet” before or after his accident — only that he completed the story while recuperating. Nevertheless, the publication, done jointly by Scribner’s and King’s Philtrum Press, is a clear sign that King intends to continue with two of his signature traits: ghost tales and innovative publishing.

As for the ghostly part, King’s story offers that roll-along momentum that readers have come to expect in his work — whether the topic is a car, a dog, a biker or, in this case, a student at the University of Maine in Orono. As with King’s serial novel “The Green Mile,” “Riding the Bullet” is a flashback, this time of Alan Parker, who has been having trouble sleeping since his mother died. The timing isn’t clear here, but he has saved this story up in his memories and now wants catharsis.

Parker tells of the year he was a junior in college and got a call that his mother was ill and had been hospitalized for a stroke. Nothing serious, but he should think about making his way down to Lewiston by the weekend, he is advised by a family friend. Parker, an only child with no memory of his deceased father, decides to hitchhike that evening to see his mother.

On the way, he gets rides from some shady characters, one of whom has come back from the dead and has an eerie bargain to offer Alan. You might call it an offer he can’t refuse.

King has nearly every spooky-tale device in place: a shadowy moon, a graveyard, a zombie, fog, references to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” The only thing missing is a howling wolf and, more importantly, that beloved Kingian effect of not wanting to read this in the dark.

Frankly, we can do without the wolf. But not without the terror. Alan’s fear, and the reason he has waited so long to spill this tale, is of being mundane. He thinks the story will fall flat, and be “no more than a camp counselor’s ghost story told before lights-out.” As Alan might say: He knows more than he knows. While the writing of “Bullet” is frequently funny and lyrical, you won’t be afraid to turn the lights out, or shut the computer down, as the case may be.

At its most engaging, “Bullet” cries an existential howl for meaning in life and death. The central metaphor is an amusement park roller coaster called the Bullet, which Alan was too afraid to ride as a kid. The lead-up to his mother’s death, however, has pushed him into another type of thrill ride, one that leaves him questioning his own emotional backbone. He remarks finally: “You wait in line and listen to them screaming — they pay to be terrified, and on the Bullet they always get their money’s worth.”

It’s tempting to hear King’s own voice here. Looking for the biographical has, it’s true, always been one of the underlying intrigues of reading his work. “Riding the Bullet,” with all of its Maine references and nuances, falls squarely into this category. But readers primarily look to King for horror, and this story is surprisingly tame. It’s well-written, even beautifully crafted in places. It just doesn’t have that compelling things-that-go-bump-in-the-night punch.

You might even say it’s not a scroller coaster.