33 pages • 1-hour read
Premium Harmony
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, animal death, emotional abuse, substance use, and cursing.
The Absurdity of Death Intruding on the Mundane
The event around which the story is structured—Mary’s death—contrasts starkly with the world in which it occurs. It is unexpected and dramatic, whereas everything around it is predictable and routine. The juxtaposition creates an atmosphere of surrealism or even absurdity that only intensifies as the death itself becomes a matter of routine.
The opening of “Premium Harmony” presents life as a mundane, inescapable loop. The couple is not traveling toward a milestone or a revelation but toward errands that have become the shape of their days in a town that is “pretty dead.” Most economic activity has disappeared from this part of Maine, replaced by a Wal-Mart. The couple’s marriage has settled into repetition and point scoring, which the narration captures as Ray’s private analogy for life: The quarrel has “circularity,” so what they chase is not each other but the emotional lure of grievance. Ray accepts the dullness of his own situation. He does not even go into the store; instead, he lounges in the baking car, thinking about gas and air flow. His day is so flat that the thought of turning off the engine is a drama, and the narration, clinging to his point of view, tallies trivialities as if they were decisive. The result is a portrait of an ecosystem of brand names, small resentments, and heat haze.
In this banal environment, the intrusion of death feels like a cosmic joke at the expense of habit. The narration stages the switch with clipped sentences that create an abrupt and discordant tone. A breathless clerk communicates the event in the simplest possible terms: “She fell down. She’s unconscious” (57). Yet the fact that the prose does not inflate to match the magnitude of the moment—it remains literal, almost procedural, as Ray steps into the chilled store and sees Mary “lying on the floor with her legs spread and her arms at her sides” next to a wire cylinder of kickballs (57)—illustrates the normalcy that persists alongside the shock. A visible and cruel irony underscores this point: The world that was boring because it was predictable becomes absurd because it is still predictable, only now in the worst way. People stare through the glass. A manager hovers. Ray kneels and calls a name because calling a name seems like what a husband should do.
Very quickly, moreover, the shock is absorbed by routine. Mr. Ghosh becomes a host and usher rather than a mourner, flapping at teenagers in order to reassert a store’s ordinary boundaries. The EMTs and their equipment offer certainty that the characters cannot. Their expertise is precise, but their rhythm and routine suggest that—for them—this is another mundane death. What had been absurd is reclassified as procedure. Ray is asked “about twenty-five questions” (60), including a mundane question about Mary’s age that he struggles to answer. Around him, consumers return to shopping. The absurdity of death has not vanished, but it has been papered over by the only systems available, which are retail and rescue. Even when Ray opens the car and finds Biznezz dead, he moves back into the circuits that promise order. He reenters the store to request cigarettes and then “smokes all the way to the hospital” (63), accepting mundanity. This quick reversion to routine hints at a deeper absurdity underpinning the normalcy of the town’s life—itself a slow process of decay that everyone has simply accepted.
Dark Humor as a Response to Grief
Despite its subject matter, “Premium Harmony” is frequently humorous; even its title is a joke, given the state of the central couple’s marriage. The ironic nature of that joke is significant, however. Amid the story’s bleak setting and events, characters reach for dark humor as a means of bearing the unbearable.
Humor emerges as a coping mechanism even before Mary’s death. Ray’s inner monologue frequently dips into sarcasm, as when Mary says that she will “dash” into the store: “At two hundred pounds, Ray thinks, your dashing days are over” (56). This barbed emphasis on Mary’s weight occasionally leaks into his speech. For instance, as she leaves the car, he issues a parting shot: “[M]aybe they’re having a special on Ho-Hos” (56). His parking, too, is effectively a joke at his wife’s expense: He has parked so close to the cinder blocks that she “has to sidle” to get by (56), and the narration lingers on Ray’s awareness that he did this on purpose to draw attention to her weight. Even Ray’s private performance for the dog—tossing it a Sno Ball—is a joke with a raised eyebrow. As Ray’s parking demonstrates, the function of these jokes is partly to needle Mary. However, it is also a means of deflection from both Ray’s smoking and, more importantly, the relationship’s deeper uncertainties and disappointments, like the children the couple never had.
Humor remains a way of managing uncomfortable emotions in the immediate aftermath of Mary’s death. For instance, when the EMTs remark that an autopsy is unnecessary because the death wasn’t “unattended,” one of the bystanders quips, “I’ll say,” a remark that underscores the surreal circumstances of Mary’s passing. Ray, too, resorts to seemingly dissonant responses, imagining that the clerk who hears him talk could supply a “mercy fuck” (59). This levity, the story suggests, is the product of a brain under duress; its very callousness downplays the significance of what has happened, functioning as a form of denial.
By the end of the story, however, the tenor and function of Ray’s humor shift slightly. The catalyst is the dog’s death: There are bits of coconut caught in Biznezz’s whiskers, which “shouldn’t be funny, but it is. Not funny enough to laugh at, but funny” (62). Ray weeps as he jokes that Biznezz is with Mary now and then discovers another grim punchline, the thought that “now he can smoke all he wants, and anywhere in the house” (62). Particularly in conjunction, the two serve as an indictment of Ray himself. The Sno Ball—a throwaway joke at his wife’s expense, given to the dog she loved—reminds him of his cruelty, while the thought of smoking reminds him of why he was cruel: to avoid self-reflection. Just as Ray’s jabs about Mary’s weight hinged on their very closeness (that is, his knowledge of her sore spots), what looks like dehumanization from the outside is, inside the narration, an acknowledgment of intimacy that he did not fully recognize while Mary was alive.
Poverty and Small-Town Discontent
“Premium Harmony” takes place in a landscape defined by economic attrition and the small humiliations that attend it. In choosing this setting as the backdrop for a story about marital discontent and sudden death, King highlights the intersections of public and private life in a changing socioeconomic landscape.
Ray and Mary’s argument unfolds against clear indications of economic stagnation. They are “rolling through an almost deserted little town where most of the stores are for sale” (54), implying the hollowing out of local commerce. All that remains, it seems, are corporate conglomerates. The dialogue reduces the town’s commercial map to two options, each a brand, and the couple’s drive is toward “the Wal-Mart [that] has its own stoplight” (54). It’s equally clear that Ray and Mary are struggling financially. The plan to reseed the lawn is an attempt to increase the value of their only asset, yet Ray’s skepticism reads as weariness, implying that such efforts are futile. That the conversation keeps snapping back to prices further underscores how tight their budget is. Mary knows the exact weekly cost of Ray’s smoking: $40 a week. Ray responds by boasting that he “pays a friend in South Carolina to ship him a dozen cartons” because they are cheaper (55), effectively conceding that her concerns are valid.
In this landscape, where financial precarity limits the number of meaningful choices, consumerism becomes a way of exercising agency. The only way to honor a niece, for example, is to get the right brand and shade of a toy. The story recognizes that these consumer choices are not frivolous, yet it also suggests that the act of choosing between brands is a trap since the differences between the options are often cosmetic. The narrative lists products in a tone that refuses to distinguish between them except by the meanings the characters attach to them.
The aftermath of Mary’s death completes the portrayal of corporate small-town life by showing how authority and sympathy have been privatized. The figure who organizes the scene is a store manager whose decisions are bounded by professional responsibility. Mr. Ghosh does the humane things available to him: He offers to cover Mary’s face, he flaps his hands at teenagers, and he chooses a small gift to honor Ray’s grief. However, even this small gift is “on the house” (61), a phrase that often functions as commercial promotion. Moreover, when Ray returns for cigarettes, Mr. Ghosh’s generosity does not “stretch that far” (63)—not because Mr. Ghosh is unsympathetic but because he is operating within the same economic precarity. Ultimately, the story implies that Castle Rock is heading for the same fate as Mary, as Ray acknowledges that the town is already “pretty dead” during the opening drive.
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