"The Monkey" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the November 1980 issue of Gallery magazine and later included in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew.
It is the story of Hal Shelburn, who struggles to save his family from a cursed mechanical monkey which took a deadly toll on his family, thirty years before, when he was a small boy.
The inescapable tropes King monkeys with in this tale include:
- Artifact of Death: Though not always for the owner. The curse seems to strike first against people to whom the owner is emotionally-connected.
- Clingy MacGuffin: The owner of The Monkey can't get rid of it by ordinary means; a special effort must be made to cast it somewhere inescapable, and it will warp probability to prevent this from happening.
- Cursed Item: A classic of the subgenre. Whenever the mechanical monkey's cymbals clash, it causes someone connected to the observer (a friend, family member or pet) to die.
- Cymbal-Banging Monkey: When its cymbals clash, someone dies.
- Disappeared Dad: Hal originally found the monkey among the stuff left behind by his father, a merchant mariner who disappeared when his sons were very young. He later thinks that his father could have fallen victim to the monkey as well.
- The End... Or Is It?: The cursed monkey has been cast into a deep lake, but its Reality Warper powers may very well result in its re-emergence, and a massive fish die-off implies that it may still be working its malign magic in its new location even now.
- For the Evulz: The Monkey seems to kill the loved ones of it's "owner" (whoever was unlucky enough to stumble across it) for no reason other than to cause them pain.
- Inescapable Horror: It make take months, years, or even decades but the Monkey will find it's way to it's target again, despite having no apparent means of doing so. Hal originally disposed of it down an old well as a child, only for it to turn up in the attic of his old relatives when he's an adult. The only true escape is death, at which point the Monkey will await the next poor bastard to happen across it.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While The Monkey itself is definitely an Artifact of Death, it's not clear whether it is genuinely a sapient spirit with telepathic powers, or whether Hal Shelburn is hallucinating its statements
- Nested Story: The main story takes place in 1980 involving the adult Hal Shelburn, his wife Terry and their sons Dennis and Peter; the nested story describes the horror wreaked upon Hal Shelburn's family ~1950, when he was but a boy.
- Nothing Is Scarier: There's never any explanation for how the monkey became an Artifact of Death; it's just a cheap trinket cranked out by a factory in Hong Kong (complete with Made in Country X stamp). Hal himself has a theory that whatever gave the monkey it's power might have happened in the years it was hidden away in the crawlspace of his childhood home, but nothing is ever confirmed.
- Papa Wolf: Hal Shelburn is willing to confront the cursed monkey directly to end its threat to his family for once and for all.
- Reality Warper: Its powers seem to work this way. Its victims always die in some possible but improbable manner, such as being run over by a car or suffering a sudden stroke. It also warps probability to return to its owner, or to strike out at anyone trying to dispose of it.
