When You Can’t Find the Answer on Google

The Darjeeling Limited is the first mention of gaslighting I ever heard. I recall the moment and I recall not knowing what it meant. There’s an interaction between two of the brothers in the film, about the ex-girlfriend of one of them:

When I saw the movie, I didn’t know what it meant, so I googled it. I did not find satisfactory answers.

The internet was different back then. I remember that time, the era when you couldn’t google your way to a satisfying answer, even a wrong one, for many of the questions you might have.

When I tried to find an answer to that dog costume in The Shining I only found an article about how the movie was really about how that movie was a metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the genocide of North America’s indigenous people. Later I’d see that same theory in the film Room 237. I assume that one of the people in that movie created the website I read in 2003 or whenever that was, although I haven’t taken the time to google it again.

Was The Brave Little Toaster anthologized as a horror story?

The latest thing I haven’t been able to find on the internet is a paperback horror anthology of short stories that I read in seventh grade. I swear it existed but I have found no evidence of it.

I first discovered this paperback in my homeroom classroom (but they called it advisory, not homeroom) and I don’t recall ever bringing it home with me. I think I found it there and that’s where I would read it, on whichever day of the week was reading day.

The thing I remember about this anthology is that it had a story by Stephen King, The Monkey, and that it had the story “The Brave Little Toaster” in it. This doesn’t make sense but I swear this is true. There was an anthology that includes a Stephen King story and “The Brave Little Toaster”, and “The Brave Little Toaster” was described as a horror story on the back of the book.

This sounds made up, like a weird dream, but I swear it really happened. And I have not been able to find any evidence of this book existing online. I’ve dug around. I’ve found copies of The Brave Little Toaster, but they are expensive.

Really, I can’t even find a copy of the book The Brave Little Toaster for sale for less than $300. But I did buy a copy of The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. That is a real book, and one I’m excited to read. It showed up in the mail yesterday.

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. A real book.

If there is a paperback anthology that includes “The Brave Little Toaster” and Stephen King’s “The Monkey”, I hope someone else googles their way to this blog post either trying to find it—validating that my memory is not a dream half-remembered from adolescence—or that, better yet, someone out there has a copy of it they’d like to send to me.