“The Music Room” provides a look into the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Enderby, who kidnap and extort businessmen in order to pay off their needs during the Great Depression. The story itself is quite short, but its content compensates for the length. Mr. and Mrs. Enderby treat their profession with complete emotional detachment–there is not an ounce of empathy to be found from either of their characters towards their victims–however, something Mrs. Enderby stated fascinated me on page 123:
“We may be thieves, but we are not murderers.”
When she said this, I thought there was perhaps a moral code that this couple goes by, where they are willing to steal money, but they do not feel they have the right to decide if someone dies. That thought is quickly snuffed out a few lines later when Mrs. Enderby says:
“But we are not murderers. Our guests simply lack sustenance, as do so many in these terrible times. We don’t kill them; they simply fade away.”
She is so detached from what they do that she pins the cause of death onto the ‘guests’ themselves and views it as fading away due to a common helplessness experienced by others, not tracing it back to what she and her husband do. Additionally, she deludes herself into thinking that whatever family their guests have (if any) will have enough wealth and/or connections to survive without them.
Mr. and Mrs. Enderby do not come off as people one may be capable of hating, and that is where Stephen King’s talent comes into play; he makes them understandable and even somewhat sympathetic.