Night Shift - Stephen King

Night Shift (King, 1978)

A collection of twenty stories, covering horror, science fiction, suspense, irony, and general darkness. There are some misfires in here for me - the plotless rat phobia exploitation of "Graveyard Shift", the bizarre group portrayed in "Night Surf", the possessed toy soldiers of "Battleground". But many of these are excellent slices of Twilight Zone-esque fiction.

Several stories deal with an ancient, unfathomable - in some cases extraterrestrial - evil intruding itself into the present, in the finest Lovecraftian tradition. Others point the way toward King's future career of taking normal, humdrum things and making them scary. Still others involve nothing supernatural at all, yet are just as intense. Some highlights for me include:

"I Am the Doorway" - An astronaut who orbited Venus comes back with something germinating in his body.

"The Mangler" - Through a bizarre set of circumstances, an industrial laundry press is possessed.

"Trucks" - A somewhat goofy premise (vehicles gaining murderous sentience), but the story is so tense and claustrophobic, I have to give it props.

"The Ledge" - A cuckolded mob boss forces his wife's lover to walk around the outside of his 43rd floor penthouse on a 5-inch ledge. I was sweating and dry-mouthed the whole time I was reading.

"Quitters, Inc." - A word-of-mouth company has a 98% success rate getting clients to quit smoking, but their methods are not revealed until you sign the contract.

"Children of the Corn" - A couple travelling through rural Nebraska find a murdered child on the highway, with the closest town eerily deserted, the only church desecrated, and the tall, rich corn whispering all around...

I'm not sure which is my favorite. The selection is broad and satisfying. I'll end with the two stories related to 'Salem's Lot. The first, "Jerusalem's Lot", has little to do with the novel other than geography, but it's another great entry in the Lovecraft category, with apostate Puritans, a family curse, and a tense narrative told through letters that never get sent. The other, "One for the Road", is a haunting vignette that takes place a few years after the novel ends, when a traveller and his family are stuck in a blizzard just inside the town limits...

The stories here are well-written, distinctive, economical, and generous. And most importantly, scary! Recommended if you want to be unsettled.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 possessed laundry presses

Hearts in Atlantis - Stephen King

Hearts in Atlantis (King, 1999)

Our relentless Dark-Tower-related Stephen King marathon continues. This is one of the strangest books I've read.  Billed as "new fiction" on the cover, it is not a novel, nor is it a short story collection.  It contains five different works, all loosely related through recurring characters.

The first is basically a novel of its own. "Low Men in Yellow Coats", a coming-of-age story set in 1960 with a supernatural twist, sees eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield saving up money for a bike while his widowed mother tries to make her way in a man's world. He meets Ted Brautigan, an old man with a secret who nurtures Bobby's love of reading and acts as a father to him, and in the first month of that summer Bobby learns about the hardness of human nature and his own weaknesses. The normal story here is quite good in its own right - Bobby and Carol's innocent first love is beautifully written, the conflict with his mom is emotional and tense, and the climactic scene (of the normal part) is a perfectly written tragedy. The supernatural elements add an interesting flavor, but they barely relate to the rest of the story, other than adding a sense of unreality and claustrophobia as signs of Ted's pursuers - the low men - start to crop up with more frequency until they cannot be escaped.

The second piece, "Hearts in Atlantis", is a novella set in a college dorm in 1966. Told in first person, its only relation to "Low Men" is that the narrator falls in love with college-age Carol. The story is more about Vietnam and other crazy 60's college stuff. The main premise - a floor full of freshman become addicted to the card game Hearts to the detriment of their college careers - is pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the story while I was reading it, but now that I think about it, there was a lot of amoral 60's free-love anti-Vietnam glorification going on, making the whole thing a bit gag-worthy in retrospect.  There's even a whole "I am Spartacus" stick-it-to-the-man bit at the end, plus a fast-forward-to-today "at least we tried to make a better world, even if we sold out in the end" eulogy. Blech.

Those two works make up the bulk of the book. Two other short stories, "Blind Willie" and "Why We Were in Vietnam", take up the thread in 1983 and 1999, respectively, and actually have something worthwhile to say, along with packing an emotional punch. The concluding piece, "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", tries to wrap it all up, and while it was very poignant, it didn't really unify everything that went before the way one might have hoped, and it actually creates some bizarre questions. There are very good moments throughout, but on the whole, Hearts in Atlantis is a bit uneven.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 innocent first loves

'Salem's Lot - Stephen King

'Salem's Lot (King, 1975)

The pacing of this book alone makes it worth the read. It's a master's class in how to write a page-turner. You are drawn in gradually to the life of a sleepy New England town, its beauty and ugliness, its routines and its scandals. By the time you've gotten a feel for the characters, evil has insinuated itself into the fabric of the community, and its spread is quick like red dye on a white sheet.

There are moments of true terror in these pages that cause delightful shivers. I think the altogether modern and normal setting established in the first few chapters makes the supernatural evil even more scary. You feel the shock the characters feel, the shock of discovering the unthinkable must be true. And there are truly blood-chilling scenes, mostly involving windows, but one particularly electric vigil in a mortuary. Stephen King updates Bram Stoker effectively. My only complaint is that, after it's all over, the book seems slight - after being compelled to read through the second half in one white-knuckled sitting, you're left wanting more.

Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 blood-chilling scenes

Everything's Eventual - Stephen King

Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (King, 2002)

Technically only two stories in here are related to the Dark Tower series, but I thought it would be fun to read them all. These are the first examples of King's horror fiction that I've ever read, and I was very jealous of his storytelling prowess on more than one occasion. There is a lot of humor and pathos mixed in, but also lots of great scares.  Some of my favorites:

"Autopsy Room 4": A modern twist on Poe's "The Premature Burial".

"All That You Love Will Be Carried Away": A travelling salesman collects weird roadstop graffiti.

"The Road Virus Heads North": A horror writer buys a macabre painting at a garage sale where all sales are final.

"1408": A cynical ghost hunter plans to stay another night in another "haunted" hotel room.

"Riding the Bullet": A college student hitchhiking home to see his mother in the hospital must make a terrible choice.

The two stories related to the Dark Tower are also very good.  "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is an episode from Roland's lonely quest through Mid-World on the trail of the man in black. Other than having Roland as a main character, it has very little to do with his quest - just a very scary bump in the road. This one could have been an X-Files episode.

Meanwhile, the title story (which I've heard relates to the last DT book) is an ingenious work, written in first person by a nineteen-year-old boy named Dinky Earnshaw with a bizarre psychic power. Employed by a mysterious company to exercise his power in what they claim is "the greater good of mankind", Dinky dinks along in pleasant ignorance until one day when he sees his work in the newspaper...

Each of these stories is a delightful vignette - some creepy, some suspenseful, some shocking, some sad. There were a lot more happy endings than one might suspect, though I guess someone does have to live to tell the tale.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 pleasantly ignorant Dinkys

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - Stephen King

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (King, 1997)

In Wizard & Glass, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake escape death but find themselves in another world - Topeka, Kansas, devastated by the plague from The Stand. On their road to find their way back - and in the shadow of a forbidding yet familiar-looking glass palace - Roland tells them the story of his first love and the beginning of his quest for the Dark Tower.

The bulk of the novel is Roland's tale of youth and tragedy, but the framing story is quite good in its own right. We get about 160 pages advancing the quest, with plenty of excitement, humor, and sci-fi/fantasy mind-bending as the ka-tet grow even closer and stronger together.

Roland's story (the other 500 pages) is reminiscent of the flashbacks from The Gunslinger, but more fully realized and satisfying. It strikes just the right tone in its unique mix of courtly medievalism, Wild West shootouts, and eerie technological ruins. Sent east by his father for safety, Roland and his two friends encounter a plot against the kingdom, a vindictive witch, and Susan Delgado - Roland's first and only love. Mere teenagers, they fall into a rush of emotion and devotion which becomes their downfall as they are caught in the forces swirling around the town.

If it weren't for the ending and the sprinkles of adult-rated content, Roland's story could be straight from the Hardy Boys or Scooby-Doo: "And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!" But the ending is harsh, devastating, and poignant all at once. We learn a lot more about what has shaped Roland's hard and merciless nature, but we also see the broken heart beating limply in the rubble.

Though I would have wished for a little more forward progress in the present storyline, Wizard & Glass ultimately delivers. I can't wait to read the fifth book - oh, wait, there are a bunch of other Stephen King books related to The Dark Tower that I need to read first... shoot...

Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 vindictive witches

The Stand - Stephen King

The Stand (King, 1978/1990)

I've been curious about this book for a long time. When I was told I should read it before the fourth Dark Tower book, I figured it was now or never. I wanted to read the original 1978 version, but a friend had the complete and uncut edition (which added about 400 pages), so I dove in. What I found was a very well-written book with engaging characters, exciting vignettes - and very little plot.  Lots of things happen, but they don't always hang together as part of the same story.

The biggest disconnect for me is the essential division of the book into two stories. The first is a harrowing account of a supervirus escaping a government lab and swiftly decimating the population. Attempts at containment and cover-up disintegrate as millions die and the fabric of society crumbles away. We follow several survivors during and after the plague, as they lose everyone they love and then try to pick up the pieces, hoping they are not the last people on earth.

The second story involves the survivors having the same dreams: one a comforting dream of an old woman in a Nebraska cornfield, the other a terrifying dream of a dark man in boots pursuing them, calling them west. As people start to discover everyone is having the same dream, they have a choice to make - follow the dream of love or the nightmare of fear. As people start to gather around the old woman and the dark man, it is clear the dark man means to destroy the remnant of humanity, and those who would fight his evil must make their stand.

Each of these stories is gripping, but it is unclear why they need each other.  The supervirus story could stand on its own, and the psychic showdown didn't really need an apocalyptic event to work, either. Maybe if Flagg (the dark man) had caused the supervirus to escape, the two stories would be better connected, but he didn't. He just capitalizes on the opportunity to seize power and pick up the weapons lying around.

Some of the strongest moments to me are in the seemingly small details of the story. When millions die, it is easy to lose sight of the human tragedy in the face of the massive disaster, but King selects a few well-chosen, heart-wrenching details to remind us that these are real people, not just expendable extras in a story. He also successfully turns the book on the reader and puts us in his characters' shoes - I couldn't listen to my baby cough with an easy mind for quite awhile after The Stand.

He also presents several compelling pictures of imperfect faith. Mother Abagail, the old woman in the dreams, is a staunch believer in God, probably the only professing Christian of the main characters, but she succumbs to pride. The other characters struggle with what to believe after such a calamity, but they submit themselves to do what is right, even at the cost of their lives. The Stand is a very realistic portrait of people living in devastating yet miraculous times, and a chilling reminder of how easily regular people can give themselves over to evil.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 heart-wrenching details