International bestselling author Stephen King is in terrifying top form with his first collection of short stories in almost a decade. In this spine-chilling compilation, King takes readers down a road less traveled (for good reason) in the blockbuster e-Book “Riding the Bullet,” bad table service turns bloody when you stop in for “Lunch at the Gotham Cafe,” and terror becomes deja vu all over again when you get “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French” -- along with eleven more stories that will keep you awake until daybreak. Enter a nightmarish mindscape of unrelenting horror and shocking revelations that could only come from the imagination of the greatest storyteller of our time.
Terrifying. Spine-chilling. Nightmarish. Unrelenting horror.
Really? Here’s a tip. If you want your collection of short stories to represent “unrelenting horror,” then don’t let the author introduce each one with what was on his mind when he first put pen to paper.
I guess if I have a favorite in this collection of stories, “L.T.[‘s Theory of Pets]” would be it. The origin of the story, so far as I can remember, was a “Dear Abby” column where Abby opined that a pet is just about the worst sort of present one can give anyone. It makes the assumption that the pet and the recipient will hit it off, for one thing; it assumes that feeding an animal twice a day and cleaning up its messes (both indoors and out) was the very thing you had been pining to do. So far as I can remember, she called the giving of pets “an exercise in arrogance.” I think that’s laying it on a bit thick. My wife gave me a dog for my fortieth birthday, and Marlowe -- a Corgi who’s now fourteen and has only one eye -- has been a honored part of the family ever since. During five of those years we also had a rather crazed Siamese cat named Pearl. It was while watching Marlowe and Pearl interact -- which they did with a kind of cautious respect -- that I first started thinking about a story where the pets in a marriage would imprint not upon the nominal owner of each, but on the other. I had a marvelous time working on it, and whenever I’m called upon to read a story out loud, this is the one I choose, always assuming I have the required fifty minutes it takes. It makes people laugh, and I like that. What I like even more is the unexpected shift in tone, away from humor and towards sadness and horror, which occurs near the end. When it comes, the reader’s defenses are down and the story’s emotional payoff is a little higher. For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want to make you laugh or cry when you read a story … or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
It’s a little like the magician showing you how the trick is done. See? Not really magic, is it?
My favorite story -- and frankly, the only one that sticks with me -- is the very first one: “Autopsy Room Four,” a first-person narrative about a man, conscious but apparently dead, who is about to be autopsied on. Dare I say, it’s the only one for which the four adjectives excerpted from the jacket copy might actually apply.
The rest suffer from many of King’s usual tropes and cliches. To cite just one example, in “The Man in the Black Suit,” King hobbles the narrative with a cumbersome and needless frame.
I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young -- only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I. I've never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will … at least not with my mouth. I've decided to write it down, though, in this book which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can't write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don't think it will take long.
This is the opening paragraph. Our narrator is obviously an old man, who has written the story we are reading in a kind of journal. He can’t write long, he tells us, because his hands shake so these days. And then, six pages later…
The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hissing through the deep needled groves. I walked with my pole on my shoulder like boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand like a valise or a salesman’s sample-case. About two miles into the woods along a road which was really nothing but a double rut with a grassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried, eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled backs and pure white bellies, and my heart went up into my chest.
The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I went down out of summer and back into midspring, or so it felt. The cool rose gently off the water, and a green smell like moss. When I got to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breathing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and the skitterbugs skate. Then, farther down, I saw a trout leap at a butterfly -- a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long -- and remembered I hadn’t come here just to sightsee.
I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for the first time with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked the tip of my pole down a time or two and ate half my worm, but he was too sly for my nine-year-old hands -- or maybe just not hungry enough to be careless -- so I went on.
This is so obviously not an old man who can’t write long because his hands shake so, and so obviously Stephen King warming up his thousand-page writing muscles, that I don’t understand why King’s editor (does King even have an editor?) let him go with the needless frame in the first place. Our narrator could just as easily be a young man, or even an author -- a device King has used plenty of times to allow himself the freedom of his expansive literary imagination. If you're going to be an old man with shaky hands, Stephen, then for God’s sake, BE an old man with shaky hands.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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