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King's first collection of short stories. I'd read a bunch of them separately, but this was my first time reading all of them. Which I did while lying on the sofa during a power outage. Boy was that a mistake. By the time I hit "Children of the Corn," the house was pitch black and the only light glowed eerily from the Kindle.
Unlike many people, I overall prefer King's novel to his short stories; short stories, especially horror, run on plot and atmosphere and concision, and what I love most about King are his characters and messy, sprawling emotional realism. But he is a great short story writer and it was fun reading the collection, except for the part where a raccoon or something rustled outside and took about three years off my life.
Like all collections, not all the stories are good. But the outright clunkers here are few, many stories are excellent, and most are entertaining. As always, King's introduction is great. An extremely solid collection.
"Jerusalem's Lot." Epistolatory historical Lovecraft pastiche in an old-school Lovecraft voice, fun and spooky but doesn't really have the King feel.
"Graveyard Shift." A good solid story of bad bosses and mutant rats, for me a bit overshadowed by the absolutely batshit movie featuring Brad Dourif as an exterminator who's basically Quint from Jaws but with rats, Stephen Macht as the boss with an accent I can only describe as Maine squared and an outstanding cast of supposedly scary but actually extremely adorable rats.
"Night Surf." Fucked up people in a post-plague world. Very unlikable characters.
"I Am the Doorway." An astronaut goes into space and comes back changed. Short, punchy, very creepy body horror. I always forget the astronaut part, which is funny because I love the idea that space holds horrors beyond human ken.
"The Mangler." This story about an evil mangler (industrial laundry folder) gets a bad rep. Okay, yes, it's a bit ludicrous to imagine a giant washing machine raging down the street, but industrial machines are terrifying all by themselves, let alone if they want to hurt you, and the story itself is entertaining and scary. It's also got a great nod to the evil refrigerator in It.
"The Boogeyman." A man goes to a psychiatrist to explain how the boogeyman killed his children. Honestly I'm getting freaked out just thinking about this story. I don't love the twist ending, but the meat of the story is deeply unnerving and showcases King's ability to narrow in on things many people find disquieting, like closets with doors hanging ajar, and make them into objects of terror.
"Gray Matter." It's gross, there's fungus, it's fun to read but not very memorable.
"Battleground." Toy soldiers come to life and attack someone who deserves to be attacked by toy soldiers, of course I enjoyed the hell out of this.
"Trucks." Trucks come to life and trap people at a diner. This is mostly the dumb fun that it sounds like, but it has a moment of genuine horror when the trucks figure out how to communicate with the humans. Inspired the hilaribad movie Maximum Overdrive, which delightfully added an evil soda machine that fires soda cans at a Little League.
"Sometimes They Come Back." A teacher is haunted by old students. This had the plot and feel of classic King, but ultimately felt too long to not have any kind of explanation for why any of it was happening, but without the character depth that would justify the length. I think it would have worked better as a novel or novella.
"Strawberry Spring." Very atmospheric serial killer story but a bit too dependent on its predictable twist.
"The Ledge." Terrific story. It combines a cracking good plot with something King absolutely excels at, the incredibly visceral depiction of a terrifying event-- a man having to edge around a tall building on a narrow ledge-- made utterly real by moment-to-moment detail, unexpected yet logical occurrences (pigeon attack!), and intense physical, emotional, and sensory detail. If I taught a short story class or honestly any writing class, I would make them read this story.
"The Lawnmower Man." WTF even is this bizarre story. It reads like a dream you'd have after getting sunstroke mowing the lawn and then falling asleep reading The Golden Bough.
"Quitters, Inc." Basically evil AA. Effective but the horror equivalent of a one-liner; it has a premise, it executes it, and that's it. George R. R. Martin has a very similar story, "The Monkey Treatment," which is considerably longer and which I think benefits from both more detail and an inventive funny/creepy manner of preventing the quitters from getting what they want, which is a literal monkey on their back that snatches it away from them.
"I Know What You Need." I recall literally nothing about this story.
"Children of the Corn." Excellent, scary work of folk horror that taps into the numinous/mythical aspects-- a much better probable result of reading The Golden Bough than "Lawnmower Man." Great use of the apocalypse diary, harvest rituals, and the inherent creepiness of corn fields.
"The Last Rung on the Ladder." A beautiful, heartbreaking story of a brother and sister in childhood and adulthood, not horror except in the existential sense that bad things happen to people we love. The central image of the incident in the barn is absolutely haunting.
"The Man Who Loved Flowers." A man buys flowers for his girlfriend. Very short and very well-done; the pace is leisurely but all that atmosphere is essential. Great use of seemingly throw-away details that turn out to be critical.
"One for the Road." Excellent, old-school spooky postscript to Salem's Lot, both literally and metaphorically chilling.
"The Woman in the Room." Mainstream fiction about a young man and his dying mother, compassionate and sad but I didn't find it as memorable as "The Last Rung on the Ladder." I'd have switched the places of the stories in the collection and closed on the stronger one.
Unlike many people, I overall prefer King's novel to his short stories; short stories, especially horror, run on plot and atmosphere and concision, and what I love most about King are his characters and messy, sprawling emotional realism. But he is a great short story writer and it was fun reading the collection, except for the part where a raccoon or something rustled outside and took about three years off my life.
Like all collections, not all the stories are good. But the outright clunkers here are few, many stories are excellent, and most are entertaining. As always, King's introduction is great. An extremely solid collection.
"Jerusalem's Lot." Epistolatory historical Lovecraft pastiche in an old-school Lovecraft voice, fun and spooky but doesn't really have the King feel.
"Graveyard Shift." A good solid story of bad bosses and mutant rats, for me a bit overshadowed by the absolutely batshit movie featuring Brad Dourif as an exterminator who's basically Quint from Jaws but with rats, Stephen Macht as the boss with an accent I can only describe as Maine squared and an outstanding cast of supposedly scary but actually extremely adorable rats.
"Night Surf." Fucked up people in a post-plague world. Very unlikable characters.
"I Am the Doorway." An astronaut goes into space and comes back changed. Short, punchy, very creepy body horror. I always forget the astronaut part, which is funny because I love the idea that space holds horrors beyond human ken.
"The Mangler." This story about an evil mangler (industrial laundry folder) gets a bad rep. Okay, yes, it's a bit ludicrous to imagine a giant washing machine raging down the street, but industrial machines are terrifying all by themselves, let alone if they want to hurt you, and the story itself is entertaining and scary. It's also got a great nod to the evil refrigerator in It.
"The Boogeyman." A man goes to a psychiatrist to explain how the boogeyman killed his children. Honestly I'm getting freaked out just thinking about this story. I don't love the twist ending, but the meat of the story is deeply unnerving and showcases King's ability to narrow in on things many people find disquieting, like closets with doors hanging ajar, and make them into objects of terror.
"Gray Matter." It's gross, there's fungus, it's fun to read but not very memorable.
"Battleground." Toy soldiers come to life and attack someone who deserves to be attacked by toy soldiers, of course I enjoyed the hell out of this.
"Trucks." Trucks come to life and trap people at a diner. This is mostly the dumb fun that it sounds like, but it has a moment of genuine horror when the trucks figure out how to communicate with the humans. Inspired the hilaribad movie Maximum Overdrive, which delightfully added an evil soda machine that fires soda cans at a Little League.
"Sometimes They Come Back." A teacher is haunted by old students. This had the plot and feel of classic King, but ultimately felt too long to not have any kind of explanation for why any of it was happening, but without the character depth that would justify the length. I think it would have worked better as a novel or novella.
"Strawberry Spring." Very atmospheric serial killer story but a bit too dependent on its predictable twist.
"The Ledge." Terrific story. It combines a cracking good plot with something King absolutely excels at, the incredibly visceral depiction of a terrifying event-- a man having to edge around a tall building on a narrow ledge-- made utterly real by moment-to-moment detail, unexpected yet logical occurrences (pigeon attack!), and intense physical, emotional, and sensory detail. If I taught a short story class or honestly any writing class, I would make them read this story.
"The Lawnmower Man." WTF even is this bizarre story. It reads like a dream you'd have after getting sunstroke mowing the lawn and then falling asleep reading The Golden Bough.
"Quitters, Inc." Basically evil AA. Effective but the horror equivalent of a one-liner; it has a premise, it executes it, and that's it. George R. R. Martin has a very similar story, "The Monkey Treatment," which is considerably longer and which I think benefits from both more detail and an inventive funny/creepy manner of preventing the quitters from getting what they want, which is a literal monkey on their back that snatches it away from them.
"I Know What You Need." I recall literally nothing about this story.
"Children of the Corn." Excellent, scary work of folk horror that taps into the numinous/mythical aspects-- a much better probable result of reading The Golden Bough than "Lawnmower Man." Great use of the apocalypse diary, harvest rituals, and the inherent creepiness of corn fields.
"The Last Rung on the Ladder." A beautiful, heartbreaking story of a brother and sister in childhood and adulthood, not horror except in the existential sense that bad things happen to people we love. The central image of the incident in the barn is absolutely haunting.
"The Man Who Loved Flowers." A man buys flowers for his girlfriend. Very short and very well-done; the pace is leisurely but all that atmosphere is essential. Great use of seemingly throw-away details that turn out to be critical.
"One for the Road." Excellent, old-school spooky postscript to Salem's Lot, both literally and metaphorically chilling.
"The Woman in the Room." Mainstream fiction about a young man and his dying mother, compassionate and sad but I didn't find it as memorable as "The Last Rung on the Ladder." I'd have switched the places of the stories in the collection and closed on the stronger one.
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Especially agreed on "The Mangler" (it gets an unfairly bad rap!), "The Ledge" (perfectly tense Hitchcockian genius, with another excellent last line), "Children of the Corn" (a classic fully responsible for me being thoroughly creeped out by cornfields, which was very inconvenient when I lived in the Midwest), and "The Last Rung on the Ladder" (which I have never read without crying).
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The only stories that were complete misses for me in the entire collection are "Night Surf," "Sometimes They Come Back," and "I Know What You Need."
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aha. that is how King gets his plots!
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I'm one of those people who tends to prefer King's short stories, I think because to me the short stories usually seem to have more solid endings, and I think maybe they also seem creepier to me because they're a bit more generalized? But I don't know, I'm working off of an extremely limited data set, because the only piece of fiction that has ever actually scared me was one short story in Skeleton Crew, so I guess by default I assume short fiction is scarier, even though it's really just that one story. XD
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I'm reading Skeleton Crew next!
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The movie The Lawnmower Man, based off the short story is bizarre as well, but better than the short story.
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The story stuck with me because of the weird mix of happy ending and abusive and controlling relationship that the viewpoint character handed himself (and, we discover, his family) over to.
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I remember a bunch of the stories from your write ups, and now now as both an adult in general, and one with some writing craft, I want to re-read them from a Skills perspective as well as a double hit of the feels. There is in fact a Booktopia ebook right there... Many thanks for the review, is the point I'm coming around to, here! :D