You Like It Darker, by Stephen King

[rachelmanija]

A new collection of shorter works: 7 short stories and 5 novellas. The shorts range from meh to good. All five novellas are terrific; if you like King's work at that length, get this collection. For me, it would have been worth it for "Rattlesnakes" alone.

Like Different Seasons, which contained "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," the genres of the novellas are varied. "Rattlesnakes" and "The Dreamers" are horror, "The Answer Man" is fantasy, and "Two Talented Bastids" and "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" are cross-genre and/or hard to categorize. Despite the title, this anthology isn't actually all that dark as far as King goes, and several stories are outright uplifting.

There's a strong theme of aging and mortality running through the volume as a whole. King is in his seventies and he's clearly thinking about that. One of the novellas, "The Answer Man," has a pretty extraordinary backstory relevant to that, which I'll get into when I discuss it.

I'll take the shorts first as I have less to say about them.

"The Fifth Step" is a horror short about a guy who gets buttonholed by a stranger doing the "Make Amends" AA step. It's fine but predictable.

"Willie the Weirdo" is another horror short, about a creepy kid and his creepy dying grandfather. The story isn't original but it's done well; very atmospheric. I enjoyed it.

"Finn." An Irish kid with bad luck has an unlucky encounter with gangsters. What the hell was this story even. Why Ireland? Why did it have the ending it had? A clunker.

"On Slide Inn Road" is a crime story inspired by Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Good climax, otherwise... fine.

"Red Screen" is a horror short about a cop who arrests a guy who claims he killed his wife because of an invasion of the bodysnatchers situation; the cop starts wondering about his own wife. This story was ruined by its ending, which should have left the situation ambiguous.

"The Turbulence Expert" is Twilight Zone style fantasy about a man with a very unusual job that involves being a passenger on airplanes. It has some dark elements but overall it made me smile.

"Laurie" is a story about a grieving widower who gets a dog. It's really sweet and heartwarming, but because it's Stephen King there's also an alligator attack. (The dog is fine.)

On to the novellas!

"Two Talented Bastids" is a really interesting story in the context of King's career and preoccupations. It's about two friends who were ordinary guys, one (Laird) who wanted to write and one (Butch) who painted a bit, who suddenly achieved meteoric success as a writer and a painter in middle age. The story is told from the point of view of Laird's son Mark, now a middle-aged man, who finally learns how that came about. The story involves some well-worn tropes but with new spins on them, and goes to some pretty dark places with zero violence or even malice.

The ending is an absolute gut-punch. I was expecting the magic talent-booster to just not be there, but it IS and Mark doesn't have enough to begin with to make it work. It's not clear whether that was because he didn't have enough inborn, or because he never worked to develop whatever he did have. I'm guessing the latter, since unlike the talented bastids, he never did try to develop it. Either way, ouch.

And then there's the understated little manner of the world coming to an end very soon now. When Laird is protesting his heterosexuality and his annoyance with "Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey" (a real and influential essay, incidentally), and then there's the stuff about "No, Butch definitely isn't gay, he's just not the marrying type, I thought, "I GET it, Steve, they're just friends!" But in retrospect, I think the purpose was to make sure we knew that Butch is straight, plus a little smoke and mirrors so it doesn't occur to us why we need to know. Why DO we need to know? Because Laird already had a child when he met the aliens. After that, Butch never married or had children, not because he was gay or not interested, but because, I think, he didn't want to bring children into a doomed world.

Nice nod to The Martian Chronicles with Ylla.

"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" is about a janitor who dreams of a woman's buried body, goes to look and finds it, calls the police, and learns the truth of the saying "No good deed goes unpunished" when an unhinged cop decides Danny killed her and Danny must pay. This is an extremely anxiety-inducing story which starts with a literal nightmare and turns into a living nightmare of persecution and injustice and bad things happening to people who don't deserve it. I could have done with slightly less of Jobert's counting mania, but it's a very effective, tense story.

The question of "Why was Danny sent the dream?" I think is answered with "Because Danny will do something about it. But "Why was the dream sent to him at all?" is much less clear. (I think both visions were sent, rather than the answer being "Because that's who Danny is, he has the shine," because so much was made of nothing like that ever happening to him before.) The dream wasn't sent so the murderer could be caught; that happened independently. Nothing good came of Danny's dream, and a lot of bad did. But Danny was deeply offended by the dog desecrating the woman's body, and maybe he wasn't the only one; maybe it was an affront to God, the God of Desperation, who is cruel.

"Rattlesnakes" is my favorite story in the book, and it has some strong competition. It's a sequel to Cujo, of all unexpected things. Vic, now an old man, goes to stay in friend's cabin in Florida, and meets an old woman who is also still mourning her twin sons who died many years ago. Creepiness ensues. This story is a banger - genuinely scary, with unexpected twists, solid character work, tons of tension, very moving, and also a really good sequel. Donna does not appear on-page, but we hear a lot about her and we learn what happened to her and Vic in the aftermath of Cujo. It was deeply satisfying for me to find out that, not really unexpectedly, Stephen King loves Donna and thinks she's a hero.

Donna and Vic divorcing and then re-marrying many years later was not an outcome that ever occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense. I literally cried when Donna died seeing Tad grown-up. The idea of people having the choice to grow up or not in the afterlife is something I never thought of much, but it was very moving when applied to Tad and fucking terrifying when applied to the twins. When Vic uses his camera as a way to look behind him, I almost had a heart attack.

I think it's adult Tad that Vic sees waving at him from Duma Key, but for a moment I thought it was Wireman. I like to think of adult Tad and Wireman having drinks on the beach together.

"The Dreamers" is a terrifying novella about a Vietnam vet who gets a job assisting a mad scientist researching dreams. It reminded me of Revival, with the blend of low-tech weird science and cosmic horror, but they blended better in this. Also I'm much more scared of dreams and the way they're treated here than I am of (Revival spoiler; rot13) tvnag nagf. When I was a child and read Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I initially didn't understand why everyone wasn't immediately terrified of the island where dreams come true: I'd never heard the phrase used to mean "wishes coming true," and my mind instantly went to the worst nightmare I'd ever had. But "The Dreamers" isn't about nightmares, exactly. It's about something worse.

The idea of going into a dream and lifting it up to see what's backstage is viscerally scary to me. So is the idea of dreams as the protective layer between reality and what lies behind reality. So is the idea that there's something behind reality.

"The Answer Man" is about Phil, an ordinary man who gets three chances to get answers from the Answer Man over the course of his lifetime. The scenes with the Answer Man are really fun and Twilight Zone-esque ("Tempus is fugitting.") The answers aren't exactly helpful, but they're not monkey's paws either. It's not clear whether Phil's life would have been the same if he'd never had those encounters, but they do change his perspective in some ways. Some of his life is tragic, some is wonderful, some is just a life. It's a beautiful, mature, haunting story.

Stephen King wrote the first part of the story, when Phil is a young man, when he was thirty. He then set it aside and forgot about it for FORTY YEARS, until someone else found it and suggested that he finish it. So he wrote the final section, where Phil is old, when he was old himself. It feels very personal.