The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King: Setting Up Foundations and Connecting Tropes in Graveyard Shift, Night Surf and I Am the Doorway

As I previously mentioned in my introduction to this series, very few short stories from King's debut collection Night Shift haven't been adapted into other media; notably films, short films, series or even radio adaptations, and that's one of the reasons this work is a staple to have set standards for horror fiction to come. That entails setting up new tropes, pushing existing tropes into the horror domain or reinforcement thereof, creating a "hype" around them. The next short stories I'll discuss, Graveyard Shift (originally published in 1970 in Cavalier Magazine), Night Shift (Ubris Magazine 1969) and I Am the Doorway (Cavalier Magazine 1971) are all writings that boosted tropes that were both sort of hanging in the realm between science fiction and horror as well as pushed them into the mainstream horror of its time.

As always, I recommend reading the short stories along.

'Where do you suppose all the rats go to?' Hal asked, almost to himself. 'Not into the walls.' 

If Jerusalem's Lot was a take on Lovecraft's classic Rats in the Walls, only without actual rats in the walls, then Graveyard Shift is the horror story with indeed lots of rats in the walls and everywhere else, especially the basement.

These rats infesting the basement of a small textile mill in some Maine small town are indeed so numerous and belligerent that they have evolved into something much more - an own ecosystem, an empire. Hal, a young college dropout and traveling worker, is tasked to exterminate these vermin, but the rats are not the only vermin he's facing, there's also his cruel foreman Warwick whom he convinces to go down with him. And when they go down into the subbasement, they will see such sights they have never seen before...

After writing a better Lovecraft pastiche than Lovecraft himself, I assumed he now would outherbert James Herbert (who wrote the iconic creature feature The Rats), but in reality King actually preherberted him, because The Rats was written four years later than Graveyard Shift, and both works must have helped driving the hate and fear of the intelligent rodent to new heights.

I'm personally terrified by rats, I'm especially irked by their little human hands, so this story works well for me. As with quite a few stories in this collection, this too takes a trope well existent especially in the field of science fiction, and appropriates it for horror, as the rats breeding and evolving into almost a new empire, a civilization, though terrifying, is in its core a science fictional trope.

You can watch the film adaptation of Graveyard Shift here if you don't mind Portuguese subtitles. It is a decent enough watch, with, as is usual for movie adaptations, lots of unnecessary stuff and characters added for dramatic effect. What most filmmakers don't see or understand is that the desperation of an unhappy ending is an essential part of King's horror. You close the book and the world seems a dark and hopeless place because the ending didn't convey the "all is well that ends well" nonsense. Why pretend movie audiences are delicate snowflakes while the reader can take a blow or two?

So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu.

King does something similar in his following story, Night Surf, which intersects dystopic science fiction and horror. Here you can feel the weight and the influence of King's other literary idols than Lovecraft, such as Fritz Leiber or Frank Herbert, who also explored the fine line between SF and horror in dystopic ways. You can read more about King's idols and influences in his quasi memoir Danse Macabre.

Consisting of only an extract, a moment in the life of a handful of New Hampshire survivors of an apocalyptic virus plague, Night Surf's main importance surely isn't its post-apocalyptic claim or contribution, as the end of the world through a disease had already been to various degrees explored by various science fiction authors such as Mary Shelley (The Last Man), Edgar Allan Poe, or George R. Stewart (in his amazing Earth Abides).

The importance of Night Shift lies in the fact that it gave birth to the monumental The Stand by setting up a universe hit by the 99% deadly virus "Captain Trips". In the short story, we read some casual conversations about the origin of the virus as well as other flu strains that aren't deadly, but provide immunity. The young survivors pull out a dying man from his car and burn him alive while protagonist Bernie thinks about the good old days before humanity wasn't swept away by the flu. They find out that one of them is infected too and speculate about him lying about his immunity. The story ends rather abruptly.

There really isn't much to remark about this story - especially having gone through a pandemic of our own, musings about themes such as immunity, origin or human isolation lost their shine and glamor for us. It also features one of the most unlikeable and abusive protagonists, Bernie, the kind of main character which King often wrote about in his Richard Bachman phase, a phase in which he wanted to write as ugly and nasty as he wanted to without being associated with that kind of writing with his real name and identity. I'm wondering whether Bernie's mood is maybe due to the circumstances, hard to say. Had it not been for its sequel, Night Surf would have been, and maybe still is, one of the weaker writings in the collection.

There's a halfway watchable short film circulating on YouTube, right here.

Maybe we don't belong out there.

In his next short story, I Am the Doorway, King returns into Lovecraft territory, and a slightly more hard science fictional realm at the same time. We're thrown into a conversation between former astronaut Arthur and his friend Richard, in which he narrates his space mission to Venus during which he was exposed to an alien mutagen and after which he became disabled, unable to walk. He talks about changes he went through after his voyage went wrong, especially the itching in his hands, which transforms into a swarm of tiny eyeballs on his fingertips. We find out that these are the so-called "doorway" for an alien civilization to look into our world, and control Arthur to kill humans. You see, for them we are hideous abominations who deserve to die, they are equally frightened as disgusted by us. Arthur tries burning his hands, but is unable to close the doorway. Will he then keep on killing humans until there are none left?

There is a certain delicious dread inhabiting King's open-end horrors. The beginning, the shock moment of a very unnatural or a very undesirable situation has been given and not only is there no end to it, it will even expand and thrive. A disease for instance, hand-implanted spyware, never-ending weight loss... The balance has been tipped off and there's no end in sight, no way of turning back. This is a very King-ish kind of horror, or terror rather, which is akin to the above mentioned unhappy ending.

The main idea of this story, that extraterrestrial beings are full of hate and hostility towards us for no apparent reason, is a horrid one, and the dread on a personal level is quite effective too. Plus, the former is a very self-reflective kind of anxiety, I can well imagine humans hating on aliens for the sole reason that they are different from us, strengthening Adam Roberts' theory that all SF tropes are based on fears mirroring our own behaviors.

Well, friends, next time we'll continue with the next two short stories in Night Shift: The Mangler and The Boogeyman, for which I'll presumably include the film adaptations into the discussion. Speaking of which, I Am the Doorway has an amazing number of short film adaptations on YouTube, go take a look which one you like best!