Tapping Into Primal Fears - Inanimate Object Horror in The Mangler, Battleground, Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back
First off: I was initially going to follow the order of short stories in Night Shift for this my column "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King" : with The Mangler , The Boogeyman and Gray Matter up next. But considering that the latter two are both in an island position between many stories which deal with the horror of inanimate objects coming to life, I decided to go rather thematically just for this once. So, in this post we'll take a look at The Mangler , Battleground , Trucks and Sometimes They Come Back which all deal with lifeless things who have no business being alive and moving around. The fear of the inanimate animate, moving objects, the unexplainable, the unscientific is, as is well-known, a big fear of mine. Taking this fear beyond the initial "boo!" moment, King shows how to turn that shock into dread and terror, or even dystopia, and there's arguably no other book of his with a wider range of short stories about objects comi...