The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King - Horror of Sand, Mirrors, More Rats and Even More Trucks

Welcome to the short story lover's guide to Stephen King! In this penultimate post about Stephen King's second short story collection Skeleton Crew we'll take a look at one science fiction horror, two inanimate horror and one rat horror pieces of writing as well as one poem he wrote for his son, author Owen King.

It would be good if you read along, or at least know or be familiar with the stories because I will spoil everything! Let's go! 

Beachworld (Weird Tales, 1984)

"It was a beach in no need of an ocean."

In a distance future two astronauts, Rand and Shapiro, crash-land on an uncharted planet covered entirely with sand and nothing else. While Rand becomes hypnotized by the endless sand landscapes, loses his mind and surrenders himself to the arid landscape by running out and refusing to drink water, Shapiro is more cautious and finds refuge in the shipwreck. He imagines how this world once was home to intelligent life but was eventually overtaken by sand.

When another spacecraft arrives to save them, Rand tries to fight them off while Shapiro is saved, the planet forms a giant sand hand to catch them but they manage to escape, leaving behind Rand who starts eating sand.

When talking about sand horror, the first work that comes to mind is of course not Beachworld, but Michael McDowell's iconic The Elementals, which has its flaws, but is top tier from the vantage point of eeriness and scariness. This might be a weird fear, but there's just something inherently terrifying about something without end, and that thing flowing infinitely into a finite space. Like flood, like a desert. It's a similar fear I mentioned before in this series, a fear of the ever continuation, like the infection with an extraterrestrial bacteria that keeps on multiplying and multiplying, it's a fear of invasion in its essence, the fear of a lethal agent overtaking life. And ultimately, a fear of excess and unbalance, as everything is good in balance and moderation, once the scale tipped to one side, it's only harmful from there.

That horror being placed in an alien planet is a factor that equally aggravates and alleviates the graveness of the situation. It makes everything worse because an unknown scary place always magnifies fear, but the fact that it's somewhere outside means that it's not your home, you can always leave like Shapiro. Poor Rand is so captured that he can't.

Film adaptations; 2012, 2015, 2016 (animation), 2019 (click to watch full version), and 2022.

The Reaper's Image (Startling Mystery Stories, 1969)

I love a story in which movement meets background info: stories in which the way to a destination is used to nonchalantly describe what we're about to see, preferably during a conversation between a host and a visitor. Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh is a great example for this, many military science fiction, and of course, The Reaper's Image that we'll take a look at now. 

We're walking in the long corridors of the Samuel Claggert Museum that displays antique artifacts. Collector Johnson Spangler is ushered by museum curator Mr. Carlin, who informs him (and us) about the legendary Elizabethan "Delver's Mirror" which was manufactured by an ordinary handyman using a special kind of material. The mirror is insanely valuable since there are only five mirrors left by this artist, plus legend says that the mirror in question shows the Grim Reaper to some chosen people. There are no catastrophes or such happening for the one who sees the Grim Reaper, but those people quietly disappear from the surface of the Earth. And of course, so does Spangler. Do they die or do they switch universes? The story offers no answer to that question.

The Reaper's Image kind of reminds me of  Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction which was a TV show aired some twenty years ago and they would show a creepy thing happening and then ask the audience whether this was fact or fiction. The weirdest stories were the ones that actually happened, and this short story reminds me of that show, I loved watching it. 

There are two short film adaptations from 2012, and from 2013. 

Nona (Shadows, 1978)

In the following two short stories we can see the perfect amalgamation of the subconscious of an author with his work. There are fears and motifs in King's head that keep on resurfacing regularly in different settings, and you can't even be mad at the repetitiveness, as the same thing can scare differently in King's work.

Take Nona, for instance, in which a college dropout hippie who is hitchhiking his way around Maine in a snowy winter night meets a gorgeous woman, Nona, to whom he feels a weird connection, not necessarily love at first but maybe something even stronger. He is lured by her to kill several innocent people then taken to a cemetery where she morphs into large rat who laughs at him. The narrator lands in prison, and we never know if Nona even was real, a supernatural entity, or his imagination all along. In prison he recounts his story as he will soon commit suicide and he hears sounds from inside the walls, not unlike rats.

If they start making Stephen King collections that are thematically connected, the Rats tome would probably be among the thickest. Whatever Lovecraft (or maybe another encounter with rats) awakened inside Stephen King, he surely knew how to take that feeling and keep injecting it into so much of his work. Starting to read this story, you never guess the way it will go and that's a neat thing.

The stories in Skeleton Crew weren't so far as well interlinked as the short stories in Night Shift, but not Nona; we have the bully Ace Merrill and Vern Tessio from Stand by Me/ The Body, plus the graveyard the narrator ends up is in Castle Rock, which is like a hub for evil in this universe.

The length of the descriptions of the narrator's life make me think this might be autobiographical, but I'm not sure.

The short film adaptations were: 2016, a French full version here, a Dollar Baby version from 2021, and a 2024 short film.

For Owen

For Owen is a thirty-four line, free verse poem about King and Owen walking to school, and Owen telling his father about a school that various fruits attend. It's rather sweet, really. 

Uncle Otto's Truck ( Yankee in 1983)

Talking about recurring themes - how about some murderer cars? No, not Christine, it's a truck, but not the trucks from The Trucks either - our narrator's Uncle Otto's truck to be precise. Uncle Otto Schenck and his partner McCutcheon, two relatively wealthy business men in the post-depression era in Castle Rock, adopt the abandoned truck. Soon after Schenck crushes McCutcheon with the vehicle, but claims that the truck made him do it, and gradually becomes a recluse and loses his mind in the aftermath. Until one day, his nephew our narrator finds him dead at his home - drowned with motor oil and a spark plug shoved down his throat.   

I have to admit that Uncle Otto's truck is much more creative in terms of killing methods compared to Christine which must have been written around the same time around 1983, and an earlier prototype can be Eliot Silverstein's 1977 supernatural horror film The Car. Since he wrote about it so extensively to fill a book and at least two short stories, we can safely say that besides rats that preferably dwell in the walls, killer sentient vehicles are equally part of the Stephen King Universe. I'm assuming that here too, the time in which the story is set plays a certain role, cars as machines that eat gas and gas being expensive, being the resource to wage wars over, all set in a time people just barely started recovering from poverty.

There's also something sweet, nostalgic about a child, or younger person observing and telling the story of an older person who then goes on to pass. It brings you back into times where you were the child observing, while now we're the people that have a story to tell.

The adaptations stem both from 2019 and 2019.  

There's one more story of King's from the point of view of a child witnessing an older relative's death, and for me, it was always one of his most terrifying stories - Gramma. I'll talk about that one in my next, almost last installment about Skeleton Crew. I'm saying almost last because I skipped two stories as I was going in order, The Monkey and Survivor Type which I want to discuss separately. The Monkey in order to compare it to the Oz Perkins movie, and Survivor Type because it's my favorite story in this collection. As I'm skipping his novella collections and only doing short stories (or novellas that were published within short story collections) the next short story book will be Nightmares and Dreamscapes, published in 1993.

Stay safe!