So, having set the record straight, let's get to it!
As usual, it would be great if you have read or if you read along the short stories as I will throw around spoilers mercilessly.
Morning Deliveries (Milkman No. 1)
This weird short story was adapted/generated from an unfinished novel project titled The Milkman and is a complementary piece to the following short story, Big Wheels, even though the former was written earlier, in 1980. The story follows the early hours in a working day of Spike Milligan, a milkman in Pennsylvania, who leaves scary, disgusting or even lethal "surprises" in the milk bottles he delivers to his clients, like spiders, gas, or poison.
There's an interesting thing about this text - when you read it, you have a slightly jolly, 50s kind of happy and fresh work morning tone that heavily clashes with the content of what is being said (spiders, poison etc.). The audiobook version read by Dylan Baker underlines that feeling with a romantic opening music from the 50s or early 60s, reminiscing of Hollywood movies played by Doris Day, or Rock Hudson. It does get heavier as the story advances, as the insanity of the milkman becomes more and more apparent, but that initial joviality sets the tone.
But the text also works on a different level when those rosy-cheerful elements are left out, injecting obscurity from beginning to end, the way the short film adaptation does (watch it here). I personally prefer the former.
On a different note, this story leaves many question marks in my head. Is this a universe where people are actually expecting poison or venom in their milk in the morning and this is a regular delivery? Does he do it in low doses, so that nobody dies and he can do it regularly? Or is he going insane and this is a killer spree? We'll never know.... Or will we?
Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman No. 2) (New Terrors, 1980)
The above mentioned never-published novel The Milkman must have been some interesting project as it gave birth to not one, but two short stories, that were published in Skeleton Crew subsequently as companion pieces.
We follow two laundry workers, Rocky and Leo, who live in the same Pennsylvania small town as Spike the Milkman. And the story is basically two guys getting piss drunk and progressively drunker, driving around, looking for a station where they can renew Rocky's car's inspection certification. They find a place, Rocky's old friend Bob has a garage where he does it and they keep drinking while Bob gives out the approval. They both go home, and later in the night Bob kills his wife and burns down their house.
In a previous episode Leo and Rocky are followed by a vehicle on their way home and it's presumably a milk truck. Rocky is terrified of Spike and implies that he is a serial killer, plus his wife left him for the murderous milkman, no love lost between them. Panicking, he crashes his car into another vehicle. Spike, on the other hand, is on his way to Bob's place to leave there some gasoline, manipulating Bob into burning his place down.
Again, the tone here is semi-humorous sugarcoating horrific things. Some of King's most memorable characters are these blue collar small-town goonies that Rocky and Leo are, this story is always good for a chuckle and I kind of like the duality that forms with the previous story. I bet these two stories were different chapters from The Milkman. Unfortunately, we'll never know.
There's a 2019 short film realized through the Dollar Baby program.
Gramma (Weirdbook 1984)
If Survivor Type is my number one story in this collection, then Gramma follows it on its heels on number two.
It's no secret I don't like it when horror uses older people for a scare, but I will make an exception for Gramma - Grandma Bruckner with her opaque eyes and her ties to Hastur, The King in Yellow, who is a truly chilling person.
George Bruckner is an 11-year-old boy who has to confront his biggest fear in life: his overweight, toothless, blind, bedridden and senile grandmother. When his mother is called for a medical emergency for his older brother, George is left alone with his creepy Grandma in their home in Castle Rock, Maine.
As he waits for his mother to return, he thinks of all the scary things that resurface in his mind: nobody wanting to take care of his grandma when she becomes old and sick, her being kicked out of her church, her being dismissed from her job as a schoolteacher, and the weird books she owns and protects. Those books... Her first two children were stillborn, but after obtaining them she had nine healthy babies. He suspects she's a witch.
While he ponders, he hears noises coming from her room and finds her seemingly dead. Unfortunately, the phone is dead too, so knowing that there is a dead body in the next room, the boy has to wait until someone comes home. He goes in to cover her face, but she comes back to life and George understands that she actually intends to take over his body. After a very tense back and forth the dead phone starts ringing, and it's his Aunt Flo, who tells George to say to Grandma to stop and say the name of Hastur. He does it, but his Zombie grandma still manages to hold him.
An hour later his mom and brother return home and George tells them that grandma is dead. We then find out that Aunt Flo died of an aneurysm, a punishment for trying to cross The Unspeakable One. George goes to his room, and starts planning to torture his brother, thus we know that something evil has entered George's body.
Gramma is, outside of the IT Universe, one of the best, if not the best depiction of a child's fear that came out of King's pen. I was so genuinely scared when I first read this, I could grasp that tension of having to sit in a room next to the dead body of your grandparent, facing this alone. All this is crazy enough, but then the gradually introduced supernatural elements, climaxing in absolute evil... Exquisite! This story is just gorgeous, it is the pinnacle of cosmic dread and would make a breathtaking film in the right hands.
There's a Twilight Zone episode that is adapted from this short story right here.
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1984)
Henry, a fiction editor with an alcohol problem, is at a cocktail party and tells the story of how he and Reg Thorpe, the new shooting star in literary skies, share a madness. They both believe in the presence of Fornits, little literature muses who live inside their typewriters and bring creativity and good luck. But it wasn't always like that: Thorpe having paranoid fantasies and a belief in various conspiracy theories, convinces the borderline alcoholic Henry of the reality of his delusions, and Henry gradually descends there.
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is not only the second novella in this collection after The Mist, it is also the collection's second text about descend into madness after Survivor Type. The title "flexible bullet" refers to insanity, in the sense that it is a bullet to the head, that might leave you long time unaffected but will kill you in the end, it might damage you badly, but its effects are ultimately unpredictable. The novella ponders heavily on madness and its effects in the literary world. Choosing a depressed author as well as an alcoholic editor, both conditions making them prone to madness, King certainly puts his finger on a bleeding wound especially in artsy circles that he presumably would have experienced himself personally.
Folie à deux, a madness shared, is a very interesting phenomenon too. I feel really drawn by authentic people and feel put off by people who mirror my own ways, but they exist, people who imitate others, maybe not even in a malicious way, maybe it's just how they are. Here, maybe driven by his addiction to alcohol, Thorpe's delusions find fertile ground in Henry and grow and thrive from there, pushing him into a self-destructive spiral that he copies from Reg.
Interestingly, there are no film adaptations of The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, one of the rare King stories that has had no adaptation, huh!
The Reach (Yankee, 1981 first published as "Do the Dead Sing?")And just as Night Shift ended with an emotional, almost literary short story about the death of an older woman, so does Skeleton Crew. The Reach is about the oldest person in Goat Island, Stella Flanders, who just celebrated her 95th birthday. Goat Island is separated from the mainland with what the locals call the Reach, and Stella has never crossed it, staying all of her 95 years on the island, and never felt the need to go away.
Stella now has bowel cancer, and while she is dying from it, she starts seeing the dead residents of the island; her husband, her best friend etc. Her husband calls her to the mainland and for the first time in her life, she decides that it is time, and at the end of her walk, during which a snow storm breaks out, she is surrounded by her friends and family marking her death and her crossing to the other side, so to say.
Her body is found on a rock on the mainland.
There is a peculiarity to The Reach that ties it to two other short stories in the collection, namely the sentence "Do you love?" repeated many times over. The other two stories I'm talking about are The Raft and Nona, both of which are about college students. I can't find any clues as to what it means, there is a reddit thread about it, but nothing founded in facts. The only other thing these stories have in common is that their main character dies in the end. So, I was thinking it might be something personal, that the stories describe some milestones that mark important things in the life of author Stephen King, but I don't know. I'd love to find out more about this, though.
Anyway. The Reach is one of those King stories where the New Englander in him speaks, and he speaks with a thick Maine accent to recount this story of quasi Gothic Americana, and has deservedly won the World Fantasy Award in 1982. It has been adapted into short film twice, in 2018 and in 2025.
Alright, almost done. Don't skip reading Nightmares & Dreamscapes so we can start discussing it in the next Stephen King Short Story corner!
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