protean depravity

After breaking routine in the last installment of "The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King" and comparing a novella with its film adaptation, here we are back to our usual, continuing discussing the short stories in the second King collection Skeleton Crew . 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!

It is not very often that an epigraph reflects the overall atmosphere and mood of a particular book ideally, but Samanta Schweblin's latest short story collection Good and Evil and Other Stories opening with Silvina Ocampo's words "strange is always truer" is a great example. It is an atmospheric, quite unique, strange work about seemingly everyday situations and people that are just a little bit eerie, but never openly horrifying, yet always slightly terrifying.

Probably everyone has some kind of story revolving around the first author they enjoyed reading, and for many people in my broader generation that author is Stephen King, since fear as he writes it moves children and younger people on a deeper level. I first read The Stand  in middle school and back then it was already all the hype to read Stephen King, it was even more impressive to read this particular book because it was so thick and the cover was so crazy. Still, then and now, it has never been my favorite King book. The reasons for that are many, but mainly because I see it more like a dark Fantasy book and it has many religious implications I personally don't very much enjoy. I can still acknowledge the importance of a book without necessarily loving it, though, and that's what I'll do in this case. So, ever since I heard about The End of the World As We Know It , this mammoth project of 35 short stories set in the The Stand universe by 35 contemporary horror authors ...

For the first chapter of the second book in the series A Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King , I thought I'd do something quirky and combine it with my dormant column Based on Books since Skeleton Crew  opens with The Mist , a short story (or rather novella) as masterly written  by Stephen King  as legendarily adapted to film by director/writer/producer Frank Darabont. Straight up from the start, some useful multimedia links; a good audiobook narration , a ZBS radio drama , and  some fun fan art . There is a TV series somewhere too, but I'm personally not crazy about series/serializations, so you need to find where to stream it yourself. I WILL SPOIL EVERYTHING SO READ THE BOOK, WATCH THE MOVIE BEFORE READING AND DON'T BLAME ME! 

In the same way that it is not unusual to return to the same music one used to listen in their teens and twenties, I lately feel the need to return to books that I've read in my early youth and that have left a mark on me. It is interesting to observe how you perceive them now compared to back then, and what feelings those same books awake in you today. As a fan of short stories and a lifelong reader of Stephen King, it thus occurred to me to take a closer look at his best work, his short stories, and to launch off the series " The Short Story Lover's Guide to Stephen King ". We will take the chronological path from his first short story collection, Night Shift to his most recent You Like It Darker . Having finished Night Shift , we now move on to Skeleton Crew , I hope you actively follow the series and join me in (re)reading King's best. 

Alright, constant reader, let's finish up this first chapter in the series A Short Story Reader's Guide to Stephen King, by taking a look at the last four short stories in King's first collection  Night Shift . The four stories discussed here are The Last Rung on the Ladder , The Man Who Loved Flowers , One for the Road , and finally, The Woman in the Room , two of them are horror stories and are pre-published before being included in Night Shift , while the remaining two are rather contemporary, or even literary short stories that are rather on the emotional side and which have been written specifically for this work. As usual, it might be better to read the short stories beforehand, because I will spoil everything.

Finally did I collect enough short reviews to post here... I have been reading a lot of non-speculative fiction and the birthday week of the Hammett bookstore plus my regular day job finished my energy off, resulting in me not being able to read everything I wanted. But I'm still happy there were a couple of really good books amongst the ones I managed to read. So, here are the short reviews, I hope you enjoy them!

Slowly closing in on the final pages of King's debut short story collection The Night Shift , this penultimate look will be all about chain smokers ( Quitters, Inc. ), uncanny stalkers ( I Know What You Need ) and creepy kids ( Children of the Corn ), possibly even about creepy kids who smoke and stalk , who kows! Let's go! It would be good for you to read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, because I'll spoil everything!

C'est le moment où un homme sain d'esprit qui cause avec un fou ne s'est pas encore aperçu que c'est un fou. The above quote by Marcel Proust from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs , the second installment of his In Search of Lost Time series, describes a moment you haven't yet realized that the person you are chatting with is, in fact, insane. It is this quote, oddly enough, that has always sprang to my mind, the feeling that surfaces from within me, when I listen to the American folk rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the core of what this music's surface of pleasantness and harmony, conveyed by melodious, honeyed, smooth tunes, hiding outbursts of intense emotion and distorted, disrupted by glimpses of insanity, by cacophony, awakens in me. And it intrigues me, it haunts me, I can listen to them and be inspired to a different feeling every single time, but that basis of oddity, of weirdness remains.

It would be good  to read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, because I'll spoil everything! Americans are obsessed with many things: college sports, high school life, peanut butter, haunted houses, ice in their drinks, UFO's... Out of their many strange obsessions, though, the strangest of them all surely must be the love for their lawns. I can't claim to understand how and why the small piece of green grass around their houses became some sort of status symbol, but I can accept it, as it seems relatively harmless compared to other stuff.

In line with my previous statement that it is inherent to Stephen King's short work that the endings be utterly unhappy, with lingering pessimism, dreadful twists and erasure of all hope for better days, I've assembled his stories from Night Shift that end on a particularly negatively striking, evil, or pessimist note, giving you the chills even long after you close the book. Everything will not be OK in the end, and the worst is yet to come. And film adaptations should stop changing that to make King's horror more palatable for the mainstream audience.   It would be generally good if you read along the stories I'm discussing in this column, even more so for this particular blog post since I'm talking about some of the best endings in all of King's work and spoilers are inevitable.

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...

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 Surf (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.

In almost every horror anthology there's one recurring name that piques my attention because the stories under that name almost always land among my highlights: Joe R. Lansdale. I also keep on hearing how great he is, even more so since I started working at a crime and mystery bookshop, because Lansdale shines both in horror and crime fiction. So, you know how you have an endless back list of authors' names you want to read some day? Well, Lansdale was one of those names perpetually in the back of my head. I even have his The Best of Joe R. Lansdale sitting on my shelf, because you know me, I'll buy it and let it sit there for years before finally reading a book and then get frustrated because I had this gem in my home all these years.

Discussing Jerusalem's Lot , we just have to start at the root, and in many horror works, especially of that time, whether the writer knows it or not, whether the writer likes it or not, that root is H.P. Lovecraft. Not that King tries to hide anything: the setting and background, a mansion inherited by a cousin; the main character, a single young man, the only and last descendant of an old family line with a dark secret; the "symptom", noises from inside the walls of the mansion, mistaken (or not) for rats running around... All these are carbon copies of Rats in the Walls by good old HP. There are still twists - King decides to introduce vampires into the story, and gives it a supernatural touch, while Old Howard's dirty secret is based off human depravity and is much more terrifying, although there's arguably supernatural forces at work here too.

In the same way as it is not unusual to return to the same music one used to listen in their teens and twenties, I lately feel the need to return to books that I've read in my early youth and that have left a mark on me. Of course, the role both books, music, and the associated communities play in the shaping of one's personality is undeniable, so presumably no matter how many decades past, you'll always be partial and subjective, and it's nearly impossible for the fan to give an objective assessment on these works. It would be still interesting to observe how you perceive them now compared to back then, and what feelings those same books awake in you today.

What comes to your mind when you think of the “Wild West”? Horses, bandits, desperados, cowboys, wise natives, prostitutes in petticoats dancing to piano songs in wooden saloons, rangers, scorching heat, guns, dust, grave diggers, Sheriffs and Reverends, public hangings, even Chinese railroad workers and wandering medicine men? Well, Hot Iron and Cold Blood adds flesh eating birds, vampires, worshipers of Yog-Sothoth, revenge spells, headless warriors, ghost dinosaurs, spirits, crazy pimps, and speaking holes to that, and so here we have one of the most original and well-done anthologies of the past decade which absolutely succeeds in wonderfully integrating the weird, the unsettling as well as the horror and terror into this intrinsically surreal and hostile, but at the same time free and hopeful environment. The idea of living in a time without my dentist and Nine Inch Nails is terrifying to me. Any historical story set in a time without these is principally uninteresti...

Of course one can never know the hardships of curating and editing a horror anthology as iconic as Datlow's Best Horror of the Year and there may be reasons beyond our knowledge why some stories don't make it there and why others do. I'm pretty sure that 2022-2023 was an exceptionally good time for horror short stories, but unfortunately I don't see that reflected in this book. In consequence, this year is one of those years in which the Datlow Best of Anthology does not quite strike my fancy. It happens.

  So here's my not so surprising surprise I said I would announce this week: Revealing the cover of my translation project of a Turkish SF-anthology (cover art by Alessio Gherardini), and the publication date which is October 9th 2024!

There are books on this Earth, which can take you away - not so much into another world than rather into another reality. You know that place exists, only it is different from where you are, they do things differently, the history is another, and the horrors, though similar in nature, are different there too. In ten stories from various Latin American countries, Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories takes you into such a different reality where it’s nothing astounding to have a vulture as neighbor, where you can see the ghost of a serial killer, where supernatural, extraterrestrial beings are among us, in our houses, in our gardens, and where the haunting remnants of Nazism brought here from far away mesh with cults and communes and reign in terror.