protean depravity

In my introductory blog post to  Skeleton Crew  I stated that there are stories in this collection that outright bother me, that I don't like, and even yes, I hate. I don't mean to be preachy or judgy, but some of these are extremely mean - especially against people above a certain weight. I don't want to claim that King is fat-phobic, but after re-reading these stories, I almost think he might be. I certainly hope it was a phase and he's not like that still, because it is a bitter pill to swallow for me, as I'm obviously a fan of his.  Where do we draw the line in such cases, though? How can a reader discriminate between an author writing a character realistically, with their flaws, misogynistic, racist, homophobic characters because in real life they exist and should be written about; and an author being himself misogynistic, racist, homophobic and using a character as his mouthpiece? This is a difficult task for any reader and I'm usually very lenient and giv...

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.