Skeleton Crew (1985) Overview

Yeh best start believing in ghost stories…

Here There Be Tygers

We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my arm.

Stephen King, Skeleton Crew‘s introduction

Note: due to its The Mist has been covered separately in a previous essay.
To read about that in more depth, click here.

By 1985, King was perhaps as big as he was ever going to get. Throughout his career he has had lows and highs of popularity, but he was consistently publishing in that time. The 80s was his peak, but we’re also probably around the peak of everything else as well: his addictions, as already discussed in numerous other essays so far in this blog, but also the pressures from publishers, fans, film studios, and his family must have been insane. All the coke and alcohol is understandable under those conditions, and it is remarkable that in this time he is also perhaps his most prolific with multiple books out a year and a whopping 22 stories in this collection. In recent years he has slowed down, managing at least only one book per year (though there are three in the year 2022). Yes, they cover a span of 17 years, but the majority are published within the last five years, with only four not published during the 80s.

I’m a big fan of King’s novels, but I think I will always prefer his short stories. There’s something about the brief dance, the quick kiss, of a perfectly executed idea that makes them so thrilling and enjoyable. Though King still publishes collections, they tend now to be more in the mould of Different Seasons, with novellas or novelettes rather than a bumper crop of stories like this. Skeleton Crew is a cracker of a collection. There are stories in here I haven’t read in years, yet have burned into my memory since I read them maybe fifteen years ago, and not always the ones you might expect. I remember very clearly Mrs Todd’s Shortcut, Here There be Tygers and Beachworld amongst other more well known stories, which are not often part of the conversation around King. Upon revisiting, they remained as strong as when I first read the book.

One of the recurring themes or scenarios played out in the stories is the influence of outside universes invading ours: The Mist, Mrs Todd’s Shortcut and The Jaunt all deal with this theme. Though he might well have outwardly shown he was okay (alcoholics tend to hold it together until, suddenly, they don’t), I think this is perhaps an expression of King’s own reactions to the outside pressures he was facing at this point in his career. I think these stories, maybe only partially and almost certainly subconsciously, are King’s expressions of anxiety against these pressures. In The Mist they are terrifying invaders; The Jaunt contains something to try and ignore (but will send you mad if you even acknowledge for a second what’s in there), whereas by Mrs Todd’s Shortcut King has come to a sort of peace with them, so long as they don’t cause too much fuss. It is possible that King is processing how these pressures from his new fame-filled life affect him through these stories. Having said that, Gramma, arguably the most terrifying story in the collection is about bodily invasion from the strange universe if Gramma and her life beyond death, so more likely I’m just seeking narratives that aren’t there.

One of the other themes that crops up a couple times is desperate survival. In The Mist, The Raft, Survivor Type and Beachworld, characters are forced to take extreme lengths to survive. With King in short story mode, characters survival are far less certain than in his novels, and allows for a real frisson of excitement as characters are gleefully picked off by a writer who’s having fun creating, and then melting, his characters. Other stories have characters have slow descents into madness, but the lessons here are that insurmountable odds drive people mad, and he expresses this by turning those with the worst fates into quislings who embrace the evil rather than fight. With the exception of Pet Sematary, it is rare for a King character to give in quite so easily because we as readers (and King too as the first reader) want only the best for these characters we have grown to love. With a short story, there’s not so much love as a desire to see people melted, though in some ways that is a weakness of the collection (see below). It links back to the previous paragraph, in that it those external influences are still felt upon King, but with perhaps far less positive results

A trope of King’s is taking the normal and twisting it until it becomes abnormal. Stories like The Monkey, Beachworld, The Reaper’s Image, and Gramma all take mundane normal things like toys, sand, and elderly relatives and instils within them some unexplainable evil that leaves a mark on the reader’s brain. Not that this hasn’t appeared before in King (a hotel but spooky! A teenage girl but spoooky! A animal graveyard but spooooky!), but here King gets to real deliver a punch of horror that doesn’t need to be justified. Compare something like The Monkey to Christine as an example. Though The Monkey does go into detail of our main character’s history, it doesn’t seek to give origin to why a toy monkey is quite so malevolent. It just is. Yet Christine is given chapters devoted to delving into the car’s history, giving as much as an origin story as possible. Your mileage may very as to which is more effective, but the intent is different in a short compared to a novel. King is here to scare in whatever of the three modes he wants to try, and he’ll leave you gasping for breath if he’s done his job well.

And though there are some stories that can be grouped by commonality, there are some interesting unique stories in the collection too. Wedding Gig, though admittedly one of the weaker stories, is a crime story without nary a bump, ghoul or scare among its pages. Paranoid: A Chant is an incredibly rare example of King writing poetry, until the vastly different For Owen a couple of stories later. The Jaunt and Beachworld were science fiction with a healthy dose of horror included. Though we haven’t quite the same number of literary efforts that Night Shift had with the likes of The Last Rung on the Ladder or The Woman in the Room (though we’ll get to that), King is still demonstrating his skills beyond horror and perhaps demonstrating that he chooses to stay in the horror sandbox. It suits him down to the ground, and it’s easier to hide the bodies.

But one of the main things I think that comes through in this collection is, surprisingly, King’s sense of humour. It’s a broad church, where something like Word Processor of the Gods is like a Twilight Zone in one of their goofier morality stories to the absolute pitch black but still funny Survivor Type. Other ones that get a couple chuckles, at least from me, include Mrs Todd’s Shortcut, The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands and Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1) not because of the jokes that may be within them, but the way the stories are structured. Often times, King’s characters will make jokes that cause ‘tears to squirt from their eyes’ (they always squirt from their eyes) that at best cause the reader to do one of those soft exhales through their nostrils. King’s jokes are corny and, generally, not very funny. But looking at his stories as more examples of long form joke telling, where the punchline can be a melted character or something genuinely funny, is perhaps a better way to look at them. Word Processor of the Gods has such over the top dreadful characters it’s hard not to laugh at how awful they are, and the final lines of Survivor Type will either leave you gagging or chuckling at how brazen it is.

But there is somewhat of a common theme between the more modern stories he has written compared to his late 60s output. The characters, particularly in his 80s output, are assholes. Not a single likeable person exists in The Raft, The Wedding Gig, Beachworld, or the lead of Survivor Type, amongst those that spring to mind. Some are arguably more sympathetic than others, but in the main they’re assholes. Even characters like Richard Hagstrom in Word Processor of the Gods is ostensibly a nice character who’s put down by those around him, yet gets away with deleting his wife and child from the world and replacing them with his dead brother’s dead wife and son without a single negative consequence. It’s written in a way that we’re okay with it, but put into those terms he’s still an asshole. Compare this to the texture of characters in Night Shift who I think on the whole are generally more likeable. Not all by any means, but much more so than the ones here. And then returning to that idea presented earlier that King is struggling with the pressures of his fame, it would make anyone struggle with even normal social interactions. Though it doesn’t affect the quality of the writing it certainly comes through in the characters and stories he tells.

To be glib, I think it’s the cocaine that was the problem. This is the main weakness of the book, as it leads to our delight at their deaths rather than care for their loss. It depends what you want out of a horror short, but though there is King’s knack for character still present, he turns that increasingly to people who are awful rather than ones who are victims of fate. Cocaine is great solely for the person on it; to everyone else, you’re an asshole.

Maybe partially the reason for this is the shift in the type of characters we see. Part of Night Shift’s flavour was that the stories had many working class characters and viewpoints. It gave the collection a more earthy, relatable tone that made it so entertaining to read. Inevitably, with King’s many extra funds coming in, the characters have in general (though not in all cases) shifted up a class. And coupled with the fact that many of them are assholes, maybe King is finding himself in a world that he thinks is full of assholes, retaining his sympathy for working class that populated stories like The Mangler or The Graveyard Shift. It’s an interesting shift to observe being presented by King, and I wonder how far he realised this was present in his writing.

It’s not true for every story. The final story of the collection, The Reach, suggests he is still capable of a more heartfelt, literary effort. But though it is unique, I don’t think that’s why this story is so different to all the others. I think the why is because the story is about Maine. It’s the closest we get to a psychogeographical examination of the local life that King so clearly loves. It’s similar to works like Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem or Voice of the Fire or Iain Sinclair in general. It’s the indication of what King truly cares about beyond horror – it’s Home.

Overall, this is a great horror collection. I think Night Shift that had more texture and variety, though still specialising in horror, but the stories contained here still show his fine instinct for horror with the variety of skill that a novel doesn’t afford. There are stronger and weaker stories all throughout, but none that I shudder (or at least, shudder with annoyance) to read. Even his earliest stories in this collection contain within some raw power that make this a strong collection. King has definitely improved as a writer, and, as I said in my essay on Night Shift, you could do a lot worse if you wanted to start reading King. Night Shift still is my preference (though I’ll admit nostalgia may cloud my judgement somewhat), but the writing present here is consistently, incredibly strong, and you could do a lot worse than by joining the Skeleton Crew.

Observations and Connections has been given its own page. Click here to read that and more individual thoughts on each individual story.

UP NEXT: It’s time to go into TOP GEAR as we go into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE.