Observations and Connections
Presented here, story by story, is a quick review of each, any connections to the wider Stephen King mythos and more general observations. A basic understanding of the stories is assumed, and spoilers freely discussed.
Willa
This was the story that got King back to writing short stories, the one that led to almost this whole collection. King admits that it may not be the strongest story to open the collection. It’s not an uncommon type of story for King to have written previously – The Reach from Skeleton Crew is a similar story – but King usually saves them for later in a collection. To open a collection with it is a brave choice, as the first story can define the overall feeling of the collection, But I think it pays off. It’s a sweet, melancholy ghost story that isn’t what you typically think of if you heard the words ‘Stephen King’ and ‘ghost story,’ in the same sentence.
Initially, it reads like a typical King story where a couple end up in a terrible place in the middle of nowhere (examples including Children of the Corn, You Know They’ve Got a Hell of a Band or Rainy Season), but casually subverts those expectations. Our main characters may be dead, but they are together at least. It speaks to the power of love, and how the rest of the world sort of doesn’t matter when you’re with the one you love. I could almost imagine this is King’s ideal afterlife – with Tabitha by his side, at a venue that gets some good bands, plus you get to spook the locals.
The Gingerbread Girl
The contemplative mood of the previous story lingers somewhat through to the beginning of this one, though doesn’t stick around for too long. It’s a shorter version of King’s stories similar ‘Women in Trouble’ trilogy, though understandably at a sprint. Around half the story is detailing Emily’s escape from Pickering, but it works neatly as a metaphor for Emily’s emotional arc. Emily’s obsession with running could be interpreted as her not facing or processing the loss of her child. When she is unable to escape from Pickering, it is only when she confronts him that she is able to overcome him. Similarly, the story ends with her beginning to heal from the loss of her child. It’s not a big clever metaphor for grief, but it’s enough for a short story, especially one as thrilling as this.
I have seen some speculation that the Pickering of this story may be a relation to another character with the same surname in Insomnia. I’ve connected characters previously for the same reasons, or even less, but there’s no evidence either way. If you want there to be one, there is. At one point in Gerald’s Game, Jessie Burlingame refers to herself as ‘the amazing Gingerbread Girl,’ which has obvious resonances here.
Harvey’s Dream
A proper creepy one this. Harvey announcing how he woke up screaming from his dream screaming is an absolutely killer line, and begins to peel back several domestic nightmares: a marriage without love, ageing, Alzheimers, children leaving home, gradually building in paranoia until it we can only conclude the worst has indeed happened.
It’s a slight tale, but in a scant few pages King is able to combine those domestic fears with the same kind of horror he invoked in 1408, where the horror comes down the end of a phone line. But it does show that King is a master at building dread in such a confined space.
Rest Stop
An even slighter story than the previous one that reads as a fantasy where Stephen King gets to play the role of Richard Bachman, appropriate considering the main character’s profession. It asks the difficult question about what we would do in a situation as described in the book, and luckily John Dykstra comes out on top. Not badly written by any means, but probably the weakest of the collection.
There is a mention of Richard Stark, the actual author. King borrowed the name for his villain back in The Dark Half.
Stationary Bike
An interesting story, partly when seen as part of the long-running continuum of other overweight characters King has written about previously. I discussed this in my Thinner essay, but King had a history of depicting overweight characters as disgusting, lazy slobs. This was most prominent during the 80s, when King saw himself as overweight, so I think this was something of self-loathing thing for King, in much the same way that alcoholics and addicts get short shrift in his books when he was one. But during the 90s and beyond, it proved to be an exception. This story subverted my expectations, especially considering how it starts, as I thought it was King slipping back into bad habits of his depiction of weight. But I was pleasantly surprised to see how the story developed into a warning about excess the other way as well. Exercise becomes just as much an addiction for Richard Sifkitz as junk food was. Instead, this is about finding that happy medium, looking after your health but allowing yourself the occasional indulgence too.
The crew that works within Sifkitz’s mind is an odd bunch, but also includes Michael Whelan. Michael Whelan is well-known to King fans as the illustrator for many King stories, including The Dark Tower.
The Things They Left Behind
In his notes to this story, King briefly discusses the effect 9/11 had on him, as well as the rest of America. As a writer, writing stories is what helps him process what comes after, which helps explain the number of car accidents in his stories after his accident. Yet 9/11 has been curiously absent from his stories, save for a few fleeting references. The most prominent one is from The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah where Black Thirteen is left in a locker in one of the towers, and its inevitable destruction is almost treated as an in-joke.
This story is wildly different, taking on the survivor’s guilt of those people who happened not to be in the building that day. In the time after 9/11, America went a little mad. You only need to look at the culture that came about in the immediate aftermath to see quite a bit chest-thumping patriotism and dick-swinging to reassure Americans that America was still unassailable. This story ignores the politics of the situation, and King wisely focuses on the individual instead. It shares some similarities in tone with Willa from earlier in the collection. The closest previous effort in terms of subject matter was Hearts in Atlantis, where King wrote about the Vietnam war by writing around it, and in the future there is 11/22/63. I get the feeling that King sees the tragedy inherent to the day, and besides this thoughtful piece has nothing else to add to it.
Graduation Afternoon
Less a story and more a scene from the opening of a movie like Threads or The Day After. It forms a neat counterpoint to The Things Left Behind, being much more visceral in its description of an attack on New York. There’s an element of class King is playing with here too, comparing in particular the music tastes of the characters. It seems if you like country, you’re all right by King. But there’s not much meat to the bone, except in its nightmarish quality. King explains in his notes that story came from going cold turkey from Doxepin and suffered from incredibly vivid dreams as a result. In that sense, it is also the twin to Harvey’s Dream from earlier in the collection. A creepy thrill, a good one, but nothing much beyond that.
N.
Occasionally, King will indulge his horror fanboy whims and write a deliberate homage to classic horror stories. There are many Lovecraft references to be found (Crouch End from Nightmares & Dreamscapes being the most notable, but there are many others), as well as his homage to Stoker in ‘Salem’s Lot and its prequel Jerusalem’s Lot. The telling of the tale as a nested epistolary gets across the feeling of a mind virus, and the general narrative of horrors breaking through into our universe makes this the most outwardly horror (and also scariest) story of the collection so far. The use of a therapist to record the story also recalls The Boogeyman from Night Shift.
This could have easily been a pastiche story, but King instead uses it as a framework to explore mental health, in this case OCD. OCD can be a crippling illness, where the rituals of the everyday are enough to hold back the end of the world. Even those with OCD know that isn’t true, but that doesn’t stop the rituals. King imagines a horrifying scenario where those rituals are indeed helping save the world, (though the epistolary report throws a little doubt over the proceedings). In addition to scares, it touches upon the importance of mental health and keeping in touch with the world around you. No man is an island and all that.
Obviously, numbers have an important role to play in this story, and inevitably 19 makes an appearance. 19 drew importance from the Dark Tower series, though has many appearances throughout King’s work both textual and meta. Stone rings have played important roles in the Tower series too, usually as places of ritual. Maybe the stones present in Ackerman’s Field are keeping a Todash thing in check? This taking place in Maine is located close Harlow (mentioned first in Bag of Bones) and Castle Rock.
The story is a deliberate riff on Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, which is even shouted out within the text. Cthun is more of a general Lovecraft reference however (and probably not a World of Warcraft reference), though also probably related to the word chthonic. Ackerman is probably a reference to Forest J Ackerman, who died a month after publication but was receiving hospice care from around October. King told a story about Ackerman in On Writing, where Ackerman had brought along a story for King to sign. King had submitted the story to Ackerman when he was 11.
To promote the book, a motion comic was created, adapting this specific story. Special editions of the book were sold with a DVD of all the different episodes, but you can watch it online easily enough these days.
The Cat From Hell
The odd story out, in the sense that it is the oldest one here. Nightmares & Dreamscapes had existed as a collection to clear the decks as it were, but this was included here, possibly to bring the collection to a total of thirteen stories. Originally published back in 1977, and had been reprinted numerous times since, including as a bonus story in Duma Key; it had even been adapted for the Tales from the Darkside movie. But King had just forgotten to include it prior. Still – thirteen stories is quite a neat trick.
It’s a fun, gory tale, told across two different chairs in the most domestic way. Something about the cat forcing its way down Halston’s throats provoke sickened chuckles in me, though the image is equally horrifying too. It reads like an EC Comic, and it would not have been out of place in Creepshow. Finding a home in Tales from the Darkside is quite apropos. There’s little else to it aside from it being a quick little thrill, though more puerile (and more fun) than some of the other thin, more modern stories collected here.
A couple stray observations: Drogan’s sister and her ‘lifelong friend’ Carolyn Broadmoor, though only very minor characters, are almost certainly gay. Though the name Dick Gage is an inherently funny name, that we have a character called Gage who is killed by a cat, forms a rough and ready link with Pet Sematary.
The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates
Another on the secret language of marriage and love, similar in some ways to Lisey’s Story with the dead communicating their love from beyond. Though not mentioned, it brings to mind the terrified final calls of those on 9/11 before the planes crashed, which frankly I never actually want to hear. Knowing they exist is depressing enough. The story carries with it that same punch, and has an ending that though I wouldn’t describe as mean, I lack the vocabulary to properly describe.
The imagery of the the afterlife being like Grand Central Station recalls similar imagery from The Exorcist III.
Mute
Almost a monologue that intercuts between two locations, this is a story that feels like a real throwback to the kind of story that appeared in Night Shift. The religious aspect of playing with guilt adds an interesting dimension to the story. It’s almost a ‘be careful what you wish for,’ except Monette doesn’t express guilt; it’s relief. A good deed is repaid, albeit in a way Monette could never have predicted.
Monette is driving to Derry, the location of many King stories starting with It.
Ayana
King will often have a story, and even often at the or near the end of a collection, that is less horror and more about touching meditations of life and death, especially with family members. It was a tradition started in The Woman in the Room back in Night Shift, and though not bettered this is a similarly touching story about passing on the good to those you can. It forms a neat counterpoint to the previous story, where the ostensibly good character comes out ahead from an evil act compared to here, where good begets good. It tugs at the heartstrings, and reminds us to value the time we have with those we love.
The character of Ayana, who is able to cure people with a kiss, passes her gift onto the narrator of this story. The power feels reminiscent of John Coffey’s power in The Green Mile, and maybe this is the legacy of his gift, passing on miracles to those who need it. Entirely speculation from me, but why not?
This story was published in The Paris Review, and can be found online here.
A Very Tight Place
An odd story to end the collection on, but a darkly hilarious one too. Much like Survivor Type, I can imagine King cackling (with a shit-eating grin too I bet) as he wrote this particular story. It makes for an odd end to the collection, and perhaps would have been better had it swapped with Ayana. By no means a bad story – just odd placement.
And that’s it! For a more general overview of the whole collection, click here.
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Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 