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"Springheel Jack...I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back..."
Night Shift is the first of Stephen King's short story compilations, and arguably the finest. Perhaps the most endearing aspects of this group of tales are their inspired inventiveness and their almost undivided insistence on gloomy, unresolved endings. Most of the stories found within are, to me, like some inexplicable personification of magic and wonder, turning pages of biting nostalgia mingled with the dark, romantic fascination of horror: crimson and viscous, like thick ropes of blood. When I reread them now, it is through two sets of eyes that I see: the 15-year-old boy I was and the 36-year-old I have become. Dimly and muted, a child's hollow call from the bottom of a well, I can still feel the magic King's words had for the dreaming, yearning, goggle-eyed teenager. Yet overlaying that enchanted quality is the residue of time and years and the changes of perspective and disposition they bring. As with many of these old King stories, I feel like two different people when I reread them these days. It's always a dangerous ground to embark upon, somewhere between a past half-forgotten and a present only half-glimpsed. But the wordsmith takes the constant reader's hand once again, just like always. And I go with him. Just like always.
Jerusalem's Lot
Here King gives us a prequel of sorts to his earlier novel Salem's Lot. Set in the mid 19th century, most of the story is told in flashback form through the usage of letters written from the main character, Charles Boone, and the replies to those letters. Within this framework, the essential characteristics of the tale are conveyed. It's a story that embodies a deep sense of atmospheric disturbance and wrongness: from the foreboding sound of apparent rats scratching behind the walls, to the gruesome "signs" in the nearby communities that something is greatly amiss and the resultant spite from the townspeople, to the detection of the shunned village and dark church, to the unveiling of the Boone legacy and the rapid, fevered decent into insanity by Charles Boone. Jerusalem's Lot explores a bit into the inner consciousness of madness and the internal and external forces applying pressure to the condition, as well as being something of a timepiece describing the lifestyles and mindsets of New England people in the mid 1800s. It's also an effectively creepy piece of work, particularly the parts in the abandoned village. The pacing and storytelling technique worked well, as did the slight twist at the end. It makes you want more of the world created here, an expansion beyond the realms of the short story format.
Graveyard Shift
You've been here before. Anyone who's ever worked blue collar shift work knows this place: the indistinct old industrial factory, the primeval machinery grinding and whirring arduously away inside, the domineering foreman and the bleak, dismal monotony of existence there for the workers. Stephen King creates such a tangible atmosphere of reality from the first sentence that the whole story-characters and setting and plot-springs immediately to life around you. It's as familiar as your driveway. And once that is done, well...the author can take you anywhere once you believe, can't he? In Graveyard Shift, we're given a precise, textured account of this world and people who inhabit it, an effective character study in the swords and shields of industrial workplace social interaction. But this is concurrently threaded through a tale of terror, terror in the guise of a teeming, monstrous rat population that King paints a portrait of with vibrant brush strokes. To these rats, he assigns an almost human quality of malice and understanding. Unease is cultivated and festers, growing to fruition in the dark places. We're led along a path of incrementally increasing horrors and abominations until, at the very end, we can almost believe what we find.
Night Surf
This story seems nothing less than a work of art: a dark, morose, pessimistic labor, bleeding hyper-reality from the corners and pointing an accusing finger at humanity from the grave, flawed with human frailties, but a work of art nonetheless. Foremost, it's a side story to the legendary Stephen King novel The Stand; it tells of a small group of teenagers and early twentysomethings encamped around a former New England beach resort area who have watched everyone around them sicken and die, and who are themselves just waiting to die. The flow of events is stagnant, immobile, melancholy; the pages turn with the shriek of creaking rust, and the final futility and pointlessness of existence the characters feel absorbs into your fingers as you turn. What's left? The A6 superflu has killed everyone, and they might be the last people alive anywhere. They'd thought they were somehow immune to the flu-Captain Trips, if you can dig it-until they eventually began to become infected too, later than the rest of humanity, but just as surely. Their days and nights blend together into uneasy collages of haunting memories, warm beer, listless sex and dead emotions.
"We smoked and I watched the surf go in and out. Needles had Captain Trips. That made everything real all over again. It was late August already, and in a couple of weeks the first chill of fall would be creeping in. Time to move inside someplace. Winter. Dead by Christmas, maybe, all of us.
"I put my face in my hands and clutched it, feeling the skin, its grain and texture. It was all narrowing so swiftly, and it was all so mean-there was no dignity in it.
"The surf was coming in, coming in, coming in. Limitless. Clean and deep. We had come here in summer, Maureen and I, the summer after high school, the summer before college and reality and A6 coming out of Southeast Asia and covering the world like a pall, July, we had eaten pizza and listened to her radio, I had put oil on her back, she had put oil on mine, the air had been hot, the sand bright, the sun like a burning glass."
I Am the Doorway
It just doesn't get any freakier than this. Here King does something he's done so expertly on occasion over the years since: the deft blending science fiction elements with horror elements. A retired, wheelchair-bound astronaut one day discovers that circular red welts have appeared on his hands and fingers. The condition worsens, until one night he realizes that his eyes were closed and yet he was still seeing, albeit with a blurred, ghastly, multiplied vision. He snaps open his eyes and finds...eyes. A dozen or so small eyes have popped through the sores on his hands, and they're staring at him with hate and revulsion. He's a monster to them; this world is monstrous to them. Later he considers that he must have been infected or possessed by them during one of his deep space explorations. To his further alarm, he soon finds that the hands have a resolute willpower of their own, that they can take control of his body, make him do things they want him to do. He is pretty sure he murdered someone. In an act of utter desperation, he burns his own hands off, and action which does seem to cauterize the infestation. For a while, anyway. This was just a great story front to back, morbidly fascinating, shocking and enthralling with an aptly tragic ending.
The Mangler
The Mangler is one of my slighter favorites in this collection, although it's not entirely without its charms. It tells the succinct tale of an industrial laundry press machine that's become possessed by a malevolent demonic presence, that's had a random, chance taste of human blood, liked it, and begins to actively seek out more. There are some horribly graphic, gruesome descriptive sequences here involving hapless laundry employees being mangled by the possessed machine. Two people eventually realize what's happened-or so they think-and their bumbling efforts to thwart it result in further critical mutilations and, ultimately, the potential for far worse occurrences. The final bizarre, lunatic images of the tale might be even a bit much for hardcore fans to absorb.
The Boogeyman
The Boogeyman is a classic horror parable, the stuff of midnight campfire whispers and long, restless nights in bed. It's almost comic book in style and timbre and theme, the manifestation of cliched children's fears into brutal, maddening adult realities. It's not without a poignant element of tragedy as well, laid out in the form of the deaths of three young children. Yet the story resonates strongly with the denial from adulthood of all the fears that are so real to children, the peering through the looking glass darkly and shaking the head no, no, no, that does not-can not-exist. The monster in the closet is not real. Or is it? As in many other King writings, the door is always open to the idea that everything that happens exists solely in the head of the main character, that we are ultimately not privy to a tale of the darkly supernatural, but rather that of regular man's very real madness.
Gray Matter
In Gray Matter, we're invited into the inner circle, the temperate envelope, the well-worn place where King often likes to lead us and point out the silhouettes moving behind the window panes: the small-town general store, a gathering place for the aged, retired crags in town to mull about, whittling away time with excruciating slowness, a twilight bonding and death watch ritual. Into this established format, any number of story elements can be introduced from any number of angles. Here, a young local boy familiar to them staggers into the store, chased by the winds from a wailing January snowstorm, and begs the men there for help: something about his father. And from here, the landscape tilts on its axis, the world as we know it turns inside out, the crawling things in the furthest corners of imagination begin to encroach into the light. We've crossed over. Seems the boy's father is a case-of-beer-a-day alcoholic, unemployed and on compensation from work. Nothing to do all day and night but consume and consume. Only one night...something was wrong with the beer he was drinking. Something that begins to change him, turn him into...something else, something not quite human. Soon, he becomes a very real threat to himself and those around him, and the boy enlists the help of the men in the store to make sense of what's happened and, if possible, help his father in some way, any way. There's a wonderfully ambiguous ending here.
Battleground
Here we have a professional hitman named Renshaw returning home to his secluded San Francisco penthouse after a lucrative, successful job in Miami. We have an organized crime backdrop lightly sketched, both feet planted firmly on the ground. Then the utterly surreal and absurd puts a large, imposing footprint square in the middle of our noses. Yet it's irresistible; I find myself still grinning ear to ear when the small toy foot soldiers, helicopters and jeeps begin to buzz importantly about and then begin waves of attack upon Renshaw. This story fun to read and, for me at least, the very incarnation of coolness.
"Tiny foot soldiers, about an inch and a half tall, began to crawl out. The soldiers were wearing miniscule army fatigues, helmets, and field packs. Tiny carbines were slung across their shoulders. Two of them looked briefly across the room at Renshaw. Their eyes, no bigger than pencil points, glittered.
"Sudden excruciating pain in his foot made him cry out. One of the foot soldiers was standing on his shoe and bayoneting his ankle. The tiny face looked up, panting and grinning. Renshaw kicked at it and the tiny body flew across the room to leave a splatter on the wall."
Trucks
With Trucks, the concept of Battleground is taken one step further. What if, instead of small soldiers becoming sentient and animated, all the trucks of the world somehow became conscious of their existence, sentient themselves...and vengeful towards mankind? Then we take the wide angle shot and zoom in to detail on a small group of people trapped in a truck stop, hopelessly penned in by driverless, snorting, roaring, homicidal trucks endlessly encircling them. Homicidal? Indeed. For the trucks are mercilessly running people down any chance they get, wiping the face of humanity off the planet as well as they can. There's a great sense of claustrophobic tension and, eventually, desperation amongst the group holed up in the truck stop. King gives us a brief character study of how varying personalities react under extreme stress, stress in this case mingled with a pervading sense of unreality and disbelief. At the end, we zoom back out and see something akin to global armageddon transpiring as the hopes of the surviving people dwindle to a pinpoint. Once again, the forlorn, unresolved ambiguity at the end left me starry-eyed and spinning.
Sometimes They Come Back
Ostensibly a ghost story, there is also a very real element of tragic, wrenching sorrow and regret here, as well. Jim Norman was 9 when he saw his 12-year-old brother killed by some street thugs. Fast forward 16 years and we see he's well-entrenched in twentysomething adulthood, married, and a schoolteacher. Yet the nightmare images have never left him for long, the memories swirling uneasily of his lost brother, leering and lost replays of that black day so long ago. There'd been a breakdown before, the circumstances masked in the unsaid. But now things are turning worse. Far worse. For he has begun to imagine he sees the murderers of his brother sitting in his classroom, the same age they were then, but now 16 years later. Are they real or not? We're led to believe they are, but once again the door is always open to other interpretations. A man who has undergone such an extremely violent experience and been exposed to something so overwhelming at such a young age is surely apt to carry the scars all through life, if not have the scars become his life. For whether the ghosts are real or imagined, sometimes we can never bury them completely, sometimes they come back. The only part of this story I didn't really care for was the finale, the all-too-easy summoning of the dark spirit. The story made the conjuring of a demon from the netherworlds appear as easy and commonplace as ordering a pizza.
Strawberry Spring
Back in 1985 I recorded a short instrumental song on my Yamaha 4-track recorder and called it "Strawberry Spring." It had two acoustic guitars playing simple finger-picked chord melodies and two soft electric guitars playing a lilting harmony overtop. The people I knew back then loved it. I always thought it served the title well, if not exactly encompassing the mood of the Stephen King story from which the title came. This tale of Springheel Jack and of strawberry spring come to a frigid winter New England landscape is a work of dark, absorbing beauty. The pining nostalgia within has teeth sharp enough to draw blood. It thoroughly enchants with its darkness, it beckons us to step into the phosphorescent mists of night, it coils around our necks in a dangerous lover's embrace; it holds the fact of murder up to our face, and in that mirror the face is our own. If the actions of a serial killer can be made to seem romantic, then this story does it. The whole environment is alive with wonder and baleful threats, with the allures of youth and realities of death. And yes, King serves up yet another fantastic ending here. Strawberry Spring-both as a title and as the story beneath the title-holds a place of almost inexplicable closeness to me, a place only further solidified by the passing years.
"For me, it was one of the most beautiful nights I can remember. The people I passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuring shadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers, walking with hands and eyes linked. The melting snow dripped and ran, dripped and ran, and from every dark storm drain the sound of the sea drifted up, a dark winter sea now ebbing strongly.
"I walked until nearly midnight, until I was thoroughly mildewed, and I passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily off down the winding paths. Who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces."
The Ledge
Like Night Surf and Strawberry Spring before it in this collection, The Ledge is also a tale devoid of any rustling or cavorting supernatural plot elements. It's a straight story. And like them, it is also excellent. There can be drawn a certain parallel between this account and Battleground, for both are set in big city high-rise penthouses, and both feature a backdrop sketch of organized crime. Yet where Battleground employed bizarre surrealism as a plot twist, The Ledge simply opens up the human heart: the malice, the deception, the love, the devotion, the desperation, the utter lack of humanity all spill out across the floor. We're given a bird's eye view of a tale here where the good-guy character is maneuvered into a no-win situation and must succeed at overcoming a difficult wager to have any possibility of wiggling free. The wager...the bet? A touch of demented whimsy from his captive: navigate around the top of the 400 foot tall building in heavy crosswinds, and do it on a five-inch-wide ledge. The scenes out on the ledge are hair-raising and dizzyingly tense, enough to instill real unease in those with a fear of heights, and the overall descriptive component paints dramatic, three-dimensional images of the scenery and characters. The tale twists and turns in almost noir-style into its semi-tragic conclusion.
The Lawnmower Man
This may be more bizarre and unusual than even I Am the Doorway. A man who's let his lawn run riot for most of a summer has finally decided to hire a lawn service company-a company chosen at random from the listings-to tend to it for him. The man arrives-The Lawnmower Man, he says he is-and begins to work. Only...only the lawnmower is running itself. And the Lawnmower Man is crawling naked behind it, eating the grass as fast as it's being mown. Row after row this continues, the man's belly grotesquely bulging with grass, green juice dripping off his chin. The man in the house passes out. When he awakes, he finds that the Lawnmower Man is in the service of some darker authority, and that this darker authority is what? Satan? Enlisting the minions and hordes of darkness to do yard work on the side to rake in a few extra bucks in between blood sacrifices and satanic rituals? I don't know, really. In the end, the man in the house panics and calls the police. As it turns out, he really shouldn't have done that.
Quitters, Inc.
I can remember being slack-jawed with awe the first time I read this one. It was such a concept, and so bluntly and brutally implemented. It's still fun to read through it again, but the wicked, sadistic plot machinations, being known so well to me at this point, don't have quite the same impact they once did. Like Night Surf, Strawberry Spring and The Ledge, this is a straight story with no abrupt left turns into a supernaturally-laced twilight zone. Once again, the darkness and strength inside the human heart is cut loose and left to wage a forbidding pitched battle against one another. It's a remarkable, captivating premise, and King fleshes it out with some colorful, emotional characters, the expansion of whom is only limited by the short story format.
I Know What You Need
This might be considered a sister-story to Strawberry Spring. It shares a common setting-the same community college-and a similar mood and pacing. Although here we find vivid, cutting human emotion at the forefront rather than the elegiac, nostalgic musings of Strawberry Spring. And here, as well, the long, seeking fingers of the supernatural unwind from the back of memory and reach out, reach out through all the long years, reach out and brush the forehead, the cheeks, the lips in a dappled caress. Then they begin to squeeze the life out of you. Edward Jackson Hamner is an outsider at college, an interloper in the sun, a silhouette skulking around the periphery, nondescript, unnoticed, a loner both by appearance and by social proclivity. Yet he knows what people need; has a certain kind of precognition, can read the uncertain lines of human emotion and can see elements of the future. But he's only had one real obsession over all the long years. This is a love story, plain and simple, but a love story with a dark, homicidal underbelly clutched in the skeletal fist of those long fingers. It's a candid portrayal of the avarice in the human heart, and the blinding, all-encompassing, overwhelming nature of unbridled emotion. And in the end, I can't help but wonder, at least a little...is Hamner the same person who narrates Strawberry Spring? Can he be, please?
Children of the Corn
In the sprawling, barren expanse of middle Nebraska farmland, the small town of Gatlin has gone bad. Everyone is gone, other than the children. And the entire town is falling into ruin, other than the church. But the church is no ordinary church; bent and twisted in nature, it's become a place of worship to a dark god in the cornfields that surround Gatlin. And the children are no ordinary children. Not anymore. They've been absorbed by the presence in the fields, He Who Walks Behind The Rows, and have become its disciples; in the name of the corn, they'd murdered all the adults in Gatlin, and now offer as sacrifice each of their own number when they reach the age of nineteen. Secluded and remote, Gatlin has gone on like this, undisturbed, possessed, for some twelve years. Then comes a young married couple into town to seek help after an automobile accident. But instead of help they find the truth of what Gatlin's become. Children of the Corn is a masterpiece of the horror genre, at once gripping and terrifying and vivid, all together there. Descriptive sequences describing the landscape are like photographic images implanted in the memory. The bickering interplay between the two main characters is all-too-real, and the situation they find themselves in happens with sudden, unforgiving abruptness. There is a supernatural force afoot, a dark and vengeful presence amongst the endless rows of corn, but the story never paints him in absolutes and, as such, is that much more real to us. Curtains of the surreal descend, a world tilting sickeningly on its axis, as horror and terror and religious dementia mix in the blood of the Nebraska corn. The brutal, unforgiving ending deserves a nod of pragmatic acknowledgement: yup, this is how it ends, with the unraveling thread unceremoniously cut.
The Last Rung on the Ladder
"There was only a single sentence below the 'Dear Larry.' But a sentence can mean enough. It can do enough."
Funny how certain stories can stick with you, year after year, decades on decades, always looming somewhere just this side of the conscious memory, circumferences bulging with sharp, accusing meanings and emotions and imagery, overwhelmingly painful in their very existence, but never quite forgotten. They stay with us as we change, as our lives evolve and grimly progress into uncertain futures. We grow up. All the worlds of childhood, all the meanings that can be ascribed to the very nature of our lives in those years, it all washes away. We forget, if not the actions and events and items, then what those actions and events and items really meant to us. It all changes. We become absorbed with our own lives as we get older, we become selfish and narrow-minded in our personal pursuits. We forget the promises of childhood, the loyalty and trust of being 8 or 10 years old; we lose the magic, that window of simplicity on the world, as surely as if it had been stolen some dark night from our beating hearts as we slept. But it was never stolen. Rather, we give it away. We hand it over, the fare for passage into adulthood. Take my life as I knew it before. Take the magic and wonder and wistfulness and loyalty and the giggling secrets and the undiluted, purest forms of emotion and love and spread a pall over them; beat them bloody, break them, disease them and sicken them and make them ready to face the wide, wide world of grown-ups. Innocence is a child's bauble smashed on the sidewalk. Yes, we grow up. We become too busy and distracted to remember, too enamored with personal interests to care.
The Last Rung on the Ladder is one of the most moving group of words I've ever had the fortune of reading. But the beauty is commonplace, bitterly tragic and reality-based in the most difficult sense, a thing to be carried like a heavy weight in the recesses of memory, a reminder of what has been and what may come. It pushes you face-first into a kind of deep, penetrating nostalgia, it forces upon you an acute sense of loss and sadness, a feeling of time's passing hands gone, gone, gone and never to return. It pushes you face-first into helpless, spilling tears, bright and pulsating with memory, confusion, and regret. You find recognition, transference to events in your own life and the lives of your children-both now...now when the magic is yet strong and true and unbroken, a thing so tangible I can see it floating in mid-air before my own eyes, yet not for me to grasp and understand and love, no, not anymore-and later on...later, when things change, change because they can't help but changing, because that's the nature of the world and of the people in it. The void, the hollow space where nothing grows in the heart of every adult is the place where the child has been buried. We grow up. We forget. We get lost. And we can never get it back again. I cannot bear reading this story anymore. This was it, the last time. Never again.
"We grew up. That's all I know, other than facts that don't mean anything."
The Man Who Loved Flowers
Whoa. Stephen King creates such a vivid, three-dimensional mock-up here of an idealized, 1963 twilight-descending-into-nighttime New York City that it feels as if the Constant Reader-you and me-could just step right through the pages and be there. I can see the sky darkening from blue to the calm violet of dusk, the warm glow and soft twinkling of the city lights, the people smiling at me from shop fronts, the amiable passersby on the street, the gentle ebb and flow of life. A night made for rooftop stargazing, a night for people who love the city to revel in it. If there are threats here, they are pushed well away from the forefront. I can see the young man, the young man that everyone is looking at with dreaming, nostalgic eyes aglow with pining memories. They defer. He's a man in love, and in every fissure and crack of his face and demeanor it shows. And the world moves for love, or so they believe. The man stops at a flower vendor on the street to buy flowers. A man in love, going to meet his love, surrounded in an untouchable white aura. The static voices from a radio station sizzle on the night waves, bad news that no one listens to: a situation in a small Asian country that would bear watching, an unidentified woman pulled from the East River, the Russians had exploded a nuclear device, a hammer-wielding serial killer on the loose. None of it seems real, or seems to matter. The air is sweet and clear, spring balances on the edge of summer, and in the city it's the season of dreams. The man is closing in on his love, flowers in hand, once again, for Norma, always for Norma, they're always Norma, and in the final twist here we're helpless but to marvel at the work of a master storyteller. Whoa.
One for the Road
Downright scary it what this one is, the stuff of creeping horror and the kind of rigid terror that grabs your chest and squeezes the air out of it. If Night Surf was a side-story to The Stand, then consider One for the Road a postscript to `Salem's Lot. So here we have the second short story in this compilation related to Jerusalem's Lot. This one takes place years after the final events of that novel, in a small Maine town a few miles away from what is left of the burned out Lot. Yet, for all the efforts of Ben Mears and his friends, the creatures from the Lot still do not rest easy. They still float dreamily on the cold night air in search of satiating their hungers, and the whispered local legends are awash in their tales. Once again, we find ourselves knee-deep in a howling Maine northeaster blizzard, and there we find a family stranded on an abandoned access road near Jerusalem's Lot. The man leaves his wife and daughter in the toasty confines of the running automobile and goes for help miles away, contracting a sever case of frostbite in the process. The locals, who are aware of the nature and history of the area near the Lot, are hesitant to venture near it, but in the end give in to save the man's family. Only...only when they get there, something has already happened to them, something either very good or very bad...
"You may have an occasion to be traveling in southern Maine yourself one of these days. Pretty part of the countryside. You may even stop by Tookey's Bar for a drink. Nice place. They kept the name just the same. So have your drink, and then my advice to you is keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don't go up that road to Jerusalem's Lot. Especially not after dark."
The Woman in the Room
...the embodiment of how life can be like a wheel, of how we can live to see all that was once familiar and known get turned asunder and reversed, negated by the very passing of time. Does the parent know that this will happen, that the child will one day be the one in the position of power, that the job of parenting is rented, limited, a transient state in which you do your best with what cards you've been dealt and hope to have your good will and love returned in some measure at some indefinable point in the future? As you feed and care for your helpless infant before you, a teacher, a provider, a friend, a god of every detail in their world, the sun and the moon and the earth for them, so they will be for you later on. Sometimes we reap what we sow, and sometimes the tables skew aslant and nothing is as we thought it might be. The body and mind betray us. So many years, so much water under so many bridges, and at the end we just disintegrate before our own eyes. The body fails; the mind fails. Does the emotion endure, the love and good will and the bonds that were forged early on, or do they get pushed away, crowded out by the distractions and shifting sands of time? When the body changes, begins to falter and malfunction, gears grinding and belts slipping, when we become less than the gods we once were to our infant children-children now with both feet planted firmly in the soil of adulthood-and our very existence begins to become a trial, a frustration, a burden, can we expect payment in full for all that we've done, both good and bad? Are we entitled to that, or is it a matter of our jobs being finally completed and us silently slipping away to a final goodnight? There is no dignity in aging, no rationalization that makes the slippage bearable. We're here today, gone tomorrow; the parts of our lives with our children are even shorter. They grow up, and we grow old. Time isn't kind to either of us.
The woman is in the room. And oh, I don't want to go in there. But I will. It's my job, and I must see to it. Just as it will someday be my children's job to see to me. Life, life moving like a wheel. Enjoy it if you can while it's here. It doesn't stay long.
King at his best
Stephen King is an undeniably talented writer. He has written several books that really and truly scared me. But of the many works of fiction he has published, I find that the most effective are the shorter ones: CARRIE, SALEM'S LOT, CUJO, the Bachman books. Even some of his misfires (CHRISTINE, GERALD'S GAME) still make for some compelling reading. But the novels I am less impressed with -- THE STAND, IT, THE TOMMMYKNOCKERS -- take too long to tell what are essentially simple stories. I feel that the more time King spends on a story, the less effective it is. That's why I think I like NIGHT SHIFT so much. Sure, there are a few clunkers here: "The Mangler" is a less-than-thrilling thriller about a killer shirt-pressing machine (!), in "Battleground" killer toys come after a poor sap wanted by the Mafia, and "I Know What You Need" is predictable and silly. But never mind... there's alot of great stuff here: if you only know "Sometimes They Come Back" and "Children of the Corn" from their incredibly lame film counterparts, now's your chance to revisit them in their fullest (and most effective) forms; "Jerusalem's Lot" and "One for the Road" revisit SALEM'S LOT to wonderfully creepy effect; "Night Surf", "I am the Doorway", "Quitters Inc.", and "The Lawnmower Man" supply a generous portion of gleefully grotesque weirdness; "The Ledge", "The Last Rung on the Ladder", and especially "The Woman in the Room" all represent a change of pace, though no less disturbing than the more overtly horrific tales on display here; "Gray Matter" and "Trucks" are solid horror tales; "Graveyard Shift" will test your gag threshold (at one point I had to stop reading it to keep from tossing my cookies -- and THAT'S hard to do to me!); and "The Man Who Loved Flowers" is a swift little shocker reminiscent of the writings of Robert Bloch. But the best story here -- a crowning achievement for King, if you ask me -- is "The Boogeyman". This is the single most terrifying Stephen King tale I think I've ever read. In fact, I've read it several times, and it still scares me every time. This story alone makes the book worth buying. Most of these stories come from the earliest part of King's career, back before he was apparently paid letter by letter. I enjoy the stories in this book immensely (even the mediocre ones), and I hope if you haven't read it that my review has painted a clear and accurate picture of what you're in for. Thanks.
King's first collection of masterful short stories
One thing that has always distinguished Stephen King among his peers is his commitment to the short story. You don't find many novelists writing short stories these days, but King has always excelled in the area of short fiction, and I daresay the discipline involved in telling a story in a relatively small number of pages has helped make him such a successful writer of long fiction. Night Shift, which was first published in 1976, is the first of King's short story collections, bringing together twenty stories originally published in such disparate magazines as Cavalier, Penthouse, and Cosmopolitan (yes, Cosmopolitan) in the early to mid 1970s. These stories have given birth to a surprising number of film adaptations, but I would urge you not to judge these stories in advance by the quality of films such as Children of the Corn, The Mangler, Sometimes They Come Back, and The Lawnmower Man (especially The Lawnmower Man, as the film has nothing whatsoever to do with King's story).
There is a lot of variety to be found in this collection, as King delivers much more than a sequence of horror stories. The horror is there in droves, of course, but so are stories of a general bent that show just how effective a writer King is when he wanders away from the dark forces usually driving his imagination. The Woman in the Room, for example, is a rather tender story of a son struggling with his mother's impending death, while I Know What You Need and The Man Who Loved Flowers display romantic sensibilities of a truly engaging nature.
The book opens with Jerusalem's Lot, a thoroughly Lovecraftian exploration of the early history of this infamous little hamlet; told in the form of letters and steeped in Mythos lore, it is the type of tale that could have been written by a member of the original Lovecraft Circle. One For the Road also centers on Jerusalem's Lot; it's unusual to set a vampire story against the backdrop of a severe New England blizzard, but this proves to be one of the most effective stories in this collection. Rats, traditional horror favorites, play a part in a couple of stories, particularly Graveyard Shift with its rat-infested subterranean levels containing monstrosities that can no longer be considered mere rats.
The Ledge is, to me, the most uncomfortably effective story in the collection, mainly because it ruthlessly exploits my own fear of heights. Quitters, Inc., though, stands head and shoulders above the other nineteen stories; brilliant in its conception and development, it details a brutally surefire way to quit smoking. Children of the Corn is also a masterful tale; the film adaptation elaborately expounds upon the idea, but the core of the story and the mysterious horror of He Who Walks Behind the Rows is given a glorious birth in these pages. Sometimes They Come Back gave birth to two less than exhilarating films, but the original story is vintage Stephen King, with three dead youths returning to high school to finish the deadly job they started years ago. Then there is The Boogeyman which builds upon the palpitating fear that has touched every child scared of the dark; I can picture King grinning wickedly as he was writing the twisted final lines of this tale.
Battleground holds special meaning for me as this was the first Stephen King story I ever read - believe it or not, we actually read this in my advanced English class in seventh grade. Some regard it as a weak contribution to Night Shift, but the story is a lot of fun despite its rather unbelievable nature. The Lawnmower Man is more than weird enough to be memorable. Some people also don't care for The Last Rung on the Ladder, but I think it is a wonderful little story; the human element takes precedence over any overt horror, and some people prefer their monsters to be external to themselves. The Man Who Loved Flowers is masterfully done, an idyllic look at a young man in love that takes a deliciously insidious turn at the end. I Know What You Need is similarly executed; this account of a young lady who finds true love (or so she thinks) in the most unlikely of potential mates calls to mind the psychological mastery of Shirley Jackson.
There are no bad stories in this collection, but a few don't live up to the standards of the rest. Strawberry Spring is a little disappointing, as this story of a serial killer who comes in with the fog of unusual New England weather is quite predictable. I Am the Doorway, with its touch of alien horror, isn't as good as I think it might have been, Gray Matter is the equivalent of Creepshow's The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill, The Mangler offers nothing special, Night Surf is a pale shadow of its cousin The Stand, and Trucks runs out of gas rather quickly.
All in all, Night Shift delivers a shockingly good collection of short stories from the hand of a masterful story teller plumbing the depths of his horror-laden imagination while at the same time tapping into his immense knowledge of human nature and popular culture to produce tales of fiction that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
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DVD's
Night Shift (1978) 
