Skeleton Crew

I've read hundreds and hundreds of books in my life, but not a single one of them was written by Stephen King, easily one of the most popular and successful authors of all time. Until now. With so many other blog members posting about Stephen King left and right, I knew I had to jump in somewhere. But where? King's bibliography is massive and his body of work is diverse enough for portions of it, I'm sure, to appeal to just about anyone. Would I enter on the ground floor and tackle some of his earliest and most popular stories? Would I begin with something contemporary like Under the Dome? O how about that Dark Tower series that so many people seem to love, arguably his magnum opus? Hell, why not start with something that had already been turned into a movie I'd seen, like The Shining? Ultimately, I settled on Skeleton Crew, a 1985 collection of a novella and several short stories published in magazines and horror story anthologies between 1968 and 1985. It was a varied set of stuff, to say the least, spanning the genre gambit from speculative science fiction to gruesome horror to quirky tales about supernatural phenomena. The stories inside were as brief as four or five pages and as long as fifty. The novella, The Mist - now a feature film! - was 150 pages itself. All told, there were 22 separate works in here spanning 565 pages, and I've had more than an appropriate introduction to King's many different styles, quirks, and capabilities. I can't possibly talk about each and every story in here, so I'll just focus on The Mist and a few other highlights.

The Mist

This wasn't just the longest Stephen King piece I read; it was also the first. It begins with a severe storm that knocks out the power and several trees in a rustic little Maine town and it ends with a monster-plagued apocalypse throughout New England (at least). The bulk of the tale is told from inside a grocery store where several townspeople have barricaded themselves indoors to escape from giant spiders and carnivorous tentacles. The whole thing felt a tiny bit cheesy and B-movie-ish, but King acknowledged in a notes section of the book that he had intended for it to feel that way, as if you were watching the events of the book unfold at a drive-in theater. What impressed me here was King's ability to start with a totally normal situation - a big storm knocks the power out - and have his characters react in totally relatable and normal ways, only to escalate the situation (rather quickly) into a horrible spectacle of gruesome monster attacks. The end felt like a bit of an open-ended cop-out - a trick King would pull multiple times over the course of this collection - but, again, at least he acknowledged that his ending wasn't really an ending at all. This served as a great introduction to Stephen King and his storytelling capabilities and left me looking forward to seeing what he could do in a full-length novel. This was shameless schlocky horror at its best.

The Rest

Honestly, what followed was a mixed bag. Very few stories, if any, could be called "bad" or "boring," but I'm struggling to single out more than a few as being truly memorable in any way. No discussion of Skeleton Crew would be complete without mentioning "Survivor Type," a gruesome story about an experienced surgeon who survives a shipwreck with no food and a bag full of heroin. After messing up his ankle, the narrator and sole character decides to amputate his foot, using heroin (for the first time) to numb the pain. And since he has nothing else to eat... Yeah. Suffice it to say, the story plays itself out to its natural conclusion. My favorite story in the bunch - and I can't really say why - was "The Raft," another short horror story. In that one, four college friends decide to drive up to a remote lake after class one weekday for just one last swim in the lake before the autumn chill sets in. They swim out to a raft in the center of the lake and, well, not all of them make it back to the shore. There were all sorts of well-developed examples of friendship and jealousy and lust all over this one, and there was also an extraordinary amount of brutal gory detail. I was a huge fan. What else can I talk about? The story that lends itself to the original book cover image, "The Monkey," was pretty bland and disappointing; in that one, one of those grinning toy monkeys with cymbals wreaks psychological horror on a man. "The Jaunt" and "Beachworld" were futuristic sci-fi tales I enjoyed. "Cain Rose Up" was a disturbing quick story about a twisted college kid who goes on a shooting spree with a sniper rifle. I read it before the Sandy Hook tragedy occurred, and even still, it just sat with me the wrong way. I could go on and on. Again, none of these stories were particularly notable but very few were awful. Some were rather lazy and some were undercooked. One or two were even an excerpt from a planned novel about a serial killer milkman that just never panned out, I guess. Oh, and the book' final story - "The Reach" - was a nice little tale about an old woman dying and reuniting with old loved ones.

In the end, this book was all over the place, and it felt long even for a 565-page collection. I enjoyed my time here, but I'm glad it's over all the same. No longer a Stephen King virgin, I look forward to the many possibilities ahead.