Here's a lengthy collection of Stephen King short stories I've been working my way through for a few months- let's take a look at them on an individual level with a 1-10 relative scale- 10 being the best of the stories, 1 being the worst.
Dolan's Cadillac- 10. That's right, the first story in the whole thing may have been the peak. There's not really any supernatural forces at work here- just a simple man waiting for years to get his overly complicated and incredibly grim revenge on his wife's killer while possibly going insane. I loved it.
The End of the Whole Mess- 8. Things continue with a strong story about an attempt to save the world which of course causes its destruction. There are subtle hints at an unreliable narrator throughout with a great payoff.
Suffer the Little Children- 6. Nothing too special here- a schoolteacher's students may be demons. Good enough.
The Night Flier- 5. This story of a tabloid reporter finally finding out a monster actually exists was slow and boring until the excellent final scene.
Popsy- 7. This was appropriate right after The Night Flier as they could possibly be connected. A man in a great deal of debt to a drug lord has worked out a deal where he can work it off by abducting children; unfortunately his current mark seems to be good friends with a monster who may have been "The Night Flier".
It Grows on You- 2. I read King's novella The Sun Dog, a prologue to the novel Needful Things and found it to be pretty slow. The epilogue, It Grows on You, was much worse. This does not have me excited to eventually read Needful Things.
Chattery Teeth- 4. I have no problem with a story about an inanimate object seemingly working on its own in some frightening way, but this story about chattery teeth (the wind-up gag ones with little walking shoes?) saving a man's life was too ridiculous for the series tone King employed here.
Dedication- 3. This finishes up a string of poor stories- something about a maid in a hotel using voodoo to give her son musical talent? I dunno, I checked out on this one pretty quickly.
The Moving Finger- 10. Much better. The question of what's lurking down your drain got a great answer in It, but an even better one here. This is classic King nightmare-fuel.
Sneakers- 7. Continuing with horror in the bathroom, this one's about seeing a pair of legs and shoes in the stall next to you at the restroom at work... and then seeing them there again and again day after day. This started creepy but ended kinda lame.
You Know They Got a Hell of a Band- 4. I can usually handle King's baby boomer nostalgia trips- I loved 11/22/63, but this one wasn't great. What if your waitress was Janis Joplin's ghost? OOOoooOOOooohhhh...
Home Delivery- 7. A novel twist on the zombie genre- what happens on a remote island with few corpses and fewer living inhabitants during the zombie apocalypse? The survivors actually have a chance given that the living dead aren't seemingly infinite in numbers. Maybe this is well-worn territory though, I think others on the Blog have more zombie knowledge than me.
Rainy Season- 6. A little bit Biblical, a little bit The Lottery. One of the times where King could have eased off of the supernatural and let reality be horrifying on its own.
My Pretty Pony- 1. No idea what King was going for here, and this story about a family and their pony just dragged on and on...
Sorry, Right Number- 6. Written as a screen-play, this one looked into who is on the other line of wrong number calls. A bit of a predictable ending, but this was fine.
The Ten O'Clock People- 7. This is apparently being made into a movie set for release next year; it concerns a chemical imbalance among people who are quitting smoking that allows them to see the true form of monsters living among us. It was nice and tense and took place in Boston, so that's fun. Apparently They Live starring Roddy Piper was written around the same time so the two stories often get accused of being rip-offs of eachother.
Crouch End- 9. King takes London! No seriously this was great- an American couple gets lost in a suburb of London and stumbles into a Lovecraftian nightmare. Awesome!
The House on Maple Street- 8. This felt like King was trying to write a children's story- a group of brothers and sisters work together to get rid of their mean step-father in a very surreal way. Not really going for scares, but this was fun.
The Fifth Quarter- 8. Four guys manage to steal and hide a fortune and agree to wait for the heat to die down before retrieving it, but of course they start turning on each other quickly. Who wins out?
The Doctor's Case- 7. King tries his hand at a Sherlock Holmes short story, and although it was written well I found the key to solving the case a bit too unbelievable.
Umney's Last Case- 6. This was a decent read and all, but the story of a character who starts to realize he's in a book is something I've seen before plenty of times and this didn't add much to the idea.
Head Down- 2. Technically this was an essay; King goes into the minute details of his son's little league baseball season. I suppose it's a bit noteworthy because his coach was named the national amateur coach of the year, but other than that I didn't see any point in revisiting this season, especially in such excrutating detail, often including pitch-by-pitch recaps.
Brooklyn August- No Score. Appropriate right after Head Down, this was a short poem about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. It seemed fine enough but no way am I going to give it a ranking compared to the actual stories.
The Beggar and the Diamond- No Score. This... didn't exist in my copy. Normally I'd blame the online download, where even paid-for books have had low levels of care put into them, but we stopped at Brooklyn August and went straight into the afterword.
So yeah, all in all, pretty good. I think if King had cut out the stories I gave a four or less, and then left in You Know They Got a Hell of a Band which a lot of people did seem to like, this would be much better remembered. Instead Nightmares & Dreamscapes has a reputation as one of his lesser short story collections. We've got many more coming, but not any time soon. I do highly recommend Dolan's Cadillac and The Moving Finger at the very least.
More and more I'm finding that short story collections are rough for logging. A full-length novel, good or bad, makes you want to keep going, either because you're genuinely intrigued or because you just want it to end so you can move on. Short stories aren't really designed to be read in tandem, one after another, so you almost feel forced to take breaks between them; if you don't, it's very easy to forget some of them entirely. On the other hand, as soon as you're ~1/3 through a short story without it grabbing your interest yet, it's so damn easy to just bail and skim through in order to get to the next one. So in my experience you end up forgetting some of the good ones and just plain giving up on a lot of the lesser ones. And these collections always seem to take weeks or even months to finish! Plus Wikipedia tells me this collection in particular was 900 pages long, which, gosh, yikes. Good on you.
ReplyDeleteYeah I mostly split this up into two chunks- I remember getting to and reading Sneakers (about halfway through the collection) on the beach several months ago. I just needed to put the whole thing down for a while and ended up reading A Dance With Dragons, so that took up a lot of time. Also it turns out The Beggar and the Diamond is in here, just after the afterword, so I'll see how that one is tonight.
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