Lauren RabainoWith Halloween just around the corner, what better time could there be to curl up in the deep hours of the night and read some spooky short stories? Of course, there’s many a fine novel available in the horror genre, but being the busy college student you are, why not treat yourself to some quick doses of darkness that will likely leave you with a chill no matter how brightly the sun shines over San Luis Obispo.
And who better to turn to for a reliable fix of fright than Stephen King? I know, I know: How unoriginal can you get in recommending a horror author? Fair enough.
It’s worth remembering, however, long before a seemingly endless supply of King novels cluttered bookstore shelves, before a plethora of movie and television adaptations of his work, and before a biweekly “Entertainment Weekly” column in which he muses in a self-consciously “folksy” voice about whatever seems to be floating through his head, King wrote some of the most urgent, engaging and potent horror fiction ever. Yes, ever.
After achieving mainstream success with such novels as “The Shining” and “The Stand,” King published “Night Shift,” his first (and, in many respects, best) short story collection. Most of the stories were written when King was a struggling high school English teacher who lived in a trailer and worked part-time at a laundromat to make ends meet. Those tough circumstances seem to have helped infuse the stories with a tension and dread that still pack a punch more than three decades later. King opens the collection’s forward by directly addressing the reader with, “Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear,” and, as the 20 stories which follow make quite clear, he’s well suited to talk about the topic.
As with many collections, some stories hit the mark more than others. The real standouts here are “Strawberry Spring,” “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” “Children of the Corn,” “The Ledge,” “Quitters, Inc.,” a macabre tale about trying to overcome a nicotine addiction, and “The Boogeyman,” in which a grieving father seeks help from a psychiatrist who may or may not have the father’s best interests at heart. Written with skill, economy and the occasional touch of pitch-black humor, these stories invite comparison with the best works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Like any gifted storyteller, King is a bit of a magician, and like any magician, he has a few tricks up his sleeve, one of which is a story without a drop of the supernatural or even the scary, yet manages to break your heart with its evocative rendering of a relationship in which one partner drifted from the other, unaware of how much the person left behind still needed. In this story, the hidden strength of many of the other stories rises to the surface: What makes King such a successful storyteller is not so much his understanding of horror as his understanding of humanity.
Quentin Dunne is a psychology graduate student and Mustang Daily book reviewer.