BOOK REVIEW
It’s a Trifecta.
If a reader is a Stephen King fan; if a reader loves short stories, and — if a reader has a weakness for “Film Noir,” this newest collection of twelve short stories should be their next read.
King fans will recognize his style; no one else, even on the best seller lists, handles the language as well as this author.
“His face was as white as fresh snow, as Mody-Dick’s underbelly, as amnesia.”
from “Two Talented BASTIDS”
Sometimes, Stephen King is scary, as in The Shining, and sometimes, Stephen King is dark, as in Pet Cemetery.
Then along comes his 2024 You Like It Darker with both terror and the macabre in story after story. Using a variety of settings, narrators, conflicts, and personalities, King artfully controls his readers’ attention.
The definition of “short story” reads: a fictional narrative, featuring one main character (protagonist) with one main problem (conflict), that can be read in one sitting.
Eight of these stories are short, most 10 pages. Two are more novellas than short stories; however, those two are sooo captivating, that one sitting is a must.
The first story, “The Bastids,” uses a frame story as its construction – a story within another story, as a son researches his father’s bizarre professional path, which catapults from mediocre to insanely successful.
Using a twisted relationship between two friends, this first-person narrative is the third longest of YLID’s stories.
Obviously set in the 50s, with its mention of “Butch Wax” in a “lakeside forest known as 30 Mile Wood,” two young boys enter the woods and emerge not as the good artist and writer that they would have become otherwise, but as geniuses in their crafts.
Believable? Kings leads the reader down that road with Jack, who enjoys an uber profitable career writing “Metafiction,” and Butch, whose art finds phenomenal success, all because of an encounter one eerily silent night in those woods when they a rescue a woman’s body, which felt like “Play-Doh,” off of a nearby bridge.
Cue EpiPen, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and meeting “another” creature from “another world.”
Then visualize intrigue in an abandoned cabin in the 30 Mile Wood, a forgotten folder, and fortunes changed.
The son is left to wonder – as is the reader – did that really happen?
Story No. 4, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” and No. 10, “Rattlesnakes,” both definitely novellas, deserve reviews of their own, but No. 4 is quintessentially Stephen King!
Danny’s “bad” (putting it mildly) dream conjures up a typical King scenario; this one in an abandoned “HILLTOP TEXACO” on “COUNTY ROAD F,” featuring a mongrel dog (Cujo?) scratching at a human arm, sporting a charm bracelet (a great King motif at work), rising up from the dirt behind the gas station.
Yes, he screams, wakes himself up, and the story is off.
As a school custodian, Danny has access to the library’s computers, so he is able to find that County Road F exists near Gunnel, Kansas, and even has a “Closed” Hilltop Texaco.
As King often does, he writes-in a couple of minor characters who eventually become an essential part of the plot, in this case, a pair of teen summer helpers at the school: Pat, surly and turgid, and Jesse, enterprising and helpful.
Without giving the storyline away, of course, Danny has to go to Kansas to see if his dream exists. Of course, it does.
Danny, being Danny, has to do something about the arm sticking up out of the dirt.
Of course, he wants to keep himself anonymous. Of course, he botches it. Of course, another character enters the story — a police detective obsessed with “arithomania.”
And, yes — of course — Danny finds a lawyer.
Themes: “Belief is hard,” and dreams are real!
Though dubbed “The King of Horror,” most famous for his novels, King has written more than 200 short stories, mostly in collections, such as You Like It Darker.
His first two novels, Carrie (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1975), set this Maine native on his wildly prolific career.
The Shining (1977) and The Stand (1978) rooted him as a “serious” author; since those first two books, he has penned 63 other novels and 5 non-fiction works.
The screen adaption of Misery, King’s book published in 1987, won Kathy Bates, playing Annie Wilkes, an Academy Award.
He has co-written with other authors, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, collaborated with numerous renowned film makers, and survived being hit by a van while on a walk near his home.
He often sets his works in Maine, frequently in the fictional town of “Castle Rock,” and takes advantage of other bizarre settings to compound his tones of macabre and ghastly atmospheres.
His latest book, Never Flinch, features recurring character, Holly Gibney, whom he first introduced in Mr. Mercedes.
— Kay Bradshaw Holland is a retired English teacher and writes book reviews for the Concho Observer.
