![]() The final story, “The Woman in the Room,” is a heartbreaking piece about a man’s decision to euthanize his terminally ill mother. “I Know What You Need” and “The Man Who Loved Flowers” both begin with romance tropes before subverting our desires for the characters. The nostalgic “Strawberry Spring” takes on a darker turn as the Twilighty Zone vibe grows. Yet where we really see the range of King’s writing is in the stories that teach us to expect the unexpected. The short story Children of the Corn has somehow spawned ten films…and counting! “The Lawnmower Man” similarly got a film adaptation but is completely different from the virtual-reality focused film that was released in the 1990s. Although how it spawned 10 TV and film adaptations and sequels is beyond me. ![]() “Children of the Corn” feels the most complete, filled as it is with a slow-building tension that could have sustained an entire novel. As the fuel hungry trucks make the humans choose between survival and enslavement, I imagine this is exactly what the origin story of Disney-Pixar’s Cars looks like. Holed up in a service station, a small group of survivors contemplate what to do next, and it’s vaguely reminiscent of the format that King would use a few years later in “ The Mist” short story and, of course, Christine (1983). Similarly, “Trucks” is about killer…well….trucks. “The Mangler” sees a laundry machine turn horribly evil and become possessed by a demon. Some of the stronger stories are where King sticks to some basic horror tropes. Most of these attitudes come from the internal monologues of less than honourable characters, such as the ambiguously motivated character in “The Boogeyman” who can’t fathom waking up and finding out that his son is “a sissy,” for example. On that note, it’s hard to ignore the casual homophobia, sexism, and racial attitudes that were very much ‘of the time.’ It would be a stretch to call out King for being prejudiced in any way, but those elements are so common in this era of King that it does make reading them in the context of 2018 difficult. It’s unfortunate that both stories have an unhealthy fascination with torturing or baiting the protagonists’ wives in order to achieve their aim. “Quitters Inc” and “The Ledge,” for example, both formed part of Cat’s Eye (1985), and are both gripping in their moment to moment horror. In fact, a number of the stories here were adapted to the screen. Singleton could turn this into a schlock horror film in 1990. “Graveyard Shift” takes the rats in the wall of “Jerusalem’s Lot” more literally, and its easy to see why Ralph S. King would return to some of that world years later in Wolves of the Calla (2003), the fifth Dark Tower book. Like the narrator, you may be left with lingering memories of this tale for many years to come. As the penultimate story in this collection, it’s bloodcurdling because of what we don’t see and hear. King’s fascination with the world continues in “One for the Road,” a shockingly modern indirect sequel to ’Salem’s Lot. Even if you’ve not read King’s 1975 novel (and you should: it’s brilliant), the slow building tension draws you into historic Maine, and leaves us with a winkingly clever final beat that sets up the bigger story. The Lovecraftian “Jerusalem’s Lot” opens the book, an epistolary approach in which the reader and writer come to a dawning horror about what actually lives in ’Salem’s Lot. ![]() So the stories here – covering a publication period of 1968 to 1977 – show us exactly how King got to that point, and where he would be going next. After all, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand are a fairly impressive opening salvo for any author. This collection of short stories came out at a time when Stephen King was making a mark and had clearly defined where he was going as a writer. Welcome to the feature column that explores a decent number of Stephen King’s books in the order they were published!
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