Two years ago, I spent the month of October reading Stephen King short stories and writing up my reactions. It was a greatly rewarding experience for me, so I’m going to try it again: throughout the month of October, I’ll be reading one Stephen King short story each day (more or less), and recording my thoughts here.

As time allows, I may poke my head into some of King’s shorter novellas and side projects as well. But for the most part, I’ll be choosing stories from the following King collections:

• Night Shift
• Skeleton Crew
• Nightmares and Dreamscapes
• Everything’s Eventual
• Just After Sunset

If you’ve got ready access to these books, I would love it if you read along with me. First up is “Dolan’s Cadillac” from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

For the record, here’s what I covered in my first Stephen King short story project:

1. You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
2. Jerusalem’s Lot
3. Fair Extension
4. Word Processor of the Gods
5. The Moving Finger
6. The Raft
7. Trucks
8. The Road Virus Heads North
9. The Doctor’s Case
10. The Man in the Black Suit
11. Strawberry Spring
12. Sorry, Right Number
13. The Monkey
14. The Lawnmower Man
15. That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French
16. Beachworld
17. The End of the Whole Mess
18. Sometimes They Come Back
19. Survivor Type
20. Popsy
21. Rainy Season
22. In the Deathroom
23. Children of the Corn
24. Crouch End
25. Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
26. Graveyard Shift
27. I Am the Doorway
28. The Fifth Quarter

I’ll be picking up where that list left off. Here’s my progress so far in round 2:

1. Dolan’s Cadillac
2. All That You Love Will Be Carried Away
3. The Reaper’s Image
4. N.
5. Dedication
6. The Cat From Hell
7. Lunch at the Gotham Café
8. The Long Walk
9. The Night Flier
10. Umney’s Last Case
11. One For the Road
12. The Langoliers
13. Battleground
14. Night Surf
15. Mile 81

And beyond that, there are a few more:

1. The Dune
2. Gramma
3. L.T.’s Theory of Pets
4. Bad Little Kid
5. A Death

I hope to hear from you in the comments as I read! Let’s get started, Dear Reader!

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The story: “The Fifth Quarter,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1979. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: A crook named Jerry Tarkanian sets out to avenge the death of a friend (and crook) who was double-crossed after a lucrative heist. And while he’s exacting his revenge, if he happens to come into possession of the four pieces of a map to the villains’ buried treasure, well…

My thoughts: It’s occurred to me more than once this month, as I’ve made my way through King’s short stories, that King’s writing strength is in suspense as much as horror. There are certainly exceptions, and obviously the two genres have a lot in common—a good horror story usually involves a lot of suspense. But I’d venture to say that King is at least as good at writing non-supernatural suspense as he is at writing scenes of supernatural terror. In non-supernatural stories like “In the Deathroom,” “Survivor Type,” and this one, he ratchets up the tension quite effectively without calling in the ghosts and goblins.

That’s one reason I’m glad my short story project is ending on this, a straight-up crime story. King seems to loves pulpy crime stories (in fact, he just published one, and his earlier novel The Dark Half sees him exploring this interest), and that’s what “The Fifth Quarter” is.

My own knowledge of the noir and crime genres is almost non-existent, so I can’t compare this to other examples of the form. The plot includes the expected elements of mistrust, backstabbing, and overly-complex criminal plans, all of which are neatly resolved in a few scenes of deadly violence. The backstory feels like a cross between The Usual Suspects and Treasure Island: four crooks carry out a heist, but to avoid drawing the attention of the law, they agree to hide away the ill-gotten gains for a number of years. They arrange for a map of the cache’s location to be drawn up—and then split into four “quarters” that must be combined in order to learn the precise location of the loot. Each of the four crooks takes a piece of the map and they go their separate ways, promising to meet up again after the heat of police attention has passed.

As you might expect, some of the conspirators decide they don’t want to share the wealth, and one of them (possibly with the help of others) kills off a member of the group and takes his part of the map. Unfortunately, the betrayed man was friends with the protagonist Tarkanian, a scoundrel with a certain sense of honor. (It’s funny how much slack we’re willing to cut fictional criminals who follow a code of honor.) Tarkanian is a fun protagonist—we don’t have a lot of sympathy for him, but he’s smart and sneaky… and we do want him to get the bastards who killed his pal. Tarkanian tracks down the three surviving conspirators to find out which of them killed his friend, and do the eye-for-an-eye thing.

The heart of the story is in Tarkanian’s confrontation with the first two conspirators. Holding them at gunpoint, he must match wits and glean information from a pair of thugs who will kill him if he makes even the slightest misstep. His “investigation” then takes him to the home of another conspirator; things go bad quickly and Tarkanian finds himself in a tense shootout. He survives and winds up with three parts of the map—enough, he thinks, to point him in the right direction.

I enjoyed this story. For one thing, after several weeks of different horror subgenres, it was nice to get lost briefly in a world of fast-talking scoundrels and gangsters with codes of honor. The scenes in which Tarkanian is bantering with his enemies are almost nerve-wracking at points. That all said, I didn’t love “The Fifth Quarter”—once Tarkanian’s quest is complete, there isn’t a lot to like (or even know) about him, and at the end of the day this is just a story about criminals backstabbing each other. It’s a nice diversion, and King can write a great suspense scene. But there’s nothing here I’ll remember fondly a year from now.

That’s it! And with this, we wrap up our month of Stephen King short stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and even more, I hope you’ve taken the time to check out at least a couple of these tales. It’s been a huge amount of fun for me. Thanks for reading along!

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The story: “Graveyard Shift,” collected in Night Shift. First published in 1970. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: Workers at an old, run-down textile mill are tasked with cleaning out the mill’s long-unused basement level. To their disgust, it’s crawling with huge rats. In the course of their job, they discover an entrance to a sealed sub-basement. They descend to investigate, and stumble across a hideous ecosystem of giant, mutated rats and other vermin. It doesn’t end well.

My thoughts: An empire of rats living undiscovered beneath our feet. What’s more repulsive than that? “Graveyard Shift” is primarily an exercise in exploiting our general disgust with rats, bats, and other vermin, and to a lesser extent our mingled fascination and discomfort with the idea of “lost ecosystems.”

The classic “lost kingdom” inhabited by holdovers from a past age (often dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts) is fun but not especially horrifying. Creepier is the idea that deep (or worse, not so deep) beneath the Earth’s surface are inhuman beings darkly mirroring human society above (morlocks). But perhaps even worse than the latter idea is the special twist provided by Charles Darwin’s insights into evolution: the thought that the dark and harsh conditions underground might be breeding survivors—creatures much better at surviving than comparatively pampered surface-dwellers. And what type of creature would we least like to see enhanced in this way? Yeah. Stephen King thinks so too. That’s the fear that King taps into with “Graveyard Shift,” where we’re asked to imagine an ecosystem of vermin that have for years (centuries?) been evolving and mutating into monstrosities that aren’t quite so intimidated by humans.

The protagonist here is a drifter named Hall, who for the first half of the story is a reasonably relate-able character, but who slips into a strange obsession in the story’s final pages. The central tension of the story is not actually related to the rat empire; it’s the conflict between Hall and Warwick, a cruel mill foreman who’s ordered his cleanup crew into the clearly unsafe basement level. Warwick shows little sympathy for (and often mocks) men who are bitten by rats or who show signs of breaking down. When, after several days of this abuse, Hall discovers an entrance to a long-forgotten sub-basement, he and Warwick descend to investigate, neither of them willing to “chicken out” in front of the other.

It’s here that Hall’s madness begins to manifest; he has an inkling of what lies in store, but pushes on anyway so as not to lose face in front of Warwick… and when they stumble across a cow-sized rat queen attended by countless thousands of giant rats, Hall (possibly driven insane by what they’ve discovered) actually shoves Warwick into the “royal chamber” and to his death. By that point, though, it’s obvious they’re both doomed; Hall is swarmed (laughing hysterically) before he can make it back to the stairs and safety. The story ends as the rest of the cleanup crew descend into the sub-basement to find out what happened to Hall and Warwick; we’re left to imagine what will happen next.

We don’t learn much about the rat-world beyond this, although King seeds “Graveyard Shift” with some tantalizing hints at the backstory. The door into the sub-basement is actually sealed from below, and Hall and Warwick come across a human skeleton in the sub-basement—what would have led somebody to seal themselves down there with the rats? They also come across objects in the sub-basement dating into the early 1800s, and before they die they realize that the underground chambers extend far beyond the mill property.

Little details like this, and the time King spends developing the animosity between Hall and Warwick, make this story more effective than it would otherwise have been. But really, this story is mostly about the gross-out. Disgust with rats seems to be a nearly universal human characteristic, so it’s unlikely many readers won’t be at least a little creeped out by this story. That said, I’ll confess that I don’t find rats to be inherently upsetting (spiders, on the other hand…), so this story didn’t hit a nerve in me the way it might for others. It comes down to this: do rats freak you out? Then, Dear Reader, this story was written for you with love. If not… well, let’s be honest. It’s still pretty gross.

Next up: “I Am the Doorway,” also from Night Shift.

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The story: “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” collected in Skeleton Crew. First published in 1984. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An old man recounts the story of a woman who disappeared years ago from their rural Maine town: Ophelia Todd, who was obsessed with finding shortcuts whenever she had to drive somewhere. Her shortcuts went from impressive to slightly frightening, as she started covering distances faster than physics should allow. When she vanishes, it’s suggested that she has found her way to an otherworldly realm through which her shortcuts have been taking her.

My thoughts: “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” isn’t a horror story—it’s a “let me tell you about something weird I once saw” campfire tale, told in the form of an old man’s reminiscences. There’s no gore or violence to be found, and it has a happy ending—it’s almost sweet. It’s wistful and maybe a little melancholy, but in a pleasant way.

Of the stories I’ve read so far this month, “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” is probably most similar to “The Man in the Black Suit,” although the latter has a horror element whereas this story feels more like a milder episodes of The Twilight Zone. It’s narrated as a mostly one-way conversation between two elderly rural Maine geezers. Homer, one of the men, shares the story of his peculiar encounter with the titular Mrs. Todd many years earlier, shortly before she vanished without a trace.

King has an obvious fondness for (and almost certainly firsthand experience with) the mannerisms of Maine’s rural residents, and it took me a few pages to get used to the slow, rambling pace of this story—which follows Homer’s somewhat scattered train of thought. I sometimes find the heavy use of regional accents and speech mannerisms in fiction irritating, but any annoyance with all the rural slang faded quickly and I found myself settling for the story by the time Homer’s tale begins in earnest.

Let’s take a step back for a moment to consider Stephen King’s storytelling. I’ve often wondered what it is about King’s writing style that is so undeniably appealing. After all, King’s prose is often overly verbose and lacking in literary grace. What King does do, however, is make you feel like he’s sitting right there with you telling you, personally, a story—between his obvious enthusiasm for his own stories and his lack of pretension in telling them, King really earns the title “storyteller.” In a story like “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” he’s amping the let-me-tell-you-a-yarn vibe up to the maximum, and because he’s so darn earnest about it, and because his stories are frankly just interesting, it works really well. (It also fosters a real sense that you, the reader, know Stephen King on some vague but slightly personal level. Read a half-dozen King books, and you’ll comfortably identify yourself as one of the “Dear Readers” he often addresses in introductions or afterwords.)

“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” is a good story, and it’s one you could probably actually tell around a campfire, if people do that kind of thing anymore. In it, Homer describes how Mrs. Todd would confide in him about her progress in finding shortcuts through their corner of Maine. He listens with skeptical interest to her stories of shortcuts that shave off 15 minutes… 30 minutes… and even more time off of her trips. She might even be growing younger with each shortcut she takes. Homer becomes infatuated with Mrs. Todd, and comes to understand that she might be too graceful, beautiful, and wild for this world.

At the peak of his infatuation with her, he accepts an invitation to ride along with her on one of her shortcuts, and is alarmed to find that her shortcut takes them through some very uncharted areas—outside the car window, he spots a strange, primeval wilderness with weird, dangerous-looking flora and fauna. He’s too scared to accompany her on further shortcuts, but she keeps finding them. She vanishes shortly after finding her fastest shortcut yet, and it’s implied that she’s found her true home in the wild roads of some otherworldly realm. In the story’s closing scene—I got a little teared up, I’m such a wimp—an impossibly young, beautiful Ophelia Todd returns one night decades later to pick up 70-year-old Homer and drive him off into the sunset.

“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” has more in common with a fairy tale than with the horror or suspense genres. It’s the story of somebody who must find their way to their “true home” in the underworld/fairy-world/heavens/etc. (For a moving example of this in modern pop culture, think of Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth.) The closer Mrs. Todd gets to her apotheosis, the more young, vibrant, and even godlike she appears to Homer. (She’s compared to the goddess Diana at several points.) Her vanishing is a homecoming, and when she comes back for faithful old Homer, she’s taking him to the wild kingdom she now rules, across the borders of death and reality.

Random note: there’s a brief reference to King’s novel Cujo near the beginning of “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut.” King likes to plant little references like this throughout his books and stories.

Next up: A return to straight-up horror with “Graveyard Shift,” from Night Shift.

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The story: “Crouch End,” collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. First published in 1980; revised for inclusion in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Wikipedia entry here.

Spoiler-filled synopsis: An American couple on vacation in England gets lost—very lost—while walking through the London neighborhood of Crouch End. As they try to navigate unfamiliar streets, they have increasingly unsettling encounters and are pulled into a nightmarish Lovecraftian dimension, where the husband vanishes. His wife survives and returns to the “real world,” but her sanity has been dealt a devastating blow.

My thoughts: Another explicitly Lovecraftian short story, “Crouch End” differs from “Jerusalem’s Lot” in that it’s not a direct pastiche of Lovecraft’s writing style. “Crouch End” is a modern horror story, and works better because King is free to bring his own writing style and thematic interests into the story, rather than simply mimicking Lovecraft.

“Crouch End” is more explicitly a “Cthulhu mythos” story than “Jerusalem’s Lot,” too. “Jerusalem’s Lot” quite clearly takes place in Lovecraft’s meta-setting of forbidden knowledge and unspeakable god-monsters, but it steers clear of actual mentions of specific Lovecraft characters or entities. “Crouch End” actually comes forward and name-drops several beings from the Cthulhu mythos… almost. I qualify that statement because King doesn’t quite name them: some of the mythos entities mentioned here have very slightly misspelled names: “Yogsoggoth” instead of “Yog-Sothoth,” “Nyarlahotep” instead of “Nyarlathotep,” “R’Yeleh” instead of “”R’lyeh,” etc. I’m not sure if King did this to avoid a lawsuit (the Lovecraft copyright legacy is notoriously messy), to recapture the unpronounceable nature of names that are now familiar to most horror and sci-fi nerds, or to simply irritate Lovecraft purists.

(I should note here that “Crouch End” is largely responsible for introducing me to, and getting me obsessed with, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft in college. While I was mildly aware of Lovecraft’s name and influence when I first read this story, this was the first place I encountered those bizarre, unpronounceable names, and it hooked me. In the early 1990s, Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos were not nearly as ubiquitous in pop culture as they are these days.)

“Crouch End” departs from both King and Lovecraft in that it’s set not in New England (the usual stomping grounds of both authors’ pet horrors) but in actual England. This has the effect of evoking the Lost American Tourist Abroad trope. You might not think of London as being an especially alien place to Americans, given our general obsession with the British (my wife is watching a low-budget interwar British mystery in the background as I type this)¹; but I would say there’s some potential creepiness to be mined from contradictory (and probably quite inaccurate) American stereotypes of British hospitality and snobbiness, not to mention all that History they’ve got going on over there. King also manages to use more British colloquialisms in the first two pages of “Crouch End” than appear in the entirety of Jeeves and Wooster.

So what of the story itself? It’s good, particularly in the way that King slowly escalates the tension. It starts with one or two unpleasant encounters with unsavory Crouch End residents, but becomes increasingly unsettling until Lonnie (the husband) is attacked by some kind of inhuman horror. King nicely does not describe the encounter; an unhinged Lonnie refuses to provide details for his wife Doris, or for us. As Lonnie and Doris become more and more lost, their surroundings begin to warp and the stars in the night sky become unfamiliar. It is suggested that “Crouch End” is a place where the veil between our world and some hideous otherworld is weak, allowing horrors to occasionally cross over from there to here (and allowing lost tourists to occasionally wander in the other direction).

It’s all nicely random and unexplained, in a typical Stephen King “why do bad things happen to good people?” sort of way. True to Lovecraftian form, the couple’s encounter with alien horror takes a toll on their sanity. Doris never quite recovers:

Sometimes when she cannot sleep—this occurs most frequently on nights when the sun goes down in a ball of red and orange—she creeps into her closet, knee-walks under the hanging dresses all the way to the back, and there she writes Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young over and over with a soft pencil. It seems to ease her somehow to do this.

Oh, Steve. You had way too much fun writing those sentences, didn’t you?

Next up: “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” in Skeleton Crew.

¹ Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is set in Australia? I thought it was London. Although now the extended scenes on the beach make more sense.

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