Collections and anthologies are always hard sells for me. I know good any well, there’s going to be parts that I don’t care about. Some stories don’t thrill or excite as much as the others. It might have seem like a good read in a magazine while you’re sitting on the bathroom throne or drinking your coffee on a Saturday morning. However, if you’re reading one simple story after a better story, it’s not the best.
Even though he continues to write huge books that are published each year and many of them have been turned into movies, King continues to write shorter stories. Maybe it’s because he feels that the short stories in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped him get his foot in the door. And the skin magazines he sold them to helped pay the bills in addition to his job as a school teacher in rural Maine.
Most of the works in You Like It Darker were previously published in magazines or in another medium. But five were unpublished. The best work in the book is Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, a novella in which the main titular character is a 30-something janitor at a rural Kansas school. He has a bad dream of a dead woman at an isolated rural dilapidated gas station. He devises a plan to drive out one Saturday with a burner phone to check it out and make an anonymous 911 call.
Of course, it happens to be true and he makes the call, ditching the burner. But investigators with the Kansas State Police track him down as they suspect he had something to do with the woman’s murder. It’s a Hitchcockian story in which an honest man, with a somewhat flawed past, becomes the prime suspect and has no one believing he’s innocent.
Another good novella, Rattlesnakes, which brings back Vic Trenton, decades after King first wrote about him in Cujo. Vic is now an older man and widower. After the incidents in Cujo with their son, Tad, dying of dehydration, Vic and Donna divorced but got back together. However, she has since passed away from cancer. Vic travels down to the Florida Gulf Coast to wait out the Covid-19 pandemic.
He befriends an even older woman who is pushing a stroller when they first meet. However, one day, he discovers the woman, Alita Bell, dead in her driveway next to the stroller. Police suspect there is something going on as they await the autopsy on Alita, especially since Alita rewrote her will leaving Vic her possessions. Also, the stroller seems to have a haunting mind of its own appearing when no one expects it.
“Old Slide Inn Road” is a nice little story about a family on a road trip running into some highway robbers. And “Finn” is a thrilling short story where Finn Murie, a young Irish man, is kidnapped because he is mistaken for someone else. And the kidnappers don’t believe they’ve nab the wrong person.
“Willie the Weirdo” is another short story set during Covid in which the 10-year-old Willie Fiedler gets close to his adoptive paternal grandfather, James, who is dying. “The Turbulence Expert” has a Final Destination feel to it as a man, Craig Dixon, has a premonition of the plane he’s flying on crashing during turbulence.
“Laurie” is more of a touching story that moves away from thrills and chills about a retiree bonding with a Border Collie-Mudi mix he calls “Laurie.” The story is set in Florida as well as some other stories in the book. It shows that King doesn’t always have to write about scary things even though an alligator plays a crucial role in the story.
But some of the other works don’t mix well. “Red Screen” which is about an NYPD detective interrogating a plumber charged with murder seems very undeveloped and not the type of thing King would do. I couldn’t get into the novella Two Talented Bastids that begins the book. The Dreamers and The Answer Man are two novellas that have good ideas that King could’ve expanded on. Instead he seems to make huge books or short stories. They could’ve been expanded to stories that were 200-300 pages. I’ve been reading King since the late 1980s and I still don’t understand the issues the man has with written works that are about 200-300 pages.
The Dreamers is about test subjects administered a drug during the 1970s. The Answer Man is about a man’s life which the random encounters of the titular character throughout his life from the late 1930 to the 1960s. They don’t really hold my attention as much. Like I said, maybe if King had expanded the stories, he could’ve delved deeper into the subject matters more.
It’s still a better book than his previous work Holly which had a great premise but seemed to get lost in a lot of anti-Trump rhetoric. At 76, King doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. One of his earlier novels The Running Man is in development with Edgar Wright at the helm to stay closer to the source material than the 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is still one of his more better collections. I’m almost certain Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream will end up as the next adaptation with Wyatt Russell or Jackson White in the role. White was in Pet Sematary: Bloodlines.
If you’re a King fan, you will enjoy it. However, if you’re not a King fan, you may not find much of the works to keep your interest.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 