The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Stephen King warns at the beginning of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams that some of the stories are previous published (which is how most collections work, I believe), but some have been rewritten since their original publication. King says a story is never really done until the author’s death or retirement.
He says, “When a long book succeeds, it’s not just an affair, we’re married.” He feels the limitations of his talent the most when he’s trying to get a short story right. While some stories in this are far better than others, this may be the first collection of his where I really liked all the stories. I have my favorites, but none of them would I pull from the collection and replace with another to make it better, and for me, as a Stephen King fan and Constant Reader, that’s a first.
A number of these stories involve facing death. That’s nothing new for a Stephen King story. A large number of them involve older characters and many find their settings in retirement homes. A character in a retirement home recounting a story from earlier years is not new for him as an author either, but the number of times this occurs in this collection makes it stand out. I think it is true of every writer who continues creating stories through their lifespan that characters start to get older on the average along with the author.
All the stories are preceded by author notes and all of those short essays are good.
Mile 81
This story was originally called “Mile 85”, but Stephen King lost it while doing acid. He’s lost more than a few stories over the years. The geography of the particular highway changed over the years, so he moved the abandoned rest area in the story.
There are hints of From A Buick 8 in this. Christine too, I suppose.
The kid that we open the story on is a weird combination of innocent and worldly. I suppose that is more true of kids at a young age than we realize, but it is not well-balanced in this particular character for his implied age.
I like the rapid-fire character introductions as they pop into the action of the story. It changed the whole flavor of the story after the tone of the rolling introduction to the first character, the setting, and the story.
Premium Harmony
We have a marriage on the rocks, fighting about everything. An unhappy hostility permeates the scene. The strange, absurd manner in which the loss comes leaves the reader feeling unanchored in the manner that being hit by a loss like that would always feel in reality.
Batman and Robin Have an Altercation
In the author note, King talks about story ideas coming to him first as a cup, but he can’t hold it and use it until the handle for the story comes later, the thing that allows him to begin writing the story because he finally understands what it is and how to use it. This was one of the rare stories that came to him whole with the cup and handle together.
The older character in the story is struggling with losing his memory, but he has one more trick up his sleeve just as it is needed.
The Dune
This story has one of Stephen King’s favorite endings. His endings are a common point of criticism about his work over the years.
In the midst of this one, there is a dialogue tag typo. A character’s name is switched in the middle of a conversation once. I might have passed right over it except I had been in the middle of a story where I screwed up my dialogue tags and so I had that on my mind as I read this.
This story hinges on the real world vs the machinery of the universe underneath much like in the novel Revival.
“Oh, no… not mine.” Simple, yet chilling
Bad Little Kid
With the previous story and this one, we have two confessional stories in a row.
King villains now tend to have over bright red lips like in this story and the convict in Finders Keepers.
There are no quotation marks in this story. An interesting choice that works just fine here.
I like the idea of catching the supernatural thing finally, but the reality of whether it is supernatural or exactly what it appears to be cuts both ways. This is a story with a good, subtle ending too.
A Death
King admits to having visions. Not all become stories. This one did. The silver dollar tells the truth and fools us because we always expect these stories to go a certain way. It’s a good, solid Western short story.
The Bone Church
This entry in the collection is a poem. King says he’s not much of a poet though he’s written a hundred or more.
This one is narrative in nature. It was written in 1968 or ’69. It was apparently lost along the way. Surprise, surprise. He recreated it from the memory of someone else reading it. In a later story entry in this collection, he has a couple poets read each other’s work.
There are unique visualizations in this work. I’ve never seen a story haunted by elephants before.
Morality
A lot of King’s stories in this collection have the cost of cigarettes as a plot point.
This story explores what happens when sin changes you. It starts with something simple, but deceivingly hard to return from.
A “library policeman” of sorts makes a visit. This is an ongoing obsession in King’s mind.
Marriages are such fragile things when not handled with care.
Afterlife
Another character is born in Hemingford Home. Every character living in Nebraska since Mother Abigail in The Stand seems to call this town home.
It’s a simple story that seems to have assurances after death but also feels like a self-imposed trap of sorts. In the author notes, he discusses an ideal version of an afterlife rewind, but here, it is a little less ideal and makes for an interesting story.
Ur
King ended up writing a story for a new e-reader from Amazon. This story was considerably revised from its original published version. Here we get to see other worlds and try to change history.
The Paradox Police are as bad as the Library Police, but in the end, everything serves The Tower.
This is a good story.
Herman Wouk is Still Alive
King is writing about fat women in detail about how fat they are again.
The world is grey. King tries to make sense of a real-life car accident in this fictionalized version and does a fine job on all points with all characters and all motivations.
Under the Weather
We know the ending before it’s revealed most likely, but that works perfectly fine with this story. It’s tough to say goodbye.
Blockade Billy
I’ve been looking forward to this one and it was worth the wait. King writes himself in as the unseen, unquoted interviewer getting this story from an elderly former third base coach. I never saw the ending coming. It’s his best baseball story by a mile and he’s written a few of them.
Mister Yummy
More old people being old in a retirement community. And we got more old fellas from Hemingford Home. He uses “verboten” a lot in stories now. He deals in part with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, but does a better job with it this time than he did in Wolves of the Calla. Death puts on a pretty face and approaches slowly. New and interesting ideas.
Tommy
A poem? It reads like a short story, but is structured like a poem.
Death and loss. Remembering how it touches all. Sometimes you live long enough to sell insurance.
The Little Green God of Agony
This could have been a straightforward and predictable story, but it surprised me more than once and delivered all the way through. It was written years after his accident, but tackled the problem of pain he experienced after that pivotal event. He’s tapped into and used aspects of that experience in other stories, but my read is that this story taps the deepest and is the most direct rendering of that experience into his fiction yet.
We see there might be a con job in the works. There are interesting reveals that work so well because we are seeing the story through multiple layers of character.
Science and religion clash and twine in the masterful way Stephen King does it.
This story is surprisingly good.
Cookie Jar
I first read this story when it was released for free online, but liked it even better after reading it again here. I’m not sure if there were changes between versions on this one. It seems close to what I remember, but either way, I appreciate it more now.
King plans to write a story called “Fuzzy Duck”. That doesn’t appear to have happened yet.
Crazy is safer when it goes unrecorded. That’s a great line in a great story.
That Bus is Another World
King thought of this story when he was in Paris on his way to a reading he wasn’t exactly looking forward to. He added a shocking bit to the idea. If the woman he met eyes with through the window of that bus knew what he was going to do in the story, she’d probably be quite disturbed.
Obits
An interesting exploration of the rules of journalism and the idea of “the end for now at least.” This story is reminiscent of the short story “Everything’s Eventual”. Power is very addicting.
Drunken Fireworks
This is a good, interesting, unique feud story. In the end, rural Yankees aren’t all that different from Southern Rednecks.
Clutterbuck is still policing and is police chief in Castle Rock as of 2015. I thought they were in the Sherrif’s Department prior, but maybe my memory is bad on that.
Tony Soprano is mentioned as are the TR90, from several stories including Bag of Bones, and Chester’s Mill, from Under the Dome.
Interesting ending to this one too.
Summer Thunder
Ending the collection with a story about the end of the word seems appropriate. The setting and the crux of the story came from King’s ride across America on a motorcycle. The kind of bike King used was also used by a side character in the previous story. I think the motorcycle in this story is a different type. Each character must face an ending.
My next post in this series will be Before End of Watch which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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