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Back in November, I rushed out and got my grubby little paws on Stephen King's newest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset. Half of the collection I'd read piecemeal in various magazines and anthologies and found universally solid. So I had high hopes for the other half.
On the main, I was disappointed. Only one of the previously unread stories was bad, but three were lackluster. "Willa" was a potboiler spook yarn about people who don't know they're dead. I've read the story before in superior iterations. I've seen a fine iteration of it in Sixth Sense. A literary example of a superior spin on the tale is "The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft, though in that case, the bogey in question is a rotting corpse, not a ghost.
"Willa" is an incredibly weak story, and I suspect it was little more than filler with which to meet the magical number of thirteen. It was bland and felt unfinished, as though he'd simply cobbled enough words together to call it a plot and moved on.
King is the same man who has gifted the world with such gems as "Survivor Type", "Gramma"(Oh, my God, I never wanted to be around old ladies again after that. Holy fuck.), "Home Delivery", "The Monkey", and "Chattery Teeth". I know he can do better, because I've been privileged to read it when he does. Oh, "L.T.'s Theory on Pets" is another proof of his prowess in this form. So why include such a humdrum story if not for the simple need to fulfill a quota?
Then again, perhaps that role went to "The Cat From Hell", which was a waste of tree pulp. He simply threw a handful of horror tropes into the word processor, and the misbegotten, wet fart of juvenile gross-out porn was what the trusty HP printer spat out. I'm all for a gory denouement, but I also prefer a bit of character development, at least enough to allow me to set my moral compass. "Cat" was just a sophisticated exercise in self-indulgent dick-fiddling for which he was paid 28.00 a pop.
"A Very Tight Place" was a story that simply derailed in an adolescent soup of poop. Literally. It wasn't the abomination that was "Cat", and I found myself thinking of the story for days thereafter, but it was also little more than a prolonged potty joke.
The bad was bad but the good was absolutely beautiful and often sublime. The absolute standouts of the collection were "N" and "The Things They Left Behind." The latter's title reminded me of The Things They Carried, the collection by Tim O'Brien. That collection dealt with the burdens, collective and personal, carried by a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam. King's collection of the things 9/11 victims left behind is a haunting, beautiful treatment of a very tender subject and speaks more eloquently to the unfinished business of unexpected loss and the tenacity of even the most tenuous of human connections than any bloated psychobabble bible ever could. "Behind" is a story I wish I could have written.
And then there was "N". "N" justifies the $28.00 price tag, and I would've paid it for this story alone. "N" is a creepy homage to Lovecraft that functions as a clinic on how to build a story. The pacing is sublime, and the tension builds to an unbearable level. I wanted to stop reading at times because I knew that this was a story that could have no happy ending, that this was a quintessential Bad Place from which no one escaped unscathed. Yet I kept reading because the goblin in me had to see just how deep the darkness ran. The answer? Pretty damn deep. And I was right: nobody got out unscathed. In fact, most people didn't get out at all.
The rest of the stories ranged from serviceable to very good. "Mute" was a delicious vengeance yarn, and "The New York Times at Bargain Basement Rates" was a sweet glimpse of the enduring nature of love, a bite-sized Bag of Bones. "Ayana" was a tale of the cost of paying it forward. "Harvey's Dream" was a story about terrible parental prescience, and "Gingerbread Girl" was about the corrosive nature of unbearable loss("Live babies are the glue of a marriage; dead ones are acid."). "Stationary Bike" explored the notion that even the healthiest hobbies can become an obsession and reminded us that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. "Rest Stop" was a story about how writerly fantasy temporarily gave rise to an unlikely hero.
Just after Sunset is a Whitman's Sampler of King's wares, and like its sugary counterpart, it's got its hits and misses. "N" is the strawberry creme; "A Very Tight Place" is the caramel that sticks to the roof of your mouth no matter how much you scour your palate with your tongue; "The Cat From Hell" is the coconut creme or the stale peanut candy that makes your ass and mouth pucker in a perfect symmetry of disgust. There are undeniable disappointments, but there is also vintage King, and he's still the only author that can justify the asking price of a collection with the sheer artistry and resonance of a single story.
B- because "The Cat From Hell" really was that bad.
On the main, I was disappointed. Only one of the previously unread stories was bad, but three were lackluster. "Willa" was a potboiler spook yarn about people who don't know they're dead. I've read the story before in superior iterations. I've seen a fine iteration of it in Sixth Sense. A literary example of a superior spin on the tale is "The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft, though in that case, the bogey in question is a rotting corpse, not a ghost.
"Willa" is an incredibly weak story, and I suspect it was little more than filler with which to meet the magical number of thirteen. It was bland and felt unfinished, as though he'd simply cobbled enough words together to call it a plot and moved on.
King is the same man who has gifted the world with such gems as "Survivor Type", "Gramma"(Oh, my God, I never wanted to be around old ladies again after that. Holy fuck.), "Home Delivery", "The Monkey", and "Chattery Teeth". I know he can do better, because I've been privileged to read it when he does. Oh, "L.T.'s Theory on Pets" is another proof of his prowess in this form. So why include such a humdrum story if not for the simple need to fulfill a quota?
Then again, perhaps that role went to "The Cat From Hell", which was a waste of tree pulp. He simply threw a handful of horror tropes into the word processor, and the misbegotten, wet fart of juvenile gross-out porn was what the trusty HP printer spat out. I'm all for a gory denouement, but I also prefer a bit of character development, at least enough to allow me to set my moral compass. "Cat" was just a sophisticated exercise in self-indulgent dick-fiddling for which he was paid 28.00 a pop.
"A Very Tight Place" was a story that simply derailed in an adolescent soup of poop. Literally. It wasn't the abomination that was "Cat", and I found myself thinking of the story for days thereafter, but it was also little more than a prolonged potty joke.
The bad was bad but the good was absolutely beautiful and often sublime. The absolute standouts of the collection were "N" and "The Things They Left Behind." The latter's title reminded me of The Things They Carried, the collection by Tim O'Brien. That collection dealt with the burdens, collective and personal, carried by a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam. King's collection of the things 9/11 victims left behind is a haunting, beautiful treatment of a very tender subject and speaks more eloquently to the unfinished business of unexpected loss and the tenacity of even the most tenuous of human connections than any bloated psychobabble bible ever could. "Behind" is a story I wish I could have written.
And then there was "N". "N" justifies the $28.00 price tag, and I would've paid it for this story alone. "N" is a creepy homage to Lovecraft that functions as a clinic on how to build a story. The pacing is sublime, and the tension builds to an unbearable level. I wanted to stop reading at times because I knew that this was a story that could have no happy ending, that this was a quintessential Bad Place from which no one escaped unscathed. Yet I kept reading because the goblin in me had to see just how deep the darkness ran. The answer? Pretty damn deep. And I was right: nobody got out unscathed. In fact, most people didn't get out at all.
The rest of the stories ranged from serviceable to very good. "Mute" was a delicious vengeance yarn, and "The New York Times at Bargain Basement Rates" was a sweet glimpse of the enduring nature of love, a bite-sized Bag of Bones. "Ayana" was a tale of the cost of paying it forward. "Harvey's Dream" was a story about terrible parental prescience, and "Gingerbread Girl" was about the corrosive nature of unbearable loss("Live babies are the glue of a marriage; dead ones are acid."). "Stationary Bike" explored the notion that even the healthiest hobbies can become an obsession and reminded us that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. "Rest Stop" was a story about how writerly fantasy temporarily gave rise to an unlikely hero.
Just after Sunset is a Whitman's Sampler of King's wares, and like its sugary counterpart, it's got its hits and misses. "N" is the strawberry creme; "A Very Tight Place" is the caramel that sticks to the roof of your mouth no matter how much you scour your palate with your tongue; "The Cat From Hell" is the coconut creme or the stale peanut candy that makes your ass and mouth pucker in a perfect symmetry of disgust. There are undeniable disappointments, but there is also vintage King, and he's still the only author that can justify the asking price of a collection with the sheer artistry and resonance of a single story.
B- because "The Cat From Hell" really was that bad.
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