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You Like It Darker
Copyright 2024 Stephen King
502 pages, Hardcover. First published May 21, 2024, Simon & Schuster, LLC
The first collection of short stories by Stephen King since 2015 (he has over 140 short stories published now), this latest is a bit uneven, ranging from readable to outstanding. Many of them are straight-up horror stories, a genre that King often resists but never can quite escape. (He finds it limiting, and has stated that there’s only seven basic plots available in the genre.)
Even the most predictable of the twelve stories benefits from King’s matchless ability to create relatable and genuine characters with only a handful of keystrokes, along with immaculate pacing and a very real sense of surroundings, steeped in Americana and small-town life.
Even the more hum-drum tales have moments. His first short, “Two Talented Bastids” is the tale of a son learning that his late father and his best friend may have had help moving from the level of two good artists (writer and painter respectively) to two great artists. Along the way, he uncovers an excerpt from the same story, one written during his ‘good’ period, and the other during his ‘great’ period. The two paragraphs, side by side, constitute a gem of an example between good writing and great writing, and King is one of a handful with the chops to try such a thing ˗ and get away with it. But there’s that famous King wit behind it: the theme of the descriptive paragraphs could be called “It was a dark and stormy night.”
There’s two novellas in the collection of twelve stories. One, “Rattlesnakes” features, somewhat inexplicably, the father of the boy who died, trapped by a rabid Saint Bernard, in Cujo. I read that over 40 years ago and had forgotten there was a father, to tell the truth. (I saw the movie, but the only thing I remember about it was that it was terrible and had a cop-out ending.) The story is a solid ninety-page haunting yarn, rich in local color and satisfyingly mystifying. The Cujo link adds nothing to the story, but doesn’t really detract, either. It takes place in the world created for Duma Key, suggesting a future King novel may return there.
The other, at 152 pages, falls just short of novel length, and is one of the best works King has ever written. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream starts, as the title suggests, with the eponymous protagonist having an eerie dream about walking along a dirt road toward an abandoned Sunoco gas station. Upon arriving, he sees a human arm sticking out of the dirt, a girl or woman’s. A dog comes along and begins worrying at the flesh.
Unlike other such dreams, this one does not evaporate into the mists of forgetfulness, or even fade. After a day of being haunted by the dream, Danny does a search engine inquiry, only to discover the locale—and the details of same—actually exist, even though Danny is certain he has never actually visited before. A day later, he drives out to the scene, and discovers that everything, including the woman’s arm and the dog, are exactly as he dreamed. Unwilling to leave the dead girl to the ministrations of the dog, he gets a burner phone and calls the police, mindful that his story is unbelievable and that he would immediately be the prime suspect in what is clearly a murder.
His precautions aren’t enough, and he comes to the attention of one Inspector Franklin Jalbert, of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Jalbert is an obsessive, driven gendarme who quickly concludes that Danny is guilty of the girl’s murder and will move heaven and hell to prove his case. (King himself states that Jalbert is closely modeled on Javert, the inspector from Les Misérables.)
The story is a suspense murder mystery, a genre that King absolutely excels at, and this massively engaging and engrossing story is King at his absolute best. There are a half-dozen other major characters, but really it’s all Danny versus Javert, a face off worthy of Duel. Just by itself, it makes “You Like It Darker” a must-read.