The Boston-based ‘The Ten O’Clock People’ - a tale that seems to call out the demonisation of the smoking class - features creatures that fans have said are not dissimilar to the Can-toi of Low Men in Yellow Coats and the Dark Tower. Indeed, there’s metatextual links all throughout the anthology. Indeed, the next story in this collection - ‘Popsy,’ a story of a kidnapping gone wrong thanks to the identity of the boy’s father - features a bat-like creature that King says is connected to his Night Flier. Inside View turns up repeatedly in the Dark Tower multiverse, while the character of Richard Dees first turned up in The Dead Zone (1979) a decade earlier.
The taut mystery-cum-horror tale will appeal to lovers of ‘Salem’s Lot, but the King connections don’t stop there. Yet time has been relatively kind to the piece he calls an “archetypal horror story, with its mad narrator and its account of premature burial in the desert.” Once you get through the weirdness of ‘Suffer the Little Children’ - a Ray Bradbury style piece that King says has “no redeeming social merit whatever” - we’re on even firmer ground with ‘The Night Flier.’įirst published in the 1988 anthology Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror, ‘The Night Flier’ follows a tabloid reporter for Inside View as he investigates a would-be vampire. Opener ‘Dolan’s Cadillac,’ for example, is one that King says he “absolutely loathed” when he first finished it.
The first few entries feel like they are solidly in ‘traditional’ King territory, if such a thing exists. Consisting of stories published in various places between 1971 (‘Brooklyn August’) and 1992 (‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’), King has also included a handful of hitherto unreleased stories too. At the very least, it’s his most diverse collection. In his introduction to 1993’s NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES, King’s third published collection of shorts, King declares it to be “an uneven Aladdin’s cave of a book, one which completes a trilogy of which Night Shift and Skeleton Crew are the first two volumes.”Ĭollecting all the self-described “good stories,” King’s third official compilation is arguably one of his strongest to this point. Over the course of his prolific writing career, his six collections of shorts have showcased well over a hundred stories to date - and counting. If you find yourself enjoying Stephen King in small doses, then you’re in luck.
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