Night Shift

If you ever want to find out what horror means to an audience and to a writer - or if you simply want to be chilled out of your wits - then Night Shift is the perfect answer. It's also a great way to get introduced to Stephen King's writing, and his thoughts on why he writes horror and why people read it. The introduction he has written for the collection acts almost as a condensed version of his longer exploration into the meaning of horror in society, Danse Macabre, which I read concurrently to this. That introduction is a great way to get you prepared for the stories that follow it.

I must say, 'Jerusalem's Lot' is such a clever opening story for the collection. People have called this story boring, and I can almost understand where they're coming from, but it's such a wonderfully-crafted horror story in the simplest sense of the word that I couldn't imagine any of the other stories setting the tone for the entire collection. It harks back to Lovecraft, and borrows from him, too, but it's exceptionally detailed and cleverly creepy.

The few stories that follow it are of the more obvious variety, relying on gore and shock tactics to get their points across - which is perfectly fine. I'm not going to turn down the opportunity to read some gore! But among these few - 'Graveyard Shift', 'I Am the Doorway', and 'The Mangler' - lies a story that seems to get overlooked by many. 'Night Surf' was written prior to The Stand, and it is clearly the main influence for the longer novel which came after it. But it's brilliant. It's full of subtlety and bittersweet reminiscence for the past. Its overriding theme, characterised brilliantly by the line 'Nobody should think about winter in August,' is heartbreaking. I loved it.

Then come the stories that we all know because of the movies: 'Trucks' (adapted into the brilliantly awful King directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive), 'The Lawnmower Man', 'Sometimes They Come Back', and 'Children of the Corn'. My favourite of these is definitely the latter; it has great characterisation, creepy children, fanatical religion (which King does so well), and some nice nods to The Dark Tower, which I'm always in favour of.

Other stories of note would be 'Strawberry Swing', 'Quitters, Inc.', and 'The Woman in the Room,' which is one of King's most tender moments.

Overall, the collection is probably King's strongest. It has a good mixture of creepy, gory, fun, and melancholy, yet the quality of the writing in some does tend to leave you wishing for more.

Also published on Goodreads.