You Like It Darker

“It says, the moon is full of demons”

The release of a new work by Stephen King is an event, especially if it contains his short fiction. The latest work is a mixture of short stories and novellas, from different eras, styles as well as themes.

Titled in a tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen’s last CD release, King’s collected stories like Cohen’s songs explore age and aging. Long term readers of King who also see their own mortality in the [increasingly nearing] distance will find this collection of stories rather elegiac as well as unsettling.

The shorter stories are less engaging than the longer ones. The Fifth Step being unpleasant, Red Screen being little more than a shrug, while Two Talented Bastids and On Slide Inn Road are eventful tales that despite the meandering, are just delightfully throw-away ditties.

However, it is the presence of four novellas that make this collection unmissable.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is extraordinary. Ostensibly a short crime novel, detailing the eponymous character reporting the presence of a dead body from the fragments of a dream – it soon becomes a frantic thriller.

Rattlesnakes a lengthy coda to CUJO and DUMA KEY which features the theme of loss and reflection in the context of how the grief of the past can become the horrors of today.  

The Dreamers is a superbly realised cosmic horror piece that weaves the memories of the Vietnam War to what may lie beneath the veneer of reality by way of H P Lovecraft.

And mention must be made of the closing tale, The Answer Man, a dark morality tale, written in a beguiling style that starts with whimsy, but soon turns nasty. It’s an EC horror styled narrative that is both incisive and thought provoking.

King closes the collection with an afterward that adds context to these stories as well as into the craft of imaginative writing.

Some of the stories I read in hardcover, while others I enjoyed narrated by Will Patton.

An unmissable love letter to his constant readers.