Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King:
- Jerusalem's Lot (Previously unpublished)
- Graveyard Shift (October 1970 issue of Cavalier)
- Night Surf (Spring 1969 issue of Ubris)
- I Am the Doorway (March 1971 issue of Cavalier)
- The Mangler (December 1972 issue of Cavalier)
- The Boogeyman (March 1973 issue of Cavalier)
- Gray Matter (October 1973 issue of Cavalier)
- Battleground (September 1972 issue of Cavalier)
- Trucks (June 1973 issue of Cavalier)
- Sometimes They Come Back (March 1974 issue of Cavalier)
- Strawberry Spring (Fall 1968 issue of Ubris)
- The Ledge (July 1976 issue of Penthouse)
- The Lawnmower Man (May 1975 issue of Cavalier)
- Quitters, Inc. (Previously unpublished)
- I Know What You Need (September 1976 issue of Cosmopolitan)
- Children of the Corn (March 1977 issue of Penthouse)
- The Last Rung on the Ladder (Previously unpublished)
- The Man Who Loved Flowers (August 1977 issue of Gallery)
- One for the Road (March/April 1977 issue of Maine)
- The Woman in the Room (Previously unpublished)
Stephen King's early short stories appeared for the most part in markets that don't exist any more -- "girly" magazines that published stories in between the sections of nude photos. And those markets paid much better than the genre markets for short stories.
Night Shift appeared the same year as The Stand, after the success of Carrie (novel and movie), 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining (and after the pseudonymous publication of Rage as by Richard Bachman). 40 years (and many re-readings of many of the stories) later, a few observations.
King was very generous here with unpublished material -- four stories! And they're good stories. "Jerusalem's Lot" is King's most Lovecraftian pastiche, and it's a lot of fun. "Quitters, Inc." is a solid thriller with a twist. And "The Last Rung on the Ladder" and "The Woman in the Room" are moving, "slice-of-life" stories then atypical for King.
The published stories are almost all horror. And they're still very effective. "The Boogeyman" is my all-timer here, one of King's ten best horror stories. Throughout the collection, King's ability to synthesize horror and the mundane waxes and wanes. I do love the transformative, tainted beer in "Gray Matter" (based on a true story, sort of!).
King's world in these stories is one in which, pushing H.P. Lovecraft to the fringes of absurdity, eldritch tomes of forbidden knowledge are available at your public library. King goes to the well of easily-acquired magical books a couple of times too many. He would lose this tendency very quickly, coming up with more normative, intuitive ways for his characters to do battle with the forces of darkness.
The suspense/thriller stories are also top-notch, none moreso than "Battleground," with its cool-headed assassin faced with a most unlikely payback. "The Ledge" and "Quitters, Inc." are also nice, taut pieces of suspense based on clever ideas. The latter two were memorably filmed as part of the under-rated Cat's Eye movie, while the former was brilliantly adapted and filmed for the Nightmares and Dreamscapes miniseries of more than a decade ago.
I count six other film or TV adaptations besides the ones noted above. But no "Gray Matter" or "Jerusalem's Lot"! Ridiculous! Highly recommended as one of the five or six greatest original horror collections ever published. All-timer!
The House Next Door (1978) by Anne Rivers Siddons: Colquitt and Walter Kennedy are upper-middle-class semi-twits (demi-twits?) in a posh suburb of Atlanta. On the lot next to them, a young architect plans and builds his first house. A couple moves in. And then things start to go horribly wrong for anyone living in the house and, occasionally, for anyone even remotely connected to anyone living in the house.
But as the Kennedys (make of that last name what you will) joke at one point relatively early in the novel, there's no record of the new house being built on an Indian burial ground or any other such stereotype of ghostly house haunting. It's a new house. And the things that happen could, for the most part, just be a string of increasingly dire coincidences.
Well, up to a point.
Stephen King praised The House Next Door in his early 1980's non-fiction book on horror, Danse Macabre. And it is excellent. Siddons has not, so far as I can tell, ever ventured again into the realm of horror. Pity. Just in terms of the horror elements, she's very good here, avoiding pitfalls that plague many a gifted, committed horror writer.
And as King observed, this is a horror story involving reputation -- the house strikes again and again at the social standing of its inhabitants and their friends. It's a monster devoted to embarrassment, at least initially. But it gets hungrier and more dangerous as the narrative progresses.
Siddons creates a fascinating world of privilege and gossip and extremely reluctant 'heroes.' Just the act of trying to save people from the house brings down embarrassment, loss of social standing, and loss of work on the heads of the Kennedys. In trying to defeat the house, they feed it. And where does the colossal enmity and growing danger of the house come from?
Well, Siddons will answer that last question, sort of, by the end of the novel, in a manner that satisfies while also preserving the mystery of Evil in the world of The House Next Door. This is a deeply satisfying horror novel with finely observed sections of social commentary and satire. Really, a remarkable work, and one of the four or five finest 'Haunted House' novels I've ever had the pleasure to read. Highly recommended.
Ba'al by Robert R. McCammon (1978): McCammon's first novel and first published novel is a humdinger with a lot of flaws and a lot of raw energy and ambition. The influences -- conscious or otherwise -- initially seem to be The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen. By the end, though, McCammon has staked out his own odd territory with a climax on the Arctic ice during the long night of the North Pole.
A terrible baby is born sometime in the late 1950's, at least partially the product of a supernatural rape. It's Ba'al, the human-sacrifice-loving god of the Canaanites, a Christian demon known as Beelzebub. Shenanigans ensue. People die. The kid creeps everyone out. By the time he's an adult, apocalyptic cults will form around him. More people will die. And Ba'al's long grudge against the Jews and their god will drive his (or its) actions.
Of course, a ragtag group of heroes will form to face this foe, the most interesting an aging theology professor who initially gets pulled into events while on a search for a colleague gone missing while investigating the rise of the Ba'al cult in Kuwait. The globe-trotting aspects of the novel bear more resemblance to the sort of plotting seen in a spy thriller than in a typical horror novel. McCammon's influences are never programmatic, or programmatically used, even here at the beginning of his writing career.
All in all, I enjoyed this novel. There are flaws, though I'm not sure whether the main flaw is McCammon's fault or his publisher's. Simply put, the novel doesn 't have a middle. We basically jump from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end, from Ba'al at 10 to Ba'al ascendant. As there are textual references to a confrontation with Ba'al in Mexico and the American Southwest during the 'ascending' portion of the being's development, I really do wonder if this section (also cited in a later, otherwise unrelated McCammon novel, They Thirst) was cut by an editor with the mandate of a specific page length.
In any case, the novel -- and McCammon's brief but illuminating 1988 afterword to the novel -- both make for a diverting experience with much more depth and scope than the similarly themed Omen. Recommended.
