Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

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• Jerusalem's Lot (Previously unpublished)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• Quitters, Inc. (Previously unpublished)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• The Last Rung on the Ladder (Previously unpublished)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• The Woman in the Room (Previously unpublished)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King was very generous here with unpublished material -- four stories!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!

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990)

Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990): adapted by John Esposito from the short story by Stephen King; directed by Ralph S. Singleton; starring David Andrews (John Hall), Kelly Wolf (Jane), Stephen Macht (Warwick), Vic Polizos (Hose Guy), and Brad Dourif (Exterminator): Singleton's only film-directing credit; he was primarily known as a producer on such projects as Pet Sematary, Clear and Present Danger, and... Juwanna Mann? Well, at least he had range.

Rats are a problem at a decrepit Maine cotton mill in both the superior short story and this inferior movie.

Stephen King observed that the movie dumped a lot of money into the Maine economy. That's high praise!

But it's an enjoyable piece of trash, with mostly decent acting (though Pennsylvanian Macht's over-the-top struggles with a Maine accent are intermittently hilarious). Brad Dourif has an almost entirely self-contained and pointless cameo role. But he's always good, even in this dog.

Director Singleton seems to have no idea how to create mood in a horror movie. The basements, sub-basements, and sub-sub-basements are unterrifyingly well-lit, and Singleton is no Kubrick when it comes to well-lit horror. 

Pre-CGI problems abound with the rat actors as well. Real trained rats can't actually flood areas with people in them the way they do in the claustrophobic, rat-crowded story. So they instead put in appearances from time to time, looking unbearably cute. By the end, the movie seems to be about a heroic human saving a bunch of cute rats from a lifetime of servitude to a mean, giant rat-monster tyrant.

The giant rat-monster (you knew there was a giant rat-monster in this, right?), so effectively revealed in the short story, instead just keeps showing up throughout the movie. Apparently it has a clock to punch. As it seem to have free access to the upper levels of the mill whenever it wants that access, its Final Boss Monster status has been completely eroded by the conclusion, when we see it for about the hundredth time (subjectively).

Still, there are worse ways to spend 100 minutes. And the beefy, yelling guy with the high-pressure hose is an unintentional bit of exquisite comedy. Badly recommended (new rating!).

Night Shift by Stephen King (1978)

Night Shift by Stephen King, containing the following stories: The Woman in the Room, One for the Road, The Man Who Loved Flowers, The Last Rung on the Ladder, Children of the Corn, I Know What You Need, Quitters, Inc., The Lawnmower Man, The Ledge, Strawberry Spring, Sometimes They Come Back, Trucks, Battleground, Gray Matter, The Boogeyman, The Mangler, I Am the Doorway, Night Surf, Graveyard Shift, and Jerusalem's Lot (Collected 1978):

Stephen King's first collection of short stories spans a decade of his writing life, more than half of it before he broke big with the sale of the novel Carrie. Overall, it's his best collection of pure horror, though there are also studied, moving, non-horror outliers contained here, "The Woman in the Room" and "The Last Rung on the Ladder."

King shows his early range, as the horror stories range from the Lovecraft pastiche "Jerusalem's Lot" through the fairly straightforward thrillers "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" to the loopy tale of beer gone bad, "Gray Matter." There's also a quasi-sequel to Salem's Lot, "One for the Road," and a dry run for The Stand, "Night Surf," inspired in part by a line from a Bruce Springsteen song ("The kids are huddled on the beach in the mist").

The scariest stories showcase King's early mastery of fantasy Grandmaster Fritz Leiber's committment, all those years ago, to trying to come up with a formula for new horrors for the industrial age in the 1940 short story "Smoke Ghost" and subsequent efforts. In stories like "The Mangler" and "Sometimes They Come Back", a matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural that recalls Leiber's Conjure Wife is super-collided with modern technology.

So we get a possessed industrial steam-press in "The Mangler" or magic that partially relies on recorded sound and visual effects in "Sometimes They Come Back." "Gray Matter," while straightforwardly horrific, has as its sinister contaminant a bad can of beer -- this itself a play on a 1970's incident involving beer that had seaweed extract intentionally put into it, with dire (but non-lethal) results.

The scariest story here, and maybe the scariest story King has ever written, is "The Boogeyman." It works perfectly on the surface level of horror, but it also could be a case study for King's occasionally misguided belief that horror is really all about subtext: the monster seems to be a metaphoric stand-in for a child-abusing, wife-hitting husband. But it also isn't. Or is everything in the protagonist's head? In any case, the damn story has made me afraid of closets ever since. All in all, I think this is probably one of the ten best, non-best-of horror collections in English ever assembled.

There are occasional stretches of clumsy prose and a couple of laughable mis-steps in the description department ("The Last Rung on the Ladder", otherwise excellent and understated, gives us dimensions for a barn that would roughly be the size of NASA's vehicle assembly building. Coupled with the ladder shenanigans in The Shining, this makes me wonder if King has never actually climbed a ladder, or at least been told how high those ladders actually were). But like Robinson Crusoe's amazing disappearing-and-reappearing pants, these mistakes simply add a bit of rough charm to an otherwise terrific performance. Highly recommended.