If It Bleeds (2020) by Stephen King: Stephen King returns to the four-novella volume he previously explored in Different Seasons (1982), Four Past Midnight (1990), and Full Dark, No Stars (2010). I think it's a stronger quartet than Four Past Midnight but not quite as good as Full Dark, No Stars and definitely not as good as the excellent Different Seasons.
That last one yielded three movies from three of its novellas (Stand by Me from "The Body," Apt Pupil from "Apt Pupil," and The Shawshank Redemption from "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"), while the fourth, still-unadapted novella is an above-average 'Club Story' ("The Breathing Method").
Onwards!
"Mr. Hannigan's Phone": Childhood nostalgia meets The Twilight Zone, as in "this is the most Twilight Zoney novella here!". King manages to tweak an already-overused horror trope that started with telephones and moved on to cellphones. Bittersweet dark fantasy more than horror.
"The Life of Chuck": A backwards-moving triptych of linked stories exploring the title subject. Again, this is bittersweet and more than a little elegiac.
"If It Bleeds": Private investigator Holly Gibney of the Bill Hodges Trilogy and The Outsider returns to battle another supernatural menace. This is a horror thriller, enlivened by both the concept and by the always engaging Holly, who keeps her personal demons at bay while battling another monster hiding in human form. or forms.
"Rat": King returns to exploring the lives of writers, in this case a man who not only has never finished a novel but was driven nearly insane by his last attempt to do so. We return to the unincorporated townships and fishing cottages of Maine, and an unexpected visitor with more than a bit of Monkey's Paw DNA.
Overall: Not much horror here, but certainly a worthwhile read. Recommended.
Full Dark, No Stars (2010) by Stephen King: King's third four-novella collection (after the great Different Seasons and the indifferent Four Past Midnight) is a bleak affair in which three of the four novellas feature women revenging themselves against monstrous men.
1922: This is the closest thing King has ever written to a noirish novel by James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) or Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me). Out in the bleak Midwest of the Year of Our Lord 1922, a farmer plots to kill his wife because she wants to sell her land to a hog-butchering firm. Narrated by the farmer in first-person, 1922 is a bleak tale of (possibly) spectral revenge with a hint of Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart."
King does a great job here of writing a protagonist whom, while well-spoken, is as dumb as a fencepost. He doesn't go Blood Simple -- he's simple long before he sets out on his murderous course. And he takes a lot of people with him. It's a haunting, distressing piece of work with no particularly sympathetic characters.
Big Driver: Things go terribly wrong for a female mid-list mystery novelist on her way home from a speaking engagement. Is revenge in the cards? Yes. Yes it is. The protagonist is sympathetically drawn (and is one of King's few characters with a cat as a pet, for what that's worth). The antagonists sort of slide off the believability plateau about two-thirds through, allowing for gruesome revenge without any need to parse the rightness or wrongness of it all.
Fair Extension: The shortest piece is also the grimmest. Well, maybe. A cancer-stricken man makes a deal with the Devil (or a devil, perhaps), possibly the same one from King's award-winning short story "The Man in the Black Suit." Things go poorly, though perhaps not as one thinks. It's a sort of one-note horror piece, drawn out a bit too long.
A Good Marriage: Revenge will be served again, as a woman married for more than 20 years to a seemingly good-guy accountant discovers that he's a serial killer. The novella's examination of what one would do under these circumstances is nuanced and suitably thrill-filled, backed by a sort of existential dread about just how much anyone knows about even their closest friends and loved ones. The investigator who shows up at the end seems to be a dry run for Bill Hodges in character if not in physical appearance.
Overall: Well worth a read. Nothing here hits the heights of the four bruisers in Different Seasons (Apt Pupil, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Body, and The Breathing Method). Really, what could? And when do we get a goddammed movie of The Breathing Method, btw?
