 |
Just After Sunset
|
...there wasn't a cloud in the sky, it was pure blue, but the sky was darkening, just the same...
|
Just After Sunset
|
A Collective Critique
I have a little ritual I do when Stephen King novels hit the shelves. I get up early and get on the train and head to the bookstore in the city that opens the earliest. It’s a whole Annie Wilkes compulsion; I slam my money down and I get the first copy. Usually I’ve taken the morning off, and I head to Starbucks and spend the early hours reveling in words. I read slowly (which is sometimes rewarding and sometimes frustrating), so if I get through a hundred pages that first day, I’m giddy. Over the next few days, I live with the book, catching spare moments here and there, drinking it in during lunch hours and those moments before bed. It’s a fun little ritual, though my friends and coworkers have other words for it.
That’s the business with new King novels. Collections however are a different – pardon the pun – story. I make sure to pick them up in hardcover the day they are released, but I’m not adamant about getting the first copy. I usually pick it up on my lunch hour at midday, and I might read a couple of the stories before putting it on my shelf for later perusal. In this case, “later” might mean years from now. All Stephen King books are created equal, but for lunatic fans like myself, some are more equal than others.
See, for lunatic fans like myself ... we’ve read most of the stories already. They’ve appeared in The New Yorker or Playboy, in horror collections or in the premiere Esquire fiction issue. For people who like Stephen King a little more deeply than the casual reader, the short stories are read – and in some cases collected – long before the official collections come out.
Thus, when Everything’s Eventual came out, I had three problems with it; two were King’s, one was mine. The first problem was that all of the stories had appeared previously – there was nothing at all brand-new in this volume. The second was the order of the stories. If you’ve been reading King for any length of time, you’re aware on some level that his short story collections are carefully organized, the placement of the tales deliberate so that they flow easily. In Everything’s Eventual, the stories were arranged at random, so that the logical opener – “The Man in the Black Suit” – came second, and the logical closer – “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” – came directly after that. (Plus, it didn’t help that not all of the stories were top-drawer. A collection as grand as Skeleton Crew can support something like “Beachworld.” A slim volume like Everything’s Eventual can’t take something like “The Death of Jack Hamilton” and “The Road Virus Heads North.”)
Ah, but the third problem, the one that’s my fault? I didn’t re-read the stories. I’d read them individually over the course of a few years, and didn’t think it was necessary to delve in again. After all, they’re stories. It’s not a novel. They’re old. Right?
Wrong, and fortunately I realized my mistake leading up toward the publication of Just After Sunset. When the list of stories came out, I noted that I had read nine of the fourteen stories and vowed not to read any more. I further vowed to re-read all of them, even the ones I hadn’t particularly liked (like “Willa,” and “Stationary Bike.”) It was my duty – to myself as well as to the collection – to read these tales as this book would have us read them: as a whole, not as a series of parts.
After King’s brief introduction (illuminating as always; King’s forewords and afterwords are some of my favorite pieces of writing by him), I delved in ... and surprised myself. I read “Willa” last year after a debacle in purchasing Playboy at my local Borders, and hadn’t cared for it much. Here, I absolutely loved it. A glance at the table of contents had told me, in my infinite wisdom, that King had again placed the wrong story in the pole position; it was obvious to me that “The Gingerbread Girl” – King’s long, masterful action story – belonged there. Man, was I wrong. “Willa” whispers in, gentle and unsettling, and sets the mood perfectly for the volume that follows. There’s not as much visceral horror in Just After Sunset as in, say, Night Shift or Skeleton Crew, but in stories like “Harvey’s Dream” and “Mute,” the suggestion of a world off-kilter is enough to unnerve you.
And, full disclosure: when I first read them, I didn’t like “Harvey’s Dream” or “Rest Stop.” I felt that “Harvey’s Dream” was another in King’s existential experiments, like “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French,” and “Luckey Quarter.” In the context of this collection, it seemed not only real, but keeping solidly with King’s long-standing trope of putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. I felt that “Rest Stop” was a weird side-trip down King’s well-trod road of pseudonyms and how they affect the people who create them; it was a side-trip I didn’t think King needed to take. Here, it drives a heavy, violent spike between the quieter stories “Harvey’s Dream” and “Stationary Bike,” seeming vital to the balance of the collection. (Plus, it’s actually a lot better than I remembered it being. This could have something to do that I originally read it in a dentist’s office waiting to get a filling.)
“Rest Stop” and “The Gingerbread Girl” aren’t the only grab-you-by-your throat pieces, either. Though Just After Sunset tends to skew towards quiet ruminations, there are still plenty of good old-fashioned horror stories in here: “The Cat From Hell” – which King admits he thought had been published in one of his other collections – is a violently gross story from the 70s you have to read to believe. “A Very Tight Place,” the closing story, is one of King’s most disgusting to date. (That’s a good thing.) In the afterword, he claims he even grossed himself out. And “N.,” King’s epistolary story linking obsessive-compulsive disorder to a Lovecraftian universe where Things are trying to break through to our world is simply terrifying. “N” gave this guy nightmares, I’ll tell you that right now.
Though I liked a great deal of the stories in Everything’s Eventual, I felt it wasn’t as much of a success as it could have been. Not so here. Just After Sunset contains no bad stories. Maybe, as King believes, it has something to do with King’s being the editor of the Best American Short Stories collection in 2006. Maybe, as I believe, it has a little to do with King’s change in venue (a number of these stories take place in Florida.) Maybe it even has to do with the fact that most of these were written after 9/11 – the spectre of that tragedy looms large over at least three of these stories. Whatever it is, King has crafted a volume of tales that can stand with his strongest works.