Things happen to make readers cringe and shudder in most stories by Stephen King. With 14 of his short stories together in Everything's Eventual (2002, Hodder and Stoughton, 416 pages), readers who relish hair-raising scenarios can find ample enjoyment, but little relaxation.
The contents include several award-winning tales, four earlier published by The New Yorker and one, “Riding the Bullet”, that the author used to experiment with e-publishing. “I've continued to write short stories over the years, partly because the ideas still come from time to time – beautifully compressed ideas that cry out for three thousand words, maybe nine thousand, fifteen thousand at the very most,” King said.
“Short stories are still piecework, the equivalent of those one-of-a-kind items you can buy in an artisan’s shop. If, that is, you are willing to be patient and wait while it's made by hand in the back room.”
Like many people, King savors short stories. “...for me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.”
The book shares its title with a story inside. A former grocery-store shopping-cart-roundup guy takes a secret job with fantastic benefits, and the work's easy. For a time, he believes that “everything’s eventual” (slang for “going great”).
“I took a deep breath, held it, then let it out and said, ‘This is eventual.’
Mr Sharpton laughed, his clean-shaven cheeks gleaming in the dashboard lights. He didn't ask what I meant; he knew. ‘Everything's eventual, Dink,’ he said. ‘Or can be, for the right person.’ ”
In time, the protagonist realizes otherwise. “It occurred to me – for the first time, as if I was finally waking up – that I was a murderer. A mass murderer.”
King finds inspiration in classic short stories or TV shows. In one tale, “Autopsy Room Four”, he recalls an Alfred Hitchcock episode when a man believed dead remains fully aware amid preparations for his postmortem. As King's story unfolds, “She laughs, and something clanks. The clank is followed by a sound that scares me badly: steel instruments clicking together. They are off to the left of me, and although I can't see them, I know what they're getting ready to do: the autopsy. They are getting ready to cut into me. They intend to remove Howard Cottrell's heart and see if it blew a piston or threw a rod.”
Hitchcock had a soon-to-be-sliced man reveal his dilemma by crying a tear. Can King find a different solution?
In “L.T.'s Theory of Pets”, a cat that a man gave to his wife and a dog that she presented to him participate as the marriage unravels. Then one person vanishes, maybe a victim of foul play.
King and his characters never hesitate with advice, even words of wisdom. “I kept quiet. It was late. It had been a hard day, a harder evening, and I was tired. The last thing I wanted was to have an argument with my wife when I was tired and she was worried. That's the sort of argument where one of you ends up spending the night on the couch. And the only way to stop an argument like that is to be quiet. In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It's silence that is a marriage's best friend.”
A motorist makes a deadly mistake in “The Road Virus Heads North” by buying an unusual painting at a yard sale. “He took the picture out of the trunk and looked at it, and it was during the space of the 10 seconds when he looked at it without remembering to breathe that he became authentically afraid of the thing....”
A pre-divorce meeting turns extra destructive in “Lunch at the Gotham Café”. When violence erupts, a heartbroken man saves his disgruntled wife, but not their marriage. “I had to put my hands in my armpits. They wanted to kill her, to reach out and wrap around her neck and just kill her.”
In “1408”, a room at the Hotel Dolphin is haunted. When King describes even ordinary places, like hotel rooms, hackles rise. “But hotel rooms are just naturally creepy places, don't you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV?”
For two decades, no paying guests stayed in Room 1408. Then a man arrives who refuses to believe in the supernatural and deliberately defies spirits. Will unearthly forces teach him a lesson in the Hotel Dolphin's notorious room?
“Riding the Bullet” has the familiar theme of a hitchhiker picked up by a long-dead driver. “I could see a heavy black line which circled his throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper arm, only the line around the driver's throat wasn't a tattoo. Dozens of black marks crossed it vertically. They were the stitches put in by whoever had put his head back on his body.”
Told that someone will die, either the hitchhiker or his ailing mom, the ride-along protagonist must choose. “ ‘Who rides the Bullet and who stays on the ground. You or your mother.’ He turned and looked at me with his drowning moonlit eyes. He smiled more fully and I saw most of his teeth were gone, knocked out in the crash.”
From Bangor, Maine, King has dominated bestseller lists since the 1970s. His scary novels, many turned into horror movies, include Carrie, Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary, Needful Things, Desperation, Cell, Dreamcatcher and Bag of Bones.
This author writes so many great stories and few disappointing ones. No dismal efforts appear in Everything's Eventual.
Anyone with heartbeat irregularities should open this book only with medications near at hand. Otherwise, the results could be tragic, not “eventual”.
Approval rating: 80 per cent.
For more information: www.stephenking.com
(December 14, 2011)
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