I’ve always enjoyed Stephen King’s shorter fiction so I had high expectations of ‘You Like It Darker‘ his latest (488 pages / 20 hours 12 minutes) short story collection. I wasn’t disappointed.
The twelve stories in the book, some quite short, some almost novel length (well, not Stephen King novel length but longer than the average novella) cover a lot of ground. They’re more speculative fiction than horror but it’s not their genre that distinguishes them but how the stories are told. I was fascinated by Stephen King’s ability to ground me firmly in a stranger’s reality, bringing people, places and periods alive and then introduce a small change or an anomaly or a What-If? speculation, that led me and the main characters into strange places where they had to function under stress and where they often discovered who they really were. When the stories were over, what lingered in my mind were not the woo-woo elements of the tale but the people and what encountering those woo-woo elements had done to them.
The stories aren’t clustered around any common theme except, perhaps, that life can always get darker, often when you least expect it. As Stephen King puts in it one story, “The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.”
A few, mainly the shorter ones, were what I think of as ‘Twilight Zone’ stories where identifying the nature of the strangeness that you’ve been aware of from the start, like a smell of rot not quite hidden by air-freshener provide a memorable sting at the end of the tale. Those were a lot of fun and provided a welcome change in pace from the longer pieces.
Many of these stories feature old men, nasty old men, violent old men, remorseful old men and old men seeking a peaceful way to live out the days that remain to them. It seemed to me that these stories were permeated with a heightened awareness of mortality that added depth to them.
I’ve reviewed each of the stories after SoundCloud clip below. I’ve tried to come up with an image and a quote that gives a sense of what each story meant to me.
I listened to the audiobook version of ‘You Like It Darker’. I hesitated to do this. The audiobook was over twenty hours long and had only one narrator, if the narrator get it wrong or even delivered a competent-but-no-more-than-that performance, I was going to get bored. Fortunately, Will Patton gave a wonderful performance, adjusting his delivery to get the most out of every story. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.
The two talented bastids of the title are men who had been friends from childhood. They’d lived their whole lives in a small town in Maine, They worked together and had achieved some social standing. Once a year, they spent a few weeks hunting deer and camping in a shack in the woods. The course of their lives seemed to be set and they were mostly content. Then, on one of their trips, something happened that dramatically altered the course of their lives. One became a sought-after artist, the other a successful novelist. ‘Two Talented Bastids‘ tells how, after the death of the novelist, his son searches for the truth of what happened out in the woods.
This is a Matryoshka Doll of a story. The first and smallest doll starts with a journalist’s suspicion that there must be an untold story that explains how a small town in Maine spawned two talented men, lifelong friends, whose careers both started in their middle years. The second doll is in the form of a read-after-my-death account from the novelist, that may or may not be fiction. The final doll, which frames the rest is the interior struggle of the everything-must have-a-rational-explanation son of the novelist to work through how much of what he has uncovered and deduced is real and what it meant for his father and what it might mean for him.
All the dolls are fascinating but it’s the son’s doll that made the story special for me. At the heart of the son’s struggle is a contemplation two things: what talent is, why some people have a lot of it and others, no matter how much they long for it, have none and what it means to be given or denied your heart’s desire.
Given how much talent Stephen King has, I found these reflections fascinating. I particularly liked one line. I believe it should be etched in stone above the entrance to every Creative Writing classroom: “Nothing can give you what isn’t already there. That’s axiomatic”
This was the first of the Twilight Zone-type stories and it was a doozie. What I liked most about the story was how clearly, after a few deft paragraphs, I could see Harold Jamieson: widower, New Yorker, taking pleasure in his recent retirement and apart from missing his wife, looking forward to what came next. Then came the twist on the Twelve Step program that provided the sting in this tale and showed me that some wrongs should not be shared. Neither Harold nor I saw it coming.
From the first page, this story stank of evil waiting to happen and yet, when it did happen, it still caught me by surprise.
This is a short but deeply disturbing story. What unnerved me was the use of the same tone to describe the details of ‘normal’ domestic life – a mother and daughter exchanging confidences while washing dishes – and the details of the bizarre, unwholesome exchanges between grandfather and grandson – watching fireflies die and sharing stories of slaughter. Then there was that ending. Let’s not go there.
This is a powerful novella. Not a pleasant read but a compelling one. It was grindingly oppressive and totally believable. Except that’s not quite right because not being believed was the source of all of Danny’s problems. His biggest problem was a KBI Investigator’s absolute and monomaniacal belief in Danny’s guilt.
Watching Danny, a nice man who was trying to do the right thing, being pulled down by his dream and its consequences until everything seemed hopeless was a claustrophobic experience made grimmer by the pain and grief caused by the crime and the growing malevolence of the KBI investigator.
I thought I knew where the story was going but the ending, which was both tense and thoughtful, caught me by surprise (again).
To me, ‘Finn‘ was the story equivalent of a chef asking: “What if I add pineapple AND birdseye chillies to this pizza?”. My answer would be “It’s bold and original but I don’t love it.”
If the idea of the story was to trigger dissonance in the reader, it succeeded with me. I couldn’t reconcile the almost jolly, sure-aren’t-we-all-stage-Irish-here? tone and the nightmarish description of the torture of an abducted man. It was as if the story itself was another form of mental torment. By the time I got to the Kafkaesque ending, I was just glad the story was over.
This is the story of a life-or-death moment that shows the different assessments of and reactions to threat, made by three generations in a family. It’s a thriller centred on a tense, tightly written action scene, made three-dimensional by the vivid depiction of the family.
This is the second story with a grandpa in it, although he’s nothing like the one we met in ‘Willie The Weirdo’. The thing about old men is that they weren’t always old. Who they are now has been shaped by things their own sons may have no conception of. This grandpa was a Vietnam Vet. He doesn’t see the same world that his son sees.
This was a fast, clever, Twilight Zone-style take on what the red screens that have appeared on some iPhones really mean. This one amused me and kept me guessing. It may even spawn a new set of conspiracy threads on Reddit.
This was another Twilight Zone-style story. I’ve spent a lot of time as human luggage on commercial flights and been bounced around quite a few times so this one appealed to me. The central conceit of the story was original and fun. The story was briskly told and felt a little sparse.
This novella is for the dog lovers (like me). There’s no high horror here but there is a solid story about a new widower whose older sister gets him a puppy. The story pulled me in and it got me to look up Collie/Mudi crosses. It was another take on being old and alone and trying to give your life shape and purpose. And, of course, it had a puppy at its heart. I wondered if this story was a tribute to Stephen King’s recently deceased dog. Molly.
This was one of my favourite stories in the collection. It was thoughtful, felt truthful and as spooky as all get out. In other words, it was classic Stephen King.
Vic, the main character, is another old man, recently widowed and trying to get his head together. He’s spending the summer at a friend’s McMansion on the Florida Keys. Vic is a character from ‘Cujo’: the husband of the woman and the father of the boy trapped in a car by a rabid Saint Bernard. I haven’t read ‘Cujo‘ but that didn’t prevent me from getting to know Vic. Vic’s troubles start when he meets his only neighbour, a widow around his own age, is a nice woman who makes great cookies but who also always pushes a double stroller that she seems to believe is occupied by her long-dead twin sons.
I admired how the supernatural slithered into the day-to-day reality of the story like wind-blown sand slowly burying a beach house. Stephen King evokes a real place, populates it with real people and then makes the supernatural overwhelmingly real.
I liked the intimacy of Vic’s interior voice and Vic’s reflections on the randomness of tragedy and the endless power of grief and guilt to erode joy.
I didn’t think I’d like this one. Lovecraftian stories tend to bounce off me. This one worked because it focused more on the struggle of a young man who has recently returned from the war in Vietnam and who has grown so used to numbing his feelings that he is now unable to connect with life and the living. His fatalism and his emotional distance gave this story of a scientist meddling with things best left alone a depth that surprised me.
‘The Answer Man‘ tells the story of Phil Parker’s three encounters with The Answer Man, the first being in 1937 when he was a new law graduate with ambitions to marry and hang out his own shingle. The last being when he is an old man approaching the end of his life.
The publisher’s summary says that this story “Asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.”.
It does do that but, on the whole, it didn’t carry me with it. I found this story too abstract and too bio-pic fast. Even so, parts of the story captured my imagination: Parker’s first encounter with TheAnswer Man, his conversations with his wife about enlisting after Pearl Harbour, The Burned Woman telling Parker her story. The parts that focused in close on people kept pulling me along, even when my interest in the overall arc of the story flagged.
Mike Finn's Fiction 