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The Gingerbread Girl, N., A Very Tight Place, Rest Stop -- these were all home runs in my opinion, and enough to make this book worth the price. HOWEVER, when it's a hit, it's out of the park.
Now keep in mind, when King misses, it's bad. This collection is extremely hit and miss.
There's no getting around that. Some of these stories were complete wastes of time.
I'm a huge King fan -- though maybe not a "constant reader" like some of you -- but there were some bad entries here. Some of these shorts have stayed with me for days or even weeks after finishing them.
Willa was a nice short little story to get the blood flowing and the eyes working. It wasn't a waste of time, but I would have ripped some of those pages out had I been the editor. The Gingerbread Girl is a story of running, and how running can either save you or.well.not save you I guess. It was sweet and happy with a bit of sadness tossed in for flavor.2. is probably my favorite in the book and actually kept me up late to finish.
4. N. A look at what would you do if you found yourself in a situation you needed to handle, but weren't sure if you could.5. A Very Tight Place is probably my second favorite in the book. However, I also love Stephen King, so I found myself reading a book of his short stories thinking that it would probably be ok as one great would more than cancel out the bad.
I'd like to start by saying that I'm not a big fan of short stories. There were only a couple of the stories that didn't please me as much as they could have.had they been developed and expanded into full size books. Good old fashioned Stephen King horror.9. It reads almost as if King started to write one and then stopped after the first chapter.8. Harvey's dream left me with one question.What. agian.
Rest Stop was one of the best in the book. A woman finds herself pitted against quite a psycho.3. For the most part it was a great book. Mute was very entertaining if predictable. (Richard you will not want to read this one).10. The Cat From Hell had me laughing, but I don't think I was supposed to. I totally missed the point on this one. The Things They Left Behind was touching and moving, but it left me wondering What.
What happens when you confess your innermost thoughts to a hitchhiker that you think is deaf and mute. There never seems to be enough time to develop anything. A story about moving on and accepting death.11. The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates is one I hardy even remember reading. Graduation Afternoon is a great start for a book. Well, let me tell you it isn't what you expect.12. A good old fashioned suspense about a neighbor that takes his frustrations out on his gay neighbor.but maybe the tables will end up being turned.So, there you have it. So I'll give a short wrap-up of each one, but I don't want to give too much away.1.
A story of healing and miracles.13. Stationary Bike was another excellent one, where imagination meets reality and a man may have gone too far trying to get into shape.6. It was well written, but the topic deserved to have more to it than just a short story.7. Ayana reminded a bit of The Green Mile. But if I did that then we wouldn't have the magical number of thirteen stories.3.5/5
It's little wonder that I keep postponing my reading of Duma Key and have actually skipped over that one to read Just After Sunset, his latest short story collection. Rest Stop is a good example of this, in which the main character is a writer who adopts two different personalities to fit his writing, a theme already explored thoroughly in books like The Dark Half and Misery.Will this please King fans. The Cell was a bit better though hardly vintage King, and while Blaze was great, it was also not really a recent book but rather a "lost" novel from King's most fruitful period in the 1970s and 1980s. Lisey's Story, Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8 and The Colorado Kid are all very flawed books. There was a time when the arrival of a Stephen King novel was a cause for celebration. The unoriginality will not be an issue and so-so King is still better than many other writers at their best. What's worse is there are some stories that have a been-there-done-that feel, in which King seems to be rehashing old story ideas. As stated earlier, there are no really bad stories, but there are a couple weak ones such as Harvey's Dream, in which a man relates a dream that may or may not predict the future.
Will it please non-King fans. The fourteen stories range in quality from so-so to good: there is nothing really bad here, but there is also nothing really great.Among the best in the lot is N, a distinctly Lovecraftean story about an amateur photographer who happens upon Ackerman's Field, a bit of land that drives any who view it into madness. Of late, however, his writing has been rather lacking. Probably not, as they will know he's done better and more original work. The good news is it's not a bad collection, but the bad news is that it is not King at his peak. A Very Tight Place is also good, involving a man put by his enemy in a very unpleasant trap. Probably. I'd recommend this book only for those in the latter group, though if you're a King fan, you'll probably pick this one up despite any discouragements and make your own judgment.
Many stories hearken back to some of his earlier work, albeit with softer or more thoughtful edges.Two of the first three stories in the collection are ghost stories. "The Things They Left Behind" is another bittersweet effort which seems to be supernatural retelling of Don DeLillo's Falling Man: A Novel. As a result, "Just After Sunset", his latest short story collection, does not have a large number of memorably chilling stories. He's made serious efforts to mature and broaden his output, focussing primarily on stories of grief and loss. When I was in junior high school there was no scarier book in my collection than Skeleton Crew. "Ayana" is yet another bitersweet tale of death in the family, which may have been stronger had there not been three or four similar stories earlier in the collection.Finally, "A Very Tight Place" is vintage King: a gross-out survival story which again works better as black comedy than as horror.All together this is a vastly different King than the writer who terrified me with "Skeleton Crew" 25 years ago. "Stationary Bike" features a character taking a geographically improbably crosstown bus from 99th Street to SoHo, but the rest of it is a cute story about an artist trying to paint away his high cholesterol. This is much more comedic than the earlier novel.Next up is a loose trilogy set in New York City.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates", although superficially similar to "The Things They Left Behind", shows King at his most emotional (a la the early chapters of Bag of Bones). Third in the collection is "Harvey's Dream", an odd bit of character study with an ambiguously ghostly ending. I didn't read every story, but the few that I did read gave me nightmares for years ("Survivor Type" and "The Raft" among the grisliest).Stephen King is no longer the author of "Skeleton Crew" or other creep-fests. Last in this line is "Graduation Afternoon", the one story in the book that kept me up nights -- although the next two stories, "N." and "The Cat From Hell", are equally disturbing (albeit in markedly different ways).The book closes out with a set of four diverse stories showing King at his most flexible. First up is "Willa", probably as close as King ever comes to a happy ending (think of how many relationships end badly in his novels). Sandwiched in between those two is "Gingerbread Girl", a longish effort which starts off cut from the same cloth as Duma Key: A Novel (a psychological ghost story set in King's adopted Gulf Coast Florida home), but which takes a sharp left turn that I won't spoil."Rest Stop" seems to be a more optimistic retelling of The Dark Half, King's horrific love letter to pseudonymous mystery writers. "Mute" is an Alfred Hitchcock-style mystery with a rather predictable black comic twist. However, although some of his newer stories tend to drag, the end result is definitely worthy of the King brand.
This is another short story collection, akin to "Everything's Eventual." On the whole, the stories in this collection are interesting. There are no surprise punches in this novel - every story is what you would expect from Stephen King. This is a great book to bring along on a trip to pass the time.
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