Stephen King’s thriller novels do not attract me, and I rarely read him, although his memoir, On Writing, was brilliant. And I usually shy away from collections of short stories, mainly because it seems that just as you’re becoming absorbed by the fictional world, the story ends.
But I picked up this book because the cover said that King introduces each story with a piece on when, where or how he came to write it. It turns out he’s not that keen on short stories either. In an introduction to the collection he acknowledges that he’s really a novelist, and yet he occasionally enjoys the intense experience of writing short stories.
“It can be invigorating, sometimes even shocking, like a waltz with a stranger you will never see again, or a kiss in the dark…”
Short stories require an acrobatic skill that “takes a lot of tiresome practice… Miscues that can be overlooked in a novel become glaringly obvious in a short story. Strict discipline is necessary… I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction”.
Well, reading this collection makes it clear that King’s talent has few limitations. He is an extraordinarily clever writer, which of course we know, but it is a great pleasure to be reminded of it.
He has created a world of characters, ordinary people going about their everyday lives until something terrifying or weird or extraordinary happens to them.
The first, Mile 81, is surreal, about a man-eating car and the people who dance around it before being sucked in and digested. It came to him, he writes, as a student, regularly driving a stretch of lonely highway to visit a girlfriend. What if one day his old station wagon conked out on the journey – would someone stop to see if he was all right?
He took it further. What if his station wagon was an impostor, a terrible trap for the unwary?
“I thought it would make a good story, and it did.”
It is the ordinariness of the car’s victims, contrasted with the horror of the car, that makes the story so compelling.
In a sense this collection is a masterclass in writing. Sometimes a story arrives in his head complete, he says, but more usually it arrives in two parts: first the cup and then the handle.
He keeps a box of cups in his head, waiting for the handle to appear. “You can’t go looking for a handle, no matter how beautiful the cup may be; you have to wait for it to appear.”
So the story that became Batman and Robin have an Altercation started with King almost having an accident in his car after a truck driver turned in front of him.
A second truck driver had to slam on his brakes, and flashed a finger at the first driver. There was a moment when this could have developed into real road rage, but it passed.
King imagined if the two guys had started slugging it out there on the highway, but this in itself was not a recipe for a short story.
It was, he says, a cup with no handle.
Then, a year or so later he was in a restaurant and saw a man in his fifties cutting up an older man’s steak, while the older man stared vacantly over his head.
“I decided they were father and son, and there it was: the handle for my road rage cup.”
When you read the story that follows, the roots are obvious, and yet he weaves them into a story that starts off gently and ends in a shocking finale. He really is a master.
This collection is a great read, and the introductions for each story make it even better.
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is published by Hodder and Stoughton