Stephen King has been publishing short story collections since the 1970's, and they often include some of his best work (my favorite is "The Jaunt" from Skeleton Crew). I don't know if any of the stories in You Like It Darker are destined to rank among my favorites, but I really loved a few of these stories and I think they're all at least pretty good. I'm happy to report that Uncle Stevie has not lost his Shine when it comes to short stories.
In You Like It Darker, you get everything from paranormal-spiced crime fiction to science fiction to horror to straightforward mimetic fiction. There's even a novella-length sequel to Cujo 40+ years after the original novel was published.
It's hard to review short story collections. Do you review each story? Or themes? Or your favorites? I'm also writing this a few weeks after finishing the book, so instead maybe I'll just talk about some of those that for whatever reason are sticking in my mind as most memorable at the moment.
"Two Talented Bastids" is an exploration of the secret to two men and their success, with a fun science fictional twist of a somewhat X-Files type (King did actually write for The X-Files at least once).
"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" finds King back somewhere in the neighborhood of The Outsider, not so much in characters or plot, but in the idea of how law enforcement might relate to something outside of naturalistic explanation. In philosophical terms, it's an exploration of absurdity in Camus's sense: how do we react to a universe that's weirder than we can explain? One detective refuses to believe that Coughlin's dream revealed the location of a murder victim, not unreasonably at first, but more obsessively as the novella goes on. And what does Danny do with this weird dream he can't shake? It's a fascinating story.
"The Turbulence Expert" was one of my favorites of the collection. King imagines a secret society of psychic operators who keep airplane turbulence from killing people (King describes it better, of course). This one felt like vintage 80's or 90's King-- it felt like it could have been in Skeleton Crew or Nightmares and Dreamscapes. There are enough ideas here for a novella or even a novel (heck, maybe even a whole series), but I kind of like that King just sketches a little corner of a vaster world and lets the reader wonder at the larger implications.
"Rattlesnakes" was getting all the hype. And for good reason! It's a sequel to Cujo that involves one that novel's characters: Vic Trenton, father of the poor deceased Tad. Decades later in 2020, Vic is living in south Florida near "Rattlesnake Key." You might think this one is about rattlesnakes, but it's actually about ... ghosts of all things. And of course Vic's painful memories of losing his son and the life he lived afterwards. King doesn't write a lot of straightforward sequels, so it's fascinating to see what this character is up to 40 years later. It also becomes poignant and thoughtful, almost a bit melancholy ... all in a way Constant Readers will recognize and which King seems to be writing more of these days.
"The Dreamers" is another fun one with some Revival vibes. The main character is a Vietnam vet who ends up working for a mad scientist exploring dreams as an avenue to a deeper, more disturbing reality. It's some great cosmic horror.
"The Answer Man" just might be my favorite, which is odd because the first pages seemed a bit boring to me. It starts with a man in the 1930's trying to choose which type of law career to pursue and where to live with his bride. But it turns out to be a fascinating arc of his entire life with three important meetings at three points in his life with the eponymous, mysterious Answer Man.
The Answer Man doesn't give advice. He only answers questions with "yes" or "no." It's a great way to explore how knowledge of important things might affect how you live your life, deep questions about causality, destiny, fate, or what have you. For example, the main character learns he will survive WWII, so he's a bit more heroic in battle than he otherwise would have been, so did the answer merely report what he was going to do, or did what he decided to do come from the answer itself? It's a fun philosophical puzzle amidst a touching story of a man's entire life.
According to the afterward (a classic King afterward in which he addresses the reader directly), King started writing "The Answer Man" decades ago. He abandoned it unfinished until his nephew found it in a drawer in his office a few years ago and asked him to finish it.
It's fitting, I suppose, that this story was written over several decades of King's own life. And the collection itself is a nice meeting between King with his Constant Readers at this stage in his long and fascinating career.
See also my Goodreads review.
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