I've been enjoying Stephen King's short fiction lately, and I continued to do so with 2015's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
While there were a couple stories ("little Kings" as I recently called them) I didn't care for as much, I enjoyed the vast majority of this 2015 collection, which shows that King's more recent short stories are up there with his early collections like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew.
Some selected stories:
"Mile 81" is classic King: several POV characters intersecting at an abandoned rest stop for a bit of otherworldly creepiness after we get to know them. Along with a couple others, this might technically be a novella.
"Premium Harmony" is an emotionally complex tale of a bickering couple, one of handful of straightforward fiction without any fantastic elements, which it's important to remember, King can do really well (see Different Seasons). Also in that vein are "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation" (father and son deal with the father's Alzheimer's) and "Herman Wouk is Still Alive" (a woman under stress goes on a road trip with her friend and kids while a couple of aging poets go on an intersecting road trip) are two of the most heartbreaking stories. I especially enjoyed the latter, although "enjoyed" is maybe the wrong word for a story that makes you think about the fragility of life and what philosophers call moral luck.
Speaking of morality, "Morality" is a fine thought experiment about the limits of people's conceptions of morality, and might make a fun topic for a discussion of consequentialism and deontology.
The only stories I really didn't care for were both non-speculative as well. "Blockade Billy" seemed like it might be a horror tale with a bit of baseball, but turned out to be a rather long baseball tale with a bit of (non-fantastic) horror (your mileage may vary, especially if you love baseball). "Drunken Fireworks" is an amusing concept with some funny bits (a pair of families compete with fireworks over several years), but the story is stretched further than the premise can support.
Stories in the more fantastic direction or that have a speculative element or whatever the term is for stuff that snooty Capital-L Literature people don't like are "The Dune," "Bad Little Kid," "Mister Yummy," and "The Little Green God of Agony." These are all classic King stories with an edge to them. "Summer Thunder" also packs an edge as a much shorter, more depressing, and sadly probably more realistic version of The Stand--if the world were really ending beyond all hope, would you choose to rage against the dying of the light?
But King also does some more whimsical stuff like "Afterlife," which for my money is the best little unexpected gem of this collection. It combines King's take on the always-amusing concept of afterlife as bureaucracy (this was before The Good Place, but it's an old idea) and combines it with the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return. If you could live your life over, but exactly as you lived it, would you choose to do so?
There were two expected gems for me: "Obits" and "Ur," the former because I had read it before, the latter because of its Dark Tower connection.
"Obits" is the only one of these stories that I had read before, when it was nominated for a Hugo in 2016 (the first year I voted for the Hugos. It didn't win.). It's a riff on a similar theme King explored decades earlier in "Word Processor of the Gods," but it's far more developed and far creepier. A writer for a fledgling website starts writing imaginary obituaries that come true. People die. Thrills and deep thoughts on death ensue.
As an unreasonably obsessed Dark Tower fan, "Ur" was the main reason I picked up this collection. And it did not disappoint. What if there are not just a few different universes, but millions upon millions of them? And what if you had a device that gave you glimpses into these different levels of the Tower, er, reality?
The emphasis on the Amazon Kindle is a little cheesy I admit (King originally wrote this to be released as a stand alone on Kindle), but the mind boggling concept of multiple dimensions combined with some good stuff on freedom and determinism make for a great story.
Like most of King's Dark Tower tie-ins, you could easily enjoy "Ur" knowing nothing about that series, but for my fellow Tower junkies, it's essential reading. Fans of 11/22/63 may also enjoy this one, but of course with King it's all related on the wheel of ka. (Which reminds me, I'm reading Black House next to round out my Dark Tower tie ins).
See also my Goodreads review.
No comments:
Post a Comment