I recently started calling Stephen King short stories "little Kings." 1993's Nightmares and Dreamscapes is another great collection of little Kings. It's an interesting (and long: almost 900 pages!) collection with shades of both King's earlier and later career. I can't do justice to every story in this humble review (did I mention it's long?), but I will say there were some nice gems here and the one I was most looking forward to, "Crouch End," did not disappoint.
I always love King's intros, and this one is great. Everyone says it feels like King is talking directly to us Constant Readers, but it's true. Be sure to also check out the notes on individual stories in the back of the book.
"Dolan's Cadillac" is almost a novella. It's weird revenge story involving a Las Vegas mobster (apparently they made a movie out of it starring Christian Slater, which sounds interesting). It wasn't my favorite, but it's clever and more enjoyable than the other story about criminals, "The Fifth Quarter," which appears much later.
You get some classic King fare that wouldn't be out of place in his earlier collections (some of the stories were even written much earlier), like the gnarly story of a teacher gone mad in "Suffer the Little Children," the vampire pilot story "The Night Flier," the bizarrely eerie "The Moving Finger" (which is just what the title suggests, only detached and growing in your bathroom), a creepy office building story with "Sneakers," classic creepy toy story "Chattery Teeth," and maybe the best of the more old school stories of Rock 'n Roll Heaven (or is it hell?), "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band."
There are even a few post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories, like "The End of the Whole Mess," "Home Delivery," and (arguably) "The Ten O'Clock People" (okay, maybe that last one is "apocalypse in progress").
Some of the stories that felt like King's later work (not that you can draw a sharp line; the guy still loves a good gory scare even today): a poignant story of a a town over decades ("It Grows on You"), a weird but nice story of a hotel maid whose son is a famous author ("Dedication"), a grandfather's life instructions to his grandson about the passage of time ("My Pretty Pony"), and a story of children dealing with their obnoxious stepfather and a mysterious house that felt to me like a Ray Bradbury Twilight Zone episode ("The House on Maple Street"). There's a little bonus retelling of a Hindu parable ("The Beggar and the Diamond"... I'm not familiar with the source, but there are thousands and thousands of these stories).
And there are even a couple style homages of detective fiction: a fun Sherlock Holmes story in which Watson solves a case before Holmes ("The Doctor's Case") and a Raymond Chandler homage that I found a bit boring at first until there was a delightful twist that may be a preview of what King would later do in the last two Dark Tower books ("Umney's Last Case").
The only things I didn't care for as much were the nonfiction article on King's son's Little League team (originally published in The New Yorker... I skimmed the baseball details but found the life lessons interesting) and the screenplay ("Sorry, Right Number"), which just didn't grab me for some reason (maybe it was too jarring to get a screenplay among the stories).
"Crouch End" was one of the main reasons I picked this up (also, I've just been digging King's short stories lately). King's explicitly Lovecraftian story? Yes, please! An American woman in London loses her husband to... well, what, exactly? The story unfolds in very Lovecraft-y nested narratives as the woman tells her story to the local police. And this isn't just inspired by Lovecraft (like It or the Todash Darkness), it explicitly mentions Lovecraftian entities (Nyalathotep FTW!).
I have complicated feelings about Lovecraft (due to his racism and xenophobia), so maybe this would be a better intro to that mythos for contemporary readers than the man himself (although there are even better authors to read there, who take on Lovecraft's racism directly, like Victor LaValle). One weird thing: this story is set in England, whereas almost all of King's other work is set in the US (or Mid-World as the case may be). While he's quintessentially an American author, I've always wanted a little more international King works, so this is a nice change of pace.
This collection is bit of a grab bag of different types of stuff, which I like. By this time King was famous enough that they'd make it 900 pages long and even put his nonfiction about his son's baseball team in there if he wanted it (and he did, for better or for worse). He was no longer just the "King of Horror," as this diverse buffet of offerings demonstrates. (Idly I wonder if any other writer today has this degree of creative freedom in this world of marketing to a specific niche with targeted social media ads ...)
If I could sum up this motliest of crews, a major theme of most of the stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes is a riff on the basic idea of "Crouch End": there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Sometimes things we don't understand poke their way into our familiar lives and worldviews. Sometimes life stops making sense. This can be terrifying, but, as these stories reveal to Constant Readers, it's rarely boring.
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