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- Jan 22, 2008
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I don’t read much Stephen King, and while I like a few of his books a lot (in particular, Salem’s Lot and The Shning), I wouldn’t call myself an avid fan. I’ve always liked his non-fiction best of all: On Writing and Dance Macabre are two of the best books about writing that I’ve ever seen. Reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a collection of short stories, reminds me of what King’s strengths and limits are.
Perhaps strangely, I find King's writing at its best when he's not actually talking about horror. Two of the stories in this volume deal solely with crime – “The Fifth Quarter” and “Dolan’s Cadillac” – and both are very strong. The first reads like the closing scenes of a ferocious thriller, and the second is a macabre piece of revenge drama, and they suggest that he would have made an excellent noir writer. One thing that comes through from King’s writing is his intense interest in normal people. I’ve heard King criticised for only talking about small-town white folks (he seems to occupy a lot of the same social territory as Bruce Springsteen), but he really seems to know the people he writes about. Where, say, Clive Barker’s horror thrives on the spectacular, King is at his best when describing mundane people with family worries, approaching deadlines and debts they can’t quite pay. At times, this becomes a liability: King has a weakness for schmaltz, and “My Pretty Pony” is a great big sickly dollop of it.
It’s the actual horrors themselves that disappoint. King seems wedded to the “evil object” concept, and one of the stories, “Chattery Teeth”, feels as if he wrote it as a result of a bet to turn the most harmless item imaginable into a vessel of terror. So we have evil shoes, an evil house, an evil phone... When we do see actual monsters, they’re quite often old-fashioned and unintentionally a bit naff: vampires of the Herman Munster variety crop up two or three times.
However, when King breaks free from this, he becomes much more powerful. “The Moving Finger” is a good piece of surreal horror that is perhaps disturbing because it is so absurd, and “Suffer the Little Children” and “The End of the Whole Mess” are both interesting and unsettling. Despite its revelation, “The Night Flier” is really about mood, the sense of loneliness and fragility that comes from a journalist’s pursuit of a scoop in his light aircraft, and scores highly in that regard.
King rounds off the collection with a few homages to other writers, which work reasonably well although they’re not my cup of tea, and a couple of articles on baseball, where he makes a subject in which I have no interest quite entertaining. I wonder whether he would have made a good journalist, like a more humane P.J. O’Rourke? The author’s notes on his stories are, as ever, intriguing.
So I would cautiously recommend Nightmares and Dreamscapes, although none of the stories is a masterpiece. It shows King’s strengths and weaknesses, and includes some strong writing as well as a few oddities. I think King is a very good writer, and, when he resists the temptation to follow the easy route, he is capable of startling and powerful ideas.
Perhaps strangely, I find King's writing at its best when he's not actually talking about horror. Two of the stories in this volume deal solely with crime – “The Fifth Quarter” and “Dolan’s Cadillac” – and both are very strong. The first reads like the closing scenes of a ferocious thriller, and the second is a macabre piece of revenge drama, and they suggest that he would have made an excellent noir writer. One thing that comes through from King’s writing is his intense interest in normal people. I’ve heard King criticised for only talking about small-town white folks (he seems to occupy a lot of the same social territory as Bruce Springsteen), but he really seems to know the people he writes about. Where, say, Clive Barker’s horror thrives on the spectacular, King is at his best when describing mundane people with family worries, approaching deadlines and debts they can’t quite pay. At times, this becomes a liability: King has a weakness for schmaltz, and “My Pretty Pony” is a great big sickly dollop of it.
It’s the actual horrors themselves that disappoint. King seems wedded to the “evil object” concept, and one of the stories, “Chattery Teeth”, feels as if he wrote it as a result of a bet to turn the most harmless item imaginable into a vessel of terror. So we have evil shoes, an evil house, an evil phone... When we do see actual monsters, they’re quite often old-fashioned and unintentionally a bit naff: vampires of the Herman Munster variety crop up two or three times.
However, when King breaks free from this, he becomes much more powerful. “The Moving Finger” is a good piece of surreal horror that is perhaps disturbing because it is so absurd, and “Suffer the Little Children” and “The End of the Whole Mess” are both interesting and unsettling. Despite its revelation, “The Night Flier” is really about mood, the sense of loneliness and fragility that comes from a journalist’s pursuit of a scoop in his light aircraft, and scores highly in that regard.
King rounds off the collection with a few homages to other writers, which work reasonably well although they’re not my cup of tea, and a couple of articles on baseball, where he makes a subject in which I have no interest quite entertaining. I wonder whether he would have made a good journalist, like a more humane P.J. O’Rourke? The author’s notes on his stories are, as ever, intriguing.
So I would cautiously recommend Nightmares and Dreamscapes, although none of the stories is a masterpiece. It shows King’s strengths and weaknesses, and includes some strong writing as well as a few oddities. I think King is a very good writer, and, when he resists the temptation to follow the easy route, he is capable of startling and powerful ideas.
