★★★★☆ | Horror | Audio/Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I’m continuing my quest to read every book published by Stephen King. I’m down to short story collections and a few of his less (ahem) popular novels.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes isn’t King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
My favorites from the collection:
- Head Down. My favorite piece wasn’t even fiction. It was a long essay about King’s hometown Little League baseball team going to the state championships (King’s son Owen played on the team). I’ve only read one other essay/memoir by Stephen King, and that was On Writing, which I loved. This one brought back sweet memories of my kids playing baseball and reminded me how much I love the game.
- My Pretty Pony. This little gem was resurrected from a Richard Bachman novel that was never published. It’s a poignant story about a grandfather “giving instruction” to his grandson about the meaning of life.
Having a pony to ride was better than having no pony at all, no matter how the weather of its heart might lie.
- Dolan’s Cadillac. A terrific story of a well-planned act of revenge told by a narrator who has almost certainly come unhinged.
- Umney’s Last Case. It’s a rip-off of a classic Raymond Chandler story until it turns in on itself in a very meta way. I loved it.
In an 800-page collection, there were some clunkers and some campy and absurd horror tales, but I enjoyed most of these stories. If you wonder how King does it, he shares this in the end notes:
Craft is terribly important, that the often tiresome process of draft, redraft, and then draft again is necessary to produce good work, and that hard work is the only acceptable practice for those of us who have some talent but little or no genius.