Stephen King's "Just After Sunset"

I'll start this review by saying that I'm not an avid Stephen King reader. In fact, this is the first Stephen King book I've ever read from cover to cover. I started reading The Shining several years back and liked it but never felt compelled to finish. I mean, if you've seen the film adaptation of The Shining you can understand my lack of interest in the source material – Stanley Kubrick's version is so damn good it makes it hard to get excited for the actual novel.

Up until a couple years ago, I had discounted Stephen King as a supermarket pulp writer. I figured that an author who pumped out books with such frequency (he's published 49) and with such silly names and covers surely could not be worth my time. Reading Just After Sunset has changed my opinion.

In 2007, King was asked to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories anthology, and this experience motivated him to write Just After Sunset, his 5^th collection of short stories. As an introduction to the collection, King comments on how writing short stories harkens back to his roots when he was struggling to make money publishing stories in random magazines. He remembers how exciting it was and how the writing just flew out of him. I think you can sense that spirit in Just After Sunset - more than anything else, these are fun reads and must have been fun for King to write. 

While reading the stories in this collection, I noticed something. There are moments in each when I stop and appreciate a sentence, or the pacing of a section, or a character. And then there are other moments when I stop and shake my head, feeling like I've encountered throw-away lines or trite cliches. I think this comes with the territory. Years from now, people will probably not read Stephen King in their Literature class (in their higher level Genre class, maybe - wait a minute...are they already doing that? it's possible), but that is not to say that he doesn't have the chops. It's a fact that these stories have been published in magazines like the New Yorker and McSweeney's. There wasn't a story in this collection that I had to labor through. Some, I loved. Others, I didn't necessarily feel an excitement for but still enjoyed. With King, you have to take the strokes of genius with the occasional commercial elements. Now, on to the stories:

My favorite is “Stationary Bike” – I love this story for the wonderful complexity and ingenuity of the setup. A commercial artist needs to lose weight so he paints a mural depicting a country road in front of his stationary bike. But the motivation becomes dangerous as he imagines characters into life and struggles to keep his grip on reality. It's such a great / interesting story because the frightening and suspenseful elements are all coming out of the action going on in a painting / fictional world that a fat man had to create for himself in an attempt to lose weight.  

The “Cat from Hell” is a treat in that “give me what I expect” kind of way. If you don't know much about Stephen King, you might expect him to have written a story “The Cat from Hell”. You can probably even guess the plot – possessed cat seems to be killing off everyone around it and a hired hand comes in to fix the problem but may have met his match because this cat... This story has long been anthologized and is included here as a kind of bonus. It's intriguing enough but the thing you'll remember is the payoff at the end and the rather gory and very graphic details.

“A Very Tight Place” is the most disgusting of the stories. There are a lot of cringe worthy moments and King even wrote in his notes that he grossed himself out at points during the writing of this one. The main character is a gay man and he has to deal with a very homophobic / insane man for much of the plot - this is just one instance where King engages serious content within a story that largely exists to entertain / scare. “Harvey's Dream” is very short and succinct. In its few pages, you get a vivid image that will stick with you. I can still picture a scene from this story, weeks after I've finished reading it.

“Willa” is maybe the only story in the collection that I would describe as “cute”. It's a story about ghosts and it has some sadness and some scare but that's not what I took away from it – I remember the image of ghosts dancing together in a road side bar. They're not going to hurt anyone, but they do make for quite a scene. “The Things They Left Behind” is, as King explains in his notes, his attempt to engage the September 11^th attacks and write about them in a way that could help him to understand what happened and how it affected the people who were there and who were directly touched by it.

The most forgettable story for me was “New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” – maybe it would work better as a movie? The crux of the action happens on a telephone and it reminds me of the Mothman Prophecies and the scenes in that movie where so much suspense and tension happened via phantom phone calls. This story feels like a scene more than a complete and finished work. 

If you have seen the Coen Brothers' A Simple Man, and remember the abrupt ending to that movie you will recognize a similarity in the story “Graduation Afternoon”. “N” is one of the longer stories and was later made into an animated miniseries. It feels like the most ambitious of the stories and involves a mix of writing styles and a very involved presence of the supernatural which is less conventional / pulpy than ghosts or cats from hell. During some of the conversations between the N character and his psychiatrist, I felt like I was reading an Edgar Allen Poe tale – there was this horror and just “off” feeling about the conversations, but it was always kept muffled and never allowed to come fully to the surface. “N” has a slow and strong progression. Each page is peppered with hints and tips of the inevitable and frightening conclusion.

I appreciated the brief section at the end of the book, where Stephen King writes a short explanation of where he was coming from with each of the stories. It's good to have a context and a frame for these imaginative worlds and characters. While a story can stand on its own, it can also be enriched by context, which I think it is here. So, in conclusion, I say YES! to Stephen King. He may write pulp/horror fiction but he does it well. I'm looking forward to reading more Stephen King in the future and think I'll next take the plunge into one of his epic books - The Stand.