Length Matters Not!
I had my first honest-to-God nightmare in a long time the other night: suddenly awake at 3:45, short of breath, so sure there was something else ugly in the room that I couldn't make myself reach three feet to turn on the lamp. Two minutes later I felt like a spineless twit, the panicked onslaught of my pulse already an afterthought. Real fear, adrenal gland deep, is tough to sustain, which is why I've always preferred Stephen King's short stories to his novels. Fortunately, King himself has an enduring affection for the form, and in last year's Everything's Eventual he treats his constant readers to an involving (if uneven) set of fourteen tales.

As in previous short story collections, King provides brief commentary on each piece, and his tag for "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French" raises a ticklish question about the author at this stage in his career. "This story is about Hell," King writes, "a version of it where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. ...There's an idea that Hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition." If this is true, King's already slaving away in the fiery pit. "That Feeling..." features one of his favorite plots, a dissatisfied couple on vacation when something terrible happens. It's not that this story's bad or uninteresting; King still has a knack for springing the initially baffling, gradually unnerving detail that lets you know things will end badly. But we've seen this from him before. What's more, we've seen him do it better in "Children of the Corn," a great story no matter how many incompetent movies get tied to its bumper. The main character's déjà vu in "That Feeling..." gets drowned out by the reader's, and it's tiresome rather than hellish.

Upfront, yo.
Then again, King's always been upfront about the fact that he's tapping in to old material. Fear predates Gutenberg, and possibly even Keith Richards. If King seems a little tired when he copies himself, he seems to get a special charge from trying out somebody else's style. "The Man in the Black Suit" is written with "Young Goodman Brown" in mind. The suspicion here is that anyone inviting comparison with Hawthorne can only come out to the good, but there's more to it than that. By setting the story in turn-of-the-century rural America, King finds a voice for evil that's subtle and mannered, persuasive in its indirections. When he writes in more contemporary settings, King's bad guys sound too often like an eleven-year-old who's just learning how to cuss. I mean, it's nice that he recognizes that there's something juvenile in even the most sophisticated malice, but who's really fooled by that sort of appeal? The Man in the Black Suit unsettles us with the elegance of his insinuations, an elegance King arrives at in part by pretending he's another writer instead of the one he often is. (See also "Jerusalem's Lot" in Night Shift, a riff on Lovecraft that's so creepy I can't read it alone even in daylight, or "Nora" in Skeleton Crew, where he channels Poe flawlessly and refreshes both necrophilia and the unreliable narrator.)

"The Man in the Black Suit" won the O. Henry Best Short Story Award back in 1996. Like the other stories in this volume, it's made its debut elsewhere prior to appearing between these two covers. "Riding the Bullet," originally published as an e-book, introduces itself to those of us insufficiently cyber to have caught it the first time around. It's an unusually skillful blend of natural and supernatural queasiness. "The Little Sisters of Eleuria" is a prequel to King's increasingly protracted Dark Tower series. Your reviewer's missed out on the Dark Tower series, but this story gives a convincing sense of why fellow newmoanyeah staffer Jay Mastaitis has been raving about it so insistently for so long. The world we glimpse here is such an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of dislocated weirdness: western smushed up against sci-fi, then cut with a pseudo-Celtic medievalism. It's as if pop culture is a giant junkyard (no, not a waste land, Mr. Eliot), and King's cobbled together an improbably functional robot from carefully culled debris.

Everything's Not Cohesive
Given the disparate venues in which these selections have appeared, Everything's Eventual is a little unsatisfying as a collection in that not everything here belongs together. It lacks the cohesiveness of Skeleton Crew. But there's something to be said for being able to pick and choose. Alfie Zimmer, the lead character in "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away," has been collecting bathroom graffiti from twenty years on the road. It's a modest habit, which may or may not be enough to stave off the drudgery of keeping on, but King departs from his usual chat 'n' splat to make it believable. I doubt he would have tried to do this in a novel, which can be an all-or-nothing proposition. In these short stories, the reader (like Alfie) gets to weigh what works and what doesn't with a more judicious eye, and it's nice to be trusted with that sort of decision.