Stephen King--Just After Sunset

Just After Sunset was an impulse purchase. I was in Borders to pick up Inherent Vice (which has been a pretty good time so far) and happened to walk past a big display for the paperback release of King's newest collection of short stories on the way to the register.

I've always considered King first and foremost a superb writer of short stories. Since writing short stories has been, ever since the 1950s, a poor man's game, an indulgence of already famous writers and artschool trustafarians, there aren't too many good short story writers left.

The stories in Just After Sunset can be divided into two groups: The ones that suck and the ones that don't. Sad to say, there are more of the former and fewer of the latter than in any of King's other collections.

In the interest of staying upbeat at this ungodly hour (it's early in the morning, but that's well past midnight when adjusted for us daysleepers) I'll start with the stories that were enjoyable.

Rest Stop: Rest Stop is a story about a famous writer of hardboiled fiction who publishes under a pseudonym and whose quotidian mannerisms as a wholly unremarkable professor of literature are wildly at odds with his authorial persona. He breaks up a domestic dispute he stumbles into at a rest stop along the highway, and the line between the badass character who has made him a fortune and his own milquetoast mannerisms become slightly blurry. This is the most mature and satisfying iteration of King's career long obsession with the question of the relationship between writers and the worlds they create when they write.

Stationary Bike: Another story about a hack artist who begins to immerse himself in a world of his own creation. The narrative is sloppy and King clusterfucks the climax, but it was still a fun read.

N [Lovecraft Mythos] Another of King's postcards to Lovecraft. A shrink slowly descends into madness after a series of visits from a patient who is convinced he has blundered onto a spot where reality is wearing thin and The Old Ones are poised to break through. King, despite his obvious piety for HPL, is staggeringly more gifted as a storyteller than Lovecraft ever was and so his "tribute stories" often turn out better than any of the weird tales to which he's paying tribute.

The Cat From Hell: A professional hitman meets his doom trying to assassinate a vengeful spirit in the guise of a house cat. The back story is kept to a minimum, the hitman is fairly likable (King has always been eerily good at writing sympathetic criminals), and the story is unapologetically weird. It's one of the best stories he's written since Night Flier.

Mute: Mute takes the form of a lapsed Catholic's bizarre confession to a priest. It is well written, engaging, and extremely creepy. A quibble: Like so many horror writers, King has a difficult time writing female characters.* King's women tend to be fairy tale princesses, or fairy tale witches, with very little room for nuance in between. By writing from the point of view of an estranged husband whose wounds are still fresh he mitigates this weakness slightly--the narrator of the frame story's bitterness is plausible and his offhanded admissions of his own indiscretions make him just unreliable enough as a narrator to give King some distance.

In total, this is 192 pages of decent fiction. Now, for the rest:

Willa: Unreadable. There are some passengers on a train. Or are there? Some shit happens to them. Or does it? I got pissed off. Or did I? Yes, yes I did. Harold Bloom probably liked it, though.

Gingerbread Girl: There is an uninteresting woman and she's being pursued in an uninteresting way by somebody who is uninteresting and this lasts for 84 pages.

Harvey's Dream: This was published in The New Yorker and I think it was meant to be poignant. I can sum it up thus: Dear New Yorker, please send me money and handjobs from reviewers. Love, SK.

The Things They Left Behind It's described by King as a "9/11 Story." It's been a long, long time since I've disliked a narrator this much.

Graduation Afternoon: Appalling. Here's the weird thing though--this reads exactly like a terrible, terrible knockoff of Less Than Zero/Informers era Ellis.**

King gave Lunar Park some bizarrely effusive praise, and there are two reasons why this always bothered me. First, I remember seeing an interview a long time ago where King talked about meeting a hip young American writer in the late 80s who turned out to be a world class cunt. I'd always assumed this was Ellis or McInerney or maybe Donna Tartt. I guess McInerney is the most likely, since King took some pretty personal shots at him in The Stand. The other thing is that I remember an introduction to one of King's books a long time ago where he ranted rather bitterly about the emergence of what he considered facile, off-putting minimalism in American fiction. Saying "I hate minimalism" and then saying, years later "But I love Ellis" is like saying "I hate circles of dough covered in sauce and toppings, but I sure love pizza."

Anyway this is a really hamfisted horror story about rich, indolent kids that reads like shitty Informers fanfic. Its three major weaknesses are plot, characterization, and narrative style. King also has this problem where he can never seem to write about rich people without getting pie-eyed and self-conscious, even though he has been a rich person with more money than God or Ellis for most of his adult life. Contrast this with a 20something Ellis, who wrote of wealth and affluence so laconically that I've known bright people and good readers who have read Less Than Zero from cover to cover and never realized just how fucking rich Clay's folks were.

The New York Times at &c: A ghost story that's also a love story and also a story about getting older!

Ayana: Have you ever seen Bagger Vance? Have you ever said "Man, I'd love to see Bagger Vance?" No? Save yourself 25 pages.

A Very Tight Place: Two rich aging men in Florida, one of them gay, both of them going nuts, are having a lonesome private war. The premise was so promising, and this is the one short story that would probably have made a hell of a good 300 page novel. Unfortunately, as it is written, the 82 pages is much too long as it quickly descends into a poorly executed grossout story with an unconvincing denouement.
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* Less trouble than Lovecraft, who simply never included a woman in his stories unless she was an honest-to-God witch, or Koontz whose misogyny is palpable. The only horror writer I can think of offhand who writes interesting female characters is Barker.

** I've written enough terrible knockoffs of Ellis to know one when I see one.