Review by New York Times Review
THERE ARE TWO DOGS in Stephen King's fat new collection, THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS (Scribner, $30). Both of them die. You expect there to be a certain amount - well, a lot - of death in a King book, and he does his best, as ever, to deliver the mortal goods. What's unusual about the tales in this volume is how many of its deaths are ordinary, mundane sorts of demises: deaths by cancer or heart failure or car accident or simple, non-supernatural homicide. Sure, in "Mile 81," the long, nearly self-parodic horror story that kicks off the book, a few people are sucked into a mysteriously voracious station wagon at an abandoned rest stop, and some, in later yarns, meet their ends with the help of otherworldly agencies: a sand dune on which the names of the soon to be dead are written, a "bad little kid" who doesn't age and who drives his victims to suicide - that kind of Kingian thing. But to a surprising extent King tries to play it straight in this collection. And that seems to make him a little nervous. (His readers know how it feels.) In the chatty introduction and head notes the author supplies here, as he often does in his collections, King addresses his "Constant Reader" in an uncharacteristically defensive, sometimes even self-deprecatory tone. He says things like this: "I may be a Professional Writer to the I.R.S. when I file my tax return, but in creative terms, I'm still an amateur, still learning my craft." And this: "The point is, you write some scary stories and you're like the girl who lives in the trailer park on the edge of town: You get a reputation." And this: "The term genre holds very little interest for me." And, maybe most tellingly, this, in his gloss on a story that draws on his own experience of pain and rehabilitation: "Like several other stories in this book, 'The Little Green God of Agony' is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I'm not in the business of confessional fiction." No, he really isn't, and the reason "The Little Green God of Agony" is one of the strongest stories in "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams" is that in this one, at least, King finds a serviceable horror metaphor for what's on his mind, rather than trying to express it more directly. There's quite a bit of territory in between what King sneeringly calls "confessional fiction" and the sort of powerful, disturbing genre fiction that, at his best, he writes as well as any American ever has, but on the evidence of this book he's still just driving around aimlessly on that long highway, looking for a place to rest. The more realistic stories here don't carry much conviction, and all but a handful of the fantastic ones feel a bit desperate, as if he were trying too hard to "entertain." The better stories seem like oddities, one-offs. There's a nice, gleefully dark tall tale about baseball, called "Blockade Billy," and a funny, spooky piece of Internet-era satire, "Obits," about a writer of death notices for a snarky Gawker-like website who discovers, to his uneasily mixed horror and delight, that he can cause people's deaths merely by writing their obituaries in advance. It's a writer's power fantasy and a writer's nightmare, and it fits perfectly in this book, in which Stephen King, still learning, seems ambivalent about his own creative powers, uncertain how he feels about staying on in that trailer park. Once, stories like "The Little Green God of Agony" came to him regularly, and his writing showed the joy he felt receiving them. But that was in another country, and besides, the dog is dead. King started writing young, and he's been at it for a long time. His first novel, "Carrie," came out in 1974, when he was 26, and he's barely paused for breath since. When William Gay's first novel, "The Long Home," was published, in 1999, its author was in his late 50s. He didn't have the time for self-doubt. Two more novels and three collections of short stories and nonfiction appeared before his death, at 70, in 2012, and now a third novel, LITTLE SISTER DEATH (Dzanc, $26.95), has surfaced, a lovely small vessel of unease salvaged from a deep river. Gay wasn't a horror writer as such, more a lyrical, word-drunk conjurer of everyday dreads, in the Southern Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers and Davis Grubb; the title and the epigraph of "Little Sister Death" are from Faulkner. But he has a supernatural tale to tell here, a version of the Bell Witch, a backcountry legend of his native Tennessee. In this short, intense novel, the name has become Beale, and the ghostly details have been changed and embellished, but the terrain, Gay's home ground, is the same, and the mood of malevolence is as thick as the air on a hot day in the American South. The lush prose suits the atmosphere. Gay moves back and forth in time as his hero, a young writer named David Binder, investigates the local legend. Binder, who is a classic asking-for-it horror-story fool, moves himself, his wife and his young daughter into the old Beale house in order to, you know, stimulate his creativity and is predictably undone - though not in a predictable way. What happens to him is worse than the grisly fates that usually befall the luckless heroes of horror fiction: worse than death. "Little Sister Death" is in fact less about death than it is about what the fear of death does to the soul. Late in the novel, Gay stops the story cold for a few paragraphs to describe what it feels like for Binder, his pregnant wife and his daughter to spend every waking moment anticipating something they can't name and can hardly imagine. "Every day was waiting," he writes, "every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases." The whole county, going through a dry spell, seems to feel that way, in abeyance: "Some days dawned with the mocking promise of rain but the sun hanging over the eastern field withdrew it, the dew vanishing, the bog along the lowland almost instantly sucked into nothingness until all there was was a malevolent red sun tracking across the horizon into a sky gone marvelously blue and absolutely cloudless." Whatever the Beale Witch is, its curse is pervasive. "That place gives me the all-overs," one character says about the Beale property. That's a fair description of the effect of "Little Sister Death." The writing life of William Sloane was even shorter than William Gay's. Sloane's only novels, "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water," appeared in 1937 and 1939, and then, still in his early 30s, he just stopped. (He spent the remaining 35 years of his life as an editor and a publisher.) These terrific books are now being reissued together in a volume called THE RIM OF MORNING (New York Review, paper, $18.95), with an introduction by Stephen King. As King notes, both stories have elements of science fiction and mystery, but, he concludes, "I would argue that these are essentially horror novels." He's right. Sloane's kind of horror doesn't much resemble King's, though, or anyone else's. "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water" are elegant and serenely paced, and they're light on both the overt shocks of a King story and the overheated prose of a weird tale by Poe or Lovecraft; Sloane's manner is patient, gentlemanly. What terrifies us, finally, in both these books is the vastness of our ignorance of the universe. In "To Walk the Night," two young men, having returned to their alma mater for a football weekend, decide to visit their old physics professor after the game and find him dead in his laboratory, burning with a strange fire: "Clear, white, silent, flickering as fast as a snake's tongue, writhing like streamers of kelp in a tide race." (That's about as shock-/ ing, and as purple, as Sloane's writing gets.) The questions, naturally, are what happened to the unfortunate scientist and why. One of the young men, a scientist himself, thinks he can find the answers; the other, the narrator, becomes increasingly sure that it would be better not to. And in any event, the answers, when they come, are only partial, and lead to larger, darker enigmas that, in the end, the narrator is relieved to admit he'll never be able to solve. As in the best ghost stories, the mystery isn't so much resolved as it is allowed to trail off suggestively into the ether, and good riddance to it. That's the basic narrative philosophy of "The Edge of Running Water," too, which is also ostensibly about the limits of science and is also at heart a ghost story. The narrator of this one, another sensibly wary young man, begins his weird monologue with a mournful sort of urgency. "The man for whom this story is told may or may not be alive," he writes. "If he is, I do not know his name, where he lives, or anything at all about him." (King rates this "as good an opener as I've ever read in my life.") There's a bit more action in "Edge," and the primary setting is a lonely house in Maine - both reasons, perhaps, for King's preferring it to the earlier novel. But the tone, of quiet awe, is identical, and so is the zero-gravity chill it leaves the reader with at the end, a sense of floating free in the epistemological dark. Sloane's novels may or may not be, as King claims, "actual works of literature," but they are at the very least uncommonly beautiful and distinctive pieces of (apologies) genre fiction. The horror stories of Thomas Ligotti, however, may be peculiar enough to qualify as "actual" literature: They clearly obey impulses that have little to do with entertainment, and sometimes feel indifferent even to story. A few years ago, Ligotti told an interviewer: "For my part, I don't care for stories that are just stories. I feel there's something missing from them. What's missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author's consciousness." The stories in his 1985 and 1991 collections SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE, (Penguin, paper, $17), now reissued in a single volume, do not lack that authorial consciousness, and a frightening consciousness it is. The voices in his tales are, more often than not, those of men who expect very little of life: no spiritual meaning, certainly, no pleasure beyond the occasional sardonic chuckle, no beauty save in the grotesque and the anomalous, and no good end. They believe that "the most innocuous phenomena should eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or from bad dreams into those that were wholly abysmal." One character, in search of "a reality so saturated with its own presence that it had made a leap into the unreal," finds in an old book "his longsought abode of exquisite disfigurations." He may be a madman, or he may not; Ligotti isn't sure, so he leaves it up to us. There are powerful echoes of Lovecraft in Ligotti, both in his willing embrace of demented physical and mental landscapes and in his often ornate, archaic-sounding prose. Ligotti is a much more accomplished stylist, though; you can detect traces of a higher, more self-aware decadence in his manipulations of pulp hyperbole, a hint of Lautréamont in the Lovecraftian perfume. The closest thing to a conventional genre story in these collections is a creepy little item called "The Last Feast of Harlequin," in which an academic social anthropologist - author of "The Clown Figure in American Media" - travels to the upper Midwest for an obscure local festival and stumbles onto something rather stranger than he'd anticipated, a cult of voluntary zombies. "Their ideal," he writes, "was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many shapes of death and dissolution." Yes, that gives the story away, but with Ligotti that matters rather less than it would with, say, Stephen King. King, the great entertainer, needs the story as the comedian needs the joke, and when he can't quite deliver it he dies (in the comedian's sense). King is a master of horror, though. When inspiration fails, he has the technique to fake it. Thomas Ligotti is a master of a different order, practically a different species. He probably couldn't fake it if he tried, and he never tries. He writes like horror incarnate. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
For thousands of readers, few things are more comfortable than hunkering down with a Stephen King short story an odd fact, considering how uncomfortable some of those stories make us. With this, his more-or-less tenth collection, King offers an arsenic sugaring to his poison pies: brief intros describing the hows, wheres, and whys behind each tale, from working out personal demons to instants of dumbstruck inspiration. The faithful might have already read or heard a few Ur, Blockade Billy but King's batting average is just as strong with the unfamiliar tales as with the familiar ones. The van strike that almost killed the author in 1999 haunts the book; vehicular accidents crop up everywhere, perhaps most disturbingly in Herman Wouk Is Still Alive, a nihilistic shocker about a dual suicide by car, and, most entertainingly, with The Little Green God of Agony, which King confesses is directly inspired by his rehabilitation. Here, an exorcist of sorts extracts pain from a sufferer in the shape of a globular green beastie. Though the stories swing from sad to wistful to grim, it's this cackling sense of play that makes Uncle Stevie so much fun to have around. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Why not order a few copies? This King kid, he might be going places.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A dream team of talented performers reads these 18 tales and two poems by master fictioneer King. Several of the stories-including "Blockade Billy," a baseball yarn with a predictable violent punch line, and "Under the Weather," an exploration of the grim effect a tragedy has on an ad man-are not the author's strongest, but they are given a boost by, respectively, Craig Wasson's keep-rounding-the-bases-and-slide-into-home exuberance and Peter Friedman's conversational narration, which shifts the emphasis from the repetitiveness of what he's saying to the compelling way he's saying it. Other stories are as strikingly composed as they are performed. As wonderful as the professional readers are, it is King's nasal voice that distinguishes the production, preceding each story with information about its creation. He also begins the collection with an intriguing introduction explaining the differences between writing novels and short fiction, warning about the stories that follow: "The best of them have teeth." A Scribner hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
King (Everything's Eventual) is back in the short fiction business with this collection of 20 stories. Most have been previously published, but two ("Mister Yummy" and "Obits") are new and one ("Bad Little Kid") is newly available in English. With such topics as a monstrosity of a car (no, not Christine), a sand dune that writes the name of people who will soon die, a study in morality, and even a cowboy tale, the anthology explores vastly different landscapes and introduces listeners to interesting characters. Each of the stories are prefaced by King himself, and the narrators, 16 total, are perfectly matched to their pieces, though Edward Herrmann, Mare Winningham, Will Patton, and Cotter Smith stand out. The stories differ in length, from longer tales, such as "UR" and "Mile 81," to quite short fables like "The Bone Church" and "The Dune." This would be a perfect choice when trying to ease a new fan into the King realm. -VERDICT Recommended for any library with a good King collection and patrons who love well-crafted short stories; in other words, all libraries should purchase. ["The stories collected here are riveting and sometimes haunting": LJ 10/1/15 starred review of the Scribner hc.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form. Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King (Finders Keepers, 2015, etc.) has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King's considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid's scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and '50s, with allowances for modern references ("Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes"). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: "What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there oneor a dozen, or a thousandwhere he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?" Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: "Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast." Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about ("This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use"). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers. Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King's sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
