Just After Sunset by Stephen King -- A Book Review

Photo: Hardcover edition (and the one I read) from its Wikipedia page.

Very entertaining collection of short stories, which I apparently bought, put on the shelf with my collection of all his books, and then completely forgot about and never read.  A recent article in Entertainment Weekly informed me that a movie (or show, I forget) would be made of one of them, "The Things They Left Behind."  (It's an okay story about objects left behind by those who died on 9/11.  They create psychic damage to those who own them--and they suddenly turn up out of nowhere.  He did what he could with this one.  Nice little story.)  This story sounded unfamiliar. I can't say that I can recall the plot of all of King's 200+ short stories, but I'll at least remember the title.  Not this time.  Turns out, never read the book.  Just a little blip to remind me of my old age...

Anyway, this book of short stories is best remembered for the ideas behind the stories, rather than for the awesomeness of the stories themselves.  I don't mean this as a slight, but there's nothing in here that rivals "Jerusalem's Lot," or any of the truly good and freaky short stories from Night Shift or Skeleton Crew.  But there are some good ones here; just not great ones.

I've already written a blog entry about "Willa," which is maybe my favorite here.  He does everything with it that he could, which I can't say for some of the other good ones.  Anyway, this one is more about happy resignation in the...waystation between here and there, I guess.  I think an entire novel could be written about this waystation, where time is elastic, and the people are in denial.  But there's a really good honkytonk bar nearby, and you can dance all night if you let yourself...Great idea, fully realized.

"Stationary Bike" is another good one, but I don't feel he did everything with this he could have.  (So much so that I've written some notes for what I think will be a good short story of my own.  There won't be a stationary bike in it, and...Well, hopefully, you'll see.  In a magazine someday.)  A man needs to lose weight and is a bit lonely after a loved one dies.  He buys (see title) and, because those things really are as boring as hell, imagines himself on a road to a little town he used to love.  This being a Stephen King story, you know his imagination gets away from him, and weird things happen.  This could go in a million directions (a la Duma Key, or a story about a traveling guy in a painting that I hated...the story, I mean), but it ends with...well, I won't ruin it for you.  But for me it was a letdown.  A metaphorical letdown, no less.  But some great ideas and images.

"N." is a very good story that could have been so much more.  A psychiatrist gets rained in by his suicidal / OCD patient who kills himself in defense of a Lovecraftian horror that's got a Lovecraftian name--and a field named after early schlock writer Forrest Ackerman.  The psychiatrist then descends into "Sole Survivor" mode.  He doesn't eat his own foot, but...essentially the same.  This one could easily be made into an episode of some series, or maybe a really bad movie.  But good story.

"The Cat from Hell" is a short story you might remember from 1990's Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.  An evil cat kills those who live with a guy who owned a company that tested its meds on thousands of cats, killing them all.  He hires a hitman to kill it, but he fails.  In a rather gruesome way, a la the old guy with the cockroaches in the last segment of Creepshow.  This is a story from King's early days, and it shows.  It's amusingly gross, but...(nitpick alert!) there's a sentence towards the end that begins: "And the last thing he heard was..." and then a paragraph later, he sees and hears a great many things until the end.  Oh, well.  Early shock stuff, with badguys twirling their mustaches and reaching appropriate ends.

"Ayana" is a very good story with nostalgic sadness, like the last third of Insomnia.  This is probably the best-written story here, and a very good premise.  This is immediately followed by a story of an old guy who gets trapped inside a Port-A-Potty, and is covered in what you might expect.
Opposite ends of the King spectrum.  But you like that, or you wouldn't consider reading his stuff in the first place.

Lastly, a little nod to Stephen King, who gets paid at least $10 million per novel.  Or, maybe, per novel manuscript.  As you know, he turns those out like I get sinus infections.  It takes a lot of short stories to equal one novel manuscript, but he turns them out by the hundreds anyway, though in terms of time taken, it's undoubtedly not worth his time, financially, to do so.  But he does anyway, because he likes them.  Short stories are making a little bit of a comeback these days.  This is due in a small way to writers like King and Joyce Carol Oates (though she's more known for her short stories than for her novels, I think) who have kept the flame alive and passed the torch.

Writing and Moving

Well, actually, it's moving and writing, but I've had a few better ideas lately, and I don't feel that all is lost like I have been for awhile.  I've written a short nonfiction piece that I think I'll send out after I move--which is Thursday and Friday.  Yup, two days.  I'll be setting up an office, clearing a ton of space, and I'll be sticking to a few self-imposed rules.  (I'm very excited about setting up this creative environment and writing more.)  Among them:

--I'll write for at least one hour every day.  After X amount of time, that'll grow to two; then three.  I may hope to grow to four, especially on weekends, vacations and summers, but we'll see.  Stephen King said in a video for his latest book that he writes for three hours a day now; I just finished reading a Writers Digest interview with him where he said he wrote for four to four and a half hours--in March 1992.  I'll be happy with one, and ecstatic with two or three.

--I'll read for at least an hour every day.  This reading time won't count into my writing time.  In other words, editing my work won't count as reading time.  I especially will read books and magazines.  I have tons of Writers Digests and Times (just saw Susan Smith); reading those again would be cool--and it'll fire me up.

--I'll write a lot longhand again, and on something that doesn't have the internet.  Too much of a distraction!  I have an Epson Expert 2000 that'll do the trick.  Also a typewriter from the 30s.  And I think I have another word processor somewhere.  But a notebook--both paper and electronic--will work.  Looking forward to that.

--I'll keep track of my ideas, my submissions, and my rejections better.  I often go long lengths of time in which I don't write anything or send out anything.  Then something comes back and I don't remember sending it out to begin with.  Now I'll keep a ledger of submissions.  Keeping an Excel spreadsheet and a Word table about them just didn't work for me.  I'm a write-it-down kind of guy.

--I'll work out, or walk, or run, or bike more.  As reading gets my gears going, so does physically moving.  I read an article recently that said that watching an hour of tv every day, on average, takes over 22 minutes off your life.  It's not the TV, they say--though that's debatable considering much of what is on--but the slothful lifestyle of those who watch that much TV.  It occurs to me that reading can do much the same thing.  Some people--not me!  not me!--are such vicious readers when they're on a roll, that they're not very active.

--I won't stop writing or reading when I go back to work.  This is much easier said than done.

Well, that's it for now.  I might not be around for awhile as I move out and move in, and then set up.  And then return to work 10 days after I move in.  But I hope to produce more writing, here and elsewhere.