I feel like I would have enjoyed the story more if I’d been able to connect to him in any way, but I’m sensing that the Stephen King of the mid- to late- 70s genuinely enjoyed writing positively horrible characters. I never quite outgrew my fear of the dark (or closets at night), so this one felt a bit disturbing, but it was hard to enjoy with how positively horrific and cruel the father of the deceased children was. In which a gentleman goes to a therapist to confess how his lack of foresight caused all three of his children to be individually eviscerated by the Boogeyman in the closet. If I had to pick just one favorite from this collection, this would be it. Gory, gruesome, bloody, gross, and downright fantastic. When a laundromat machine goes haywire, it starts slowly picking off the staff, almost as though it has a mind of its own. King’s wordiness really comes in handy with how clearly he paints the scene in this one. This story made me cringe so hard because it felt super gruesome and disconcerting. “Beneath the bandages, my new eyes stared blindly into the darkness the bandages forced on them.Ī trip to space results in a bizarre ailment that causes tiny, cruel eyes to form in a disabled former astronaut’s hands. Holy hell, the narrator in this story is horrible, though! He spends 90% of the story fat-shaming his girlfriend and threatening to beat her. I honestly don’t know how to sum up the plot for this story other than telling you there is some sort of disease killing people off. Gruesome, morbid, but overall just a bit… “meh”. When a mill employee agrees to work a bit of overtime cleaning out the factory subbasement, he finds he has bitten off more than he can chew when his colleagues are slowly picked off by massive, mutated rats. This was probably my favorite story of the collection the narrative being given through letters was unique and a fun way to frame the events, and the action kept up enough to keep me interested to the end.

Upon exploring the Lot, he finds a twisted, gruesome church.

The first story is told through letters to an unseen recipient, and follows a man who has moved into an inherited family home, in which he learns of a peculiar superstition in a nearly place called Jerusalem’s Lot. “The lamb had not been torn or eaten it appeared, rather, to have been squeezed until its blood-vessels had forcibly ruptured.” As I usually do with anthology reviews, I’ll break it up in pieces. I appreciate his style tremendously more now than I ever did in years past, but won’t say that I loved all of the stories in this collection. I DNFed his books so many times in my teen years because his writing just wasn’t for me. I am stunned to admit that, at 25 years old, having been a fan of all things in the horror world for my entire life, I have only just now completed my very first Stephen King novel.

Night shift stephen king short stories