Weekly Reading List

You Like it Darker - Stephen King

OK, so this is something new.

And, the truth is, it really shouldn’t be.

When I started writing these articles 15 months ago, I had it in mind that I would cover books, movies and music. I even have it in my wee “why subscribe” intro : -

“I love movies, books and music. Every week I write about why they mean so much to me”

Hmm, not sure what happened there. Well, actually I do, and we’ll get to that. However, I had imagined that books would be my main topic of interest. Then I would maybe dabble in the odd movie review or look at a classic TV show that I loved from years gone by, and finally chat about my favourite bands or musicians.

I think, to date, I have written two articles about music and the rest have pretty much been exclusively about film and TV. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love writing about that stuff, mostly because there’s so many quality shows and movies to cover that it’s a pleasure to watch them. Yet, saying all that, books and reading were always my first love, and I had looked forward to sharing my thoughts on ones that I was planning on re-reading, as well as discussing new titles and writers that I had come across. I have done none of that.

Now, there’s a couple of reasons. One of them good and the other not so much.

Firstly, I joined Substack and discovered there were so many fantastic writers right here that I just wanted to read all their stuff, all the time. It was amazing. I’m not going to embarrass anyone by listing them here but, if you’re reading this, then there’s a very good chance you’re one of them! Finding all these incredibly talented creators in one place was mind blowing. I have limited time in my day to day life to read anyway so whenever I had a spare moment, I would go on the app and just consume everything like a big word eating monster! Which, despite the crudeness of that description, was a good thing. Remember, I’ve also got this strange affliction that, if I don’t read every night before going to sleep, my nightmares become, well, the stuff of nightmares, including screaming, shouting and sleep walking. Fun and games. So, clearly reading Substack was great for a number of reasons.

However, that meant I stopped reading books. I just didn’t have the time. Which, to me, for the last forty odd years would have been unthinkable.

I remember my family and I went on holiday one year when I was still quite young and I steadfastly refused to leave the hotel room one day, to go on an organised day trip, because I was reading a book and wanted to see how it ended. It was Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson which, looking back now, I realised I probably shouldn’t have bothered that much but, at the time, I couldn’t pull myself away from it. That’s just how I was. Books came before most things.

“Hellfire, mouth full of ash etc etc”

Anyway, in the past 12 months, I have read three books. Two of them by the same author, one of which I will be discussing in this article, and Dune by Frank Herbert. And, the only reason I read Dune was because a few friends on Substack were re-reading it due to the movies coming out, so I thought I would join in. Otherwise I would be sitting here having read two books in a year. Which is just bizarre. I used to read a book a week.

Apart from Dune, the two other books I have read are Holly and You Like it Darker by Stephen King. And, probably the only reason I’ve read those two is because I am one of King’s many Constant Readers.

We’re gonna need a bigger shelf

That’s one side of my library. So you can see what I mean. I have read every one of King’s novels. I started with The Stand. The blurb on the cover compared it to Lord of the Rings, so you can imagine my surprise and horror, as a fourteen year old reading about Captain Trips for the first time. It was fantastic. That was in 1985/86. I went from The Stand to The Talisman and, for the last 38 years, haven’t looked back. Reading any of his books, even now, is like meeting an old friend.

Over that time, a lot of things have changed with regards to Stephen King. When I first started reading his novels, horror was, and occasionally still is, regarded as a second or even third rate type of literature. Something not considered a proper book. Just pulp. Or, as some critics called it, “disgusting filth".” So, of course, as a teenager, that made it required reading! It was also seen as a bit edgy to like reading stories about monsters both human and supernatural, who tended to do horrific things to their victims that were described in wonderfully gruesome detail.

There were three authors I read at the time. King, James Herbert and Clive Barker. All of them notorious in one way or another. Be it for giant rats eating humans, pleasure demons that tore peoples soul apart or writers going crazy in a snowbound hotel. These guys were where I got my horror fix. The latter two were pretty famous in genre circles, but King’s fame, due to, not only the sales of his novels, but also multiple film versions of said books, was on another level.

Initially he embraced the fame and all the perks that came along with it, including a few that he got addicted to. However, he used his clout in helping make The Evil Dead the huge hit that it became by giving his famous quote, “the most ferociously original horror film of the year.” Sam Raimi tells the tale that they were struggling for funding to release the movie until distributors saw that King loved it and started to invest.

Scary Movie!

However, after a few scary encounters with over zealous fans, King eventually retreated back from the limelight, got himself clean and sober, and let his writing do the talking. But, to this day, he is still the most recognisable horror writer anywhere on the planet and, even though no one has done more to make the genre more respected and respectable, in this modern culture, because of that, he divides opinion.

I don’t want to look at that side really, but instead mostly just focus on his writing which, despite the odd fluctuation in quality over the years, continues to be of the highest quality. Yes, the classics still stand far apart from the rest of the field (IT, Salems Lot, The Shining, The Talisman and Dead Zone being my favourites) but I have a soft spot for the late eighties/early nineties output such as The Dark Half and Needful Things. Then recently we have had Billy Summers, The Outsider and Holly which were also still really strong.

The outliers for me have been his short stories because, apart from a few in Night Shift, which was a long time ago, I haven’t read any of them up until now. Which is unusual as these are where even his detractors say he’s at his most frightening. And I certainly love a good scare. However, it’s not like the five novels above lack terrifying moments! Of course, I did the novella collections such as Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, but the shorter form, not just with King, had always left me cold. So, I would imagine, that it’s no coincidence, after reading so many great short stories on Substack, that I chose now as the first time to properly give some of his a try.

And so we come to “You like it Darker” which I find a bit of an odd title, but there we are. It’s a collection of 12 short and not so short stories. Some are only 10 or 20 pages long whilst others run into the hundreds of pages and are pretty much novella size.

Overall, I think it’s a really strong collection. Out of the 12, I would say 7 are absolutely brilliant and the others still very strong.

They cover everything that King has been ruminating over these last few years from crime stories to getting older and horrors that defy rational explanation.

Super Scary Shadows!

I thought I would quickly run through those magnificent seven, and give you a bit of a feel for what they’re all about without revealing too many spoilers. I’m going to jump about a bit too so these are not in the same order as in the book, but just how I read them.

The first story I’d like to look at is one of my favourites, and the fact it’s the longest in the whole book is probably no coincidence.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is about a man who has a nightmare or, more accurately, what seems to be a psychic episode, where he supposedly sees the location of a murder victim. The story then revolves around him finding out if what he has witnessed is accurate or just the “bad dream” of the title. This has a lot of similarities to The Outsider with a guilty man, certainly in the eyes of the police and specifically an Inspector Jalbert who is sure Danny is the murderer, trying to prove his innocence against the backdrop of a supernatural occurrence. It runs at nearly 150 pages so it certainly not a short story, but it cracks along at a great pace examining the relationships of all the main characters and has a suitably satisfying denouement.

Next up is something completely different. The Dreamers is what could best be described as cosmic horror. Here King returns to similar ideas he had in his hugely underrated novel, Revival.

The story is set in the late 1970’s but has the feel of a gothic tale from the 1890’s. William Davis is a Vietnam Vet who answers an add in the local paper and ends up working for a “Gentleman Scientist” called Elgin who is carrying out experiments using dreams to explore parts of the universe untapped by the human mind and go beyond the veil of consciousness. So, you can tell we are already in the realms of H.P. Lovecraft as the two men invite unsuspecting locals to take part in what seem like straight forward tests but can have deadly consequences. Not just for them but for the whole of civilisation as we know it.

This is a fantastic story with some really striking imagery and wonderfully mysterious dialogue that does seem to belong in a tale set in centuries gone past : -

“You want to go over the wall of sleep, don’t you.”

He laughed at that. “No, I want to go under it.”

One of the best in the collection and highly recommended.

On Slide Inn Road finds the author looking at family dynamics and how they can fracture when put into a stressful situation. One of the characters is a pretty repugnant, crotchety grandfather who spouts out a lot of stuff that isn’t deemed to be acceptable these days. However, it raises interesting points about modern society and, at the same time, also has a nice level of grit and grime to it that made for a short, sharp satisfying read. It’s dedicated to a specific writer who I won’t mention here as that would give the game away, but you can see what King was going for in the way he tells the tale.

The Turbulence Expert is a story that feels like it belongs in something like the aforementioned Four Past Midnight. It’s got that flavour of mid to late eighties King where it’s a straight forward set up of a scared man receiving a phone call and being told he has to catch a flight for unexplained reasons, which then become clear as the story progresses : -

“This isn’t hell, he thought, the accommodations are too nice, but it’s purgatory. And no prospect of retirement for a long time.”

Again, it’s one of the shorter stories but is maybe one of the few that could be turned into a longer format as the basic ideas are really strong. Very good.

Rattlesnakes is probably the story on which this collection was promoted being billed as a sequel to Cujo, but whereas it does concern one of the minor characters from that book in Vic Trenton, the father to Tad and husband to Donna, who, if you remember, were the ones terrorised by the rabid St Bernard in the original book, it’s actually a story about loss and grief whilst, at the same time, being an absolutely chilling slice of hard edged fiction and a properly scary ghost story. This is King flexing his horror writing muscles and showing everyone that he still has what it takes. Out of all the stories in this collection, some of the scenes in this one will stay with me the longest. Genuinely creepy and utterly brilliant.

Super Scary Old Man!

The last two stories I want to look at see King at his most contemplative about old age and mortality. They are softer than what has gone before, but that doesn’t make them any less effective.

Laurie is just a lovely little tale about a lonely widower who is struggling to keep going after losing his wife of forty years. Much to his annoyance, his sister brings him a little puppy in an effort to get him to embrace life again. And that’s the story. There’s a wee bit of a savagery at the end just to remind folks who the book they are holding is written by, but mostly it just about finding the ability to put one foot in front of the other when all hope seems lost. A small story but one with a big heart.

Finally we have The Answer Man which is actually the last story of the collection and a perfect closing note to finish this book on because it’s basically just about what makes a life. It’s 43 pages long and I flew through it just like back in the day when I was reading a book a week.

It could be my favourite above all the others because it’s so simple yet contains so many wonderful moments that stay with you long after the final page has been turned.

“Phil Turner had the great good fortune - or great ill luck - to meet the Answer Man three times during his life. On the first of these occasions, in 1937, he was twenty-five, engaged to be married and the professor of a law degree on which the ink had almost dried. He was also caught on the horns of a dilemma so fierce that his eyes watered each time he thought of it.”

Isn’t that just a wonderful opening paragraph that just draws you in and immediately makes you want to know what is this great dilemma that Phil is wrestling with.

It contemplates what a well lived life actually is. It’s joys, it’s tragedies and whether knowing the answers to the big questions is a help or a hinderance in getting where you want to be.

In the afterword, King admits to starting this story when he was thirty, only to put it aside before finishing it when he was seventy five, and that’s a perfect mirror to the actual tale that is being told to the reader. King describes the feeling of picking something back up again after so long : -

“Whilst working on it, I had the oddest sense of calling into a canyon of time and listening for the echo to come back.”

That’s a perfect way to put it, and it is interesting to see a lot of these stories harking back to his previous works. You get the feeling that it’s deliberate with a writer closer to the end of his life than the beginning, mulling over what has gone before and how it can be used to affect what is to come.

This is a great collection that shows King still has what it takes to tell warm life affirming stories, but also some really nasty, short jolts of horror for which he was originally best known.

I know his next novel is another Holly Gibney story which, unlike a lot of people, I do actually quite enjoy. It’s clear the character has got under his skin and if he has got more compelling stories to tell like the recent, Holly, then I’m all for that.

However, I would really love him to go back to pure horror. The visceral, heart stopping terror of another IT or The Shining or Salem’s Lot. Remind everyone why he is the GOAT. Reading these short stories, particularly Rattlesnakes and The Dreamers, he definitely still has it in him to go to those nightmarish places and drag our terrified minds along with him. So, would I like him to go darker? You’re damn right I would.

Anyway, that was good fun. I genuinely have no idea what I’m going to read next so if anyone has any good suggestions then I’m all ears.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.