For the first time in a while, a Stephen King release slipped by me. (Although typing that feels familiar, and it could be that a delve into the archives would prove me wrong. We’ll pretend this is not my problem and proceed, nevertheless.) But I noticed it just a couple of weeks later and easily found a copy at Half Price Books next time I was in, because he’s one of those authors that is big enough to fill the inexplicable niche of people who pay hardback prices, only to resell the book at a pittance the moment they’ve finished reading. Contrariwise, while I may love books[3] at only a slightly above-average amount for my circle of friends, I’m pretty sure that in the general population, I’d be the inexplicable one, so there you go.
Just after Sunset is a short story collection, which makes me feel a bit better about having run late on it; after all, I’ve read a couple of these already in Playboy, months or years beforehand. Which maybe balances out the month or so I ran behind on the rest of the stories? And they’re, you know, Stephen King. None were bad, and a few were hovering right in that range that I’d call brilliant. He can scare you, sure, but his best talent has always been the way he can shine a spotlight on the human soul. The fear, the anger, the grime, the longing, the love, just all of it. And I think some of that is effortless, but I have to think that some of it is carefully honed craft. I can say this because some of my favorite of his stories over the past decade (including, in this book, N.) are natural[1] successors to H.P. Lovecraft’s terror over the worlds that lie just to the left of ours and yet are unbearably alien and unthinkingly malevolent. And he rarely wrote in that style before, which makes me imagine that one day there was a conscious effort to start. And now, lots of success at it!
Plus, he wrote a story that perfectly captured the spirit of my sporadically recurrent nuclear explosion nightmares. I’m glad[2] I’m not the only one that still gets hit by that, every so often.
[1] And more importantly, modernized! I mean, the language more than the topic-space. ‘Cause… yeah.
[2] “Glad” is probably not the right word. Relieved is closer, but a little too far the other direction.
[3] Not specifically reading, although that too!