You Like It Darker (2024) by Stephen King
“God has a vile sense of humor”
Readers unfamiliar with You Like It Darker may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.
There are several minor-key short stories in You Like It Darker. "The Fifth Step," "Finn," and "On Slide Inn Road" are modest and compressed thrillers. "Willie the Weirdo" begins as a coming-of-age story, but its strange dialogue between grandfather and grandson slowly hints at something much weirder. But You Like It Darker also offers three richly complicated longer works as good as anything King has written in his six decade career.
Several background motifs recur: Covid-19 casts a shadow over several stories; a couple of widower protagonists fill retirement with Netflix before their fortunes are reversed; two young men live on the razor's edge of the autism spectrum.
You Like It Darker is a collection of stories by a writer full of energy, confidence, and an appetite to see his country as it is
"Two Talented Bastids"
#sf #Covid #alien #cabin #friendship #talent #hunting #son
"Two Talented Bastids" is a gripping novella about the lifelong friendship between two men. As the story begins, one of their sons tries to figure out how two everyday working stiffs could go on a hunting trip and return two weeks later with respective masteries of painting and the novel.
"The Fifth Step"
#AA #NYC #NYT #retirement #stranger #murder #Netflix #Turnabout
"Willie the Weirdo"
#possession #grandpa #grandson #spectrum #Transmigration
Cf. "Alison's Birthday" (1981)
"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream"
#arithmomania #dream #murder #badcop #evilcop #Kansas #spectrum #Netflix #wrongman #bodydump #jigsawpuzzle #Mirandize
"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" is a full length novel, a story of police persecution, a masterpiece. It demands to be read in a single sitting.
"Finn"
#UK #wrongman #badcop #worsecop #torture #waterboard #blueballs #Kafkaesque
Cf. "The Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce
"On Slide Inn Road"
#crime #family #cancer #hijack #killers #LouisvilleSlugger #grandpa #grandson #granddaughter #bodydump
Cf. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
"Red Screen"
#sf #cop #NYC #interrogation #marriage #Mirandize
Cf. "The Body Snatchers" by Jack Finney
....Kind of a bummer, all in all. Has he become forgetful and a little slipshod lately, or has she gotten more prickly in the last six or eight months? He doesn’t know and it’s too early for such questions.
"The Turbulence Expert"
#sf #recruitment #airline #clearairturbulence #librarian #TEs #coachclass
"The Turbulence Expert" is much better on second reading. I read it first in 2020, in the Flight or Fright anthology. It struck me then as a modest tale about a man whose job is tantamount to a deal with the devil. Today, as a story about a man living on his last nerve while still trying to serve his organization and recruit new blood to it.
"Laurie"
#Florida #siblings #sister #puppy #widower
"Laurie," is a slice of life about a widower who gets a dog from his sister, and the change it makes in his life.
"Rattlesnakes"
#ghosts #Florida #DumaKey #thinplace #Covid #bereaved #PTSD #neighbors #widow #widower #shakul #shakula #Vilomah #skepticalcop #stroller
Cf. Cujo by Stephen King
"Rattlesnakes" begins with a meeting between a man who lost his young son to a junkyard dog and a woman who lost her twin toddlers to a nest of rattlesnakes. These losses happened long ago, and King nicely telescopes the sedimentary layers of two lifetimes nearing their ends. It is a story of ferocious haunting, of "Tragedy calling to tragedy."
"The Dreamers"
#sf #experiment #hypnosis #house #cosmic
Cf. "From Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft
An amateur hypnotist tries to send his test subjects under the wall of sleep to scout the terrain.
I wrote about "The Dreamers" here.
"The Answer Man"
#1937 #1951 #1995 #NewHampshire #lawyer #bereaved #widower #acutelymphocyticleukemia #Eniwetok #Marines
Even more than "Two Talented Bastids," "The Answer Man" is a gripping and life-spanning masterpiece in miniature.
Phil Parker had the great good fortune—or great ill luck—to meet the Answer Man three times during his life...
In the six decades of the tale, the Answer Man never ages. He grants answers, not wishes; questions must be worded carefully to get accurate information.
"Everything is happening now” in his temporarily visible fold in reality.
Jay
26 June 2024
