I do indeed like it darker
I’m roughly nine months late with this, but new Stephen King books are precious things to me and I only dive into them when I’m good and ready. You Like It Darker is King’s most recent tome and is a collection of short stories and novellas that range from gruesome snapshots of grisly crimes to lengthy introspections on grief (complete with a ghost or two).
Even the ‘worst’ of these stories isn’t a complete waste of time, and the best serve as continued proof that King is one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Regardless, enjoy this numbered list. No spoilers, of course.
12. Finn
I don’t know what convinced Stephen King that he should write a story set in Ireland—I wonder if he even knows himself—but it just didn’t work. I’ll admit that much of what didn’t work was that King doesn’t know enough about the small idiosyncrasies of daily Irish life for his normally sharp characterisations to be worth anything. Every time he got something wrong—a speech pattern; the colour of our currency—it ruined my immersion in the story.
The concept itself isn’t that bad. It’s a zippy tale about a young man—Finn—cursed with a shocking case of bad luck that has followed him his entire life, culminating in a case of mistaken identity that might cost him his life. King is great at writing characters put in unjust situations (more on that later), and the story presented a tidy little arc for Finn…
But the character’s voice and the small details that King kept getting wrong simply ruined the experience for me. It’s likely that if you’re not Irish you won’t have as bad a time with this one as I did, but I’m still confident in placing this at the bottom of the pile.
11. Willie The Weirdo
This one isn’t even that bad, but it’s being placed down here purely off the strength of the other stories. Willie The Weirdo offers us a brief glimpse into the life of one Willie Fielder—a ten-year-old boy with a psychopathic streak in him. He likes dead things, and he especially likes watching things die.
He’s close with only one person: his strange and off-putting grandfather, who tells stories about historical events as if he'd been there—which is impossible, of course...
This one won’t waste your time, and King does some delightfully disgusting work in putting the reader in the shoes of Willie as he delights in his twisted perversions. It’s too lacking in plot to make a deep impact, but it wraps up neatly and I enjoyed my stay.
10. The Fifth Step
This feels like a somewhat personal story from King—a man who’s been sober since he wasn’t. The story is a confession: While reading the newspaper on a Central Park bench, Harold is approached by a stranger looking to unburden himself of all his wrongdoings—the fifth step in the Alcoholics Anonymous’ twelve-step program.
For the most part, it has the feel of an anecdote—“A stranger came up to me in Central Park today and started telling me his life story! Super weird, but at least he was interesting!”—but, of course, this is a Stephen King story, so not everything is as it seems.
I’m always leaning in when King writes about addiction and being at all-time lows because, given what he’s been through, I wholly trust his perspective on such matters. And so, my guard was all the way down when he delivered the final blow of the story. I can’t say it was a revolutionary beat—it maybe isn’t even one that makes total sense—but, hey, it’s fun.
9. Red Screen
This is a sinister little tale about a conspiracy theory which posits that aliens are slowly replacing the human population by nagging people to death. Yes, nagging. It’s nuts when stated so bluntly, but King puts us in the POV of a cop investigating a murder perpetrated by someone who wholeheartedly believes in this conspiracy theory, which helps with our induction.
This gap between what the main character believes and what we assume to be the truth (because we’re reading a Stephen King story) creates a fun arc of tension that the reader will look forward to seeing resolved. There’s some nonsense here, but the story is very tongue-in-cheek, and I can’t help but imagining King chuckling to himself as he wrote it.
8. Two Talented Bastids
This is a story about talent—where it comes from, who deserves it, or if it’s even real in the first place. It’s a topic that King has broached before, especially in On Writing, but he tackles it here with an outlandish twist.
I was quite compelled by this novella-length story, which centres around a middle-aged man named Mark, whose father is a popular novelist not long for this world. His father wasn’t always a novelist though, and found success relatively overnight after a mysterious encounter in the woods with his best friend Butch back in the 70s…
I had great fun in joining Mark’s explorations of his father’s past, but Two Talented Bastids is also the first story in this collection, and although I can’t be sure, I think the pure excitement of having a new King book in my hands may have somewhat coloured my perception of this story.
It’s still good fun, but upon reflection—and in comparison with some stronger entries—I’m putting it at number 8.
7. The Turbulence Expert
I wasn’t scared of flying for most of my life, but a flip switched in my brain a few years ago for no reason, and I now I find myself with sweaty palms during a flight, especially during take off and touch down. I wouldn’t say that I have an outright fear of flying—call it an apprehension—but it’s enough for me to strongly empathise with the main character of The Turbulence Expert.
The concept is maybe a little bit unevolved: What if a passenger who was deathly afraid of flying had the ability to save planes that would otherwise crash? I am, of course, a big fan of King injecting some unexplained supernatural phenomena into real life—but the lack of even a hint of an explanation of what’s going on here was a little dissatisfying.
That said, I really love how King puts the reader on a plane going through a rough patch. There’s a famous bit of writing advice that goes something like: ‘Don’t tell the reader it’s raining; make them feel the raindrops.’ So much of what makes King a great writer is his exceptional ability to transport the reader’s senses, and even though I don’t like flying, I really liked this one.
6. On Slide Inn Road
This is an entertaining story about a road trip gone wrong. What makes this one engaging are the strained family dynamics at the heart of it. But throw in a few external sources of conflict—a couple of disagreeable fellows fresh from disposing of a dead body, perhaps—and you have a neat little thriller that’s sure to get the heart pounding.
There’s nothing otherworldly about this one—or anything particularly high-concept that will make for a good adaptation someday—but there’s something inarguably entertaining about watching this family unravel as it attempts to deal with problems both pedestrian and criminal.
5. Laurie
Real King fanatics will know about Molly a.k.a. The Thing of Evil a.k.a. King’s pet corgi that pops up on the man’s social media feeds from time to time. King is a man who loves his dog. That love has bled onto the page from time to time in stories like The Stand (Kojak/Big Steve) and The Dark Tower (Oy*), but with Laurie, he’s really putting his love for a good canine companion front and centre.
This is the story of Llyod—a lonely man living in the Florida Keys who’s given reluctant charge of a puppy by his sister. He names the puppy Laurie. Cue the bonding montage. If it weren’t the ruminations of grief and razor-sharp characterisations of Llyod and the supporting cast, this would be almost unrecognisable as a Stephen King story.
Of course, there are the alligators in Florida, so Llyod and Laurie better watch out...
*Yes, I’m aware that Oy technically isn’t a dog, but I don’t want to explain what a billy-bumbler is to people who haven’t read The Dark Tower.
4. The Dreamers
I love it when King goes Lovecraftian. In The Dreamers, we follow a mad scientist and his assistant as they attempt to pull back the veil of our reality and peer into an unseen world through a process that involves dreaming.
Naturally, things don’t go well for them, but for as much as I loved the moments of hyper-disturbing horror, my favourite thing about this story was the voice of the main character—the mad scientist’s assistant. He’s an extremely terse man, and King’s ability to peel back his layers with a mix of both exceedingly simple and rambling run-on sentences makes for propulsive reading.
There’s some neat lore with this story too, and so much history that’s just barely hinted at. I can see a screenwriter taking this premise and expanding greatly upon it in the future. As it stands, I loved much of the imagery and concepts here and it really left me wanting more.
3. The Answer Man
This one is King’s most recent attempt to take on life, so to speak. Taking place over the course of decades, The Answer Man follows the life of Harvard graduate Phil Parker and his three meetings with a mysterious roadside vendor known only as ‘The Answer Man’.
The Answer Man has the answer to any question Phil could dream of, for a price (a literal financial cost, before you start getting any ideas about curses or some such). Phil, naturally, uses the answers provided by The Answer Man to mould his life the way he wants it. Alas, life, is an uncertain thing.
In this tale, King tackles ideas of predestination and free will; ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men’ and all that. The story feels like King’s take on Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (adapted into the 2016 movie, Arrival, if you didn’t know) and I really enjoyed reading both the broad strokes of Phil’s life, and the ‘zoomed in’ moments that changed its trajectory.
There is tragedy in Phil’s life, but this isn’t a tragic tale. It is, however, the kind of tale that might make you pause and reflect on past and future of your own life, so be warned.
2. Rattlesnakes
This one was a complete surprise to me. It was common knowledge, apparently, that this novella was a pseudo Cujo sequel, but I didn’t know this until the big rabid Saint Bernard got a mention a few pages in. I use the word ‘pseudo’ because while Rattlesnakes does follow up on a character from Cujo forty-odd years later, it’s not like the dog itself is anywhere to be seen.
In fact, the story can easily be read without a prior reading of Cujo. It follows Vic Trenton—now an old man—who moves to the Florida Keys after his wife’s death. There, he meets a strange woman named Alita, who, despite the fact that her twin children died tragically decades ago, still pushes around an empty stroller and seems to believe that her children are, in some way, still alive.
This is a spooky one, made all the more compelling by the tragic arc of Vic’s marriage and the lingering effects of the events of Cujo. King injects his usual dose of personality into the supporting cast, creates a thematically resonant conflict for Vic, and is filled to the brim with disturbing imagery. It's everything you want from a Stephen King story.
1. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream
The pièce de résistance of You Like It Darker. If we don’t see a movie or miniseries based on this novella in the next decade, then something has gone very wrong. DCBD has an exquisitely simple premise: A man, Danny Coughlin, has a dream in which he stumbles upon a dead body half-buried behind an abandoned gas station. Unable to shake the dream upon waking, Danny realises that this gas station is a real place. He ventures there and finds… well, you should read the story.
This story will make you angry, but it will be the righteous anger of the unjustly maligned. King zeroed in on the power of harnessing this emotion way back with Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (and, in a way, with Carrie), but here, he perfects and distils this emotion through a novella that I literally could not put down at night, even when I knew that I had work in the morning and should be sleeping.
This is a story about faith, belief, and obsession. It’s also an underdog story that plays out with unfailing logic like a boulder rolling down a hill, gathering speed until it winds up in the only place it possibly could have. There is such delight to be had in experiencing the various inevitabilities of this story. I don’t think any particular story beat came as a true surprise, but there was serious satisfaction in watching it unfold.
Danny Coughlin's arc is satisfying in it's own right, but so is the arc of a dogged police detective being driven mad by a certain case. This novella is in the strongest story in this book in part because of the strength of this antagonist—this cop who does everything he can to make poor Danny's life miserable.
You will be swept up by Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream. It is disconcertingly easy to feel strongly for Danny and his predicament, but despite the hardships, it will be a pleasure to have been by his side.
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