Nightmares & dreamscapes (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1993; vuoden 1994 painos)

1995 May 6
2007 Jan 1

~ Dolan's Cadillac - 3*

I heard my name and I was confused as to how it was being used. haha I learned a new word: Chorine [kohr-een]- a woman who dances in a chorus line
"It was what looked like twelve Vegas chorines crowded in with one old boy who was wearing the biggest cowboy hat and the darkest Foster Grants I'd ever seen. One of the chorines mooned me as the green Cadillac went fishtailing onto the detour."

I've listened twice. I did it the second time because I learned it was narrated by Rob Lowe and I had no idea so I decided to listen again. He does do a great job narrating it.

~ Chattery Teeth 3* read by Kathy Bates
~ The Moving Finger 3*
~ Suffer the Little Children 3*
~ Crouch End DNF
~ Rainy Season 3*
~ The House on Maple Street 2*
~ Umney's Last Case DNF Summary sounds good but I couldn't handle the reading style. so detective-ish, as it should be. Detective character in book. Author who created him is dying so he switches places.
~ Chattery Teeth 3*
~ My Pretty Pony 1* Hated it. Something to do with time. Time moves faster when you grow up. Time is a pretty pony with a wicked heart. "Pretty pony has done it's fair share of running" (aged rapidly)
~ Sneakers 1*
~ Dedication 3*
~ The Doctor's Case 3*
~ The Moving Finger 4*
~ Home Delivery 3*
~ It Grows on You 1*
~ You Know They Got a Hell of a Band 3*
~ The Night Flier 3*
~ Popsy 3*
~ Sorry, Right Number 3*
~ The Ten O'Clock People 3*
~ The Beggar & the Diamond 3* ( )

Overall, a good book. Clearly from back when Stephen King wrote good stuff (he seems to have fallen a bit with the later stuff). ( )

Three Stephen King books in one year? I know, right? I'm an animal.

Speaking of threes, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is the third in a loose trilogy of short story collections. Combined with Night Shift and Skeleton Crew King admits that this threesome comprises everything good he'd written up to Nightmares and Dreamscapes' publication in 1992. That description of this collection makes it sound like some barrel scraping might have gone on. I don't think that's really the case: none of the stories herein are particularly lousy. But it's short on the mythical wow! factor too.

That's not to say none of the entries are good, some of them are very good indeed. They're also long enough so that they had time to grow on me. Suitably enough a good example of this was It Grows on You, an epilogue to King's Castle Rock saga that ended with 1991's Needful Things. The story is about a bunch of old men sat in a diner talking in that way that old men do. The glacial pace and lack of, you know, anything happening, put me off for a start. But sure enough the story grew on me, and on looking back it's one of my favourite in the whole lot.

Another favourite was Chattery Teeth about a young father who buys an oversized and over-creepy set of those wind up novelty teeth. At first it feels like it's going to be one of those stories that Stephen King gets mocked for, the lamp-monster kind.


Raarh!

Here we go, I thought, he'll buy the teeth, take them home to his wife and adorable kid, and then have to defend himself and his family when the teeth tries to eat them all. But the story — while still being goofy schlock horror — managed to defy expectations and end on a satisfying note, a rarity with Stephen King.

Endings, as always with King, let down several of the stories. The Night Flier and Sneakers are both satisfyingly spooky stories that collapse like poorly made soufflés at their conclusion. And The Ten O'clock People, which was shaping up to be one of my favourite tales in the bunch, seems to lose all direction and stumble to its end rather than stride decisively. Apparently it was written in three days a few months before the collection's publication. The lack of steam by day three shows.

There are quite a few pastiches and homages covering a variety of genres, from Conan Doyle to Lovecraft, via Ray Bradbury and the Chandler–Hammett–Macdonald school of hard-boiled detective noir. I particularly enjoyed the Bradbury and Lovecraft ones despite not being a fan of the former author and never having read the latter. The Sherlock Holmes yarn was less enticing. And the hard-boiled detective one, Umney's Last Case, was… actually I don't know how I feel about that one. It reminded me of the whole Dark Tower series in microcosm, starting off like your average genre fiction with a bit of a twist, then suddenly becoming utterly surreal and playing with meta-fiction and the like. King says in the endnotes that it is his favourite story in the collection, and with time I certainly might come to agree with him.

Of course, the story that really stands out as different is the one that isn't a story at all. Head Down is the article about Little League baseball that King wrote for the New Yorker, prophetically during the season that his son's team made it to the State finals. It's like that film about the Boston Red Sox that was supposed to use them losing in the finals as per The Curse of the Bambino as a plot point, except it was filmed in 2004 when the Red Sox finally beat The Curse and won that important game thing, you know, that one. Oh who am I kidding, I know only the rudiments of baseball and while I was happy to follow the trials and tribulations of this bunch of kids playing a sport and doing better than expected, I really couldn't follow King's enthusiastic and long descriptions of the individual games. I'm not going to penalise the collection for my lack of baseball knowledge, though, that'd hardly be fair.

Of the three King works I've read this year, then, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is probably the least good. But even when he's not amazing, King can write a mean story. Which is why I suspect I'll be squeezing in a fourth visit to his repertoire before the year is out. ( )

Three Stephen King books in one year? I know, right? I'm an animal.

Speaking of threes, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is the third in a loose trilogy of short story collections. Combined with Night Shift and Skeleton Crew King admits that this threesome comprises everything good he'd written up to Nightmares and Dreamscapes' publication in 1992. That description of this collection makes it sound like some barrel scraping might have gone on. I don't think that's really the case: none of the stories herein are particularly lousy. But it's short on the mythical wow! factor too.

That's not to say none of the entries are good, some of them are very good indeed. They're also long enough so that they had time to grow on me. Suitably enough a good example of this was It Grows on You, an epilogue to King's Castle Rock saga that ended with 1991's Needful Things. The story is about a bunch of old men sat in a diner talking in that way that old men do. The glacial pace and lack of, you know, anything happening, put me off for a start. But sure enough the story grew on me, and on looking back it's one of my favourite in the whole lot.

Another favourite was Chattery Teeth about a young father who buys an oversized and over-creepy set of those wind up novelty teeth. At first it feels like it's going to be one of those stories that Stephen King gets mocked for, the lamp-monster kind.


Raarh!

Here we go, I thought, he'll buy the teeth, take them home to his wife and adorable kid, and then have to defend himself and his family when the teeth tries to eat them all. But the story — while still being goofy schlock horror — managed to defy expectations and end on a satisfying note, a rarity with Stephen King.

Endings, as always with King, let down several of the stories. The Night Flier and Sneakers are both satisfyingly spooky stories that collapse like poorly made soufflés at their conclusion. And The Ten O'clock People, which was shaping up to be one of my favourite tales in the bunch, seems to lose all direction and stumble to its end rather than stride decisively. Apparently it was written in three days a few months before the collection's publication. The lack of steam by day three shows.

There are quite a few pastiches and homages covering a variety of genres, from Conan Doyle to Lovecraft, via Ray Bradbury and the Chandler–Hammett–Macdonald school of hard-boiled detective noir. I particularly enjoyed the Bradbury and Lovecraft ones despite not being a fan of the former author and never having read the latter. The Sherlock Holmes yarn was less enticing. And the hard-boiled detective one, Umney's Last Case, was… actually I don't know how I feel about that one. It reminded me of the whole Dark Tower series in microcosm, starting off like your average genre fiction with a bit of a twist, then suddenly becoming utterly surreal and playing with meta-fiction and the like. King says in the endnotes that it is his favourite story in the collection, and with time I certainly might come to agree with him.

Of course, the story that really stands out as different is the one that isn't a story at all. Head Down is the article about Little League baseball that King wrote for the New Yorker, prophetically during the season that his son's team made it to the State finals. It's like that film about the Boston Red Sox that was supposed to use them losing in the finals as per The Curse of the Bambino as a plot point, except it was filmed in 2004 when the Red Sox finally beat The Curse and won that important game thing, you know, that one. Oh who am I kidding, I know only the rudiments of baseball and while I was happy to follow the trials and tribulations of this bunch of kids playing a sport and doing better than expected, I really couldn't follow King's enthusiastic and long descriptions of the individual games. I'm not going to penalise the collection for my lack of baseball knowledge, though, that'd hardly be fair.

Of the three King works I've read this year, then, Nightmares and Dreamscapes is probably the least good. But even when he's not amazing, King can write a mean story. Which is why I suspect I'll be squeezing in a fourth visit to his repertoire before the year is out. ( )