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Stephen King is wrongly deemed the master of horror and suspense on a daily basis. He’s the master of storytelling – he spins a yarn capable of reeling in even the most ambivalent readers, like flies to disgusting, sticky strips of chemical tape in the kitchen.
In King’s fifth short story collection, “Just After Sunset,” the sights are set on obsession and madness. The narratives – mostly composed over a tight, two-year span – have themes in common, but are diversified with varying styles and viewpoints, as well as vastly differing scenarios and scenery.
Between the covers are 13 tales, ranging from bite-size 10-pagers to meaty near-novellas – three stories top 50 pages. Most of the plots begin like fortune cookies you can’t quite tug the tricky shred of paper from; expect to be thrown mercilessly into situations, trying to grasp the issue at hand and asking, “Wait a minute, who are these crazy characters?”
The developments and payoffs tend to be straightforward – slick, sinister and sometimes sleazy – rather than grandiose in this particular collection. “Willa” is a grinning, prime example of one of King’s seemingly bare-bones models, leading off the book and spinning toward a foreseeable conclusion that somehow resonates long after the last word. The same goes for “Graduation Afternoon,” a simple premise with a climax horrifying in its gruesome American foreshadowing and play on the politics of fear.
“Reality is a mystery . and the everyday texture of things is the cloth we draw over it to mask its brightness and darkness,” dictates a psychiatric patient in “N.,” a centerpiece of the collection and the only story not previously published in a magazine or anthology. This is an unbreakable thread through King’s catalogue, a pattern he holds true to in “Just After Sunset.”
He paints characters and issues instantly recognizable and bitingly real, and relishes in placing these players on the brink of ordinary and supernatural. “Because under the right circumstances, anyone could end up anywhere, doing anything,” sums up the narrator in “Rest Stop.” Thus, 15 years after King buried a fellow alive inside an iconic automobile in the short story “Dolan’s Cadillac,” he challenges another to survive a claustrophobic fate in a tipped-over Port-A-Potty in “A Very Tight Place.” Prepare to gag and shudder.
Although the collection may not be as timeless or fun as “Everything’s Eventual” or “Skeleton Crew,” it’s a worthy contribution to the underfed, underrepresented short story genre. Many narratives pass in one satisfying session (“The Cat From Hell,” “Harvey’s Dream”), some entertain for multiple late-night reads (“The Gingerbread Girl,” “Stationary Bike”).
“I wrote this story for the same reason I have written so many rather unpleasant tales, Constant Reader,” King writes of one tale in the enlightening notes in the back, “to pass on what frightens me to you.”
Grade: A-
