Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (Mass Market Paperback)

In his introduction to Everything's Eventual, horror author extraordinaire Stephen King describes how he used a deck of playing cards to select the order in which these 14 tales of the macabre would appear. Judging by the impact of these stories, from the first words of the darkly fascinating "Autopsy Room Four" to the haunting final pages of "Luckey Quarter," one can almost believe King truly is guided by forces from beyond.

His first collection of short stories since the release of Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993, Everything's Eventual represents King at his most undiluted. The short story format showcases King's ability to spook readers using the most mundane settings (a yard sale) and comfortable memories (a boyhood fishing excursion). The dark tales collected here are some of King's finest, including an O. Henry Prize winner and "Riding the Bullet," published originally as an e-book and at one time expected by some to be the death knell of the physical publishing world. True to form, each of these stories draws the reader into King's slightly off-center world from the first page, developing characters and atmosphere more fully in the span of 50 pages than many authors can in a full novel.

For most rabid King fans, chief among the tales in this volume will be "The Little Sisters of Eluria," a novella that first appeared in the fantasy collection Legends, set in King's ever-expanding Dark Tower universe. In this story, set prior to the first Dark Tower volume, the reader finds Gunslinger Roland of Gilead wounded and under the care of nurses with very dubious intentions. Also included in this collection are "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French," the story of a woman's personal hell; "1408," in which a writer of haunted tour guides finally encounters the real thing; "Everything's Eventual," the title story, about a boy with a dream job that turns out to be more of a nightmare; and "L.T.'s Theory of Pets," a story of divorce with a bloody surprise ending.

King also includes an introductory essay on the lost art of short fiction and brief explanatory notes that give the reader background on his intentions and inspirations for each story. As with any occasion when King directly addresses his dear Constant Readers, his tone is that of a camp counselor who's almost apologetic for the scare his fireside tales are about to throw into his charges, yet unwilling to soften the blow. And any campers gathered around this author's fire would be wise to heed his warnings, for when King goes bump in the night, it's never just a branch on the window. --Benjamin Reese --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

When I first discovered Stephen King as a kid in 1988, he had three audiences. There were the horror junkies whose sallow faces were mainly consigned to pulp fiction conventions and hobby-shop cabals; there were the more upstanding types who made guilty forays into his oeuvre while on vacation; and there were the legions of adolescents (male mostly) graduating from Silver Surfer and Incredible Hulk comic books who were not yet forced to read the literary canon that would oppress them later in high school.
Since those days, King has found an unlikely fourth audience: a morbidly curious intelligentsia. The same author who got his start selling stories to nudie magazines like Cavalier and Swank has since the mid-90s been a frequent and celebrated contributor to The New Yorker. The readers of that magazine, it seems, have been eager to read some of King's slightly less gory, profane, or scatological offerings, and King has seemed eager to vie for the esteem of more discerning members of the reading public.
Of the 14 stories in his latest collection, Everything's Eventual, four of them were New Yorker pieces. The rest were previously published in fantasy and horror magazines, or, in one case, on the Web. The most notable story is "The Man in the Black Suit", which garnered King the prestigious O. Henry Prize in 1996. In it, an elderly man recalls meeting The Devil as a young boy. Lucifer is no wing-flapping beast, but a dapper gent with a smooth radio announcer voice "who had walked out of thirty miles of trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoes of gleaming leather." The horror comes from watching the enormous malevolence of such a being start to punch its way through this facade, and the boy desperately pretending not to notice so he might be allowed to escape their dialogue alive.
There are other twisted imaginings here. In "Autopsy Room Four", a man completely paralyzed and rendered mute by a snake bite must somehow convey to the coroners that he's alive before they pry open his ribcage for their post-mortem examination. Good, squirming-in-your-easy-chair fun. In the title story, a disaffected high school dropout uses his paranormal powers to assassinate his targets through cyberspace. The narrator's chummy, slangy voice immediately invites the reader into his darkly seductive world. For one hour, I was completely transported.
That said, there are patches of mediocrity in this collection, stories that are just too stale or tedious to corroborate King's status as a master storyteller. King has a bad habit of overwriting and overexplaining, too. Some of his stories are prefaced with his own comments about them, such as "I like . . . the unexpected shift in tone, away from humour and towards sadness and horror." Other times, a story reaches a logical conclusion, but King has tacked on an afternote where the character explains what he did for the rest of his days. A little carefully applied ambiguity would have been most welcome.
All of this suggests that Stephen King is too hamfisted to attain enduring success in high literary circles. While that might nag at King, I'm sure it won't bother the majority of his fans. They just want what King does best: devising elaborately ridiculous eviscerations, immolations, and mastications that scare or embarrass us into shakily laughing at death.
Matt Sturrock (Books in Canada) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.