You Like It Darker by Stephen King
Extraterrestrials, fortune tellers, dead children, and more...
From my admittedly limited experience reading Stephen King thus far, I almost feel like I prefer his shorter stories (or maybe it’s just his more recent stuff, as opposed to his more prolific coke-fiend 70s output… I’ll have to read more to be sure).
You Like It Darker is a collection of twisted tales from the monarch of the macabre, and I’ve got to say: much of it I really, really enjoyed.
Some highlights:
The first story, Two Talented Bastids, grabs you immediately with the curious mystery of how two men — childhood best friends whose previously grandest accomplishment was co-managing the city dump — become overnight successes in the world of art and literature.
It’s clear that something happened that prompted the awakening of their talent, but whatever it was, no-one outside the two of them knows. As the last surviving of the two prepares to take their secret to the grave, his son and a reporter try to piece together the puzzle — with it being crystal clear from the outset that there’s undeniably more to the men’s story than they ever shared with anyone.
The tale also offers the welcome opportunity to peek behind the curtains of a professional writer as evidence of the famous writer’s talents are demonstrated by the inclusion of three different attempts to write the same passage from a novel — before and after his expert abilities were unlocked.
The biggest story in terms of page count is Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream, which spins a yarn about a janitor who has a nightmare about a buried body. Once awake, he tracks down the location from his dream — a place he’s never before visited in real life — only to find that, sure enough, there is a body buried there.
Danny calls in an anonymous tip to the police, but soon finds himself prime suspect number one. The horror in this story then becomes the plight of an innocent man at odds with a realistic world of practical logic that can’t simply accept he had a magical dream. The detective in charge is convinced he’s guilty and will gladly ruin Danny’s life in order to force a confession, but poor Danny doesn’t understand how he dreamed the location of the victim and certainly never wished for such a grisly vision — so how on earth can he explain it or defend himself against the accusations he’s faced with?
It’s a neat twist on the somewhat familiar trope of a psychic called in to assist with a murder investigation, and King’s prose keeps you turning the pages even as the plot alternates between breakneck action and meandering (but always interesting) molasses.
The story that stuck with me the most, Rattlesnakes serves as a sort-of decades-later coda to King’s Cujo (a novel I’ve yet to read but am at least familiar with), following Vic Trenton — a husband (and father, once) in mourning — as he isolates at a friend’s beach house in the Florida Keys during Covid.
A few houses away, lives an old lady — a local crazy woman celebrity named Alita Bell — who pushes an empty twin stroller along the street; imagining her long-dead toddlers are still with her. They’re not. They died decades earlier, victims of hundreds of rattlesnake bites.
When this sweet (if cracked) old lady collapses, our hero fends off the vultures that have descended on her corpse and calls in the police. Unfortunately, this puts Vic under the microscope as a suspect. For one thing, he’s the only other resident of this gated community during this summer of the pandemic. For another, Alita had a freshly-handwritten will on her kitchen table — leaving everything to him.
Stranded in an isolated McMansion, Vic starts to be visited by Alita’s stroller; its squeaky wheels inexplicably turning up at his home in the middle of the night. He soon comes to realize that the stroller was never actually empty… and that what he inherited from Alita was far more than just her worldly belongings.
Each of these novella-length stories quickly draws you in and puts you under its spell, weaving an intriguing tale of the unexpected, if not technically horrific.
Elsewhere, a bounty of shorter stories of varying note includes a Lovecraftian nightmare experiment, a secret organization than prevents airplane crashes, a tragedy involving a roadside prophet, and an alleged alien-possession resulting in murder. Two of the stories — one involving an immortal grandfather, the other a case of mistaken identity leading to kidnap and torture — are strikingly Pinteresque.
Overall, I found You Like It Darker to be a thoroughly engaging collection of stories. It certainly made me eager to explore more of King’s writing beyond what I’d attempted in the past, so in that regard alone it’s a good reading recommendation for others like me who had struggled to get into King previously.