For a writer famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for penning novels with four digit page numbers, Stephen King has always been remarkably good at novellas. If It Bleeds collects four of them, all previously unpublished. They’re a diverse lot, but consistent in quality, and in a broader theme of morality and hard decisions.
Mr Harrigan’s Phone is classic King, and of the four feels the most like one of his old short stories—tales where an ordinary person brushes up against dark forces he can’t quite understand, and backs away form them unbroken but changed. king metes out tough justice, which I’ve always appreciated, and you can’t help rooting for Harrigan even if, as the narrator does, you feel a little ill at ease with the consequences of his powers.
The Life of Chuck is, arguably, the most experimental story King has ever written, and a good rebuff to critics who brush off his writing as lackign literary merit. I’ve always pushed back at this assumption, as King, while no stranger to the potboiler plot, writes real people, not cardboard cutouts, and rich themes invaraibly thrum beneath the pulpy action on the surface of the page. Here those themes are given more spotlight, but still anchored enough to character to avoid feeling showy, as if it were some vanity project to prove his literary chops. The plot is hard to describe—its actually more like three different, each humming their own note to make a sad, autumnal chord—but gets to the notion that there is in each of us a world, perhaps a universe.
If It Bleeds steals the show, as was obviously intended—the collection’s not called Life of Chuck, after all—thanks to the welcome presense of Holly Gibney. With Castle Rock, Giliead, and the dark townships of Derry largely pushed aside, King has very ably built a new world through hir David Hodge novels, which have spilled beyond the initial trilogy into other works, notably The Outsider. This story plays as a kind of sequel to that one, with another shapechanger on the loose, which Holly must track down and destroy. The action is slow to build, giving the story lots of breathing room where King can show his strengths in building relationships between characters. It has always bee nthese, more than fantastic creatures or outrageous landscapes, that have formed the firmest foundation of King’s worlds.
Rat finishes the collection. It’s another troubled writer story, and while this is not my favourite King mode, I must admit this story held me with its excellent use of mood. Doom builds like a fever before breaking in a turn of events that it both jarring and graceful, offering a glimpse into King’s assessment of the creative process, and the old notion of writers as mediums for a distant and ghostly place, where spirits give gifts that always have strings attached. And at least this time we’re granted a semi-supernatural reason why every King character farts out bestsellers.
A solid collection, and evidence of King in top form.