Nightmares
and Dreamscapes
Stephen
King
I’m
pretty sure that i have written previously about my preference for
Stephen King’s short stories over his full-length
(and “length” is the operative term) novels; just in case, let me
now reiterate that as a short story writer he is almost without
parallel in the current crop of active and popular writers. He holds
his reader carefully, builds the plot and characters skilfully, and
lets the story develop to create the effect he wants which, being
King, is always some form of horror or fear. I find him much more
readable in the small doses (even in this very large [900+ page]
collection), than in the novels he manages to produce with such
enviable regularity. The only story in the collection, in fact,
which i did not enjoy as much as i would have liked is, funnily
enough, the one he identifies as his favourite, a parody of Raymond
Chandler given the special King twist, which for me simply doesn’t
work ~ perhaps because there are too many Chandler parodies already ~
and i found it dragging and wishing it would end. On the other hand,
one of my favourite pieces is a story told as a teleplay, apparently
written and planned that way from the beginning; it works, perhaps
even better than it would as a simple prose story, and had me chilled
and sad at the same time. Lastly, there is a lovely piece of
non-fiction writing, sports-writing, covering a Little League team’s
journey through the end of season playoffs, which King wrote apparently because his son was on the team; it scarcely fits the
title of the book (unless because their journey was a dream come true
for them), but i am delighted that it is included. In fact, i’m
lead to wonder, has he done more non-fiction?
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