Just After Sunset is a very strong collection of short stories. The variability in style which mars Nightmares and Dreamscapes is gone. These are tales written in a period of rising energy and enthusiasm for the craft by a writer of unflagging industry.
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Willa (2006)
A sweet-sad afterlife collage.
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The Gingerbread Girl (2007)
When I first tried reading Just After Sunset twelve years ago, I gave up because I hated everything about "The Gingerbread Girl." "Willa" was an adequate afterlife fantasy, giving full play to contradiction. "The Gingerbread Girl," on the other hand, struck me as the kind of ugly tale that fools (like me) thought King wrote all the time. Rereading "The Gingerbread Girl" today, I found it to be a bracingly executed and well-observed melodrama, with no prurient belittling of the woman protagonist.
....She thought she needed to explore the limits of her endurance, and she suspected the exploration would be a long one. There was a JuCo with a cinder track not too far from the house. She began to drive over there in the early mornings just after Henry left for work. Henry didn't understand the running. Jogging, sure—lots of women jogged. Keep those extra four pounds off the old fanny, keep those extra two inches off the old waistline. But Em didn't have an extra four pounds on her backside, and besides, jogging was no longer enough. She had to run, and fast. Only fast running would do.
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Harvey's Dream (2003)
One of King's major leitmotifs: detailing the woe that is in marriage. Until the uncanny comes along to raise the woes to a higher level than meer Updikery.
....she thinks, this is merely practicing to be old, and she hates it. She's afraid that when he retires it will be this way every morning, at least until she gives him a glass of orange juice and asks him (with an increasing impatience she won't be able to help) if he wants cereal or just toast. She's afraid she'll turn from whatever she's doing and see him sitting there in a bar of far too brilliant morning sun, Harvey in the morning, Harvey in his T-shirt and his boxer shorts, legs spread apart so she can view the meagre bulge of his basket (should she care to) and see the yellow calluses on his great toes, which always make her think of Wallace Stevens having on about the Emperor of Ice Cream. Sitting there silent and dopily contemplative instead of ready and raring, psyching himself up for the day. God, she hopes she's wrong. It makes life seem so thin, so stupid somehow. She can't help wondering if this is what they fought through for, raised and married off their three girls for, got past his inevitable middle-aged affair for, worked for, and sometimes (let's face it) grabbed for. If this is where you come out of the deep dark woods, Janet thinks, this . . . this parking lot . . . then why does anyone do it?
But the answer is easy. Because you didn't know. You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered. You kept a scrapbook devoted to the girls, and in it they were still young and still interesting in their possibilities: Trisha, the eldest, wearing a top hat and waving a tinfoil wand over Tim, the cocker spaniel; Jenna, frozen in mid-jump halfway through the lawn sprinkler, her taste for dope, credit cards, and older men still far over the horizon; Stephanie, the youngest, at the county spelling bee, where cantaloupe turned out to be her Waterloo. Somewhere in most of these pictures (usually in the background) were Janet and the man she had married, always smiling, as if it were against the law to do anything else.
Then one day you made the mistake of looking over your shoulder and discovered that the girls were grown and that the man you had struggled to stay married to was sitting with his legs apart, his fish-white legs, staring into a bar of sun, and by God maybe he looked fifty-four in either of his best suits, but sitting there at the kitchen table like that he looked seventy. Hell, seventy-five. He looked like what the goons on The Sopranos called a mope....
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Rest Stop (2003)
Another peroration on the King/Bachman split/braiding.
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Graduation Afternoon (2007)
A splendidly brief slice of life from the last normal hour in the life of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. Brief, uncynical, and sharply observed in class terms.
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The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates (2008)
As with "Graduation Afternoon," a good model for any aspiring short story writer. This story, unlike "Willa," is very up-to-date, and the slingshot ending allows an uncanny anecdote to take on a bit of Hawthorne's majesty.
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Mute (2007)
A traveller's tale of Answered Prayers in the form of a confession to a perfectly unflappable priest who thought he had heard everything. It also touches on three modern-day horrors which seem (but only at first) absurdly unscary and mundane: money trouble, sex addiction, and gambling.
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Ayana (2007)
A glimpse behind the curtain at the machinery of miracles and answered prayers. After the story's first section, an unnerving bit of everyday fantasy, King raises the sights of the story by probing the issues and contradictions, not explaining-away but richly sharpening the tale's scope.
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A Very Tight Place (2008)
King once famously said, and was for decades quoted as saying, he was not scared to go for the gross-out if all else failed. There is no failure in "A Very Tight Place," but at its point of plot-thickening the gross-out level gets turned up to 11 for pages of nearly unendurable horror. I think the worst (i.e. the most accomplished) element is how acutely and concisely the events are narrated. I'll say no more. Read it yourself.
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Jay
1 April 2020
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