Night Shift by Stephen King (1978)
It would be hard to overstate the impact of Stephen King's short story collection Night Shift (1978) had on me as a young reader and then-wannabe fiction writer. Plus, the cover art of a hand half-wrapped in gauze and pulsating with eyeballs... I assumed that was just a publisher flight of fancy! Little did I know...
Seriously, rereading these stories is a delight. In his hungry years, when King had to craft tales to make sales, he was keyed and pitched like no one else in the early 1970s. (Harlan Ellison might come close, but the cloying tone of moral superiority stunted much of his fiction and all his non-fiction.)
Night Surf (1974)
"Night Surf" is a clear precursor to King's magisterial The Stand. Here we have teenagers on the New England coast after a flu called Captain Trips has wiped out all but a small remnant of the human race. This is a pocket edition of On the Beach, lamentation and keening and stiff-upper-lip adolescents facing the end of all things, too young to fathom all that is lost.
....So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu. I'd like to put down a huge plaque somewhere, in the Bonneville Salt Flats, maybe. Bronze Square. Three miles on a side. And in big raised letters it would say, for the benefit of any landing aliens: JUST THE FLU.
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Trucks (1973)
"Trucks" is an apocalypse of a different color: no flu, no children's crusade. Just a blue-collar Judgment Day with big rigs, bulldozers, laundry vans, and pickup trucks in place of Skynet.
....'I was coming up the interstate to Pelson,' I said. 'A truck came up behind me - I could see it in the mirror a long way off- really highballing. You could hear it a mile down the road. It whipped out around a VW Beetle and just snapped it off the road with the whiplash of the trailer, the way you'd snap a ball of paper off a table with your finger. I thought the truck would go, too. No driver could have held it with the trailer whipping that way. But it didn't go. The VW flopped over six or seven times and exploded. And the truck got the next one coming up the same way. It was coming up on me and I took the exit ramp in a hurry.' I laughed but my heart wasn't in it. 'Right into a truck stop, of all places. From the frying pan into the fire.'
The girl swallowed. 'We saw a Greyhound going north in the southbound lane. It was . . . ploughing . . . through cars. It exploded and burned but before it did slaughter.'
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Sometimes They Come Back (1974)
Teaching has to be one of the worst jobs, filled with horrors the rest of us cannot even guess at. With one or two exceptions, all my teachers grades 6-12 were narrow-minded, bullying, spiteful little Eichmanns; at the time it never occured to me to walk a mile in their shoes.
....A cop pulled him over on his way to the hospital, then went ahead of him, siren screaming. There was a young doctor with a toothbrush moustache in the emergency room. He looked at Jim with dark, emotionless eyes.
'Excuse me, I'm James Norman and -'
'I'm sorry, Mr Norman. She died at 9.04p.m.'
He was going to faint. The world went far away and swimmy, and there was a high buzzing in his ears. His eyes wandered without purpose, seeing green tiled walls, a wheeled stretcher glittering under the overhead fluorescents, a nurse with her cap on crooked. Time to freshen up, honey. An orderly was leaning against the wall outside Emergency Room No.1. Wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying blood splattered across the front. Cleaning his fingernails with a knife. The orderly looked up and grinned into Jim's eyes. The orderly was David Garcia.
Jim fainted.
Funeral. Like a dance in three acts. The house. The funeral parlour. The graveyard. Faces coming out of nowhere, whirling close, whirling off into the darkness again. Sally's mother, her eyes streaming tears behind a black veil. Her father, looking shocked and old. Simmons. Others. They introduced themselves and shook his hand. He nodded, not remembering their names. Some of the women brought food, and one lady brought an apple pie and someone ate a piece and when he went out in the kitchen he saw it sitting on the counter, cut wide open and drooling juice into the pie plate like amber blood and he thought: Should have a big scoop of vanilla ice cream right on top.
He felt his hands and legs trembling, wanting to go across to the counter and throw the pie against the wall.
And then they were going and he was watching himself, the way you watch yourself in a home movie, as he shook hands and nodded and said: Thank you. . . Yes, I will.
Thank you. . . I'm sure she is. . . Thank you .
When they were gone, the house was his again. He went over to the mantel. It was cluttered with souvenirs of their marriage. A stuffed dog with jewelled eyes that she had won at Coney Island on their honeymoon. Two leather folders - his diploma from B.U. and hers from U. Mass. A giant pair of styrofoam dice she had given him as a gag after he had dropped sixteen dollars in Pinky Silverstein's poker game a year or so before. A thin china cup she had bought in a Cleveland junk shop last year. In the middle of the mantel, their wedding picture. He turned it over and then sat down in his chair and looked at the blank TV set....
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Strawberry Spring (1975)
In his hungry years, when King had to craft tales to make sales, he was keyed and pitched like no one else in the early 1970s. (Harlan Ellison might come close, but the cloying tone of moral superiority stunted much of his fiction and all his non-fiction.)
....In New England they call it a strawberry spring. No one knows why; it's just a phrase the old-timers use. They say it happens once every eight or ten years. What happened at New Sharon Teachers' College that particular strawberry spring. . . there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they've never said.
At New Sharon, the strawberry spring began on 16 March 1968. The coldest winter in twenty years broke on that day. It rained and you could smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. The snow, which had been thirty-five inches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush. The Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clear-cut for two months by the sub-zero temperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. The caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the Tep fraternity house cried melted tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall lost its frozen feathers and its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places.
And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of joint, strange, magical. The unwary traveller would step out of the juke-thumping, brightly lit confusion of the Grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and instead he would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the only sound his own footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo and Sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy panorama of moors and yew trees and perhaps a Druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring.
The jukebox played 'Love Is Blue' that year. It played 'Hey, Jude' endlessly, endlessly. It played 'Scarborough Fair.' ....
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The Last Rung on the Ladder (1978)
This is a perfectly voiced and executed story, one that haunts long after reading.and rereading. Brothers and sisters...
'I didn't know what you were doing,' she said.
'You must have! I was right under you, for cripe's sake!'
'I didn't dare look down,' she said. 'I was too scared. I had my eyes shut the whole time.'
I stared at her, thunderstruck.
'You didn't know? Didn't know what I was doing?' She shook her head.
'And when I told you to let go you. . . you just did it?'
She nodded.
'Kitty, how could you do that?'
She looked at me with those deep blue eyes. 'I knew you must have been doing something to fix it,' she said. 'You're my big brother. I knew you'd take care of me.'
'Oh, Kitty, you don't know how close it was.'
I had put my hands over my face. She sat up and took them away. She kissed my cheek. 'No,' she said. 'But I knew you were down there. Gee, am I sleepy. I'll see you tomorrow, Larry. I'm going to have a cast, Dr Pederson says.'
She had the cast on for a little less than a month, and all her classmates signed it - she even got me to sign it. And when it came off, that was the end of the barn incident. My father replaced the ladder up to the third loft with a new strong one, but I never climbed up to the beam and jumped off into the haymow again. So far as I know, Kitty didn't either.
It was the end, but somehow not the end....
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Graveyard Shift (1970)
In 1989-1990 I worked as a bundle-boy at Lion Knitting Mill in Cleveland. It was an old 4-story building, and I lost a hundred pounds running around the floors hell-for-leather. For that reason, "Graveyard Shift" has always been very weighty for me.
....Hall had developed a habit of collecting a small arsenal of soft-drink cans from the trash barrel during his break. He pegged them at the rats during times when work was slow, retrieving them later at his leisure. Only this time Mr Foreman had caught him, coming up the stairs instead of using the elevator like the sneaky sonofabitch everyone said he was.
'What are you up to, Hall?'
'The rats,' Hall said, realizing how lame that must sound now that all the rats had snuggled safely back into their houses. 'I peg cans at 'em when I see 'em.'
Warwick nodded once, briefly. He was a big beefy man with a crew cut. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was pulled down. He looked at Hall closely. 'We don't pay you to chuck cans at rats, mister. Not even if you pick them up again.'
'Harry hasn't sent down an order for twenty minutes,' Hall answered, thinking: Why couldn't you stay the hell put and drink your coffee? 'I can't run it through the picker if I don't have it.'
Warwick nodded as if the topic no longer interested him.
'Maybe I'll take a walk up and see Wisconsky,' he said.
'Five to one he's reading a magazine while the crap piles up in his bins.'
Hall didn't say anything.
Warwick suddenly pointed. 'There's one! Get the bastard!'
Hall fired the Nehi can he had been holding with one whistling, overhand motion. The rat, which had been watching him from atop one of the fabric bags with its bright buckshot eyes, fled with one faint squeak. Warwick threw back his head and laughed as Hall went after the can.
'I came to see you about something else,' Warwick said.
'Is that so?'
'Next week's Fourth of July week.' Hall nodded. The mill would be shut down Monday to Saturday - vacation week for men with at least one year's tenure. Layoff week for men with less than a year. 'You want to work?'
Hall shrugged. 'Doing what?'
'We're going to clean the whole basement level. Nobody's touched it for twelve years. Helluva mess. We're going to use hoses.'
'The town zoning committee getting on the board of directors?'
Warwick looked steadily at Hall. 'You want it or not? Two an hour, double time on the fourth. We're working the graveyard shift because it'll be cooler.'
Hall calculated. He could clear maybe seventy-five bucks after taxes. Better than the goose egg he had been looking forward to.
'All right.'
'Report down by the dye house next Monday.'
Hall watched him as he started back to the stairs. Warwick paused halfway there and turned back to look at Hall. 'You used to be a college boy, didn't you?'
Hall nodded.
'Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind.'
He left. Hall sat down and lit another smoke, holding a soda can in one hand and watching for the rats. He could just imagine how it would be in the basement - the subbasement, actually, a level below the dye house. Damp, dark, full of spiders and rotten cloth and ooze from the river
- and rats. Maybe even bats, the aviators of the rodent family. Gah.
Hall threw the can hard, then smiled thinly to himself as the faint sound of Warwick's voice came down through the overhead ducts, reading Harry Wisconsky the riot act.
Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind.
He stopped smiling abruptly and butted his smoke. A few moments later Wisconsky started to send rough nylon down through the blowers, and Hall went to work. And after a while the rats came out and sat atop the bags at the back of the long room watching him with their unblinking black eyes. They looked like a jury.
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Quitters, Inc. (1978)
A droll conte cruel.
....love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.
Jay
19 March 2020
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