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OK!
I'm not generally so crazy about Stephen
King's short stories. I think he's at his best when he really gets
into details. He has this gift for turning the most insignificant
detail into a hair raising revelation and can indulge fully in it
when he allows himself to be creative over 500 pages or more. They
have been exceptions: Carrie and Misery or The Dark
Half are brilliant but relatively short. But in stories like
The Stand, The Tommyknockers, It or The
Dreamcatcher, to mention only these, King builds tension
progressively, introducing these little creepy details that are his
signature (I'm thinking mainly about how he introduces the secret
thoughts of the characters in the middle of situations, giving the
reader chills). Anyway, I'll come back
to short fiction at the end of this review, since it is the subject
of Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art, the introduction of
Everything's Eventual. I've decided to dedicate part of this
review to this introduction, since it has achieved what the stories
themselves haven't: it has kept me awake at night! Yes, I've
actually had troubles sleeping because I was trying to figure out
the reason why the short story is an art on the verge of
extinction... I've come up with a couple of explanations though,
that I will reveal once I've given a survey of the short stories in
Everything's Eventual.
EE (let's settle this once and for all: EE
=Everything's Eventual) begins with Autopsy in Room Four. In
several EE short stories, King revisits classic horror themes more
or less successfully. One of the way to achieve a good "remake" is
to do it with humor. This one is a success: it was fun! I found it a
good way to break the ice with the reader provided ice needed to be
broken of course...
The Man in the Black Suit follows, I
don't know if my revealing this information makes it a spoiler, but
I would personally have preferred to be given this element
of understanding before, so I
could have paid more attention to certain details: King, who provides a
short comment on each of his EE stories, sometimes beforehand,
in this case afterwards, says he wanted, with this one, to pay tribute
to one of his favorite short stories, Hawthorne's Young Goodman
Brown. I happen to know this particular short story very well,
and hardly noticed any real resemblance (whether in the story itself
or in its symbolism, except maybe the woods
and the real identity of the Man, on a very down-to-earth
level). However, I liked it, I enjoyed reading
about the Big Bad again... I like this guy, I mean,
I don't think he's cool and want to pat him on the back, but I think
he's an interesting character. Usually I don't care for all-good or
all-bad characters, but I admire how King achieves to craft a Big
Bad so evil, without even the slightest trace of humanity, of
compassion or doubt: it
produces a pretty scary effect! I think it's always him, in most
King's novels or short stories, whether he is a library cop or the
seller of "Needful Things", whether he goes by the name of Randall Flagg or Andre Linoge.
All That You Love Will Be Carried Away
was original, different from what King usually writes. Actually it
was one of my favorites, I enjoyed the mixture of poetry and popular
wisdom and the ending was a fine one...
The two stories that followed, The Death of
Jack Hamilton and In the Deathroom almost had me giving
up EE or at least, skipping 50 pages or so. I read them to the end
though, and didn't care for them a bit. But The Little Sisters of
Eluria did the trick: I was hooked again, and this particular
story confirmed that King is not only a writer but also a very good
marketer! This short story is a prequel to The Dark Towers
series, series that I had scrupulously avoided until now. I've read
lots of King's books, not all of them, not even 80% of them, but
probably a good 60-65%. I've got a long reading list awaiting and I
didn't need four more books on it. Of course, as King points out,
you don't need to read The Dark Towers to enjoy The Little
Sister of Eluria, the story stands by itself, but with hints
such as these: Roland lives in a world that has "moved on", he's
pursuing a magician in a black robe, there's a Tower "at the very
end of the End-World", what's King trying to do? Promote the series
of course, awake the reader's curiosity... And he's succeeded, now I
intent to read The Dark Towers, the four volumes of it, and
eventually the seven volumes of it, once the series is complete...
Everything's Eventual is the story that
justifies my thinking that King is better for novel-writing. My! This
one was good, so good that I was disappointed to reach the end and
to be left with some questions unanswered (I mean sometimes it's
better this way but not in this case...). If he's just a bit
conscientious, King should work on this one and make it a 500 pages
novel: this story has expansive potential! Well, I know he wants to
retire, but at least this story (and others) are proofs that he still
has fresh ideas... L.T.'s Theory of Pets was OK, I wasn't too
crazy about it and I'm not much inspired talking about it.
The Road Virus Heads North almost
achieved what the introduction did: it almost prevented me to sleep.
King says in introduction to 1408: "I think that what scares
us varies widely from an individual to the next", 1408 was
the one that did it for him, but not for me: though I found it
interesting, it left me completely unafraid... Which was not the
case of The Road Virus, this one really gave me the creeps...
Lunch at the Gotham Café is another one
of my favorites, this guy who decides to go through the hell of
cigarette withdrawal (that King describes with the knowledge of
somebody who went through it) while divorcing, the gory episode in
the restaurant... This one had all the elements of a great short
story, and I mean a short story, not a story that screams to
stretch itself beyond the boundaries of a short story in which it
has been confined... King has mastered it: when the reader feels
sympathy toward a character of a short story and hate for another
(knowing that you can only bring them
to life in a limited number of words), this means it is a good short story!
That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is
in French was also excellent: a real nightmare... I've already
mentioned what I had to say about 1408, which follows.
Riding the Bullet is also great King, scary, well-written and
raising an interesting moral debate...
The final story, Luckey Quarter was
forgotten as soon as read...
Now comes what I promised at the beginning:
the results of my reflections (for those who care about them!) on
the disappearing of the short story.
I think one of these reasons would have come
to me while writing this review, had it not been suggested by
my husband when I tried to raise his awareness about the awful fate
of the short story: Reviewers must hate short
stories! I mean, how can you write a review, relatively short (at
least on my web site, I do what I want, if I decide to stretch this
review endlessly, it's my privilege, even if nobody reads it until
the end!) and give a fair impression of a heterogenic book such
as a short story volume? Unless all stories have a common theme or
are related in some way (I'm thinking about the four intertwined
stories of Hearts in Atlantis, but should we consider them as
short stories? Have you ever thought about this: how short must a
short story be to be considered a short story?) you have to reflect
the impression of each story and of the volume as a whole: hard task
for a reviewer! In a nutshell you have to do the job the author
didn't do: find a link! (at least the first short stories ever
written, The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales for
example, had a frame that brought them together!). In a country like
the USA where the people from The New
York Times or Oprah decide what
people read (I hope to comment on that in a
future review...), when these people make their minds that it is
troublesome to present a short story book for the reasons
above-mentioned, then short story volumes shall not be promoted and
therefore not widely read...
The second reason I think, is the quality of
the short stories itself. I thought first, I'm not crazy myself
about short stories and why is it so, but then I remembered that one
of my favorites among the classics is French author Guy de
Maupassant, and though he also wrote novels, I have a preference for
his short stories (the same goes for Henry James...). Some authors
are better poets, some have a gift for writing plays, some are
excellent novelists and poor short story writers and that's it...
Also, as King said, there's no demand for short stories (probably
for the reason mentioned in the preceding paragraph) so unless an
author is genial for writing short stories (as Raymond Carver was)
he will stick to writing novels. As for King himself, he is popular
enough to publish whatever he wants. I have said he is better for
novels, but in EE there are a couple
of really fine short stories that almost had me change my mind...
I see a last reason for the sinking of short
stories. King says "Yet for me, there are few pleasures so excellent
as sitting in my favorite chair (...) reading a good story which I
can complete in a single sitting". Unless you don't have a full-time
job or small kids or both, reading a short story (at least a King's
short story: they are quite lengthy!) in one sitting is a luxury few
people can indulge in. King can though and undeniably deserves it:
being a popular writer has some "fringe benefits" (to quote EE, in
EE), the ability to manage your time with more freedom than most
people is one. The "lost art" of the short story is, I think, a
side-effect of living now and in our society, linked also to the
fact that we are always connected to the Internet and have a
cell-phone nearby (King describes well the spirit of it
on page 16). I'm not judgmental and I don't speak for myself, I
state it as a fact that I could observe. And I think that when
people are on a holiday without the computer or the phone at hand,
they'd rather settle for a long novel, one in which we can be
immersed in for a long time, a best means of escape.
It all finally adds up to the fact that people
don't read much: when they do, they have to be told what to read (so
they don't lose too much time browsing books in bookstores or
libraries) and they are rarely told to read short-stories, as a
result there is almost no demand for them;
writers don't bother writing them and as a consequence, since the
genre (troublesome for reviewers as I said) is not widely
represented, it is not picked
as an Oprah recommendation (not that King would ever
be picked by Oprah anyway...), and so on and so
forth... A real
catch-22, ain't it?
Rating: 
© Discussing Books, 08/14/2002 |
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