Book Review: Night Shift

Night Shift by Stephen King

A collection of twenty short stories from the King of Horror, Night Shift is a good fit for anyone without the patience or attention to sit through a whole novel. Most of these stories were written and sold to various publications in the seventies – the heyday of King’s writing, in my humble opinion – before being anthologised in this tome.

Some readers may castigate me for saying this but I prefer the King’s earlier works – The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Dark Half – to his later books – Needful Things, Gerald’s Game. The truth is that I’m not a fan of his writing style (having being brought up on a diet of British books, I find his style a little too informal, a little too direct), but there is no denying the fact that he is a good storyteller. As evidenced from these short stories. Practically every one (with maybe only 2-3 exceptions) is a gripping tale that holds the reader tightly without letting out till the end of the story. And that is why the short story format is great in this instance. Instead of obsessing over a thick book for 2-3 days and letting normal duties slide, the short story can be finished within forty minutes to an hour and after that, you’ll be free to go and handle your daily grind.

Twenty tales is too many for me to introduce so I’m only going to talk about the six that I like most. If you hate spoilers, stop right here.

I am the Doorway

An innovative science fiction/horror tale. Arthur was a retired American astronaut who was crippled in an accident when he was returning from outer space. His partner was killed in the accident and Arthur barely survived. After that, he retired and moved to a seaside town.

In the town, he befriended another retiree, Richard, and he recounted to Richard the troubles that plagued him after the accident. His crippled legs notwithstanding, he began to develop an itch at his fingertips. The itch became so bad that it almost drove him crazy and his fingers became red and mushy. Gradually, he realised that he was infected by some alien life form when he was up in outer space. Slits grew in each of his red, itching fingers – they were eyes.

Through these terrible eyes, he began to be ‘possessed’ by the aliens who hijacked his body and he shared their thoughts: how they perceived humans as foreign monstrous beings. He ended up being truly possessed by the aliens who shut off his consciousness and used his body to murder other humans: a boy who wandered along the beach, scavenging for coins lost in the sand, and Arthur’s own friend, Richard. After killing Richard, Arthur tried to put an end to the murders by dousing his hands with kerosene and plunging them into a fire. But a good horror tale needs a good solid twist at the end and Stephen King gives us that. Read the book yourself to find out what the twist is.

The Mangler

Belladonna

The Mangler is an unusual story about a laundry machine possessed by a demon.

Police officer John Hutton got called in to investigate an industrial accident. A woman, Adelle Frawley, had been caught in the speed ironer at Blue Ribbon Laundry with fatal and gruesome consequences. (A speed ironer is a machine used to iron sheets and linens. A conveyor belt carries damp-dried sheets in continuous cycle between sixteen huge revolving cylinders – eight above and eight below. The sheets are pressed like ‘thin ham’ between the cylinders – you can imagine what happened to Adelle Frawley, although you might not want to.)

After some investigations which unveiled the fact that this machine became very accident-prone after Sherry Ouelette cut her hand and bled all over it, Hunton began to suspect that the machine was possessed.

With his friend, college professor Mark Jackson, he did some research which turned up some common ingredients that had to be present for a possession to take place: blood of a virgin (tick – thanks to Sherry Ouelette), graveyard dirt (unconfirmed), hand of glory aka belladonna (highly unlikely), bat’s blood (possible because of dark nooks and crannies in the laundry), night moss (also possible due to dampness) and horse gelatin (tick – found in Jell-O).

When Hunton and Jackson found out that Sherry Ouelette was a virgin, they realised that it was highly likely that the speed ironer was possessed and they decided to hold an exorcism. Only things didn’t quite pan out as they expected…

This story is strange because most stories about possessions involve humans. But King does have a thing about machines. Think Christine. And the best thing is that despite the strangeness of a mechanical thing being possessed, the story works.

The Boogeyman

This one takes the form of a therapy session. Lester Billings, 28, was talking to a psychiatrist.

Lester Billings’ three children, Denny, Shirl and Andy, had all died in separate accidents, or so it seemed. Denny died from crib death (a term for young children dying inexplicably in their cots), Shirl had a convulsion, swallowed her own tongue and suffocated and Andy allegedly climbed out of his cot and broke his neck when he fell.

Actually, even after the first death, Lester had an inkling that it was not an accident. He began to hear and see strange and frightening things in the house but he stubbornly refused to admit that anything was wrong, even after Shirl died. It was only when his third child, Andy, was born that he began to take precautions for he loved Andy best amongst his three children.

He allowed Andy to sleep with him and his wife, Rita. He even moved house. However, after a year, he began to sense that the house was not the same anymore and he suspected that whatever killed his older children – they called it the Boogeyman – had found them after searching for them for a year. In the end, Andy proved to be unable to escape the fate of his siblings and died at the hands of the Boogeyman too. This was actually witnessed by Lester himself who rushed into the room at the last minute to see a hideous being shaking his son until the latter’s neck broke.

This story is brilliant because in the course of the therapy, we learnt that Lester could have prevented all the deaths, if he had been a more caring and sensitive father. Especially the third death. By then he was aware of what was happening but he was too scared of the Boogeyman and he chose to sacrifice his son to save his own hide. Ironically, the twist at the end hinted that despite the price he paid to save himself, he was ultimately unable to do so.

Grey Matter

This is why drinking
is not a good idea.

This story began in Henry Parmalee’s Nite-Owl, a pub in a small American town.

A few old men were gathered in the pub, passing time, when a boy, Timothy Grenadine, ran in, looking like he had seen a ghost. He started babbling, asking Henry, the proprietor of the pub, to bring his father (Richie Grenadine) some beer because he could not bear to go back. Out of concern, Henry took him aside to talk to him. When Henry returned, he asked for some volunteers to follow him to Richie’s apartment and the narrator and Carl Littlefield volunteered.

It was only when the trio were on the way that Henry showed his two companions what he had brought along – a pistol – and gave them the full details of the incident.

Apparently, Richie had drunk a case of bad beer after which he started to grow weird. He became sensitive to light and became very inactive, slouching in front of the TV the whole day and not even bothering to report for work. He also began to smell worse and worse. Eventually, his condition deteriorated to such an extent that even the light emitted by the TV was too much for him and he switched off the TV and sat in darkness all the time. At the same time, he was developing a layer of gray slime (hence the title).

Out of curiosity, Richie began to spy on his father and one day, to his horror, he saw his father take out a decomposed dead cat which he (Richie) had hidden and eat it.

The men came to the conclusion that whatever Richie consumed in that can of bad beer must be turning him into some sort of mutant fungal human. It was also hinted in the story that Richie had moved beyond feasting on rotten dead felines and was attacking humans for a couple of young girls and a wino had gone missing in the town.

The three men reached Richie’s apartment and asked him to come out but he was understandably reluctant to do so and only charged out when sufficiently provoked by Henry. As he burst out of the door, the narrator and Carl caught a glimpse of the altered Richie – not a man but a wobble of jelly with flat yellow eyes that belonged to an animal – and skedaddled back to the pub as quickly as their old legs could carry them. As they were fleeing for their lives, they heard Henry opening fire thrice.

Stephen King ended the tale with a cliff-hanger: Did Henry triumph or was he overcome by Richie who would go on to infect the rest of the town, and eventually the whole of humanity?

Battleground

A retro toy?

Another unusual and interesting story.

John Renshaw was an assassin from the Organisation. He had just completed a hit job in Miami. His target this time was the owner of a toy company, Hans Morris. When he returned to his apartment, he was surprised to receive a package from the mother of his victim, Hans Morris’ mother.

He removed the wrapping to see a box stencilled with:

G.I. Joe Vietnam Footlocker

20 Infantrymen, 10 Helicopters,

2 BAR Men, 2 Bazooka Men, 2 Medics, 4 Jeeps

Morris Toy Company, Miami, Fla

Surprisingly, the box began to move by itself and it fell to its side, with the top open. Tiny soldiers trooped out and began to attack Renshaw. Despite his excellent combat skills and sharp survival instincts, he was no match for the voodooed figures which came armed with a rocket launcher, twenty surface-to-air ‘Twister’ missiles and a scale-model thermonuclear weapon. Renshaw had no chance against a nuclear bomb, small as it was. He was eliminated as coldly and efficiently as he had eliminated Hans Morris.

What is interesting about this story is firstly its concept. Toy soldiers are very common and most children, especially boys, would have some recollections of playing with them. It is very clever of Stephen King to use such a common toy in a horror story, giving the reader a fresh perspective on the ubiquitous toy.

He also did an excellent job describing the battle between Renshaw and the figurines, for battle it was. It was fascinating to see the seasoned Renshaw using all his wits to try to survive and how the bewitched toys outmanoeuvred him every step of the way.

All in all, a great tale by a great storyteller.

The Last Rung on the Ladder

This is the most unusual story in the collection for it is not a horror story at all. Instead, it is a tale about the relationship between a pair of siblings, Larry the reliable older brother and Katrina the beautiful younger sister.

The story started in the present, when Larry and Katrina were all grown up already. Larry was very successful in his career, commonly acknowledged to be one of the best corporate lawyers in America but Katrina was not doing so well.

Stephen King’s hook at the start of the story was that Larry had just received a troubling letter from Katrina but King does not reveal to the reader what the letter was about. Instead, he took us back to the duo’s childhood when Larry was ten and his sister eight. At that time, they were very poor and living on their father’s farm. King sketched their affectionate relationship in loving strokes and we could tell that they were very close.

Their favourite sport at that time was a hazardous game of climbing the rickety ladder (forty-three rungs) in their barn, walking along the beam to which the ladder was nailed and then jumping off the end of the beam into a stack of hay below.

One day, just as Katrina climbed up to the last rung of the ladder, the ladder broke free from the beam and for a few precarious minutes, Katrina was hanging, for her life literally, on the last rung. In the meantime, Larry was desperately trying to put together a mini haystack that would cushion Katrina when she inevitably fell and hopefully save her life.

He succeeded.

Although Katrina broke her left ankle, she survived. Later, we learn that in those desperate minutes when Larry was running from big haystack to mini haystack, Katrina didn’t even know what he was doing because she was too scared to look down. Essentially, she had let go when Larry instructed her to do so in blind faith. She trusted her older brother and believed that he would take care of her.

Then we come back to the present to find out that Katrina had died. She committed suicide by jumping off a tall building, an ironical point given the siblings’ favourite game when they were young.

We also learn that the troubling letter was actually the last of a series of letters in which Katrina had requested for her brother to visit and help her, but Larry, who was too caught up in the rat race and who had no idea that his sister was having a hard time, had not been able to do so. Again, a poignant twist that contrasted cruelly with how earnestly he had carried out his duties as older brother when he was a child.

With this story, Stephen King demonstrated that he is not just a horror scribe, but that his fine writing skills extend across genres. He not only spins a fine horror yarn, he is also capable of telling a tragic tale.

These twenty stories are great examples of King at his best. Read Night Shift. I guarantee that you won’t regret it.