How do you write a summary of your thoughts of a short story collection? Especially one as varied as King’s first collection Night Shift. This book contains some of my favorite stories I’ve ever read. Some are complex, wide-reaching, cosmic horror, some are silly little creature features.

There are so many stories in this collection that are the precursors of truly great works. “Jerusalem’s Lot” is a period piece that’s a prequel to the novel ‘Salem’s Lot. “Night Surf” meanwhile is told from the point of view of Californians dealing with the outbreak of the infamous Captain Tripps virus. “One for the Road” is a sort of brief sequel to ‘Salem’s Lot, dealing with the fallout after the town has been rung dry by its vampire infestation. And then you’ve got stories that themselves birthed genre classics — be they cult or regular — like “Children of the Corn” and “Trucks” (which was the inspiration for Maximum Overdrive).

For me, growing up at least, the stories that stood out to me and of which I thought about for years and years to come were “I Am the Doorway”, “The Boogeyman”, and “The Man Who Loved Flowers.” The latter is a very simple story, almost more a practice in unreliable narrator than anything resembling a normal story structure. But it blew my mind with the dime-turning cruelty and horror of the titular man who loved flowers. “The Boogeyman”, similarly, is a pretty straightforward story about a man who’s child tries to warn him of the Boogeyman, which the man does not believe until it’s too late.

But the one that really flipped my lid was “I Am the Doorway.” An astronaut comes back from space and begins developing itchy welts on his hands, then on the rest of his body. These welts eventually emerge as strange, alien eyeballs through which he can see…but he’s not the only one looking through them. This one feels of a kindred spirit to “Survivor Type,” from Skeleton Crew, which I’ll get to eventually. It was one of my first brushes with cosmic horror, and I was infatuated and terrified of the idea that there were things out there that we couldn’t even fathom, that might be alien in the truest sense of the word, and they may not have our best wishes at heart.

Reading through it this time, “I Am the Doorway” and “The Man Who Loved Flowers” were still very enjoyable. However, as a man in my 30s, I was struck by new stories this time around — “The Ledge” and “Quitters, Inc.” in particular. “The Ledge” — about a man who’s forced by a mobster to walk around the narrow ledge of a building and try not to fall — played hell with my fear of heights. And there’s something about these loss of power stories — where you’re forced into doing something you otherwise wouldn’t because to do anything else is death — something about that loss of power, the horror of losing control of your life, hits me very close to where I live. And “Quitters, Inc.” is very much in that vein as well — people sign up for this program to quit smoking. And they agree that this company can do whatever it needs to do to make sure they stay quit — even if it means hurting that people they love. It’s all too common for folks to agree to things without fully understanding what they’re signing up for — a theme that is explored in The Long Walk as well, which I’m very excited to revisit.

There are other stories that are fun in a Saturday matinee monster movie kind of way, but beating beneath even those stories are far more complex themes than people talk about. “The Mangler” ends with the titular laundry press fully uprooting itself and storming through the town like a low-end Transformer, but it’s also a look at how the blood (and labor) of poor folks are used to fuel businesses, and often that sacrifice is met with very little thanks and even less support. “Trucks” — like the movie I discussed on my podcast — explores a fear of our reliance as humanity on the conveniences of modern technology and how we’d fare if we lost the ability to rely on those things. “Children of the Corn” is about how harmful religious fundamentalism can be, and how it can corrupt even the most well meaning of people and convince them to do terrible things in the name of God.

I was happy to revisit this collection. It’s frustrating there’s not a better audiobook for it — there are three audiobooks with selected stories from Night Shift, all read fantastically by John Glover. But those three audiobooks don’t include “Children of the Corn”, “I Am the Doorway”, “One for the Road” nor “Trucks.” It’s a baffling decision, but even more confusing that it hasn’t since been corrected. I can see being afraid that super long audiobooks wouldn’t sell and couldn’t justify the materials needed to manufacture all of the cassette tapes or CDs, but in the era of 40, 50, 60+ hour audiobooks, I don’t understand why these aren’t completed and collected in one audio volume.

Next I’ll be digging into The Stand. I debated about whether to read it now or skip it until I reach the 90s when the “Complete and Uncut” edition was released, but I decided I wanted to go ahead and read it now since it was still his sixth book, and even if it was heavily revised, it’ll be interesting to see where King’s head was at early in his career. It would admittedly have a very small audience for such a novelty, but I think it’d be neat if they released the audiobook for the original cut of The Stand, if only for the novelty of comparing and contrasting — King did add around 400 extra pages or so, and it’d be interesting to hear the pared down version.

Until next time!