You Like It Darker is a collection of twelve short stories by horror master Stephen King. Five of the stories are being published for the first time, while the other seven previously ran in magazines or on King’s websites. All twelve stories were new to me.
The collection’s title would seem to indicate that King has ratcheted up his penchant for the macabre, but if anything I thought he used an ironically light touch for most of the twelve stories. Though there are of course supernatural elements at play, the main thrust concerns more mundane horrors like bad luck, illness, and death. Perhaps the title is meant to redirect our fears away from the impossible and toward the inevitable.
Two of the collection’s standouts are also its longest entries. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is a novella about a high school janitor who has an out-of-nowhere psychic revelation while dreaming. After dreaming of finding a dead body in an oddly-specific location, Coughlin feels compelled to check out the scene, opening himself up for a lot of scrutiny when the dreamt-of corpse is actually there. The story also features a memorably freaky villain and a cinematic final confrontation. The second-longest story, Rattlesnakes, is the most supernatural of all. A retiree (who turns out to be a character reappearing in King’s work after four decades) spending time in Florida to grieve encounters a local eccentric whose tragic past turns to not be so definitely in the past. With some truly creepy imagery, Rattlesnakes is the one most likely to give the squeamish nightmares.
The collection’s shorter pieces contain their pleasures, too. In Willie the Weirdo, a little boy is fascinated by his grandfather’s preposterous stories, perhaps too fascinated. In Finn, the unlucky title character suffers from a case of mistaken identity and finds himself in a maddening and life-threatening situation. And in Red Screen, a cop who’s afraid his wife is getting tired of him takes a confession from a wife-killer with one hell of a defense.
While the collection displays enough of King’s prowess to remind the reader why he’s been so successful all these years, there are signs of trouble. The leadoff story, Two Talented Bastids, about two friends who turn their lives around after an unlikely encounter on a hunting trip, dithers toward an unremarkable conclusion and, even worse, contains a howler of an anachronism that really should have been caught by an editor. I was also taken aback that other stories featured minor characters named Althea Gibson (here a hairdresser, in real life a women’s tennis legend) and Regis Toomey (here a local Mainer, in real life a movie star from way back in the day.)
These slipups, if that’s what they are, do not detract much from the overall quality of the stories. Though You Like It Darker seems unlikely to enter the pantheon of King’s greatest work, it’s still a reminder of his immense talent for entertaining readers.
