Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
The paperback release of Stephen King’s last collection of short fiction is worth grabbing, even if you have the original hardback release because it contains a story that was not previously included. Though ‘The Music Room’ was first published in 2016 in Playboy Magazine and then reprinted later that year in Lawrence Block’s collection ‘In Sunlight and Shadow’ – and now finally available in a Stephen King collection.
Titled in a tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen’s last CD release; King’s collected stories like Cohen’s songs explore age and aging. Long term readers of King who also see their own mortality in the [increasingly nearing] distance will find this collection of stories rather elegiac as well as unsettling.
The shorter stories are less engaging than the longer ones. The Fifth Step being unpleasant, Red Screen being little more than a shrug, while Two Talented Bastids and On Slide Inn Road are eventful tales that despite the meandering, are just delightfully throw-away ditties.
However, it is the presence of four novellas that make this collection extraordinary.
Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream ostensibly a short crime novel, detailing the eponymous character reporting the presence of a dead body from the fragments of a dream which soon becomes a frantic thriller.
Rattlesnakes a lengthy coda to CUJO and DUMA KEY which features the theme of loss and reflection in the context of how grief from the past can become a horror of today.
The Dreamers is a superbly realised cosmic horror piece that weaves the memories of the Vietnam War to what may lie beneath the veneer of reality by way of H P Lovecraft. This my favourite story of the collection.
The Answer Man, a dark morality tale, written in a beguiling style that starts with whimsy, but soon turns nasty. It’s an EC horror styled narrative that is both incisive and thought provoking.
And of course, together with the newly collected short story The Music Room makes this paperback collection unmissable.
King closes the volume with an afterward that adds context to these stories as well as into the craft of imaginative writing.
An unmissable love letter to his constant readers.
