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Book Review: Just After Sunset December 26, 2008

Note: This is #65, the LAST BOOK in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. I'm done.

Pyramids

Just After Sunset is Stephen King's latest collection of short stories, containing a hodge podge of different tales that with one exception had been previously published in various magazines or anthologies. I've liked Stephen King's similar works in the past, despite the fact that some of his so-called short stories have clocked in at novella or even full novel length. This collection, however, contains relatively short works that can all be easily read in one sitting. Unfortunately I didn't care for hardly any of them.

What we have here seems to be more like a collection of literary doodles or proof of concepts that just kind of fell out of King's brain. Most of them seem like either short little vignettes that don't seem to have much point or outlines for larger works that King never quite got around to fleshing out. You know, the kind of thing that you might find in the last 50 pages of a full-length novel after he'd spent hundreds of pages building character, place, backstory, and tension.

Only one of the stories, N., really did anything for me. It's King's homage-slash-fanfiction for H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos where he links obsessive-compulsive disorder with rituals that in reality keep otherworldly horrors at bay for the select few that are unlucky enough to be chosen as guardians for the "thin places" between worlds. It's a really neat concept, and he executes it well.

On the other hand, one of the other stories, Stationary Bike is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen put down on paper. Really, it's incredibly stupid.

So, it's going to be hard for me to recommend this one unless you're a Stephen King completionist like myself.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week: