Book Review: You Like it Darker by Stephen King

 You Like it Darker by Stephen King

 502 pages, Hardcover
Published May, 2024 by Scribner

 

At Stokercon in San Diego this summer I talked with fellow horror podcaster Talking Scared’s Neil McRobert. One of the two topics we discussed in our short introduction was being critical of Stephen King. There are multiple reasons why it is tough for me. Like many of us, Stephen King is one of my formative authors. When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I was a subscriber to Castle Rock. The actual newsprint paper came in the mailbox. The Raft more than any other story was the light bulb tale that taught me to become a writer. No one has done more for the genre than Stephen King, to say I love and respect him as a writer is an understatement. He has written masterpieces like The Dead Zone and books I don’t like. You can’t write as many books as SK and not have duds.

Neil and I chatted about King being so popular that he has become a common language, when we (I mean the whole horror community) are critical, we can’t hurt him, not in terms of sales, and King is one of the few universal languages in the genre. He is as close to a common language as we have. So if one of his books has problems, it is something we as a community can talk about, and grow from. SK knows he is not perfect, listen to him talk about mystery writing and plotting.

All That said, it means you can take it to the bank, when I tell you that I love a SK book. I will tell you that I found Fairy Tale unreadable when I do. You Like It Darker is an excellent collection of stories, most short stories but one is a short novel. It is 235 pages more than double Of Mice and Men after all. 

 There is a major difference between the author of Skelton Crew and Night Shift and the author of this collection. As King has gotten older so have the constant readers. There is no journey with an author that readers have taken quite like it. Maybe Dean Koontz but he has clearly different eras like Odd Thomas, or his Frankenstein books.. This is the same author with more tools but the same imagination and it is glorious to read King’s work when he is at full strength. 

The opening story will make you wonder if King was given his talent by way of an alien encounter, like the characters in this novella. This is a charming well-executed tale, built with excellent storytelling chops. The characters are great, but it is the structure and how it unfolds that makes it work. The second, the Fifth Step, is a weird story, short almost entirely built on a punchline ending. Up next is a weird vibe piece Willie the Weirdo that seems like a spin on the concept of the classic King story Gramma. (which was turned into a Twilight Zone written by Harlan Ellison). It is a pretty interesting piece. It had a creepy tone and I wasn’t sure where it was going at first. It had the creepiest tone that King had reached in a while. Loved it. 

 I am not going to go through every story, some work better than others but that is the nature of a collection. I admit I scoffed when I saw Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream was essentially a novel as that is not what I signed up for. That said King working at the length is generally magical. The set-up is midwestern noir meets Les Miserables. Danny is a great and rare King character, not a writer, but a janitor, who has a dream that leads him to the body of a woman who was murdered in the middle of nowhere. An attempt to anonymously report the body ends with him as the main suspect. 

We know he is innocent, and that makes the novel work for me. Danny is wronged, and convicted in public opinion. On the Kingcast the discussion involved a debate on this story. Someone suggested that it might have been a better story if the reader was not sure if Danny was innocent or not. I disagree. The tension and suspense of the story is the fact that this innocent man is in an almost impossible situation. Each time it looks worse for him it is like a rope getting tighter. Danny is a regular guy and you are rooting for him, and the worse it looks the more tense the whole thing feels. I won't spoil the second half but this story is worth the whole book. 

On the Slide Road Inn also felt like a new spin on a Skeleton Crew classic Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut but the connection was not as close. I mean it involves a shortcut. This was a good one.  The next one I feel I must comment on is Turbulence Expert. As Dickian, I had to notice the similar set up this one has to the PKD classic Adjustment Team, King rarely plays with similar themes. 

The last one that hit me was the novella Rattlesnakes. A Kinda sorta sequel to Cujo in the sense that the father who lost his son Tad (the kid who died at the end of CUJO) is the central character. It is interesting as he is mostly off-screen in that novel, catching up with him decades after the tragic event in his life. This is a haunting novella, and pure horror that serves as a sequel that an older writer is perfect to write to a book he wrote when he was younger. 

One of the things that is so cool about Rattlesnakes is that he couldn’t have written it when he was younger, and without the natural passage of time, it wouldn’t work. Seeing the consequences of the novel from so long ago…it was a great piece of work. 

Dreamers and The Answer Man were great ways to end the collection. Dreamers is a weird work that had cosmic horror vibes, and The Answer Man was a delightfully charming period piece that apparently King started in the 80s or 90s and it feels old school. The old-timey charm mixed with Twilight zoney strangeness was the perfect way to end 

You Like it Darker is a fantastic sample of the master at work. A must-read for King fans, bt there is reach beyond the constant readers for sure. It is not a mainstream King like Shawshank, it is horror King and I love that.

 

 

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