Recent Reads: Everything's Eventual, by Stephen King.

I've always enjoyed Stephen King's short stories more than his novels, and the modern-day godfather of dark tales comes through again with this collection. Some of the stories are openly-acknowledged homages to past masters like Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Nawthorne, or to nearly-forgotten mini-genres like the gangster tales of the thirties or philosophical concepts of hell drawn from Sartre or Camus. Some are "conventional" horror tales (to the extent there is such a thing); others, such as All That You Love Will Be Carried Away, are subtler stories about people whose despair and horror comes from their everyday lives, the slow loss of illusions and dreams, the banal vulgarities scrawled on the walls of public restrooms. All of them work perfectly, except, perhaps, for L.T.'s Theory of Pets, whose ambiguous ending left me mystified, although King's casual mastery of slightly-cracked characters and dialogue made it a pleasant read anyway. As usual, King's introduction is as interesting as his fiction. Among other things, he discusses his abortive attempt to write a radio play, his experience in electronically publishing Riding the Bullet and The Plant, and the declining market for popular short stories and the magazines that publish them. His description of now-defunct Story magazine as "a lodestar for young writers (including myself, although I never actually published there)" particularly caught my eye, since I recently picked up a decade or so's worth of back issues of that magazine that a certain university up nort' was casually dumping.