Not for him, the tricks and games of metafiction, although his introductory notes here - both to the collection as a whole and to each individual story - render him a central player in “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.” This sense of catharsis, of epiphany even, occupies the center of much of King’s fiction he is an old-fashioned storyteller, after all.

But for its protagonist, grade-schooler Pete Simmons, the mysteries of the world, both pleasurable and terrifying, bring him to a point of reckoning, after which he will never be the same. To call “Mile 81” a coming-of-age story is not exactly accurate it unfolds over a single afternoon. “Mile 81” involves a classic King construction, that of the bored kid who goes somewhere he shouldn’t - in this case, an abandoned highway rest area - and ends up staring down an evil that the adults can’t, or won’t, recognize. Insanity? His defense attorney thinks so, until in the aftermath of his client’s execution he receives a piece of evidence suggesting that the condemned man was indeed telling the truth. In “Bad Little Kid” - inspired, King informs us, by the Beatles’ 1965 cover of Larry Williams’ “Bad Boy” - a man convicted of child murder tells his story: It was not a child he killed, or so he insists, but some sort of shade, a demon that had hounded him since childhood. Long stories such as “Ur” (originally written as a promotion for Amazon’s Kindle) or “Obits” echo with depth and drama, fleshed out with character details, three-dimensional setups, the landscapes of a fully realized world. “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams” illustrates this formulation neatly, since the sharpest work here is that approaching novella-length. That middle zone, however: His finest efforts emerge from this territory, shorter novels “Misery,” “Joyland” and “The Shining,” novellas such as “The Body” or the chilling “A Good Marriage.” In this material, King has the breadth to do what he does best, which is to evoke the very human underpinnings of terror, while also remaining constrained by certain limitations of space.Īs he explains in “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams,” which gathers 20 pieces of fiction, along with brief reflections on their composition, “Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable, and perhaps obtain some sort of closure.” The key word there is not the unthinkable in which King traffics, but closure, the closure of the midrange form.

His big novels - “The Stand,” “It,” “11/22/63” - have always felt a little baggy to me, while his shortest work (he has published more than 200 stories, gathered in a number of collections) can feel sketchy, more idea than nuanced narrative. Stephen King, I’ve come to think, is at his most adept when writing in the midlength range.

The bazaar of bad dreams review