You Like It Darker (2024)

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Stephen King celebrates 50 years of publishing with You Like It Darker, his first collection of short stories since 2020’s If It Bleeds. The title honors Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker”, the late singer/songwriter’s elegiac acceptance of his mortality as he shuffled off this mortal coil. Likewise, here King seems comfortable with his position in our culture, ready to pay homage to his literary heroes by indulging his influences with an inventive glee that makes many of these stories some of his best work in years.

Since “Carrie” first introduced him to the world five decades ago, King has often been maligned as just a horror writer, but this is unfair. He’s a genre writer, possibly the best we’ve ever had, and that gift is on display throughout the dozen stories collected here. Some are reprints from magazines, one a digital creation for charity, others have never been published before. Hang on tight, because you’re in for a treat.

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“2 Bastids” explores how two men from a small town with no backgrounds in either literature or art suddenly came to prominence as two of the most successful writers and artists in the world so late in their lives. It’s a tale of generational curiosity and the nature of creativity – and possibly close encounters of the most unexpected kind.

In “The Fifth Step” Harold Jamieson, enjoying his retirement, sits alone on a park bench when he’s approached by a strange man who admits to be a recovering alcoholic, telling Harold he’s going through Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 step program and has reached Step 5 (Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs). What follows is a confessional Harold wishes he wasn’t privy to. In “Willie the Weirdo” a young child’s fascination with death helps him form a special bond with his eccentric grandfather, one that will prove to be closer than anyone could imagine.

The novella-length “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream”, the collection’s longest, explores how bad things can get for an imperfect man trying to do the right thing. A high school janitor dreams of a dead woman half-buried in an obscure location, and out of compassion attempts to discover if his dream was just that or possibly an act of clairvoyance. King borrows from his own recent dalliances with detective noir, but also Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables; the KBI’s Inspector Jalbert is an easy stand-in for Hugo’s obsessive Inspector Javert. With some tweaking it’s not hard to see how this could have easily been crafted into a new adventure for the Holly character from King’s own Mr. Mercedes trilogy.

In “Finn” the world’s unluckiest young man’s luck gets even worse when he’s mistaken for someone else and gets kidnapped by a madman with questionable aims. “On Slide Inn Road” reimagines Flannery O’Conner’s most famous story (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) by way of Raymond Carver, with a characteristically King-style conclusion that brings it all together. “Red Screen” may be a difficult read for some, given how it blends misogyny with the suggestion of a benign alien invasion (framed around another murder investigation, one of three included in this collection).

“The Turbulence Expert” comes from an anthology of stories about flight-based horrors, naturally, and with an intriguing premise: what if the surest way to guarantee safe flights was to enlist the services of pre-cogs, or those gifted with psychic powers that let them predict when clear-air turbulence (the kind that can’t be anticipated by usual means) will occur? Now what if these “talented” psychics were required to be terrified in order for the visions to come?

In “Laurie” a recent retiree is grieving the loss of his wife when his sister, worried about his mental state, gives him a new puppy, an adorable Border Collie-Mudi mix he quickly bonds with and names Laurie. While out on a walk together, an unfortunate encounter with a prehistoric beast will give Lloyd Sunderland more to ponder about the nature of life, and survival, than he bargained for.

For longtime King readers “Rattlesnakes” may be the tale they’re most looking forward to, and for good reason. Billed as a sequel to his 1981 novel “Cujo”, King plays a similar trick as he did with 2013’s “Doctor Sleep”, the followup to “The Shining”, by altering the premise by not giving readers more of what they wanted, but exactly what they needed.

This new tale follows Vic Trenton, the husband in Cujo, now 40 years older yet still mourning the loss of his son Tad, as he looks back on eventful moments in his twilight years, including his wife Donna, a woman who once bravely “faced a rabid St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat” but would soon face an even deadlier foe. When an eccentric neighbor dies by unusual circumstances, Vic will have to confront what can only be described as supernatural grieving.

In “The Dreamers” a Vietnam vet with a talent for language and intuition takes a job with a mad scientist performing unorthodox experiments with dreams – and dreamers. While moments of this one suggest Lovecraftian horrors, King’s prose and storytelling pays homage to the recently deceased Cormac McCarthy, a man who realized that not all monsters look like monsters.

“The Answer Man” is a modern fable, the second longest in this collection, and may be one of the best short stories King has ever published. Legend has it he started writing this one decades ago, a draft sitting unfinished until it was ready to be revisited and finished. Here King plays fast with the concept of magical realism in a tale about a man given the chance to glimpse aspects of his future, the cost (or price?) conditional on when and how he asks the right questions.

Almost a reworking on the story of Job, Phil Parker gets everything he ever dreamed of, provided he follows ‘the path’ suggested by the mysterious Answer Man. But tragedy strikes his family, and strikes hard. Before long, however, Phil will realize that, for others, tragedy can strike even harder.

Conclusion

King has written about death longer than most of his readers have been alive, so we’ve come to expect this from him. You Like It Darker reminds us how masterfully he writes about the act of living, about those who outlived the dead or survived attempts to hasten the inevitable. This seems like a prerequisite for a writer in his 70s, and many of the characters in these dozen stories reflect this. They also remind us that one can’t have death without life, and vice-versa, and that the only real difference is which end of the timeline you happen to be on. For King, this feels like a late-stage revival.