When was night shift published

Initiated by those early stories, King can coax his reader into a deeper understanding of the rest of the stories in this first half of the book, stories that could have been easily dismissed when considered individually. Together, the nine stories that populate the first half of the collection succeed in reinvigorating and recasting pulp. The early stories necessitate a credulity that horror fans happily adopt, making the first half of Night Shift quite satisfying; however, the stories that remain take full advantage of the newly minted expectations and shatter them.

This is the perfect combination of the human experience and recycled horror hallmarks. King proves he can do this with horror, and now he shows that he needs no crutch of form to repeat the effect, again and again. The last half of Night Shift also grounds itself more firmly in reality than the first. Many stories are entirely possible if unlikely—a triviality when juxtaposed with aliens and boogeymen—some feature an unstable or otherwise unreliable narrator, and the most disturbing tales of all hardly wander beyond the realm of mainstream literary fiction.

Register Don't have an account? Night Shift. View source. History Talk 0. Do you like this video? Play Sound. Trucks, about possessed … trucks? They were silly. I enjoyed them, but they don't exactly challenge the reader's preconceptions of King's work. The Woman in the Room did, and it's beautiful. Now, because of the wonders of the modern age, I know that it's basically non-fiction.

King called it "healing fiction", written to help him cope with his mother's death. That only serves to make it more affecting. King says in Night Shift's introduction that a good horror story "holds the reader or listener spellbound for a little while, lost in a world that never was, never could be … the story holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft.

But one — the one that feels real, that deals with cancer and pain and the frailty of life that we understand as little as we understand haunted houses and vampires — stands head and shoulders above the rest.

This is something King would revisit in later short fictions, where he abandoned fantastical horror for cruel, bitter realities; but as a rare note here, it's exemplary.

It's been a few weeks since I've written about Randall Flagg , the big bad antagonist who appears throughout much of King's work. He makes his first real appearance in The Stand, and then explicitly in several of King's later books , but he has a number of smaller walk-ons throughout King's oeuvre, some obvious, some less so.

In Children of the Corn we find one of the latter examples. The titular cult of children worships an old evil pagan version of Christianity's God, and they call this god He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

Now — bear with me — Randall Flagg's most common pseudonym is Walter O'Dim; He Who Walks Behind the Rows is a name given by the children, a sobriquet that just happens to include all the letters of the name Walter, in order.

And yes, maybe that's a stretch although King's innate sense of world building means that very few stretches in his fiction are unplanned.

And then, in The Stand, there's an abundance of corn, and something in there, watching …. Rereading Stephen King: week five — Night Shift. Stephen King uber-fan James Smythe is rereading the works of the horror genius in chronological order. This week, he tackles Night Shift, King's first compilation of short stories, in which he laid the foundations for some of his greatest work. One story, 'Children of the Corn', appears to presage elements of one of King's greatest novels, The Stand