Book Details
| Title: | Just After Sunset | |
| Author: | Stephen King | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 01.21.10 |
Other Books Read By This Author (27)
- 11/22/63
- Bazaar of Bad Dreams
- Billy Summers
- Blockade Billy
- Cell
- The Colorado Kid
- Doctor Sleep
- Duma Key
- Elevation
- End of Watch
- Fairy Tale
- Finders Keepers
- Full Dark, No Stars
- Holly
- If it Bleeds
- The Institute
- It
- Joyland
- Later
- Lisey's Story
- Mr. Mercedes
- On Writing
- The Outsider
- Revival
- Under the Dome
- The Wind Through the Keyhole
- You Like It Darker
| Date Read | Note |
| 01.21.10 | I always like King's short stories and am very grateful that he releases them in collections such as this rather than letting them drift off to nowhere in whatever random publications they first appear. I thought what he said in his intro about how short stories are a different skill than novels was interesting and probably 100% true. That always struck me as odd and ultimately limiting in Chuck Palahniuk's work where he said he always starts each novel as a short story just to make sure it works. With King, his short stories are often more direct presentations of his ideas than his novels which are carefully wrapped around character and emotion. The Gingerbread Girl could've easily been twice as long with a little more back-story and context and sold as a novel but instead it's just about the situation and the set-up is minimal. Having The Cat from Hell in there was really interesting. This was the basis for his segment of the Tales from the Darkside movie in the early nineties but was originally published very early in a men's magazine. It's very interesting to compare his style back then to now; I think it definitely shows how brutal and immediate he was back then, which is what comes to mind when I think back to Salem's Lot and Christine and the like, whereas his recent work seems more aware of writerly things like prose style and tone like Willa and Ayana. Not better or worse but definitely different. My favorite story was probably N. I've only recently discovered how much Lovecraft was inspired by other writers so for this story to be more from Arthur Machen then Lovecraft I guess makes sense to me... but for me it's very Lovecraftian (probably because I've never read any Machen). It mostly addresses something that was heavily stressed in the Call of Cthulhu pen & paper RPG and therefore something that has stuck with me as a cool idea for the mythos: that the scope and alien nature of these great old ones or elder gods or whatever you want to call them - the things from another dimension that are not at all like us - are so strange and so alien that the human mind is incapable of understanding them. Spending too much time around them drives people insane. I always loved that, and in the RPG that's exactly what happened. The idea was you could run into something so terrifying that it would take your capacities away from you and you'd flee, or your character would suffer long-term effects of mental instability. In the story of N., it manifests as OCD behavior. That's pretty interesting. And the story builds. In fact, if I ever pick up the pen again, I may steal the idea for one of my characters! Anyway, a fun read! |
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