As King admits in his afterword to this 12-story collection, he is often criticised for being too prolific. As someone who has waded through many of his novels, I’d add that many are too long. Although there are always moments of brilliance, a vivid narrative drive, fascinating characters and his books are never less than entertaining, it sometimes seems King can’t help himself.
This collection sidesteps the length issue, of course, although not all the stories here are that short. You Like It Darker – named after the Leonard Cohen song You Want It Darker (King apologises for changing the verb) – features five new stories along with reader favourites The Fifth Step, On Slide Inn Road and Willie the Weirdo.
One, The Answer Man, was begun 45 years ago and was brought to King’s attention by his nephew, who saw promise in the six-page fragment. King writes that he finished it with a sense of “calling into a canyon of time and listening for the echo to come back”, and it’s one of the collection’s highlights.
Darker opens with Two Talented Bastids, a story about friends whose business and personal lives are successful, but both men harbour creative ambitions that aren’t progressing. One day, they go on a hunting trip and what they encounter there changes their lives. Afterwards, their talents bloom. Both become famous and rich, one a painter, the other a bestselling, now ageing, author. He’s not unlike King, now 76, and at one point reflects wryly on the vicissitudes of the creative life. “What the fuck is talent, anyway? I ask myself that question sometimes while I’m shaving, or … while waiting to go on television and sell my latest glut of make-believe … Why would I be chosen when so many others try so hard and would give anything to be chosen?”
Indeed, a number of stories have protagonists who are elderly, in some way bereft and struggling with their place in the world. One asks simply, “After we die. Do we go on?”
Then there’s Vic Trenton, who last appeared in King’s 1981 classic Cujo. In Rattlesnakes, the now 72-year-old is a grieving widower seeking downtime in a friend’s house in Florida – only to be caught up in a nightmarish situation involving long-dead twins who get around in a stroller with a squeaky wheel.
In Laurie, an atypically sweet tale for King (though it does involve a man-eating alligator), a depressed elderly widower is given a dog by his sister in an effort to cheer him up.
Fate and luck, or – more often – the lack of it, is a theme that runs through Darker. Although some characters have psychic insights and paranormal powers, the stories, for the most part, remain grounded in a very recognisable modern-day America, yet prey on our primal myths and beliefs.
The longest here, Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, is also one of the finest. King apparently had the idea one morning while getting dressed. It’s the story of a man who wakes up from a dream that tells him the location of a woman’s body. He calls it in and is immediately the prime suspect.
King’s so omnipresent and his output so prodigious that we risk taking him for granted. Let’s hope there are many more books to come from him, but this is a collection to treasure. If it isn’t the darkest in his considerable oeuvre, it is among the best.
