If It Bleeds by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a new collection of four short novels in which King gets weird, traditional, and, of course, spooky.
Minor spoilers follow.
“Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” is a simple story of revenge from beyond the grave, in which a young boy reads to a somewhat weird old man after school and they form a relationship that yields results even after Harrigan passes on. In the notes at the end, King highlights how he got an original working iPhone to play around with, and a lot of the fun in the story is treating the smartphone as a wondrous thing, even if it maybe rings in places it shouldn’t.
“The Life of Chuck” feels like an experiment and King again notes as much in the afterword. The scenes themselves are interesting, ranging from those instant and unexpected connections that can happen in public (or used to in The Olden Times), to cryptic, terrifying world-ending stuff. But the three pieces, presented in reverse chronological order, never really cohere into a whole. Maybe it’s intentional, maybe King wants the reader to fill in the gaps. In the end, Chuck was kind of unremarkable. Sorry, Chuck.
“If it Bleeds” is the closest to a full novel in the collection, and works as a sequel to The Outsider. Here, the story focuses on another shifter who has assumed the forms of reporters over the years, all the better to be close to the tragedy it feeds on. When it starts to create the tragedy it needs, it begins drawing a little too much attention to itself, and this is where Holly Gibney comes in.
Gibney was introduced in the first novel of the Bill Hodges trilogy, Mr. Mercedes, and as King again explains, was never meant to be more than a slight supporting character. He clearly loves writing about her and her role in each story has expanded as a result. It’s fun to watch her here as the main character, grappling with her family, the new outsider, trying to hold it together, growing more confident, but never too confident. The story itself is pretty straightforward, with few surprises and the actual outsider gets a bit too Campy Villain in the end, but Holly makes it well worth the read.
The concluding story, “Rat” is basically a monkey’s paw story, but King writes it with relish, with flashes of dark humor sprinkled throughout. The story is simple–an English professor struggles to write novels–past attempts having led to nervous breakdowns–but when he comes up with an idea he is certain he can execute, he gets offered a guarantee from an unexpected visitor in the family cabin he has hunkered down in to start writing.
One of the little details I love in the story is how effectively King gets across the idea of Drew Larson driving himself crazy over indecision, where choosing the right turn of phrase becomes a maddening series of endless but equal choices. The scenes with the titular rat are droll and cheeky. Sometimes a writer just wants to have fun with a story, nothing more, and “Rat” delivers that.
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