‘I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills…’
I like short stories as an art form. There is a certain skill to telling a whole story in 20 pages and having that story make sense. I also like how they give the writer free rein to try something a little different. Stephen King is a master of the artform with The Lawnmower Man, Children of the Corn and 1408 some of the more famous King short stories to have been released over the years. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is King’s sixth and most recent short story collection, and as with many of the others, there are more hits than misses.
The award winning Obits describes a journalist who is able to kill people off with a stroke of his pen, Mile 81 revists the autohorror of Christine and Premium Harmony takes the reader back to Castle Rock – King’s famous fictitious city – for a morbidly humorous tale that recalls Tom Waits’ Frank character. As ever, each story has a short introduction from King himself which provides some background and context as to why and when each story was written. Often, these small insights are as illuminating as the stories themselves, such is King’s ability to speak directly to his readership.
I will always be a Stephen King completist so I snapped The Bazaar of Bad Dreams straight up when I saw it glaring up at me from a charity shop bookshelf, and once again, I wasn’t disappointed. There is something strangely familiar and nostalgic in returning to King’s mysterious world, and it is a testament in his abilities as a storyteller that even now, as he is approaching his twilight years, he is still able to shock and surprise. A virtuoso storyteller.