"Horror's finest hour"
Even though its seems unreal, Stephen King has not
written a short story collection in almost a decade (see
NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES). However, the flexible
grandmaster returns to the form with this fourteen-story
book while showing (as he continually does with novels), he
can still spin quite a superb short tale. Each tale is dark and demonstrates Mr. King's writing
abilities while proving he remains one of the stronger
short story tellers today. The theme running through the
tale is encounters with the dead spicing up the mundane
lives of the living or those who expedite the passage of
death. This anthology includes three pieces coming from
alternate media, four from The New Yorker magazine, and a
former E-book. One added bonus is a Dark Tower longer
short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria". Each one and
the remaining six are all quite good and a bit or two
frightening. Macabre and clearly paying homage to another versatile
grandmaster Edgar Allen Poe, EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL is
another triumph for Mr. King as fans of the ghastly and
morbid will enjoy this collection. The great author seems
to have accomplished everything in his thirty years of
published writing except lift the curse of the Bambino. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted March 16, 2002
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The first collection of stories Stephen King has published
since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's
Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other
award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker,
and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which
attracted over half a million online readers and became the
most famous short story of the decade. "Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first
time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see
his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he
ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Café," a sparring
couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the
maître d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in
print for the first time, is about a successful writer
whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards"
or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408
at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing
about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only
Say What It Is In French," terror is déjà vu at 16,000
feet. Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near
dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting
smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his
form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's
Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly com-pelling, they
announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the
greatest storyteller of our time.
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