Entertaining the Alien

44. Everything's Eventual, Stephen King*

I'm at the end of Tower-crazies (for now, at least), I promise. I wanted to re-read this book because two of the stories in the collection are Dark Tower stories ("Everything's Eventual"--the main character becomes a major character in DT VII, and "The Little Sisters of Eluria"--a story about Roland before the events of DT I) and I couldn't remember much about them.

The other thing I'd forgotten was how good some of his stories are. Despite the subtitle ("14 Dark Tales"), most of the stories here aren't straight-forward horror, and some of them are flat-out, downright literary, albeit with a little twist of the strange. Reading these stories was both enlightening and frustrating from a writer's perspective. Enlightening in that I could see exactly how and why some of the stories worked, and frustrating in that I couldn't quite see how to apply some of that knowledge to my own work. But oh yes, I could make the comparison quite clearly.

The best story in the book? Probably would have to be the O. Henry-winning "The Man in the Black Suit", but I think the 'best title' award has to go to "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French".