Skeleton Crew (1985)

Read some of the stories in here. At least these but I imagine there are more.

~ The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet 5* - I hope to read this one again at some point. I had read in The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Look at the cover from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1984


~ The Reach aka Do the Dead Sing?- 2* - I read in The Century's Best Horror Fiction Volume Two

~ The Monkey - 3* - I read in Fantasy Annual IV

~ The Mist read so long ago.

~ The Raft or did I just see the movie. not sure, it was so long ago. ( )

This collection of stories (including one longish novella, "The Mist") was first published in 1986, although some of the individual stories are significantly older.

As with most story collections, the quality here is a little variable, but I think the least interesting or well-written ones are mostly also the shortest ones, so that works out well enough. And overall, it's a pretty solid collection. I'm not sure if any of the pieces quite rise to the extreme heights of creepiness or sensitive storytelling that King is capable of at his very best, but some of them might come close, and most of them are at the very least engaging and do basically what you want a Stephen King story to do for you. And I'm actually pretty impressed by the way in which he repeatedly takes basic ideas that were hardly fresh and new in 1986 -- people trapped somewhere isolated by monsters, a creepy doll that reappears when you try to get rid of it, a murderous companion who turns out to be all in the main character's head -- and somehow makes you forget for the course of the story just how cliche they might be.

Although I do have to say, while these tales in some respects don't feel particularly dated at all, in others they feel like dispatches from a strange and uncomfortable past world, a world in which things like drunk driving, domestic abuse, and casual racism were much more easily accepted, or at least tolerated and ignored. And so was the practice of writing female characters who are nothing more than ugly or annoying stereotypes cut from the flimsiest variety of cardboard. Alas.

And "The Mist," I'd say, has aged weirdly in an entirely different way as well. In King's notes, he describes that story as having a deliberate sort of cheesiness to it, and imagines the reader watching it in black-and-white at a drive-in theater. But I think reading it through two layers of nostalgic remove -- 50s B-movies filtered through 80s Stephen King as viewed from the perspective of 2020 -- makes it feel stranger, cheesier, and more off-kilter than it was probably meant to. That being said, though, it's still one of those stories that does a surprisingly good job with an old-fashioned trapped-by-monsters plot. It also gave me a mildly unpleasant dream a couple of days after I read it, and it's a very rare horror story, indeed, that I can say that about.

Rating: Despite its flaws, I'm going to give this a 4/5, if only in honor of the fact that it did kinda-sorta manage to give me a nightmare. I mean, that's got to deserve some kind of recognition. ( )

Storygalore! I really love the Jaunt, it is short but it packs as wallop! ( )

Stephen King outdid himself with this compilation of stories. The Mist, The Raft, and Mrs. Todd's Shortcut had me riveted. Word Processor of the Gods creates the type of power we all wish we could have at times. (added things to life or deleted them from existence). Beach World and The Jaunt were probably my least favorite, but that doesn't mean they weren't good. ( )

I don't remember a lot about this one, beyond the fact that I definitely read it as a teenager.
( )