17. 'It Grows on You', and 18. 'Grey Matter' (both 1973).

The next two stories on my list don't have a huge amount in common, but I've popped these two together because I thought both were a little thin, like snippets of much bigger ideas. Many of these early King stories have felt like practice runs for his bigger novels, and perhaps that's what some of them are.

It Grows on You

It wasn't that I didn't like It Grows on You, exactly, I just couldn't quite work out where it was going. Just as with Night Surf, four years earlier, I felt like this was more a collection of interesting ideas and a concept that King wanted to explore, but couldn't quite get a handle on.

The story is the first set in King's famous fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, and is told through the gossipy old man conversations of a small group in a general store. The town of Castle Rock is dying, but the Newall house, visible from the store, is alive and growing. It's a house with a history of death and devastation; among other things, various people connected to the house have died unpleasantly or mysteriously, and a baby is born horribly deformed. Every time a death occurs, a new wing appears on the house, as though it is literally sucking the life out of the people around it and thriving on it.

It's an interesting idea, but the execution is slow and doesn't really set off at any point. The concept of the vampiric house is something that King would later revisit in Rose Red, a TV mini-series which got fairly poor reviews but which I thought was deliciously shivery. There's something about the maze-like quality of the house and the inability to tell what is real and what is not, that gave me a serious case of the willies.

But I'm losing focus, and Rose Red will have to wait until 2002 - a long way off.

It Grows on You is slow and fairly uneventful, and the characters telling the story lack the usual charm of King's small-town Maine every-men. Nothing really happens, and the only thing that truly unsettled me was the end, where one old gent recalls the lady of the house lifting her skirts at him when he was a young boy. Somehow this utterly inappropriate moment, which seems to have very little to do with the rest of the story, is the only bit that really sticks.

Grey Matter

Stephen King is a big fan of the original creature-feature horror movies he grew up with as a kid, and this story was clearly inspired by those old films like The Blob and The Fly. It relies entirely on King's number 2 'bear' - a fear of squishy things. I'm not sure this story is scary as much as it is gross, but anyone who knows King, knows he isn't proud, and will go for the gross-out when he can get it.

In Grey Matter, the son of permanently injured sawmill worker appears at the local store, terrified and begging the store owner and other men to help him. He claims that his father, Richie Grenadine, who has become a recluse after being placed on workmen's comp, has begun to change into something horrific after drinking a bad beer with some kind of transforming agent added to it.

The description of Richie is a disgusting triumph, really about as mushy and rotten as you could want from a King gross out. It's a description I have tried without success to shake off since reading the story, and comes close to Jack Chamber's (first) death in The Gunslinger, or my biggest King gross-out, the description of Doc's insides literally squirting apart in Black House. Urgh.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note is the (potentially unintentional) It Easter eggs scattered about. Firstly, the characters' names - we have an Eddie, a Richie, a George, a Henry, and a Bill. Pure coincidence? Possibly. But then add the throwaway tale one of the men tells another about an acquaintance who went down into the sewers and came up with white hair, claiming to have seen an enormous spider with kittens in its web.Sound familiar? I do love an Easter egg, even a retrospective, probably accidental one.

My main takeaway? Don't read this while eating dinner. Definitely don't read it while drinking beer.