7. 'Graveyard Shift' (1970).

It's lockdown week 2. Both reading and blogging have been a challenge this week, as my husband and I juggled setting remote learning, heading into work to look after key worker children, and trying to stop our own child from devouring her crayons. But, I'm making progress, and Carrie is tantalisingly closer every day.

Although this blog post will be relatively short, Graveyard Shift feels like it needs its own entry. It doesn't really fit with any of the other stories just before or after it, and stands alone both in length and in content.

Graveyard Shift

This is one of King's better known short stories, partly because of the 1990 movie adapted from it. I've not seen the movie yet, so watch this space for my thoughts on it. It received a hilariously low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that's a score I've rarely seen beaten. I'm hoping it fits in the 'so bad it's good' category. Fingers crossed.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the story, it follows a mill worker named Hill who agrees to take on extra shifts over a holiday weekend to clear out the basement section at the bottom of the mill. The weather is so oppressive during the day that these shifts will take place overnight - the titular graveyard shift. When the workers begin the job, they immediately notice the vast number of rats, which get progressively bigger and more aggressive as they wade further into the rubbish.  

I enjoyed Graveyard Shift, which is one of the most complete of the short stories I've read so far. The characters were well drawn and authentic, and were exactly the kind of men I could imagine volunteering for this sort of job in this sort of town. I quite liked all of them even though they weren't particularly likeable men - all of them, in fact, even the wicked foreman of the mill.

The story builds up well, and the ever increasing size of the rats is unnerving and icky, even for someone who isn't scared of them. Any creature that's three times the size it should be is an unpleasant prospect, whether a rat, a spider, a moth - even a giant sparrow or pigeon would be pretty creepy. Their attacks on the men, and the foreman's refusal to show any concern about them, is uncomfortable even today, when low paid workers are still often told to put up or shut up, or not get paid at all.

The ending is ridiculous and very funny, and I couldn't quite work out if this was intentional or not. In this case, the humour works either way, as the laughter provoked by the enormous Jabba the Hut King Rat the men discover under the basement is mixed with a disgusted horror that stays with you. The image is effective enough to keep coming up behind you and tapping on your shoulder when you're not expecting it to.

I did have a few issues with the story, one of them being the relationship between Hill and the foreman. I couldn't work out what the issue between them was; there didn't seem to be any bad blood between them, any real rudeness, or any reason for Hill to throw him to the wolves (or rats) in the way he does at the end.

My other issue is a purely personal one. I'm not afraid of rats, I know I said earlier that this story still works if you're not, but it does take the edge off. Had this been about spiders, you might have got me. Moths, most definitely. Rats? I dunno. They're kinda cute!