The Girl Who Loved Stephen King

I'm going to start this post by making it clear that I fully understand if anyone reading my previous posts is baffled by my admiration and enthusiasm for this particular story. I have, on several occasions, referred to some of the stories I have read as 'silly' or 'ridiculous', and there is very little I can think of that is more ridiculous than a haunted laundry machine. But, like the fairly stupid sounding premise of The Day of the Triffids, for some reason, it just works. The Mangler I loved this story. It's about a detective who is investigating the horrifically grisly death of a woman who worked on 'the Mangler' - a supersized folding and ironing machine - after she was pulled into its workings, despite safety apparatus which should have made this impossible. The detective soon discovers that this is not the first 'accident' involving this particular machine, and starts to believe that it may be possessed by an evil force. Now, do...

Lockdown continues, but so does the beautiful sunshine. This is perfect weather for the next two stories, which are real summer horrors. They are, in many ways, nothing alike, but I've placed them together because they feel like trial runs of some of King's later heavy hitters. Both of them have a slightly unfinished quality, which could be intentional, but may result from them belonging as part of a much bigger whole. Night Surf Night Surf , collected in Night Shift , is set in the aftermath of a world-sweeping illness called Captain Trips, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same name given to the population-ending virus from The Stand, published eight years later. In this short story, the flu-like illness is pretty much the same, except that victims heads swell to bizarre proportions just before death, which is something I don't recall from  The Stand. It's an interesting snippet which doesn't feel particularly finished, and wouldn...

In a busy first week of lockdown, I've been setting remote learning for my students, answering millions of (usually ridiculous) questions, chasing my tiny tornado of a toddler, and ploughing through the first big group of King's short stories. I'll admit that I hadn't realised just how many short stories King had published before Carrie came out in '74; I even had my copy out and ready when I started compiling my list of his works and organising it. It wasn't to be. King was pretty prolific even before Carrie  made him a household name. If you don't include Jumper  and Rush Call , by my count he'd written eighteen stories and one essay before his big break. Rather than dedicating a blog post to every story, I thought I'd put them together into groups which felt connected, not necessarily by theme or subject matter, but by a feel of the writing. Occasionally, where a story really speaks to me, I'll give it its own post. Cain Rose Up From t...