Christmas Vacation, First Delivery

ENTERTAINING BUT NOT CAPTIVATING

These short stories and novellas will not surprise you so much. You will recognize some situations or some direct allusions to older books or older novellas. It is the case of Cujo in the story “Rattlesnakes.” It is the case of a man accused of a crime by the police with no evidence, just on a conviction in “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream.” You will think of The Outsider. But such transfers of characters and situations happen all the time in literature, but not very often with Stephen King. Are short stories and novellas some kind of testing laboratory for longer novels? Why not? In this collection, I have already listed two. We could also think of a third novel located in the Keys in Florida, Duma Key. It must not happen too often though and the differences between the old and the new have to be important enough to make the stories no easy self-plagiarizing.

What is more important for me is that these stories, at least most of them, have little horror, little supernatural, and little paranormal. But the tone is different. Most of them deal with older characters, in fact with retired characters who have nothing to do apart from meddling with what other people are doing, like in the recent novel Holly with the return of an old character from previous novels. These characters live in definitely weaker tension…