The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams

Nightmare Time

In his sixth collection of short stories, enticingly titled The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams, Stephen King has prefaced each story with a short introduction on how he came to write it. In one of them he takes an amusing dig at himself, when he narrates an incident of a woman scoffing at his claim of having written The Shawshank Redemption. (“The point is, you write some scary stories and you’re like the girl who lives in the trailer park on the edge of town: You get a reputation.” )

His introductory pieces are sometimes better than the stories themselves, which are good mix of horror, humour and whimsy, some new, some previously published. Of late, the writer has been working more with the crime thriller format, so this collection is vintage King.

The first story Mile 81 (reminiscent of Christine) about a carnivorous car gets the reader right into the mood for some nightmarish chills.  King even makes the act of reading a bit spooky—in the strange story Ur which he wrote to promote Kindle, a literature teacher buys an e-reader to impress his young girlfriend, and finds himself in an alternative literary universe with masterpieces by greats like Hemingway and Poe that were never published.

Suspension of disbelief is always required with such dark tales, and King makes it easier, even when he is writing standard issue stuff like Obits in which a columnist finds that he is able to kill people by writing their obituaries in advance; there’s The Dune in which a man who owns a small island, finds the names of people about to die imprinted on the sand.

If there’s a wealthy air crash survivor in the grip of a charlatan healer (he could be out King’s novel The Revival), there’s an ageless bad kid tormenting the narrator, who is convicted for killing the child, but knows that nobody will believes his story.

He has actually moved beyond monster-under-the-bed kind of scary stories, so King knows he is pandering to his old fans, he calls them “Constant Reader” and occasionally adopts a self-deprecatory tone-- “I may be a Professional Writer to the I.R.S. when I file my tax return, but in creative terms, I’m still an amateur, still learning my craft.”

It is a measure of his enormous skill, honed by prolific writing, that even in the most ordinary story in this mixed bag of twenty, he is able to create credible characters (Blockade Billy) and believable scenarios. He can always be witty, moving (the story about two aging poets), and of course, disturbing.

This Bazaar lays out its selection of curios in a neat row, readers can pick their own kind of bad dream.

The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 496