You Like It Darker by Stephen King – A Response by Kit Power

You Like It Darker by Stephen King – A Response by Kit Power

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You Like It Darker by Stephen King

Stephen King’s been on my mind a lot lately. 

That’s not surprising. Like Bruce Springsteen, King is an American artist whose work has had an incalculable impact on my life; a constant (and amazingly consistent) wellspring of brilliance, celebration, and implicit challenge. Like Springsteen, King is now in his mid-seventies, and while neither shows any sign that their talents are fading, it’s impossible as a fan not to regard with some alarm the inevitably of the passing years, and what it will ultimately mean for both men, and for those of us who will (hopefully not for another decade or two, but eventually) be left in a world without the promise of new work from them, to help us make sense of ourselves, our world, our hopes and fears.

Both men were also among my father’s favourite artists. As I hurtle toward the first anniversary of his passing, it’s deeply unsurprising that I find myself listening to Springsteen a lot (indeed, Letter To You, his jaw-droppingly brilliant 2020 album, is playing as I type) and reading a lot of King. I’ve enjoyed revisits (Night Shift, Everything’s Eventual, and the novel Finders Keepers), and I’ve also treated myself to some books from the increasingly small list of new-to-me texts; specifically From A Buick Eight (which I understand has a bit of a spotted reputation, but which I absolutely adored).

Which brings us to You Like It Darker, King’s latest collection of short stories, purchased by my kids as a Christmas present pre-order, and which arrived on my doorstep a few weeks ago. And this preamble is to give you fair warning of my overall emotional state when I picked this up; the degree to which what follows is any kind of critical essay, as opposed to a love letter to the author, is an exercise I leave for you, dear reader. I give you fair warning, and I offer no apology.

EXTENSIVE, COMPREHENSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW; IF YOU WANT TO READ YOU LIKE IT DARKER UNSPOILED, STOP READING NOW.

I adored You Like It Darker.

The collection opens with Two Talented Bastids, and the story sets out the stall for the collection as a whole, with themes reflecting on mortality (here, the passing of a famous author, no less), the nature of talent, and (like Buick Eight, and recent novel Fairy Tale, as I think about it) secrets held long and deep. Our first-person POV narrator is the son of the deceased, a high school English teacher who took early retirement to care for his ageing author father in the last years of his life. 

It’s a brilliant character portrait, both of the deceased father and of the son who is telling us the tale – something I’m not sure King gets enough credit for is how vivid his characters are, how memorable they become.

It’s a talent that’s thrown into especially stark relief in his short-form work, where we/King don’t have the luxury of a novel’s length to get to know them, and something that, if possible, he still seems to be improving at with age. But as strong as the character work is, it’s the themes that resonated with me most strongly. Like in Fairy Tale, there’s the sense of King interrogating the source of his own talent/secret gold mine; either to try to make sense of or to at least play with that question that he’s no doubt been asked versions of a million times (and, maybe, that he’s asking himself, once in a while, as the days grow shorter); where does talent/storytelling really come from? 

And that’s partly a political question, right? Sure it is (most questions are, if you scratch the surface). The question behind the question this story poses is ‘why some people and not others?’. 

And the real-world answer is, talent, hard work and luck.

So far, hopefully, so uncontroversial, but where the politics definitely starts to show is how much weight you give to those three factors (and how you unpack ‘luck’, which we’ll get to).

The conservative position would no doubt put a lot of emphasis on the first two factors (perhaps even digging out that old canard ‘the harder I work, the luckier I get’, which may or may not be true of the person saying it, but certainly labours under what we might charitably call ‘survivor bias’ – sure, pal, you worked hard and got lucky, but nobodies putting a mic in the face of the unknown numbers of people who worked as hard, if not harder, and got jack shit, so, you know).

A more left-wing commentator might point out that ‘luck’ is a word of limited use to describe a far more complex matrix of factors that might include one’s financial status, race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), orientation to gender assigned at birth, physical or mental disability, and access to opportunity; any one of which might impact on your ‘luck’ through no fault of your own, and no matter how smart or hard you work (and, as you’ll exhibit no surprise to learn, that’s broadly the position I’d stake out).

King’s own take on this is interesting;

in On Writing, he posits that ‘talent is as common as table salt’, and ascribes his own success to the second two factors. What’s interesting about Two Talented Bastids is that it seems to posit that the talent factor is more significant. In the story, we eventually learn that the source of our narrator’s father’s writing success (and his best friend’s success as a graphic artist) are a gift from beyond the stars; in exchange for saving the life of an extraterrestrial, they are given a gift that, they are told, will give them ‘a way to use what you are not using’ (also stating ‘nothing can give you what isn’t already there’).

It’s a fascinating exchange; the extraterrestrial explains that ‘thoughts are pointless… dangerous’, implying the gift they offer is a way for the two men to bypass their consciousness, tap into something.. Well, primal is the word used by the ET – and the ability to access that deeper state is what leads to their meteoric success. In a genuinely painful denouement, the son, having learned the truth behind his father’s success, locates the box that contains the gift, but when he seeks to activate it, it won’t open for him. The implication the narrator takes away is that it couldn’t give him ‘what wasn’t already there’ – that he doesn’t share his father’s potential for talent.

Of course, other readings are available; it’s possible the box (triggered by breath) didn’t open because it detected DNA, and the son will have carried markers from his mother as well as his father. But I can’t help but reflect on King’s 2023 interview with Talking Scared, where he said at one point, in response to a question about genre.

‘I’m lucky, I don’t have an editor breathing down my neck, telling me what to write; never have’,

and his description in On Writing of his own writing process as being an act of archaeology, trying to uncover a story that’s already there, waiting to be discovered (he talks about this some more in the Talking Scared conversation, and the afterword to You Like It Darker, where he expounds that the only two times he felt he got the whole story up fully intact were The Shawshnak Redemption and The Green Mile). With that in mind, it feels like Two Talented Bastids is implying that the ability to access your subconscious, find those shapes and bring them out without thinking too hard about them, is the best route to artistic success… as long as the raw materials are already there, of course. 

It’s an interesting proposition. As you’d expect, I still find it a little deterministic (how many people contemporary to Shakespeare were never taught to read, let alone write, for example, and how many might have had the potential to meet or exceed his genius?), and a little utopian in the notion that America is the place where such dreams can still happen…

But then I remember, well, it did for King, and the writer in this story was born in 1933, a different era… and also, there’s the subtle twist where the ET declares, matter of factly, that humanity has only a century left to run. So maybe I’m not giving King enough credit for understanding the current moment; maybe this is intended in part as a eulogy for an idealised version of the country of his youth, with a tacit acknowledgement that many doors are closing, now, perhaps all of them, perhaps for good. 

Either way, it’s a remarkable start to You Like It Darker

The next story, The Fifth Step, is a compact piece that feels like it could have been an unused entry from King’s Night Shift era. Structurally, it follows the same shaggy dog story/punchline formula as The Man Who Loved Flowers, though I think the execution here is far superior; King makes the canny choice to go third close on the eventual victim rather than the unexpectedly violent protagonist, so the twist lands with real force. Many of my very favourite King shorts are his non-supernatural outings (The Ledge, Dolan’s Cadillac and Survivor Type all immediately spring to mind) and The Fifth Step belongs in that exalted company, as far as I’m concerned; a story that’s exactly as long as it needs to be and one one word longer. It felt like a present.

Willie the Weirdo I also enjoyed a great deal; the voice has a mean edge that evoked King’s Bachman alter-ego, to me, creating a layer of grime over an already grim situation (I also detected echos of the skin-crawling relationship at the heart of Apt Pupil, one of the most disturbing novellas in King’s output, in my opinion). My only quibble is that the punchline felt a lot like a reworking of Skeleton Crew’s Gramma, which is one of my all-time favourites. Willie the Weirdo may not reach those heights, but I don’t want to undersell how terrific the atmosphere of this one is, and the way King uses simple language to evoke a sense of unease and almost spiritual nausea that’s genuinely unsettling.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is quite simply a masterpiece.

It’s got the best opening premise of a King story since The Outsider, and for my money delivers far more satisfyingly. King is an infamous pantser, and critics haven’t been slow in suggesting this has led to occasional issues with the endings of his work (a criticism I think is often considerably overstated, but not 100% invalid).

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream could not provide a more vivid rebuttal to that argument; as a long-term King fan, it was a breathless delight to follow King following the narrative thread of his brilliant premise, to feel the elements falling into place around me, the sense of building escalation and threat… There’s a moment, toward the end of the story, where Danny C has his second premonitory dream, and when I read the line, I put the book down, looked to the ceiling, and said ‘I love you, Stephen.’

And I do. And I love Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream. It’s the kind of story a writer can only produce when they are writing, not for market, or word count, or editorial concerns, but purely for the love of the chase, and wanting to know how it ends. I could feel King’s giddiness, his excitement, in every single line. Putting this story down was a wrench, and domestic chores were neglected, and I regret nothing. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. 

You Like It Darker – A Response

Finn again felt like another Skeleton Crew outtake/B-side (I mean that as a sincere and very high compliment, to be clear). King’s short work often engages with nightmare hypotheticals (what if I get trapped inside a portapotty that’s toppled onto its door on a hot day? What if I have to walk around the 2-foot wide ledge of a 40-story high building? What if I find myself on an autopsy slab and I can’t move but I can still feel and the party is about to begin?) and Finn feels like a story firmly in that tradition.

At least until the final couple of pages, which introduce an ambiguity that’s equal parts touching and sinister (a neat trick to pull off, I think you’ll agree). And the titular character was an instant favourite, for me; a man whose plausible and undeniable streak of bad luck all but guaranteed he was going to end up wandering into a Stephen King story, sooner or later (as King says in the story notes from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, “sometimes, the answer to ‘why do good things happen to bad people’ is, ‘Meh, don’t ask’”).

On Slide In Road is another short crime story, featuring stone classic King elements; a bickering, fractured family unit, a bad-tempered long-distance drive, an ill-advised ‘short-cut’, and a chance encounter with some Very Bad Men. King is pitiless here; whilst we’re clearly meant to root for Grandpa, he’s only marginally likeable, and that’s only because the rest of the family he’s surrounded by are so dreadful (but not implausibly so; as always, every character in the story is frighteningly believable, as are the hells they build for each other).

It’s almost a relief when the bad men turn up and start spreading their mayhem, and King does such a good job with his descriptions of Grandpa’s physical frailty that his desperate bid to save his family feels like it carries incredible risk; partly because it’s a King story, you just don’t know how it’s going to play out. Again, as a huge fan of his non-supernatural work, this one felt like a real treat, and was an instant addition to my (long) list of favourites.

Red Screen felt like yet another throwback, a classic pulp horror in the spirit of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers (or King’s own The Ten O’Clock People), complete with a wry double twist where I could almost feel King grinning as he played with expectations, acknowledging the tropes and wrong-footing this reader with what felt like a genuinely touching confession… before delivering the final line of the story with a wink and a chuckle. Fucking adorable.

The Turbulence Expert feels rooted in King’s oft-stated ambivalence towards flying, and posits the following question; what if the only thing that keeps planes in the air when they’re experiencing dangerous turbulence is having someone on board who believes they are going to crash so completely that, somehow, their vivid visualisation prevent the catastrophe from happening?

Like many King ideas, stated baldly, it can feel a little goofy,

But I thought this story was a little gem, again in no small part due to the character work. Craig Dixon is a classic King outsider character, working for a vaguely defined but clearly wealthy and powerful organisation (indeed, I wondered at first if his work might be tied in with the team at The Institute, though in the event his employers seemed considerably less sinister), lonely but committed.

And as a flyer with a vivid and occasionally rather unpleasant imagination, I can only say the central premise, goofy or not, spoke to me on a very deep level. Is there a lesson in here somewhere, about how having a mind for horror can help prepare you for the worst, and make the worst marginally less likely to manifest? Maybe… and if so, there are worse stories to tell ourselves, I think.

King’s beloved home state of Maine has been a central fixture of many of his novels, novellas, and short stories down the years, to the point where its cruel winters have, at times, felt like a recurring character all by themselves, but for the last decade or so, he’s spent his winters in Florida, so it’s nice to see The Sunshine State serving as the backdrop for Laurie and Rattlesnakes, the next two stories in the collection.

The tales are twinned in other ways, too; both take place at Rattlesnake Key, just down the road from the submerged Duma Key, and both feature recently widowed men trying to deal with unfathomable loss. In Laurie, Lloyd Sunderland is given a new lease on life thanks to his sister Beth’s gift of a new puppy. King’s love for his own dogs is one of the only reasons to still care what happens on Twitter, and it’s a joy to see that indulged in this story, as the puppy leads a reluctant Lloyd back into engagement with the world around him (and, sure, eventually a very large, very angry ‘gator, but hey, it’s a Stephen King story). 

You Like It Darker – A Response

The widower in Rattlesnakes would probably not take so kindly to being gifted a puppy; Vic Trenton last appeared in a Stephen King story in 1981’s Cujo , so the guy’s probably had his fill of dogs. In one of the longer tales in the collection (possibly even falling into that delightful word length category of ‘novelette’), we learn that Vic and his wife Donna divorced after the events of that novel, only to remarry after a chance encounter several years later. Following her recent death from cancer, Vic is staying in the house of one of his advertising buddies while he tries to put what’s left of him back together. The story plays out with Vic befriending a local woman who lost her twin sons forty years ago (in another rhyming incident, they stumbled into a nest of the titular rattlesnakes).

What follows is a twinned narrative, the developing relationship with the neighbour running alongside Vic getting us caught up on his life since we met him last. Again, King’s grasp of character is masterful; by chance, I re-read Cujo around six months ago, and this is palpably the same Vic as that novel, even with the additional bruises life has handed out. And while, unlike Cujo, Rattlesnakes is an unapologetically supernatural tale (and, for my money, a deeply creepy, unsettling one) it carries that same resonance of grief, exploring what the life consequences might be for those who suffer one of the most profound losses imaginable; a parent, losing a child.

Rattlesnakes is a story steeped in that loss, but it also seems to offer at least some fragile chinks of light too; the horrors that Vic faces also represent a chance for him to face down the demons of his own past. A beautiful and haunting story.

The Dreamers digs into similar cosmic horror territory to Revival, only this time out the Gentleman Scientist believes it’s through the manipulation of dreams that we may be gifted a glimpse of what lies under the skin of reality. Our narrator is another King classic; a Vietnam vet who writes and thinks in clipped sentences, and who gets caught up in this questionable scheme purely because it makes him feel something, after a long period of post-war emotional numbness. It makes him the perfect narrator for this story as events unfold, his matter-of-fact descriptions rendering the fantastic that much more terrifying. Wonderfully unsettling.

The collection ends with The Answer Man, which at first felt to me like a reworking of one of my favourite King novelettes, the brilliant Fair Extention from Full Dark, No Stars. Interestingly, in the afterword, King tells us that the first six pages of this story were written when he was in his thirties and that it was his nephew who’d found it recently, going through his old unpublished manuscripts to find forgotten gems. Which couldn’t be a more apt origin story for the tale that closes out this collection – a classic three-act journey through a life, told via the lens of three encounters with the titular Answer Man.

His set-up may be the same as the bargain striker from Fair Extention – a roadside stand, seemingly magical powers, and a robust cash-for-services-rendered philosophy – and the story may also bear some structural similarities with Bloch’s seminal short story That Hellbound Train, but The Answer Man is a far more ambiguous character. Whereas Fair Extension presents us with one of the more challengingly bleak portraits of human nature King’s ever drawn (even including the often harsher work he completed under his Richard Bachman pen name), The Answer Man is far more bittersweet, pondering the great imponderables of a life lived; the twists and turns, triumphs and tragedies.

Whether or not there is an underlying pattern, or if events are essentially random and unconnected is left unresolved; I suspect the story will work as a pretty effective Rorschach for whatever your personal life philosophy is. For my part, I found it profoundly moving, and at the time of writing, it’s certainly up there with my very favourite of King’s short work (an admittedly pretty crowded field, but, still).

The afterword I found similarly emotional; ever since I was a kid, one of my favourite things about picking up a Stephen King collection was getting to devour the story notes at the back, and I remain borderline boring in my continued insistence that King’s non-fiction voice is one of the most criminally overlooked aspects of his work. And You Like It Darker’s afterword felt like a warm hug from a beloved old friend.

I’d really like it if we could get at least another dozen King short story collections (and, for that matter, a similar number of Springsteen albums, if God’s taking requests) before the inevitable happens. But it also occurs to me that at this point, both artists must have somewhere in the back of their minds that each release may end up being the last (of course, that’s true for all of us, but I imagine that it’s a thought that gets rather tougher to dismiss with each passing decade). Certainly, the themes of age and mortality that infuse both Letter To You and You Like It Darker feel to me to represent both powerful acts of courage, and a profound continued commitment from each artist to their devoted audiences to, as King exhorts in On Writing, ‘be honest’.

You Like It Darker – A Response

It feels impossible that I’ll never get to talk about Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream or On Slide In Road or The Fifth Step with Dad. But (and for once I really don’t care how this sounds) I can report that reading this collection made me feel close to him in a profound, vivid, intense way.

I’m starting to suspect there are some losses you don’t ‘get over’, at least not in the way that phrase implies. Sometimes, there’s just a before and after, and the after part is figuring out what you’ve got left, and how/if you can make it ‘work’, whatever any of those words even fucking mean.

And I think Stephen King understands that too, very well indeed, and always has. 

And I think You Like It Darker is a profound gift, from a profoundly gifted writer, and I’m enormously grateful to have it in my life.

KP

1/7/24

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

‘You like it darker? Fine, so do I‘, writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life – both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel ‘the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind’, and in You Like it Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

‘Two Talented Bastids’ explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In ‘Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream’, a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In ‘Rattlesnakes’, a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance – with major strings attached. In ‘The Dreamers’, a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. ‘The Answer Man’ asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.

‘As classic as King’s novels are, his shorter fiction has been just as gripping over the years’ – USA Today

‘One of the great storytellers of our time’ – Guardian

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