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King Lightens Up Usual Darkness

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By TED ANTHONY

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 30, 2008

"Just After Sunset," by Stephen King (Scribner, $28)

For a generation, we have associated Stephen King with darkness, or at least with an absence of light. He is the national summoner of darker instincts, darker thoughts, darker realities bleeding into our own. But perhaps we have missed the point a bit.

If you take a more lingering look, the most powerful tales spun by King are not about darkness itself, but twilight - that gray, uneasy land that lies between the prosaic texture of human days and the unending desolation of our nights.

For this reason, King's latest anthology of short stories is quietly dazzling, a snapshot of his ability to erode that membrane between light and dark, to make us believe that any of us, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, could slip into somewhere that's not quite right.
Weird things happen in these stories, but they are not necessarily horrifying things. The main characters are people living, sometimes unawares, on the edge of reality. It's the part of King's inner workings that is neither H.P. Lovecraft nor Peter Straub, but Rod Serling.

So this happens: King's unfortunates tumble into strange pockets and find themselves unable to get out. Or the opposite happens: they manage to flee against all odds and reclaim normality, or at least a tenuous substitute.

They don't always die. That's because a positive undercurrent runs through King's shorter works of fiction, a sense of control amid the lack of it. Sure, people in his 100,000-worders sometimes survive, but here survival seems like one of several options, and in short stories, each choice really matters.

Ted Anthony writes for The Associated Press.

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