Night Shift is the first Stephen King book I consciously remember reading. As I've stated before, I remember plucking it from the stacks of books and magazines that Mom always had in the living room. I must've been 7 or 8 years old. Maybe I've read it since then, I honestly can't remember.
I know this: as a child, I got scared. The rats, you see...
Reapproaching Night Shift now, I saw things a little differently. I noticed connections to things, I found myself truly enthralled by some of the stories, and underwhelmed by others.
Night Shift was released in 1978, filling the gap between The Shining, and his upcoming work, The Stand. Night Shift is a collection of 20 short stories, including 4 previously unreleased tales.
I'm not going to bore you with musings and reviews of all 20. Instead, I want to talk about a select few, so let's start at the top and merrily skip our way through it.
The book opens with 'Jerusalem's Lot'. Written as a series of letters from the main character to a friend, JL tells the story of strange goings-on in an area of Maine in 1850. Possibly a 'prequel/prologue' to 'Salem's Lot, I wasn't really interested in it. The writing style, the syntax of the Civil-War era letters, kept me from really engaging in the story. You can make an argument that people wrote some masterful prose in those days, but it seemed overdone and somewhat nauseating. The literary equivalent to Old Lady Perfume.
The second tale in the book is really where this entire journey begins. 'Graveyard Shift' is the story of a knockaround guy who works overnights (the graveyard shift) in a textile mill. His boss offers the crew the opportunity to make money during a shutdown week by cleaning out the cellar of the mill, where old furniture, equipment, and materials have been left for years to decay. The boss is a manipulator, and essentially holds the men hostage to the job, despite the safety risks. The risks?
Rats.
The dark basement and abandoned materials are the perfect elements for rats to build nests, multiply, and essentially own that part of the building. They don't take kindly to efforts to evict them, and they fight and bite back. The boss only cares about getting the job done, and makes the crew keep working. Eventually, the crew turns on the boss.
Now, I will tell you this, and leave the details of the rest for you to learn when you read it for yourself. There is a Queen Rat at the center of all this. The rat is described in the book as being the size of a cow (!), albino and blind due to the total darkness of the cellar, and immobile. The rest of the rats serve and protect her.
I'm 7, maybe 8 years old, in the mid 1980's. My other association with rats at this point? Not Splinter, because I think we were just on the cusp of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a phenomenon.
Templeton. Templeton from Charlotte's Web. The book and the movie, but especially the movie. Templeton was my boy. The Smorgasbord song! Paul Lynde!
That, my friends, is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Moving on to 'Night Surf', a story that I don't remember reading. A story that's only allure to me, at this point, is the introduction of Captain Trips.
'The Stand' would hit shelves after 'Night Shift' in the Fall of 1978 and introduce the world to Captain Trips, or the SuperFlu, or A6, a flu-like virus that essentially wipes out 99% of Earth's population. Night Surf focuses on a group of teenagers, maybe young adults, living in this post-apocalyptic world of A6. The collapse of society, the survival instinct, and the absence of law, order, and supplies all play a part in this short story. It isn't terribly remarkable by itself, other than to realize that it was originally published in 1969. The seed of The Stand, arguably one of King's greatest works, first poked it's head above ground 9 years prior.
As a child, I didn't recognize any of that. I hadn't read The Stand yet, and I didn't care about a group of lawless kids on a coastal beach. Now, it resonates obviously in the same universe as The Stand, which is also the same universe as The Dark Tower. We'll come to all of that in due time...
One, two, skip a few, and we come to 'The Mangler', a story about a possessed machine in a commercial laundry building.
Yes, you read that right. A possessed machine in a commercial laundry building.
Anywhoo, once again, something that meant nothing to me as a child rung a bell as a grown up. Small connection, and minor coincidence, but the machine in question is housed at the Blue Ribbon Laundry. Later, in a little story called 'Roadwork', our main man Bart Dawes works for... Blue Ribbon Laundry.
Roadwork is a Richard Bachman novel. I don't know all the details of the Bachman ruse unraveling, but maybe the Blue Ribbon Laundry appearing in both a King and Bachman story was enough to ring a couple people's curiosity bells. Then again, maybe it's just a natural recycling of a bland setting. Either way, it's the only reason that The Mangler bears mention in my rundown.
'Grey Matter' kind of creeped me out. As an adult, I mean. See, here's the thing: I love the movies 'Creepshow' and 'Creepshow 2', and I was a big fan of 'Tales From The Crypt' when it was on HBO. Grey Matter, while not memorable to me as a child, has a definite EC-Comics feel to it. In the middle of a snowstorm, a bunch of locals hanging around at the neighborhood grocery come to the aid of a young kid from the block and make a terrifying discovery.
I swear, I didn't copy that synopsis from anywhere, I wrote it myself. Maybe I have a future in paperback book covers. Whatever. The point is that I read the story and, while I can't pinpoint exactly what triggered it, I began to see it with my mind's eye in a storyboard/comic book fashion. Panels of pencil sketches and word bubbles. Drawings of something terrible, so terrible that it has to be drawn in a comic because it won't translate into reality.
It's as if the drawing makes it more terrifying, because in the pencil and ink world of comics, anything can happen. Once it transfers into a realistic medium of film, you're constrained by the limits of special effects and budget capabilities. The decision of my mind to recognize it in a comic style allowed me to get a full-on case of the heebie jeebies. The fact that it ended in suspense only added to my enjoyment of the story.
'Trucks'. Trucks is etched into my brain forever because it's the basis of 'Maximum Overdrive', which is one of the best worst movies ever made. I know, I said that I wasn't going to make movie vs. book comparisons, and I'm not. Just hear me out...
'Maximum Overdrive' was a movie that I would rent, over and over, from the video store as a kid. The premise is that a comet does something to the atmosphere that causes all man-made machines to come to life and take over the world. The movie itself centers on a little truck stop somewhere in the Southeast United States, and it's full of bad acting, gaudy gore and violence, and a soundtrack of AC/DC music.
It's a masterpiece of embarrassment and I'll still watch it today whenever I see it on TV.
Trucks, on the other hand, is slightly different. See, in Maximum Overdrive, the humans triumph (SPOILER ALERT), but in Trucks, it's not so easy. The story itself is mediocre and obviously far-fetched, but it bears noting as the foundation of one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures.
I know you remember this truck...
Lawnmower Man is about a guy who hires a lawn service to take care of his overgrown property. The manner in which the guy does so is... bizarre. It's absurd, and it's almost whimsical in it's telling. All logic is out the window, but the best part is that the climax of the story is left to the reader's imagination. King ramps up to the big moment, then he skips to the aftermath. You're left to play out the horror in your mind, and it's pretty gross. At least, it was for me.
Quitters INC. I felt like I'd heard this story before, and it took the power of the Googles for me to figure out why. Quitters Inc was made into a movie, well, part of a movie. It was one of the 3 vignettes in Cat's Eye. Anyway, This was possibly my favorite story in the book. A man visits an office shrouded in mystery, seeking help to quit smoking. The folks at Quitters Inc guarantee he'll quit, and he does, but their methods are extreme.
I loved this story. I can relate to it. I'm a smoker. I've been a smoker for a bezillion years. I quit a few times. Once, I quit for over 3 years, but I've always ended up going back to it. If I was faced with quitting smoking against facing consequences like the folks at Quitters Inc offer, would I quit?
I'd quit in one single heartbeat and never look back. At least, I think I would. Dick Morrison thinks he would, too, but he doesn't. He smokes again, and he pays the price.
Quitters Inc is essentially the mafia. Using their service is akin to taking a loan from the loan shark. You promise to never smoke again. First slip up? A little electrocution, a little shock therapy. The catch is, it's not you in the hot seat. It's your wife, or your husband, or your mom, or your dad. Don't pay your bookie and maybe he beats you up, works you over a little, but the fear with Quitters Inc is that you're putting your family at risk. So, bottom line, do you value your family over yourself?
I do, and yet, I'm going to walk away from this keyboard in a couple of minutes, take a break, and have a cigarette. Sure, I don't have the threat of my wife or children being harmed, but maybe... just maybe, if I can find a way to feel that level of fear, to feel that level of determination, to feel that level of desperation, the feeling of true consequence, then MAYBE I'll put the pack down and walk away and never look back.
My First Grade school picture
...and now that I'm back from that reasonably guilt-free cigarette, let's continue on to...
Children of the Corn. This shit creeps me the fuck out. Way more so as an adult than as a child. I think it's because I live in an area where we're regionally inhabited with Amish and Mennonites. That doesn't mean I think they're bad people. Not at all. They do their own thing, live by their rules, and let's be honest, they make amazing food.
Still, the premise of Children of The Corn is essentially when one of those isolated, living out of time communities goes horribly horribly awry. King is a master of making things go horribly awry and dropping the everyman into the situation to deal with it. The story feels a little dated, because the advent of modern technology leaves few parts of the world untouched by communication, so the scenario is pretty unlikely in this day and age. However, in the 1970's, maybe you could come across a barren town in the middle of farm country. The kind of place where people, with huge tracts of corn and soy and wheat, live miles away from their closest neighbors. The kind of place where the social climate, influenced by strict conservative religion, could slowly turn until, all at once, it becomes some kind of altered, pagan nightmare.
Children Of The Corn got bastardized into a horror movie franchise that I never followed. The original story is enough for me.
Finally, I'll touch on 'One For The Road'. Not the last story in Night Shift, but it was originally published a little over a year after 'Salem's Lot. Again, we're back in small-town Maine. A man wanders into a bar during a blizzard, seeking help. His car was caught in the storm, and he left his family in the car to stay warm while he left to get a tow, or a ride, anything. Of course, this is no ordinary small town, and the man's car got stuck dangerously close to a certain little town that everyone avoids. We know what's happened in Jerusalem's Lot because we've already read the book. We're already hip to the danger, but the guy who wandered away to risk frostbite and save his family doesn't know it. The two men in the bar only know that weird shit goes on up there, and that everyone local avoids it. The weirdness stays within the Lot, and they all coexist with it in a form of unspoken and uneasy peace. The man's wife and daughter, stuck in that car in the wrong part of town, are prey. They're literally sitting ducks for the unspoken horror that could fall upon them at any moment.
Night Shift, to me as an adult, begins and ends with the vampires of Salem's Lot. Yes, there's a story after One For The Road, and I can simply chalk it up to the editor's final sequencing, but One For The Road is the bookend. It's not the end of Salem's Lot in the King Universe, but it ties the book up pretty nicely. With a full novel, and two separate stories about this town, King has established his fictional territorial homebase for spooky shit. Eventually, he'll expand his map to include Castle Rock and Derry, but until then, we know that when we see Salem's Lot appear in a story, somebody is fuh-huh-hucked...
GET FUCK OUT!!!
As with most of the King story collection books, there are some good ones, some duds, and each reader probably sees it a little differently. The stories resonate with you based on your life and your experiences. I'm certain that I see it differently now than I did at 8 years old. A massive queen rat isn't the stuff of my nightmares anymore. The idea of harm coming to my family because of something I did is.
Nevertheless, we close the page and move on. As we do so, let me say a couple of things about what's coming up next.
The Stand is a unique book in the King bibliography. Originally released in one format, it was rereleased over a decade later in a sort of 'Director's Cut', with over 300 original pages of material added back in. While the long version is the version that's readily accessible to most, and is my preferred version because of it's complete nature, I'm going to read the original release version of The Stand for the next installment. Later on, when I get to the Unabridged Version's time in the chronology, I'll re-read that version and address it in a new and separate entry.
The Stand is a long book, even in it's original form, and my rambling entry could be equally lengthy. I can feel a tendency in my mind already to regard things that I 'expect' to think and expect to feel when it comes time to write about it. I'll make note of those, and maybe they'll end up getting addressed in the final rundown, or maybe they're anticipatory, like my thoughts about 'Rage', and they'll end up disregarded.
Night Shift, ultimately, felt like a book that I needed to get through, because I was already eager to move on to The Stand. I really did my best to fight off those feelings, because it can diminish appreciation for what's already right in front of me. I don't know if I succeeded, and maybe this entry struggles because of it. Either way, I'm done with it, and it's time to move on (like the world itself, it always moves on)
And, with that, we slowly make our way down into New England. Into New York City, and Ogunquit, Maine, and Stovington, Vermont... Let's hold hands and be witnesses to the end of the world...
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