Skeleton crew

1985

american horror tales
nested narrative
novellas
alcoholism
anecdotes
diaries
heroin
cruise ships
islands
insanity

The story

From the Flap: The Master at his scarifying best! From heart-pounding terror to the eeriest of whimsy--tales from the outer limits of one of the greatest imaginations of our time! Evil that breathes and walks and shrieks, brave new worlds and horror shows, human desperation bursting into deadly menace--such are the themes of these astounding works of fiction. In the tradition of Poe and Stevenson, of Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone, Stephen King has fused images of fear as old as time with the iconography of contemporary American life to create his own special brand of horror--one that has kept millions of readers turning the pages even as they gasp. In the book-length story "The Mist," a supermarket becomes the last bastion of humanity as a peril beyond dimension invades the earth. . . Touch "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands," and say your prayers . . . There are some things in attics which are better left alone, things like "The Monkey" . . . The most sublime woman driver on earth offers a man "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" to paradise . . . A boy's sanity is pushed to the edge when he's left alone with the odious corpse of "Gramma" . . . If you were stunned by Gremlins, the Fornits of "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" will knock your socks off . . . Trucks that punish and beautiful teen demons who seduce a young man to massacre; curses whose malevolence grows through the years; obscene presences and angels of grace--here, indeed, is a night-blooming bouquet of chills and thrills. ([source](https://stephenking.com/library/story_collection/skeleton_crew_flap.html)) --- Contains: - [The Mist](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL149144W/The_Mist) - Here There Be Tygers - [The Monkey](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL149146W/The_Monkey) - Cain Rose Up - [Mrs. Todd's Shortcut](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL149148W/Mrs._Todd's_Shortcut) - [The Jaunt](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20663554W/The_Jaunt) - The Wedding Gig - Paranoid: a

What it’s like

Hard, clipped sentences that move quickly from flat small-town normalcy into sudden wrongness, with the nested tales stacked like a rack of pulp magazines: a supermarket under a fog that swallows the windows, a dry grey New England afternoon, a brass monkey drumming in a dusty attic, a sun-bleached cruise deck at dusk, a lonely diary crumbling into madness. Its vibe is bleak, dry-humoured unease with flashes of grotesque whimsy, the kind of book to read late at night with one lamp on, or over a rainy weekend when you want to be startled and then laugh at yourself. Pacing is brisk and episodic, with the longer pieces like "The Mist" building slowly through claustrophobic dread and the shorter ones landing hard and fast. Its people are ordinary and cornered: fathers, drifters, a disturbed boy, drinkers and addicts who lose their grip. Intensity is high and unsparing: frequent gore, sudden violent deaths, creature horror, a corpse-filled room, sexual menace and teen seduction themes, heroin and alcoholism depicted without softening, and cruelty that lands with real weight. Not gentle. For readers who love classic horror anthologies, Twilight Zone twists and King's grimier, funnier side, and who want their chills served with plenty of grit.

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