Thoughts on
Skeleton Crew from my somewhat recent (2016) re-read:
The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet - still as excellent as ever. One of my favorite King short stories.
The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands is an excellent old-school “weird tales”-type thing, folded within the framework of an enjoyable return to 249B East 35th.
The Reaper's Image - short, packs a punch. One of his better ones.
Mrs. Todd's Shortcut,
The Jaunt,
The Wedding Gig,
The Raft, and
Survivor Type are good, but not among my favorites.
I feel like I'd enjoy
Nona and
The Reach more if I could tell what was going on. Not that I couldn't follow what story there was; I just always had the feeling there was a bit more to it than he was telling us.
In
The Wedding Gig, is he alluding to The Black Spot ("...Billy-Boy…formed a band of his own...an all-black combination...")?
In
Nona, was Charlie Logan the person known as "lard ass" Hogan, of
The Body? After all, this story did have an appearance by Vern Tessio.
I wonder what Tabby thought upon reading
Word Processor Of The Gods.
The Mist,
The Monkey,
Uncle Otto's Truck, and
Gramma (probably the best of this group) are still good stories, although I'm no longer as wild about them as I once was.
King's traffic cone story (in
Notes, at the end) is quite entertaining.
Morning Deliveries: (Milkman #1) strikes me more as a writing exercise than writing.
I'm apparently not a poem guy;
Paranoid: A Chant and
For Owen did nothing for me.
So fond am I of my own writing that I will close by quoting a long passage (about the character of David Drayton in
The Mist) directly from my notes taken during that re-read:
Quote:
It must be said: David Drayton is a cheesy asshole. Let’s examine:
Seeing that Norton’s “eyes crawled over her [Steff’s] tight T-shirt” and that later “his eyes went to the front of Steff’s T-shirt again” meant Norton “was not a man I was every going to be able to really like.”
But only a few hours later, our hero was “developing an uncomfortably strong feeling for” Amanda Dumfries and “wanted to make love to her," despite the fact that his “wife was at home, maybe alive, more probably dead, alone either way…”
And not long after that, he did the deed, considering that “this was a way…to take the curse off what Ollie and I had just done [cut down and hid the dead soldiers’ bodies]…the only way.” Not since Friend of the Year Dennis Guilder have we seen something this cheesy in the way of justification.
Sure, you’re in a tough spot – maybe have some more beer, or even some hard stuff, maybe some junk food – but this?
