1 - Jerusalem's Lot

This is an odd choice for the very first story in Stephen King's very first short story collection, because by the title you would expect it to be related to his novel, 'Salem's Lot. But it's only related indirectly. I believe King wrote it before he wrote the novel. It still contains a town called Jerusalem's Lot where everyone disappeared, but it's not the same town (this one is near the ocean) and it's not the same problem.

But once we move past that, it's an interesting little story, told through letters and journal entries. The majority of these are set in 1850 and are written by Charles Boone, who has inherited a family home from a dead cousin. The locals are under the impression that the home and the family are both cursed, but Charles, modern man of science, scoffs at the notion, until one day his friend/manservant/THEY'REJUSTFRIENDSOKAY, Cal, realizes that the noises in the walls are not rats. There's something big in the walls of the old home, and Cal discovers a secret cubby in the walls behind a false bookshelf. It doesn't seem to connect to anything though.

But it leads them to the discovery of an old map that notes the location of Jerusalem's Lot, a couple miles away. They hike over there and find a perfectly abandoned village, everything left just the way it was on the day everyone vanished. This is the same idea that eventually sparked the full 'Salem's Lot novel. They enter an old church that is set up with a bunch of satanic trappings, including a Latin/Druidic Book of Evil, about the mysteries of the worm. Worms aren't all that mysterious, they dig and pop up everywhere when it rains, but whatever, ancient satanic dudes. Charles touches the book and they hear/feel something in the ground, so they get the hell out of there.

They start to hear noises in the cellar as well as in the wall, so they go down to check it out and stumble across the undead, shambling corpses of two of Charles' ancestors who died in the home way back when. Up to this point I was thinking it was going to be vampires again, but it appears that some sort of undead zombie is the order of the day. They run out of the cellar, block it shut, and pretend it never happened.

Cal discovers an old journal from one Robert Boone, who lived here in the late 1700s, and they learn that another of Charles' ancestors founded Jerusalem's Lot in 1710 and started a weird incest satan cult there. They secured a copy of the worm book and then everyone vanished. Charles and Cal go back to the ghost town to burn the book, but something was there first and sacrificed a lamb to the book, and this time when Charles touches it, it takes him over and he starts spouting ritual nonsense that makes the ground shake. He burns the book but not before the earth erupts and an enormous worm emerges and kills Cal before retreating as the book is destroyed. Then the undead zombie body of the town's founder crawls out of the hole and Charles runs with his tail between his leg and determines to kill himself to end the Boone curse. But of course it can't end there, so the story then reveals that there was another Boone who now in the 1970s has taken up residence in the home, implying the problems will start again. And they lived happily ever after!

There wasn't a lot to the story, despite the fact that it was over 30 pages long. It was interesting to see King's original idea for Jerusalem's Lot, before he scavenged bits of it to use in his vampire novel. The character voices feel authentically 1850s, and King is able to submerge his usual style in favour of this, something he hasn't fully done in his novels so far, where lots of the characters make the same sort of King-esque asides and observations. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as this is simply King's writing voice, but it's interesting to see him do something different.

Grade: C+



2 - Graveyard Shift

A group of millworkers get extra duty cleaning out the basement during the graveyard shift each night while the mill is shut down for a week. The basement is the sort of place that hasn't been cleaned in ages, everything that was never needed was just shoved down there and left to rot, items from half a century before or longer. It's seriously gross down there, but hey, it pays $2 an hour. Wow, the 1970s must have been awesome.

There are lots of rats down there too, big ones, and they get bitey sometimes when the men try to haul their homes away, which, I mean, can you blame 'em? The men are getting a little spooked by all the aggressive rats, and the mill foreman is getting angry because the job isn't getting done fast enough and he's not paying them to stand around and be freaked out by rats. That's when they discover a trap door leading down into an even deeper, unknown level of the mill.

Hall, one of the workers, threatens to get the mill shut down for sanitary reasons unless the foreman goes down into the sub-sub-basement with him to see if there are any rats. Really he just doesn't like the foreman, and has been getting this idea in his head that something big is going to happen. So they open the trap door together, hating each other, and head on down. But the door was locked from the underside, a lock so old it's fallen apart now. Why lock it from beneath? And who would do that? It's a wonderfully creepy detail.

It's ripe with rats down there, absolutely ripe, and the little buggers surround the pair, keeping a short distance away. They have a high-pressure hose that was being used to clean up above, if they need to use it on the rats. But Hall isn't really worried about the rats. He just wants the foreman to keep going with him, to see which one breaks first. The rats are getting bigger, the further they go. There's a moldering, ancient skeleton down here, likely the person who locked the trap door from beneath. The rats are three feet long now, enormous, and there are even bigger ones that are blind and have no back legs, mutants, evolution in action.

They pass beneath the edge of the mill's foundation and are somewhere deeper, a lost place of darkness far beneath the earth, surrounded by milling mutant rats, and the atmosphere is creepy as fuck. That's when the foreman sees what's ahead at the end of the passage, and finally breaks. Instead of letting him run, Hall uses the hose to blast him back to the end of the passage, where a gargantuan, legless rat tears him to pieces, a rat the size of a cow. The other rats all attack Hall. He tries to get back, using the hose, but the rats have been chewing it and the pressure is dwindling. He gets attacked by bats as well as rats, and he laughs crazily as they all pull him down to devour him, his mind perhaps shattered by one too many giant rats.

Up above, the other workers wait, and wait, and finally decide to go down after them. And they lived happily ever after!

A fun, creepy story full of creepy rats. It's a short, snappy read that slowly builds up to the climax where the giant rat appears, and it's an effective build. The last few pages as they discover the trap door and go down verge on downright unnerving.

Grade: A-



3 - Night Surf

This is sort of a nothing story, very small, not much happens. It seems to be a precursor to some ideas King ended up using in The Stand. Essentially, we're with a small group of young people living on a beach in Maine, and the world has ended because of a southeast-Asian flu called Captain Trips that killed just about everyone. King kind of glosses over the details, except for one chilling reference to bodies being hauled away in garbage trucks for mass burials. All the story is really about is some people on a beach, some treating each other well, some treating each other poorly, all of them secretly waiting for their immunity to be a lie and for the world to wind its way down. Just a little slice of everyday life in the post-apocalyptic beachland, with no actual plot or resolution. But interesting to see the start of the idea that would germinate shortly into The Stand, King's first magnum opus. The first of ... three? Is it safe to say he had three, if you count The Dark Tower as one and It as the other?

Grade: C-



4 - I Am The Doorway

A strange story about a former astronaut, revealed nicely but overall feeling a little off, as King tries to inject some horror into America's 1970s love of the idea of space travel, a combination that doesn't quite fit and tells you why he didn't write science fiction. It's set in a near-future (from the 70s) Earth where the US space program saw all its dreams realized and explored the solar system, including Mars and Venus. The main character was an astronaut on the Venus orbit, looking down at the planet from space. He has a great line about how it seemed like a skull, picked clean, and how he got the feeling that maybe space exploration is a bad idea, maybe humans weren't meant to go out this far. It evokes a nice chilling feeling about what might be out there, similar to the feel you get from some of the finer moments the video game Doom 3.

But they returned home, crash-landing on re-entry, consigning Arthur the Astronaut to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Except that a couple years later alien eyes grew in the palms of his hands, eyes that he could see through at the same time as he could sense something else looking through them. The things he could see through his hands came with a sense of the alien perception, so he saw things as strange, terrifying, monstrous, utterly alien from what the things in his hands are used to. So he bandages them up to keep them from seeing anything. But they slowly start to gain the ability to take over his body, making him walk even though his legs are dead, and the next thing you know he killed a boy with psychic hand-eyeball powers.

His friend thinks he's crazy, so Arthur takes the bandages off and shows him the eyes. The eyes then take him over again and call lightning down from the sky to kill his friend. Venus must be just an awesome place. Arthur, terrified, douses his hands in kerosene and jams them in a fire, burning them clear off. But then years later a ring of eyes appear on his chest, so he prepares to kill himself. And they lived happily ever after!

Interesting concept, competent execution, but it feels strange throughout, as though King doesn't quite feel comfortable with space and trying to describe all the alien things that happen to Arthur.

Grade: B-



5 - The Mangler

Machinery tries to kill us! A classic King idea, taking something normal and turning it into something scary. In this case, a big steaming laundry press, a speed ironer. A woman gets caught in it and is mangled to little pieces, which greatly disturbs the police officer sent to investigate. There's nothing outwardly wrong with the machine, but both he and the inspector get a bad feeling from it, and the inspector tells him about a fridge that once seemed to delight in trapping things inside it and suffocating them, even after it was thrown out.

He tries to put it out of his mind, but soon the machine burns people working near it with steam, and then it catches a maintenance worker by the arm and begins to pull him in to mangle him up but good. Another worker there at the time hits the off switch, pulls the fuses, but the machine keeps going. So he gets the fire axe and takes his friend's arm off so he can't be pulled in, at which point the machine stops. It's a great scene, as the man doesn't want to use the axe, but has to.

The officer and his friend become convinced that the machine has accidentally had a demon summoned inside it because of coincidentally getting all the summoning ingredients into it. Which, okay, I like this story, but that's a bit of a stretch. The idea that just the ingredients touching the machine over time, with no actual will or incantation or anything, will summon a demon into a thing and trap it there. But oh well. They are convinced, from the ingredients that seem likely to have gotten into it, that it's a relatively harmless demon that they can banish, so they go to try. Only they were wrong and it was a much bigger, badder demon. The machine goes into overdrive and literally rips itself out of the concrete floor. And thus is born what is at the same time one of the scariest and one of the most ludicrous monsters King has ever created. A big demon-powered laundry machine that can hop around on its own and eat people. It's like something from the Ghostbusters cartoon show, like the toilet with teeth. It's ridiculous. It's stupid. But somehow it works. That goddamn machine is scary, and after it kills the officer's friend it tracks him through the streets to the inspector's home, where he goes for help. It comes rumbling down the street smelling of steam and blood, coming to devour them all. And they lived happily ever after!

Grade: B+