The sixth story in King’s first collection, “The Boogeyman” recounts the therapy session from hell. I fell in love with Night Shift as a child and I have never looked back.ĭavid Dastmalchian as Lester in 20th Century Studios’ THE BOOGEYMAN. My obsession with “The Mangler” and “The Boogeyman” bloomed into a devotion for King’s writing that would eventually change the course of my life. I even toted my copy of Night Shift to slumber parties and insisted on reading the stories to my terrified friends. I devoured them along with the additional eighteen entries in King’s first collection. At ten years old, both stories thrilled and unsettled me. The latter is a cruel story about a man haunted by a monster living in his closet. The former follows the unlikely tale of an industrial folding machine possessed by a demon. They simply end at the most dreadful moment, leaving us frightened and alone with our thoughts to imagine the worst possible outcome.īrowsing Night Shift ’s table of contents, my eye immediately fell on two titles: “The Mangler” and “ The Boogeyman.” Each promised the kind of classic horror movie scares I was discovering as a new fan of the genre and seemed limited enough that my young reader’s brain could digest them in a single sitting. However, like “Gramma” many of King’s stories offer no such relief. One of the scariest stories in Skeleton Crew, “Gramma,” describes a set of reassuring headlights pulling into the driveway thus reestablishing the safety of an adult presence.
King’s earlier short stories often end on especially nasty stingers, implying brutality lurking just around the corner.
The brief format removes the need for comforting explanations and we rarely get close enough to a character to grow emotionally attached before a gruesome death. I would soon learn that King saves some of his darkest work for short story collections. The table of contents included evocative but familiar titles like “Sometimes They Come Back” and “Children of the Corn” and most of the stories were short, clocking in around 10-20 pages. At just 326 pages, it seemed more manageable than the 1,000 page epics I would later fall in love with. When I finally gathered the courage to read one, I chose Night Shift. I grew up staring in awe at my dad’s paperbacks lining a high shelf and pondered the haunting images emblazoned on their spines: a hand covered with eyes and bandages ( Night Shift ) green claws poking through a sewer grate ( It ) a crow man fighting a man I assumed to be Luke Skywalker ( The Stand ).
Like many Stephen King fans, I found the Master of Horror as a child.
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