Three Kings

by Jeff Baker

I’ve told this story before.

Sometime around the fall semester of 1981 when I was in College, one weekend when I had no homework and didn’t have to go work at my job I grabbed a paperback copy of Stephen King’s first short-story collection “Night Shift” at the school Library just before closing time and took it to my dorm room.

After dinner I sat down to read some of the stories, hoping to find out what all the fuss was about the author. I had read “Carrie,” and hadn’t liked it. (I had read “The Long Walk” by Richard Bachman and thought it was superior to this King guy’s stuff!) I read several of the stories that evening; probably “Jerusalem’s Lot” (which I thought was “so-so”) a couple of others and then a few that really impressed me; “The Mangler” (with its clever twist!) “Strawberry Spring” (“trunk” is still an ugly word!) and the one that really grabbed me; “Trucks.”

King’s perfect description of the diner reminded me so much of places I’d been in, and the grisly descriptions later in the story and the gripping pace convinced me that this guy was damn good! (And that I wanted to write stuff like that too!)

I read a bunch of the other stories over that weekend, especially “Sometimes They Come Back,” and loved them! King didn’t hit the bullseye on every story but most of them worked. And I didn’t realize I hadn’t read all of them until years later when I picked up my Brother’s copy and read “The Lawnmower Man,” which has virtually no relation to the movie!

Fast forward to the early 1990s. I was driving a small delivery truck and trying to teach myself to write by writing as well as by reading all the paperback anthologies and collections I could get my hands on.

One of them was King’s “Skeleton Crew.”

I kept it with me in the truck and read it while I was waiting on customers or having lunch. I read “The Mist” over a couple of days and got spooked reading “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” sitting on a dirt road in a little Kansas town waiting for the customer to show up. The stories were fun, some were excellent and King’s story notes were half the fun! (“I got to thinking about cannibalism one day, because that’s the kind of thing a guy like me thinks about…”)

“Skeleton Crew” was published a few years before I got my copy. A year or two later, King’s “Nightmares And Dreamscapes” was published and I wound up with two copies. Read through it, loved it.

What all three of these books had in common was they were jam-packed with material. A lot of it was early stuff from King’s days selling stories to “Men’s Magazines” or from his College and even High School days. (“An uneven Aladdin’s Cave of a book” King said in the intro.) Critics have tut-tutted about that but much of it is fun.

In his later collections, he is sometimes a bit more literary and the books are not that huge. But I almost miss the Mammoth Books of King Stories. These were new when I was discovering fiction writing for myself, although I am no Stephen King. I look through those three books every now and then. They bring back memories of dorm rooms lit by a bedside lamp, delivery trucks parked in the sunlight or my old bedroom at my parent’s house.

There’s a new collection of King stories or novellas every five years or so now. But I still miss the old days.

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