Nowadays, it’s easy to see Stephen King’s name and have a conceived notion of his legacy. He remains well into old age one of the most prolific authors of his generation, producing masterpieces that dig under people’s skin and recontextualizes fears we’ve long taken for granted. In this Short Stop series, I will explore a period before he was the icon we know and love. Even with a handful of bestsellers to his name, his status had yet to cement. That is why I’ve chosen to take a look at his first story collection, “Night Shift,” and hopefully get a glimpse into the writer taking shape, before his style was cemented into a cultural touchstone. Was he always the master of horror, or was there a simpler time when he was as messy and weird as the rest of us? All it takes is turning the page to find out.
After 20 stories, this is how everything ends. Stephen King ends not with a grand, theatrical horror show but something quieter and more familiar. Whatever shortcomings “The Woman in the Room” lacks for compulsory page-turning, it more than makes up for with elongated details capturing the pain of watching your parent die, growing helpless to the point they are trapped in their bodies with nothing but time to focus on. The question becomes one of the selfish, where to keep somebody alive is to watch them suffer slowly. Where is the line of reason? Is it worth risking something worse in the event that something worse will happen instead?
That is the only reason that the opening exchange works despite the crass presentation. Instead of being precious about how a suppository is used, King insists on exploring how gross it is to stick something up someone’s “ass” only to melt. The image is intentionally gross, but it also paints a picture of the lengths protagonist Johnny could go to keep his mother alive. Nobody is capable of being happy in this scenario. Along with her strength, her sanity is fading fast, leaving nothing behind that would match the relationship they once built.
Unlike “One for the Road,” the awareness of mortality comes in the form of a drawn-out process. For most of the page count, nothing happens that is traditionally scary. He’s wandering a hospital and realizing how surreal the clinical world is. Nurses are as much there to treat as they are to rob their vulnerable patients. Most rooms are wired to monitor their patients at the risk of them experiencing an accident. King’s cleverness allows discussion of the failing body to be both gross and somber, as if mankind has its own ways of turning people into deformed creatures.
The part that works best is how this conflicts with the other 19 stories. Most of them have dealt with supernatural horrors that are beyond our control. They may be boogeymen or homicidal rats, but they all show how scary the world is. King’s best emphasizes the everyday tragedies as things often inescapable no matter how much we push back. His fear is less about the grotesque but how the idea relates to something inside us. We feel it on a physical level because these ideas connect to our shortcomings, reflecting mistakes we could’ve avoided with a little less arrogance.
But all of this can’t compare to the desperation that comes with aging. We may live a perfect life and still have to suffer in the final days. Good health will fade, and our future might be stuck in somebody else’s hands. They don’t know what the deeper intentions are. Johnny can’t read his mother’s mind. All he can do is watch her body shut down, disposing of its waste in the most unpleasant ways possible. This is not a story that uses its discomfort for novelty. Everything comes with a sincerity to the medical process. The pages grow unbearable as the redundancies pile up. She’s paralyzed, only able to communicate through the smallest of finger movements. Is that really living?
I’m not sure how this story plays to younger audiences who have never watched a loved one die over months or years. While I haven’t experienced anything to this scale, there’s the recognition of people aging and losing their mobility. They become codependent on you, and it will push your idea of love into conflicting corners. The dissonance forces you to see what is happening to them and yourself. Do you want their feeble bodies to be something that weighs on your conscience, or is it better to let them pass with a sense of peace and dignity?
That is where Johnny’s life becomes a horror story. He’s ultimately in charge of how this story plays out. It’s a different kind of tragedy. The guilt, even in the best situation, comes back to you because you made the decision. It’s the end of a moment where your symbolic comfort disappears forever, leaving you alone in a world that will never understand you like your mother. Is it better to hold onto the idea or attempt to restore your impression of who they were? It’s doubtful that Johnny won’t be grieving for a long time, but how much of that was additional worry from years of ailing conditions?
It’s not the most subversive story. Everything unfolds predictably. Whereas that would usually be an issue, King needs to keep everything simple. He knows that somewhere in his story is a meditation on how mortality is never pleasant. It’s a mix of the personal with frustration at the institution for not providing miracle cures. They can do everything right, and things will still go poorly. How does one change this course? Much like other stories in more flamboyant manners, the reality is you can’t. At most, you can cherish what humanity is hidden inside the morbidity.
In short, Johnny euthanizes his mother after forcing her to swallow pills. While this may seem controversial to some readers, it comes from a place of love that reflects King’s rich sense of complexity. Does one let nature run its course or end the pain? The final image of the book is of Johnny returning home with a need to drink water. He needs to replenish his life and find something new to bring him peace. The pain is over, but will he ever escape the horrors of the past? “Night Shift” may not have had too much of a thematic overlay, but it was always about overcoming the worst moments of your life. What lies on the other side may be peace, but everything before has more than likely changed how you see the world forever.
As a conclusion to this anthology, it’s a decent enough story. I think it’s easy to get caught up in the intent and think the haunting morbidity makes it more provocative. The story may reflect King’s future ability to explore our vulnerabilities in painfully detailed ways, but it feels like a test run of his better work. I accept that the gross imagery is important to understanding the situation, but it also can be a crutch at times, with many examples feeling similar in ways that bog the pacing down. The emotions never fully resonate on a level deeper than death, and his mother never has a sense of history beyond her current condition. Maybe it helps to make the endgame easier to process, but there is a distant feeling that feels like it could’ve been better explored.
In one of the more amusing coincidences, this story is not without one last fun King tradition. Upon its release in “Night Shift,” the young filmmaker Frank Darabont insisted on turning “The Woman in the Room” into a short film. He pushed to have King give him permission, thus becoming one of the most noteworthy filmmakers to be associated with the Dollar Baby movement. In fact, Darabont would continually collaborate with King’s short stories, most notably with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” being adapted to the Oscar-nominated The Shawshank Redemption (1994). In general, he’s also one of the most successful people who found the emotional complexity hidden inside the artistry.
All in all, I am not the biggest fan of “Night Shift.” Is it a good short story collection? Yes. There’s been plenty to mull over and take joy in a young and hungry King. Even then, this is a writer who was clearly still forming the identity that would define his greater pop culture presence. It is in there, but the effectiveness of his presentation is overall messy, and I’d argue still buried under his influences. Maybe it’s because of how the anthology progressed, but it felt like things got stronger the more he pushed past the novelty and allowed the humanity to fight with something more uncontrollable. The back half is definitely my favorite run, though I think this book suffers from being by someone so prolific that you could argue there are five better versions of the same story. It’s not bad (except “Lawnmower Man”), but there’s a reason most authors’ best work isn’t their first novel.
Outside of “Different Seasons,” this is the first Stephen King collection I’ve read in its entirety. While I wasn’t expecting to be in complete awe, part of me was disappointed by the journey being so messy and sometimes downright boring. However, it’s why I wanted to read this in the first place. I needed to know what he was like before The Master of Horror was a brand, when he still needed to prove himself. The results have that foolish ego that would slowly disappear. I’m grateful that enough of this is, at worst, snappy fiction. He’s yet to become the voice of a generation, but he’s not selling himself short either. He’ll scare you before breaking your heart. Now that’s something only a special author can accomplish.
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