Book Review: Night Shift by Stephen King

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“Let's talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear.”

📚

This was my first time reading Stephen King’s Night Shift, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, as short stories tend to be minefields for me. If I’m not in the right mood or frame of mind, I can’t engage, and I prefer novels, where my brain can settle into longer narratives. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews for this collection, though, so decided to give it a go, and I’m glad I did.

Like the majority of collections I’ve tried, I didn’t connect with every story, but those that grabbed me, really grabbed me. Night Shift is chock-full of eerie, disturbing tales, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it in the future, when I might gravitate toward different stories than those that transfixed me this time around.

Favorites:

“And what’s a bat but a rat with wings?”

•Graveyard Shift: A nightmarish, claustrophobic subterranean horror set in the filthy, abandoned basement levels of an old mill teeming with mutated vermin, black secrets, and dark history. Supremely creepy, gothic, grimy, and riveting, it’s a visceral account that literally made me sit up in my chair and left me wanting more in the best way.

“There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry . . . It was a noise almost like a chuckle.”

•The Mangler: A macabre and captivating tale of a possessed industrial speed ironer. Bloody and malign, gruesome and gory, it’s a catastrophic, havoc-laced story of chance and circumstance that brought portions of Michael McDowell’s The Amulet to mind.

“Maybe all the monsters we were scared of when we were kids, Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy, maybe they were real. Real enough to kill the kids that were supposed to have fallen into gravel pits or drowned in lakes or were just never found.”

•The Boogeyman: A haunting, ghastly chronicle of murder, negligence, abuse, and fear capped off with occupied closets, squishy sounds, slithering shadows, and monstrous appendages. Malevolent and bone-chilling, malicious and appalling, it conjures shades of another fantastic horror novel: Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman.

What’s your favorite Night Shift story?

🖤Amanda

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