Book Review: ‘You Like It Darker’

Every time you may feel just about ready to give up on Stephen King for good, he turns around and surprises you.

There are right ways and wrong ways for writers to stay relevant. Some of King’s late works strive for inventiveness only to blow up in the reader’s face, and these days he tends to spend an excessive amount of time on X, tweeting about topics far beyond his areas of expertise. Yet his recent writing has gravitated toward realism and grittiness in the depiction of Middle Americans and their struggles. His new collection of short stories, You Like It Darker, features a number of Carveresque gems along with the straight-up horror and suspense.

Another influence is the great Flannery O’Connor, whom he explicitly acknowledges at the end of “On Slide Inn Road,” the strongest of the 12 tales here. It starts off with an account of the tensions among members of a Boston-area family taking a detour on a backwoods road on their way up to Derry, where an ailing grandmother is on her deathbed. The dad driving the old Buick is a prim banker who regards his own father on the back seat as a relic from a justly forgotten world that exalted traditional roles and competitive sports, and all the cards, mitts, bats, comic books, and other gear and kitsch that sprang from them, with none of today’s hypersensitivities.

King uses deft touches to etch in the differences among the social media-savvy kids in the car, their white-collar parents, and the old-timer. The banker can barely stand the ornery, plain-spoken grandpa, and tensions grow so acute that the reader may wonder whether the older man will have to get out and walk the rest of the way. But then a breakdown on the remote road puts the family at the mercy of a pair of strange and menacing young men who, the reader guesses, are ne’er-do-wells at best and dangerous criminals at worst. This being a Stephen King story, it does not take long to figure out.

The encounter with the two psychos poses a direct threat to all the travelers, but only one of them (spoiler alert!) has the courage and resolve to trick them into thinking there are valuable things inside a bag in the car and then removing from it a bat supposedly signed by none other than Ted Williams. The bat is a weapon as deadly as the gun one of the punks wields.

“On Slide Inn Road” has an obvious debt not only to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which King acknowledges at the end, but to King’s own “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” in which a grandfather steps in to protect his son during a road-rage incident.

Yet this tale is far more than just recycled O’Connor or King. In contrast with the supineness of the others in the little party, and that of the craven banker in particular, the grandfather’s act of heroism is thought-provoking. The white-collar son looks back on less enlightened ages of American life with distaste, especially their blunt insensitivity on race and sexuality, and holds a poor opinion of grandpa for his uncouthness and lack of political correctness. But the act of heroism at the climax will make you wonder what we in 2024, who tiptoe around difficult subjects and put all manner of polite euphemisms and evasions to use on matters of race, gender, and sexuality, have given up in our endless quest for social virtue.

When push comes to shove—and a crisis presents choices that will actually have serious and immediate moral consequences—the banker who sternly observes progressive etiquette proves a weakling and a coward. The old deplorable shows what he is made of. “On Slide Inn Road” will not lead to invitations to cocktail parties or PEN America functions for King. It is by far one of the most perceptive things he’s done in a long time.

The rest of the collection has hits and misses. “The Fifth Step” is about a retiree who makes the mistake of getting into a conversation with a stranger in Central Park. The latter is a recovering alcoholic with an unusual approach, broken up, as the title suggests, into several steps. Each phase helps take his mind off drinking, but if you give up one diversion, the pathology that made you crave it will find different outlets, as the retiree finds out too late. The story is darkly amusing.

Another entry is “Finn,” the tale of a boy’s abduction at the hands of creeps whose leader’s name, Mr. Ludlum, derives from one of the most renowned spy novelists of all time. “Finn” is not an unsuccessful work, but it raises questions of a possible debt to King’s son Joe Hill, whose story “Black Phone,” the basis for the hit 2021 movie, relates the misfortunes of a young smart-mouthed abductee named Finney.

Half-Baked Concepts

In “The Turbulence Expert,” King envisions a clandestine firm that employs telepaths who can predict highly erratic weather and can unite the psychic energies of fellow passengers on a plane in order to keep the jet from getting swept right out of its flight path and going into a tailspin. The expert of this story has a demanding work schedule. No sooner does he begin to relax in a hotel room after a flight than a call comes in telling him to get himself on another plane which is heading into danger. After having saved all the passengers on a flight to Sarasota, the expert lets one of them, Mary Worth, in on his secret and holds out to her the prospect of joining his secretive company.

King’s concept here is interesting, but he might have thought it through with more rigor. If a firm existed somewhere that employed people who could predict dangerous weather, would it not find a more lucrative arrangement providing services directly to airlines? The airlines, rather than the company, would pay for the extrasensory services. Rather than having telepaths help people through such nerve-fraying situations at 34,000 feet, they could take a preventive approach and alter flight paths in advance, sparing passengers all the terror and injuries. Alternatively, the telepaths could get individual contracts directly with the airlines. It’s not impossible that the major carriers would offer them higher pay and more manageable schedules than the shadow firm that calls its poor seers in hotel rooms at random hours of the day and night and makes them drop what they are doing to jump on a flight somewhere.

Finally, “The Turbulence Expert” fails to answer the question of why Mary Worth, whom the expert meets on the Sarasota-bound flight and then recruits, would be a candidate for this type of work. She appears to have no more telepathic ability than the next person, and King offers no clues as to why the expert would consider her a potential match or trust her with the strictly kept secrets of his role.

“The Turbulence Expert” is one of many stories that King should have thought through more carefully and set aside if he could not resolve its contradictions. All too often, the guy takes an interesting concept and runs too far and too fast with it. Reading this tale, you may think of “The Ten O’Clock People,” one of the pieces in King’s wastebasket collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, whose title refers to the gaggles of office workers you sometimes glimpse standing around outside on a cigarette break at a certain time of the morning. The story itself turns out to be a highly campy action-horror yarn with little thematic relationship to its header. A catchy phrase does not a successful story make.