Skeleton Crew Book

"I stood there for a moment, first surveying the damage, then glancing out at the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind - a very gentle breeze - was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was very, very white. The only thing I can compare it to would be fresh-fallen snow lying in dazzling contrast to the deep-blue brilliance of the winter sky. But snow reflects hundreds and hundreds of diamond points in the sun, and this peculiar fogbank, although bright and clean-looking, did not sparkle…[M]ist isn't uncommon on clear days, but when there's a lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there was no rainbow here…"
- Stephen King, The Mist, featured in Skeleton Crew

When I imagine a Stephen King book in my mind, I am picturing a novel that can range in size from a brick (the mass market edition of The Stand) to a puppy (the hardcover edition of Under the Dome). I conjure memories of swollen word counts, massive backstories, and side-plot detours that can wander hundreds of pages away from the main storyline. More than anything, when I think of King's vast body of work, I think of excess, in terms of gore, in terms of violence, in terms of sheer number of pages. And frankly, for as much as I sometimes grouse about King's meandering tomes, that's really what I love about him. There is something absolutely marvelous about getting entirely lost in a work such as It, where a simple good-evil concept is spun to lengths of which Tolstoy or Proust would have approved.

Yet for all that, King - according to his own recollections, found in the introduction to Carrie - started his career writing short stories and selling them to various print magazines for a few hundred bucks a pop. He'd get an idea - invariably weird - and then bang out a draft in a few days before sending it off to publications that no longer exist.

Normally, I don't care much for short stories. It's a personal taste, one that I can't explain, except for the unsatisfied sensation of having something ending just at the point where I start becoming invested. Nevertheless, having made a small dent in King's voluminous bibliography, I decided to check out some of his shorter works.

Skeleton Crew is a collection of twenty-two short stories originally published between 1980 and 1985. Even though many of the individual selections are pretty quick, the whole shebang - cover to cover - is over five-hundred pages long.

The headline selection in Skeleton Crew - and the reason I chose it in the first place - is The Mist. More of a novella than a short story, The Mist follows a group of people trapped in a supermarket after being surrounded by a fog hiding a deadly threat. It is quite good, with several top notch sequences. Still, I suggest that the movie version is vastly better, with its brutally unflinching, unforgettable ending. I suppose I couldn't get over the fact that The Mist was both too long and too short. As part of a short story assemblage, it overstayed its welcome. At the same time, the concept is crackerjack, and with the potential inherent in a large cast of characters, I would have appreciated getting the full, big-novel treatment.

Even though I was interested mainly in The Mist, I decided - out of compulsion, really - to read the rest of the stories straight through. As I suppose is true of any such collection, no matter how skillfully curated - and Skeleton Crew feels pretty random at times - it is a mixed bag.

Surprisingly, my favorites tended to be more science-fiction than horror based. In Beachworld, two astronauts end up stranded on a desert planet that seems to be alive. Immediately, one of the astronauts starts going mad. Utilizing only a handful of pages, King is able to hint at a much larger - and potentially extremely interesting - universe surrounding his compact tale. In The Jaunt, King toys with the concepts of time, space, and teleportation, while providing a gruesome kicker of a denouement. It feels very much of a piece with The Twilight Zone, with the addition of King's omnipresent willingness to take things too far.

King has always had a warped sense of humor, and that is certainly on display in many of Skeleton Crew's stories. For instance, in Survivor Type, a drug-running doctor ends up on a deserted island. In a series of journal entries, he narrates his increasingly extreme efforts to fend off starvation.

Unfortunately, King also has certain unfortunate literary tricks and tics that appear and reappear so often they start to feel pathological. His handling of female characters, for instance, is extremely shaky, and often revolves around disapproving descriptions of a woman's weight. When he's not fat-shaming his women, King is positioning them as slutty temptresses or incessant henpeckers. A story like Word Processor of the Gods, about a struggling writer who has to put up with an overweight, nagging wife, simply doesn't work anymore, if it ever worked at all. It is borderline cruel and feels like the wish fulfillment of an eternally self-centered misogynist.

This leads to another repeated theme, that of toxic masculinity. That particular term entered the lexicon around the time that King wrote these stories, but there is no indication that he was responding to concerns about the troubling actions of certain young men. To the contrary, in Skeleton Crew, there are several stories in which the protagonist is an entitled male filled with murderous impulses that we are implicitly nudged to cheer. One unredeemable selection features a college student shooting people from his dorm room. (Though this was published long before Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas, King was clearly inspired by Charles Whitman's 1966 slaughter from atop the tower at the University of Texas-Austin). There is no point, except that it gives King the opportunity to vividly describe headshots and spattered brains. Another equally useless wallow in depravity follows an ex-college student's vicious rampage, every murder painted with loving, leering care.

In my experience with King, the good and bad have always gone hand-in-hand. Even his best novels have problematic parts, or sections that have aged poorly. Usually, the good outweighs the bad, often by a wide margin. Skeleton Crew has a closer balance. Every story is readable, and even the worst-conceived of the lot are written with King's underrated skills. Even when the underlying framework is deplorable, most of the stories are effortlessly entertaining. They are also a bit insidious. On nights that I had read Skeleton Crew, I noticed that my sleep was often disrupted by vivid and unsettling dreams. That Skeleton Crew managed to disrupt my dream life is a compliment of sorts.

With that said, the best stories in this assortment are not quite good enough to make you forget the rot seeping from the worst.