Night Shift

One story, 'Children of the Corn', appears to presage elements of one of King's greatest novels, The Stand ... Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images One story, 'Children of the Corn', appears to presage elements of one of King's greatest novels, The Stand ... Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images Stephen King uber-fan James Smythe is rereading the works of the horror genius in chronological order. This week, he tackles Night Shift, King's first compilation of short stories, in which he laid the foundations for some of his greatest work It begins and (nearly) ends with these bookends, both stories that add to the mythos established in Salem's Lot . Jerusalem's Lot is an epistolary prequel, taking place in 1850, and so imbued with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos that it might almost be set in Innsmouth . It tells the age-old story of an ancient evil found in a small abandoned town – but this time the evil comes in the form of a worm (along with a couple of vampires) that was drawn to the town in the late 18th century by a puritanical cult. The narrator and his servant discover the town and it secrets, and their story is told posthumously by the narrator's descendant – a descendant who, it transpires, is doomed to repeat his ancestor's mistakes, rats in the walls and all. One for the Road, on the other hand, is set after the events of Salem's Lot: a much more basic story of a family lost in the abandoned town during a snowstorm, it's an effective and neat ending to the more ambiguous conclusion of the original novel, offering hints as to whether Ben and Mark succeeded in their mission at the end of Salem's Lot. (Interestingly, King really wears his influence on his sleeve for these two stories: where the worm in the prequel tale is heavily indebted to Brian Lumley 's Cthulhu classic The Burrowers Beneath , the second story's lost family are named the Lumleys. Nice little touch.) In between these two are some stories that casual readers might assume are full novels. Children of the Corn, Sometimes They Come Back, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man were all made into varyingly successful films (with, in The Lawnmower Man's case, litigious levels of alteration to the original concept ). Children of the Corn stands out as one of King's greatest scary shorts: ostensibly about the dangers of organised religion, it's packed with terrifying children, murderous monsters and a pretty vile use for corn husks. The collection also features King's first published foray into science fiction, and one of my first real exposures to the genre. I Am the Doorway is the story of an astronaut who is mutated in order to give an alien the ability to see through his body. Only, he's a bad cypher, and the images are distorted; the alien, presented with the horrors of Earth, takes over his body and forces him to murder on its behalf. It's almost pure Ray Bradbury in tone, but with a distinctly King-ian horror touch, and a real kicker at the close. Then there's Night Surf, the story of a group of survivors capturing and burning a man as a sacrifice to prevent them from catching a disease called Captain Trips. Sound familiar? I read this collection before I read The Stand , and I distinctly remember thinking that Captain Trips was a strange name for a virus, and wondering where this little story – this strange thing that seemed aimlessly dark, like an idea looking for a plot – came from. Evidently, King did as well, because a few years after writing it he turned the nugget into 700 pages of apocalyptic epic journey narrative. Before I read Night Shift, my 13-year-old self assumed, not unlike those readers who dismiss his stories as one-dimensional nasties, that King was relatively easily pigeonholed. He wrote horror, tales designed to scare, and they did their job. A couple of the tales in Night Shift confused me at first, therefore. Quitters, Inc and The Man Who Loved Flowers are both odd-but-great additions to King's storybook, the former a clever tale