Horrific Halloween 2019 - Night Shift

It's October, so Shangrila Towers is serving up All Hallows' Eve-themed posts for the guys and ghouls in your neighborhood. Today's post is about Stephen King's short story anthology "Night Shift," originally published in 1978.

One of the perks of practicing law is the esoteric research that's sometimes required. Case in point - to defend a copyright infringement suit, I looked into the provenance of "Children of the Corn," an early short story by Stephen King about a bickering couple who get trapped in an eerie Nebraska town. That meant digging up a copy of the March 1977 issue of Penthouse, where the story was first published, and buying a copy of "Night Shift," where the story was later collected.

Now, "Children of the Corn" isn't the world's greatest short story, but it is macabre and memorable in the grand Lovecraft tradition. Most of the tales in "Night Shift" are like that - hapless protagonists tangle with surreal, often apocalyptic forces, and invariably come out the worse for wear. Whether it's a malevolent laundry pressing machine ("The Mangler") or deadly semi trucks ("Trucks," the basis for King's cocaine-fueled, cheesy cult classic film "Maximum Overdrive"), these stories do a good job of showing the darkness lurking behind our everyday world, even if they are a bit rough around the edges.