"Horror's finest hour"

Even though its seems unreal, Stephen King has not written a short story collection in almost a decade (see NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES). However, the flexible grandmaster returns to the form with this fourteen-story book while showing (as he continually does with novels), he can still spin quite a superb short tale.

Each tale is dark and demonstrates Mr. King's writing abilities while proving he remains one of the stronger short story tellers today. The theme running through the tale is encounters with the dead spicing up the mundane lives of the living or those who expedite the passage of death. This anthology includes three pieces coming from alternate media, four from The New Yorker magazine, and a former E-book. One added bonus is a Dark Tower longer short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria". Each one and the remaining six are all quite good and a bit or two frightening.

Macabre and clearly paying homage to another versatile grandmaster Edgar Allen Poe, EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL is another triumph for Mr. King as fans of the ghastly and morbid will enjoy this collection. The great author seems to have accomplished everything in his thirty years of published writing except lift the curse of the Bambino.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted March 16, 2002

Summary

The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago, Everything's Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which attracted over half a million online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade. "Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Café," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French," terror is déjà vu at 16,000 feet. Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life, from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark tales assembled in Everything's Eventual. Intense, eerie, and instantly com-pelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.