With King, everything’s eventually frightening

“EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL,” by Stephen King, Scribner, New York. 459 pages. $28

Of all the fiction writers whose works are assured a nonstop flight from the publishing house to the best-seller list, Stephen King may be the only one who consistently explores a variety of writing forms. He has been, by turns, columnist, novelist, essayist, serialist, stylist, screenwriter and, as if bored with the mundane publishing practices since Gutenberg, the first to publish an electronic book. Since “Carrie” in 1975, King has produced more than 40 books. If we are to believe his publisher, all of them have been worldwide best sellers.

In “Everything’s Eventual,” released this week by Scribner, King returns to one of his earliest forms: the short story. He has been a practitioner of this specialized genre since selling his first story at age 21. Over the years, King has maintained an intrigue with the inherent compression, abbreviation and – considering the substantial length of his novels – the challenge of the process. “It’s not about making more money or even precisely about creating new markets,” writes King in the introduction to this book. “It’s about trying to see the act, art, and craft of writing in different ways.”

Such goals may be of more interest to those in the publishing business or in academia, where King’s works have been showing up on heady reading lists in college lit classes. His Constant Reader, however, is more likely to tear right past the take-me-seriously intro and dive headfirst into “Autopsy Room Four,” in which a golfer collapses on a green, is taken for dead and ends up in a body bag about to go through a post-mortem. Except he’s not dead. Rather, his vital signs have been acutely minimized by the venom of a rare, poisonous snake hiding in the rough, and the docs in the autopsy room are too busy practicing their craft (and flirting with one another) to notice. The blades are out and ready to splice the sternum when the corpse asserts itself in signature King style.

Sound familiar? King reveals in a postscript that the story grew out of his childhood devotion to the TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The scariest of all the shows, recalls King, was one in which Joseph Cotten is injured so badly in a car accident that he, too, is taken for dead and sent for an autopsy. His character pushes out a single tear to alert the doctors. King’s variation is not quite as subtle, but the story achieves the requisite suspense of the premature burial theme.

As with all the stories in this collection, “Autopsy Room Four” appeared previously in another publication. Nearly a third have been seen in the New Yorker, including “The Man in the Black Suit,” which earned King an O. Henry Award in 1996. In previews and postscripts, King revisits each story with a personal anecdote about the evolution of the idea behind the piece.

“The Man in the Black Suit,” about a Maine farm boy who meets the devil on a fishing trip, is an homage to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” about a suicidal traveling salesman who collects graffiti, grew out of King’s own cross-country travels by car or by Harley. And “The Death of Jack Hamilton,” about a group of get-away gangsters in Chicago, showed up in King’s imagination after reading John Doland’s history “The Dillinger Days.”

In public forums, King has repeatedly shown a kind of genial impatience with his fans’ most frequently asked question: Where do you get your ideas? In “Everything’s Eventual,” however, he chattily uncovers the answers. From TV, from travels, from a glimpse into a restaurant on 5th Avenue, from a Dear Abby column, from his own imaginative meanderings. In short, he tells us stories about the stories, like a small play within a play.

At first, this inclusion may be off-putting. Why not let the stories speak for themselves? But given the breadth of King’s cultural presence, the personal narratives become a friendly handshake between reader and writer before the romance of the short story takes place. “We’re in it together, after all,” he cajoles. “This is a date we’re on. We should have fun. We should dance.”

Not all of the stories live up to that prescription – sometimes because there doesn’t seem to be enough meat, such as “L.T.’s Theory of Pets,” or because the stories spin into phantasmagorical discursiveness such as “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” about the Dark Tower hero Roland Deschain of Gilead and his encounter with a gory order of nuns. Some of the stories double back on King’s well-traveled thematic territory.

Still, this collection often shows King at his mischievous best and widest range. The stock broker, the newspaper reporter, the horror writer, the factory worker, the college student, the hotel maid, a South American mafia thug: All these show up on King’s dance card. For his suburban youth audience, King presents Dinky Earnshaw, a 19-year-old high school dropout with murderous mystical powers in the book’s title story, “Everything’s Eventual.” For Dinky, the word “eventual” means “awesome,” and the contrivance becomes King’s own testimony to an elastic, if not hiply poetic, use of language. King will clearly never suffer from linguistic inertia as long as there are words whose spelling, meaning and usage he can redefine for his own gala night at the ball.

The highlight of the collection comes with the three stories that close the book, and it is well worth the wait. The brilliantly composed suspense of “1408” was a riling read and came close to bumping the novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” out of first place as my favorite King work. “1408” is about a horror writer who has built a career out of staying in haunted spots and recording his experiences. But he has never come upon anything as swooningly powerful as Room 1408 in a small but historic New York hotel. If you’ve ever lived in a high rise, then you know floor 14 is really floor 13, and, if that’s not enough of an omen, then total the numbers on the door of the room. Perhaps King means for us to consider the number 14 more carefully in regard to the actual number of stories in this collection – although that might be pushing the conceit too far. No matter: Take the bait. This is King’s “ghostly room at the inn” story. It’s more compact but every bit as unsettling as “The Shining.”

“Riding the Bullet,” which is King’s famed cyber story, is still a winner, and “Luckey Quarter,” the last story, is a triumphant little rags-to-riches jewel.

Ultimately, “Everything’s Eventual” is about sitting around the campfire listening to ghost tales, one of the most basic and irresistible manifestations of storytelling. Add a ghost, a ghoul, vampires, the devil and, well, it’s King’s dance, all right: step-two-three, step-two-three. Just be careful not to trip over the dead body on the floor.