Is "If it Bleeds" Stephen King's Best Anthology? (Book Review)
I make a practice of reading at least one Stephen King book every year. Some of those books are among my favorites, but as good as his novels are, for me his short story collections are the best. “Four Seasons,” and “Hearts in Atlantis” are fantastic and strange experiences that I recommend to anyone willing to go to the places that King takes you. I’m not sure if “If it Bleeds” by Stephen King quite rises to the level of those books, but I enjoyed each of the stories which I will go into individual detail on each of the four stories.
“Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” by Stephen King
Of the four stories, this is closest to traditional horror. The story follows a young man named Craig who is hired by a rich, retired, old man to read to him a few hours a week and to do a few other odd jobs. He does this for years and over that time gets to be close friends with Mr. Harrigan.
One oddity of Mr. Harrigan is that he gives people scratch off lottery cards as gifts. A minor point except that Craig wins 3000 dollars from one of those tickets. As thanks for the gift, he buys Mr. Harrigan a generation one iPhone. Mr. Harrigan isn’t all that interested, but he lets Craig show him what it can do and upon seeing the stock trading app he becomes far more interested as he has done a great deal of investing and sees the large amount of value it can have.
As people do, Mr. Harrigan becomes addicted to the phone. This continues as his health declines and one day Craig discovers his body. In an act of grief he grabs the phone and takes it with him, but returns it to Mr. Harrigan at his funeral and the phone is buried with him.
This is a long setup for the payoff, but Stephen King knows what he’s doing and by connecting you both to Craig and the relationship he makes the rest of the story feel more reasonable. First, Mr. Harrigan leave Craig enough money for college and more. And shortly after, Craig is attacked by a bully. Angry and scared, Craig decides on a whim to call Mr. Harrigan just to hear his message and to have someone he can talk to. He explains what happened into the phone and strangely enough gets a response as a text that doesn’t mean a lot except that it’s from a phone that has been buried.
This naturally freaks out Craig even though he realizes someone had probably spoofed the phone and he forgets about it for years even though he knows that something strange may have happened. And years later, when his favorite teacher is killed by a drunk driver, he pulls out the old phone and calls Mr. Harrigan one last time and once again gets a response and this time it’s harder to ignore.
The setup of this book and the character building feels more like that of a novel than a short story, and it isn’t really that short of a story, but I can also understand why it didn’t become a novel. There isn’t exactly an antagonist. There isn’t even really proof that anything supernatural has happened. But it is both creepy and interesting.
“The Life of Chuck” by Stephen King
Sometimes structure makes a story. That is the case of “The Life of Chuck” a strange mysterious story that explores the idea that each of us contains the world and simply examining the life of one random and unimportant man and reminding us that every life is important.
The first of three parts of this story is set in a world that is dying. The exact nature of that death isn’t clear to anyone, things are just breaking and not getting fixed or when they are fixed, it’s slow and not as good. Then signs begin to appear everywhere that simply reads something like “Thanks Chuck Krantz for 39 wonderful years.”
At first it seems like something that’s overdone by a bank, but it begins to appear everywhere from pop ups on the Internet to a skywriter and each time it becomes a bit more creepy until the message begins to appear on the windows of every house.
Alone this would have been a strange and surreal story, but it cuts to the part two which takes place before the first part. In this you see Chuck Krantz, a man who knows that he is going to die in a few months but who stops and dances next to a street performer. A moment that reminds him of what it was like to be a child.
The third part goes back even further, exploring Chuck as a young man when his parents die and a strange moment in his grandparents’ attic. Which both ties and doesn’t tie into the rest of this strange and disjointed yet interesting story.
“If it Bleeds” by Stephen King
It is strange to me that the titular story of this book is not either the first or last story, but I’m not a professional editor and I suspect the name was likely simply picked because it looked best on the cover. Either way, this story follows a returning Stephen King character, Holly Gibney. I didn’t know this character before because I’ve somehow avoided the specific stories that she was in, but I enjoyed her in this.
In this story she is already aware of outsiders. Strange creatures that can feed on pain and suffering and while not necessarily evil (they don’t have to cause that pain and suffering) they aren’t good either. As she is watching TV, she notices something strange about a reporter. It is a minor, mostly inconsequential detail, but one that sticks in her mind and she begins to investigate.
Eventually this leads her to meet two other characters, an elderly former police sketch artist and his gay grandson who have both been investigating this reporter. They are convinced that until now he was simply near events, but this time he blows up a school rather than wait for a tragedy to happen. This pushes him over the line, but they aren’t capable of doing anything, so Holly Gibney decides it’s her responsibility.
She blackmails the reporter telling him to bring a large sum of money to her work, though she has no intention of taking the money or allowing him to leave and suspects he has no intention of giving him the money. Things go poorly for Holly Gibney’s plan, but they go more poorly for the reporter.
This is more a suspense story than horror and one that was fine, but aside from the character it had little depth to it. If you’re a fan of Holly Gibney, as Stephen King seems to be, then I think you’ll likely enjoy this story more, but otherwise it’s enjoyable but doesn’t have a lot of weight to it.
“Rat” by Stephen King
Stephen King has a tendency to write about writers. It makes sense and as a writer I like it. “Rat” is not only about a writer but about writing and the writing process. It isn’t even clear in this story if anything supernatural actually happens because the character has enough going on in his head that it’s possible it’s just his mind playing tricks.
The story begins with something I often dream of. Taking time off and going to a cabin in the woods to write for a couple of weeks without interruption. This is to me where the story gets a bit too busy. His wife is unhappy about him going mostly because she is worried about a near mental break the last time he tried to write a book. The road to the cabin is also dangerous. He runs into a man who is clearly sick who he shakes hands with and on top of all that he is nearly run down by a moose. Most of those things hardly seem important to the plot of the story, aside from clarifying that it’s going to be difficult.
This continues because once he is in the cabin there is a major storm and he is trapped there. It is also when the titular character arrives. The writer hears a scratching and when he checks the door. He finds a rat that has been injured. He assumes it is going to die and almost crushes it to put it out of its misery, but he scoops it up and puts it near the fire so it will be warm.
That night while he is sick and worried, the rat disappears and soon after it appears to him to make a deal. He will finish his book, but a friend of his is going to die. The friend has cancer, and it’s unlikely he will survive, and since the writer doesn’t take it seriously, he agrees.
The next day with some effort he returns home, and he finishes the novel, removing the weight from his soul as he does it. He sends it to his agent who can sell it for a considerable amount of money and the writer goes back to his life. Things are going well, especially for his friend who has cancer who has gotten better. Proving even more that the rat wasn’t real. Except this is a Stephen King story and so the friend and his wife, while driving to the doctor for the last time, are hit by a car and killed.
The story ends with the writer returning to the cabin and confronting the rat. This may confirm that the rat was real, or it may simply confirm that the writer had a mental break. Either way, the story was interesting and because it was a short story, some oddities of the story are less important than they would be in a novel.
Conclusion
I have always enjoyed Stephen King more as a short story writer than as a novelist. He sometimes goes on to long and becomes self indulgent and his endings are often unsatisfying to the point where in at least one of his books he tells you it’s going to be unsatisfying in the novel. Short stories, being by definition short avoid the first problem, and an unsatisfying ending is far less of a problem in a short story.
And while “Hearts in Atlantis” is likely still my favorite of his short story collections I enjoyed all four of the stories in this book and I think they are a better introduction to Stephen King than most of his novels if for no other reason than you’re not committing to hundreds of pages of the same story.