Clemmie Judges

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL

BOOK INFO

Title: Everything's Eventual

Author: Stephen King

Pages: 605

Publication date: November 1st 2005

Description: 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 compelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.

STORY

Of all the aspects of this book I thought would be the weakest, this certainly wasn't it. Mind you, the stories are still good, especially compared to a lot of other stuff I've read. Some of it's great, in fact. Like, real top-notch stuff.

I think the problem's less because of Stephen King himself, and more because these are short stories. Meaning, limited word count. Now, for some, word count limitations can be a good thing, but on his book On Writing, King wrote that he sees writing as digging up a fossil. It takes time, it takes delicacy.

Stephen King needs time and delicacy to build up his stories. It explains why his books are—to my knowledge—long. Over 100.000 words long.

Now, this book is a mix of different genres with different tones and narration style and, well, different everything. But one thing sticks out to me; how much he builds up his stories. It's a recurring thing. He keeps building them up and up and up, then it'll either come crashing down or it'll end up turning into a masterpiece. That part depends on your personal preference.

I think this is less of Stephen King's work and more of his playground. He gets to play around with all the different people and settings and themes and, well, everything. Some of it's mellow, others are creepy. 

This, in my opinion, is a sneak peek into what sort of a writer Stephen King is, and what sort of stories you can expect from him. 

Personally, I find more misses than hits. That may be because I'm judging it in a more modern standard, and have read plenty of stories, but still. A lot of his stories aren't original, and even though they're good in their own right, I still feel like it could've been explored more and into an actual novel, or a novella, at least. 

Being that this is a compilation of short stories, I feel as though the stories themselves end before they can really begin. It's like watching a trailer only to have someone tell you, "Oh, no, that's not the trailer. That's the whole movie, dude. You just watched everything."