Just Finished Reading Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Every few years, my favorite author Stephen King will come out with a collection of his short stories.  Most of them were previously published in magazines or in e-books/Internet releases.  His November, 2015 release, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams with its eighteen short stories and two poems, is no exception.  Still, the only one of these I had previously read was Blockade Billy, a baseball story that had been published a few years ago in its own very small book (I once read it off the shelf at my local Books-a-Million store).  If there is one theme that tends to permeate these tales, it is mortality and how we deal with it under different circumstances.  The psychology of stress and how people handle it is another common theme as well.  As a matter of fact, the most compelling thing about this book is how well King gets into the minds of his very believable characters, who are thrust into often unbelievable situations, and reveals their motivations and rationalizations for their actions...

I didn't like all of the stories in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, but most were interesting.  My favorites were the opening piece Mile 81 (yet another King yarn about a monster car), Batman and Robin Have an Altercation, Ur, The Little Green God of Agony, That Bus Is Another World, Obits, and Drunken Fireworks.  And I suppose that of these, the very disturbing (and rather short) That Bus Is Another World is the best...with the hilarious Drunken Fireworks following it closely and Obits a distant third...

Not only did I generally enjoy Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, but I keenly appreciated his comments prefacing each entry.  It's true that good writers will put some of their own lives into their stories, and King acknowledges doing this as well.  But he is wise enough to let his characters take on their own "lives", fictional as they may ultimately be.  Now, when is this dude going to come out with another blockbuster novel like 11/22/63?