Below are my reactions to the final six tales appearing in the recently published short story and novella collection by Stephen King titled You Like It Darker. Overall, I was very impressed by this effort of his...
RED SCREEN (short story)
A New York City detective is investigating a man's murder of his wife, who he claims was no longer in her body and had been taken over by an alien. The suspect further elaborates that he knew of this extraterrestrial conspiracy by going on the Dark Web, and that a spouse's nit-picking, nagging behavior is a sign of being possessed. The detective returns home to his own wife, who recently has been stepping up her own nagging of him: guess where this goes...
THE TURBULENCE EXPERT (short story)
A man seems to be in a special "black ops" organization, going on special assignments that seem to carry some extremely unpleasant and scary elements with them while he enjoys special privileges and amenities from the "organization". With great trepidation he boards a passenger jet flight, and as it goes into extreme turbulence he knows he is about to die...and reveals the reason for his job in the first place. I thought the story's premise was extremely cool and it was one of my favorites in the collection...
LAURIE (short story)
After an elderly Floridian man's wife dies of brain cancer, his rather pushy-but-well-meaning sister gets him a dog to care for, against his wishes. Gradually he warms up to Laurie's presence although the pooch seems to have some difficulties with her "toilet training". One day he and Laurie are out on a walk and encounter a big, mean old gator in the worst way. A "man's best friend" story where Lassie descends into the Twilight Zone...
RATTLESNAKES (novella)
Related in setting to King's Duma Key novel and plot and characters to his Cujo work, this novella provides closure to the trials undergone in that latter book by characters Donna and Victor Trent...and their son Tad. In Rattlesnakes, it is several decades gone by and Victor, alone now, is staying on a southwest Florida key at his friend's for a while. He encounters a woman who is always pushing a stroller with the empty clothes of her long-diseased twin boys, who died from rattlesnake bites some forty years before. Victor soon discovers that the "boys" aren't exactly gone, and they've decided they just might like to hang out with him...
THE DREAMERS (novella)
A celebration of sorts of the writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, a reclusive amateur scientist hires as his assistant and stenographer an embittered Vietnam veteran to investigate different experimental subjects for their dreams after placed under hypnosis. Need I say that the experiment goes horribly awry? The experiment goes horribly awry...
THE ANSWER MAN (novella)
This is the story of a man's life, a New Englander who is just on the verge in pre-World War II America of making crucial decisions about his upcoming marriage and where they will live. While driving he encounters a roadside man who dubs himself "The Answer Man"...with the answers he gets, our protagonist then plunges into the war and beyond, only to encounter the Answer Man decades later...and with a different set of answers. I loved the tail ending of this story, which I think was probably the best one of the twelve in the collection...
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