What fresh hell lurked behind titles like “I Am the Doorway” or “Sometimes They Come Back” or “I Know What You Need”?
The first time I read Night Shift as an already King-obsessed tween in the early 1990s, I remember the table of contents alone sending chills down my spine. Each story is like a guy who shows up to the campfire, tells the scariest yarn you’ve ever heard in your life, then promptly leaves before anyone can fuck it all up by asking him to elaborate. The inherent economy of the form means that the idea itself is the star of the show. King’s short fiction doesn’t have this problem. (King has a longstanding policy known as the “Dollar Deal,” in which he allows aspiring directors to adapt his short stories into short films for a fee of $1 Frank Darabont, who’d go on to direct the Oscar-nominated King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, is one notable alum of the Dollar Deal initiative.) I haven’t seen the new film, and it remains to be seen if it will live up to its terrifying source material or fall short as so many King adaptations have-but if there’s any justice, it will at least occasion a renewed and overdue celebration of Night Shift and King’s short fiction more generally. This Friday sees the release The Boogeyman, a feature-length adaptation of one of Night Shift’s stories-one that, according to IMDB, has already been adapted twice before, in 19, each time as a short film.
They also are the earliest evidence of King’s greatest gift: his twisted and seemingly inexhaustible imagination. The tales in Night Shift are well-crafted and preternaturally fluid works of storytelling, with a master’s sense of structure and suspense. But in between The Shining and The Stand King published a book that complicated that image and, perhaps more than any of those others, foreshadowed the extraordinary career that was to come: Night Shift, a collection of those works from the pages of publications like Ubris and Cavalier, written back when he was a hungry comer.
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