King tales raise fears in readers
by Charles Matthews, Knight Ridder Newspapers

    Nothing in Stephen King's new collection of stories, Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales, had me shining a flashlight under the bed or double-checking the deadbolts. But a few of the stories crept into my dreams. And the best ones seemed to have crept out of them.

   This is King the way I like him: in pungent bites. Though he can sustain a narrative in such thousand-page doorstops as It and the unabridged The Stand, those books magnify his weaknesses, which include a limited gift for characterization and a persistently adolescent vulgarity that revels in gross-outs.

   The best-known story in the collection is Riding the Bullet, which made news when King put it online and several hundred thousand people downloaded it. This experiment in electronic publishing helped King make the cover of Time.

   Many of the stories in the collection are there just to scare us: A man is paralyzed by a snakebite and wakes up at his own autopsy, unable to signal that he's still alive.

   A King-like writer picks up a creepy painting at a yard sale and watches it change and become deadly as he drives home with it.

   An author of books debunking the supernatural checks into a haunted hotel room and gets what you might expect. A woman experiences deja vu and discovers that she's trapped in a hellishly diminishing time loop.

   Each of these is well done, but they have their own deja vu about them: They're like something you might have seen on The Twilight Zone.