The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

by: Stephen King
Since his first collection, Night Shift, was published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles twenty short stories, some of which have never appeared in print, some of which King has revisited and revised. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.
There are thrilling connections between stories: themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who die of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers--the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits"; the old judge in "The Dune" who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In "Morality," King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil's pact they can win.
Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, the stories in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams comprise one of King's finest gifts to his Constant Reader--"I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth." {cover copy}
I don't know why, but I always seem to want to ease my way into reading Stephen King by starting with his short stories. Not like these are going to be any less scary or freaky. Nevertheless... I do it. And this was a great re-introduction into the crash course of King novels which I am currently on. I listened to this on Audbile and it was truly enjoyable, even in the dead of night by myself. I don't know that I have a favorite from this set of stories, though some definitely stick out in the memory more than others, but at any given time those "some" switch and replace themselves with the "others" so that's not really fair to say. Either way, I'm glad I started with this book. {There is no first line or last word section since this had many and I don't want to write them all down. So here are the quotes that stuck out to me}:
"People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all."

"...curiosity rather than rage was the true bane of the human spirit."

"The ideas don't stop just because one is old. The body weakens, but the words never do."

"God's grace is a pretty cool concept. It tays intact every time it's not you."