You Like It Darker

by Stephen King

His face was as white as fresh snow, as Moby-Dick’s underbelly, as amnesia.

Why would I be chosen when so many others try so hard and would give anything to be chosen? Why are there so few at the top of the pyramid? Talent is supposed to be the answer, but where does it come from and how does it grow? Why does it grow? Well, I tell myself, we call it a gift and we call ourselves gifted, but gifts are never really earned, are they? Only given. Talent is grace made visible.

He imagined it was like the sound of the wind in graveyard grass on a hot July day.

Nothing bad is happening at first, but that doesn’t help; the sense of impending doom is so strong it’s an actual taste in his mouth, like sucking on a clump of pennies.

The good thing about the bad ones, he thinks as he lathers his face, is that they never last long. Dreams are like cotton candy: they just melt away.

It occurs to Ella that lack of belief is the curse of intelligence.

Greg told me they show up by the hundreds if there’s a red tide, gobbling the dead fish that wash up on the beach. But there had been no red tide that summer—the prickling in your lungs is impossible to mistake for anything else—and

If onlies are also rattlesnakes, I think. They are full of poison.

Here and there I spotted shark’s teeth, some as big as my index finger. I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, thinking I’d give them to Donna. Then I remembered, oh snap, that my wife was dead. Bitten again, I thought.

A group of lawyers is an eloquence; a group of rattlesnakes is a rhumba. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. The mind isn’t just a venomous reptile that sometimes bites itself; it’s also an enthusiastic garbage picker.

These memories circled and circled. They were buzzards, they were rattlesnakes. They pecked, stung, wouldn’t let me go.

Having your own mind turned against you is a gilt-edged invitation to insanity.

He was breathing but dead inside and I knew from Nam that dead people are heavier. They shouldn’t be but they are. Gravity is greedy for the dead and wants them in the ground. Just my opinion but others share it.

Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic. A paradox, but a true one.

The only drawback, call it the fly in the ointment (or the fatal flaw, if you want to be hifalutin), is that the execution has never—no, not one single time—been as splendid as the original concept. The only two times I even came close to getting it all were in two prison stories: The Green Mile and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” All the others fell short of what I wanted for them. Even with long novels such as It, The Stand, and Under the Dome, I finished with the sense that a better writer would have done a better job. Still, on measure I’m proud of what I’ve done. And I’m proud of my short fiction, probably because they have always been hard for me.

Great thanks to you, dear readers, for allowing me to inhabit your imaginations and your nerve-endings. You like it darker? Fine. So do I, and that makes me your soul brother.