Books I Didn't Finish: You Like It Darker

My roughly once-a-year desire to read a Stephen King book has returned, and luckily he has a new short story collection out just in time. I’ve always thought that King excelled at shorter fiction much more than his gigantic 900-page epics, and the title seemed to promise spooks a-plenty, in contrast to the bulk of King’s recent work, which has been more in the crime and thriller genres. So I went into this not as a hater, but genuinely quite excited to read it.

Turns out, I got my hopes up for nothing. Based on the roughly half of it I could stand before giving up, You Like It Darker is at best rushed and underbaked, at worst severely phoned in. Let’s see how many Stephen King tropes we can spot while we go through the stories I read! Will there be autobiographical elements, do you think?

The collection starts off with Two Talented Bastids, a story about a famous novelist’s son getting his father’s affairs in order shortly after his death (that was quick). Prompted by enquiries from a journalist, the son deciphers the mystery of how his father and his father’s best friend suddenly became successful and famous at their chosen creative fields—writing and painting respectively—in their early forties following a mysterious incident in the woods.

To my delight, the solution to the mystery involves aliens, and in particular a classic old-school contactee experience like the ones that were in vogue during the early days of UFO mythology. This gets spoiled by the alien explaining how he and his people are basically tourists pootling around the galaxy picking up souvenirs, including recordings of Judge Judy, whose name they comically mis-pronounce. Now granted, the actual contactee stories were often extremely stupid, so this is true to life, but it really eliminates any eeriness that the alien element might have introduced.

The central characters of the story—the two talented bastids—are simple folksy down-home salt of the Earth types, which lets King write a huge glut of that quaint “Well old Rob Derwilliger kept right on driving that rattlebug down the road as surely as the sun don’t shine at night as my great gran-mama Spitoonia used to say” dialogue that he loves so much. I have never encountered anyone in real life who speaks like this, but I guess they must exist somewhere.

As you might be able to tell, I didn’t think too highly of this story. It drags on for too long given how unexciting the pay-off is, the characters are all annoying King stock figures, and its messaging left a bad taste in my mouth. The story is at its core about the nature of talent and creative skill, and the perspective on that subject that King enunciates here is completely antithetical to my own (and to what I believe is objectively correct): that some people are born with talent and others aren’t, and the amount of it you’re born with places a hard upper limit on what you can achieve via practice. King expressed similar views in On Writing decades ago, so this does seem to be his own opinion rather than just the narrator’s.

This is something that I think a lot of people who have been creatively accomplished for a long time genuinely believe, because they learned the fundamental skills so long ago that they can’t remember not knowing them. The thing is, it’s not true. I do believe that some people are born with an aptitude for certain skills, which lets them learn them faster than others, but no one is born being good at something creative, and there isn’t an arbitrary limit on how good you can get via practice.

Belief in the mode of creativity that King expresses here can be ruinous to new writers, who spend so much time and mental energy paralysed by anxiety over the possibility of lacking the special Writer Gene that would allow them to write well, that they never put in the practice that would actually allow them to write well. If you’ve ever been on writing forums, you’ve seen the sad spectacle of someone finishing a first draft of their first-ever project, realising it’s shit, then fading wistfully into the sunset while lamenting that they weren’t born with The Talent and will therefore never amount to anything, oblivious to the fact that they’ve actually completed an important—and impressive—first step towards becoming a good writer. I really have to wonder how many more of these wasted opportunities King is going to create by endorsing this way of thinking.

(While we’re on the subject, the story also indulges in the fantasy that there’s any sort of correlation between writing skill and financial success in publishing, a myth that the ongoing sales of Fourth Wing have scientifically disproven).

The Fifth Step is a very brief piece about a guy who’s sitting on a park bench when a recovering alcoholic (ding) comes up to him and offers to pay him $20 in order to listen a recounting of his past misdeeds, as part of his titular fifth step in the AA program. Great setup, and I was very interested to see where it was going.

Answer: the dude is a serial killer, who murders the protagonist after telling him about how he’s a serial killer.

Well, that was disappointing. The story also highlights a perennial issue with King’s handling of villains, but I’m going to talk about that more in relation to a later story.

Willie The Weirdo is another shorter story about a boy, who is weird, and his dying grandfather who claims to have been present for a range of historical events dating back to Cleopatra’s time. It’s decent and it has a neat twist, although the fact that Willie is weird really doesn’t end up mattering at all to the story, especially given how much time is dedicated to the subject at the beginning.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is the longest story in the collection by a pretty comfortable margin, almost getting into novella territory. Since this is a form that I’ve always believed Stephen King excels at—in my opinion, the best things he’s ever written are all novellas—I was quite excited to dig into it. Unfortunately, it ended up falling flat.

It’s about a man (a recovered alcoholic, ding ding) who has a psychic dream showing him the location of a buried body, who then ends up becoming the prime suspect in the ensuing murder investigation after he calls it in to the police, especially once an obsessive detective (named “Inspector Jalbert” ha ha do you get it) gets after him. That’s a pretty great premise.

The problem is that the story is far too kind to Danny. Yes, he loses his job, his neighbours turn on him, and he’s forced to move, but he has a ready-made backup plan in the form of going to another state where he can easily get more work and hang out with his (unrealistic and badly-written) autistic brother. In every encounter with Jalbert he comes out on top, putting Jalbert on the back foot and usually looking like the smartest guy in the room while he does it. He never gets arrested for the murder, never even comes close, which feels both unrealistic and like a huge missed opportunity when you consider how eager the justice system in America is to snatch people off the streets, often on much flimsier evidence than what Danny is implicated by. Given how long this story is, the dearth of concrete stakes or compelling twists and turns really makes it drag. It’s basically scene after scene of Danny saying “nuh-uh” every time Jalbert talks to him.

I’ve said before that I don’t think Stephen King gets enough criticism for the maudlin sentimentality in his writing. In earlier phases of his career, his tendency towards grand guignol violence and his willingness to do things like kill off cute child characters probably masked it, but I’ve noticed that as he’s gotten older, he’s become either unwilling or unable to put that sort of content in his writing, producing work which is often tamer than your average PG-13 horror movie. As such, the sugary glurge is on full display, and part of that includes an unwillingness to put his protagonists through anything too nasty. That also means that his readers aren’t getting put through anything too exciting.

And then there’s Jalbert. When we first meet him, he comes off as a properly threatening adversary, with a palpable aura of dread surrounding his scenes. Then we find out he’s got creepy ground-down teeth and undiagnosed OCD and he’s a religious fanatic who’s fixating on Danny for irrational reasons, and he becomes an utter cartoon character.

This is a point I’ve also raised repeatedly, but it bears repeating since it seems like it’s going to be a feature of King’s work until the day he either retires or dies: the man is, apparently, fundamentally incapable of writing villains who aren’t either avatars of platonic darkness or cackling psychopaths. King’s stories take place in a world governed by a very Christian-inspired battle between the forces of absolute good and absolute evil, and while the forces of good often choose flawed and nuanced individuals as their emissaries or champions, the forces of evil are always, every time, ghoulish caricatures. They might be suffering some inner torment or believe that they’re acting for the greater good, as is true in both cases of Jalbert here, but eventually the mask falls away and they end up trying to drive an oil tanker into a children’s hospital at the behest of their dead mother or something.

(That was a hypothetical, I should be clear. It doesn’t happen in this story, although I wish it did).

Speaking of common King foibles, he has in recent years seemingly lost the ability to put himself into the shoes of younger characters, which I guess is fair enough at his age. But this is the sort of thing an editor should really be correcting. In this story, we get a thirty-six-year-old protagonist who doesn’t know what Tinder or SIM cards are and who talks about Netflix like it’s something he just discovered last week. For reference, I am currently thirty-six, and anyone who reads this blog should be able to tell how extremely online I am. Thirty-six-year-olds are firmly in the category of people who came of age in the digital era. In real life Danny would probably have gotten his first cell phone when he was a young teenager, early adulthood at the very latest. Why does he not know what a SIM card is?

(Danny is also a school janitor who lives in a trailer park, so King just being terminally out of touch is honestly the most charitable explanation here).

Before we leave Danny Coughlin behind I want to highlight a returning character type from the Bill Hodges trilogy, which is a younger teenage black guy who the older white protagonist has a kind of surrogate big brother/father dynamic with. This version of the character isn’t as bad as Jerome was in those books, but I still don’t think King’s attempt at rendering “black people dialogue” is particularly true to life, and to be honest this is kind of a cringe thing for a white dude in his seventies to be writing in the first place, regardless of how it’s executed. I’m not saying it’s necessarily racist, but it’s definitely hacky.

Trouble with accents also comes up in the next story, and the last one that I could stomach before giving up, which is Finn, a brief bit of nothing about a chronically unlucky guy who gets kidnapped by some vague secret organisation due to a case of mistaken identity, then gets released after being waterboarded a few times. It’s very underbaked and would normally leave zero impression on me.

Except it did, because of the dialogue. Context clues early on make it clear that the story is taking place somewhere other than the US, and I kept thinking “what the fuck are these accents supposed to be?”

Turns out it’s set in Ireland, which means we get subjected to King’s attempt at Irish slang and vernacular. The results are even more hilarious than usual attempts to render such by Americans. Behold:

“‘I’m hungry,’ Finn blurted. ‘Could I possibly have something to eat, sir?’

Mr Ludlum went on staring. Just when Finn decided he wasn’t going to speak, that he was in some kind of trance, Mr Ludlum said, ‘How does the full Irish sound to you, Mr Herlihy?’

Finn gaped. Mr Ludlum laughed. ‘Just yanking your lower extremity, Finn. Finn now, Finn forever. What do you say to the whole shooting match? Eggs, bacon, mushroomies, and a nice plump banger. With a tomato for good looks!’”

This is extremely realistic. I’m always strolling into my favourite breakfast place, giving the proprietor a hearty “top of the morning” and ordering mushroomies with a nice plump banger. The full shooting match, as it were.

Throw in some UK slang that no one here uses, a few “boyos”, the secret society goons talking like 1940s Batman villains and boom, instant Irish accent. Works every time.

There’s a bit in On Writing where King talks about one of his earliest attempts at writing a novel, a story about gang violence in (if I’m remembering correctly) Detroit. He acknowledged at the time that he had never been to Detroit and knew nothing about gangs who operated there, but that he didn’t let this slow him down. This sort of gung-ho attitude is probably a positive thing in a newbie writer who just needs to get the words down and get some practice under their belt—lots of people never get past the first hurdle because they get too in their heads about what they’re putting on the page—but in a published author with a decades-long career, ploughing ahead into cultures and places you have no familiarity with can at best lead to public embarrassment, and at worst it can be actively offensive.

In the past, I could perhaps be more forgiving of writers who don’t do their research on foreign countries, because after all the only way to get a sense of the way someone from a certain area speaks would be to either know someone like that, or to go there yourself, neither of which might be practical. But thanks to the terrifying digital nightmare panopticon we live in today, that’s no longer the case. Now, typing a few words into a search box will instantly call up tens of thousands of hours of video of people from almost anywhere in the world broadcasting their day to day lives, speaking in their local vernacular, and generally immersing strangers in what their location and culture is like. That’s not to mention media created in those countries, or translated books, or even the people themselves, who are on-hand to give your story a once-over and point out any screamingly obvious mistakes before you put them in a book for the entire world to see. There’s no excuse for this kind of thing anymore.

(Also, all that aside, here’s a little Ronan Tip for any writers reading this: you do not actually have to render dialogue with an accent or local slang if you don’t want to. In fact if you’re not already familiar to at least some degree with the vernacular of a particular country or culture, you probably shouldn’t attempt it.).

My interest in continuing with the collection was already shaky after Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream turned out to be such a waste of time, but Finn was so poorly written that it stopped me completely in my tracks. It’s not just the weakness of the stories on display here, but that a nagging issue was rising steadily to the forefront: where are the spooks? If I supposedly Like It Darker—and I do—then why aren’t the stories darker?

Obviously, there’s a chance that all the horror content is loaded into the back half, but looking at other reviews, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, even some five-star reviews of the collection on Goodreads complain that the title is a misnomer.

It seems apparent that King has completely lost interest in writing the horror fiction that made his career. That is absolutely his prerogative—I don’t think authors have any sort of responsibility to pigeonhole themselves—and I’m personally of the opinion that some of the best stuff he ever wrote, at the height of his literary powers, wasn’t horror anyway. But it’s also a fact that I’ve found his latter-day crime and thriller writing extremely hit-or-miss (I didn’t review it, but I read Billy Summers last year and thought it was pretty bad), not to mention strangely amateurish, as though in switching tracks like this King has left his decades of experience behind.

As such, I think this is the stop on the Stephen King ride where I get off. The stuff coming out now is too boring even to appreciate ironically, and it’s been a long time since he put out the kind of entertaining page-turner that I genuinely enjoy.