Just After Sunset

Being a lover of a good work of literature, it is easy for me to dismiss the popular best-selling fiction authors.  These are the writers who seamlessly churn out mysteries and thrillers which are then consumed by the masses.  The side of me that is an indie-snob assumes that most  products of popular culture are, in actuality, total crap.  I don't necessarily need all the flash and intrigue that most people enjoy.  What I desire is good, strong writing with real characters and conflicts to which I can relate.  So I rarely visit the best-selling and new fiction shelves at my local book store.

But I was recently pleasantly surprised when I picked up a copy of Stephen King's Just After Sunset.  In my dislike of pop culture as well as the horror genre, I overlooked something: Stephen King is a good-ass writer. 

Just After Sunset  is a collection of thirteen short stories in which King begins by presenting fairly normal, yet extremely poignant human conflicts.  With these conflicts he relates to the reader and gets you invested in his characters.  Then he ups the ante and thrusts the characters into much more extraordinary, often surreal conflicts.  A therapy patient with a seemingly textbook case of OCD reveals the very specific way in which his compulsions are actually preventing the world from ending.  A woman dealing with the sudden death of her husband receives a call from her husband in purgatory.  A man gives a ride to deaf-mute hitchhiker and begins to vent to him about his unfaithful wife.  Then he finds out that the hitchhiker wasn't deaf at all when he shows up to return the favor.  And in my favorite story, a man is dealing with survivor's guilt because he was playing hooky from work on 9/11.  Then, possessions of his now-deceased coworkers mysteriously show up at his apartment.

There is not a single boring story in the collection, and they cater both to readers who appreciate more literary fiction as well as readers who like exciting, fantastic events that are sometimes inspiring, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes (somehow) both. 

What It's Like to Learn Otherwise

Like a hurricane inside your brain,

Like you need to act… now.

Like being left for the enemy

Who then takes a bow.

Like a kick in the nuts

Or a secret family disgrace.

Or going the whole day

With something on your face

Because no one spoke up—

Had the respect to say,

“Hey, you look stupid.”

Or like trying to look tough

After being bitch-slapped by Cupid.