To understand my feelings about Stephen King’s Night Shift, you must first understand how Stephen King gets his ideas. Thankfully, YouTuber Man Carrying Thing has us covered. Consider this required viewing before I move on to the rest of this review.
Reading Night Shift reminded me of this video. I often nodded and thought “Yep, that’s about right.” I wasn’t mad about it, though. It’s like walking into a dank and crowded dive bar on a Saturday night. You don’t know what’s in store, but your friends are there. The space offers a speck of familiarity to offset the drunken, meandering masses. Night Shift evokes that same feeling. You know a smidge of what you’re getting in each of the collection’s short stories. Night Shift fills the blank in “What if [blank] was scary” with, among others:
- Rats
- An industrial laundry machine
- The boogeyman
- A ledge
- Teenaged boys
- Men
- Corn slash children
- A naked man who eats grass
- Trucks
- Quitting
- Aliens
Most of the stories, no matter their length, start in roughly the same way. A workaday white man goes about his business. The doldrums of his daily life are soon upended by something horrific, and he responds by exploring further than any reasonable person would realistically explore such horrors.
You might have read this review up until this point and assumed I wasn’t a fan of Night Shift. King’s style lends itself well to the quick-hit short story format. You don’t need to do a lot of legwork to understand his characters. They’re simple folks who want to live their lives only to find themselves entrenched in dangerous and deadly scenarios. If you want more, you won’t find it here. I worried the format would get old after a handful of stories, but each offered something just different enough to keep me interested.
And that’s really the thick and thin of it, folks. If you like Stephen King and/or short horror stories, Night Shift will be your cup of scary tea. If not, give it a good ol’ pass!
Rating: Night Shift – 8.0/10
-Cole
Read this as a teen in the 80’s and I still don’t trust laundry machines and the story Quitting is just a gem that lives rent free in my head some 40years later ….