For Stephen King, As Well As His Fans, If It Bleeds Is a Coming Home

King can still write a horror story that scares and delights in equal measure.

If It BleedsStephen King’s writing suggests that kindness, some brief contentment, can be found in the most terrible places. Yes, many of his tales are black to the bone—The Shining and Pet Semetary offer no illusion of hope—but more often than not, King’s interest is on the warm-heartedness and compassion that defies the darkness at the edge of town. There’s both a warmth of character and a reassuring familiarity to his worlds that mitigates the horror within.

The same can be said for his latest collection of novellas, If It Bleeds, which feels like a coming home, both for King and the reader. Each of the tales is a return to well-trodden ground for King, but for the most part, they’re written with such charm that the old-fashioned feels refreshing in its sincerity. And, indeed, sincerity is a key feature of these tales. The titular story, which revisits Holly Gibney, the sleuth who evolved from sidekick to heroine throughout the Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, is the collection’s longest and least effective. For one, it distractingly echoes Holly’s previous outings, marrying Mr. Mercedes’s baroque criminality to The Outsider’s pulpy sci-fi horror, never really doing anything new with either strand. The monster itself is nicely drawn, but a chapter devoted entirely to tracing its appearances throughout recent history reads like a pared-down version of Pennywise the clown’s backstory in It.

King never reads less like himself than when he’s writing about Holly Gibney, who’s interesting but rarely believable. From novel to novel, her quirks, which suggest that she may fall on the spectrum, have been either exaggerated for effect or retconned if they get in the way of plotting. She’s a rough approximation of an autistic personality, and her artificiality weakens the story as a whole, which is made more obvious by its proximity of the other novellas in the collection. Where they are classic King—horrid, yes, but full of humor, humanity, and authentic local color—“If It Bleeds” is a well-honed exercise in mechanical storytelling.

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“Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” could be lifted from any of King’s early collections. It owes an obvious debt to the EC Comics and Twilight Zone reruns that the author has credited as his early inspirations. The simple plot concerns 12-year-old Craig’s friendship with his eponymous neighbor and the gift of an early-model iPhone that disrupts their lives and afterlives. The tale is set in the early aughts, yet it has such a timeless voice that the phone already seems an uncanny, anachronistic object, even before the supernatural shenanigans kick in. That isn’t a knock, as the juxtaposition of tone and technology is what gives the story its edge.

King, an avowed critic of cellphone ubiquity (most notably in Cell) is clearly making a point about the handset’s damaging influence, and not a subtle one. But there’s a freewheeling whimsy to “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” that elevates it beyond the modest sum of its parts. Regardless of the year in which it takes place, the story concerns a world of school dances, bullies, dollar scratch cards, and a young boy happy to spend his afternoon reading to an old man. In such a world the crude morality at the heart of the tale makes emotional sense.

If “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” calls back to King’s early pulps, then “The Life of Chuck” is a fair representation of his later experiments with literary fiction. The story is told in three distinct parts, each one working within a different genre as King takes the reader on a reverse tour through moments of Chuck’s life from the cusp of mortality back to his childhood. The first is an apocalyptic nightmare tied to Chuck’s impending death via a neat metaphysical trick, while the last looks at his childhood in a uniquely haunted house. But it’s the middle section that gleams brightest as a piece of emotionally driven, nostalgic character work, the kind of writing that King most often succeeds at when working just outside the horror genre.

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We encounter Chuck in early middle age as his path crosses with a lonely young woman and a street musician. Their brief meeting isn’t life-changing or even particularly significant, but it’s the impermanence of the moment that gives the vignette such poignancy. The rules of Chuck’s world are temporarily suspended and the story, peculiarly for King, offers an unreservedly positive moment of human engagement. “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” is exhilarating in its sensory minutiae, yet it never loses sight of its overarching emotional theme. King is able to conjure joy from such small incidents that the reader is left wondering quite how the trick was done.

And if writing is some kind of magic or strange alchemy, then the final story in King’s collection explores both the light and dark halves of that enchantment. “Rat” sees that stalwart of the author’s fiction—the writer-protagonist—sequestered in a cabin in the woods. Drew is there to write a novel, something that carries significant risk, as earlier attempts have driven him close to madness. While everything goes well at first, soon storm clouds (both literal and figurative) begin to gather. An ill-advised handshake and the presence of a strangely talkative rat turn the tale of a writer’s angst into a Faustian bargain.

“Rat” is King’s best attempt at conveying the pressure and claustrophobia of the writing process since Misery. We feel Drew’s excitement at the blank page and the endless possibilities it offers. It’s a call to creative arms. The first 30 pages may leave you longing for a cabin in the woods of your own, so as to be free from the obligations of a normal life. King writes with absolute clarity about writerly frustration, likening it in one memorable image to Drew’s son, Brandon, choking on a tomato. “This is like that,” he writes, “only stuck in my brain rather than my throat. I’m not choking, but I’m not getting enough air either. I need to finish.”

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As Drew begins to “lose his words” and his options narrow, both creatively and in terms of survival, “Rat” transforms into a Poe-esque tale of madness, isolation, and obsession. Anyone who’s ever poured all their efforts into a personal, creative project will recognize Drew’s loss of perspective as the novel becomes all-consuming.

Whether “Rat” has a happy ending or not is open to debate, but as a conclusion to If It Bleeds the story demonstrates that, happily, King can still write a horror story that scares and delights in equal measure. Each of these stories is a pared-down, or even recycled, version of a horror the author has unearthed before, but they’re told with such verve, confidence of voice, and, yes, warmth that you find yourself creeped out and comforted at the same time.

If It Bleeds is now available from Scribner.

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Neil McRobert

Neil McRobert completed a PhD in Gothic Literature and promptly fled academia. He now lives in a small British village, where he writes stories and has opinions on those written by others.

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