Skeleton Crew (Stephen King, 1985)

When I went to Austria last year I took along Night Shift, Stephen King's first volume of short stories, and found it was good to dip into, so in Cyprus this year I took Skeleton Crew, the next collection of short pieces. The main story, more of a novella I suppose, is The Mist, on which Frank Darabont's film is based. I say 'based', I mean the story that Darabont filmed almost verbatim (aside from the movie's superior, gut-punch ending) from the short story - I loved the movie, and because it is almost exactly the same as the story it took the shine of it somewhat, but it's still an excellent premise: locals are trapped inside a supermarket as a mist descends on the town, hiding in which are a variety of ferocious creatures.

The other 21 stories were completely new to me, and I enjoyed them all, although the couple of attempts at poetry were instantly forgettable. Stand out stories that I thought showed off King's expert thriller and creative gene included: Mrs Todd's Shortcut (the title character finds ways of shaving minutes off her journeys be finding possbile extra-dimensional shortcuts); The Raft (4 friends are attacked, incredibly gruesomely, on a raft in the middle of a lake and cannot fall asleep); Word Processor of the Gods (that has a delete button that works on real life); Survivor Type (an icky diary entry tale of a man stuck on a desert island, forced to eat himself to stay alive); and Gramma (about a huge grandmother who wants to kill her grandson). I look forward to the next holiday and the next collection!