Usually when I revisit short stories, I am disappointed. Not sure why. And Stephen King often is rightly criticized for clunky writing. But some of his stuff is truly great, like this passage from “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut:”
“I stood at the door. It was twilight in that deep part of summer when the fields fill with perfume and Queen Anne’s Lace. A full moon was beating a silver track across the lake. He went across my porch and down the steps. A car was standing on the soft shoulder of the road, its engine idling heavy, the way the old ones do that still run full bore straight ahead and damn the torpedoes. Now that I think of it, that car looked like a torpedo. It looked beat up some, but as if it could go the ton without breathin hard. He stopped at the foot of my steps and picked something up-it was his gas can, the big one that holds ten gallons. He went down my walk to the passenger side of the car. She leaned over and opened the door. The inside light came on and just for a moment I saw her, long red hair around her face, her forehead shining like a lamp. Shining like the moon. He got in and she drove away. I stood out on my porch and watched the taillights of her little go-devil twinkling red in the dark … getting smaller and smaller. They were like embers, then they were like flickerflies, and then they were gone.”
Damn that’s nice. And even better if you read the entire story and are enmeshed in the allusive particulars that precede that passage. Glad I read that tale again for the first time since maybe 1988. I was not disappointed; quite the opposite.
