On If It Bleeds

A note: this gives away key plot points and endings.

Stephen King’s If It Bleeds — four novellas, one of which might really be a novel — is a strong collection, proof that King is as good a writer in the 2020s as he was in the 1970s. I tend to think of him as a plot-driven horror and thriller writer, but this keeps those trademark genres while doing thematically rich work on the nature of evil, on Faustian bargains, and on the small intimacies that make a life worth living.

Take “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.” On the surface it’s a ghost story about revenge and ethics — how far can we call on other powers without sacrificing ourselves in the process? — but, like most ghost stories, it’s really about trauma and loss. Harrigan was hardly loved by his peers, but he made a deep connection with the protagonist, one that stays with the boy for a long time, and only at the very end does he let himself properly grieve, just after grieving his beloved teacher. “The Life of Chuck” opens as an apocalyptic tale about the end of the world, only to open out into the rich inner life of a young man dying too soon; we follow him as he dances down Boylston Street, sharing an ephemeral moment with street musicians and a young woman in the middle of a hard breakup, and it makes all the difference to him, adding to the multitudes inside him. It has its ghosts too — an attic that haunts those who enter it — but Chuck’s life is one of love and wonder.

The longest, the title story, works as an excellent thriller, but King’s ideas about the nature of evil get a bit lost in it. The Changeling, Ondowski, is a kind of vampire, feeding on people’s suffering — and, as is almost always the case, the vampire is an old creature that corrupts the young. We expect the protagonist, Holly, to lose herself in the hunt, but she doesn’t; she finds strength of will and overcomes her cowardice and her baggage. The story is good, and it’s better for subverting our expectations, but some of its themes slip away. Finally, “Rat” follows a man named Drew, manic in his need to finish a novel. Every time he makes headway he loses the words and collapses into a crisis his whole family suffers through with him. He retreats into the wilderness of northern Maine, falls ill, gets caught in a storm, and neglects his wife, his children, himself, faltering as he always does until he saves a rat and strikes a Faustian bargain with it. He finishes the book, returns home, reconciles with his family, and publishes to acclaim — but the price is that he loses his mentor and his mentor’s wife in a freak car crash, after he’d recovered from pancreatic cancer. He goes back to the cabin to confront the rat, who taunts him: “[Drew] didn’t finish [the novel]. [Drew] could have never finished it. [The rat] did.” Drew seems oddly unbothered, and though we readers know never to make a bargain like that, we’re left feeling he should suffer more than he does.

Some of the stories flesh out their themes well and others leave you wanting a better resolution, but all of them are well told in excellent prose. King isn’t a philosopher; he’s a fiction writer, and that’s more than enough. The one downside is that I came away the way I do after fast food: it tasted good in the moment, but it didn’t quite give me the nutrition I needed.