This new collection of 12 stories opens with Two Talented Bastids, which questions how two ordinary guys from a small town in Maine managed to become famous almost overnight; one as a writer, the other an artist. They always denied any mystery but, after their deaths, the writer’s son discovers a notebook that seems to explain the secret of their success. In the collection’s afterword, King puzzles over similar questions: where do his stories come from? And why are so many of them concerned with dark matters? Horror stories, he writes, are “best appreciated by those who are compassionate”, and in his stories he has “tried especially hard to show the real world as it is”. Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream is about a man who feels compelled to find out if a murder he dreamed about is real. He discovers a body and tips off the police only to be suspected of the crime himself. Rattlesnakes looks at the later life of a character from King’s 1981 horror novel Cujo, as an old man visiting Florida, where he’s pursued by the ghosts of a long-ago tragedy. King is still the king.
The final book by the popular American SF writer, who died earlier this year, is a compilation of the monthly feature he wrote for Locus(the genre’s only trade journal) from April 2004 to July 2023. Inspired by “Today in History” columns in daily newspapers, Bisson imagined them written from the perspective of two centuries ahead. For almost 20 years he was dedicated to creating four micro-fictions every month. The result is a collection of pure, distilled science fiction at its best, perfect miniatures that combine social satire with prediction in stories surreal, disturbing, thought-provoking and hilarious.
