NIGHT SHIFT (1978)

Vampires and pigeons and rats O MY.

Fifty Shades of Wheat.

In a coincidence straight from the bowels of a certain wreck of a factory, I happened to read Stephen King's Night Shift short story collection around the same time the song of the same name was topping the charts back in 1985. Much like the Night Shift short story and subsequent movie adaption of "The Lawnmower Man," King's collection and the Commodores' song have little in common.

Nevertheless, my mind plays the song whenever I pick the book up to read it anew, much like it has since I first got my hands on the ratty, used paperback edition (whose back I cracked without mercy or regret the first go around). It was the version with the hand on the cover, the hand full OF EYES. Creepy and humorless, thus completely fitting for the work. There's no question of the inspiration--the doomed astronaut in "I Am the Doorway"--and the cover art does what the cover art is supposed to do: make the buyer want, no need to know just what the hell is going on in these here pages. It fits. It works. No discordant disconnect. Like how the song plays in my head whenever I set eyes on the book.

I wish I could say the same for the newer, library version I recently finished. I guess the cover art is meant to allude to the short story "Children of the Corn" but it's the worst kind of faceplant fail for a couple of very valid reasons. According to the copyright page, the library paperback is a reprint of the August 2012 Anchor Books edition. Can you guess which raunchy little indie-penned trilogy was released commercially earlier that same year? None other than the saucy, slap and tickle romp through one seriously bad relationship: the Fifty Shades of Grey series. And sure, there is a "bound woman" in "Children of the Corn" but she's not tied up with sexy ribbon. She's crucified. With barbed wire. Her eyes have been gouged out and her sockets and mouth have been jammed with cornsilk. Not remotely sexy.

Great author photo, tho.

It's not the first time I've seen similarly sad attempts to capitalize on another newer or more popular book's comet ride to fame and fortune. I once worked on a book for a distribution client whose nonfiction cover design for something completely unrelated to teen vampires turned out to be a blatant rip off of the first edition design of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. I don't recall the outcome of the uncomfortable conversation with the client, but I do remember that the design was changed. What was the big deal? It was borderline stealing and full-on LAME. Ugh. This isn't the same, but it is stylistically suggestive and not immediately evocative of the source material, that which the cover is trying to sell, allegedly. Clang clang clang.

Also, look across the bottom of the front and back covers. I'm pretty sure that's wheat, not corn. Maybe it's meant to be corn tassels but I don't think so. It certainly isn't the standard image one would use to say "CORN field," especially if you are alluding to a story about children of the CORN--you'd think more green husks, lines of leafy plants, etc. To be fair, stock photos can be criminally mislabeled (it happens more than you'd think)--just Google "corn field close up" and you will see plenty of...wheat.

In the long run, does all this matter? Yesno. It matters to foolios like me who would have loved to work on any edition of Stephen King's work, past or present. It irritates me that they didn't try harder.

Aside from production woes, the most striking thing about Night Shift the actual book (what really matters, I know I know) is how perfectly it encapsulates a specific time. The dark swell of the late 60s, the gritty undertow of the 70s. There's a pervasive gloom hanging over the whole work. It is a weird trip back to an era growing dimmer in the rearview, where so many customs once so common would be met with outrage now. The ubiquity of smoking, for example--how it was literally everywhere, so casual, so common, so accepted. All throughout Night Shift, characters just smoke. They go into buildings smoking...they take a seat in waiting rooms ready to light up...there's even a scene in a hospital where a son helps his dying mother smoke one last cigarette. They won't let her have aspirin, oh no, but the cigarettes in her nightstand are totally fine. For the cancer patient. In a hospital.

I love that the library had to add the little
label for the title. For the sake of uniformity,
ya gotta. Katie says hi.

Flat cut trim--it's uncommon, but I have seen rough
cut trims on paperbacks. It is the very definition of
"extra," though, and entirely unnecessary. Further,
it makes page turning a chore.

I lived during this age, smoked in fast food joints and restaurants, smoked in bars and clubs, smoked in people's houses, at parties, in stairwells, all the designated smoking areas. I even got to experience smoking on planes, though only as an observing child sucking up all the extra second-hand smoke that my little lungs could absorb. I remember what it was like to drink down the bar to closing time, roll into bed half dead, and wake up the next morning smelling like a charred hellhound. There's a wide gulf of time between the days when smoking was the norm, when at least half the people you knew were regulars, and the here and now, where smoking is banned everywhere (with noted exceptions, hello casino jones), and the social contract has all but shut out those dirty birdy smokers. There was a reason my last years of smoking took place in my apartment and nowhere else--societal pressure, baby. It's a hell of a drug. But in Night Shift, smoking just is. It is a pastime as all-American as apple pie (with a smoldering butt jammed in the middle).

There's also some casual drunk driving, another throw back to a stupider era. It's not to say that society collectively embraced such reckless behavior back in the pickled past, but the seriousness of it, and the underlying sense of gravity and shame associated with drunk driving today, was far less common prior to educational campaigns and the unwavering tenacity of groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). I liken those olden golden days to the current trend of Wine Moms and their shrill slogans plastered on t-shirts, wall art, bumper stickers. Drinking two bottles of wine a night is fine as long as we're all doing it, amiright?

Even worse, depending on the state, the drunk driving laws could be very lax, sometimes just the equivalent of a whoopsy daisy you had a little boom boom. Prime example: I know a person who totaled their car, woke up covered in blood and glass in the hospital with a cop standing over them, face serious, judgmental but fatherly, who said, I'm gonna give you a warning, just don't do it again. That was it. And wouldn't you just know it...my acquaintance did it again...and again. They just didn't get caught. Hell, I had relatives who regularly drove while intoxicated. Friends, too. But ever so slowly, people stopped being so casual about it and started taking drunk driving seriously.

The best kind of praise page. No references to this or any
other work, just an unabashed lovefest for an author
who stands at the very top of his field.

In some ways, you can align the changes in societal mores in terms of overall safety with the dawning of the squeaky, straight-edged 80s. Imagine the terror of the 60s, the unparalleled social upheaval from coast to coast: the war, civil rights, women's rights, the counterculture, hippies, dippies, and Charlie Manson and his clean-cut little coven capering on the news. Then came the inevitable, crippling hangover of the 70s, burnouts and serial killers run amok, gas prices soaring, the economy circling the drain, all the kids self-medicating, all the adults half bombed and starting to think this American Dream shit is nothing but ass vapors. On so many levels the trust was broken, blown out, burnt to the ground.

Embossing evident on the back of the front cover.

Then came the 80s. New romantic skinny ties with gelled hair and coke habits. Citizens rebranded to Consumers and gave each other permission to find purpose in materialism, the pathological accumulation of Things. Cars and picture frames and houses and projection tvs and boats and track suits and motorcycles and wine racks and ottomans and 100 percent pure cubic zirconia. The Home Shopping Network delivered more delicious Things, more stuff to pile on top of other stuff crammed in dusty hutches while the oldest stuff found its way to the basement or the attic or the closet or the yard sale because more was good, but newer was better. MALLS were a brilliant thing, a beautiful neontopia to drop ten or a thousand dollars on any given Saturday. There were no limits to the number of jeans! Blue jeans, black jeans, pegged jeans, stone washed, acid washed, multi-toned, even pin-striped. Chic, Lee, Guess, Jordache, Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Levi's but only 501's with the button fly-eye-eye. So many chunky, over-sized sweaters with wild graphics, and layers and layers of popped collar Oxfords to wear underneath--Izod, Polo, Ocean Pacific board shorts and don't you dare forget the forty-seven Swatch watches to wear up and down each arm like a goddamned postapocalyptic psychobabe on her way Bartertown to bet on Thunderdome. Things!

Author bio page also shows that bad glue job. There
shouldn't be such an uneven gap in the gutter.

I've lived this nightmare. You have to update the
previous publications page, but there are so manyyy.
So you set it in a smaller and smaller font until
it virtually squeaks.

Pegged pants, rolled sleeves, feathered hair lacquered with various gels, mousses, hairsprays; everything tight, tight, tight. Even the music seemed tighter, seamless and produced to perfection...no more smelly, hairy, drunk Golden Gods swaying at the microphone with their fuzzy navels out. No more grit, not one speck...at least not on the commercial stations. Just clean, coiffed, pancaked mannequins tripping tight, tight, tight dance moves to swift, tinny beats. Clean, tight...and safe. Just Say No. This Is Your Brain On Drugs Any Questions. Greed Is Good. Love Shack, Baby Love Shack.

It was like the 60s were the shock and awe, where the ugly undertruth was churned up and exposed to the bitter light, and the 70s rumbled with queasy aftershocks of too much reality and not enough weed in the world to dull it. The 80s opened its eyes to the horror and deemed it solvable. We became suddenly aware of the concept of child molestation, child kidnapping, child murder, and the faceless boogiemonster everyone could get behind with a pitchfork: stranger danger. Donahue and Oprah taught us the perils of freedom, the worst of what could be, the stories behind the faces on the milk carton. Letting your kids run wild in the streets was truly at your peril. As long as we were protecting the children from outside harm, we realized we'd had just about enough with all the babies flying through wrecked windshields, so child safety seats morphed from optional to required by law. There would be no more joyriding in the back of the pickup and no more calling shotgun. Then, as if our tight little coked up minds could bear one more outrage, some psychopath tampered with over-the-counter pain killers, so now just about everything requires some sort of safety seal to assure Consumers that their drugs (and juice and sour cream and...) are safe. Safety cords on blinds, plastic bottles instead of glass, flat beds with no fluffy blankies for infants, wacky rubber playgrounds! And no more sticking keys and forks in outlets to find out about electricity the hard way. There was something to purchase for every safety need.

More glue shenanigans.

But Night Shift's stories take place right before all that, at the cusp of it, in the wasted embers of what was left after the 60s blew out the circuits and jam banded into oblivion. There is a grating anger running through so many of the stories; angry couples on the verge of relationship collapse ("Children of the Corn"); shitty, resentful husbands ("The Lawnmower Man"), angry fathers unleashing punishment for next to nothing ("The Boogeyman"), angry vermin ("Graveyard Shift"), angry aliens ("I Am the Doorway"), even angry trucks ("Trucks" lol) for God's sake, all bent on vengeance, murder, obliteration. Then there are the shitty, shitty men: hateful men, malevolent men...from manipulative Lotharios ("I Know What You Need"), to cruel post-apocalyptic boyfriends ("Night Surf"), to happy-go-lucky serial killers ("The Man Who Loved Flowers"). It is difficult to find a sympathetic character in these stories, though there are a few outliers (the doomed protagonist from "Jerusalem's Lot," for one).

Half title page.

I haven't read Danse Macabre or On Writing in ages, so I hope to get some enlightenment there. Are the stories collected in Night Shift meant to serve as an extended exercise in unreliable, sometimes wildly flawed characters? After all, you wouldn't want to read Night Shift assuming that's just how people were back then--assholes, basically--and I certainly don't remember my childhood that way...exactly. Though the sexism and racism were definitely unchecked and festering. Watching a truly bad character get what's coming to him can be satisfying, but even characters that we're supposed to root for are too unsympathetic to bother. It is clear that King is stretching his creative muscles in terms of plot and story--the more outlandish and weird, the better--and it seems he was game for just about any wild notion ("The Mangler" is somehow both hilarious and deeply horrible, an absurd but delightful detour through Hell)--but his early character work is all over the place. The women remain flat, though some spark ("The Last Rung on the Ladder") and at least one catches fire ("The Woman in the Room"). The men are more fleshed out, though some remain inscrutable, one at least by nature ("Battleground"--fantastic fun). One too many of the "heroes" read as obnoxious little assholes, however, and one wonders if this is authorial counterintuitive manipulation or simply a "sign of the times." Whatever the case, King is cutting his teeth, working it out, and in every subsequent novel and collection the "constant reader" can see how he's getting better and better.

Full title page.

Full fledged copyright page, resplendent with
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
(cip) information. This was the eighth reprint
of this particular edition.

Some of the stories live only within the pages of Night Shift, others were adapted into student films (dollar babies!), but several are easily recognizable especially to 80s Cablevision zombies like me. "Children of the Corn" is probably the most recognizable to anyone, having spawned film adaptions and sequels and too many cultural references to count. I hadn't read the short story in decades so was relieved to find it far more economical in plot than the 1984 film which was, for lack of a better word, silly. "The Ledge" and "Quitters, Inc." were part of the Cat's Eye compilation film, both of which are solid, simple concepts on the surface, but are annoying in execution as the characters in both stories are products of "the times," i.e. when women were peripheral pawns in the Stories of Men. Funny aside: I was relating the gnarlier details of "Quitters, Inc." to my mother over pasta and breadsticks at Ye Olde Olive Garden when a server caught the tail end of a sentence that went something like "...and if he gains too much weight, they cut off one of his wife's fingers." To which said server yipped, "what!" And I had to explain, no sir, just, ugh, Stephen King. Short story. Horror guy? That one. Sorry. There wasn't time in the exchange to mention that it was in the sexy old days when your wife was property enough to get the first punishment if her husband happened to take even a single drag of a nasty ol' cigarette. Yeah.

What makes me think this is from the original
printing? The typeface, for one, is very familiar,
and reminiscent of the early published SK works.
The type is also heavier than the new prelim
material. In cases where we didn't have original
electronic print files, we would scan in and print
from the original, adding on our own prelim
pages as needed to update the publisher info.
The end product always looked very similar
to this edition of Night Shift. 

Permissions page, the best way to "place" the
contemporary narratives. 

And of course there is "Trucks," a not terribly fleshed out little story about semis driving themselves, running down humans with murderous glee, and enslaving the rest to feed them fuel until...well, the story never says. (Un)fortunately, someone decided to give Stephen King a hat that said "Director" on it and he made a little film called Maximum Overdrive starring the beefy jock from The Breakfast Club, Emilio Estevez. Hoo boy. The movie expands on the revolution, so that not only semis and construction vehicles are autonomous, but soda machines, ATMs, and hair dryers (one of the more hilarious "death tableaus" of the movie)--basically any "machine" is revving up and ready to kill. There is also an attempt to explain the cause (aliens and/or comets) and a relatively upbeat resolution that in no way strengthens the story. The movie does have truly funny and clever bits, and who couldn't love an AC/DC soundtrack, but the best part by miles is Stephen King's cameo. King is a born hambone, and this brief clip is just about the right amount of clown. Little slivers of humor can't make up for what a stinker the movie turned out to be overall, but as with many of King's works, sometimes it's better to leave it on the page.

The weirdest "updated" section of backmatter,
an ad page for the novels that preceded Night
Shift (and The Stand which was first published
that same year). It's only weird because they
bothered to update the previous publications.
The inclusion of the ad pages in the backmatter
is very old school, and usually when you're still
trying to "sell" your author, something Stephen
King surpassed--by lightyears--decades ago.

See? It's weird. Just one more paragraph
about The Shining and then miles of blank
space because...why? Only the publisher knows!

While the upcoming Skeleton Crew short story collection will always be my favorite (and contains within it a story that scared me so bad I had nightmares for weeks), Night Shift does deliver, if not so much in scares than in memorable ideas, that 70s gloom of a mood, and special, bell-bottomed weirdness that makes a few of the stories really stick. My personal favorites are "The Mangler" (insane), "Battleground" (gonzo), and funnily enough, "The Lawnmower Man." The movie is pure shit and largely unrelated to the short story, even if you squint at it through your third eye. It does King's short story a great disservice merely by existing and every copy should be burned and dropped in a deep trench. The actual story, however, is classic King on a mind melting tear. The narrative starts off insipidly mundane (lazy husband has to get the lawn mowed, boo hoo hoo woe is Man) and then goes completely B-A-N-A-N-A-S in a direction that, at first reading, my little 14-year-old mind could not adequately absorb (mythology and gophers and PAN o effing MY??). My old woman mind, however, reels. It's deranged, delicious, hilarious and just...wrong. If you read Night Shift for nothing else, read it to redeem the poorly maligned "Lawnmower Man." Wonderfully weird stuff.

Grade: C
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. Overall I would classify the collection as more unsettling than anything. Unless you are afraid of rats, kids, or SMOKING.
Warnings: More casual bigotry, common profanity, proportionate gore, general human shittiness, SMOKING.
Artifact: Flawed 2012 edition reprint. Paperback, flat cut, trade pulp, embossed CMYK cover. The typeface for the bulk of the book (contents, stories) appears to be the original type, but the add-ons in the prelims (updated for this publisher's edition: title pages, copyright, ad, author, praise, etc.) don't match and are frankly all over the place in terms of design. The cover is a misfire for the aforementioned reasons. And, personal peeve, the text block is not glued evenly, so there are weird gaps and tears in the gutter that simply should not be there. It's not so egregious that you'd kick it back to the printer for a do over, but it's not good, either. (RIP my 1978 edition. It smelled heavenly, too, like imagination run wild, not unlike a possessed steam-iron-folding machine unleashed on the streets, shrieking bloodlust through the night(shift)).