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25 Essential Stephen King Short Stories
The best King stories are full of heart, horror, and humanity, each riffing on the eternal question: what if?
What begins with the devouring of raw bird meat descends so much further, culminating in the immortal line “they say you are what you eat and if so I haven’t changed a bit!” It’s one of many King stories that exploits horror for all its darkly comic potential, and you can almost feel him laughing at his own audacity. When young Gary encounters the titular black-suited fellow out in the woods, maybe it’s the smell of burned matches that surrounds him, or the hideous long fingers, “as pale as the hand of store window dummy,” or the cheery use of the word “fisherboy”— but there is something intensely disquieting about this particular entity. He appears to Phil Parker on three occasions, offering to answer any question posed to him, a semi-Faustian pact that blends older traditions with a flavor of American rural gothic, as if Mark Twain had taken a stab at a fairy tale.
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