of consciousness effect. Occasionally we are subjected to all capitals in parentheses with triple exclamation points (!!! ON BOTH MARGINS !!!)! This is Mr. King's way of being climactic….

Mr. King lifts images and plot fragments from books (Poe, Blackwood, Lovecraft) and films ("Diabolique," "Psycho," "Village of the Damned") as if his characters and readers are indeed noticing them "for the first time."

Occasionally Mr. King seems aware of his triteness, but instead of playing the awareness for laughs, he offers apologies. In one scene, a character has an epiphany over a wasps' nest: "He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into The Great Wasps' Nest of Life. As an image it stank. As a cameo of reality, he felt it was serviceable." Like an admission of guilt, the apology only makes things worse….

To be sure, "The Shining" does have its chilling moments. There is a bathtub apparition that, though derivative, is wonderfully frightening. And there are others, though the hyperbole and stylistic fumblings make an equal number unintentionally funny.

H. P. Lovecraft once remarked that "atmosphere is the all-important thing" in this genre. A compelling atmosphere can make us forget the clichés. But since atmosphere is so much a function of style—which Mr. King hasn't developed yet—the clichés in "The Shining" stand out in ghoulish, jeering relief. (p. 8)

Jack Sullivan, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1977 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), February 20, 1977.

[The Shining] has flaws, some minor and some serious….

But when all's said, the novel works! It makes one tremble in anticipation of the day when King gets it all together and writes a 'perfect' book…. King's style … is his most obvious fault. It's all good writing, it's all pertinent, but it goes on and on…. Setting a realistic scene and creating believably complex characters are laudable traits, but King seriously overdoes it.

King builds his mood slowly, at first establishing the idyllic setting of the peaceful old Overlook…. Minor ominous incidents occur at intervals between lengthy flashbacks to Jack's and Wendy's youth, showing the childhoods that molded their personalities. Gradually the story stabilizes in the present as the hallucinations become more vicious, and the Torrances are increasingly hard-pressed to rationalize them as imaginary….

King continues to add … detail, building upon minor incidents, filling in a mosaic of horror which has unsuspected depths….

There's [another] annoyance that's obvious …, King does not portray Danny as a five-year-old child. He's too mature; he seems nine or ten at least. Even granting that a telepathic boy might be emotionally older than his peers, it's important for plot reasons that Danny be no more than five. Whenever King switched to a lengthy scene with the boy, the story suddenly became less convincing. There are also some subplots that don't really fit the story; they're too obviously just to give the reader some extra chills.

Most of the flaws are in the nature of loose ends that the reader is bothered at finding unresolved. Some may be setups that King decided to drop, such as an old canvas firehose that has a 'disturbingly coiled' aspect, we are told several times, but which never does do anything. Some may be due to deliberate vagueness; King doesn't seem to want us to be sure at what point the hotel's manifestations pass from the illusory plane to the actual one…. A list of other loose ends would be tedious to those who haven't read the book yet, so I'll just say that the totality leaves the reader with a distinct wish that King had spent less time on the Torrances' past and on their emotional complexes, and more on finishing the story in a complete manner.

But it's still the goddamnedest best horror novel I've read in over two decades. (p. 6)

Frederick Patten, in Delap's Fantasy and Science Fiction Review (copyright © 1977 by Richard Delap), April, 1977.

[King demonstrates in Night Shift that he] is as effective in the horror vignette as in the novel. His big opening tale, "Jerusalem's Lot"—about a deserted village—is obviously his first shot at 'Salem's Lot and, in its dependence on a gigantic worm out of Poe and Lovecraft, it misses the novel's gorged frenzy of Vampireville. But most of the other tales go straight through you like rats' fangs…. Bizarre dripperies, straight out of Tales from the Crypt comics…. (p. 1285)

Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1977 The Kirkus Service, Inc.), December 1, 1977.

Most [of the stories of Night Shift] could be classified as "horror stories," yet they lack the true horror of Henry Kuttner …, the obsessiveness of H. P. Lovecraft, the variety of Richard Matheson, the humor of John Collier, the richness of Ray Bradbury. But all the stories are competently done, some ("The Mangler," "Quitters, Inc.") much above that. (p. 385)

W. H. Lyles, in Library Journal (reprinted from Library Journal, February 1, 1978; published by R. R. Bowker Co. (a Xerox company); copyright © 1978 by Xerox Corporation), February 1, 1978.

Some of [Stephen King's plots in his short story collection "Night Shift"] are … imaginative, even ingenious. (p. 13)

But it seems not to have occurred to Mr. King that style is crucial to story, as are characterization and theme. His own characters seldom serve any purpose save as ballast for his bizarre plots…. His worst stories strain mightily to generate one last frisson, using twist endings that should have died with O. Henry, the hoariest clichés of the horror-tale subgenre ("I was shaking in my shoes") and lines that provoke smiles rather than terror…. It's baffling to think that anybody might find these stories fascinating or frightening…. (pp. 13, 23)

Michael Mewshaw, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), March 26, 1978.

[The stories of Night Shift] all begin in our normal world, where everything is safe and warm. But in almost every instance, something slips, and we find ourselves in the nightmare world of the not-quite real. (p. 6)

Such stories require a willing suspension of disbelief, of course, but they also require an author who is an expert manipulator, one who can make horror seem not only plausible but almost logical. King is an expert, and many of these stories will not be easily forgotten…. Perhaps ["The Mangler"] is the best example of King's skill at what he does. The idea of a steam ironer possessed by a demon seems laughable, but no one who reads "The Mangler" is going to laugh for very long. (pp. 6-7)

Bill Crider, in Best Sellers (copyright © 1978 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation), April, 1978.

Striking a far less hysterical tone than in The Shining, King has written his most sweeping horror novel in The Stand, though it may lack the spinal jingles of 'Salem's Lot. In part this is because The Stand, with its flow of hundreds of brand-name products, is a kind of inventory of American culture. "Superflu" has hit the U.S. and the world…. Immunity seems to be a gift from God—or the Devil…. Good and Evil come to an atomic clash at the climax, the Book of Revelations working itself out rather too explicitly. But more importantly, there are memorable scenes of the superflu spreading hideously…. Some King fans will be put off by the pretensions here; most will embrace them along with the earthier chills. (pp. 965-66)

Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1978 The Kirkus Service, Inc.), September 1, 1978.

The haunted hotel [of The Shining] is a stock sort of device, left over from the days when people were still writing straight ghost stories. The struggling family offers the pathos that no doubt is in part responsible for the book's popularity—real characters, beautifully handled for the most part, though some of the development toward the end is a bit too hasty. Even the child with the "gift" is a common theme of Stephen King's…. But herein they are combined, redeveloped, slowly woven into a dark, unfamiliar tapestry—something dreadful and inevitable and ultimately terrifying….

King's creation of atmosphere is masterful—the first irrational hint I had that anything unusual might happen terrified me as fully as the later, more logically-constructed episodes. In fact, where the novel falls short is in the fact that the conclusion is not nearly as frightening as the mood that has been predicting it. King takes the stance that he should give the reader a hint of the ultimate horror early in the game, and then—when they're sure to be afraid that it's actually going to happen—give them exactly what they've been nervously waiting for. It's a technique that works rather well, though in this case the intimations of doom are more frightening than the doom itself. (p. 34)

Marc Laidlaw, in Nyctalops (copyright © 1978 by Harry O. Morris, Jr. and Edward P. Berglund; reprinted by permission of Marc Laidlaw), Vol. 2, No. 7, 1978.

Deadly disease running rampant over the countryside is a natural subject for horror stories; King is a natural teller of such tales…. [The Stand] elicits fear and dread as completely as he has in previous works …, [and] the suspense is underlaid with questions concerning good and evil in human nature. (p. 601)

Booklist (reprinted by permission of the American Library Association; copyright 1978 by the American Library Association), December 1, 1978.

In 1980, America dies for its sins (pollution of both landscape and spirit) in a shifting antigen plague leaked from some cavern of government-sponsored biological warfare. But the purge leaves certain issues of good and evil unresolved. In The Stand, Stephen King divides the survivors up like tiddledywinks into two camps, one devoted to good …, the other to the devil. Will it be Walden III or the Fourth Reich? In the panorama of mass disaster—and with such moral freight to consider—King loses his characterizations … in a clutter of place-names and products….

[The] devil (otherwise known as Randall Flagg, an agent provocateur out of the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil) successfully raises hairs on the arms. The prose flows well, describing multiple plague deaths, swollen corpses, and the rantings of idiot savants…. But The Stand is not a horror story like King's Carrie or The Shining, and that's why it ultimately bores. Horror lies in that area where known becomes unknown, where ordinary turns menacing.

Too much of King's new book deals with a little leaguer's vision of American democracy somehow smiling through apocalypse; good and evil are set up like so many kindergarten blocks. Bad is Las Vegas where those survivors who sell their souls gather; good is Boulder, Colorado, and the American constitution. Similar equations act like dry rot on the plot.

Anne Collins, "No Sympathy for the Devil," in Maclean's Magazine (© 1978 by Maclean's Magazine; reprinted by permission), December 18, 1978, p. 51.

Stephen King has been writing very good and very scary novels and short stories for a number of years now. The Stand is something of a departure for him. This is not to suggest that it is not good, or, in its own way, scary. But the word which best describes it is one not heard much today outside of English classrooms: epic. Another word should also be resurrected too, this one out of the dusty tomes of Biblical scholarship: apocalyptic….

[He sets the stage] for a conflict, and in reference to that struggle one could dig up one more of those rarely used old words: Armageddon.

Stephen King is a masterful writer…. (p. 378)

J. Justin Gustainis, in Best Sellers (copyright © 1979 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation), March, 1979.