[Budrys is a russian-born novelist, short story writer, editor, and critic. In the following review, he lauds King's storytelling method in Different Seasons, comparing King's style to that of Roald Dahl and John Steinbeck]

Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas by Stephen King, is an excellent piece of reading. Although one of the stories is little more than a set-piece in imitation of Roald Dahl, and another is most interesting as a gritty documentary on life in a state penitentiary, garnished by a slight and anti-climactic tale of romanticized escape, the other two stories are towering achievements.

One of these is in many ways conventional King horror-fantasy; that is, it gains its effects by concretizing a fantasy so horrible none of us will openly admit we all have it. But Todd Bowen—one of King's patented big-eyed All-American teenagers—does not shrink from the possibilities. When he uncovers the hidden Nazi concentration camp commander and makes him his prisoner, his object is to hear, to his heart's salivating content, what it felt like to have that species of absolute power.

But there are traces in that story of something even deeper, and certainly less cheap. The growing contention between the psychotic golden boy and the utterly rational Nazi reveals tensions and uncovers complexities in the human condition that you will not find in Cujo, Firestarter, or most other King blockbusters. Soon enough, the story degenerates into bang, bang, slash slash, but for a moment—a moment that might cause actual discomfort to readers who take to King as a horse takes to a nosebag—it has trembled on the brink of being painted in something besides primary colors.

[The Body] threw me and continues to throw me, and here is how and why:

In a little Maine town, four boys trembling on the verge of pubescence are living their last summer before they turn into the kinds of shits their older brothers are; before they set foot on the pathways that lead inevitably to being as drunken, shiftless and contemptible as their fathers are. Having learned the location of another boy's body—he was an outsider, wandering alone in the woods, and was killed by a train—they set out to "find" it and claim its discovery.

The actual discovery is made by one of the older boys; shiftless, dissolute, and going where he had no business to be, that boy is constrained from announcing the find. He does discuss it where his younger brother overhears him. So, when the four young boys set out on a journey of many miles overnight along the railroad track, having carefully provisioned themselves, concocted a cover story, and systematically heartened themselves, what they are affirming is not only their superior energy and ingenuity but the power of purity. They are saying that it is not inevitable to succumb to the shot-and-beer joint and the laborer's job; that the despair of their elders is not justified.

Now, I submit to you, folks, that this story, set, incidentally, in the same town as Cujo, and beset by the same love/ignorance for cars—King speaks of a "Hearst" shifter, and makes several other trivial but astonishing errors in an area where he flatly claims knowledgeability—I submit to you, folks, that this story is not only literature but major literature, at least in first draft. Furthermore, although it has its flat spots and other problems typical of first drafts, it essentially sustains its pitch throughout. Stephen King is—and obviously long has been—the peer of John Steinbeck and several other guys. I mention Nobelist Steinbeck because he is the one whose work King's The Body most resembles, and in some respects—its astonishing ability to depict real adolescents, for one—excels.

These four stories all came about in a curious manner. They are spurts of leftover energy. Each was written immediately after one of King's big novels, and, presumably, was written purely because King wanted to, and hardly cared where, when, and if it would sell. I think there is a major datum—and a cheap shot—in pointing out that the slick, essentially empty fantasy of Breathing Method is the latest, while The Body is the earliest.

There is another datum, and another shot, in pointing out that the narrator of The Body—one of the exploring boys—is a storyteller, proto-writer, and, in later years, the author of a couple of collegiate literary short stories. These are reproduced within the text of The Body. The narrator—who turns out to be a rather older man, remembering the events of his boyhood—professes to see them as essentially trivial. Personally, I found the one rather promising and the other funnier than hell, but they're his stories and I suppose he's entitled to judge them. The thing is, you see, this older narrator looking back both on boyhood and on his naive collegiate literary aspirations, has now grown up to be Gordon LaChance, world-famous author of blockbuster horror novels for the mass market, a condition in which he says he is content.