[Crider is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the following review, he praises the realism of King's stories in Night Shift.]

[The stories in Stephen King's 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, where vampires walk, where there are demons to be summoned or exorcised, where innocent people suffer and die for reasons neither they nor we can quite understand, where there are (just as we had always feared) things in the cellar.

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. Every smoker who has ever wanted to stop should read "Quitters, Inc." School teachers will get a chill from "Sometimes They Come Back." Afraid of rats? read "Graveyard Shift." Hate machinery? Try "Trucks" or "The Mangier." Perhaps the latter 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 Mangier" is going to laugh for very long.

The narrator of "Gray Matter" says, "I am saying that there's things in the corners of the world that would drive a man insane to look 'em right in the face." Stephen King writes about the things in the corners, and he forces us to look into their faces.