[In the following review, Bryant praises Nightmares and Dreamscapes for its wide range of subjects, tones, and moods, and commends King's revisions of his previously published stories.]

In the introduction to his new story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King refers to the volume as "an uneven Aladdin's cave of a book." That's a good analysis, an apt potential blurb that will never be used, and is a bit harsher on the book than it deserves. King notes that he publishes a reprint collection about once every seven years (the first two were Night Shift in 1978 and Skeleton Crew in 1985). So far as the author's concerned, all the short stuff worth reprinting is now in print, and we can maybe expect another collection in a year starting with a "2."

Nightmares and Dreamscapes is one hefty tree-mugger. At 810 pages, it's only a dozen pages shorter than the first published version of The Stand. The first printing will issue 1.5 million copies, so you needn't squirrel away first editions as though they were The Shining or Carrie. Besides King's intro and an entertaining section of story notes, the collection contains 20 pieces of fiction (some original to this volume), a teleplay, a poem, a long essay, and a fable. So much for the stats. What about the behemoth (carefully neglecting to specify whether I'm referencing the book or the author)? Is this collection going to offer more ammo to such goofball grudge-bearers as the Time critic who, some years ago, labeled King "the master of postliterate prose"?

I don't think so. If you're a reader, you'd have to possess a heart of stone and a brain of cauliflower not to warm to this genial giant. Reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes is something like I'd imagine the menu to be if one were to spend a long weekend's slumber party at the King manse in Bangor. Many, many hours listening to Uncle Steve telling askew epigrams, gross anecdotes, broadly funny bits, dramatically scary stories; hamming it up, doing all the voices and the effects; in short, doing what storytellers do best. Entertaining, thrilling, and diverting the audience.

To wit:

"Dolan's Cadillac" previously existed only as a luxury item, a finely produced chapbook from Lord John Press. This is a nice tough Jim Thompson sort of revenge play about a school-teacher patiently and implacably out to get the mobster who ordered his wife murdered. Another former luxury item is "My Pretty Pony", a genuinely affecting tale of wisdom passing between the generations. The origin of the story is unbelievably complicated—that's why the end-notes are fascinating. "My Pretty Pony" was originally published by the Whitney Museum for something like $2,300, clock and batteries included. Later it appeared as a disastrously designed $50 trade hardback from Knopf.

One of King's salient characteristics is his evolution through the swamps of popular culture. We share similar steepings in music, reading, and pop phenomena. Hence I nod my head in vehement empathy when he mentions the Ripley's Believe It or Not illustration of a guy wearing a lit candle in a hole drilled in his cranium. Some of the stories in this collection ring faint chords, suggesting near or distant influences. A good example is "The House on Maple Street", one of the volume's originals. King mentions that this one's based on the final illustration in Chris Van Allsburg's magnificent kids' book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. True enough. But a part of this tale of rebellious children and an unsympathetic stepfather also seems to go back to the '50s. In an evident hommage, the children are named Bradbury. They could, with equal appropriateness, have been called the Matheson kids. Remember "Shipshape Home"? "The House on Maple Street" has its own identity, but it also has resonances.

Another of the new pieces is "The Ten O'Clock People", a nice novella about an innocent guy in the banking business who discovers that aliens are running the world. It's a paranoids' delight in which only a certain level of active smokers are capable of penetrating the hideous aliens' psychic disguise. Episodic, this account of human rebellion and betrayal offers some good observations about addictive personalities—as well as paralleling some of the tone of John Carpenter's They Live.

I'd forgotten how many recent original anthologies King's contributed to until I started reading the collection. "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" is a good devil's advocate's jaundiced take on rock'n'roll by an acknowledged rock devotee. This account of a yuppie couple trapped in the sargasso of lost rock stars somewhere deep in the Oregon wilderness has its moments. King allows as how sometimes Bad Things really do happen to Good People for no real reason other than random circumstance, a dramatic structure that can be debated. The story also tries to skate on a few gross-out details when the real horror lies a lot deeper. First published in Shock Rock the story's grown on me a bit. So has "Home Delivery", King's contribution to Skipp and Spector's zombie anthology, Book of the Dead. When I first read it, I thought this account of a Maine island woman's coming to terms with the loss of her husband and the collapse of the entire world came across too much as the beginning of a novel. Now it seems much more self-contained and emotionally satisfying. I must be mellowing.

You want vampire stories? There are a couple of back-to-back bloodsuckers. "The Night Flier" is a nastily accurate portrait of a tabloid reporter in search of a possible vampiric aviator. "Popsy" may well feature the same vampire in a satisfying revenge fantasy of a very bad man stealing a small child from a shopping mall.

A taste for the gruesome? "Chattery Teeth" puts a travelling label salesman and a pair of wind-up novelty dentures into a collision course with a young psychopath. "Crouch End" is a beautifully atmospheric Cthulhu Mythos story about an American tourist woman losing her husband in a very peculiar—eldritch, even—London neighborhood. "Rainy Season" skirts the edge of ridiculousness, but still manages to evoke some chilly moments as an every-sevenyears rain of toads descends upon a Maine village.

Don't like toads? There's plenty more on the agenda. "Sorry, Right Number" is a Tales From the Darkside script about prescient knowledge and doom. No happy ending here. "The Doctor's Case" is a Sherlock Holmes piece in which Watson gets, for once, center stage. Inspector Lestrade has an unusual role as well. Nicely done. "Umney's Last Case" is a piece of Chandleresque metafiction about a tough detective doing his best to puzzle out and survive a complete reality crunch. "The Fifth Quarter" is a hard-edged crime tale. All show some of the breadth of King's interests and abilities.

Ditto for "Sneakers" (an unusual haunting in the record trade), "Dedication" (an impressive handling of race relations, voodoo, and love), "It Grows on You" (a solid and keenly observational treatment of community secrets), and "Suffer the Little Children" (a vintage King tale about the worst fears of a teacher). There are plenty more I haven't mentioned. This is a long book.

As well, it is a satisfying one. King answers his critics through demonstration. His range of concerns is broad. While his experiments don't always work, he's always willing to try something new, something that does not carbon-copy his past work. He fiddles, tinkers, tweaks, and outright revises work until he believes it's right. First time out doesn't make it sacred.

Oh, and let me mention the really great stuff at the end. "Head Down" is a New Yorker essay about a year in the life of a competitive Little League team from Bangor. I read it just before I watched the televised 1993 Little League championship game between Long Beach and Panama. Timing couldn't have been better. "Brooklyn August", a baseball poem, and "The Beggar and the Diamond", a retelling of a Hindu parable, make for perfectly appropriate codas.

What a feast! In The Stand, King dedicates the novel to his wife and refers to the novel as "This dark chest of wonders." The phrase could not be better tailored to describe Nightmares and Dreamscapes as well.