[Dolan is an American educator and critic. In the following review of Skeleton Crew, he suggests that King's stories are powerful because of the "realization by the reader that the line between his own life and that of the horror tale is very fine."]

You need only cable TV to know how much this country during the last few years has been in the throes of a horror film epidemic, the "Halloween Syndrome." If you have the stomach for it, you may have been able to see enough to sort the artistic from the trash. I suspect that Night of the living Dead would be near the top of your horror hierarchy, and Stephen King on your elite list of chiller creators. remember Carrie, Cujo, and The Shining? King wrote them all.

What is it that makes a story "horrible"? reading Skeleton Crew might help us to decide. Most of the twenty stories and two poems really make your flesh crawl. This is not a book to read in huge gobbets, but a collection to savor one at a time. The selections that make up the "crew" of "skeletons" are of several different types of the story horrible: the lost in space fantasy, the gory exploits of the psychopathic killer, a twist on the cannibalism motif, the classic mirror story—to name a few. But it's not gory details alone that create horror though they do add that gut-wrenching element so many readers eagerly anticipate. Even that takes—in prose, at least—the kind of imagination and verbal dexterity that enables the reader to re-create the scene and the action vividly enough for him to feel the twinge of terror that thrills and entertains.

The events, in addition to being believable, must happen to characters we can accept and identify with as fully human. No one outside the Wizard of Oz gets gooseflesh at the chilling adventures of a straw man. King's people are palpable, usually ordinary, individuals, and we are led to accept their reactions to the strange things that befall them as recognizably human. Many of King's narrators, as you might expect, are telling their own stories; they, too, speak with individual voices that place us in the action.

The essence of horror, however, I would think is the realization by the reader that the line between his own life and that of the horror tale is very fine. How do we know that some small alteration in the mind's patterns won't make us into killers or eaters of men? The image in the mirror has always asked men to question the validity of their perceptions. We all harbor childhood fantasies of the eerielooking person, or place, or object that seemed to us to bear a threat. King's stories, along with their obvious entertainment value, offer the thoughtful reader a look at his life from new angles. Not all of them are finally frightening; there is comedy here, as in "The Word Processor of the Gods," tragedy in The Mist, satire in "The Jaunt."

Skeleton Crew is an excellent book to keep by your chair for a short read in the evening. I promise you that you'll never look at a sandy beach or a Delete key the same way again.