[Atchity is an American poet, editor, educator, and critic. In the following review, he offers a positive assessment of Different Seasons.]

In the afterword to [Different Seasons], Stephen King calls his "stuff " "fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit it) downright clumsy." He summarizes a career of horror novels as "plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald's."

To find the secret of his success, you have to compare King to Twain, Poe—with a generous dash of Philip roth and Will Rogers thrown in for added popular measure. King's stories tap the roots of myth buried in all our minds. No wonder he's popular: He understands people.

King's visionary flights in these four novellas show us the natural shape of the human soul—a shape even more horrifying, for its protean masks, than the ghouls he has conjured up in the novels. His productivity is based on his awareness that audience psychology responds to the simple elements of fiction, presented directly: "The tale, not the teller."

In Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, he hooks us blatantly with the narrator's predicted triumph. Within a page or so, he can admit the falseness of the hook—and we don't care. For King, the art is to reveal the art. We adore the special effects.

The story shows men painting out of the darkest corners: " . . .I t was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger's name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willynilly, to roam his brain."

In The Body, King shows his skill at assuming a youngster's character, at the same time expressing how Americans sound not at their best but in their everyday voices:

Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that's cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That's cool. But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the road to the Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties, my feet dressed in Keds . . . the GS&WM railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of white.

The narrator tells us why he joined his friends on their expedition into self-terrorizing: "I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes . . . the darkness on the edge of town . . . and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings. No . . . not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them."

Moments of confession sneak into this story, without detracting from its momentum. The narrator is, like King, a writer:

My wife, my kids, my friends—they all think that having an imagination like mine must be quite nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a little mind-movie whenever things get dull. Mostly they're right. But every now and then it turns around and bites . . . you with these long teeth, teeth that have been filed to points like the teeth of a cannibal. You see things you'd just as soon not see, things that keep you awake until first light.

The most chilling story in the collection, perhaps the most horrifying King has published to date, is Apt Pupil, subtitled "Summer of Corruption."

" 'Great!' Todd said. 'I want to hear all about it.'

"Dussander's eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. 'You don't understand. I do not wish to speak of it.'

" 'You will, though. If you don't, I'll tell everyone who you are. . . . Today I want to hear about the gas ovens,' Todd said. 'How you baked the Jews.' His smile beamed out, rich and radiant. . . . "

The repulsion of the all-American newsboy extorting from the dying Nazi the chilling details of his role in the war is bad enough, but what evokes the infernal depths of human nature is the transfer of evil and inhumanity from one to the other by story's end. The boy is innocent no longer, and the reader recognizes his own face in King's mirror:

"Todd smiled at him. And incredibly—certainly not because he wanted to—Dussander found himself smiling back."

King's afterword describes his conversations with editor Bill Thompson concerning his career. Thompson was afraid King might be typed as a horror writer—just as Alan Rinsler, his present editor, later expressed his fear that King might stop publishing horror. King allowed that things could be worse: "I could, for example, be an 'important' writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a 'brilliant' writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers."

Whatever King and his editors decide about his image, our appetite for his McDonald's shows no signs of abating.