[Mewshaw is an American novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review, he provides a negative assessment of Night Shift.]

Still in his early 30's, Stephen King has already produced three novels—Carrie, Salem's lot and The Shining—which, by a process as eerie and unfathomable as their spooky plots, mutated into "packages." (A "package," for anyone not familiar with lit-biz argot, is a thin envelope of words, flexible enough to contain huge volumes of money and hot air. Once floated in book form, it is likely to become a best seller, then a "major motion picture" or a short television series.) Having signed a multibook contract for more than $1 million, Mr. King has now published a collection of his short stories, most of which first appeared in Cavalier magazine, and there seems little likelihood that Night Shift won't be commercially successful.

Yet for all this, Mr. King remains disarmingly modest. In a foreword he concedes that much horror fiction is formulaic and that he is "not a great artist." He is simply obsessed by the subject of fear, wants to convey this obsession as palpably as possible, and believes he can best do so by emphasizing "story value." "Characterization, theme, mood, none of these things is anything if the story is dull."

Some of his plots are indeed imaginative, even ingenious. In "Gray Matter" a beer-swilling slob metastasizes into a loathsome, oozing monster that reproduces like an amoeba. In "Battleground" a professional hit man is attacked by toy soldiers—an amusing variation on Gulliver among the Lilliputians. In "Trucks" motorized vehicles declare war on man.

But it seems not to have occurred to Mr. King that style is crucial to story, as are characterization and theme. His own characters seldom serve any purpose save as ballast for his bizarre plots, and because he has no greater ambition than to shock, his best stories have about as much thematic content as Gahan Wilson's macabre cartoons. His worst stories strain mightily to generate one last frisson, using twist endings that should have died with O. Henry, the hoariest cliches of the horror-tale subgenre ("I was shaking in my shoes") and lines that provoke smiles rather than terror ("Warwick was . . . eating a cold hamburger with great relish"). It's baffling to think that anybody might find these stories fascinating or frightening, but as Stephen King writes, "there's still strange things in the world."