[In the following review of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Nicholls declares that while critics may not be impressed by King's "baggy—if exuberant—tales, "fans will find the collection entertaining and satisfying.]

Pay no heed, Stephen King says in the introduction to Nightmares and Dreamscapes, to the critics, their voices "the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last 30 years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent." There's certainly nothing skimpy about this collection of large, leisurely short stories packed with dozens of gaudy, baffled characters reluctant to believe the varied but uniformly outrageous threats that confront them, forever trying to talk or think themselves out of some unpleasant situation until, inevitably, they're trapped. Even the horrors here are oversized: a resilient vampire with a particularly gross sense of humor; an invading army of hungry, meateating toads; and, most marvelous, batlike beings who are passing quite successfully as humans and can be seen as they truly, hideously are only by smokers—and only by those smokers who ration themselves to a few cigarettes a day. Fans of Mr. King's work will find here his usual menu: wild conspiracies; repellent, zestful monsters; scenes speckled and splashed with gore. Critics, that yipping chorus that seems to unsettle Mr. King more than all the ghouls in his stories, are unlikely to be converted by these baggy—if exuberant—tales.