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 [Mark] Twain, [Edgar Allan] 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….

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….

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….

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….

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

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…. 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.