The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is Stephen King’s latest collection of stories. It contains several pieces I’ve read before: Mile 81 and Ur were released as stand-alone e-books (and upon revisiting the later, I liked it quite a bit more than I did), and Blockade Billy was published with Morality tacked on.
Not every tale is an ace in the hole (with the poems The Bone Church and Tommy doing next to nothing for me), but there are some real gems here: The Dune, where you think you know where its heading, and then King pulls the rug from under your feet in the very last line; Under the Weather is quite the opposite: you quickly figure it out, end then you get exactly that. In Drunken Fireworks we are back in Castle Rock, where a Fourth of July fireworks show-off gets way out of hand; Bad Little Kid and Obits reads like Stephen King having fun, and, finally, both A Death and Herman Wouk Is Still Alive stood out for being reminders that sometimes things are just what they seem and bad shit just happens to everybody.
- Book read
- Stephen King — The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
- First line
- I’ve made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight.