Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

STEPHEN KING – SIX SCARY STORIES – ELODIE HARPER, MICHAEL BUTTON, MANUEL SARAGOSA, STUART JOHNSTONE, PAUL BASSETTE DAVIES, NEIL HUDSON – 2016

These six stories are funny but not really scary, except if you are scared of the dark, if not only dusk. They are also slightly too short most of them so they cannot develop the situations they envisage enough to give them any depth. They in other words are rather simple if not superficial. They are like jokes: they all depend on their punch lines, but fear and fright is not built by a punch line. They are built by an atmosphere, a development, an irresistible and unavoidable, fatal and fatalistic development or momentum that accumulates scary elements one on top of the other. A scary story must be scary from the very first words or at least paragraph. It’s not the case here.

Why does Stephen King get involved in this kind of publication in his old age? He should have better things to do, like write a couple of Dark Tower episodes, or a new trilogy. It is true these stories read easily and fast but that’s not the main characteristic I am looking for in a story. And we all know no one can count the spots of a leopard if he is alive and energetic, and you can’t change them either as a famous African advert says (which makes the story slightly racist, as if dictatorships did not or do not exist in the West), so the attempt or order to count them is at best vain and probably nothing but bull, though more on the side of the ox than the bull, in other words emasculated. And frankly that kind of dictatorship is kind of ridiculous. There is a lot more to say on such political development in our modern world.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU