The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King review – dark stories with moments of magic

With its killer cars and visions of death foretold, this collection of short works recycles familiar themes, but it also reveals King’s mastery of the novella

Often too long to sell to magazines and too short to sit alone on the bookshop shelf, the novella has long been sidelined as an awkwardly impractical form of fiction. Yet from heart-stopping skirmishes with maniacs in Big Driver and The Gingerbread Girl to the monster apocalypses of The Mist and The Langoliers, Stephen King has shown a remarkable knack for making the novella seem like the Platonic ideal of fiction. A classic King novella takes time to tease out the implications of its alarming central idea, but the ending still comes swiftly enough to make the final page resound like a slammed door.

Sure enough, in this new book of shorter fiction, the novella again proves his sweet spot. The 57 spellbinding pages of “Ur” are the highlight of a less-than-vintage collection. One wonders what Amazon were hoping for in the way of product placement when they approached King (pictured) to write an e-format story to promote the second version of the Kindle. What they got was a startling jack-in-the-box of a tale in which a literature teacher’s freshly delivered reading device provides a portal into a multiverse of written works, including new masterpieces from Hemingway and Poe. As with his evil clowns down drains, or possessed automobiles, a ludicrous premise is turned into an insinuatingly believable story thanks to King’s true superpower: suspending our disbelief by dint of a 360-degree field of brilliant HD detail.

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