Title: Everything’s Eventual
Author: Stephen King
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 540
Rating: 4/5
Everything’s Eventual is a collection of Stephen King’s short stories, although a YouTube friend of mine made me laugh by leaving a comment on one of my videos saying that with Stephen King, you should call them long stories. They’re not too long here though, and there’s maybe 15-20 stories for you to sink your teeth into here.
They’re also not necessarily his most well-known stories, and indeed my edition has the movie cover for 1408 because it’s presumably the most famous story in there, and I haven’t seen (or heard of) the movie before getting started. It also wasn’t exactly the best story in the collection, although it had some fun ideas. It was mostly about a writer going mad after going into a haunted hotel room against the advice of the proprietor.
One of the best stories was also the first one, a story called Autopsy Room Four about a man who wakes up on a mortuary table in the middle of his own autopsy with no way of signalling to people that he was still conscious. It forces you as the reader to consider what you might do if you were in the same place, and it also plays with the whole will they/won’t they of the autopsy team who are prepping to go ahead and get started.
Stephen King
I also liked The Road Virus Heads North, and indeed I thought that was a cracking title as well as just a good story. I did feel as though it was familiar though, and it gave me this strange sensation that I’d already read it before. It basically follows what happens when a guy buys a strange painting from a garage sale and finds himself unable to destroy it. And in the meantime, the painting is changing and getting closer and closer to its new owner.
I think it’s also pretty cool that King decided upon the order of the stories by assigning each of them to a card and then dealing out the cards at random. He says in the introduction that he was pretty happy with how it turned out, and I’m inclined to agree. The only thing that I would have changed would have been to have switched out a different story at the end, because I thought it was a little weak.
I also thought it was interesting how so many of the stories had an undertone of somebody quitting smoking, such as Lunch at the Gotham Café, which was delightfully bleak, super gory and pretty much what I look for from a horror story. I also liked the little explanation that he included with it, where he said that while the maitre’d of the restaurant was crazy, so too were the couple who were getting divorced, in their own little way.
All in all then, this was a nice little addition to my Stephen King collection and I’m glad I finally got round to it. In fact, if you’ve got a copy of this lying around and you haven’t picked it up, I’d encourage you to go ahead and get a shift on.
Stephen King Quote
