Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Rating:
Summary: You gotta listen to meeeeeeee!!!!!
Review: I never really read the book but I listened to the audio tape. The 8 stories were exellent. Some of King's Best only that they were all his short stories and he doesn't write short stories a lot. All in all they were great.

Rating:
Summary: If all else fails
Review: Short stories can be one of the best forms of fiction. For one they are short and to the point, no need to build characters or find a structural backbone for the plot. And the best thing is that they usually deliever the plot within a few pages and there is not a lot of time and wasted energy boring your way through a four-hundred-plus page book that consists of no plot impact. Much like Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King presents a terrific collection of stories that develop a sense of intrigue and awe. I give his other short story works a plus rating as well.

Rating:
Summary: good enough
Review: This book was a great read. Although Stephen King has done much better with his writing. Some of the stories in the book could've been left out (my pretty pony)(brooklyn august). Oh well, it's still a good book.

Rating:
Summary: Great book! I loved it
Review: This was a great book. I love Stephen King's short stories. This book had some very good ones. My favorites were Dolan's Cadilac, Chattery Teeth, and The Moving Finger. There are some boring ones ,like the essay, but I just suggest you skip that one.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK!!
Review: if you like thrilling short stories,this book has 20 of them!! A Great book! invest your time to read this book. You'll enjoy it

Rating:
Summary: High quality short fiction
Review: This is one of the best collections of short fiction that I have ever read in any genre, and clearly shows that Stephen King is a much better writer of short fiction than he is of novels. I wish he would write nothing but short fiction after reading this. The book starts with a satisfying tale of revenge in which a mafia boss is buried alive in his cadillac by the husband of one of his murdered victums. The next story, The End of the Whole Mess, is good, but it is a rip-off of the classic Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. In my opinion the best story in the book is Chattery Teeth. A novelty toy winds up saving a business man's life by biting the manhood off of a generation x, punk hitchhiker. The Moving Finger is also well done. Imagine seeing a finger coming out of a shower drain, and as it slowly gets bigger, and bigger, the person seeing it because more, and more insane until he takes a chainsaw to it. Rock and Roll Heaven just delighted me. A couple get lost in the wilderness, and are trapped in a town, and forced to watch dead musicians play nightly rock concerts. Elvis Presley is the mayor. The 5'oclock Club reminded me of one of those weird comic book covers from the 60's that seemed paradoxical. How come nobody can see those monsters besides me? Along with vampire stories, zombies, and a story reminicent of H.P. Lovecraft, there is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche which was a pleasant surprise for me, since I collect Sherlock Holmes pastiches. This was a pretty good mystery, and captured Doyle's idiom fairly accurately. The diversity found in this collection makes me want to see more short fiction by King, and I'd like to see him write in other genre's as well. This collection shows that King's writing skills are improving despite some recent lackluster novels.

Rating:
Summary: short-n-sweet
Review: For those of you who like King's style and subject-matter, but deplore his wordiness, THIS is the book for you! This is the only King book I've purchased, read,and kept on the shelf (as opposed to donating it to the library).

Rating:
Summary: THIS BOOK WAS HIS BEST EVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: I THINK THIS WAS HIS BEST EVER BECAUSE I LOVE SHORT STORIES. mY FAVORITE WAS DOLLANS CADIALAC! i THOUGHT THIS WAS THE BEST BACAUSE I LOVE REVENGE AND IM GLAD HE GOT REVENGE! I ALSO LIKED 10 OTHERS THAT WERE JUST MARVELOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I RECOMEND THIS BOOK VERY HIGHLY TO STEVEN KING LOVERS

Rating:
Summary: Scary??
Review: Ouch! I thought this was a fair book. Some stories much better than others! I loved dedication, chattery teeth, dolan's cadilac, and the moving finger the most! I dislike the sherlock homes story and the essay.

Rating:
Summary: What is Stephen King taking?
Review: An elementary school teacher leads her students down the hall and kills them, one by one. A tabloid photographer pursues a vampire with a private pilots license, finding a grisly horror in a small airport and meeting a modern Dracula. A single finger sticks out of a man's bathroom drain while he is watching a quiz show, triggering a life-destroying madness. The dead come alive and walk the shores of Maine, succesfully ending the world and sending isolated islanders into hostile terror. A couple gets lost in a dark end of London and find some very Lovecraftian terror. In Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, it seems that reality and the macabre come together in what is almost a natural effect, blending horror, fantasy, and even non-fiction (in an essay about baseball called "Head Down") to make what may just be the perfect page entertainment. While some people insist that short stories and novellas are not as enjoyable as full-length novels, I find myself begging to differ. With short stories, you can begin them and sometimes finish them in a few minutes to an hour, engrossing yourself in and enjoying an entire tale in a fraction of the time it takes you to read a novel. They are easy to enjoy without having to allow the time for the reading of an entire book. And, perhaps most importantly, you can be entertained on an equal level with the best novels. All these things only add to the power of King's collection, his fifth after "Night Shift," "Different Seasons," "Skeleton Crew," and "Four Past Midnight." His imagination, as usual, astounds, and, in many of the stories, scares the reader silly. And, as usual, he somehow still retains some sense of literary quality in the muddled pits of darkness and terror (and, more notably, Things That Go Bump In The Night). There is always something more beyond the night terrors and evil demons and unexplainable phenomena; for example, in a story called "The Moving Finger," King demonstrates his unique talent for showing a characters' descent into madness, something he has also emlployed in "Carrie" and "The Shining." In "The End of the Whole Mess," we see the narrator's thoughts as the world comes to an end and he is the brother of the man who caused it. In "Suffer the Little Children," King skillfully recounts the actions of an elementary school teacher who has always been confined by a belief in tough rules and strict punishments as she comes face to face with the fact that her mind, always centered in hard reality, is coming apart with the realization that her students may be unearthly beings with an evil intent (we never find out if the children are really the beings she thought they were or just the products of her madness). All of this, and much more, shows us, in the end, that Stephen King is not confined by the constraints of his "brand name" (particularly, a horror novelist) and that he has, and will, write things that break through and go far beyond those constraints. For now, though, we can be content with these, and many more, stories, which are just as valid as any great American novel, and more enjoyable.