Rating: 
Summary: These stories are "just right" for quick stress relief
Review: I had tremendous fun reading these stories. I read them out of order & in keeping with my mood at the time. These stories are very diverse. If you've never read Stephen King, you will get a "true sense" of his talent by reading these stories.
Rating: 
Summary: King's best short-story collection
Review: This is, by far, King's best short-story collection. I had gotten the impression, by word-of-mouth, that since "Bag of Bones," King's writing has been more mature, more literary and deeper than anything he's been putting out. With "Everything's Eventual," he proves he's as good as everyone's been saying. But don't think that these stories aren't scary -- there are quite a few that will keep his loyal readers in frightened fits. Check out "The Road Virus Heads North," "1408," "Riding the Bullet," and "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe," the last of which is beautifully written. The more literary stories include "The Man in the Black Suit," "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away," and "The Death of Jack Hamilton." While these stories may not scare you as much, take a good look at King's writing: These are certainly deeper than anything he's written in "Night Shift" or the unholy abomination that is "Skeleton Crew." Be sure to check "Everything's Eventual" out! It's well worth the read. And thank you, Mr. King, for putting out one last, wonderful!, short-story collection!
Rating:
Summary: Must-Have for King fans
Review: If you're a fan of the works of Stephen King, you NEED this book -- badly. It has something for everyone -- straight drama, bone-chilling horror, the Dark Tower -- all told with King's usual skill. It includes the e-book Riding the Bulley and audio books Blood+Smoke and LT's Theory of Pets. They also include a few liner notes from King on each story telling a little bit about where it came from, what he thinks of it, etc.I've written little mini-reviews below of teach story. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on one story or another. But that's the point. You're certain to find something you like. 1) Autopsy Room Four -- a man is brought in for autopsy -- but is he really dead? A nice little horror story.
2) The Man in The Black Suit -- A young boy runs into a terrifying stranger in the woods. Typical King -- reign you in with the characters, then turn on the horror. A pleasure.
3) All That You Love Will be Carried Away -- a strange little drama about a man in a hotel room and his obsession with graffiti. I didn't like this at first but it's grown on me.
4) The Death of Jack Hamilton -- a story of Depression Era gangsters, complete with John Dillinger. Straight drama but a little unsatisfying -- it's not really his forte.
5) In the Deathroom -- from Blood+Smoke. A claustrophic story of a journalist taken prisoner by a 3rd world government. A drama and an unlikely one at that. Just OK.
6) The Little Sister of Eluria -- a tale of Roland the Gunslinger before we met him on his quest for the Dark Tower. If you're a DT fan, this make EE a must-have book. The style and especially the ending are pure Dark Tower. How I've missed it.
7) Everything's Eventual -- good horror story with shades of Lovecraft about a young man with a strange talent and an even stranger job. It's good, but the political shift at the end was a little jarring.
8) LT's Theory of Pets -- Drama with a touch of horror about a man describing the breakup of his marriage. Touching and funny.
9) The Road Virus Heads North -- horror story of a haunted painting. Just OK. He's written this story before -- and much better -- in the Sun Dog and Rose Madder.10) Lunch at the Gotham Cafe -- vicious little story from Blood and Smoke about a crazy Maitre'D who interrupts a divorcing couple at lunch. Good, but not great.
11) Deja Vu -- strange and scary story about a woman going on vacation with her husband. Follows on a theme that first appeared in Storm of the Century
12) 1408 -- My favorite. From Blood and Smoke. A truly frightening tale about a haunted hotel room.
13) Riding the Bullet -- mixture of drama and horror. About a young man hitchhiking home to see his ailing mother. Drama works very well, horror doesn't.
14) Lucky Quarter -- an odd story about a hotel maid who is tipped a whole quarter -- perhaps a lucky quarter? A poor finish to the collection.
Rating:
Summary: Another wonderful collection
Review: While King's novels tend to be rather uneven (the difference in quality between, say, MISERY and THE TOMMYKNOCKERS was so great that it's hard to believe intensity of the former could have been penned by the same man who was responsible for the boring verbosity of the latter), but I have never picked up a bad collection of short stories by King. From the very beginning his short stories have simply been incredible, and the stories in this collection are no different. His style has changed, but his ability to move you has not. And a great thing about a collection of short stories is you have within one cover, myriad flavors to try. "The Road Virus Heads North," for instance, is reminiscent of his earlier stuff, frightening, unexplained, intense, while "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" is poignant and beautifully ambiguous, containing a character you grow to love just a little bit during the short span of the story. For my money, this book is a better buy than his recent novels.
Rating:
Summary: Great Intro To Stephen King
Review: I give this book 4-1/2 stars. I've always known about Stephen King and his reputation for writing truly scary books that are so good that many are turned into movies. But I really didn't know which book to choose to start actually reading instead of watching Hollywood's turn on his writing, thus I thought fourteen short stories would be a good start. Boy was I a happy camper when I flew through this incredible book. The book is a very interesting hodgepodge of stories that take you away into different places and scenarios with each story. As one reviewer stated, Stephen has a way of telling stories that make you feel like he is talking to you one-on-one and his personal insights and meanings of each story give you a cool, different perspective on the stories. Oh, did I also mention that this book is quite scary too. Together with the brevity of the stories, (although I really didn't care for "The Little Sisters of Eluria") makes this a "must-have" for an introduction to the creepy world of Mr. King or for that matter any reading fan. I personally liked reading myself a good campfire, ghost story before I went to bed each night.
Rating:
Summary: THE KING IS STILL THE KING
Review: In the near thirty years that Stephen King has been writing, he has undoubtedly proven that he is a writer of excellence. He has honed his craft from the "horror" genre into just being a darned good story teller. And even when his stories ultimately fail (such as in "Cujo"), one can't deny his power as the writer of the century (20th). As much as I admire King, though, I wish he hadn't totally abandoned what he did best: out and out scary tales that made you shudder when you read them--the vampires amid the seeminly normal "Salem's Lot"; the bond of childhood friendship and the impending horrors of "It,"; the doomed people greedily seeking their gluttonous fantasies in "Needful Things,"; the evil car in "Christine,"; the victimized "Carrie"; and all of his other truly scary stories. While I have enjoyed his short stories, most notably in "Skeleton Crew" and "Night Shift," I never fully enjoyed "Nightmares and Dreamscapes," nor this current collection of fourteen "dark" tales. It seemed as though King was insistent on being a literary force, one who would be taken seriously as something other than a "horror" writer. I feel that King's status as a horror writer is what has made him the force he is. So with that in mind, let me say that I only read thirteen of the stories, as I never could get into the Dark Tower series. The stories I read have a varying mixture of plot and character studies, and King continues to reign supreme with some of the characters he gives us in this collection. The narrator in "L.T.'s Theory on Pets" is a brilliant narrative, that is both funny and eerie. If L.T.'s wife was really killed by the Axe Man, where is her body and who is the Axeman? All of the stories have something of merit, but not all of them were truly scary or unnerving. "The Road Virus Goes North" is a spooky tale, but is reminiscent of the Night Gallery episode in which Roddy McDowall sees his fate change on the picture. That still doesn't negate the terror in this story as the writer knows his fate is coming after him. It's one of the best in the book. "Riding the Bullet" is unsettling in that it really doesn't explain itself truly. The hero's encounter with the dead driver is quite frightening, but its denouement offes little other than that the boy's guilt over the death of his mother haunts him; what IF he had stayed with the crotch-grabbing, pee-smelling old man? One of my favorites is "This Feeling, the One You Can Only Say is French". This deja vu thriller works on several levels, and its conclusion is haunting, it's one of his best I think in years. "Lunch at the Gotham" is out and out gory slapstick, that gives us a crazed maitre'd, with King's underlying theme that no one really pays attention to what goes on around them. And do we ever really know why the wife left her husband? "Luckey Quarter" (and why is the luckey mispelled?) is a hopeful story that shows a mother's love and faith in her children---but scary? Dark? Not really. The opener "Autopsy Room Four" is a blatant rip off of an old Twilight Zone episode, which King readily admits. His method of discovering the cataleptic corpse is however very up to date, sexually oriented, I'm sure, to please our current marketplace of readers. "1408" is a wipeout in my opinion. We get this guy held by a foreign country for his contributions to a drug lord; he gets out, and makes it back, so what?
This book also has several significant subplots involving smoking; I wonder if King has some kind of hidden agenda in this one?
At any rate, King's fans won't be totally disappointed in this collection. He knows how to write; I just wish he would continue to let us see how much he knows how to scare!!
RECOMMENDED
Rating:
Summary: Chilling and Wonderful
Review: I actually was a little aprehensive about this book. I wasn't overly fond of his last 2 books (Black House and Dreamcatcher) and was worried that maybe SK was losing his touch.
I needn't have worried. This book of short stories is fantastic! I never read the stories in a collection in order, and I was surprised that in jumping around, each story was as good, if not better than the last.
My favorite story was probably the one about the man who wakes up only to find that he is in a morgue about to have an autopsy done on him and they don't know he's alive and he is paralyzed and can't tell them. Truly creepy! If you've been a little worried about SK's writing ability, don't be -- buy this book and you will be happily surprised!
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: Amazing the way only King can do. I also loved Dreams: Gateway to the True Self.
Rating:
Summary: if stephen king has really retired, i have no reason to live
Review: Stephen King is probably my favorite author of all time, and that's saying something because I read a lot and always have. I've read IT five or six times, and each time the book has meant something more and different to me, each time I've cried. I've read his early writing (Carrie, Salem's Lot), his epics (The Stand, Hearts in Atlantis), his famous (The Shining, Needful Things) and his work as Bachman (The Long Walk, Rage). I've read King for a long time, and feel pretty intimately familar with his work. That said, I've got high standards for short stories, having read and re-read Dean Koontz's excellent collection, Strange Highways. Everything's Eventual is a solid group of stories from King, but seem surprisingly formulaic as a collection of his works. Most notable about this book is its conversational introduction and explanation by the author, and the anecdote on how the stories got their order (King used a deck of cards to assign the stories numbers) is cute. Also positive is the fact that King included a paragraph after each story about the story's creation (or the origin of the idea or his thoughts on the story). Autopsy Room Four is a horror story about being autopsied from the first person perspective. The plot drags, as the whole story takes place in the span of maybe ten minutes, but it's good writing and there's an unexpected plot twist towards the end. Luckey Quarter was my favorite because it seemed very real, and I liked thinking about the idea behind it when I was done. Riding the Bullet turns the traditional hitchhiker ghost story into a novella, and King does it with flair. I wasn't a fan of The Little Sisters of Eluria because it seemed to me to be a 50 page advertisement/teaser for the upcoming Dark Tower books King has purportedly been writing. However, I saw during a ... trip that Stephen King is supposedly retiring, so who knows when new work will surface.
Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: This is a tough one for me, as I'm a die-hard fan of Stephen King and his writing. Several of his books and short-stories are included in my all-time favorite tales, periodically pulled off the shelf and read again and again. However, he falters a bit here, at least in my opinion. Several stories are excellent, Road Virus Heads North, The Man in the Black Suit, Everything's Eventual, and L.T.'s Theory of Pets are all fine reads, showing yet again that Mr. King is NOT a hack writer who got lucky but rather a skilled master of the writing craft. In one sentence he can make a character feel real and alive. Unfortunately, the quality of the stories is variable. Lunch at the Gotham Cafe, Little Sisters, etc. simply aren't up to his usual standards. They're not bad but they simply aren't as fine as what he has shown that he can write. 1408, in particular, is a heart-breaker. It's excellent until our writer enters that room, than it falls apart. It seemed that he was shooting for a Lovecraftian feel at that point and it just didn't work, sadly. All of that said, there are gems in here. However, you have to dig for them. It's worth picking up but perhaps a wait for the paperback is in order. Matt
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