There's a reason why he's referred to as The King and it's not just his last name. Stephen King proves his talent again and again through his prolific story-telling and does so again in You Like It Darker. This collection of twelve short stories embodies its title but it's not only dark. It's supernatural, poignant, and mysterious. However, a little mystery is good, as King's character Lloyd Sunderland thinks as he gazes into the amber eyes of his dog in the story titled "Laurie".
In "Two talented Bastids", a reporter wants to know how two friends (by all accounts ordinary), just happened to become remarkably successful and famous (nay, cultural icons!), for two different reasons, at the exact same time. One might think a deal with the devil might've occurred; however, their extreme luck is granted to them (one could argue) by something more disturbing. In "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream", Danny has a dream about the location of a dead body, reports it, and is hounded by an obsessive and unhinged police officer that will not believe the fact of Danny's dream and thinks Danny did the killing himself.
In "Rattlesnakes" (here the characters and storyline of Cujo are revisited), Vic Trenton is haunted by the ghosts of twin four-year-old boys and needs to consult his own, less-scary ghost about how to shed them. In "The Answer Man", a young man named Phil Parker consults a roadside clairvoyant periodically throughout his life who answers all of his questions about where his life is heading, good or bad.
A pervasive theme in these stories is belief or lack there-of and King's characters repeatedly reflect on that. Ella Davis, the good cop in "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream", has this thought as she's trying to alert her colleagues to a stop something Danny sees in a second dream from happening: "lack of belief is the curse of intelligence". And the Answer Man cautions Phil Parker, "educated people cruise along on a magic carpet of ego, making assumptions that are often wrong". However, as Danny puts it simply at the end of the story, "belief is hard" and as King's character Vic Trenton in "Rattlesnakes" says, "Shadows don't exist unless there's something to make them".
Stephen King writes in his afterword, "horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic. A paradox, but a true one". I'm listening, Stephen King! I give You Like It Darker five stars out of five. https://youtube.com/shorts/t_FlZ7Gqo0g?si=Xy1_8Jzomr3WkYel
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