Literature / Night Shift (1978)

aka: Night Shift

"Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear."

— Stephen King, in the foreword

Night Shift is Stephen King's first collection of short stories, originally published in 1978. It contains several "excursions into horror" which had earlier appeared in magazines, along with some previously unpublished ones.

Not to be confused with the 1982 comedy film directed by Ron Howard and starring Michael Keaton, or with the 1990 LucasArts videogame.

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Stories in Night Shift:

• "Jerusalem's Lot": Scrapbook Story set in 1850. Pastiche/Homage to H. P. Lovecraft. Basis for the MGM+ TV series Chapelwaite.
• "Graveyard Shift": Workers cleaning up the basement of an old textile mill meet giant rats. Basis for the film of the same name.
• "Night Surf": Post-apocalyptic story, where nearly all humans have died in an influenza pandemic. Precursor to The Stand.
• "I Am the Doorway": Former astronaut discovers that an alien lifeform inhabits his body.
• "The Mangler": A folding/pressing machine in an industrial laundromat is possessed by a demon. Adapted to film in 1995.
• "The Boogeyman": A man tells how his children were killed one by one by the eponymous monster. Adapted into the 2023 film of the same name.
• "Gray Matter": A man turns into a Blob Monster after drinking a can of contaminated beer. Adapted in the first episode of Creepshow.
• "Battleground": A professional hitman is attacked by living toy soldiers. Later adapted into a segment of the TNT miniseries Stephen King's Nightmares & Dreamscapes.
• "Trucks": Trucks and other big machines revolt against humanity. Basis of the film Maximum Overdrive, later filmed again under the original title.
• "Sometimes They Come Back": A teacher's brother was killed by teenage greasers when they were kids. Many years later, they appear in his class, still as teenagers. Made into an instantly-forgotten movie followed by two sequels.
• "Strawberry Spring": A story about a serial killer with a Twist Ending. Later adapted into a podcast.
• "The Ledge": A crime boss blackmails a man into circumnavigating a 5-inch ledge surrounding a multistory building. Filmed as a segment of Stephen King's Cat's Eye.
• "The Lawnmower Man": Pan operates a lawn moving business. The movie with the same name has nothing to do with the story, despite using King's name.
• "Quitters, Inc.": A group of ruthless criminals operate a firm that helps people to quit smoking. Or else. Filmed as a segment of Stephen King's Cat's Eye.
• "I Know What You Need": A social outcast uses black magic to get the girl of his dreams.
• "Children of the Corn": In a small Nebraska town, a demonic entity convinces the children to kill all the adults. Adapted into a short film called Disciples of the Crow and then a full length movie, followed by several badly-received sequels.
• "The Last Rung on the Ladder": A man tells a childhood story about him and his sister who later committed suicide. Very different from King's usual style.
• "The Man Who Loved Flowers": A story about young love - albeit with a Twist Ending.
• "One for the Road": An old man tries to help a family after their car is stranded near the abandoned town of Jerusalem's Lot during a blizzard. Sort of a sequel to 'Salem's Lot.
• "The Woman in the Room": A man euthanizes his terminally ill mother with painkillers.

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Tropes in the short stories:

• The Adjectival Man: "The Boogeyman", "The Lawnmower Man".
• After the End: "Night Surf" shows the survivors of a global flu pandemic.
• Alien Geometries: Inverted in "I Am the Doorway", where the alien eyes see a sieve as "a device constructed of geometrically impossible right angles".
• And I Must Scream: Possibly, for the alien coexisting in the astronaut's body. It's never clear if the alien took control deliberately, or was inadvertently trapped there.
• Apocalyptic Log: "Jerusalem's Lot" is told through the diary entries of aristocrat Charles Boone, returning to his neglected family mansion in Preacher's Corners, Maine, and the horrors he uncovers in the nearby abandoned colonial village of Jerusalem's Lot. It also has another Apocalyptic Log in-story, when Charles finds the diary of his grandfather, Robert.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In "Sometimes They Come Back," Vinnie drops his coolness act momentarily when Jim asks him, "Where were you? Before?" (i.e., "before you came back to life after being dead") And his coolness completely shatters when Jim goes on to ask, "They dug you a hole, didn't they, Vinnie? Six feet deep. Right in the Milford Cemetery. Six feet of—" "You shut up!"
• Artifact of Doom: In "Jerusalem's Lot", De Vermis Mysteriis is a Tome of Eldritch Lore created in the short stories of Robert Bloch, and mentioned in a few by H. P. Lovecraft. Reading from it temporarily possesses Charles with the spirit of his ancestor and summons an Eldritch Abomination. De Vermis Mysteriis would later play a significant part in another King novel, Revival.
• Artistic License – Biology: Bats aren't flying rats. However, in light of the mutant abominations discovered in the sub-cellar, it's possible that the flying creatures really are rats that have somehow grown wings rather than actual bats.
• Asshole Victim: Lester Billings in "The Boogeyman". It gets a little lost in the horrific tragedy of his story, but paying attention to all his dialogue reveals that he is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and abusive (he speaks of hitting his wife in the same terms one would describe taking out the garbage in terms of problem solving, and also at least once struck one of his young children to silence them, not to mention he slut-shamed his wife by talking about 'how easily she went to bed with him before they were married'^note And becomes very angry when his therapist points out: "On the other hand, look how easily you went to bed with her."). He crosses the line when, scared of the Boogeymen, he purposely moves his son out of his room because the monster will go for him first. Because he's weaker. Whatever fate he suffers, he probably deserved worse.
  • Burt and Vicky Robeson in "Children of the Corn", both of whom do nothing but argue with each other throughout the story. They are irredeemably mean-spirited and annoying compared to their film counterparts. Unlike the film, both end up being sacrificed to He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
  • Warwick in "Graveyard Shift". As detailed below, he isn't very nice to his subordinates in the mill and makes Hall descend into the very lowest level of the basement, seemingly as revenge for threatening to blow the whistle about the mill's vermin problem. Hall might also count, as it's very strongly hinted that he's losing his marbles and led Warwick to his death.
  • Renshaw from "Battleground," despite the good fight he puts up, is a contract killer whom no one will miss.
  • Richie Grenadine from "Gray Matter" is described as a loud, fat pig of a man with poor hygiene who neglects and probably beats his child.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: From the perspective of the toy soldiers in "Battleground", Renshaw is essentially a Kaiju. They resort to using a toy-sized nuclear bomb to kill him.
• Bad Boss: Warwick in "Graveyard Shift" forces two of his employees to clean up a decrepit basement, even though it's not their job at all.
  • All things considered, Warwick is more of a Mean Boss. He doesn't force any of his employees to clean up the basement; they do so because they're getting paid time-and-a-half (double-time on the Fourth of July). He does, however, yell at, belittle and patronize the mill workers, and threatens to fire anyone who walks out because of the rats.
• The Bad Guy Wins: "Children of the Corn" ends with He Who Walks Behind The Rows continuing his control of the children and the protagonists dying.
  • In "The Boogeyman", the protagonist tries for years to escape the boogeyman who killed his offspring and stalked him endlessly. At the end of the story it turns out that the therapist he's been telling the tale to was the boogeyman in disguise, who evidently gets him (though considering what a horrible person the protagonist was, he's only not the bad guy in relation to the boogeyman, and deserved what happens to him).
• Bat Out of Hell: "Graveyard Shift" has giant bats that actually are mutant rats.
• Blob Monster: In "Gray Matter", a man slowly changes into a blob monster (hence the title) after drinking a can of contaminated beer.
• Body Horror: The eyes on the protagonist's fingers in "I Am the Doorway". Which eventually start appearing on his chest. A man turning into a Blob Monster in "Gray Matter". Also the severed fingers in "Sometimes They Come Back" and the body-folding in "The Mangler." ("A person isn't a sheet...They took what was left of her out in a basket.")
• Bolivian Army Ending: "The Mangler" and "Gray Matter" both end with the heroes about to fight the stories' respective creatures. It doesn't look good for them.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: "The Man Who Loved Flowers": man buys flowers for his girlfriend, talks and is nice with several people, and then bashes a woman's brains out.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Lester Billings pees himself in reaction to seeing the eponymous character coming out of Dr Harper's closet in "The Boogeyman".
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: In "Jerusalem's Lot", Boone manages to destroy the book, De Vermis Mysteriis. But the evil is not destroyed (Boone notes, "The burning of the book thwarted…it, but there are other copies"), and to cut his family's ties to the evil, he dives into the ocean. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either, as a descendant of the Boone line takes up residence in the ancestral home, and events begin again.
• Bully Brutality: The greaser bullies of "Sometimes They Come Back" killed a kid and come back from the dead to kill the (now grown) younger brother of the killed kid, who they were going to kill too but the car crash interrupted them.
• Cain and Abel: Philip and Robert Boone in "Jerusalem's Lot".
• Chekhov's News: "The Man who Loved Flowers" starts with a young man buying flowers for his girlfriend. The florist has a transistor radio that pours out bad news that nobody pays attention to; one of them is that a hammer murderer is still on the loose. At the end of the story, it turns out that the young man is the hammer murderer.
• Contraception Deception: In "The Bogeyman", Lester Billlings suspects that his wife lied about using an intrauterine device, because she wanted a third child after the first two died but he didn't.
• Corny Nebraska: While most of Stephen King's stories take place in Maine, in this story, the characters are driving through rural Nebraska when they come across a small town, Gatlin, where the characters worship and sacrifice to corn, and are tormented by a gigantic beast, He Who Walks Between The Rows. As a result, this is also replicated in Children of the Corn (the adaptation and its many sequels).
• Corrupt Church:
  • In "Jerusalem's Lot", the dominant cult of the colonial town practiced witchcraft and sacrifice and worshipped an Eldritch Abomination known as 'the Worm'. It is said to have begun as a offshoot of the Puritans.
  • In "The Children of the Corn", the town of Gatlin, Nebraska, has been taken over by a cult of homicidal young people who worship a pseudo-Christian diety and Eldritch Abomination called He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
• Cosmic Horror Story:
  • "Jerusalem's Lot".
  • "I Am the Doorway".
• Cosy Catastrophe: "Night Surf" features a group of teens in a small New England town in a world that has been almost depopulated by 'A6' superflu. They are traumatized by the deaths of almost everyone they have ever known, but at least they know they are immune. Then one of them catches A6.
• Covers Always Spoil: Older paperback covers of the book feature an illustration of the hand with the eyes in it from "I Am the Doorway".
• Creepy Cathedral: The church in Jerusalem's Lot. It has a picture that is an obscene parody of a Madonna and child and a large inverted cross.
  Charles: Lord...
  Calvin: There's no Lord here.
  • The church of The Children of the Corn has a mural with a Jesus with vulpine features.
• Creepy Child:
  • The children of "Children of the Corn", who pray to an unusual interpretation of God when they're not actively trying to murder adults and those who try to leave the town.
  • Francie the vampire girl in "One for the Road".
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The woman in "The Mangler" who essentially gets violently and gorily folded like laundry by the titular machine.
• Cruel Twist Ending: In "Jerusalem's Lot", our heroes have successfully fought back the undead and prevented the summoning of an Eldritch Abomination, at great personal loss. Charles Boone is left with no choice but to commit suicide to prevent his accursed family line, of whom he is the last, from ever reviving the cult and trying to resummon the Worm. He does so ... but his estate winds up in the hands of an unknown bastard relative who receives Charles's diary but dismisses it as superstitious nonsense.
  • "The Boogeyman" deals with a man whose three children were all killed by the eponymous boogeyman, as he explains his traumas to a psychologist. He leaves the psychiatrist's office and returns to ask when to schedule the next meeting... and discovers that the psychologist was actually the boogeyman in disguise.
  • After you've spent most of the story rooting for Burt in "Children of the Corn," he comes upon a clearing...
• Cult:
  • The aforementioned Corrupt Church in "Jerusalem's Lot", whose leader charmed the protagonist's ancestor into joining.
  • The "church" of Gatlin in "Children of the Corn", as well.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: It's part this and part spite that keeps Burt from listening to his wife's desperate pleading for him to heed the numerous warning signs that something is very, very wrong with the little town of Gatlin, Nebraska. It doesn't end well for either of them.
• Dirty Coward: Lester Billings. He used his own son as bait for the Boogeyman.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Even if your foreman is a grade-A jerkass, tricking him into getting eaten alive by a giant rat matriarch may be just a little too extreme, as far as payback goes.
• Downer Ending: Almost all of the stories.
  • "Jerusalem's Lot" ends with our protagonist, Charles Boone, dashing himself to death on the rocks at the foot of Chapelwaite; he believes himself to be the last link in a chain of familial evil. This turns out not to be true, however, because the presenter and editor of this epistolary story is a man named James Robert Boone, a distant relative of Charles. In the last line of the story, James says he can hear huge rats in the walls as well.
  • "Graveyard Shift" ends with the death of the protagonist, Hall, and the descent into the sub-sub-basement of the men who work in the mill; presumably some of them will not make it out alive.
  • At the end of "Night Surf", there is no resolution; the narrator states his belief earlier in the story that every member of the group will die, since they're all infected with Captain Trips.
  • "I Am the Doorway" ends with the narrator taking his own life, since new alien eyes have started growing on his chest.
  • "The Mangler" ends with the demon-infested machine pulling itself out of its concrete moorings and escaping the laundry in a killing frenzy.
  • At the end of "The Boogeyman", Lester Billings falls prey to the monster who killed his children.
  • They're still waiting at the end of "Gray Matter", but it sure doesn't look good for Henry Parmalee.
  • At the end of "Battleground", Renshaw dies in a miniature nuclear explosion.
  • At the end of "Trucks", the rigs are backed up for miles on the interstate and our narrator knows that he, the counterman and the girl will end up pumping gas until they simply drop dead. He tries to comfort himself with the hopes that maybe there are places they can't reach, or that they'll wear down and become immobile with rust in "fifty or sixty years", but understands deep down that the world will be stripped, dug out and burned by the machines just to make more paved roads, and that humanity will also be enslaved to build new vehicles on assembly lines. As he sees two jet contrails in the sky, he thinks, "I wish I could believe there are people in them".
  • "Strawberry Spring" ends with our protagonist believing that he is in fact Springheel Jack, the killer.
  • "The Lawnmower Man" ends with Harold Parkette falling victim to the titular character, his machine and Pan's cult.
  • "Quitters, Inc.": The protagonist is able to quit smoking and is on the path to become more successful, but he will be watched by The Mafia forever and forced to follow their commands on clean living... and the very last sentence of the story is him noticing that the wife of the friend that advised him on becoming a member of the group has had her pinky cut off (which is one of the many threats the group uses).
  • At the end of "Children of the Corn", Burt and Vicky end up sacrificed to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and that god demands the age of propitiation be lowered to 18.
  • "The Last Rung on the Ladder" ends on a terrible note, with Kitty committing suicide by swan-diving off a building, and Larry's knowledge that if only he had gotten her final letter sooner (it was plastered with several change-of-address stickers), he might have been able to prevent it.
  • "The Man Who Loved Flowers" ends with the murder of the woman in the alley; we learn that the young man is not in love, but is the deranged hammer murderer we heard mention of earlier in the story.
  • In "One for the Road", the two protagonists are unable to save the Lumley family who foolishly drove into 'Salem's Lot; the wife and daughter become vampires, and the husband quite probably becomes dinner. Tookey and Booth are barely able to escape themselves.
    • Even more so in conjunction with 'Salem's Lot, since it's apparent that Ben and Mark's attempt to burn the vampires out at the end of that novel didn't work, and the vampire population is still growing.
• Driven to Suicide: The protagonists in "I Am the Doorway" and "Jerusalem's Lot". Also, Kitty from "The Last Rung on the Ladder."
• Entitled to Have You: Ed in "I Know What You Need' feels he deserves Elizabeth and she can at least love him because he always knows exactly what she needs at any given time. It almost works...then we find out he used a Tome of Eldritch Lore to kill her current boyfriend and cheat reality to find out everything about her.
• Epistolary Story: "Jerusalem's Lot" is a series of letters from the narrator to a colleague of his.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Most of the characters in "Trucks" (trucker, counterman, girl).
• Evil Hand: "I Am the Doorway" was based around this trope. Although, technically, they weren't so much evil as the protagonist in a Cosmic Horror Story. We're much less likely to look upon killing mind-numbing alien terrors sympathetically when those terrors are humans, not tentacled, chitinous monstrosities.
• Evil Smells Bad: In "Jerusalem's Lot" all the buildings in the eponymous village smell terrible inside. This is probably due to the giant worm living beneath the church.
  • Also invoked in "Gray Matter". As the rescue mission gets closer to Richie's apartment, the narrator describes the smell as sharp and "mean."
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: In "I Am the Doorway".
• Fat Idiot: Wisconski in "Graveyard Shift", a tubby, lazy, whiny, annoying coward. The last bit probably saves his life, as he turns and scrambles back up the stairs as Hall and Warwick head further into the sub-cellar, where they encounter a horde of hungry mutant rats.
• Faux Affably Evil: The members of "Quitters, Inc." are people looking out for the health of their members... and are merciless members of The Mafia that have no problem talking threats like electrocution, dismembering and murder with a nice tone. While they do genuinely want to help their clients and show some genuine happiness for their success, the way they keep unnerving grins on their faces as they cheerfully talk about all the horrible tortures they inflict is more creepy than anything.
• Feathered Fiend: While navigating the ledge in "The Ledge", Norris has to contend with an angry pigeon defending its nest by pecking at his ankle.
• The Film of the Book: All of the stories except "Jerusalem's Lot" have seen film adaptations, whether in feature films, television films, or shorts. Of note are Children of the Corn (1984) and its many sequels; Cat's Eye, which incorporated "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge"; and Maximum Overdrive, adaptation of "Trucks" directed by Stephen King himself. Several ("Children of the Corn" and "Sometimes They Come Back") loose sequels were also filmed.
  • And in December 2019, MGM+ announced they would be creating a 10-episode "Jerusalem's Lot" miniseries starring Adrien Brody, though with the name "Chapelwaite". So that wraps up the whole book.
• Fingore: In "Sometimes They Come Back", Jim offers his left and right index fingers to the demon as partial payment for getting rid of the punks. He hacks them off with a pocketknife, and it's described in gory detail. Even better, he's unable to grip his knife in his right hand, so he simply rips off his left index finger.
• Forced to Watch: In "Quitters, Inc." the titular firm's method to make smokers quit is this: they keep them under constant surveillance, and if they smoke, the firm tortures their family members and forces them to watch it.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Ed Hamner from "I Know What You Need" had a dreadful childhood; his father saw him primarily as a meal ticket, and his mother was convinced he was a demon and tried to stab him to death at one point. But the story makes it clear that being a love-starved misfit in no way excuses his violation of Beth's mind and trust or his murdering Tony, and his immediate reaction to Beth finding out the truth (calling her an "ungrateful bitch" and giving her a sullen Death Glare) only cements how he only saw Beth as a prize or conquest.
• From Bad to Worse: In "Sometimes They Come Back", in order to get rid of the undead teenagers who are threatening him, Jim summons a demon who defeat them. Before the demon leaves, he tells Jim that he'll be back, and Jim realizes that he's gonna be even harder to get rid of.
• Ghost Town: Jerusalem's Lot is this at the time the eponymous story takes place (1850). It seems to happen a lot to the place.
• Going Cold Turkey: "Quitters, Inc.": So, you'd like our organization to help you quit smoking, eh? Well, we're going to force you to quit. Cold turkey. You'd better not weaken, either, because if you take just one more puff, we'll see you. But it won't be you who has to take the consequences.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Harold Parkette's death and subsequent ritual sacrifice in "The Lawnmower Man" is not described. The most we get is a cop's reaction to the remains of the latter.
• Greaser Delinquents: The gang of teenagers from "Sometimes They Come Back". When Jim Norman was a kid, they harassed him and his brother and murdered the latter. They died a few years later, but it didn't stop them from coming back as undead to harass the now-adult protagonist. He eventually decides to fight back by setting a demon on them.
• Haunted Technology: The titular machine in "The Mangler" gets possessed after an unlikely chain of events.
• The Heretic: James Boon in "Jerusalem's Lot", whose wacky witchcraft hijinks were apparently frowned on by mainstream Puritan churches in New England.
• Here We Go Again!: At the end of "Jerusalem's Lot", a descendant of Charles Boone moves to the mansion in the seventies, and ends his letter mentioning hearing "rats in the walls".
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: In "Jerusalem's Lot", Charles Boone and his ever-faithful manservant, Calvin McCann — who is also The Watson.
• Homage: "Jerusalem's Lot" is a Lovecraft pastiche, written in epistolary style with sprinklings of Purple Prose, and contains a Shout-Out to another Tome of Eldritch Lore from the Cthulhu Mythos, De Vermis Mysteriis.
• Homicide Machines: The titular machines in "Trucks" and "The Mangler" become alive on their own and their first instinct is, of course, to kill humans.
  • The toy soldiers in "Battleground" appear to be alive, offering Renshaw the chance to surrender.
  • The lawnmower in "The Lawnmower Man" ends up killing the protagonist.
  • "The Mangler" also features a murderous fridge.
    • The fridge sequence draws parallels with Patrick Hockstetter's fridge from It.
• Hostile Weather:
  • The nor'easter/blizzard in "One for the Road".
  • The norther in "Gray Matter"
• Human Sacrifice: In "Night Surf", the narrator describes how he and his friends burned up one of the flu victims in the hopes that "if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us" against the disease.
• Humanoid Abomination: In "Gray Matter", after Richie's transformation kicks in full force, he becomes an amoebic fungal monstrosity that is human only in it's rough body shape.
• Humans Are Ugly and Humans Are Cthulhu: The alien eyes in "I Am the Doorway" see everything in the world — but especially humans — as monstrous and abominable.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: In "I Am the Doorway", the alien eyes see humans as madness-inducing horrible.
• I Am a Humanitarian: Richie Grenadine in "Gray Matter", after turning into a Blob Monster, starts eating humans. (Though it could be argued that this is not cannibalism, because he isn't really a human being anymore).
• In Love with the Gangster's Girl: Stan Norris, the protagonist in "The Ledge" falls in love with the wife of Cressner, a crime boss. Cressner offers him a deal; if he can walk the ledge all the way around his apartment building, he's free to go with Cressner's wife and the money they stole. If he refuses, he'll be framed for heroin possession.
• In Name Only: The film The Lawnmower Man is so different from the short story that King successfully sued the producers for using his name.
  • "Jerusalem's Lot" has little continuity with 'Salem's Lot. That novel takes place over a century later, the town itself is unrecognizable, and it is a Gothic horror/vampire pastiche in the style of Dracula while the short story in this collection is a Cosmic Horror Story and pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft. Vampires do appear, but have little in common with the depictions in the novel. Justified in this case — the novel establishes that 'Salem's Lot was a place of evil long before Barlow came there, and implies that might have had something to do with his choosing it as his new home.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Quitters Inc. keeps its clients under surveillance, and if they smoke, kidnaps their loved ones and tortures them while they are Forced to Watch.
• Jerkass: Lester Billings, the protagonist of "The Boogeyman", is this in spades. He cares very little for his wife, constantly slut shaming her like his mother did and criticizing her for mourning their dead children because "when they're little, you don't get so attached to them." Even his children are no exception as he treats his first son like a sissy when he's scared of the dark (he was THREE). Nothing in his dialogue suggests any sort of warmth for his family except for his second son, the only one who looked like him, despite insisting that he loved his family. But then he also sold out his "favorite" child to the Boogeyman to save his own skin. When his wife knows the truth and finally divorces him, it's hard to even try feeling sorry for him, not even when the Boogeyman catches up to him anyways.
  • Burt and Vicky in "The Children of the Corn." Besides exploring Gatlin, they literally do nothing but bicker with each other viciously throughout. Imagine reading an entire short story about Beth and Jerry, and you get an idea what an ordeal King's story can be.
• The Killer in Me: The twist at the end of "Strawberry Spring"; Springheel Jack is the narrator himself.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Hall's plan after killing his foreman falls apart when the high-pressure hose he expected to clear his escape with is chewed up by the rats, reducing the water flow to a harmless trickle. He doesn't last long after that.
• The Last Title: "The Last Rung on the Ladder".
• Laughing Mad: Hall, the protagonist in "Graveyard Shift" begins to laugh, making "a high, screaming sound" as he's being Eaten Alive by a Swarm of Rats.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: In a way. In "I Am the Doorway", the protagonist eventually soaks his hands in kerosene, and puts them into fire to kill the alien lifeform inhabiting his body. It turns out that this was only a temporary solution.
• Lighter and Softer: The uncharacteristically sentimental "The Last Rung On The Ladder".
  Nary a rustle nor breath of other worlds in it.
• Living Toys: The toy soldiers in "Battleground" can move and, more importantly, have real weapons. Despite being murderous, they're actually the heroes of the story, exacting vengeance against the Villain Protagonist — a hitman who just killed a toymaker.
• Locked into Strangeness: The protagonist's hair at the end of "The Mangler" goes white after all he's witnessed. In "Gray Matter", the protagonist mentions that a sewer worker that he knew once saw something horrible in the sewers, which caused his hair to turn white in fifteen minutes.
• Lost in the Maize: "Children of the Corn" served as loose inspiration for an endless string of movies which are probably the example that a lot of people remember, and contributes a great deal to cornfields being associated with creepiness.
  "He began to walk in that direction, not having to bull through the corn any more. The row was taking him in the direction he wanted to go, naturally. The row ended up ahead. Ended? No, emptied out into some sort of clearing..."
• The Mafia: Quitters, Inc. was founded by a gangster named Mort 'Three-Fingers' Minelli, after he got lung cancer from smoking. They put their expertise to good use in a 'radical' quit smoking method.
• Mama Bear: A posthumous example, but in "Battleground" a hitman assassinates the owner of a toy making company. His mother was a witch who then sends a group of Living Toys after him to avenge her son's death.
• Meaningful Rename: In "The Children of the Corn", the children all gave themselves Biblical names after they started to worship 'He Who Walks Behind the Rows'.
• Mercy Kill: In "The Woman in the Room", the protagonist gives painkillers to his mother who is dying of cancer. He knows that they will kill her, and so does she, but neither of them say it openly.
• Mind Rape : Alice accuses Ed of this, to Beth, in "I Know What You Need."
  He might not mean to do you any harm, but he already has. He's made you love him by knowing every secret thing you want and need, and that's not love at all. That's rape.
• Mordor: Venus is portrayed like that in "I Am the Doorway". The protagonist says that his expedition around it was like "circling a haunted house in deep space."
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Elizabeth in "I Know What You Need" discovers at the end of the story that her boyfriend's accidental death on the job wasn't so accidental after all. Ed arranged it through a Voodoo-like hex.
• My God, What Have I Done?: "The Boogeyman" story involves Lester Billings, a former father of two, remorseful over how the titular monster killed his children and how he should have done something sooner.
• Nameless Narrative: "The Man Who Loved Flowers" and "The Woman in the Room". In the last, we know that the protagonist's name is John, because other characters call him by his name, but the narrative never does.
• Neverending Terror: To become a member of "Quitters, Inc." is to become a member for life. Literally.
• Next Sunday A.D.:
  • In "Strawberry Spring", written in 1968, the narrator recalls events happened in 1968 from the then-future year of 1976.
  • "I Am the Doorway", published in 1971, speaks of future space programs.
• Nice Guy: Despite being an aristocrat, Charles Boone in "Jerusalem's Lot" is involved in abolitionist causes and has a very good friendship with his manservant, Calvin.
• No Ending: "Gray Matter".
• No Name Given: The narrators in "Trucks" and "Strawberry Spring", the protagonist (and everybody else) in The Man who Loved Flowers. In several other stories, only the first or last names of the main characters are given:
  • Hall and Warwick in "Graveyard Shift".
  • All the characters in "Night Surf".
  • Arthur and Richard in "I Am the Doorway".
  • Cressner in "The Ledge".
  • Kitty and Larry in "The Last Rung on the Ladder".
  • Johnny in "The Woman in the Room".
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Lester Billings never sees the Boogeyman until the end, that is. However, he certainly hears it and is well aware of its presence in his house — he notes how a trail of slime appeared in the hallway one day and talks about how you could almost hear it dragging its claws over the bannister or sliding around. The Boogeyman's actions were stealthy but not too much — as Billings puts it, "it wanted you to hear it".
  • He Who Walks Behind the Rows in the "Children of the Corn". When it arrives to kill Burt, it's only described as "something huge, bulking up to the sky... something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs." The scene then ends with a literary version of the Gory Discretion Shot.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: The way "Quitters, Inc." makes you quit smoking: you quit or they will torture your loved ones. And if even that won't make you quit, they will kill you. From what little we see, it ironically has a very high success ratio.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampires (or nosferatu) in "Jerusalem's Lot" are never seen drinking blood, and serve primarily as zombie-like cultists.
  • Averted in "One for the Road", whose vampires (like those of 'Salem's Lot) are essentially modern versions of the classic vampire.
• Outliving One's Offspring: In "The Boogeyman", Lester Billings' three children were all killed by the titular monster.
• The Plague: A6 / Captain Trips, the "superflu" that has killed most of Earth's population in "Night Surf".
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Lester Billings thinks women should submit to their husbands and casually refers to black people as "niggers".
• Post-Modern Magik: Pan, the Greek god of the wilderness, apparently owns a landscaping company. The titular lawnmower man, a satyr, is a Yankees fan, and until he starts eating the grass is indistinguishable from a typical blue-collar worker.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: From the boy with the red hair in "Children of the Corn": "Remand your soul to God, for you will stand before His throne momentarily."^note Averted, as he does not kick Burt's ass; in fact, Burt kicks his, stabbing him in the throat with a jackknife.
• The Precarious Ledge: "The Ledge" is about a mob boss who forces his wife's lover to circumnavigate a five-inch ledge surrounding a pair of penthouses atop a high-rise building. When the man succeeds, the mob boss tells him he had his wife killed anyway, and in revenge the mob boss is overpowered and forced to do the same thing. The lover then waits for him with a loaded gun, because "he'd been known to welsh on a bet or two".
• Rodents of Unusual Size: In "Graveyard Shift", the workers encounter swarms of rats that get bigger and bigger, until they meet the giant, maneating mutant rat queen.
• Rule of Scary: In "Trucks", why did the trucks and other vehicles gain stentience and rebel against the humans? And who only large vehicles but not cars? No explanation is given.
  'What would do it?' The trucker was worrying. 'Electrical storms in the atmosphere? Nuclear testing? What?'
  'Maybe they're mad,' I said.
• Screw Your Ultimatum!: The toy soldiers offer Renshaw a chance to surrender. He responds with one word: "NUTS".
• Sequel Hook: The Cruel Twist Ending to "Jerusalem's Lot" certainly qualifies, but despite the fact that there actually are two sequels to this story, it's never really utilized. Both 'Salem's Lot and "One for the Road" go in very different directions with the concept.
• Serial Killer: The protagonists in "Strawberry Spring" and "The Man Who Loved Flowers"; both only kill women.
• The '70s : The collection was collected in 1978, and most of the stories were published in men's magazines in the 1970s. Some of the characters' back stories (Burt in "Children of the Corn" is a Vietnam veteran, for example), and the economic climate as described in the stories are reflective of the time, but they've held up well, averting the Unintentional Period Piece.
• Shout-Out: Necronomicon, H. P. Lovecraft's famous Tome of Eldritch Lore, appears in "I Know What You Need".
  • In "Jerusalem's Lot", repeated complaints by the main characters about the rats in the walls of the mansion and the whip-poor-wills that have taken to nesting on the building. The latter may be a Continuity Nod, alongside the presence of De Vermis Mysteriis, but the former probably isn't since it isn't actually rats, but the undead.
  • The super flu in "Night Surf" is known as 'Captain Trips'.
• Sinister Car: In Trucks, while the regular cars don't become sentient and murderous, large vehicles like trucks, buses, and construction equipment do.
• Slashed Throat: When Burt and Vicky in "Children of the Corn" take a closer look at the boy who they think they ran over, they find out that his throat has been cut.
• Smoking Is Not Cool: In "Quitters, Inc.", the main character has a serious smoking problem, and becomes a client of the titular company that helps people quit. It is really telling something that in spite of the extremely cruel methods used by the company (such as electrocuting the protagonist's wife when they caught him smoking), the wife was eventually grateful to them because they finally managed to make her husband quit.
• Spell My Name With An S: The Boone family in "Jerusalem's Lot" appears to have picked up the trailing vowel sometime between the birth of distant ancestor James Boon and his descendants Philip and Robert Boone.
• Spring-Heeled Jack: Strawberry Spring involves the narrator recapping how, during their time at New Sharon College in 1968, they encountered a "Strawberry Spring" (an early false spring, similar to an Indian Summer) which brought a heavy fog which provided perfect cover for a Serial Killer dubbed by the papers as Springheel Jack. Several students were murdered but the killer was never caught. The story ends in 1976 with killer returning with the arrival of a new strawberry spring, causing the narrator to realize that they are Springheel Jack. Despite the sharing the name the story has little in common with the legend. Justified in-story, the killer gets the name because he kills someone on soft, sodden ground without leaving footprints, and it's more than ten feet to the nearest asphalt - the college kids talk about what a good jumper he must be, and since that's a defining characteristic of the Trope Namer, the killer gets called that.
• Stealth Sequel: "Night Surf" may be a Stealth Prequel to King's later novel The Stand.
• Summon Bigger Fish: To get rid of the undead who are harassing him and who murdered his wife, Jim from "Sometimes They Come Back" summons a demon to defeat them.
• Swarm of Rats: In "Graveyard Shift".
• Teens Are Monsters: The children of Gatlin in "Children of the Corn", who murdered every adult in the town for their evil deity.
  • The teenage killers in "Sometimes They Come Back" are a more traditional version — a gang of Greaser Delinquents who mugged Jim Norman and his brother and killed the latter when he tried to resist. They die in a car electrocution accident and come back from the dead even worse.
• Therapy Is for the Weak: In "The Boogeyman", the principal character is indeed seeing a therapist. And yet, he insists that he doesn't actually need therapy and sneers disdainfully at what he imagines the doctor's other patients are like (gays, crossdressers, and people who "strut around thinking they're Napoleon").
• Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: In "The Boogeyman", a grown-up tells his psychologist about the closet-dwelling entity which killed his children, one by one. (Or rather what he thinks is his psychologist...)
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: De Vermis Mysteriis has an important role in "Jerusalem's Lot", a homage to Lovecraft. It's used by the local cult to summon an Eldritch Abomination appropriately named 'the Worm'.
  • The Necronomicon briefly appears in "I Know What You Need".
• Too Dumb to Live: Burt in "Children of the Corn". It's obvious that something is wrong with Gatlin, but he doesn't want to admit he made the wrong call going there, and also wants to punish Vicky by making her wait alone in a place that scares her, so he insists on taking his sweet time looking around. This gives the titular children time to find them, with, this being a Stephen King short story, predictably nasty results.
• Town with a Dark Secret:
  • The eponymous town in "Jerusalem's Lot".
  • Gatlin in "Children of the Corn", though the secret (the children kill anyone aged 19 or above in the name of a demonic being called 'He Who Walks Behind The Rows') doesn't stay secret for very long to the two people who enter the town.
• Truth in Television: Horrifyingly, the giant rats in "Graveyard Shift" were inspired by a story one of King's work buddies told him about going into the sewer and finding rats as big as dogs.
• Twist Ending: Several.
  • In "Strawberry Spring", the narrator describes the murders committed at his college community by a Serial Killer nicknamed 'Springheel Jack'. At the end he realizes that the killer is his Split Personality.
  • "The Man Who Loved Flowers" describes a young man bringing flowers for his girlfriend. When he gives them to her it turns out that they never met before, and the man is actually the insane hammer murderer, who kills women.
  • In "The Boogeyman", the protagonist tells to a therapist how his three kids were murdered by the titular monster. At the end it turns out that the therapist is actually the boogeyman in disguise.
• Ugly Cute : An in-universe example, in the way Ed is described in "I Know What You Need." Ed also plays the Betty for Liz, while Tony plays Veronica, at least on the surface.
• Undead Child: Francie the vampire girl in "One for the Road".
• Unnamed Parent: The mother in "The Woman in the Room".
• Vampire Bites Suck: Francie in "One for the Road":
  ...below her jaw I could see two small punctures like pinpricks, their edges horribly mangled.
• Vampire Episode: "One for the Road".
• Villainous Incest: The blood-sacrifice-performing witchcraft cult of "Jerusalem's Lot" topped it all off by encouraging this of its adherents.
• Villainous Lineage: The dark history of the Boone family and its connection to the evils of Jerusalem's Lot. Charles Boone is convinced that the only way to prevent the nightmare from happening again is to kill himself, the last member of the dynasty - or so he thinks.
• Villainous Valor: Renshaw in "Battleground" is a conscienceless hitman, but he doesn't back down for a second when facing the toy soldiers.
• Villain Protagonist: Renshaw again. He's a hitman who killed a toymaker, Hans Morris; the murderous toy soldiers and miniature thermonuclear weapon are sent to him by Morris's mother as a revenge.
• Vomiting Cop: Officer Hunton in "The Mangler" pukes (for the first time in his fourteen years as a policeman) after seeing the remains of a woman caught in the machine.
• Weakened by the Light: The Blob Monster in "Gray Matter".
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The members of Quitters inc are genuinely interested in helping their clients to quit smoking, but they will torture their loved ones to do it, and if they still continue to smoke, they will have their clients killed.
• Wham Line: The end of "Strawberry Spring":
  I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.
  And oh dear God, I think so too.
• White Sheep: In "Jerusalem's Lot", Charles and Robert Boone stand out as the only members of their clan not in league with the evil cult. At least not willingly, in the case of Charles.

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