Nightmare Fuel / Night Shift (1978)

aka: Night Shift

• "The Boogeyman", full stop. An eponymous creature that stalks and kills a young man's three infant children, who hides in the closet and moves around at night in such a way that it wants you to hear it. Billings tries to leave the old house, hoping to escape it but the boogeyman tracks them down and takes up residence in their new closet. Brr.
  ''"You'd wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you'd say, "It's only the clock." But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you'd close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it...
  
  And always you'd be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat."
  • The ending is even worse, with Billings discovering that the psychiatrist he has been telling his story to the whole time is the creature in disguise.
  So nice...so niiiiice
• Elizabeth's nightmare in "I Know What You Need." Briefly, she's laying in an open grave, unable to move or speak. Her boyfriend appears on the edge and tells her to marry him, or else. When she doesn't respond, he says, "It's or else, then." She hears a bulldozer start up, and realizes she's about to be Buried Alive. But suddenly another man, someone she had just met and befriended (in her real, waking life), shows up and stops it from happening. He reaches out to her, she finds she can move again, and he pulls her out of her would-be grave. She looks down at her footing as she climbs out. When she looks up again, her friend has become "a huge, slavering timberwolf." Elizabeth's nightmare undoubtedly caused a lot of nightmares.
• The Nothing Is Scarier description of the painting the narrator sees in the abandoned church in "Jerusalem's Lot". He finds himself unable to describe it in any great detail in his letters, only that it was a grotesque, unholy version of the Madonna and Child, done in the fleshy style of Peter Paul Rubens, and that shadowy, half-formed creatures reveled in the background.
  • A good deal of the village of Jerusalem's Lot, even before its true nature is revealed, especially the inverted golden cross in the church.
  • The main characters ancestor mentions that when Jerusalems Lot was still inhabited, he noticed that a lot of the inhabitants looked eerily similar, a telltale sign of inbreeding.
• The ideas behind "Gray Matter." To think that you could be transformed into a fungoid blob that eats dead maggot-ridden cats and those unfortunate enough to cross its path, by such a simple and common pleasure as drinking a can of beer, is bad enough. But, arguably, the most nightmarish thing of all? In the words of Richie Grenadine: "But it don't hurt. It feels....kinda nice." If your transformation were painful, you'd at least understand that something bad was happening to you and you would have motivation to fight against it (whether or not that fight would be successful, or whether you'd end up caged in some scientist's lab, is another story). But it feels good! Hard to imagine anything more horrible. Chug-a-lug, everyone! Drink 'er down!
  • We also hear the story—recounted by our first-person narrator—of George Kelso, a Bangor Public Works Dept. employee who went down into a sewer pipe to do his job, "laughing and joking like always," and came up fifteen minutes later "with his hair dead white and his eyes bugging out like he'd just looked through a window into hell." Then he punched out from work, went to a local bar and started drinking. In two years, he'd be dead. The narrator says that George never so much as hinted about what happened, except once when he was drunk out of his mind. He asked a friend "if he'd ever seen a spider as big as a good-sized dog settin' in a web full of kitties and such all wrapped up in silk thread."
    • Given that this is a Stephen King story, it's possible that the aforementioned spider is none other than Pennywise himself.
  • The ending where two of the main characters are sitting in the bar, waiting to see just who comes back from one of the other characters going to confront the creature. Will it be their friend? Or will it be the thing?
  • When Richie comes for the protagonist and his friends, the narrator sees he was splitting down the middle. The blob monster is about to reproduce!! And both of those will be able to reproduce, and so on...
    Two times two is four, four times two is eight, eight times two is sixteen, sixteen-times two is... 32,768 times two is the end of the human race...
• The main characters from "Night Surf" burning a man alive as a sort of quasi-sacrifice. He was half dead from the superflu, but still.
• The child vampire from "One For The Road", and the way she mesmerizes the main character Booth. Only the timely intervention of his friend saves him, and the vampire disappears in the snowstorm. At the end, Booth thinks about how that little girl is still out there somewhere, waiting for her goodnight kiss.
  • The poor stranded man who goes looking for help. Imagine stumbling into a local bar, desperate for help because your car broke down in an abandoned town in a snowstorm and you had to leave your wife and little girl behind to look for help, and the locals refuse to come with you because they're afraid of vampires. Yes, in this case it was true, but how many people would take that kind of claim seriously?
  • The Wham Line for the reader. The town the man says they were stuck in? 'Salem's Lot.
• Renshaw's death in "Battleground", getting incinerated by the to-scale nuclear bomb that was included in the package with the sentient toy soldiers. It wasn't a big bomb, but big enough that it wiped out everything in Renshaw's apartment floor. Including him.
  • And if it was a thermonuclear weapon, like the piece of floating paper said, there'll be nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination—not just in the building, but for a several-block radius. Talk about Fridge Horror; New York City would be a federal disaster area and uninhabitable for the next few decades.
• The story of the haunted refrigerator in "The Mangler". The state safety department gets a call from a woman about an abandoned icebox her dog had gotten trapped and suffocated in. A state trooper takes it to the dump, but the next day a woman reports her kid missing. He died the same way, and the woman claims her son would never play in an abandoned refrigerator. Then the dump caretaker comes to take the door off in accordance with local laws, only to find six dead birds inside- and the door closes on his arm as he's cleaning them out. It brings to mind Patrick Hockstetter's killing box in It... and given King's love of Canon Welding, who's to say the two refrigerators aren't one and the same?
  • The same story's Downer Ending, where the titular possessed laundry machine escapes the laundry and goes on a killing rampage. Nothing short of a bazooka is going to stop the demon-possessed thing which used to be a Hadley-Watson Model 6 Speed Ironer and Folder. And who knows? Maybe even that wouldn't work.
  • The extremely detailed description of the murder scene of the first woman by the press, and the people on the scene's reaction to it. It paints a very grim and unnerving Cruel and Unusual Death for the woman.
• "Quitters, Inc." is a pretty mundane story by King standards... which means the protagonist has to deal with The Mafia. Who, in true-blue Faux Affably Evil fashion will "help" him quit smoking by threatening to torture and kill everything the member loves if he ever takes so much as a single puff from a smoke. And membership is life-long, because if they are stupid or crazy enough to carry on after seeing their loved ones get maimed, the company will kill them.
  • To be more specific, the main character, Dick Morrison, goes to the titular clinic, which is heavily implied to have ties to organized crime. His counselor Vic explains that they have a 98% success rate. And how do they achieve that? Simple: representatives from Quitters, Inc. watch you. For the first month, it's 24-hour surveillance; then a random eighteen hours in the second; then back to 24 in the third, as many people backslide then; and gradually winnowing down, until you never know when the group is keeping an eye on you, for the rest of your life. They have a tiered punishment system, too, with a "ten-strike" system. On the first strike, Quitters Inc. will kidnap your closest loved one (in Dick's case, his wife), lock them in a room, and electrocute their entire body. By the fourth strike, the group will start kidnapping and beating your children. And you can never know when Quitters Inc. is watching you.
  • On Dick's first night without smoking, he's desperately craving a cigarette, so he sneaks into his study. It's the central room of the house—no windows—and the middle of the night. He's all alone in there, so he takes out his lighter...and then something in the closet moves. That's right: Quitters Inc. has literally invaded his home, and he can't bring himself to open that closet door.
  • What makes the story work particularly well is that it's essentially unaffected by Technology Marches On. It's easy to imagine a story like this set in the 2010s, with Quitters, Inc. spying on people through electronics...but this story was written in the 1980s, meaning that all of that surveillance is being carried out by real people, who are all around, all the time. When Dick does break down during a traffic jam and take three drags of a cigarette, he finds that his wife Cindy has already been taken, tied up, and put in the torture room by the time he gets home. And there are no signs of forced entry, either—they just move that silently and effectively.
  • There's another scary moment when Dick notices a young man in a blue suit who's following him around. He's clearly an employee of Quitters, Inc.—but Dick (and the audience) realizes that, in a grim take on the Kansas City Shuffle, this guy is supposed to be visible. Why? To distract clients from the people they CAN'T see.
  • Even scarier is the fact that Vic and the other employees of Quitters, Inc. are genuinely convinced they are doing a "good" thing by breaking people from their smoking habits. Vic in particular prides himself on his ruthless pragmatism, explaining that he's only doing what's necessary to save people's lives. And it's not an act, either—he's genuinely convinced of the mission. And if that doesn't give off enough cult vibes, by the end of the story, Dick and Cindy have been "converted," too, with the former passing out business cards for the group and the latter thanking them for "letting [Dick] out of prison."
  • In a final scary twist, it's revealed that Quitters, Inc. has one more unpleasant surprise in store for their clients. Since people often gain weight after smoking, and they don't want that, they prescribe their cases "highly illegal diet pills" and expect them to stay slim. And if you don't? They send someone to your house and chop off your loved ones' fingers.
• "Graveyard Shift" follows a crew of men as they clean out the unused, rat-infested basement of a mill. The further they go, the bigger the rats get (one is "as big as a healthy six-week puppy", and things start getting really bad when they enter the subbasement, blocked by a locked trapdoor. Locked from below. Down there, the rats have grown even bigger, gone blind, and lost their lower legs... and at the bottom lies their queen. Legless, eyeless, and as big as a small cow. Both of the men who went down there get Eaten Alive, one by flying rats, and at the end their coworkers head down, most likely meeting the same fate. And now that the lock on the trapdoor's been broken, there's nothing to stop the rats from getting out...
• "Trucks"': In which trucks rebel and enslave humanity, blaring demands to their new slaves via Morse code. Scarier still is the ending, where the protagonist realizes that Resistance Is Futile: humanity can hide in swamps and woodlands, but the trucks can cut the trees down, fill the swamps with sand, and pave over them. And even though they can't reproduce, they can just work their human slaves to death making more. But scariest of all, we never find out why the machines came to life in the first place (although in Maximum Overdrive it's the Earth passing through the tail of a comet, and the movie adaptation implies that it was a toxic spill in the city).
  Someone must pump fuel. Someone will not be harmed. All fuel must be pumped. This shall be done now. Now someone will pump fuel.
• "Sometimes They Come Back" could've borne the title "The Tale of From Bad to Worse." Jim Norman is a high-school teacher who's recently suffered from a nervous breakdown, stemming from the trauma he experienced after watching a group of teenage thugs murder his older brother when they were both children. His life has been deeply affected by it, and he's slowly recovering. And now three of those thugs have come back, they're somehow still teenagers even though decades have passed, and they're still just as cruel and murderous as they were back then. They want to kill Jim for being "unfinished business." And that's just the nightmarish set-up for one of the grimmest stories King has ever written.
  • This exchange, implying that whatever netherworld Vinnie Corey, David Garcia and Robert Lawson found themselves in after being fried in that car accident, it wasn't a pleasant one to say the least:
  “Where were you?” Jim asked. “Before.”
  Vinnie’s lips thinned. “We ain’t talkin’ about that. Dig?”
  “They dug you a hole, didn’t they, Vinnie? Six feet deep. Right in the Milford Cemetery. Six feet of—”
  “You shut up!”
  • The demon thing Jim contacts as part of his gambit to rid himself of the revenant punks trying to murder him. Including the ritual to summon it, its eerie, disembodied voice requesting a couple of his fingers in the bargain that he has to cut and tear off, and the demon itself appearing in the form of Jim's brother, effortlessly incinerating the three thugs when they arrive after scaring the shit out of them and sending them back to whatever hell they came from. Just when it seems like Jim is finally free, before the demon vanishes, it vows to come back for him one day as well.
• "The Ledge." If you happen to be afraid of heights, the all-too-vivid descriptions of our first-person narrator whilst he is circumnavigating a building forty-three stories above the ground with only five inches of concrete ledge and a freezing heavy wind trying to blow him off....better not to read it before bed. That said, it ends with the crime boss about to be shot to death by Cressner after Cressner forces the crime boss to navigate the ledge himself.

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