Review: Forgotten how great King is at short-form horror? Here's a reminder.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 8, 2011
Even if the Kindle didn't do anything else during its run, the establishment of the Kindle Singles program - short, low-priced pieces by a variety of authors - and the benefit it's had in reinvigorating the short story form have been more than enough to justify its existence. And a new short horror piece (about 80 pages) from Stephen King, whose short work is reliably great? Even better. Mile 81 is a simple enough tale, revolving around several people and families who find their paths converging at an abandoned rest area at the titular mile marker. As he always does, King invests his tale with prosaic details, sharply drawn characters (even with the short length of the tale, King creates characters that are richer and more compelling than many novelists can in five times the pages), and an eerie sense of wrongness that can make even a sunny day next to the interstate weirdly unsettling. The resolution of it all is a little flat and perfunctory, but it's not a deal-breaker; the story as a whole is so enjoyable that a weak ending can't hurt it too much. If you're a King fan, you can't go wrong with this; if you're a newcomer, this is a great way to get introduced to King's strengths as a writer and his remarkable ability to create fear in the unlikeliest of place.