Three Kings

"The Gingerbread Girl" - Esquire, July 2007
"Ayana" - The Paris Review, Fall 2007
"Mute" - Playboy, December 2007

Didn't Stephen King say he was retiring after The Dark Tower was finished? By my count, there's been four novels (The Colorado Kid, Cell, Lisey's Story, and Blaze) with a fifth due out in January (Duma Key). And there's been at least three new short stories in magazines this year. I had a copy of the Esquire issue but hadn't read the story. I picked up The Paris Review and Playboy this past Friday. And yesterday I sat down and read all three stories.

I suppose the big question about King's post Dark Tower work is whether or not they tie into The Dark Tower. Of the three new stories, "Mute" is the only one that explicitly ties into King's earlier work, with the narrator mentioning that he's headed to Derry, Maine. I don't think any of the stories rank with classic King, but they're interesting. "Ayana" is a short, sad tale of healing and death that fits into the mode of stories like The Green Mile and "The Reach." It also feels a bit like Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. Just not goofy. "The Gingerbread Girl" starts out like of of King's recent more literary stories and then takes a nasty left turn and becomes something very different. Of the three, it's the weakest.

The most interesting one of the bunch is "Mute." It's a fairly slight story, basically a mash-up of two story types: "Guy goes into a confessional" and "Guy picks up a hitchhiker." What's interesting is how King tells the story. Basically we have one guy telling one story, but it cuts between him telling a priest in a confessional and him telling a deaf-mute hitchhiker in his car. About halfway through you can kind of tell where it's going, but it's fascinating how it gets there. It's nicely constructed and I think it's great that the experimental type story is not the one in the literary magazine, but the one in Playboy.