Author: ST King
But there is also truth to shorter, more intense experiences. They can be exhilarating and sometimes even shocking, like waltzing with a stranger you’ll never see again, or kissing in the dark, or discovering a beautiful antique for sale on a cheap blanket at a street market.
-from Nightmare Bazaarwritten by Stephen King.
I needed gas while driving—not that it was far, but I needed to kill time, so I circled the border of Jacksonville a few times. I headed west on Interstate 10, slowing through the evening dust storm, and then got back on 95. Then I filled up, ate a hot dog, and took a big gulp of vanilla Coke that tore my throat apart. You know what? It was a good kind of pain. It’s working The irritation of the isopropyl alcohol on the wound, and the soreness of the muscles after working out my legs at the gym. The sun sets early this time of year. So it’s completely dark at a quarter past five. The junk food reminds me of my childhood: breakfast and pre-game meals, candy and processed meats.
The market is now open. I finish my Coke and get off the bus.
The air is filled with blue-white, the night cannot calm it, the sharp steel wind gives it a heavy and penetrating texture. The black outlines of wooden signs: living cars, sinking into a world different from this one, dancing with the bones of bad behavior, if there is such a thing. The shopkeepers work thoughtfully: some are old – others are older. A man in a dirty catcher’s mitt and mask – a man about my age dances in the moonlit courtyard: grabbing a woman who is not dancing with him. She may even be dead. But he smiles anyway. Flesh is just an ethereal thing.
I came here for a kiss in the dark, to dance with the nameless. Nightmare Bazaar This is the embodiment of this philosophy: Of course, for some reason. Because there is excitement everywhere.
Of course, not everyone is a great dancer.
The book is a fairly standard read: any collection of short stories with the kind of cheesy plot and a lot of sweet and sour candy. As you’d expect, the old shopkeeper manages to pull the wool over your eyes more than once, despite his failing memory and fading eyesight.
The first kiss came from the avenue: a lone muddy station wagon, blood all around it. The air seemed to bend around it. The light that touched it was dirty—this was the stage set by this Ford or Chevy or, who knows? Abandoned cars parked lazily on the shoulder behind it.
He pulled behind the station wagon, put on the four-way shocks, and began to get out. Then he noticed that the station wagon didn’t seem to have a license plate on the back…although there was so much mud that it was hard to tell for sure. Doug pulled his cell phone out of the center console of the Prius and made sure it was on. Being a nice guy was one thing, but accidentally approaching a bastard car with no license plates was just plain stupid.
-from 81 mileswritten by Stephen King (rating 3/5).
I remember the old man’s caution. He took a sip of beer from an unlabeled bottle and pointed at the dingy car. “Be careful, the best of these things have teeth.” I crossed the still road and stopped. It was a pitiful thing to do. I was nervous until I got there. But in the end, there was really nothing to see there.
Most of my interactions went something like this: Old King’s Tall Tales: A Deadly Station Wagon (81 miles) and his wife who died at the most convenient time (High quality and harmony) A few whispers in the night are indeed poetry ( Bone Chapel and Tommy) and the anticipation nearly froze me, a bitterly cold night when wisps of air were like wisps of silver smoke. I expected to be touched by those fingers—the woman holding me tight as if this was the only dance that mattered. She disappeared with the first light of dawn.
As I let her go, I was struck by a deepening, growing feeling of dread: sickening whispers from cold lips threatened to reach for whatever was not tied. I approached slowly, toward the light switch; she was gone.
Forgotten. What remained were piles of junk, worn-out clothes—empty soda bottles…
I should be relieved, but I’m not.
The main weakness of some of these journeys is the flimsy plotting.
White dunes – along the clavicles of the bazaar, where on some nights the moon dips its tendrils into grey ink: names written in familiar handwriting. The sky cracks in the dusk, a bright red. I think of my mother and Heaven’s Gate, and the people who have recently passed through a gate like this. Because they would not have missed the sight of this gate – bleeding where the moon coldly pressed down. Maybe these names were written in a dark rain, when no one was around to see. So here’s where I go next: my grandmother’s misspelled maiden name.
I was fourteen when she died.
…Every trip to this island, two hundred yards out in the bay, like a semi-submersible submarine, had at first been filled with excitement and uneasiness. Now it was only uneasiness. The pain seemed to be concentrated deep inside him and spread out in all directions. But he made the journey anyway. In these later dark years, many things had lost their appeal—most things—but not the dunes on the other side of the island. The dunes never would.
-from duneby Stephen King (rating 4/5)
…But several times that night I pressed forward in the darkness until my lips were blocked—and a chill ran through me like a warm and gentle breeze. It was then that I heard his voice loudest, that of the old innkeeper; a voice that haunted me long after I had left and left the desert.
Old men – talking about terrible things written in the mud (“Dune”) – a lover who relies on marriage to save him from the reality of life and death (“Bad Weather”), or another man, still trying to escape his own end with a new beginning (“Afterlife”). Yes, reader, these are the ones I remember well – these stories that pull you into the torrent – somewhere private and intimate. This apartment building is the residence of your greatest fears and pains. The people you love most live here. And then they die.
This is the natural order of things.
This is what I learned about Nightmare Bazaar that night—the way Old King tells these stories of human suffering: a heaping scoop of boredom, carefully selected, and he does his best—making melodies out of thin air. When the darkness becomes tiring and tiresome, those voices—blindly communicating with the stranger who leads the footsteps. His steps are the same, but different—the way he handles the tunes, lightly sprinkled with salt, pepper and chopped onions. Some of these stories, please forgive my language—I just don’t want to spoil them for the readers. But there are gems here, I promise. Whether they are enough to make your precious time valuable, I really can’t say.
But I wouldn’t mind coming here again.
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Final rating: 3.5/5
About the author: An aspiring novelist with a penchant for darkness and an insatiable thirst for fantasy, ST King currently works as a mental health counsellor, helping people purge their closets of darkness – although he admits he thinks it’s more fun to put it back in.
