"Here's something I believe: if you're going into a very dark place then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?" So says Stephen King in his Afterword to what is a brilliant, if small, collection of stories. "Full Dark, No Stars" does exactly what its title portends: it drags you into the blackest provinces of human behavior with not even a vague twinkle of hope to push a character on, their basest and most disturbing instincts often the only apparatus that propels them to their respective ends.
Presenting diverse and fascinating ruminations on the psychological impact of violence on both victim and assailant, each story has its characters killing in the name of their own personal definition of justice. "1922" starts the proceedings with a bang, King's first few lines assaulting a person's natural-born curiosity: "My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession. In June of 1922 I murdered my wife, Arlette Christina Winters James, and hid her body by tupping it down an old well." Wilfred has been arguing with her over land, land that Arlette wants to sell in an effort to gain the big-city living she craves. Their dispute grows increasingly bitter until that one fateful summer evening when Wilfred does away with her, their docile and timorous 14-year old son Henry complicit in her murder. Thinking himself unburdened and free of displacement, Wilfred seeks to hide Arlette's murder from the authorities by heaping ignorance upon the truth about her disappearance like he heaped earth upon her corpse. He is soon haunted by his crime through witnessing its effect on his son and their mutual livelihoods, some of the focus of his ascending madness fixed on the massive rats that roam his farm and seem to multiply despite his efforts to contain them. King has the reader wondering until the end whether Wilfred's continued misfortune is either the work of karmic forces or Arlette's vengeful spirit.
Madness retains its incontestable intrigue in "Big Driver", a story that focuses on the revenge of Tess, a mystery writer who is out of town on a speaking engagement. Given a convenient shortcut home by a bookstore owner, Tess punctures one of her tires on road debris. A mammoth of a man stops under the guise of assisting her; he beats and rapes her repeatedly throughout the night, leaving her for dead in a culvert with two putrefying female bodies, his presumed other victims. Making her way back home, her mind reels from the assault as well as attempting to identify her attacker, her intuition guiding her to the answers through queer one-sided "conversations" she has with her TomTom GPS and her cat Fritzy. Eventually she returns to the dreaded town where she was attacked, armed with a .38 Special and the inexorable wrath of a woman scorned.
"Fair Extension" is the least exciting of all the stories here, its shorter length (the shortest of them all at only 34 pages) and an ending that lacks either a punch or a sufficient amount of closure decreasing reader satisfaction. It seems that it was thrown in as an afterthought, meant only to round out the collection, and with a Devil-like figure who offers the lead character an extension on his life in exchange for ruining the life of someone he's closest to, it's off-putting in that it feels incomplete. Had King given me an ending with more evenhandedness instead of a completely guiltless and optimistic one (and that ending has the potential to ruffle a few feathers), I might've liked it more. But this was precisely his point - sometimes the worst people have the best fortune.
"A Good Marriage" is the ganache on this devil's food cake, King basing the story around a real-life serial killer named Dennis Rader (aka the "BTK Killer" for "bind, torture, and kill") who murdered ten people in the Wichita area between 1974 and 1991, his wife of 30 years claiming to have no knowledge of his extracurricular activities. The much-criticized Paula Dietz (Rader's blissfully ignorant spouse) comes in the form of Darcy Anderson, a homemaker married to her accountant husband Bob a solid 27 years. On a search for batteries one evening in the garage while her husband is away on a business trip, Darcy discovers a disturbing magazine hidden beneath a pile of catalogs which leads her to a hiding place containing the ID cards of Marjorie Duvall, one of eleven victims of a serial killer dubbed "Beadie" by the media and local authorities. Warring with emotion and logic, Darcy comes to realize that the man she has known all these years is still a stranger and fearing for her own life as well as the lives of other innocent women, she seeks to put an end to their mutual madness in the only manner she knows how, consequences be damned.
The Afterword is just as much of a joy to read, King offering the reader the origin of each of his stories in addition to his supposition on what good fiction is: "From the start, I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers. Making them think as they read is not my deal. If the tale is good enough and the characters vivid enough, thinking will supplant emotion when the tale has been told and the book set aside (sometimes with relief)." Mission accomplished, Stephen.
Bottom line: With 49 novels, five non-fiction books, several short story collections, a comic book, and a writing gig for "Entertainment Weekly" to his name so far, King shows no signs of slowing down or that his murky well of ideas will dry up anytime soon. His 1999 accident once had him considering retirement. It will now take the extremes of either dementia or death before he ever stops writing.
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