Brilliant ‘Sunset’

By TED ANTHONY

Stephen King moves out of the darkness into the twilight his latest story collection

For a generation, we have associated Stephen King with darkness, or at least with an absence of light. He is the national summoner of darker instincts, darker thoughts, darker realities bleeding into our own.

But perhaps we have missed the point a bit.

If you take a more lingering look, the most powerful tales spun by King are about not darkness itself, but twilight — that gray, uneasy land that lies between the prosaic texture of human days and the unending desolation of our nights. Think “The Green Mile” or the two novellas that gave us the movies “Stand By Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

For this reason, King’s latest anthology of short stories, “Just After Sunset,” is quietly dazzling. It is a snapshot of his ability to erode that membrane between light and dark, to make us believe that any of us, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, could slip into somewhere that’s not quite right.

Weird things happen in these stories, but they are not necessarily horrifying things. The main characters are people living, sometimes unawares, on the edge of reality. It’s the part of King’s inner workings that is neither H.P. Lovecraft nor Peter Straub, but Rod Serling.

So this happens: King’s unfortunates tumble into strange pockets and find themselves unable to get out. Or the opposite happens: Redemptively, they manage to flee against all odds and reclaim normality, or at least a tenuous substitute.

They don’t always die. That’s because a positive undercurrent runs through King’s shorter works of fiction, a sense of control amid the lack of it. Sure, people in his 100,000-worders sometimes survive, but here survival seems like one of several options, and in short stories each choice really matters.

In novels — Stephen King’s and in general — you’re given characters and asked to stick with them through thick and thin across many, many pages. But short stories offer more flexibility to draw from an author’s own internal Central Casting. That’s what King does here, tapping into his mind and offering us a Whitman’s Sampler of regular Americans who exist just beyond the light.

As with his previous collections going back to “Night Shift” and “Skeleton Crew,” this collection presents the feeling that there are these masses of Americans out there waiting to be manipulated by him, to be dragged unawares into something that will change, even end, their life as they know it.

“Just After Sunset” does this even better than King’s previous anthologies. The unsettling “Willa,” set in a Wyoming railroad station, is the closest thing to an original “Twilight Zone” episode to come down the pike in years. “The Things They Left Behind,” a post-9/11 meditation, is sad and weird but not at all menacing.

“Harvey’s Dream” is a parent’s worst nightmare, viewed in slow motion. “Rest Stop,” also with nothing supernatural about it, revisits the author-pseudonym duality that King explored in “The Dark Half.” “A Very Tight Place” is a claustrophobic tale about an ugly dispute and a port-a-potty.

“The Gingerbread Girl,” a harrowing almost-novella, anchors the book and bridges the inner-psyche thrillers of King’s 1990s work with his more recent stories. A story of abuse, psychosis and loneliness, it is physically exhausting to read — an astounding thing to say for a short work of fiction.

An interesting inclusion in the collection is a brief story from King’s early days called “The Cat From Hell.” While fun — and gross — it is the exception that proves the rule, a benchmark from the 1970s that isn’t all that deep and illustrates the extent to which King has matured.

In “N.” — one of the most powerful and, stylistically, most unorthodox pieces in the collection — King meditates about our relationship with death. “We see the faces of the dead as a kind of gate,” he writes. “It’s shut against us ... but we know it won’t always be shut. Someday it will swing open for each of us, and each of us will go through.”

That’s what Stephen King is about these days — the gates between us and them, between here and there. He has always opened those gates and allowed people and creatures and ideas to travel to and fro. And in doing so, particularly as well as he does in “Just After Sunset,” he reminds us just how precious — and fragile — our side of the gate really is.