Book review: Stephen King's latest offering will delight both long-term fans and newcomers

'You Like It Darker' is 76-year-old author's 13th story collection

Stephen King: One-man publishing factory. Picture: Getty

• You Like It Darker?
• Stephen King 
• Hodder & Stoughton £25 hb

Stephen King writes in the afterword to his latest story collection that he was listening to the Jeff Healey Band’s rollicking ‘Highway 49’ on his morning walk when an old friend, Cujo, and a new idea melded together in his mind for Rattlesnakes.

The link to his classic 1981 novel will delight long-term fans but newcomers may be none the wiser and will still savour the 85-page story.

It can be daunting for the newcomer to look at King’s bibliography and consider where to start. It’s 50 years since his debut, Carrie, came out, and that is just the start of any number of the milestones coming up: Salem’s Lot and The Shining came out half a century ago in 2025; it’s 30 years in September since the film version of the Shawshank Redemption was released.

It would be easy to go on but all the while King has never rested on his laurels. He’s written over 70 books.  You Like it Darker is his 13th story collection, comprising 12 stories, about half of which are previously unpublished, with the rest appearing in various publications over the past couple of years.

One wonders if time was on the mind of King, 76, when he was compiling You Like it Darker.

The opening story, ‘Two Talented Bastids’, finds one of said bastids in old age and dying. The bastid is also a writer who struggled mightily before he found, ahem, divine inspiration: “I wanted to be a writer, but I was beginning to think being a good one was beyond me. If it was, the world would continue to spin.” 

His bereaved son, going through what’s left behind, finds some old notebooks, including a work-in-progress introduction to a story now heralded but with literal strikethroughs in its initial creation.

“There was a picture in those words, and there was narration, but it was hackneyed at best.” 

You might be mistaken for thinking you’re reading King’s On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft).

There is plenty of humour here too: “I read a review of Pop’s first book… and the reviewer said this: ‘Not much happens in the first hundred or so pages of Mr Carmody’s suspenseful yarn, but the reader is drawn on anyway…” 

Considering the size of some of King’s most acclaimed work, he might have had a wry smile writing that particular paragraph.

King says the closing story, ‘The Answer Man’, had been unfinished and long forgotten, before his nephew found it and said it was too good not to complete.

King began it when he was 30 and finished it at age 75. It’s perhaps no surprise that the tale is quite poignant as a lawyer ponders destiny over the course of his life.

Even newcomers to King will get the hang of things pretty quickly: the twist is never far away, whether it’s supernatural or familial. You learn quickly not to trust what you’re reading. As the title says, ‘You Like it Darker’.

‘Red Screen’ is a particularly chilling reveal, the layers slowly peeling away and then just when you think you’ve found the centre, there’s one more jump to come.

It’s delectable.

Another matter occupying King across the dozen stories (which range from 10 pages to 150) or so of ‘Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream’, is covid.

We get comments about the US chief medical officer Anthony Fauci, the elderly falling sick from the suspected ill effects of the pandemic, the sceptics who peruse the dark web, masks, and all of those things we thought we had left behind in 2020.

Perhaps that’s King’s biggest twist of all here.

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