By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 23, 2019
Look, Stephen King obviously doesn’t need my help to sell more copies of his books — even though, as I recently established, he isn’t the best-selling modern fiction author of all (or even just of modern) times. But still…
I recently reread Night Shift, a 1978 anthology of King stories that I probably first read back in the ’80s. I’m happy to report that I enjoyed it as much as I did the first time round. Some of the passages that chilled me back then gave me the same shivers of horror more than two decades later.
The book contains 20 stories, which by my count directly inspired an eye-popping six movies: Children of the Corn, Maximum Overdrive (infamously known as King’s only directorial outing, based on the story “Trucks”), Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, Sometimes They Come Back and The Lawnmower Man (although this film was so loosely based on King’s story that he successfully sued to have his writing credit de-emphasized).
