Night Shift #1

Stephen King
Literary Fiction
Pages 1-37

Night Shift is a collection of horrific short stories written by Stephen King. The story's are suppose to provoke the fear inside a human's mind making those final minutes before a person falls asleep in the pitch black dreadful. This is the first book I've read of Stephen King's and thought I could sample a bunch of his short stories before I decided to start buying multiple books of his. So far I'm very impressed and find myself unable to put the book down at times. All of the stories are good, but a select few of them are spectacular and one can truly not stop reading even if its 1 in the morning and one eye is closed. The first short story I'm going to share with you is titled the Grave Yard Shift. Hall works at a Textile Mill and has signed on to help clean out the basement of the factory over the week of memorial day. Warwick, the boss, has hired a bunch of men to clean out the basement during the graveyard shift (1-5 in the morning) because the the intense heat in the day. The first shift Hall discovered that there was more trash then any of them could've imagined and that there were tons of huge rats. These rats aren't just abnormally large they are literally the size of a germen Shepard dog. The next day he found a locked door leading to an even lower level. The workers could here the noise of thousands of rats coming from that door. Warwick tells Hall to go find the source of rats and Hall demands that Warwick comes with him. They both go down and discover that this floor goes past the buildings foundations right into the earth. They follow the tunnel and fight mutated rats with wings just like bats. They keep going and soon 10s of thousands of rats are following them. Then they see the impossible, a giant rat with wings the size of a mini van. The mutated rodent immediately attack Warwick and Hall runs away,but trips on a rat and they all swarm him as he starts to scream out in laughter.

I love reading these short stories and really liked this one because of the detail King gives about the main characters life and thoughts. I really like King's Gothic style of writing. The endings are all short and usually result in death there is nothing climatic of the endings and that annoys me, but at the same time it leaves the readers mind open to speculation. King is a literary genius.