On the Night Shift - sans Commodores...

I'm not entirely sure what book this one was exactly. It's titled as Stories from Stephen King's Night Shift, and they do all come from that volume, but there are two or three stories missing. Don't know what was up with the licensing there, but it's still a pretty strong collection.

Not many things that King has written aren't strong, admittedly. It's not his finest collection of short stories - I think Nightmares and Dreamscapes and Skeleton Crew are both better, but this one came before the others, it was earlier King. This one, is worth going through, however. It's a strong collection with not many of the stories falling flat. A couple of them - "Strawberry Spring" and "Graveyard Shift" and "The Bogeyman" all have weak endings, but they're still a decent amount of fun getting there anyway. Many of the short stories are excellent - "Jerusalem's Lot", "Grey Matter", "Battleground", and "The Mangler" - and "The Last Rung on the Ladder" is phenomenal. And the voice work by John Glover is outstanding. I find myself being drawn to books more and more by the reader rather than, at times, the story being told. I've tried Slaughterhouse-Five as read by Ethan Hawke, and I couldn't even get through the first tape, his reading was so bad, but an engaging reader can make things a lot more gripping.

A bit of curiosity, however. Is Stephen King a great author? I know he's easily one of the biggest selling authors of the last handful of decades, but does he get the credit as a great author, and does he deserve it? I know that I've read a number of his works, and his is among the most gripping things that I've read. Some of his books are just phenomenal, the entire Dark Tower series is so absolutely well-crafted that it should - in my opinion - be among the modern classics of literature.