Book Review: Everything's Eventual

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Everything's Eventual     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Stephen King
Class/Genre:   Fiction   Horror
Scribner, Mar 2002, $28.00, 464 pp.

Even though its seems unreal, Stephen King has not written a short story collection in almost a decade (see NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES). However, the flexible grandmaster returns to the form with this fourteen-story book while showing (as he continually does with novels), he can still spin quite a superb short tale.

Each tale is dark and demonstrates Mr. King’s writing abilities while proving he remains one of the stronger short story tellers today. The theme running through the tale is encounters with the dead spicing up the mundane lives of the living or those who expedite the passage of death. This anthology includes three pieces coming from alternate media, four from The New Yorker magazine, and a former E-book. One added bonus is a Dark Tower longer short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria". Each one and the remaining six are all quite good and a bit or two frightening.

Macabre and clearly paying homage to another versatile grandmaster Edgar Allen Poe, EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL is another triumph for Mr. King as fans of the ghastly and morbid will enjoy this collection. The great author seems to have accomplished everything in his thirty years of published writing except lift the curse of the Bambino.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner