The inherent economy of the form means that the idea itself is the star of the show. King’s short fiction doesn’t have this problem. (King has a longstanding policy known as the “Dollar Deal,” in which he allows aspiring directors to adapt his short stories into short films for a fee of $1 Frank Darabont, who’d go on to direct the Oscar-nominated King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, is one notable alum of the Dollar Deal initiative.) I haven’t seen the new film, and it remains to be seen if it will live up to its terrifying source material or fall short as so many King adaptations have-but if there’s any justice, it will at least occasion a renewed and overdue celebration of Night Shift and King’s short fiction more generally. This Friday sees the release The Boogeyman, a feature-length adaptation of one of Night Shift’s stories-one that, according to IMDB, has already been adapted twice before, in 19, each time as a short film. They also are the earliest evidence of King’s greatest gift: his twisted and seemingly inexhaustible imagination. The tales in Night Shift are well-crafted and preternaturally fluid works of storytelling, with a master’s sense of structure and suspense. But in between The Shining and The Stand King published a book that complicated that image and, perhaps more than any of those others, foreshadowed the extraordinary career that was to come: Night Shift, a collection of those works from the pages of publications like Ubris and Cavalier, written back when he was a hungry comer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |