Books
5 Stephen King Short Stories We’d Love to See Adapted!
Between the upcoming releases of Pet Sematary, It: Chapter Two, In the Tall Grass, Doctor Sleep, and a new Creepshow series on Shudder, 2019 promises to be another stellar year of Stephen King adaptations. Of course, that doesn’t even touch upon the pending adaptations currently in various stages of development, like a new take on The Tommyknockers, Firestarter, or The Stand, and countless other King novels and short stories that have been optioned. Yet, the prolific author has penned over 200 stories, 59 plus novels, nonfiction work, multiple screenplays, and more, and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. This means that there’s still endless story potential waiting to be translated to screen, with some of the grisliest, most gruesome of King’s works begging to be adapted.
While King is known for epic novels, many quite massive in length, his short stories are just as effective at getting under your skin. They’re also not quite as well-known as his novels. Digging into his catalog, here’s 5 amazing King short stories that bring the horror, repulsion, and boundary-breaking fear- perfect for adaptation.
“The Boogeyman”
First published in the March 1973 issue of Cavalier magazine before being collection in the 1978 book Night Shift, “The Boogeyman” takes place in the office of psychiatrist Dr. Harper, where his new patient Lester Billings recalls how he murdered his three young children. Or rather, passively let them meet grisly ends by way of the Boogeyman. It’s easy to see why this one hasn’t been adapted yet; one of the biggest taboos is the murder of children. In this short, the three children are all extremely young, around the ages of 2-3 years old, when the monstrous creature that comes from the closet murders them in brutal fashion. Not the sort of thing that audiences would be too comfortable seeing on screen. But it’s a bold story with a zinger of an ending, and it’s not as though the ages of the children couldn’t be updated.
Perhaps more interesting is that one small paragraph in the short has Lester relaying a story he read in a Tales from the Crypt comic that featured a wife drowning her husband, who then gruesomely returned from the grave for revenge. Sound familiar? That’s because it served as the basis for the segment “Something to Tide You Over” in 1982’s Creepshow. If one paragraph inspired an anthology segment, it’s time this entire short gets its due.
“The Reach”
This short appeared first in Yankee magazine in 1981 before being collected in 1985’s Skeleton Crew. Rights to adapt it were snatched up during Cannes Film Festival in 2012, but the project seemed to disappear since. “The Reach” is one of King’s best stories, and follows 95-year-old Stella Flanders, a woman with terminal cancer prompted to finally travel across the body of water that separates the island she’s lived on her whole life from the mainland. Her journey is instigated, and then accompanied, by ghosts of the past and deceased island inhabitants. A gothic, hauntingly atmospheric tale of crossing over from one plane of existence to another.
Essentially, “The Reach” is the precise type of story that will appeal to both horror fans and the mainstream, with its blend of horror and humanity. It’s not the most gruesome or horrific, but it does embody what makes King such a special author.
“Strawberry Spring”
Initially written when King was only 22, and later revised and collected in Night Shift, “Strawberry Spring” brings King’s twist to the Jack the Ripper story. Only this time, it’s set on a college campus, with the serial killer known as Springheel Jack loose on a murderous rampage during a strawberry spring. The unreliable narrator tells of the slayings that has the police perplexed and going ultimately unsolved, culminating in the slayings beginning again eight years later, under a new strawberry spring. This story also ends in a King sort of twist.
“Strawberry Spring” combines our fascination with serial killers with King’s very distinct sense of style and world-building, setting up endless possibilities for a feature length film.
“Home Delivery”
First published in 1989’s Book of the Dead and later in 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes, this short story is King’s take on the zombie. It follows the shy and meek Maddie Pace, a pregnant woman who recently lost her husband in a boat accident. Living alone on the island of Gennesault, Maddie is forced to find her inner strength when the dead rise from their graves. Including her dead husband.
Sure, that sounds like just about every other zombie story we know, but you can rest assured that King adds his own spin. Like the source of the outbreak, for example. An alien satellite, named Star Wormwood, hovers above Earth, and its transmission meant to reanimate the dead and bring about our destruction. But wait, there’s more! Star Wormwood is actually a giant mass of ravenous alien worms, making the joint U.S./Chinese mission to stop the alien satellite a complete nightmare. Who doesn’t want to see this brought to life? Technically, Guillermo del Toro did, when he produced an animated short film adaptation in 2005. But still. “Home Delivery” could use a feature film adaptation with filmmakers unafraid to take this zombie story to all its wacky edges.
Illustration by Glenn Chadbourne, collected in The Secretary of Dreams
“A Very Tight Place”
It seems that the new Creepshow series will be tackling one of the grossest King stories of all with “Survivor Type”, which makes grisly use of the word autosarcophagy. If so, then I’d like to see this novella get an episode as well. Collected in 2008’s Just After Sunset, “A Very Tight Place” tells of an escalating battle between neighbors Curtis and Tim over property rights, exacerbated when Curtis’ dog was killed by Tim’s electric fence. A confrontation results in Tim locking Curtis up in a porta potty, and then tips it over. With no one around to help, Curtis endures one hellish night in a tipped over portable toilet, trying to find a way out.
King spares no detail in Curtis’ portable toilet predicament, which means that no one should go into this story with a full stomach. The war between hateful neighbors has never been so disgusting or vicious as it has in “A Very Tight Place”, which quite possibly wins the title of the grossest of all King’s works.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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