Death may be inevitable, King says. But to fret about it or dwell on it is a waste of time when life, even at its most difficult, can bear so many rewards.
King’s constant readers will devour this new collection — the author is in rare form, not only talking to the reader directly in each introduction, but in making his characters fully human.
Dark humor and other kinds of fireworks abound in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams...At 68, King isn’t quite an old man – and his literary career hardly suffers from any indignities.
King is still roused by battles between good and evil, and we often sense a great writer duking it out with a corny hack within the same book. On this occasion, the hack wins on points...[but] when he clambers out of his rut of undemanding retreads, King shows he is still capable of keeping it fresh.
The more realistic stories here don’t carry much conviction, and all but a handful of the fantastic ones feel a bit desperate, as if he were trying too hard to 'entertain.' The better stories seem like oddities, one-offs...Stephen King, still learning, seems ambivalent about his own creative powers...
When King dials back the horror shtick in the more harrowing tales of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, it’s the quotidian particulars of 21st century life — Walmart, DUI convictions, road rage, the stony realism of Maine’s rural poor — that haunt us more effectively than any undead vehicle.
King's constant authorial presence can't help but pull us out, disrupting the pattern of the dream. Each time he inserts himself, we are reminded of the construction of the fiction, with the author front and center when it ought to be the other way around...It's unfortunate, for there are a lot of good stories in this collection: moving, disturbing and in between.
All of these tracts demonstrate a particular polish that King has developed for his short writings over the years, yet the sharper stories are a bit further back in the mouth of this collection.
[King's] fans not only tolerate his forays into other modalities, but have come to savor them. And there is much to savor in this collection of short stories that, despite its horror-centric title — the marketing gods must be served, after all — also touches on a wide range of other genres, from drama to humor and even poetry.
...[King] has always had a wicked (in more ways than one) sense of humor, too, and it's often on display along with the scary stuff in his new short story collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
Perhaps one of King’s best gifts as a writer is his ability to create such believable characters...As always, [he] leaves his reader with plenty of things to think over.
Although a few boogeymen may be found, the stories tend to focus on protagonists coping with trauma. This thematic focus gives the book a sense of purpose that many short story collections lack, and as a result, the stories enhance each other and elevate The Bazaar of Bad Dreams from merely good to remarkably resonant.
