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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A 5-star dust cover, 4 Feb 2004
Perhaps I should read short story collections more often. They're easy to review; assign a score to each story, add 'em up, and determine the average.So, let's apply the formula to EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL. The star values for the 14 chapters are, in the order they appear: 5, 3, 1, 1, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4, 4, 3, 5, 3, and 2. The total is 41, and the average 2.9285714. OK, ok - we'll call it 3. The two five-stars in the lot belong to "Autopsy Room 4" and "1408". In the former, a golfer wakes up completely paralyzed and speechless in an autopsy room. He was pronounced dead after a mysterious mishap on the green, and now they're about to autopsy his "corpse". In the latter, a skeptical writer of books about haunted places takes a room for the night in The Dolphin, a New York hotel, despite the manager's earnest attempts to dissuade him. As it turns out, the room isn't so much haunted as alive. As an example from the other end of the spectrum, there's "The Death of Jack Hamilton", the tedious tale about the lingering demise of a mortally wounded, 1930s gangster. Or the listless "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away", in which a travling salesman contemplates suicide in a Motel 6 along I-80 west of Lincoln, NE. I especially liked the concept of the artwork on the front dust cover of my hardback copy. It shows a blood droplet descending to the bottom of a water-filled goblet standing amidst a table setting. It was inspired by the 4-star "Lunch At the Gotham Cafe". In "L.T.'s Theory of Pets" (3 stars), I discovered a nugget which, if not wisdom, is a nicely phrased metaphor about emotional volatility in marriage: "In marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye." In the Introduction, author Stephen King asserts that writing short stories is, for him at least, an exercise in "dues paying". Indeed, he states that writing these fourteen was not so pleasurable except for "L.T.'s Theory of Pets" and the title story, "Everything's Eventual". But for the fact that King desires to keep alive the art of the Short Story, it therefore wasn't clear to me why he needs the bother regardless of the entertainment value afforded the reader. Hasn't he paid his dues to the literary world?
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by Stephen King
by Stephen King
by Stephen King
by Stephen King
by Stephen King
