Night Shift

“‘You used to be a college boy, didn’t you?’

Hall nodded.

‘Okay, college boy, I’m keeping it in mind.’”

The characters’ class difference and the animosity it provokes reflect King’s history as a boy from a working-class background whose intellectual pursuits alienated him from his peers. This is an early nod at a theme that runs through King’s work. The casual viciousness of the dialogue reflects the collection’s interest in Maliciousness and Human Motivation.

“Hall said nothing. He was thinking about Warwick, and about the rats. Strange, how the two things seemed tied together. The rats seemed to have forgotten all about men in their long stay under the mill; they were impudent and hardly afraid at all.”

The techniques King uses to depict his character’s psychology are evident in this passage, which depicts the shift in Hall’s mind that allows him to conceive leading Warwick to his death. The coupling of Warwick with the rats, both objects of revulsion to Hall, others Warwick, and this evaluation of him as subhuman makes it easier to justify his death.

“And if we were the last people on earth, so what? This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water.”

Watching the tide come in gives Bernie a moment to observe the natural thrum of the planet. In acknowledging the pull of the moon, he realizes that his petty fears and suffering are of little consequence to the huge forces that dictate the natural world. That the pandemic is driven by an organic agent, a virus, weds it to these same forces.

“I put my face in my hands and clutched it, feeling the skin, its grain and texture. It was all narrowing so swiftly, and it was all so mean—there was no dignity in it.”

Bernie’s lament about dignity underscores King’s general approach to human grandness and the indifference that governs the universe. It is no surprise that this realization comes to Bernie as he is observing the surf, which, in its inexorable movement, comes to stand for the relentless breakdown of human philosophies and procedures.

“I […] saw an abominated creature that moved and respired and carried a device of wood and wire under its arm, a device constructed of geometrically impossible right angles.”

This depiction of how the alien intelligence inhabiting Arthur views a young boy holding a sieve emphasizes the utter otherness of its perspective. Arthur’s detachment from his own body is mirrored in his inability to discern the human shape. The inhumanity required to murder a child is suggested in the aliens’ total lack of compassion for the “respiring” creature.

“Adelle Frawley was dead; sewed together by a patient undertaker, she lay in her coffin. Yet something of her spirit perhaps remained in the machine, and if it did, it cried out.”

The first victim of the mangler is now inextricably tied to the machine that she worked next to her whole life. The image of a disturbed spirit inhabiting the machine underscores King’s theme of the troubled relationship between workers and their tools. The mangler is possessed by someone who did not herself “possess” it, but whose life centered around it thanks to her job: In a sense, the workers themselves are possessed.

“How could I go to Rita and admit that I was wrong? I had to be strong. She was always such a jellyfish…look how easy she went to bed with me when we weren’t married.”

The toxicity of Billings’s masculinity, his need to be right and strong and morally righteous, compromises his ability to recognize the threats to his life and his relationship. With each death of a child, Billings further rationalizes his inaction.

“Maybe all the monsters we were scared of when we were kids, Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy, maybe they were real. Real enough to kill the kids that were supposed to have fallen into gravel pits or drowned in lakes or were just never found.”

This is a straightforward example of King’s repurposing of unexplainable tragedies into tragedies of supernatural malevolence. This demonstrates the human psychological need to give form to chaos and thereby reduce the threat its inexplicability poses.

“A person doesn’t hardly want to believe such things, and yet there’s still strange things in the world.”

The plainspokenness of the narrator’s delivery is characteristic of King’s portrayal of the industrial working-class. The passage expresses the crux of many of King’s stories: the disjunction between the scope of understanding the characters’ lives have allowed and the baffling, supernatural circumstances they must confront. Timmy’s worldview is shattered with the dissolution of his father and of any sense of authority in the world.

“I can see great convoys of trucks filling the Okefenokee Swamp with sand, the bulldozers ripping through the national parks and wildlands, grading the earth flat, stamping it into one great flat plain. And then the hot-top trucks arriving.”

A traditional image of human progress—the taming of the wilderness and the laying down of concrete—now indicate the human race’s replacement.

“You try to tell Wayne you’ve been through this before, a hundred times. The local losers aren’t hanging around the gas station this time; they’re hidden in the shadows under the trestle. But it won’t come out. You’re helpless.”

Slipping into second-person narration, King emulates the character’s efforts to hold a traumatic memory at arm’s length. Norman, reliving the worst moment of his life, keeps a dissociative distance from the events, as though he were watching them happen to someone else. However, he cannot escape the impact of the memory, so even the second-person perspective takes on an accusatory tone.

“Who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces.”

There is a heavy dramatic irony in a second reading of these lines. The narrator is the only one who can say which of those shadows is the killer (none of them, as he himself is) but his philosophical delivery allows the line to pass with little notice the first reading. A hint of murderous detachment emerges in the final line, however. The narrator glimpses human shapes, but they are divorced from the humanizing grace of their faces.

“For a long time after he was gone, I could only look out the window. And even after I had opened my book and started in, part of me was still out there, walking the shadows where something dark was now in charge.”

King illustrates the dissociative split in his unnamed narrator by providing a double-sided sentence. In one respect, the narrator is reflecting on a moment in which the presence of the killer is acutely felt across campus. However, he comes dangerously close to admitting that he himself is the dark presence. This suggests that the non-malevolent aspect of the narrator is ceding ground to the unconscious violence within him. This passage is typical of King’s depiction of The Relationship Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind, which is often fraught and combative.

“The pigeon pecked me again, again, again. A cold blast of wind struck me, rocking me to the limit of my balance; pads of my fingers scraped at the bland stone, and I came to rest with my left cheek pressed against the wall, breathing heavily.”

King’s understated use of poetics contributes to the increasing tension. The repetitious first sentence emphasizes the pigeon’s relentless beak, while the long second sentence, with its quick monosyllables, portrays both the endlessness of the task and the rapid series of calculations Norris must make to maintain his balance.

“Harold Parkette refused to look, as if by refusing he could deny the grotesque spectacle that the Castonmeyers and Smiths—wretched Democrats both—were probably drinking in with horrified but no doubt righteously I-told-you-so eyes.”

The passage illustrates the reaction of the human mind to that which it cannot comprehend. The acknowledgement of Pan’s existence threatens to undermine Parkette’s entire worldview, so instead he chooses to think about the opinions of his neighbors.

“Hugging his son tightly, realizing what Donatti and his colleagues had so cynically realized before him: love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.”

This is the third time King refers to the people at Quitters, Inc. as pragmatists; each time carries a negative connotation. This reflects King’s aversion to psychology and his suspicion of treatment programs, which he here depicts as depraved enough to weaponize love in order to fulfill their ends. This bleak picture of love as a vulnerability reflects The Nature of Human Relationships throughout much of the collection.

“In a queer, twisted way she felt sorry for him—a little boy with a huge power crammed inside a dwarfed spirit. A little boy who tried to make humans behave like toy soldiers and then stamped on them in a fit of temper when they wouldn’t or they found out.”

King depicts the pity and confusion swirling in Elizabeth’s mind as she tries to come to terms with the end of the relationship. King’s brief portrait of Ed has much real-world resonance, as rejected, petulant young men with a strong sense of entitlement frequently perpetrate or advocate for violence.

“The picture was crudely done but effective. It looked like a comic-strip mural done by a gifted child—an Old Testament Christ, or a pagan Christ that might slaughter his sheep for sacrifice instead of leading them.”

To depict the strange twisting of Christianity into the religion accepted by the children of the corn, King offers two paradoxical images of Christ. Emphasizing the distortion in Gatlin, King first suggests an Old Testament Christ—an impossibility, as the rise of Christ’s ministry is the providence of the New Testament. King next suggests a pagan Christ, but “pagan” has conventionally referred to non-Christian religions (particularly polytheistic or animist religions); applied to Jesus, it only suggests his fraudulency.

“Perhaps a religious mania had swept them. Alone, all alone, cut off from the outside world by hundreds of square miles of the rustling secret corn. Alone under seventy million acres of blue sky. Alone under the watchful eye of God, now a strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who Walks Behind the Rows.”

King turns the evocation of the corn God into a type of rolling chant, emulating the strange spell that could have called up such a god. The repetition of “alone” heightens the sense of alienation. The landscape, which seems at first to illustrate setting, quickly joins the force of the repetitions, becoming the oppressive force—the summoned god.

“When I close my eyes and start to drift off, I see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept up behind her.”

Larry leaves himself this single comforting image of his sister in freefall, trusting in the safety of her landing, as a way to ameliorate his grief and guilt at losing his sister. However, the image does not bring him comfort, and comes to stand for the story’s examination of how grief alters our memories and relationships with the past. Kitty is left in freefall, calcified into the only moment which does not wound Larry; his inability to see beyond it is both willing and unconscious.

“Now the stars were out, gleaming softly, and the lane was dark and shadowy, lined with vague shapes of garbage cans. The young man was alone now—no, not quite. A wavering yowl rose in the purple gloom, and the young man frowned. It was some tomcat’s love song, and there was nothing pretty about that.”

King balances the soft-tinged nostalgia that infuses the setting with the slowly increasing menace of the young man’s presence. Here, the tone of the story shifts as the young man is about the secure his target. Though King doesn’t allude to this right away, he depicts an environment that is growing darker, foreshadows the victim’s screaming with the cat’s yowling, and ultimately suggests that there are modes of love that are intrinsically wrong.

“I only heard the word “vampires” mentioned once. A crazy pulp truck driver named Richie Messina from over Freeport way was in Tookey’s that night, pretty well liquored up. “Jesus Christ,” this stampeder roars, standing up about nine feet tall in his wool pants and his plaid shirt and his leather-topped boots. “Are you all so damn afraid to say it out loud? Vampires!’”

This excerpt offers a boiled-down version of King’s approach to supernatural subjects. King grounds the fantastical nature of vampires by having a working-class trucker broach the topic; he also focuses on details of the trucker’s clothing and the earthiness of his manner. This portrait emphasizes the normalcy of the story world, despite its population of vampires.

“It is the walk of people who are going nowhere slowly, the walk of college students in caps and gowns filing into a convocation hall.”

After comparing the people shuffling through the hospital corridor to zombies, Johnny compares them to graduating college students, suggesting that neither has anywhere to go. This echoes a theme that runs through many of King’s stories, seen most vividly in “Graveyard Shift”: the alienation of the intellectual in the midst of working-class life. It conveys disappointment with higher education while also separating the characters from their working-class background—both subjects that are personal to King.