Love the forrays into short fiction we've gotten from Uncle Stevie throughout his career, and they're always a welcome addition.
During a recent look back at Danse Macabre, I was reminded of two aspects of Stephen King's talent in relation to the modern short story: First, he certainly seems to enjoy others' entries into the art--his analysis and recommendation of the great Harlan Ellison (who I'd never heard of before King's high praise) is nothing less than the sole introduction I received to that old snarkmaster's immense talent.
Secondly, as King writes about the conservation of language and form necessary to make the short story a living, breathing literary form, I can't help but revel in his extreme usage of these special fundamentals in their leanest and most pure forms in the later portions of that book, when he offers super-short, sometimes TINY vignettes, most at the length of a paragraph or less, which contain all the elements of the basic short story, all in less than a hundred words. He's also used this form in many of his novels to show major transitions of plot, most notably in his fantasy fiction: one excellent example is in The Talisman, when Jack touches the magic sphere for the first time; and also to describe the myriad little "secret life" actions and situations of his small-town minor characters in novels like 'Salem's Lot and Needful Things and The Tommyknockers. When Steve gets up to this kind of quick-change, fast-edit, big picture style of detailed storytelling (think omnipresent point of view plus microscopic focus), he sure can make that narrative walk and talk and twist and shout, baby.
And, it's already been...what? Three years or so since our last collection's release (I'm thinking of this last collection of four very fine novellas, which is a whole 'nother form that I think Mr. King has a certain rare talent for putting together with fine sense of conservation and high relevance of style), maybe there'll be something new along those lines sometime next year. After all, it's never a disappointment to get something a little less massive--with a more potent, poisoned "kick" in its instantly recognizable flavor--from a familiar master chef who's provided more than a dozen grand, multiple-course smorgasbords for masses of diners such as ourselves.