At Mile 81 on the Maine Turnpike is a boarded up rest stop, a place where high school kids drink and get into the kind of trouble high school kids have always gotten into. It's the place where Pete Simmons goes when his older brother heads off to the gravel pit to play 'paratroopers over the side'.
Pete, armed with only the magnifying glass he got for his tenth birthday, finds a discarded bottle of vodka in the boarded up burger shack and drinks enough to pass out. That's why he doesn't notice a freshly mud-spattered station wagon ... which veers into the Mile 81 rest area, ignoring the sign that reads 'closed, no services'.
The driver's door opens but nobody gets out . . .
*****
References to boyhood camaraderie and shenanigans, a la Stand By Me/The Body?
Check.
Vehicle with murderous intent?
Check.
Alas, the youthful shenanigans and Pete's character development aren't terribly convincing. King normally has a deft hand at this sort of thing, but here he misfires.
Also, the vehicular menace is nowhere near the "genius horror" of car (and owner) possession found in Christine. It's more the implacable menace of The Raft. The origin of the vehicle is undeveloped, though it is (perhaps) hinted at in a couple of sentences toward the very end of the tale. (Admittedly, a menace doesn't need to be fully explicable to be effective.)
A large amount of space is given to vignettes (at least one of which could have easily be made redundant) involving people pulling up to investigate the mysterious station wagon and its ever-increasing tail of cars. These are enjoyable and mildly suspenseful, but would be more so if not hampered by repeated foreshadowing. Just when the story has gone on long enough that you think the next character might not - just possibly might not - be another walk-in from dial-a-victim, we have the suspense ruined by something like "...it was this soon-to-be-fatal misconception that...". Argh.
Given the space languished on these vignettes, and Pete's back-story, you'd think the climax and aftermath would be suitably well-developed. Unfortunately the climax is a little, well... anticlimactic. Before you know it, it's over. What is made of the encounter, post-slaughter, is anyone's guess.
All in all it gives the impression of a rushed, unbalanced, front-heavy tale.
Still, it's a Stephen King story, and there's something about a Stephen King story. Some sort of Pavlovian response to his prose. It's a mildly enjoyable story, and perhaps that's the problem. Mildly enjoyable. I hold Stephen King to a higher standard than "mildly" anything, especially for an exciting, new e-book exclusive.
Still, I don't regret buying it and reading it; I just expected something a whole lot more.
How about value for money? If you don't include the excerpt from his forthcoming novel, 11/22/63, you're getting around, 17000 words. That doesn't even make the grade for novella (usually 17500 - 40000 words), and that's fair enough I guess - it is only marketed as a "short story" after all. Just be aware how much (I mean, little) your four groats is buying.
Note: other worthy reviews include this one here, at The Man Eating Bookworm, where Peter Andrew Leonard laments the bad editing and cover (both of which appear to be largely improved in my version); and this one here, from horror author extraordinaire, Kealan Patrick Burke, who "felt as if [he] had read the opening chapter to an abandoned novel...", which I fully understand.
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