Like a Knife in the Dark: Stephen King’s “The Man Who Loved Flowers” and The Power of Brevity
Horror seems to be one of the few genres where short stories are consumed at a popular level. I read more novels than short stories, but with horror, it’s much more even. I also write more short stories than I do novels. My first book, The Crow’s Gift and Other Tales, was a small collection of four horror stories and my latest release, Recreational Panic: Stories, features twenty-one stories—quite the jump from where I began! My short stories usually make a bigger splash with readers as well—Little Paranoias: Stories, my third collection, remains my top seller.
I think the short story is the most effective form of horror. This is not to say a horror novel can’t be scary or great—there are many great horror novels—but the brevity of the short story serves to heighten the fear because, like a knife in the dark, it’s fast, it’s sudden, it’s unexpected, and you don’t have time to recover once it appears.
Night Shift
Stephen King
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 978-0307743640
Anchor; Reissue edition (July 26, 2011)
(other editions available)
I’m often asked which authors and texts have most influenced me. Stephen King is so common an answer that it’s almost cliché, but a man as ubiquitous and talented as he is will be a lot of people’s influence. His short stories are works of art, ones that hold up to, and often surpass, his most famous novels. I’ve read so many of his short stories that I’ve forgotten many of the titles, even if I remember liking them.
One story I haven’t forgotten, even though I read it about twenty years ago, is “The Man Who Loved Flowers.” The story appears in Night Shift. It’s one of his shortest tales—I remember it being about three pages long in my mass market paperback. It follows a young man on his way to a date. He stops and buys flowers. He rounds a few corners and finds the woman he’s meeting. He calls out her name and she approaches. As she nears him, though, he sees she’s not the woman he’s supposed to meet. But isn’t she? He calls her by her name again, and as the woman is about to tell him he’s mistaken, he snaps and bludgeons her to death with a hammer. Throughout the murder, his cascading thoughts reveal he’s done this before, has done it many times since the woman he was thinking of passed away, and once he’s finished, he goes about his walk as if nothing has happened.
I reread the story today for the first time since I originally read it and was pleased by the details I picked up on, such as the foreshadowing through a newspaper announcing a hammer-wielding murderer was still on the loose. I also appreciated the public’s observations of how sweet, how lovely this man seemed, since none of them could fathom the horrors lurking in his mind or in his pocket. Even the young man couldn’t fully fathom them until he was triggered by a woman he thought was his love turning the corner.
This last detail was what first haunted me when I read it, and which stuck with me for many years: the woman was murdered for no other reason except she crossed this man’s path. He hadn’t been stalking her for weeks. She didn’t summon him. There wasn’t some intricate method that brought this man to this woman. She simply walked into his view and he mistook her for someone else.
The young man’s victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many of us fear this? In fact, how many of us develop scenarios that are less random so we can feel like death, horror, and danger have some kind of hidden meaning that, once we figure it out, we can avoid? The truth is, though, that all that planning, all that puzzling and figuring out and explaining, it all goes to seed the minute we cross the wrong path at the wrong time with the wrong man holding a hammer in his pocket.
This is a horrific enough thought on its own, but it’s driven home even more by the brevity of the story. We don’t see the man murder again. We don’t get a back story. We don’t get a police pursuit. We see him kill, then exit. The final scene is a married couple seeing the serene look on the man’s face and ironically wondering why they don’t feel that sense of blissful romance anymore.
When looking back on my influences, I realized how much this story had an effect on my own writing. My favorite thing to do is to take something ordinary and make it terrifying or otherwise darken it. My flash fiction in particular is written to be like the stumble from a misstep that then twists your ankle and leaves an ache long after the fall. This is the type of story I like reading, and definitely the kind that scares me the most. They say to write what you want to read. In my case, I write like my anxious mind works: what if?
