Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Stephen King

A solitary finger pokes out of a drain. Novelty teeth turn predatory. Flies settle and die on an old pair of sneakers in New York, and the Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac. Meanwhile, the legend of Castle Rock returns... and grows on you. What does it all mean? What else could it mean? First there was Night Shift (1978), then Skeleton Crew (1985), and now Stephen King is back with a third collection of stories - a vast, many-chambered cave of a volume, with passages leading every which way to hell... and a few to glory.
The long reach of Stephen King's imagination and the ho-holds-barred force of his storytelling have never been so richly demonstrated. There's something here for readers of every stripe and predilection - classic tales of the macabre and the monstrous, cutting-edge explorations of the borderlands between good and evil, brilliant pastiches of Chandler and Conan Doyle, even a teleplay and a non-fiction bonus, a heartfelt piece on Little League baseball that first appeared in The New Yorker.
In story after story, several published here for the first time, he will take you to places you've never been before, places that are both dark and vividly illuminated. Fair warning: You will lose a good deal of sleep. But Stephen King, writing to beat the devil, will do your dreaming for you.

This is an extremely long compilation of short stories, and for the most part, they're all top quality.

The main ones people will probably recognize off-hand are Night Flier (which is MUCH better than the movie) and a teleplay called Sorry, Right Number which was featured on Tales from the Darkside. Most of the others are ones that have only been seen before in various magazines.

While I liked many of them and cannot choose a favorite, I can choose a least favorite. The non-fiction piece Head Down about a Little League team rising through the ranks held no interest whatsoever for me. I found it dry, boring, and could not finish it. Brooklyn August didn't do much for me either. But, then again, not only am I not a fan of baseball, I also don't read Stephen King for non-fiction pieces. I read them for fiction. It doesn't have to be horror, it doesn't have to be supernatural, but it does need to be fiction.

The non-fictions story does not ruin the book, however, there are plenty of other fantastic reads in this compilation and it's easy to skip over anything you don't like.

I might be one of the few people who didn't fully read the non-fiction because it bored me, but did read the author's intro and end notes because those were interesting.

I recommend this book for it's wide variety of subject matter and stories.

My rating: Four out of five snails.