Skeleton Crew

Skeleton Crew is a 1985 collection of short stories by American fantasy-horror author Stephen King. Often likened to the preeminent works of horror writers Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, King’s stories explore the dark underbelly of human consciousness, the vices of modern life, and the ways in which antisocial impulses and negative experiences such as fear, anxiety, anger, and trauma give shape to our dreams and nightmares. Many of the stories in Skeleton Crew, such as “The Mist,” previously stood as independent works; others have been adapted into other forms, including comic strips and films. The collection helped establish King as one of the most prominent horror writers in American history.

The stories in Skeleton Crew take place in worlds that are already unsettled, often as a result of some repressed or hidden crime or the denial of a supernatural entity that ends up being all too real. They are distinctively modern, referring to technologies, products, and events embedded in the public consciousness of late nineteenth-century America. Moreover, the voices of King’s narrators are candid, providing an objectivity and ethos that are undermined by the supernatural forces around them. In what is arguably the collection’s most famous story, “The Mist,” a mist draws itself over a suburban town, concealing a rift between the human world and a Lovecraftian world of hideous monsters. The monsters lurk in the fog, making contact with the townspeople only after the fog envelops their homes and local businesses. The bulk of the plot takes place in a supermarket, where David Drayton is trapped with his son, Billy, and a number of other civilians. One by one, each survivor enters the fog in a desperate attempt to reach safety or find help. At the end of the story, the U.S. military reaches the town just as the rift begins to close, leaving its nature and purpose unknown.

“The Monkey,” concerns a haunted windup toy that incessantly clangs a pair of cymbals together. The monkey haunts protagonist Hal Shelburn, and, he finds, has haunted past generations of his family, killing them and their loved ones. When the cursed monkey comes close to killing his son, Petey, Hal finally finds out how to get rid of the cursed monkey. Another cursed object features in “The Word Processor of the Gods,” in which a man tired of his wife and son finds a word processor that has the ability to literally redact them from his life. In their place, he writes in a wife and son who conform to his own flat and unrealistic ideals. In “The Raft,” four college students cower on a raft when a giant, flesh-eating, blob-like creature pursues them during a morning swim. “Here There Be Tygers” is reminiscent of sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” describing a child who, out of malice and resentment towards an adult authority figure, lures her into a confined space with a tiger that has impossibly materialized in her classroom.

Several of the stories in Skeleton Crew resonate with present-day events. “Cain Rose Up” describes a fanatical university student who shuts himself in a university room and executes a mass shooting out the window. Other stories take place in remote times. “The Jaunt” depicts a world in which time travel has been invented. To travel through time, individuals are strapped to machines that only work when they fall asleep, undergoing a process called “the jaunt.” A man teaches his son about the history of the jaunt, but his son then botches his first trip, arriving in the destination time as a skeletally ancient creature that quickly dies. “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands” is a blend of the modern and the ancient, following a tourist in an unnamed country who is cursed by a shaman after fatally striking a local boy with his car. The curse causes the man to kill any living thing he touches. Ultimately, the man decides to commit suicide rather than continue to jeopardize innocent people and his loved ones: he is found in bed with one hand holding the other.

The collection’s final story, “The Reach,” concerns an elderly woman who is awaiting death on the island where she has spent her entire life. Seeing the spirits of others who have died on the island, she sets out to reach the mainland by walking across the frozen sea. On the ice, surrounded by whiteness, the spirits of her dead friends and husband welcome her to death.

Passing through a spectrum of emotions and genres, Skeleton Crew is a moving and terrifying example of Stephen King’s genre-defying writing.