"If It Bleeds," a collection of four novellas, is the...

"If It Bleeds," a collection of four novellas, is the latest work by Stephen King. Credit: Scribner

IF IT BLEEDS by Stephen King (Scribner. 436 pp., $30)

Stephen King's affinity for the novella form goes back to the early stages of his long, prolific career. Since 1982, at roughly 10-year intervals, King has produced three volumes of novellas that have allowed him to play with a wide variety of themes, scenes and settings. The latest of these, "If It Bleeds," contains four compelling stories that reaffirm his mastery of the form.

"Mr. Harrigan's Phone," for example, is yet another reflection of King's sometimes baleful fascination with technology and its effects on our lives. At the heart of the story is the relationship between Craig, the adolescent narrator, and John Harrigan, retired billionaire and borderline Luddite. As their uneven relationship develops, Craig gifts the older man with a cellphone. The gift is designed to facilitate "normal" communications, but those communications darken and change, connecting the world of rural Maine to the unknown world beyond. At its deepest level, "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" is about the lasting connections we sometimes make despite seemingly insurmountable differences.

"The Life of Chuck" is the collection's most original story. It opens on the image of billboards bearing the portrait of a middle-aged accountant named Charles Krantz. Each billboard bears the words: "39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK!" Who is Chuck? And what is the story behind those billboards? In time, we learn a good deal about this character as the story, constructed in three acts, moves backward in time to Chuck's early life. The result is a slightly surreal, wholly engaging narrative about dance, music, mortality and acceptance, and about the bedrock notion that all of us, like Chuck, contain multitudes.

"Rat" returns to one of King's recurring subjects: the problematic nature of the writing life. Drew Larson is a struggling writer who has produced a half-dozen short stories, and has tried and failed three times to finish a novel, each failure bringing with it a greater degree of psychological damage. "Rat" recounts Drew's final desperate attempt to bring a novel to completion. An unpredictable, often hallucinatory narrative, this is one of King's definitive explorations of the dark side of the creative impulse.

The centerpiece of this volume is the title story, a fully developed short novel with multiple ties to King's recent fiction. The protagonist — and true hero — is Holly Gibney, the damaged, savant-like young woman who first appeared in 2014's "Mr. Mercedes," and who played a pivotal role in King's 2018 novel "The Outsider." "If It Bleeds" is a direct sequel to "The Outsider," though it contains enough relevant detail to stand on its own.

In "The Outsider," Holly and a police detective tracked down an ancient vampiric creature. Here she is battling a similarly daunting monster, but this time she's on her own. Watching her overcome obstacles, among them her own fear, her troubled past and the disbelief of others, is one of the central pleasures of this book.

In "If It Bleeds," King continues to draw from a rich and varied reservoir of stories. At its best, his work remains deeply empathetic and compulsively readable. May the reservoir never run dry.

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