What is Nightmares & Dreamscapes?

Published in 1993, it is King's third major short story collection, containing 23 stories and one poem. It includes 'Dolan's Cadillac' (a long revenge story), 'The End of the Whole Mess' (a dystopian novella), 'You Know They Got a Hell of a Band' (a town full of dead rock stars), 'Home Delivery' (a zombie story), 'Chattery Teeth' (a killer toy teeth story), and 'Crouch End' (a Lovecraft homage).

Was Nightmares & Dreamscapes adapted?

Yes. A TNT anthology television series of the same name aired in 2006, adapting eight stories. It starred a range of actors including William Hurt, Richard Thomas, and Tom Berenger. The adaptation was generally well-received, with particular praise for 'Crouch End' and 'Autopsy Room Four.'

What is 'Crouch End' and why is it significant?

'Crouch End' is set in the real London neighborhood and functions as an explicit homage to H.P. Lovecraft. A couple gets lost in Crouch End and enters a pocket dimension where Lovecraftian horrors exist beneath the ordinary streets. King rarely writes overt homages, making this story notable as a declaration of literary influence.

What is 'Dolan's Cadillac' about?

'Dolan's Cadillac' is a revenge novella in which a schoolteacher spends years meticulously planning to bury a mob boss—and his Cadillac—alive in a desert highway excavation. King has called it his homage to Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado,' both in its revenge structure and its buried-alive conclusion.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Stories

Horror Mystery

Pages: 992
Published: 1993
Language: English

Synopsis

Twenty-four pieces of short fiction, written over more than two decades, fill this 1993 collection, Stephen King's third. Some stories first ran in magazines and anthologies from the early 1970s onward, and a few were never printed before this volume.

The subjects vary widely. In "Dolan's Cadillac", a man works out a slow, patient revenge against a crime boss, and the setting is an empty stretch of road in Nevada. "Crouch End" has a couple lost in a London neighborhood whose streets no longer add up, a nod to H. P. Lovecraft.

"The Night Flier" follows a tabloid reporter on the trail of a killer who pilots his own plane. "Home Delivery" imagines the dead coming back in a small island community in Maine. "The Doctor's Case" is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche narrated by Watson, and "Umney's Last Case" drops a private eye from 1930s Los Angeles into a situation that unsettles him.

Lighter, odder material turns up too: a set of wind-up teeth that kills, and a town populated by dead rock stars. Horror, crime, dark fantasy and science fiction share the volume. Some stories are quiet and others brutal, so the mood shifts sharply from one piece to the next.