61 pages • 2 hours read
Night Shift
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Themes
The Nature of Human Relationships
Horror often assumes that extreme human suffering of the kind its characters endure ultimately reveals truth. In the crucible of King’s stories, his characters contend with circumstances that test every aspect of their lives and finally reveal them for who they are to themselves and to others. These ordeals allow King to interrogate the nature of human relationships: how people are bound to one another, and how easily they can turn on each other.
More often than not, the characters in King’s work find themselves unbearably alone, facing a horror that is uniquely suited to test them. Their relationships are conditional and often one-sided, more a banding together against threat than an intentional formation of relationships: There are many partnerships but few partners in the collection, and very little love. When characters refer to their partners, such as Bernie in “Night Surf” or Billings in “The Boogeyman,” it is usually in a negative manner. King depicts few solid love connections—no happy couples or supportive spouses. Norris, in “The Ledge,” is one of few characters who professes love for his partner. However, he is sadistically tortured because of it before learning that she has been killed. Similarly, Lumley’s love turns him into collateral damage.
King’s depiction of familial ties also tends towards pessimism—most obviously in “The Boogeyman,” where a father sacrifices a child to save himself, violating what many would argue is the defining duty of parenthood. However, where familial love does exist, it tends not to carry the disadvantages of romantic love. The latter, as depicted in “I Know What You Need,” “The Ledge,” or “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” clouds one’s judgment and potentially one’s morality; it is a source of vulnerability rather than strength. “The Last Rung on the Ladder” and “The Woman in the Room,” coming late in the collection, reverse this trend. Like “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” “The Woman in the Room” is about love and the extremes to which it will drive people. The answer in both cases is “to murder,” but Johnny’s actions are a selfless effort to spare his mother suffering. Alternately, guilt, not love, is the motivator in “The Last Rung on the Ladder.” The story broadens the collection’s approach to human relationships by including a somber reflection upon how trauma and loss can affect even our deepest held memories and truths.
Despite the bleak portraits of intimate partnerships, King’s vision is not totalizing. He affords a large degree of humanity to the beleaguered people who collect in the margins of his stories. In the face of bewildering threats, characters band together to bring rightness back to their societies. In the final scene of “Graveyard Shift,” a group of men prepare to brave flesh-eating rats to retrieve their comrades. This notion of brotherhood and self-sacrifice is recurring. Booth and Tookey in “One for the Road” knowingly face vampires to reunite Lumley with his family. Office Hunton’s friend Mark Jackson puts his life on the line to help Hunton stop a possessed laundry machine. Likewise, Henry, Bertie, and the narrator of “Gray Matter” brave a brutal snowstorm and the threat of being consumed by a gelatinous monster to keep a child safe from his abuser. Despite the bleak picture of interpersonal relationships that much of the collection offers, King also portrays a fundamental goodness in ordinary people, who demonstrate the selflessness and compassion that are essential to successful relationships.
The Relationship Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind
A deep insecurity haunts the minds of Night Shift. Reality is an unstable ground that torments the characters with strange visions and visceral experiences that test their hold over their own senses. The Freudian conception of the mind as split between conscious and unconscious realms informs King’s portrayal of his characters’ psychology. If the conscious is the character’s “self,” the unconscious is the “un-self”—the side of the mind that dwells in darkness, emerging to terrorize or bewilder.
King does not always render this split explicit. In “Jerusalem’s Lot,” Charles Boone is depicted as a troubled and unstable man who loses his grip on reality. The closing letter of the story suggests that Boone was delusional and murdered his attendant, yet King leaves the ending to the readers’ interpretation. “The Boogeyman” unfolds in a psychiatrist’s office, asking readers to pay attention to the story’s psychological aspects. Billings is dealing with violent impulses towards his family; his story of the boogeyman seems a way to rationalize the horror he feels at having harmed his family, at least until the monster itself appears at the story’s end. Yet the reader is left solely with Billings’s account, and in the context of the other divided and violent minds in the collection, must wonder if the boogeyman is not simply a hallucination. “I Am the Doorway” is even more oblique, treating the relationship between the conscious and unconscious in symbolic terms. The alien takeover of Arthur resembles the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. His horror at the fact that the aliens have manipulated his body while he was asleep mirrors the fear that the rationalizing conscious isn’t in full control of an unconscious brimming with inhumanity. This story sets the roadmap for the psychic discord that follows in the rest of the collection: The conscious struggles valiantly against the unconscious, though it will likely prove unreliable in the end.
“Strawberry Spring” provides a full portrait of the operating of cognitive dissonance by depicting a murderer who does not know he is a murderer. The name “Springheel Jack” stirs a deep part of his unconscious and prompts his nostalgic reminiscing, though he does not recognize what is happening—an example of the disassociation of which the mind is capable. Yet it is in the subconscious that the narrator’s most authentic self exists. To know himself, he must first comprehend the reality of his own subconscious, delving into his nostalgia surrounding the era of his first murders before recognizing that he is, in fact, the murderer.
A comparable realization underpins “The Woman in the Room,” though with a wholly different resonance. Johnny accesses the depth of his unconscious when he resurrects the memory of his mother spanking him with her mother’s soiled diaper. He does not come to terms with this memory, but his recognition of his grandmother’s suffering in her final days does seem to pave the way for his decision to cause his mother’s death. Similarly, “The Last Rung on the Ladder” explores the course of Larry’s reminiscence as he works a precious memory of his childhood into the fact of his sister’s suicide. At first, the thought that his sister, who was immortalized in his mind as elegance and strength in the air, could fall to her death, shakes everything Larry knew about her. Only by reworking the memory to accommodate his later neglect of their relationship can Larry come to terms with the shocking loss. Through stories such as these two King suggests that the site of repression and trauma is also the place where healing can begin.
Maliciousness and Human Motivation
A survey of the antagonists across the collection is virtually split down the middle between human-motivated maliciousness and supernatural affliction. However, even in stories that feature supernatural or extra-terrestrial antagonists, the otherworldly rarely initiates the maliciousness. In “Graveyard Shift,” Hall devises a cunning way to kill his boss. The bored group of survivors in “Night Surf” opt to burn an infected man alive under the guise of appealing to a higher power. Ed, in “I Know What You Need” uses black magic and the odd quirk of his birth to fulfill his selfish desires rather than to serve a supernatural agenda. While the cult in “Children of the Corn” ostensibly serve a primordial harvest god, they entrap and murder others and each other at the whims of their spiteful human prophets. In the majority of the stories, the instigator of violence is a cruel human with a base need to cause suffering.
Rarely, in fact, is the supernatural blatantly cruel. The boogeyman is a merciless being, and the vampires in “One for the Road” are opportunistic eaters. More often than not, the supernatural events in the book are driven by chance. A coincidental series of events places a demon into industrial laundry equipment in “The Mangler,” an unknown force powers trucks and working vehicles in “Trucks”—though the sense that the trucks are killing due to their own grievances is strong—and the alien invasion in “I Am the Doorway” is less a targeted attack than the seizure of an opportune moment. The pre-Christian gods in “The Lawnmower Man” and “Children of the Corn” have inscrutable motives but leave the true violence to their disciples, who conduct unprovoked and unplanned attacks.
The serial killers in “The Man Who Loved Flowers” and “Strawberry Spring” similarly lack motive. In the first instance, the reader is never allowed inside the murderer’s mind and can only extrapolate based on his utterances; the second depicts a mind so divided that it is wholly dissociated from its motives. Yet in both instances, the grisly murders and absence of remorse imply overwhelming human cruelty. It is human cruelty that leads to the initial murder in “Sometimes They Come Back” and the murder of Tony in “I Know What You Want.” Additionally, cruelty forces Norris onto the ledge, while the cruelty within Norris sees him promise to kill Cressner. Human cruelty even predicates the treatment program in “Quitters, Inc.,” in which the aversion part of the therapy hinges on avoiding deliberate malice. In “Battleground,” a remorseless assassin receives a comedic come-uppance when toy soldiers lay siege to his penthouse apartment. Similarly, Lester Billings is killed by the boogeyman he allowed to take his children.
All of this underscores the general malevolence of King’s universe, but the fact of its intentionality signals a sustained examination of the darkness that haunts the human heart. King portrays characters who are deliberately cruel. Even non-vindictive characters, such as Billings in “The Boogeyman” or Bertie in “Night Shift,” are passingly cruel and unfair to their partners, belittling them and imagining acts of violence against them. King is careful to work a moral consciousness throughout the work, and some characters conclude their stories by resolving to kill themselves in order to make up for the harm they have caused—though these characters are typically inadvertent channels of the universe’s latent malevolency. Nevertheless, the biggest threat humans face in King is not the indifferent callousness of nature but their own inhumanity to one another.
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