Children of the Corn stands out as one of King's greatest scary shorts: ostensibly about the dangers of organised religion, it's packed with terrifying children, murderous monsters and a pretty vile use for corn husks. Children of the Corn, Sometimes They Come Back, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man were all made into varyingly successful films (with, in The Lawnmower Man's case, litigious levels of alteration to the original concept). In between these two are some stories that casual readers might assume are full novels. (Interestingly, King really wears his influence on his sleeve for these two stories: where the worm in the prequel tale is heavily indebted to Brian Lumley's Cthulhu classic The Burrowers Beneath, the second story's lost family are named the Lumleys. One for the Road, on the other hand, is set after the events of Salem's Lot: a much more basic story of a family lost in the abandoned town during a snowstorm, it's an effective and neat ending to the more ambiguous conclusion of the original novel, offering hints as to whether Ben and Mark succeeded in their mission at the end of Salem's Lot.
The narrator and his servant discover the town and it secrets, and their story is told posthumously by the narrator's descendant – a descendant who, it transpires, is doomed to repeat his ancestor's mistakes, rats in the walls and all. It tells the age-old story of an ancient evil found in a small abandoned town – but this time the evil comes in the form of a worm (along with a couple of vampires) that was drawn to the town in the late 18th century by a puritanical cult. Jerusalem's Lot is an epistolary prequel, taking place in 1850, and so imbued with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos that it might almost be set in Innsmouth. It begins and (nearly) ends with these bookends, both stories that add to the mythos established in Salem's Lot.
No fewer than six stories from the collection have been made into movies one was the inspiration for King's most famous and lauded novel and two provide brilliant bookends to probably his scariest book. Night Shift features 20 stories written over more than a decade, some published as early as 1969 (when King was only 22). Night Shift is notable for being the first experience that the public had – not counting Rage, which they didn't know was by King – of just how astonishingly wide-reaching his imagination is. Vampires, clowns, dogs, aliens, spooky old hotels, the general concept of death … There's an argument to be made that his most successful novels (in terms of commercial awareness) adhere to this pattern and to many casual readers, this is all King is capable of. T here exists a sloppy but perhaps not wholly unjust accusation that a lot of Stephen King's earliest work is based on a definite formula: take a thing that people are scared of and make it scarier.
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