Again, I'm behind in my genre reading--this is the first thing by Stephen King I've ever read. (The story is "Graveyard Shift".) But it follows what I thought I'd think of his writing from reading On Writing, i.e. that while he's very good and really knows his stuff, he's not the kind of writer I would enjoy reading. His experiences--blue-collar work and the people whose families have done such jobs for generations--are so different from mine that I can't connect.

I did enjoy the rats, though. :> And I appreciate the sort of circly repetition of themes. And the voice...the narrative voice was great. But I suppose I'm a fan of old-style storytelling, where everything happens for a reason and how you live your life affects how your life ends up, and this was just too capricious for me. Plus, although I understand that you can't really say how this will end given the ending of the protagonist, I wanted to know more about what would happen with the rats and the cavern, etc etc etc. This felt, I guess, like the start of a really good story. And the suspense was good. It just didn't pay off for me.

I've never been a big fan of Poe, either; I'm not really a horror person, and Poe's world is a lot darker than I generally like mine to be. I've read terribly dark pieces I enjoyed, but there's a difference between darkness in setting and darkness in a character--the first I'm all for, but crazy or despairing characters, at least for a whole piece, are very hard for me to deal with. So Poe, yeah.

I've read the Tell-Tale heart before, and it transpired much more quickly than I remembered. I can't help but think that with this kind of story, it's better to have a long buildup...the ticking coming in, then out, slowly rather than quickly driving him nuts. The early buildup is good, the slow way the protagonist gets into the old man's room, and I wish it had stayed so anticipatory throughout.

Then again, now I'm thinking about it a little more, maybe that isn't the best idea. Because part of what makes this story work, when it does, is that you don't know exactly what's going on. Is the heart still beating? Is that what the guy hears? Or is he hallucinating? I can accept maybe, maybe, the heart is still beating after a few minutes. But days later? Perhaps not.

My dad loves Dashiell Hammett, so I was expecting to enjoy the Hammett story ("Too Many Have Lived") a lot more than I did. The story was pretty much a straight-up mystery. There were a number of clues laid throughout the story, including a number of psychological tricks I thought were interesting, but the major things weren't revealed till the end--which I hate, hate, hate. Other than that, I thought the characterizations were pretty pedestrian and the events not terribly interesting. I think if I was a mystery fan I would have enjoyed it more--as an early example of mystery traditions, as a guilty pleasure--but as it is I feel neutral about the story.

The Sayers story, on the other hand...wow. A writer friend of mine just loves her mysteries, and I trust his opinion, so I was unsurprised at how much I liked this story. This particular story, "Absolutely Elsewhere," has everything I love when I enjoy mysteries: the clues were all there, but unobtrusive enough that at the end there were "Aha!" moments, and I didn't feel cheated by withheld information as I did in the Hammett story. (It's odd--I feel like I know more about mysteries than I've actually experienced, since my parents love them.) I don't know if this opinion is warranted, but I also felt like it was a snapshot of what kinds of lives the characters would live, while the Hammett story was more romanticized. The relationship between Wimsey and his butler was as hysterical as I remembered from the twenty pages of a novel I read a while back. And the pacing was, in my opinion, an example to all the other writers in this set of stories. I'd be curious to discuss this with mystery or horror readers, however--SF, horror, and mystery fans overlap enough that I *think* the sense of pacing should be the same in all three, but I don't know.