Rat started out great, fantastic even. The story is about an amateur writer who goes to a cabin in the middle of nowhere to write a novel.

The setup was beautiful. King’s writing put me in the story. I imagined every detail he put on paper without any effort whatsoever. Complications developed nicely.

I didn’t want to put the story down.

Then, like Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, Rat ran out of gas and rolled to a stop.

THE GOOD
The main character is excellent and has an entertaining motivation. He wants to finish a novel. This is compounded by the fact that he had a bad experience trying to finish a novel previously. The reader feels empathy for the character’s desire to accomplish his dream.

Isolating the main character at the cabin brought the story into clear focus. The atmosphere of the location, along with simple details like needing a fire to keep warm, eating from cans and the coming storm set up a palpable mood.

In addition, it was fun to get a glimpse inside the writing process and learn about the character’s book as you read along, kind of like the way we got to read a novel within a novel in King’s Misery. It’s always educational when King talks about the writing process.

Personally, my writing process has never gone like it does for the character in the story. He pumped out up to eighteen pages a day, clean copy, “that hardly needed any edits.” He also couldn’t wait to get back to the story.

I might get two pages on a good day, and I have to drag my feet to return to a story, at least on the first and second drafts. Once I get further into revision, the writing process becomes more enjoyable. Some folks love first drafts. Not me. They are the most unpleasant part of the process. Second drafts, meanwhile, are the hardest part of the process.

THE BAD
Everything was going great until the rat showed up. Then the story veered suddenly into the supernatural, which is fine. But ultimately, the rat didn’t provide any conflict. It simply presented a bargain to the writer character, which the writer took without much convincing.

Pretty much all conflict dried up at that point. The storm blew out. The writer’s illness went away, and his isolation just as quickly disappeared. Poof, and the main character was home again, none the worse for the wear and with the book shaping up, as well.

THE UGLY
The end of the story is more a summary than an ending. The guy finished the book. It was successful, but at a cost — a cost that didn’t carry much weight. The cost affected another character who showed up for a couple of paragraphs earlier in the story. Why should the reader care much of anything about that?

CONCLUSION
Rat and If It Bleeds are the best stories in the book. Rat was on track to be the best overall, but it fell apart in the third act, whereas If It Bleeds had a confrontation in the third act. As a result, Rat gets second place (Mr. Harrigan’s Phone gets third and Life Of Chuck comes in last).

Three out of the four stories in If It Bleeds had fairly weak endings, yet I don’t fall in line with the King-has-bad-endings group overall. In general, I think most of his stories and books have decent endings (I even like the ending of the Dark Tower series and It).

However, King did seem to get into a phase there for a while where he defended stories not having tidy endings because life didn’t have tidy endings.

“And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether the’’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.”

That may be true. The problem is people don’t read Stephen King stories because they want more real life. They read King stories to escape real life.

And that’s the end of the road with If It Bleeds. All stories have been reviewed. It’s hard for the book to stand against King’s greater anthologies. Oh well, I paid my ticket to ride, and I’m not going to ask for a refund. At the very least, reviewing the stories was educational. It taught me more about the story-telling process, which is valuable in and of itself.

If I had to give If It Bleeds a rating based on the five-star system, I suppose it would fall in around two stars, considering its pedigree.