Stories Graded:

Jerusalem's Lot - 5
Graveyard Shift - 4
Night Surf - 2
I Am The Doorway - 1
The Mangler - 3.5
The Boogeyman - 4
Gray Matter - 4
Battleground - 1
Trucks - 4
Sometimes They Come Back - 4
Strawberry Spring - 4.5
The Ledge - 2
The Lawnmower Man - 3.5
Quitters Inc. - 4
I Know What You Need - 4
Children of the Corn - 5
The Last Rung of the Ladder - 3
The Man Who Loved Flowers - 2
One For the Road - 5
The Woman in the Room - 2

Stephen King is the reason I'm a reader - I picked up a copy of Misery when I was 12 and quickly became obsessed. I don't read his books as often anymore but, usually around the summer or Halloween time, I get the itch to pick one up, and I decided to go for this one, his first short story collection. As you can see from my ratings, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the stories are brilliant...I mean, Children of the Corn is so unnerving and hits all the right notes. On the other end of the spectrum is Battleground, which was laughably bad and I found myself skim reading to get to the next story. After a bad one, I found myself tempted to put the book down so, for that reason, I can't give this book higher than a 3. Yes, some of the stories in here are 5 star reads but the bad ones were bad enough that I wanted to stop reading altogether.