You Like It Darker Announced as Stephen King’s New Story Collection for 2024
You Like It Darker is officially the title of Stephen King’s next story collection, and the announcement immediately caught the attention of Constant Readers everywhere. During an appearance on the Talking Scared podcast, King revealed that a new collection was scheduled for 2024 and would contain mostly longer stories. For fans of King’s short fiction, that alone was enough to generate excitement.
What We Know About You Like It Darker
One of the most interesting details about You Like It Darker involved a story called The Dreamers. King explained that the idea came to him while lying in bed and telling himself stories before falling asleep. He envisioned a man under the influence of a drug whose eyes suddenly turned black as strange tendrils emerged from them. The image was disturbing enough that King initially pushed it aside, but the idea refused to leave him alone.
The following day, King connected the concept to H.P. Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Instead of wondering what existed beyond the wall of sleep, he began imagining what might lie beneath it. That train of thought led to a terrifying vision of a vast, sentient darkness hidden beneath ordinary dreams, forming the foundation of The Dreamers. According to King, the resulting idea was so creepy that he didn’t even want to think about it at night.
Why Fans Were Excited About You Like It Darker
The announcement of You Like It Darker was exciting because Stephen King’s story collections often contain some of his most imaginative work. Collections such as Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and Full Dark, No Stars have produced fan favorites over the years, and King’s comments suggested that this new volume would continue that tradition. The promise of longer stories also hinted at deeper character development and more ambitious storytelling.
For readers who enjoy King’s darker and more unsettling fiction, The Dreamers sounded especially promising. Any story that King himself finds creepy is usually worth paying attention to.
What did King have to say in the Podcast?
Then last year, there’s a story.
It’ll be in a book that comes out next year called You Like It Darker.
They’re mostly news stories, long stories, for the most part.
One of them is called The Dreamers.
One night I was lying in bed.
I tell myself stories before I go to sleep.
That’s how I get to sleep.
I had this image of a man who was under some kind of drug.
He opens his eyes and they turn black and these tendrils start to come out of his eyeballs.
They just creep me out.
I couldn’t think about that anymore.
I put that aside.
The next day I said to myself, oh, I remember that book, Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of
Sleep.
I said, what if a man didn’t get through the wall of sleep or over the wall of sleep, but
under it?
What if there was something beyond that wall, beyond the actual dreams that we have, a reality
that’s huge, that’s apocalyptic, some huge darkness that’s sentient, that had something
like that?
I thought that goes with the tendrils and the eyeballs.
I had that story like that.
But I couldn’t think about it at night.
I couldn’t do that because it just was so creepy to me.
