Now I know why when I was a teenager I could never find this story. You hear Stephen King, and you (at least I do) automatically think novels anywhere between 300 and 1000 pages long, you don't think short stories right away, and I did not think that that movie came from a short piece. Well last Saturday at the library I found the anthology Night Shift, originally to read Night Surf, the original Captain Trips story which he later redid as the Stand novel, and found COTC in there as well...and in my opinion, one of his better works, VERY creepy, this one oddly enough was not so graphic as his other works I have read, I was surprised by how toned down it was compared to other stories.

Though I gotta ask, WHY Nebraska? Iowa is the corn capital of the world, isn't it? So why not put them all in a little cornhusk field in Iowa? And WHAT was it with the kids couldn't live past the age of 19? Although if memory serves, he goofed there or maybe it was intentional but when the husband is reading over the ledger of all the kids who lived and died there, one of them actually made it to his 20th birthday. And why if the magic number is 19 were the last two at the end killed at only 18?


Anybody else got any thoughts on this story?