61 pages • 2 hours read
Stephen KingNight Shift
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 9 Summary: “Trucks”
An unnamed first-person narrator shelters in a diner of a truck stop with a small group of bewildered people. They cower behind the banquettes and stare uncertainly at the few trucks clustered in the parking lot. When Snodgrass, a “potbell[ied]” salesman, attempts to flee, a truck springs to life and runs directly into him. The truck thrusts Snodgrass into a ditch, where he takes hours to die. The narrator, still in the diner with the others, relates a tale familiar to them: Hours before, he was travelling on a nearby highway when a semi-trailer started knocking other cars off the road, killing drivers and destroying cars. The others have had similar experiences. None of them can explain why, but large trucks and busses have come to life and begun killing all humans.
Five survivors remain in the diner: the narrator, an elderly short-order cook (counterman), a teen named Jerry and his girlfriend, and a trucker. They plan to wait out the malevolent trucks in the diner. The counterman assures them that the diner has enough food to feed them for a month. However, when the power goes out, the counterman relays that the refrigerated food will spoil in three days. He also communicates that they will need to collect the drinkable water from the bathrooms if they are to subsist. The narrator and Jerry collect the water from an outside bathroom, but they are almost crushed by a careening truck that catches them in the open.
The narrator drifts to sleep calculating all the different vehicles that populate the world. He awakes to Snodgrass’s troubled moans and realizes that Snodgrass is still alive, albeit slowly dying, in the ditch. The narrator ignores Snodgrass’s desperate cries for help and tries to convince Jerry’s girlfriend that she should too. He insinuates that if they acknowledge Snodgrass, then Jerry will likely go out there and die in an attempt to save him. The girl agrees that there is “nothing out there” and goes back to sleep. No one else hears Snodgrass, and he eventually dies.
In the morning, the trucker realizes that the trucks cannot refuel. Without human intervention, they will soon run out of gas. Soon after, a huge truck approaches the diner and blasts its horn erratically. Jerry recognizes a pattern in the noise, recalling his Morse code training as a Boy Scout. He tells the others that the trucks are demanding that a human refill them at the gas station attached to the diner. Whoever does so will not be harmed. The narrator suggests they submit to the trucks, but the others refuse. Soon after, a belligerent bulldozer attacks the diner. The survivors drive it off with Molotov cocktails, but significant damage is done to the diner. Both Jerry and the trucker are killed.
To stop the carnage, the narrator volunteers to pump gas. The trucks, along with dozens of others, line up along the highway. The narrator works for hours, realizing that he’s become just a cog:
Trucks marched by endlessly. I was beginning to understand now. I was beginning to see. People were doing this all over the country or they were lying dead like the trucker, knocked out of their boots with heavy treadmarks mashed across their guts (149).
When he empties the tanks of the gas station, a fuel tanker approaches and refills the gas station’s stores. His hands blister, and he wryly thinks of the machines’ indifference and power over him: “They needed to know only one thing about their late masters, and they knew it. We bleed” (149). On the verge of collapse, the narrator allows the counterman to take over. He realizes that he will have to train Jerry’s girlfriend in the procedure if she expects to survive. The narrator imagines humans resorting to living in caves but realizes that most of the world is conveniently paved for the dominant new lifeforms. He entertains the hope that the trucks will eventually break down and die out because they can’t reproduce. Then he experiences a dire vision of a perpetual production line churning out endless new trucks. Humans work like a factory line—when one drops dead, another takes its place. He watches planes fly through the sky but knows there are no humans aboard.
Story 10 Summary: “Sometimes They Come Back”
When Jim Norman is 9 years old he witnesses his older brother Wayne’s murder at the hands of four greasers in an attempted robbery. Jim, who was returning library books with his brother, manages to escape, but vivid dreams of the event plague him into adulthood.
The narrative, related in close third-person point of view, begins 17 years later in 1974. Jim Norman secures a new teaching position as an English teacher after experiencing a mental crisis at a former school: When he saw three students bullying another, he tried to intervene but instead got punched himself. Afterwards, he could not approach the school without experiencing a panic attack.
Norman adjusts to his duties at the new school easily, though he finds one class, “Living with Lit,” challenging because it is populated by low-achieving athletes. One day, he breaks up a fight in the class, and a boy named Chip Osway threatens Norman for failing him. A few days later, after one of his students is killed in a hit-and-run, Norman has a new student transfer into his class. The boy, Robert Lawson, is the same age as the other students, but Norman immediately recognizes him as one of the greasers who murdered his brother in 1957. A few weeks later, one of his students falls to her death, and Norman receives a second transfer: David Garcia. To Norman’s horror, Garcia is another of the boys who murdered his brother.
Weeks later, Chip Osway warns Norman that Garcia and Lawson are planning to murder him. Osway disappears the next day. A week later a third greaser, Vincent Corey, arrives in Norman’s class. Shaken, Norman contacts a police officer acquaintance from childhood, who confirms that Lawson, Garcia, and Corey were killed in 1957 after a police chase caused them all to be electrocuted. Norman decides against telling his wife or the principal about his haunting, as he is sure they won’t believe him. Soon after, Norman’s wife dies when the greasers’ force her taxi off the road. Desperate now, Norman secures a book of spells and conjures a demon by cutting off his own index fingers. He implores the demon to get rid of the greasers and the demon complies, taking the shape of Norman’s brother Wayne and destroying the undead greasers. As the demon takes its leave, it promises Norman it will return, and Norman recalls a warning from the book of spells: “[S]ometimes they come back” (181).
Story 11 Summary: “Strawberry Spring”
When the unnamed narrator reads the name “Springheel Jack” in his morning newspaper, he recalls the murders that rocked his New England college campus eight years before, in 1968. The first victim, a young woman whose throat was violently slashed, was discovered during the titular “strawberry spring.” This local meteorological condition that occurs in cycles of 8 to 10 years during late winter. It floods the area with a thick fog, a false spring, making things “seem out of joint, strange, magical” (183).
Rumors spread about the murdered student on campus. The police first suspect the woman’s boyfriend and arrest him, quelling the panic. When the fog rolled in that night, the narrator went for a walk around campus, admiring the weather’s beauty. He wakes to a “clamor” the next day and learns that another victim has been discovered. Fear and paranoia grip the school and surrounding area; the narrator scrutinizes fellow students’ faces on his way to class. The police do not arrest anyone, but the media gives the unknown killer a name: Springheel Jack.
The narrator describes the growing atmosphere of fear as young women continue to be killed under the cover of the fog; security guards mistake sleeping students for murder victims, fearful police make rash arrests, and right-wing groups in the school push the fear of “outside agitators” (187). Contradictory rumors finally culminate in the arrest of a man few believe is the actual culprit: an “innocuous homosexual sociology student named Hanson Gray” who has no alibi for several of the murders (190).
The final murder occurs just before the college students disperse for spring break; when they return and find the murders do not resume, their attention slowly shifts to other matters. The narrator summarizes the intervening eight years: He got married, had a child, and works in publishing. However, when another strawberry spring arrives, and another young woman is viciously slaughtered, the narrator, finds parts of the new victim’s body in the trunk of his car. He comes to suspect that he is Springheel Jack, killing in a dissociative state.
Story 12 Summary: “The Ledge”
A 36-year-old tennis pro, Stan Norris, relates in first-person narration his encounter with Cressner, a malicious crime boss whose wife has been sleeping with Norris. Norris is in love with Cressner’s wife, and Cressner’s wife is in love with Norris—facts that Cressner knows after surveilling his wife for weeks. In a 43rd-story penthouse, Cressner offers Norris $20,000 and the chance to leave with his wife. However, Norris must complete an outside circuit of the building on the small ledge that rings the penthouse level. Cressner knows that Norris spent time in prison on a charge of breaking and entering, and he threatens him with a possible return: Should Norris refuse his “deal,” Cressner says he will phone the police and report Norris’s car, which Cressner has had an assistant fill with bricks of heroin. If Norris is successful, he earns the right to leave with the money, Cressner’s wife, and Cressner’s blessing. Cressner admits that he has made this wager with six others, some athletes and some not. All have fallen to their deaths.
Though it seems to take forever, Norris circumnavigates the building, battling violent gusts of wind and the presence of a territorial pigeon. When Norris returns, Cressner states that he never welches on his bets and that Norris is free to leave with the money. As Norris is leaving, however, Cressner admits that he has already had his wife murdered, as he was unwilling to accept losing her to another. Infuriated, Norris overwhelms Cressner’s bodyguard and takes possession of the man’s weapon. He turns the gun on Cressner and wagers that Cressner can’t circumnavigate the ledge, leaving the man little choice but to comply. After Cressner begins his circuit, Norris admits that while Cressner wouldn’t welch on a bet, he himself will have no problem killing Cressner, should he return.
Stories 9-12 Analysis
Moving from the decaying authority structures of the previous four stories, King turns inwards, examining The Relationship Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind. Collectively, Stories 9-12 inquire at the boundaries of the self, considering how people decide who they are and what forces can trouble this sense of self. Trucks” surveys the process of dehumanization. Trauma’s effects on memory (and memory’s reliability) are the focus of “Sometimes They Come Back.” “Strawberry Spring” presents a fractured self trying to piece together the mystery of its existence. Finally, “The Ledge” examines how the crushing existential dread of impending death undoes any personality constructs or social personas. Through these stories, King warns readers that their identities may not be so secure after all.
“Trucks” bookends the narrative of industrial decline developed in “The Mangler.” It is no coincidence that every truck that comes alive in the story is industrial or used for work. The trucks not only kill people but also their own “domesticated” cousins: vehicles used in a recreational or family manner. Humans only means of survival is to discard their former selves, to blankly accept orders from their operators, and to dissolve themselves into their duties. This resolution paints an image of subjugation previously experienced by machines themselves. The trucks’ revenge is total when they have reduced the narrator, the elderly counterman, and Jerry’s teen girlfriend to automatons dedicated to their service. To survive in these horrific circumstances, the characters dehumanize each other. The narrator and the girl’s dismissal of Snodgrass’s pleas for help speaks to the theme The Nature of Human Relationships. Driven by fear, both band together in the elevation of their own survival over the needs of another.
“Sometimes They Come Back” questions the nature of perception and memory, forcing an examination of the foundations of self. Jim Norman is a teacher riddled with fear and survivor’s guilt that he has not fully confronted. The appearance of boys he’d long thought grown forces Norman to question the reliability of his senses. They come to stand for both the recurrent memory of his brother’s murder, which each nightmare refreshes, and Norman’s desperation to rid himself of traumatic memory. The persistence of the memory de-centers his self and calls into question the idea that trauma can be resolved. Rather than coming to terms with the memories that haunt him, Norman chooses a route of symbolic repression. The erasure of trauma through demonic assistance suggests the psychological process of relegating disturbing thoughts and memories to one’s subconscious. However, the warning Norman reads implies that this strategy of avoidance will only cause the recurrence of that which torments him. The story’s title, which seems at first to refer to events within the narrative, becomes a prediction about Norman’s future.
If the conscious and unconscious refuse to stay separate in “Sometimes They Come Back,” the following story lays bare a disturbing distinguishing line between the two selves. Steeped in nostalgia, “Strawberry Spring” positions the reader squarely within the (conscious) mind of its narrator, emulating his limited perspective. At times, the depth of the spilt in his mind comes into focus, as when he recalls wandering the campus after a body has been discovered and states: “I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces” (185). The statement seems literal, but the revelation that the narrator is likely the killer casts it in a new light; the speaker sees human shapes but does not afford them the humanity of faces. This ambiguity challenges the extent to which the mind can properly assess itself, particularly via memory. In his portrait of a fractured self, King examines how the two parts of the mind—conscious and unconscious—interact to construct or deconstruct the stability of one’s world.
“The Ledge,” with its slow circuit of the building, offers a metaphor for the fear of death, which assails the self and informs its conscious and unconscious decisions. King wrote the story as an homage to Jack Finney’s 1956 short story “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket,” which contains a similar element of tension—a man on a ledge attempting to retrieve a page of his work. Like Finney, King imbues physical description with tension as Norris makes his circuit; a pigeon takes on the life-threatening proportions of any of King’s other villains. The story culminates in a mock-heroic ending. The triumphant Norris overpowers Cressner’s guard and turns the tables on his tormentor, but the final lines suggest a twist that sheds light on King’s experiment with the mutability of self. Norris’s admission that he is more morally unprincipled than Cressner is startling only because King has played with the reader’s perceptions. By casting his as a man in love, then a man wronged by a powerful enemy, and then a man simply trying to survive, King encourages the reader to forget Norris’s criminal past. The goal is to make the reader identify with Norris so that the closing nod to Maliciousness and Human Motivation will cause them to second guess not only Norris but themself.
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