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 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 17 Summary: “The Last Rung on the Ladder”
Upon receiving a worrying letter from his estranged sister, a man named Larry learns that she has died by suicide after throwing herself from a tall building. In the immediacy of his grief, he recalls an afternoon from their past that was always significant to him.
Larry and his sister Kitty grow up in Hemingford Home in Omaha. Whenever their parents leave them unattended, they sneak out to their barn, climb to the rafters, and leap into a huge pile of hay. The rafters are very high, and the ladder up to them is rickety—factors that only add to the excitement. One day as Larry is climbing the ladder, he notices that it is on the point of detaching from the rafter, but he doesn’t alert Kitty. He means to warn her once he lands safely in the hay, but by then she is already climbing the ladder. As Kitty reaches the last rung, the ladder breaks, leaving her dangling over a fall that is sure to kill her. Larry calls out encouragement to her as he piles hay underneath her. When Larry tells her to let go, Kitty falls into the hay, suffering only a broken ankle. Kitty shocks Larry when she tells him she didn’t look down before letting go, simply trusting her brother to save her.
Larry drifts away from his sister in the intervening years as they grow into their own lives. Kitty intends to attend business college after high school, but she instead wins a beauty contest and marries one of the judges. When her first marriage fails, Kitty moves to Hollywood and secures low-level modelling and acting jobs. She marries a second man, though this marriage doesn’t last either. Larry, busy with his burgeoning career as a lawyer, stops answering Kitty’s letters and doesn’t realize that she has become a call girl to support herself. After her death, Larry is left with the final letter she sent him, where she states that she believes that it would have been better if she died that day in the barn. Larry sadly reflects that if he had read this letter when it arrived, he would have immediately gone to his sister and perhaps saved her life a second time.
Story 18 Summary: “The Man Who Loved Flowers”
An unnamed young man strolls up a street in New York City in May of 1963. He is well dressed and light-footed, and every person he passes muses on the fact that he appears to be in love. His presence causes those who observe him to reflect on their own loves and the romance of the early spring season.
The young man stops at a flower stand to purchase flowers for Norma, the woman he is in love with. The radio at the stand issues a news report about a young woman’s body found in the East River and a “hammer murderer was still on the loose” (307). The young man wants to purchase cheaper flowers for Norma, but the vendor convinces him to buy an expensive bouquet. He continues up the street, flowers in hand, while passersby respond to the love so plainly on his face.
As night falls, the young man approaches a woman in an alley and offers her the flowers. She responds that her name isn’t Norma, but the young man isn’t listening to her anymore. He assures Norma that “it was always for you” before realizing that Norma has been dead for 10 years (311). The subsequent grief drives him to violence. He pulls out his hammer and kills the young woman, as he has done five times previously. For a moment, the young man is unsettled, but he then assures himself that one day he will find Norma again and that his name is “Love” (311). As he rejoins the foot traffic on the street, a middle-aged woman admonishes her partner for not wearing a similar expression of love whenever she is near.
Story 19 Summary: “One for the Road”
Three years after the events of ’Salem’s Lot, Jerusalem’s Lot has been ravaged by fire, but its vampires still actively hunt in the area. During a snowstorm, a man named Booth, the narrator of the story, and a bar owner nicknamed Tookey shelter in Tookey’s Bar in a town just outside Jerusalem’s Lot. The calm of their night is interrupted when a bewildered man, Gerard Lumley, stumbles into the bar. He explains that his car went off the road in the blizzard, and he left his wife and daughter in the car while he went for help. Booth and Tookey are horrified to realize that Lumley’s car is next to the ruin of Jerusalem’s Lot. With great reluctance, Booth and Tookey agree to help Lumley get back to his car, certain that his wife and daughter are in great danger.
Having lived close to Jerusalem’s Lot, Booth and Tookey are aware of the vampires and take protective actions such as wearing crucifixes, medals of Saint Christopher, or rosaries. However, they are reluctant to share this fact with Lumley as they are sure he won’t believe them. When they arrive at the car, they find it empty save for Lumley’s daughter’s discarded coat. They try to convince Lumley to keep away from his wife and daughter, but he doesn’t listen. When his now-vampiric wife calls to him from the trees, he goes to her, and she kills him. Booth is almost drawn to the vampiric daughter, but Tookey saves him by assaulting her with a Bible. Booth and Tookey flee.
Booth mentions that Tookey died of a heart attack a few years after the event and admits that he is plagued by nightmares of Lumley’s daughter. He warns the reader against venturing toward the ruin of Jerusalem’s Lot: Lumley’s daughter is still waiting.
Story 20 Summary: “The Woman in the Room”
Johnny’s mother is wasting away in a hospital in Lewiston, Maine, where she is battling the extreme pain of stomach cancer. Johnny struggles with seeing his mother in her condition, as well as maintaining her empty house. He is increasingly drinking to cope with his despair. More and more frequently, he entertains the idea of giving his mother enough pain medicine to kill her.
As Johnny’s mother’s condition deteriorates, a doctor informs him that she suffers from paralysis and that she will no longer be able to walk. Despite this, her death is not imminent: The doctor expects she will suffer for a long time before she dies. One night while caring for his mother, Johnny recalls an incident from when he was 12. His grandmother, his mother’s mother, was bedridden in their house while his mother cared for her. He recalls mouthing off while his mother was washing one of his grandmother’s diapers. His mother, driven to rage, spanked him with the diaper, leaving him “not a chance in the world for smart talk” (335).
Facing the prospect of his mother suffering interminably, Johnny decides to euthanize his mother. He sneaks the painkillers into her room and goads himself into giving her the overdose, which he believes she is aware of and willingly accepts. As his mother dies, he returns home and waits for the hospital to call.
Stories 17-20 Analysis
The end of the collection focuses on a quintessentially American nostalgia for a lost era. These four stories examine the consequences of that nostalgic yearning and how time’s passage warps perceptions, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. While two of the stories feature figures typical of King’s horror writing—a serial killer in “The Man Who Loved Flowers” and a vampiric little girl with ponytails in “One for the Road”—the other two are drastic departures from what typified King’s work at the time of publication. “The Last Rung on the Ladder” avoids horror to focus on personal grief and a reckoning with memory and wasted time. “The Woman in the Room” uses horror not to shock, but to investigate the compassion that can sometimes undergird what society considers murder.
“The Last Rung on the Ladder” features startling moments of terror, but not in-the-moment horror. The horror washes over Larry only after years and years, and it is bound up in loss and the realization that he might have been able to prevent calamity. These pains attend nostalgia and the broader project of looking back into the past. There is no resolution for the horror Larry faces: the prospect of a future without his comforting memory, knowing that he was unable to protect his sister a second time. It is appropriate that this story is situated from a retrospective manner; rather than following a character who may not survive to tell their story, King focuses on the resonances humans create in each other’s lives, the sadness of loneliness, and the distances that form as life is lived. It paints a more bittersweet view of The Nature of Human Relationships than many stories in the collection. Though Larry has hurt his sister, he has done so passively and inadvertently, and he is self-aware enough to recognize his failure.
Nostalgia makes up the very atmosphere of “The Man Who Loves Flowers.” By distancing readers from his unnamed protagonist, King heightens the surprise of the killer’s viciousness and plays with the nature of human perceptions—specifically, the way people use their pasts to avoid seeing what is in front of them. The story is given a retroactive nature by its situation in 1963, 14 years before its composition. King includes news from the era to evoke a distant yet still close past. The narrator is cloaked with the positive perceptions of those he passes and the niceties they project onto him, but King does not simply blame those around him for not seeing the evil in their midst. An extended passage delves into the mind of the narrator, and the exploration of The Relationship Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind reveals the contortions necessary to support his murderous spree. Unsettled upon discovering his victim is not Norma, he kills her in a wild burst of violence but then calms himself by asserting that he will find Norma. Finally, he reassumes the mantle he undoubtedly felt while she was alive—that of “Love.” The past is as much a refuge for him as it is for those who pass him on the street, and in both cases, it forestalls recognition of who he truly is.
Love is a less malicious but still dangerous force in “One for the Road,” where Lumley’s love for his family and his refusal to accept their loss results in his death. The story relies on the comfortable vernacular of the narrator to subdue the story’s horror until its final revelation. Much like the bar patrons who venture out in a snowstorm in “Gray Matter,” Booth and Tookey embody King’s type of heroism. Far from bastions of heroic masculinity, King’s heroes are the battered characters who exist on society’s margins, dredging nobility and self-sacrifice out of their unlikely lives. They are ordinary people trying make sense of the inexplicable supernatural occurrences around them: what is unsayable but felt by all. Booth, the narrator, also offers the comfort of an American tradition, the told tale, springing from the same place as the narrator of the story that made Mark Twain famous, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). King infuses his tale with nostalgia, however, leaving Booth looking back on his life and examining the final destruction of the small town. The tone is wary but also wistful for what is lost.
King has called “The Woman in the Room” a “healing fiction” that he wrote to help him cope with his mother’s death. A secondary personal aspect exists within the story as well: King’s battle with alcoholism. The guilt of addiction runs through the work, as Johnny feels that he has let down his family. However, Johnny is not an authorial avatar, and King imbues his character with a unique reaction to his own grief. Throughout the story, Johnny references books and movies. He struggles to find the words for what he confronts and instead relies on vicarious expressions drawn from pop culture. His reaction is a form of disassociation, and it is echoed in the disconnected sections, which suggest a mind focused on the present moment, unwilling to confront what lies ahead. Johnny’s mind has been blasted free of nostalgia. His mother is neither a good mother nor a bad mother but a complicated figure; the one memory King depicts—the spanking—is violent but in the service of compassion. After examining characters who wallow in nostalgia, King offers a counterimage, portraying moments that are rooted in reality and everyday horrors. King’s final portrait of heroism is Johnny’s final decision to banish the malignancy from his mother’s life. In framing murder itself as a compassionate act, the story subverts the theme of Maliciousness and Human Motivation, suggesting that selfless love and empathy can underpin even an “evil” action.
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