SHORT STORY MONDAY: a small peril

The Little Sisters of Eluria
Everything's Eventual
from the collection by Stephen King

October will be two-for-one for this collection of Stephen King stories as I want to get through it by Halloween, and for the RIP II challenge.


The Little Sisters of Eluria
And now I remember when I stopped reading Stephen King: The Dark Tower/Gunslinger era. I tried to read the first book, and could not read it. I didn't get the story - the setting, the characters, the quest. I can usually immerse myself in other worlds - Neverwhere by Gaiman, and Harry Potter's wizard world, but just like Middle Earth of Tolkien, King's Gunslinger doesn't work for me.
Unfortunately, Little Sisters of Eluria would be a prequel for the Gunslinger. I read it, it had vampires, it wasn't as incomprehensible as I remembered, but I'm still not planning to read The Dark Tower. There were some interesting concepts, like the doctor bugs, although I am getting a shiver just thinking of them again.

Everything's Eventual
What if you had the power to deal with bullies and bad guys? Just by making a suggestion or writing a letter, you had the ability to get rid of them? And who decides who the 'bad' guys are?
This is the interesting premise of the title story of this collection. Eventual means 'awesome' in the slang of the narrator. It becomes an interesting play on words. Certain people in the world have this ability, this trait, to cause deaths, and a multinational company hires them to deal with whomever they need to, after an extensive indoctrination at the company headquarters. In the tradition of great dystopian novels, our narrator begins to suspect something is wrong with this plan, but can he get out of it?

Am I hosting this week? Sure. If you have read and reviewed a short story on this Monday or weekend, provide a link in the comments and I'll put them together at the end of the day.