SOURCE: A review of Night Shift, in Best Sellers, Vol. 38, No. 1, April, 1978, pp. 6-7.

Crider is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the following review, he praises the realism of King's stories in Night Shift.

[The stories in Stephen King's Night Shift] all begin in our normal world, where everything is safe and warm. But in almost every instance, something slips, and we find ourselves in the nightmare world of the not-quite real, where vampires walk, where there are demons to be summoned or exorcised, where innocent people suffer and die for reasons neither they nor we can quite understand, where there are (just as we had always feared) things in the cellar.

Such stories require a willing suspension of disbelief, of course, but they also require an author who is an expert manipulator, one who can make horror seem not only plausible but almost logical. King...