SOURCE: "Don't Turn Your Back on This Book," in The New York Times Book review, June 9, 1985, p. 11.

In the following review, Bolotin provides a mixed assessment of Skeleton Crew.

Stephen King's fiction, at its best, is equivalent to the post-Expressionist art found in the tiny galleries of Manhattan's East Village, where painters, sculptors and collagists often turn to the aggressive headlines of tabloid newspapers for inspiration. What erupts in their work is an apocalyptic world, at once magnetic and repulsive, in which good howls at evil, nature runs headlong into technology, humor provides life's one grand escape and "control" is a word with little meaning.

At its worst, Mr. King's writing resembles generic campfire stories.

Skeleton Crew, a fat collection of short fiction and two forgettable poems, as indiscriminate in its assemblage as its author can be with words, shows off Mr. King's virtues and failings. He makes...