One of the hundred books a year I read:

Deciding whether this book interests you is simple. You either like reading Stephen King or you don’t. And if you enjoy Stephen King, you either enjoy his short stories or you don’t. I happen to fall into the absolutely yes in both categories, so this was an easy yes for me.

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream takes on old concept, a psychic who can solve a piece of a crime, and asks what if the person has only one such episode. In this case, a man dreams that he knows where a woman’s body is buried. He drives out, discovers his dream was true, and attempts to let the police know where to find it anonymously. It doesn’t take long for a determined detective to identify him and question how he really knew the location of the body.

If you don’t like snakes, don’t read Rattlesnakes. A man visits a remote Florida Key to get away from it all and befriends a strange woman next door who seems to believe that the baby carriage she pushes around contains her twins. Those twins died years before when they fell into a hole filled with rattlesnakes (told you not to read it if you have ophidiophobia). When the woman dies, the man finds himself the caretaker of the stroller… and the twins. (Oh, and did I mention that the man is the father of the boy who died in the King novel, Cujo?)

Each story in this dozen are typically King dark, which is why I say the test for whether you will enjoy this book is simple—whether you like Stephen King short stories.