Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
Dolan's Cadillac
(Cameron)
- A story about a guy whose wife is killed by an evil gangster, and many years later that guy carves a big hole in the highway, and the gangster drives his car into it and is buried alive.
- This is a Poe pastiche.
The End of the Whole Mess
(Michael)
- After finding out there is literally something in the water of the town with the lowest crime rate in America, a guy’s genius brother brings about world peace by adding this special chemical to the atmosphere.
- The result is both world peace and widescale cognitive decline as everyone gets dementia.
Suffer the Little Children
(Cameron)
- It is a story where an evil schoolmarm believes that she starts seeing the children—starts seeing their faces shift, they’re all little creatures and monsters, and so she kills a bunch of kids.
The Night Flier
(Michael)
- Richard Deez, who is the tabloid reporter from The Dead Zone, stumbles upon the case of a serial killer who thinks he’s a vampire, flies his own plane and targets regional airports, and guess what it turns out he really is a vampire and did you know that vampires pee blood?
Popsy
(Cameron)
- A guy is kidnapping children, and kidnaps a vampire child.
- Popsy is that child’s grandfather.
- That grandfather murders the man.
It Grows on You
(Michael)
- A bunch of old men in Castle Rock discuss a local sort-of haunted house where once lived a woman who sexually molested young boys of their generation, and which now appears to grow on its own, adding new wings and features despite being nominally vacant.
Chattery Teeth
(Cameron)
- This is a story about a guy who gets some little comedy chattery teeth—y’know, the ones with little feet on them—and they kill a guy.
Dedication
(Michael)
- A black woman who works as a housekeeper in a high-end New York City hotel explains to her friend how her son, a newly minted successful novelist, may be the reincarnation of an extremely racist and successful white novelist whose rooms she always cleaned when he stayed at the hotel, through a convoluted magic process wherein she felt a compulsion to lick his semen from his bedsheets.
The Moving Finger
(Cameron)
- There’s a finger in a toilet and it fights a guy.
- Well, there’s a finger in a sewer system and it comes after a guy.
Sneakers
(Michael)
- A sound engineer becomes fixated on a pair of dirty sneakers he sees under a stall of the men’s room in the building where his current office is, and which never seem to move; they turn out to belong to the ghost of a drug dealer who was murdered in that stall and may also be some sort of metaphor for this guy’s repressed homosexuality or something?
You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
(Cameron)
- Some people get lost and they end up in a town where all the dead rock stars live.
Home Delivery
(Michael)
- A woman living on an island off the coast of Maine finds herself pregnant after her husband dies in an accident at sea.
- Then the zombie apocalypse happens and she has to fight his returned corpse while the men of the island obliterate the local graveyard.
Rainy Season
(Cameron)
- Two people, Children of the Corn-like, go to a sleepy Maine town, where they meet an old man who tells them to leave for the night, because it’s going to rain frogs.
- They don’t listen.
- It rains frogs.
- They kill the people.
- We find there’s some sort of ritual that ensures prosperity for the town.
- The old man and the old woman he talks to both feel weird about it.
My Pretty Pony
(Michael)
- An old man, over many, many pages, tells his grandson about the way your experience of time changes as you grow older.
Sorry, Right Number
(Cameron)
- A teleplay about people recording phone calls from the future and the past.
The Ten O'Clock People
(Michael)
- A man trying to quit smoking realizes, because of the biological or chemical effects of quitting smoking, he can see that some of the wealthy and powerful in the world around him are secretly hideous bat creatures, and other people trying to quit smoking can see them too, and they form a resistance movement that is betrayed but then reforms itself.
- It’s the plot of They Live but for people quitting smoking.
Crouch End
(Cameron)
- A man and a woman go to a creepy part of a big city, and they meet a bunch of Lovecraftiana and experience European folk horror, and the guy dies and the woman leaves.
The House on Maple Street
(Michael)
- A group of children with a mean wicked stepfather discover their house is inexplicably turning into a spaceship, so they trap him inside and blast him into space.
The Fifth Quarter
(Cameron)
- A straight-up
The Doctor's Case
(Michael)
- For the first and only time in his career, Dr. Watson solves a case before his esteemed friend, Sherlock Holmes, who is dealing with a cat allergy while they investigate the locked-room murder of a cruel shipping magnate in his family mansion.
- Spoilers: his family did it, they were all in on it.
Umney's Last Case
(Cameron)
- There is a gumshoe in the 1930s L.A. whose life just seems to be going down the toilet because his genre isn’t working correctly.
- Come to find out, his author is trying to mess up his story so bad so he can write himself into the fiction and physically Narnia his own ass into 1930s L.A. and overwrite the fictional character.
- He does it, and then the fictional character learns how to become an author.
Head Down
(Michael)
- This is a nonfiction piece about King’s son Owen’s Little League team’s performance during the 1989 season, during which they become the Maine state champions but fall out of the running at the regional level.
Brooklyn August
(Cameron)
- This is a poem about baseball.
The Beggar and the Diamond
(Michael)
- A rewriting of a Hindu parable that keeps the setting but swaps in the Christian God and the archangel Uriel for some reason, and the archangel feels sad for a certain beggar whom God gives a giant diamond that the beggar does not see because he is too busy being grateful for his sight and the beautiful world around him despite his low station in the world, and we all learn a very important lesson.