Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#12

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#12. "Night Surf"

Imagine Stephen King's 1150-page epic The Stand condensed into a 10-page short story--actually, you don't have to imagine it, because such a piece can be found in the early collection Night Shift.  "Night Surf" reads like an Americanized version of On the Beach and Lord of the Flies.  In the aftermath of global apocalypse (here caused by the A6 superflu virus ), a small group of survivors huddle together "on the beach" in a now-desolate resort town.  These twentysomethings also have developed a pagan streak: when the story opens, they have just finished burning an infected man alive--a barbaric act carried out under the rationale "that if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us against A6."

Obviously, these aren't your stereotypical heroic survivors who've banded together for the common good.  If anything, the stress of the situation (they have to wonder if they are truly immune, or just the slowest to take ill and inevitably perish) has made them hostile to one another, like a latter-day Lost Generation.  Narrator Bernie spends a good portion of the story denigrating his ostensible girlfriend Susie.  Spending post-apocalyptic life with her is no (ahem) day at the beach, but at least Bernie is also honest enough to admit that being around him is no picnic either:

She was standing in the doorway wearing one of my shirts. I hate that. she sweats like a pig.

"You don't like me very much anymore, do you, Bernie?

I didn't say anything.  There were times when I could still feel sorry for everything.  She didn't deserve me any more than I deserved her.

"Night Surf" Gothicizes a traditional site of merriment, as Bernie repeatedly contrasts the current, grave state of the beach (with its deserted lifeguard tower "pointing toward the sky like a finger bone") to the old glory days of fun in the sun for the general public.  The story also hauntingly underscores the cosmic indifference to human life and death.  Standing watching the waves crash against the shore, Bernie thinks: "And if we were the last people on earth, so what?  This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water."  While The Stand superimposes supernatural elements onto its disaster storyline, "Night Surf" pounds the reader with the fatalistic tenets of literary naturalism.