[For previous entries, click the "Top 20 Countdowns" label under Features in the right sidebar.]
#6."Trucks"
Don't be fooled by the ultra-moronic film version, Maximum Overdrive; this is a masterful story, one that reads like Duel meets Night of the Living Dead (as a random group of humans holed up in a diner try to fend off the onslaught of massive vehicles come-to-life). Collected in Night Shift, "Trucks" offers terrific prose (a nervous salesman keeps "his display bag close to him, like a pet dog that had gone to sleep"; a diner door, torn off by a rampaging truck, flies "into the night like something out of a Dali painting") amidst scenes of horrific violence (humans die gruesome deaths, "knocked out of their boots with heavy treadmarks mashed across their guts"). King opens the story with several pages of carnage before providing the kicker (one that proves "Trucks" isn't some rip-off of a Richard Matheson piece): "There was no one in the trucks." The automobiles are now truly autonomous.
It's tempting to read this story as an OPEC-era allegory, where having to pump gas is a harrowing experience for the average man (as the narrator, forced to fuel up a seemingly endless line of trucks, learns firsthand: "My blisters broke, trickling pus down to my wrists. My head was pounding like a rotted tooth and my stomach rolled helplessly with the stench of hydrocarbons"). Still, this is more a story of Frankensteinian turnabout: humanity is enslaved by the very technology created to help it master the natural world. On the last page, the narrator realizes there's no place to hide from the trucks, because "So much of the world is paved now. Even the playgrounds are paved."
What helps place "Trucks" so high on the countdown, though, is the fact that this is a distinctly American story. It's telling that no cars (typically the product of overseas engineering) take on a life of their own here. Anyone who has ever watched a Ford commercial during a football game knows that the truck is an American icon. At one point during the extended siege of the diner, the narrator lies down to sleep, and counts trucks instead of sheep: "How many in the state," he wonders, "how many in America? Trailer trucks, pickup trucks, flatbeds, day-haulers, three-quarter-tons, army convoy trucks by the tens of the thousands, and buses." King, moreover, does not attribute the trucks' sentience to freak
"electrical storms" or the fallout from "nuclear testing" but rather suggests that the changeover is a byproduct of the national sensibility. In the final paragraphs, the narrator notes that
whatever "mass consciousness" the trucks now possess, "we've given [to] them." Ultimately, "Trucks" stands as a cautionary tale, a warning that our country's preoccupation with its machinery might someday unleash apocalyptic madness.
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