There exists a sloppy but perhaps not wholly unjust accusation that a lot of Stephen King's earliest work is based on a definite formula: take a thing that people are scared of and make it scarier. Vampires, clowns, dogs, aliens, spooky old hotels, the general concept of death … There's an argument to be made that his most successful novels (in terms of commercial awareness) adhere to this pattern; and to many casual readers, this is all King is capable of. True fans, however, know different. Night Shift is notable for being the first experience that the public had – not counting Rage, which they didn't know was by King – of just how astonishingly wide-reaching his imagination is. Night Shift features 20 stories written over more than a decade, some published as early as 1969 (when King was only 22). No fewer than six stories from the collection have been made into movies; one was the inspiration for King's most famous and lauded novel; and two provide brilliant bookends to probably his scariest book.

It begins and (nearly) ends with these bookends, both stories that add to the mythos established in Salem's Lot. Jerusalem's Lot is an epistolary prequel, taking place in 1850, and so imbued with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos that it might almost be set in Innsmouth. It tells the age-old story of an ancient evil found in a small abandoned town – but this time the evil comes in the form of a worm (along with a couple of vampires) that was drawn to the town in the late 18th century by a puritanical cult. The narrator and his servant discover the town and it secrets, and their story is told posthumously by the narrator's descendant – a descendant who, it transpires, is doomed to repeat his ancestor's mistakes, rats in the walls and all. One for the Road, on the other hand, is set after the events of Salem's Lot: a much more basic story of a family lost in the abandoned town during a snowstorm, it's an effective and neat ending to the more ambiguous conclusion of the original novel, offering hints as to whether Ben and Mark succeeded in their mission at the end of Salem's Lot. (Interestingly, King really wears his influence on his sleeve for these two stories: where the worm in the prequel tale is heavily indebted to Brian Lumley's Cthulhu classic The Burrowers Beneath, the second story's lost family are named the Lumleys. Nice little touch.)

In between these two are some stories that casual readers might assume are full novels. Children of the Corn, Sometimes They Come Back, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man were all made into varyingly successful films (with, in The Lawnmower Man's case, litigious levels of alteration to the original concept). Children of the Corn stands out as one of King's greatest scary shorts: ostensibly about the dangers of organised religion, it's packed with terrifying children, murderous monsters and a pretty vile use for corn husks. The collection also features King's first published foray into science fiction, and one of my first real exposures to the genre. I Am the Doorway is the story of an astronaut who is mutated in order to give an alien the ability to see through his body. Only, he's a bad cypher, and the images are distorted; the alien, presented with the horrors of Earth, takes over his body and forces him to murder on its behalf. It's almost pure Ray Bradbury in tone, but with a distinctly King-ian horror touch, and a real kicker at the close.

Then there's Night Surf, the story of a group of survivors capturing and burning a man as a sacrifice to prevent them from catching a disease called Captain Trips. Sound familiar? I read this collection before I read The Stand, and I distinctly remember thinking that Captain Trips was a strange name for a virus, and wondering where this little story – this strange thing that seemed aimlessly dark, like an idea looking for a plot – came from. Evidently, King did as well, because a few years after writing it he turned the nugget into 700 pages of apocalyptic epic journey narrative.

Before I read Night Shift, my 13-year-old self assumed, not unlike those readers who dismiss his stories as one-dimensional nasties, that King was relatively easily pigeonholed. He wrote horror, tales designed to scare, and they did their job. A couple of the tales in Night Shift confused me at first, therefore. Quitters, Inc and The Man Who Loved Flowers are both odd-but-great additions to King's storybook, the former a clever tale about a man who is desperate to quit smoking, the latter an insight into the cruel vacancy of a serial killer. The Ledge is a curious experiment in atmosphere, set on the ledge running around the outside of a building. Strawberry Spring a lovely unreliable narrative about a serial killer terrorising university students.

But then there are two stories in the collection that barely qualify as horror – at least, not in the sense that people usually talk about King's writing. It was a revelation, that this man who was so expert at finding what scared me was also able to write stories with nothing but an emotional core. The Last Rung on the Ladder deals with the suicide of a loved one, and it's affecting, but not nearly as much as the collection's final story, The Woman in the Room. I read Night Shift in the very early 90s: no internet, no way of reading about authorial motivation or whatever. All I knew was that there's this brutal, painful story about a man contemplating helping his terminally ill mother to end her pain. I was reading King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert novels, scaring myself and embracing these dark, horrifying grotesques; The Woman in the Room is the first story I remember reading that affected me in another way altogether. It was horror but of a totally different kind: a horror of realism, of emotional torment, of the mystery of illness, of real-world pain. I had been scared by him, and I knew his books were my favourite of the three writers who dragged me into adult reading, but I had no idea how good a writer he was until the end of Night Shift. Some of the rest of the collection threw me, because it felt silly. The Mangler, about a possessed laundry machine? Battleground, about possessed toy soldiers? Trucks, about possessed … trucks? They were silly. I enjoyed them, but they don't exactly challenge the reader's preconceptions of King's work. The Woman in the Room did, and it's beautiful. Now, because of the wonders of the modern age, I know that it's basically non-fiction. King called it "healing fiction", written to help him cope with his mother's death. That only serves to make it more affecting.

King says in Night Shift's introduction that a good horror story "holds the reader or listener spellbound for a little while, lost in a world that never was, never could be … the story holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft." Night Shift is full of good horror stories. But one – the one that feels real, that deals with cancer and pain and the frailty of life that we understand as little as we understand haunted houses and vampires – stands head and shoulders above the rest. This is something King would revisit in later short fictions, where he abandoned fantastical horror for cruel, bitter realities; but as a rare note here, it's exemplary.

Flagg-raising

It's been a few weeks since I've written about Randall Flagg, the big bad antagonist who appears throughout much of King's work. He makes his first real appearance in The Stand, and then explicitly in several of King's later books, but he has a number of smaller walk-ons throughout King's oeuvre, some obvious, some less so. In Children of the Corn we find one of the latter examples. The titular cult of children worships an old evil pagan version of Christianity's God, and they call this god He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Now – bear with me – Randall Flagg's most common pseudonym is Walter O'Dim; He Who Walks Behind the Rows is a name given by the children, a sobriquet that just happens to include all the letters of the name Walter, in order. And yes, maybe that's a stretch (although King's innate sense of world building means that very few stretches in his fiction are unplanned). And then, in The Stand, there's an abundance of corn, and something in there, watching …

Next time

We get to grips with Captain Trips – and Randall Flagg – in The Stand.